An independent filmmaker’s independence
Evan Oppenheimer serves ‘Peas and Carrots’ and a helping of chutzpah
Evan Oppenheimer’s latest film, “Peas and Carrots,” makes a seemingly unlikely pairing of family and alternate universes.
Before 16-year-old Joey Wethersby (played by Kirrilee Berger of Teaneck) goes to sleep at night, she turns on a light that projects the universe on her ceiling. One evening, the light also opens a portal to an alternate universe only she can enter.
Joey steps through that portal every evening, entering a world where she is an actor in a teen movie.
Meanwhile, back in the “real” world, where her parents were one-hit wonders decades earlier, her mom, Laurie (Amy Carlson of “Blue Bloods” fame) wistfully would like to replicate that success.
Joey finds herself torn between two worlds and has to figure out where she belongs.
It is a film that sadly suffers in summary, but Mr. Oppenheimer, who both wrote the screenplay and directed it, pulls these disparate elements together to create something warm, intelligent, and thoughtful.
But truth be told, “Peas and Carrots” was not the reason I wanted to speak to the multihyphenate. The real reason was “The Magnificent Meyersons,” a film Mr. Oppenheimer made about four years ago and is now airing on the Starz cable network. It follows a contemporary New York Jewish family — and that alone makes it a cinematic rara avis. The dialogue is smart, witty, and real, as the family navigates relationships, an unwanted pregnancy, and the return of patriarch Morty Meyerson.
That role was counterintuitively filled by comic actor Richard Kind, with a bravura performance as a troubled father who leaves his family for its own good.
In a Zoom interview with Mr. Oppenheimer, I wondered which of the Meyersons most closely resembles him. He thought the younger son, “who is studying to be a rabbi and is kind of looking for his place in the world.”
That answer surprised me, but really, probably any answer would have surprised me.
Normally, I spend lots of time researching a subject before an interview, if only to keep from asking stupid questions. But as I note at the start of our Zoom, there is very little about him on the web. It is almost as though he is operating on stealth mode.
“I’m really not big on social media,” he explained. “I don’t do all the things you’re supposed to do. It’s not that I’m offended by them. I make movies and they come out. And I’m grateful for that. Maybe I should be more out there, but I kind of think nobody cares.”
As it turned out, his family’s fascinating background — including a chicken farm in Vineland — is worth talking about, and he’s eager to do so. “I love that question, because I don’t think I’ve even gotten it before, about my personal background going back a generation,” he said.
“My dad was born in Germany. He got out when he was 2. My whole family is Jewish, so he got out just in time. His father came to America first and got paperwork to get 100 people out. You had to have a sponsor then. He went door to door and found sponsors.”
Evan’s dad, Marvin, grew up on the South Jersey farm, “vaccinating chickens. He learned how to hypnotize chickens. You kind of circle around its eyes, and eventually it kind of falls over. It’s fine. It gets up a minute later, but the first time you see it it’s shocking.”
Marvin left the farm for the University of Pennsylvania and then Yale Law School. He practiced in New York City for close to 60 years.
Mr. Oppenheimer’s mom, Suzie, also was an overachiever. “When I was growing up, she became the mayor of Mamaroneck, the town we lived in,” he said. “That was sort of a challenge, because when you’re in high school, the one thing you want your parents to be is not there.”
Suzie Oppenheimer also served 14 terms — 28 years — in the New York State Senate, “which became quite an inspiration to my three daughters,” he said. “It’s totally normal now, but back then my mom was the first female mayor of Mamaroneck. She was the first Jewish mayor of Mamaroneck. She was a bit of a trendsetter and went from being an embarrassment to an inspiration.”
He grew up attending a Conservative synagogue, went to Hebrew school, and became bar mitzvah. “We were relatively observant,” he said. “How they observed, though, “changed when my wife, Lisa, and I moved to the Union Square area right before we had our oldest daughter, who is now 21.
“We were looking for a synagogue around here. Before that we’d go to my parents’ shul in Westchester. But we wanted to get one in our neighborhood where we could develop a community here. Very near us, just a couple of blocks away, is a place called the Village Temple and as you may tell by its name, it’s Reform.
“I was a little concerned, because I remember going to bar mitzvahs at Reform temples and feeling like it was a little bit too churchy. They’d have an organ, there’d be no Hebrew, and it just wasn’t what I was accustomed to.
“But this temple is very accepting. It has a diverse congregation. It also just has a great service. They have a lot of Hebrew. There’s a lot of more music than I’m used to. My daughters have all been a part of the children’s choir, and that’s really wonderful. It’s very vibrant. It’s very alive. And now when I go back to the Conservative synagogue, I find it a bit too staid because I’ve gotten used to this more jubilant service. So it’s been an interesting shift.”
Growing up, young Evan wasn’t one of those filmmaker wannabes who run around with a Super 8 camera making movies. Ironically, his brother Josh was, and now he is a successful Hollywood screenwriter.
No, Evan developed his taste for the art later in life, at Yale.
“I was an English major, because I liked to read,” he said. “But I had no idea what to do with myself. Then in my senior year in college, my buddy Roger and I realized we hadn’t seen a lot of movies. We’d go to the film societies and watch some. But we hadn’t seen a lot of the great movies, and we were about to finish college.
“So we decided to take this Monday afternoon movie class. We would watch a great film every week. The professor was this famous film person, Annette Insdorf, and she would speak about what we just watched. All you had to do was write one paper at the end of the semester.
“Well, Roger was premed, and he didn’t want to write a paper. So he said, ‘Hey, let’s go up to Annette and ask her if we can make a movie instead of writing a paper.’ I was like, ‘How do you make a movie?’ I had no idea how to do that. But he was a photographer. He had a really nice camera, and he’s like, ‘I know how to do it. We’ll figure it out. It’ll be fun.’
“We asked Annette, and she agreed. We made the movie. We stayed up all night editing it the day before we had to show it to the class. I still remember I was sitting on the floor when we showed it to about 100 people in the class, listening as they watched and started to laugh where they were supposed to laugh.
“We’d made a comedy satirizing the films we’d watched that year. I’ve never had that experience before — having created something that was giving people entertainment.
“And that’s where it all started.”
Now, eight films into his career, I ask if he’s interested in making the transition from independent filmmaker to the studios.
“That’s an interesting question. First of all, nobody’s asking. People say, ‘Do you wanna sell out?’ But to sell out someone’s got to be buying.”
I pointed out that he’s not really making an effort, given his stealth presence on the web, and he agreed.
“That’s true. But I made a decision a long time ago that if I was gonna be in this business, I want to make my own stuff. My brother in L.A. works as a writer. He writes all the time for the studios, and I think sometimes we’re kind of a little envious of what the other has.
“I’m envious of the fact that he’s entrenched in that world, a part of this industry, and that he’s well compensated for it. That’s great. I think he looks at what I do, and he’s probably envious of the fact that my movies come out all the time. Of the stuff he’s written for probably 30 years, very few projects actually reach fruition.
“So from my perspective, I would rather be doing what I’m doing, making my movies. They come out. People have a chance to see them, rather than just being on the set for the sake of being on the set.
“I’m only willing to do it if it’s gonna be a project that’s close to me, that’s personal to me, and when it’s done, I can feel like it’s a reflection of me.”
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