Peter Riegert: King Of The Corner

I most highly recommend this film. The trailer from the movie's site.
from script magazine by Dan Lybarger

It’s hard to imagine a movie being shot because of a fan letter. But when the author is Lincoln, Nebraska-based short story writer Gerald Shapiro and the recipient is veteran character actor Peter Riegert (Animal House, Local Hero), the result is an intriguing little film called King of The Corner . It hits video stores this month.
In the film Riegert stars as Leo Spivak, a frustrated marketing tester who has the unenviable task of juggling his waning career and caring for his difficult father (Eli Wallach). In the meantime, his aggravations lead him into a series of decisions that almost end his marriage and send him to the unemployment line. The film also features Harris Yulin, Rita Moreno, Dominic Chianese and Jake Hoffman (Dustin’s son).
Riegert doggedly promoted the film by touring with it during its limited theatrical run. By personally supporting his movie, Riegert was able to get the attention of critics who embraced it warmly. Roger Ebert gave it a three-and-a-half-star review, and the film has an 83 percent approval rating on Rottentomatoes.com .
When asked if he had anticipated that Riegert would agree to direct, star in, and help him adapt some tales from his book Bad Jews and Other Stories, Shapiro, in a recent telephone interview from Oregon, politely replied, “Of course not. I had no thought of that at all. I would have to be an idiot to have thought that. I was kind of giving it to him as a thank you gift.
“I had been using his work in the form of an audiotape of a Sholom Aleichem story, On Account of a Hat , which he had made years ago. I use that in my Jewish American fiction class (University of Nebraska Lincoln) the very first night of the semester. And then at the end of the semester I always show a movie of Peter's called Crossing Delancey . These are two things that students just love. They've loved them for years.
“I wanted to thank him and (my wife and I) were not going to be in Lincoln the weekend he was there to show his film (By Courier), so I left a copy of my book with the guy who runs the theater at the University of Nebraska, the guy who'd invited Peter to Lincoln.”
The actor immediately responded to the material. “I read the book on the plane,” said Riegert during a promotional stop at Kansas City’s Screenland Theater. “I went back to Los Angeles where I was working, called him up the next day, and said first, thanks very much for your kind letter. I read your book. I liked it tremendously and I think I understand what you're getting at. Would you be interested in working on a screenplay?” He adds, “He has an excellent ear for dialogue.”
While Riegert’s response to the material was instantaneous, adapting three of Shapiro’s stories (Worst-Case Scenarios, Shifman in Paradise, and Bad Jews) took the duo nearly a year and a half. The actor recalls selecting one of three proposals by Shapiro, who then turned in an initial draft.
One of the first challenges came from the fact that while Riegert had a written and directed the 13-minute Oscar-nominated short By Courier(which will be included as an extra in the King of The Corner DVD) from a 1905 O. Henry story, Shapiro had never read a screenplay before shooting, much less written one.
“I had to go to Barnes & Noble to get one to read,” recalled Shapiro. “I bought the screenplay for Good Will Hunting, which was available in paperback. I thought what the hell, it was their first screenplay. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had never written one before, and their movie was very good, so I read it. It gave me some ideas on structure, but that was it. That was the screenplay I used as a model for how to do the format for the page.”
Over the year and a half the two traded e-mails and phone calls and had some intense face-to-face writing sessions. Shapiro said, “I'm not used to collaborating with anyone. As a writer, I'm used to working all by myself. So it was a big adjustment for me.”
Another challenge that Shapiro encountered was having to change the way he told a story, even if he was adapting the same tale. “I had to learn to abandon narrative. Narrative is one of the most wonderful storytelling tools the world has ever devised. In other words, being able to say, 'He walked through the living room, his head swirling with memories of the last time he had been here.' Just that one sentence, just that one line.
“It could be a very important line as you're writing a story. But you can't do that in a screenplay. You're not able to put a direction in a screenplay saying, 'He walks through the living room, his head swirling with the memories of the last time he was here.' It won't work. You hope the characters will be able to indicate that through facial expressions, but the narrative is not there.
“I had to learn how to tell a story visually. To be honest with you, I don't know if I did. I think that it's a screenplay that looks like it's a first screenplay. I think that everyone who's been very kind to it has been sweet about it. I look at it and I think, oh I wish I had done this, or I wish I had done that.”
Riegert recalled one way he and Shapiro attempted to make the story more camera-friendly. “A scene might take place over 10 minutes in the book, but 10 minutes of two people sitting in one place talking is very hard to sustain in a movie, as you know. So, I had to give it a little more cinematic quality, and the one thing you can do is change locations in a movie. The first one that comes to mind is when the character of Leo meets the rabbi played by Eric Bogosian. The idea of spending their entire time together in the funeral home, while funny in the book, would have been boring in the movie. So, for all kinds of reasons, I took them to a dog track.”
One aspect that both men bring to the material is a sense of rootlessness that frustrates Leo Spivak. Leo, in one particularly funny scene, laments that he’s descended from the Jews who worshiped the golden calf. Leo also has difficulty relating to his father, his wife (Isabella Rossellini), and his daughter (Ashley Johnson).
Shapiro explained, “That kind of rootlessness, that feeling of being alienated from one's past is in a lot of the stories (in Bad Jews). I think it's one of the things that has affected my life. I left Kansas City. I left home. It's weird. I'm sure if I still lived in Kansas City, I'd still know a lot of people I've known since kindergarten. My doctor, my attorney, my real estate agent, my life insurance agent would all be the people I went to Hebrew school with. And I think that one of the central facts of my life is that I left Kansas City and really have not lived there since I graduated high school. I think it's become one of the themes of my life, so obviously it's going to be a theme in my fiction.”
Kansas City had been a setting for the books as well, but Riegert found that it was cheaper to move some of the scenes to New York. Nonetheless, the actor brought similar concerns to the script. “This is part of the American tradition, you know. My grandparents came over in 1907, all four of them. They had to learn English. By the time I met them, which was in 47, the 50s, they weren’t speaking Russian. They were speaking English. I never heard Russian around the house or Yiddish around the house. Each generation loses something unless you’re taught it, unless your parents make a conscious effort to say we’re going to keep this going. It’s hard,” said Riegert.
“And I guess that's one of the things Gerry's looking at in these stories and that we certainly looked at in the movie: this question of how you are part of your community. At the end of the day, I guess Gerry would say it is that wherever you fit on the religious spectrum of your respective religion, at the end of the day, that's who you are. Good Jew, bad Jew, you're still a Jew. And who's to define it? How'd you take somebody who's extremely religious, but lives immorally as opposed to somebody who's not religious, but lives divinely, if that's the right word? It's a fascinating conundrum.”
The collaboration has been happy and successful for both screenwriters. Shapiro’s book has sold more copies, and the film, despite its limited theatrical run, has been held over in some theaters. Nonetheless, Shapiro still considers himself primarily a fiction writer. “The movie is this wonderful thing, and I'm delighted for Peter that the movie is making its way around the country and people are seeing it. And that it's getting very good reviews. I'm just delighted with all of that because he's worked so hard.
“It sounds very selfish to say this, but really I'm much more comfortable being a one-man band, which is what a fiction writer is. The fiction writer is the director, the lighting designer, costume designer, the key grip, and the best boy—everything. I like being able to do all that. It's a thrill to be a part of the work that Peter did with this movie. There's no denying it. It's extremely unusual for anything like this to happen to someone who writes stories. It's extremely unusual, and I know that. And I'm delighted with it. But at the end of the day, I'm a fiction writer.”