Oscar nomination may boost Israeli’s career in Hollywood

LOS ANGELES, March 3 (JTA) — Michele Ohayon was nursing her 2-month- old baby when the phone rang with the announcement that her film, “Colors Straight Up,” had been nominated for an Academy Award. At that early hour, 5:45 a.m., she immediately picked up the phone in her Hollywood home to call Jerusalem and break the good news to her parents. If Ohayon were shooting a movie of her own life, she would probably flash back to Casablanca, where she was born 38 years ago, and then to 1965, when her family immigrated to Israel. Other flashbacks would show her in her first job as an assistant editor with Israel television at age 17, her army service and her first professional recognition while a Tel Aviv University student for her short film “Pressure,” the love story of an Arab boy and a Jewish girl. It would then cut to 1987, when she first came to Hollywood. Cutting back to the present, Ohayon sat down in a noisy Hollywood coffee shop recently to talk about the genesis of “Colors Straight Up.” It was 1992, and she had just spent four years directing and producing her first feature-length documentary, “It Was a Wonderful Life.” The film dealt with homeless women, once seemingly secure in their middle-class status, who through divorce, misfortune or circumstance were reduced to living on the street. When the looting in South-Central Los Angeles exploded that year after the Rodney King verdict, Ohayon was shaken by the general condemnation of the black teen-age rioters, and decided to look for herself. Driving from her home in the Hollywood Hills to Watts was like traveling from a First World country to a Third World enclave, Ohayon discovered. She also discovered, at Jordan High School in Watts, an after-school performing and visual arts program, called Living Literature/Colors United. Through the program, African American and Latino teen-agers were finding a refuge from the mean streets of drugs and gang shootings in daily and weekend rehearsals under the “tough-love” discipline of white and black directors. Ohayon wasn’t sure how “a white Jewish girl” from Hollywood would be received by the youngsters and she mapped out her campaign in her characteristically meticulous and time-demanding style. For the first year, Ohayon, often accompanied by her preschool daughter, attended rehearsals, talked to the youngsters, shared their meals and visited their homes. In the second year, she started mapping out the film, using only a video camera. Not until the third year did she begin filming in earnest, focusing on the lives, sorrows and triumphs of six teen-agers. The centerpiece of the film is the group’s production of the musical “Watts Side Story,” based on “Romeo and Juliet” by way of “West Side Story” — with the Crips and Bloods replacing the Montagues and Capulets and the Sharks and Jets. The camera films the bloody rivalries on stage, and with the same fidelity records the real life that takes place off it. The lead actor, a Latino youth, is briefly arrested and jailed, a girl’s mother tells of her street life as a crack addict, and a family grieves over a son killed in a gang shooting. The result is a 93-minute documentary of unblinking, and at times almost unbearable, honesty, in which the camera is somehow in the face of the actors and unobtrusive at the same time. “Colors Straight Up” has already garnered eight awards at various film festivals, but its creation was difficult. Financing and fund raising were a constant worry and for six months, Ohayon recalls, “we couldn’t view the daily rushes because we didn’t have the money to develop the film.” Salvation came mainly through two grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, totaling $175,000. PBS will air the film nationwide on May 19. Total project cost came to $300,000 in cash and another $150,000 in donated equipment and services. The documentary’s sensitive photography is the work of the Dutch cinematographer Theo Van de Sande, who filmed “Assault,” “Crossing Delancey” and “Wayne’s World.” He also is Ohayon’s husband. There’s no guarantee that she’ll be clutching an Oscar at the March 23 ceremonies. Among her tough competitors in the documentary feature category are Spike Lee’s “4 Little Girls,” about the bloody days of the civil rights struggle, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s “The Long Way Home,” chronicling the desperate attempts of Europe’s Holocaust survivors to reach the Jewish homeland. But the nomination itself has already raised her stock in Hollywood. “When I first came here in 1987, I didn’t realize how hard it would be to break into the industry,” she says. “As both a woman and a foreigner, it was even harder to be accepted as a director. “Now, however, with the nomination as a stamp of approval, it’s getting easier. You have easier access. Where I might have been 10th on a list of possible directors for a project, now I’m close to the top.” Currently, Ohayon has lined up two possible feature film deals with Paramount and MGM. Closer to her heart, though, is a script she has carried around for more than 10 years, titled “Homeland.” “It’s the story of the illegal Jewish immigration from North Africa to Palestine, before Israel became a state, and which paralleled the Aliyah Bet effort from Europe,” she says. “It was just as dramatic as ‘Exodus,’ but nobody knows about it. I’ve pitched the story to Jewish executives here, and they had no idea that so many people from North Africa are living in Israel.” Ohayon recalls that her own father was deeply involved in bringing Jews from Morocco to Palestine, so “in a sense, ‘Homeland’ will be a fictionalized family story, a tribute to my parents.”