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Gene Wilder’s Wild Ride Examined in New Documentary
It’s amazing to think that Gene Wilder almost didn’t get the role of Leo Bloom in The Producers, which kickstarted his illustrious film career. Born Jerome Silberman, Wilder would go on to film buddy movies with Richard Pryor, and star as Rabbi Avram Belinsky alongside Harrison Ford in The Frisco Kid.
The splendid new documentary Remembering Gene Wilder, showcases the star as an innocent type, with a sudden rage that could come out in his characters. We hear his voice through audio book recordings, and learn that while playing Willy Wonka, he would do unexpected things that were not rehearsed to surprise the actors. We hear from the child actor (now an adult) named Peter Ostrum, who played Charlie. Ostrum says that Wilder helped him by not telling him how he was going to play the scene where Charlie goes to Wonka’s office to collect his prize.
We also hear about Mel Brooks’ The Producers. For example, in the famous scene at the water fountain at Lincoln Center, the person controlling the water had it shoot up higher than usual. In the film, Bloom agrees to a scheme to defraud investors in a play, because he wants his life to be like things are in the movies. And after that role, of course, Wilder’s life became magical.
“That’s why we put that scene in,” director Ron Frank told me in an interview.
Frank said he was happy get the chance to interview Brooks, and that among Brooks’ important stories is that distributor and producer Joe Levine didn’t want Wilder in the film.
There’s also a hilarious scene from Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, in which Wilder falls in love with a sheep.
“There’s a great scene where he is just quiet, but it was too long to put in the film,” Frank said. “I really don’t think any other actor could have done what he did in the film and be so believable.”
Frank said The Frisco Kid was among his favorites of Wilder’s screen work. In that comedy, Wilder plays Polish Rabbi Avram Belinski who treks through the Old West to lead a synagogue in San Francisco. It’s a buddy film, and Harrison Ford got the role that was supposed to go to John Wayne, but for whatever reason, a producer tried to get Wayne to take a $250,000 pay cut and he refused.
It was not often that audiences saw a rabbi in a leading role.
“I think it was important to see not only that he was kind and that he believed in justice, but even when he shot one of the villains in self-defense, he thought he might not be worthy to marry the daughter,” Frank said.
The documentary deals with tragedy in how Wilder fell in love with and married Gilda Radner, who died of cancer. Some of the rage he showed as an actor could also stem from the fact that he was told that if he talked back to his mother, it could kill her. A welcome surprise in the documentary is Harry Connick, Jr., who was a neighbor and friend. We also hear about how Brooks and Wilder’s only argument was whether to include the tap dancing scene at the end of Young Frankenstein, and Brooks acquiesced because Wilder fought for it.
Wilder is my second favorite actor of all time, after Daniel Day Lewis, and I relished the opportunity to learn more about him.
“I hope people will see his great commitment to comedy in giving his all in every role,” Frank said.
The film includes some great clips from See No Evil, Hear No Evil, in which Wilder played a deaf man and Pryor played a blind man. It seems the two were not great friends off camera, though Frank said Pryor did visit Wilder when he was in poor health from Alzheimer’s disease. Wilder’s last wife, Karen, appears in the film and talks about how he decided to take a last swim and was able to do so. She reveals what his last words were.
Wilder is one of the greatest comedic geniuses of this era, and it is a shame he couldn’t have done more films with Brooks. Wilder died on August 29, 2016. Some will clamor for personal gossip, but I don’t need that here. Remembering Gene Wilder is a fitting tribute to a versatile comedic actor who is one of the few to make me laugh out loud.
The author is a writer based in New York.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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