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16

JULIE YOLLES ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR

Screenwriter/director David 0. Russell
talks about hisfirst
mainstream film release.

he day after the
Academy Awards,
over tea at the
Ritz-Carlton in
Dearborn, screen-
writer/director
David 0. Russell
reflected about sex, family, a si-
multaneous fascination and dis-
enchantment with Hollywood,
dreams and ideals, and his
newest film comedy release,
Flirting With Disaster.
With preliminary reviews
and box office grosses predict-
ing a blockbuster success, Rus-
sell's in a very enviable position
as film studios and mavens
(Warren Beatty for one) throw
project offers at him.
With "Sunrise, Sunset" play-
ing in the background, Russell
described his artistic journey
from literature major at
Amherst College (where he was
one of three David Russells,
thereby adopting the "0" for
Owen in his moniker) to polit-
ical organizer immersed in im-
proving housing and cleaning
up toxic waste to independent
filmmaker of the award-win-
ning Spanking the Monkey, a
black comedy about incest pro-
duced on a budget of $80,000,
and now, the $7 million Flirt-
ing With Disaster.
A screwball comedy with a
fresh '90s twist and underlying
sexual dallying throughout,
Flirting With Disaster tracks
Mel Coplin's (Ben Stiller) quest
for his biological parents, much
to the dismay of his adoptive
parents, an aggressive New
York Jewish couple played by
Mary Tyler Moore and George
Segal (for more about the film,
see today's review).
For the role of the Jewish
mother, Russell was initially
considering Madeline Kahn or
Anne Bancroft, and for Mel's bi-
ological mother — Tyler Moore
(in a parody of her Laura Petrie
role on "The Dick Van Dyke"
show). But Russell says Mary
Tyler Moore showed up at the
audition in a skin-tight dress,
fought for the Mrs. Coplin part
and won. Of course, he says, for
the romantic scene between
Tyler Moore and Segal, Russell
had to cajole her — from want:
ing to wear a bathrobe to a
nightie to a one-piece outfit —
into-a two-piece black lace lin-
gerie ensemble.
• Russell admits that the film's
story and Jewish parents' man-
nerisms are somewhat pat-
terned after his own parents,

and his younger adopted sis-
ter's search for her biological
parents.
"I'm preoccupied with sex;
that's why my first two movies
deal with it a lot. I think that
it's probably the fact that my
parents are a little bit that way
themselves — my mother's Ital-
ian and my father's Russian-
Jewish," says Russell. "I think
it's the way that I ended up
dealing with a lot of the feelings
that I had about my childhood.
Some people end up eating,
some people end up becoming
workaholics, some people end
up becoming drug addicts or al-
coholics — this became my
thing; I don't think that it's un-
common.
"It's definitely a humor that's
uncomfortable, but I think it's
funny enough that people will
roll with it. That's kind of my
humor," Russell adds about
dealing overtly with sexual
practices and issues in the film.
"It's humor that dives into parts
that people don't like to talk
about or think about, but it puts
it up there, and you tap into
that nervous energy that peo-
ple have about it, and then it
can express itself in laughter—
that's my hope."
Describing himself as a "real
obsessive perfectionist," Russell
wrote 15 drafts of the script
while Spanking the Monkey was
in release. His wife, Janet Gril-
lo, also a screenwriter, encour-
aged him to capitalize on the
kudos of Spanking and seize the
opportunity to produce a film
with broader audience appeal
in Flirting With Disaster.
Four studios wanted it, but
Executive Producer Harvey
Weinstein and Miramax, on the
heels of its success with Pulp
Fiction, bit the hardest. One-
and-a-half years later, the film
is being released this month
across the country.
"The M.O. for the whole
movie was: Defy expectation,"
Russell says about Flirting
With Disaster, which was in-
spired by the 1972 film release
The Heartbreak Kid, a Neil Si-
mon adaptation. Directed by
Elaine May, The Heartbreak
Kid is a comedy about a Jewish
boy (Charles Grodin) who, on
his honeymoon, meets and falls
in love with a very non-Jewish
girl (Cybill Shepherd).
Similarly, the conflicts be-
tween Jewish parents, their
children, psychoneurotic Jew-
ish men and sexual repression