On The Bookshelf
HAVING
kNlagiNstka*StRipogyika.„:
ROBERT DEL VALLE
Author Dori Carter's
first novel details the
absurdities of life in
Jewish Hollywood.
Special to the Jewish News
l
MARJ JACKSON LEVIN
Special to the Jewish News
uthor Dori Carter, a former screen-
writer and television producer, has
worked in the Hollywood film industry
for 25 years. The former New Yorker
lives in California with her husband, Chris Carter,
the creator of TV's smash series The X-Files.
Beautiful WASPS Having Sex (Morrow; $24),
her first novel, is a satiric look at Jews in
Hollywood, who, averse to depicting Jews in their
films, instead offer fantasies about WASPs —
"beautiful WASPs," as the author calls them.
In the novel, Carter's alter ego, Frankie Jordan,
nee Francine Fingerman, is a struggling screen-
writer whose ups and downs fill the first-person
narrative. Full of Yiddish expressions and on-the-
mark dialogue, it shows a town where Jews revere
the images of the gorgeous WASPs they crank out
— but resent them as well.
The Jewish News recently caught up with
Carter in a phone interview, where she discussed
her book and shared a firsthand look at the way
Hollywood really works.
JN: What does the title Beautiful WASPs Having
Sex mean? Are Jews obsessed with WASPs as the
most desirable of images?
DC: I chose the title along with the picture on the
cover, one of some distant relatives of mine that
was taken when they first arrived in America,
because I think the Jews in the Hollywood of their
generation wanted to escape the image [depicted
on the cover]. They wanted to make movies about
the people they wanted to be — beautiful WASPs.
JN: But your book is about the Jews in
Hollywood today, three generations later, and
still self-conscious and negative about being
Jewish.
DC: The great irony is that now that the world has
changed and [the Jews who dominate the film
industry] are the ultimate insiders, they still feel like
outsiders. In their heart of hearts, they believe if you
are a Jew, you are separate. They work with people
Marj Jackson Levin is a Birmingham-based
_freelance writer.
9/22
2000
86
Dori Carter: "I know what makes
these people tick and I don't want
to be around it anymore."
who are very beautiful and they do not believe they
can ever live up to that image in their own lives. So,
if you cannot be beautiful, be powerful.
JN: It seems that most of your Hollywood char-
acters are transplanted New York Jews, totally
consumed with their Jewishness.
DC: That's right. These people wake up every
morning and do not forget for one second who
they are. They speak Yiddish among each other in
a very specific, bitter, sarcastic, self mocking way.
Everyone I know uses Yiddish.
t is a talented writer who can
take irony --- that trickiest of
literary devices -- and fashion
something that is both funny and
poignant. Dori Carter, author of
Beautifid Wasps Having Sex
(William Morrow; $24), is very
much in that category.
jaundiced accounts of the often
surreal world of filn-anaking have
been penned for decades. Like
quick, furtive glimpses into a
lunatic asylum, they're invariably
fascinating and repellent. It is to
Carter's credit that her book does-
n't fall back on familiar cliches or
distasteful variations of expected
plot twists. She prefers character
development to character assassi-
nation, and the heroine of her tale
is human and humane enough to
invite empathy from the reader.
In the kingdom of make-believe
called Hollywood, screenwriter
Franlde Jordan -- in an earlier
life, Francine Fingerman — is too
overwhelmed by reality to playa
-
JN: And like the old moguls, who never
made films about the rise of Nazism in
the '30s and '40s, your book gives many
examples about how the new moguls
still avoid films about Jews. Your protag-
onist, Frankie Jordan, was forced to
change her Jewish characters to Italians.
DC: Yeah, they love Italians. But you
have to understand. [Ambassador to
England] Joe Kennedy (JFK's father) told
[the old studio executives] not to make
anti-Nazi movies, that they'd be accused
of being communists. They couldn't win
JN: And this generation is still so
ambivalent?
DC: They'd like to escape the burden of
being Jewish. There's always a fear, lying in
the heart, that if the economy turns,
"they'll" go after the Jews again. That's why
they have a huge work ethic to be successful.
It's an inoculation against their own fears.
JN: If we accept the fact that American
movies are a great cultural force in the
world and that Jews dominate the
industry, do you think a Holocaust
could ever happen again?
DORI CARTER