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`The Score'
In his latest film, director Frank Oz
faced a triumvirate of great actors.
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rank Oz, the Muppeteer
and comedy director, isn't a
funny guy.
Duriner b an interview, he
sounds more like an English professor
than the man who falsettoed the voice
of Miss Piggy. It's tough to imagine
him directing Bill Murray as an insuf-
ferable nudnik in What About Bob? or
Steve Martin as a sleaze in Dirty Rotten
Scoundrels. It's tougher to imagine him
animating and voicing Muppets such
as Bert, Animal and Fozzie Bear.
But Oz (nee Oznowicz), the son of
Holocaust refugees, insists he never meant
to direct comedies in the first place. Nor
did he intend to work in the movies.
"It's all been an accident," he says.
The lanky, owlish director started
puppeteering to please his Jewish
father, Isidore, an avid amateur pup-
peteer; then Muppet master Jim
,
Henson discovered him, and the come-
dies kept coming. But after directing
Bowfinger in 1999, Oz told his agents,
"I have to do something else."
He got his chance when he received
the script of a high-tech crime caper
called The Score, now a hit summer
movie starring Robert De Niro, Marlon
Brando and Edward Norton. The film
tells of a cautious jewel thief (De Niro)
cajoled by a cheeky young punk
(Norton) to attempt one last heist.
The movie has received rave reviews,
but Oz, 56,. is annoyed when people are
surprised he can elicit something other
than laughs at the cineplex. "I grew up
with dramatic family stories, so I've
always wanted to direct drama," he says.
One of his favorite family yarns is a
caper as thrilling as any scene from
The Score. It took place a couple years
before he was born, when his father
furtively dug a hole in Nazi-occupied
Antwerp to bury a marionette he'd
secretly carved of Adolf Hitler.
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Gina Wendkos grew up as a poor, bohemian Jewish
girl — but wrote a screenplay about being royal.
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I
feel like the princess living the
fairy tale," says Gina Wendkos,
screenwriter of the Disney film
The Princess Diaries, which
opens today in Detroit.
Wendkos' second produced screen-
play, based on Meg Cabot's novel, tells
of an awkward teenager rescued from
obscurity when she learns she's a
princess.
Five years ago, Wendkos was sorely
in need of rescuing. The 40-something
writer had just been fired from a CBS
show ("I'd made, like, a zillion mis-
takes," she says), and her self-esteem
was at "a real cockroachy level."
So she quit writing for two years. "I
was going to go to law school, and I
hated lawyers," confides the former
painter, playwright and performance
artist. "How self-loathing was that?"
Enter her knight in shining armor,
who proved to be mega-producer and
former Detroiter Jerry Bruckheimer.
He needed a screenwriter to adapt
an article written by a female bar-
tender at the rowdy New York club
Coyote Ugly. He figured Wendkos was
perfect because in her 20s she'd
worked every kind of bar job except
stripping.
The petite, black-haired scribe
promptly flew off to Manhattar. to
hang out at the real club, where sexy
female bartenders triumphantly
danced atop the bar each night.
The film Coyote Ugly helped her
land The Princess Diaries gig, which
Wendkos found square but charming.
"I totally identified with the main
character," she says. "In high school, I
was also unpopular. I wished I was
invisible."
The puppet-caricature, which had a
hinny moustache and a uniform sewed
by Oz's lapsed Catholic mother, Frances,
was too dangerous to carry on the road.
So Oznowicz carefully covered it with
spadefuls of earth before he and Frances
fled south (she was sometimes disguised
as a boy) to catch a boat to England.
After the war, Oznowicz returned to
Antwerp to dig up his puppet, which
later occupied a place of honor in Oz's
childhood home in Oakland, Calif.
"I still have it on display in my apart-
ment in Manhattan," says the director,
who uses "Oz" as a stage name but
whose legal surname is Oznowicz. "His
clothes are in shreds now, but there's a
photo next to him of when he was new.
It's a crucial part of my heritage."
Oz's first memory is traveling by
boat to the United States in the mid-
dle of a hurricane at age 5. "I vividly
recall tables and chairs flying through
the air," he says.
After he started puppeteering at age
11, his classmates called him the
Puppet Man — but Oz didn't mind.
"Puppetry was a good way for me to
express myself without really putting
myself on the line," he says. "It was
safe because I was gawky, skinny, shy
with pimples and low self-esteem."
By the age of 19, Oz had followed
Henson to New York and, six years later,
Instead, her poor, bohemian Jewish
family stuck out like a sore thumb in
her rich Jewish neighborhood in
Miami. All the other kids' fathers were
doctors and bankers; hers eked out a
living painting portraits of guests at a
luxurious hotel. The other kids got to
have a bar or bat mitzvah; Wendkos'
Jewish mom suggested she check out
the free church services next door.
"I used to beg my parents not to
drive me to school," she recalls. "One
3,
year they had, like, a hearse.
In her early 20s, Wendkos still felt
like a misfit, especially while waitress-
ing at a mob bar where she was
expected to dance with customers at
S10 a pop. She hardly felt as empow-
ered as her characters from Coyote
Ugly.
"All the customers tried CO get
fresh," she recalls. "I felt like chattel."
Wendkos got fired when her
boyfriend unexpectedly arrived at the
club, saw her dancing and threw a fit.
It wasn't until she was 27 that she
landed her first writing job — pen-
ning blurbs for a phone sex line —
and discovered she had a talent for
dialogue. Wendkos graduated to work-
ing the graveyard phone sex shift,