Arts & Entertainment

Catskill Culture Clash

Director Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock describes
an intersection of cultures through Jewish eyes.

Naomi Pfefferman

Jewish Journal of Greater L.A.

W

hen half a million exuber-
ant participants converged on
Bethel, N.Y., for the legendary
Woodstock Music and Art Fair 40 years ago
this month, it proved a harmonious blending
of two diverse populations: the young people
who turned out to celebrate the festival's ode
to flower power and the older locals who
largely made the festival possible in the his-
toric Jewish mecca of the Borsht Belt.
Ang Lee's new film, Taking Woodstock,
which opens Aug. 28 and is based on
the memoir of the same name by Elliot
Tiber (born Eliyahu Teichberg) describes
this unexpected intersection of cultures
through the eyes of an entrepreneurial son
of Jewish immigrants, who saw the festival
as an opportunity to save his family's fail-
ing bungalow colony.
Like the 2007 memoir, which was
recently released in paperback (Square
One Publishers), the film revolves around
the family's decrepit El Monaco motel: — a
collection of rotting shacks teetering on
uneven foundations in White Lake, N.Y.
— where cash flow had reduced to a trick-
le. The region had thrived during the early
20th century, when Jewish New Yorkers
flocked to its accommodations to escape
the summer heat; but by the 1950s, busi-
nesses were in decline as former patrons
found they could travel to Florida for the
same price as a Catskills vacation.
All over Bethel and nearby hamlets in
1969, the surviving motels are in decline,
with porches sagging and shutters hang-
ing off their hinges. Tiber, a closeted gay
interior designer living in Manhattan, has
been called home by his desperate parents
to manage the El Monaco, which by that
time is in such dire straits that the adver-
tised air conditioning units are dummy
boxes built into the walls of each room.
Motivated in equal parts by duty and
guilt (his over-the-top shrewish mother
often describes how she escaped pogroms
in Minsk), Tiber becomes president of the
Bethel Chamber of Commerce and pounces
when neighboring towns refuse to house
the Woodstock festival. He has a permit for
his own music festival and his neighbor, the
American Jewish dairy farmer Max Yasgur,
possesses a cow pasture that could provide
the perfect venue. Before long, impresa-

Kelli Garner, Paul Dano and Demetri Martin star in Taking Woodstock.

rios descend upon the area, by helicopter
and limousine, and set up camp at the El
Monaco; then the hippies begin to arrive,
espousing peace and love to the elderly
Teichbergs, who are befuddled by their
music and casual nudity but ecstatic as
rooms and cash registers fill to overflowing.
Liev Schreiber plays a drag queen and
ex-Marine who offers security services
to the motel; Emile Hirsch portrays a
burned-out Vietnam vet; Eugene Levy is
Yasgur, who negotiates a savvy deal for the
use of his land but becomes a beloved fig-
ure when he addresses the festival crowd;
and Demetri Martin stars as Tiber, whose
quest for personal freedom mirrors the
spirit of Woodstock itself.
The seeds of the film were planted at
5:30 a.m. one morning in 2007 backstage
at a San Francisco television talk show
where Tiber was promoting his book and
the Oscar-winning Lee (Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain)
was discussing his Chinese-language spy
thriller, Lust, Caution. The gregarious
Tiber promptly gave Lee a copy of his

memoir and delivered a two-minute pitch
about why it would make a great movie.
"Usually when someone gives me a
book, I walk around the corner and throw
it in the nearest trash can',' Lee said, a tad
sheepishly, from his home in Larchmont,
N.Y. But something about Tiber's pitch
made Lee recall how he viewed his 1997
film, The Ice Storm, as "the hangover of
Woodstock"; the film explored the conse-
quences of free love arriving belatedly to
an American suburb in 1973.
Lee also remembered how much TV
news of the festival had meant to him as a
14-year-old in Taiwan, where police forc-
ibly cut off the hair of would-be hippies.
"And I had just done six tragedies in a
row — I was exhausted, in the abyss and
looking to do a comedy, something warm
at heart and without cynicism," he said. "I
thought Elliot's book could provide that
material, as well as capture the spirit of
the festival by observing the changes in
the Teichberg family dynamic."
Lee's English-language films often
explore his take on American culture; they

have been so diverse — from Sense and
Sensibility to Hulk — that creating them
has required meticulous research on the
part of the Taiwan-born director. But the
Borsht Belt proved an easier study: "I am
surrounded by Jews, working in the film
industry," Lee explained with a laugh. "And
James Schamus, my screenwriter and
creative partner, is Jewish, not Irish; his
ancestors changed their last name."
As Lee prepared to shoot Taking
Woodstock, his Jewish friends and col-
leagues regaled him with stories of child-
hood sojourns in the Catskills. "I also felt I
wanted to do this Jewish material because
I know these friends and because some of
our greatest filmmakers and films have a
Jewish sensibility.
"I feel that Jewish people know Chinese
people very well, that somehow we are
related, in our emphasis on tradition and
a certain way of life he added. "James, for
example, understood me well even before
I spoke fluent English; he would write my
scripts as early as The Wedding Banquet,

Catskill Clash on page 45

August 27 w 2009

43