Growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Micah Fitzerman-Blue says he tended to feel
“token-ish” as the only Jew in his small Episcopalian school and the son of a
Conservative rabbi.
“I was the kid who would have to bring the kosher hot
dog to baseball barbecues,” says the 30-year-old screenwriter, wearing speckled
glasses during an interview at the ROI conference in Jerusalem this
summer.
When he left home for Harvard, Fitzerman-Blue says he felt like
he had something to prove, worrying that his fellow students would judge him for
being from a less thriving metropolis.
“I think growing up in counter
distinction to the community around you galvanizes your values,” he says. “It
hardens your convictions and it gives you a chip on your shoulder. It gives you
something to prove.”
And he still has something to prove.
“It
turns out maybe it wasn’t my hometown,” he jokes. “It was just my
disposition.”
Both in his professional life and Jewish life, Fitzerman-
Blue is carving out a place for himself, whether it’s alongside Dakota Fanning
or his collective of Jews in Los Angeles’ East Side.
He most recently
wrote the screenplay for Willy Vlautin’s 2006 novel The Motel Life, starring
Emile Hirsch, Fanning and Kris Kristopherson, slated for premiere later this
year.
The small production, shot in Reno, Nevada, tells the story of two
brothers who leave town after being involved in a fatal accident. It’s
Fitzerman-Blue’s first feature film since moving to Los Angeles in 2006 and
scoring a creative development deal at Fox TV Studios.
“On a film of that
size you’re trying really hard to make your days,” he says, explaining that as
the director tries to get all the shots he needs, the writer steps up to shorten
or lengthen a scene depending on how production is proceeding. “You’re on hand
to help solve those logic problems and to execute that.”
When Fanning was
cast, he says he and co-writer Noah Harpster fleshed out her role. He also wrote
The Last Meal (2008), a dark, 13-minute short about a couple caught in a diner
that serves the last meals eaten by the likes of Aileen Wournos and Timothy
McVeigh.
Fitzerman-Blue runs 5432 Films, a media production company
focused on online content.
“The thing I love most that is written are
movies,” he says. “I like people, and screenwriting is one of the ways that you
can write and collaborate with people. It can be a very lonely existence... I
like that when you’re making [a film] you’re sort of creating a little village
and you’re doing it all together.”
But he attended the ROI conference not
for his film career, rather to strengthen his blossoming side project, East Side
Jews, an upstart, non-denominational collective for Jews living in Los Angeles’
East Side. Drawing between 100 and 200 people per event, the group gets together
for programs like Rosh Hodesh text study and facials at a Korean spa and
stand-up comedy and Chinese food on Christmas at the Ace Hotel in Palm
Springs.
“The reality is we’d be hanging out already,” says
Fitzerman-Blue of the originally programmed events he and his cohort plan. “We
just make a flyer for it.” The eye-catching flyers are artistically
punk.
The events are one part ritual, one part cool, like Sacred/Saucy,
an evening of havdalah, tacos and beer for $10, or a food-themed event in which
the group learned about kashrut from a shochet, and then ate
dinner.
Along with his so-called “brain trust,” a group of 10 or so
volunteers, Fitzerman-Blue plans the events, which he says are always
over-attended, as the brain trust thinks 50 will show up and ends up with an
average of 100. “It’s a good problem to have,” he says.
East Los Angeles
used to be the center of the city’s Jewish community, but over time it migrated
west, he says. Those neighborhoods, like Los Feliz and Silver Lake, are once
again “brimming with people who are enthusiastic about building a community
around them and also a community in their image that reflects their values of
creativity, of irreverence, of a little subversiveness and of
authenticity.”
The group especially enjoys celebrating those lesser known
Jewish holidays like Lag Ba’omer, the 17th of Tammuz and the sixth day of
Hanukka.
“We’re trying to plan events that we would want to go to that
reflect Judaism we want to look like,” he says.
Fitzerman-Blue lives with
his wife, Liba Rubenstein, a Brooklyn native, daughter of two rabbis – one
Reconstructionist and one Reform – and Tumblr’s outreach director, in Silver
Lake, “right in the heart of it.”
Fitzerman-Blue is careful that his
group’s programming doesn’t look too professional or marketed.
That would
be a turn-off not only to him, but to the crowd he’s trying to attract. And he’s
not trying to compete with synagogues, though 2011’s Down to the River: A High
Holidays Transformative Experience at the LA River, also included the tashlich
ritual of casting away one’s sins into running water, live music and
food.
“We’re doing what we want to do,” he says. “And we want people who
would otherwise be unavailable to come to our events.”
From the workshops
and networking with other Jews running their own organizations at ROI,
Fitzerman- Blue says he looks forward to refining East Side Jews’ programming,
but not messing with the rag-tag havurah’s original recipe.
“It’s
important to us not to change what we’re doing too drastically. There’s a risk
in this sort of environment where people really are market based. They’re going
about this with a high degree of professional acumen. All I know is what
we have feels authentic and I would not want to change that. I think if it feels
too professional you can tell.”
ROI isn’t Fitzerman-Blue’s first Jewish
conference. As a teen, he participated in the Bronfman Youth Fellowship in
Israel (where he first met his future wife), and he attended a Reboot
conference, an organization founded in 2002 for Jewish culture creatives and
innovators to generate projects that influence their secular and Jewish
worlds.
“I feel like a junkie,” he says. “I feel like I should get a
badge. Or at least a free sandwich.”
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