A reality Jew

From ‘Big Love’ on HBO to big love for Israel.

By HANNAH BROWN
Big Love (photo credit: Courtesy)
Big Love
(photo credit: Courtesy)
‘I fell in love with Israel when I visited last November [on an organized trip] for the first time. I just fell in love, and I feel like I’m making up for lost time now. That’s why I’m back so quickly,” says David Knoller, the HBO producer, director and executive who was here at the end of June for the Tel Aviv-Los Angeles Master Class, run by the Los Angeles Jewish Federation’s Tel Aviv-Los Angeles Partnership in cooperation with the Tel Aviv Municipality, the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and Tel Aviv University. Reassured that a day trip with his parents at 16 while on a cruise doesn’t count as a real first visit, he continues: “It was just so great, I decided to have my younger son’s bar mitzva here.”
There’s nothing strange about an American Jew visiting Israel and feeling more connected to his heritage, but it’s ironic that the show for which a nice Jewish guy like Knoller is best known, the HBO series Big Love, is about a small group of upscale polygamists who have broken away from mainstream Mormonism in present-day Utah.
Although he is quick to credit Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, the longtime professional and personal partners who “came up with the idea for Big Love on a drive from Nebraska to New York,” Knoller was an integral part of the creation and production of the show. Big Love, which ran for five seasons, was an unlikely commercial and critical hit, which chronicled the ups and downs of the Henrickson family.
The protagonist was Bill Henrickson, the proprietor of a chain of hardware superstores, who grew up in an oppressive polygamous community known as the Juniper Creek Compound. Bill was forced out of the community as a teen and embraced mainstream Mormonism, marrying Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), a college-educated Mormon, and fathering three children with her before deciding to “live the principle” and take other wives: Nikki (Chloe Sevigny), who grew up on the compound as well, and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), his children’s babysitter, who was happy to be included in the family. Throughout the series, Bill and his family try to prove that polygamy is not synonymous with exploitation and cruelty.
“It’s really a story about an alternative family struggling for acceptance,” says Knoller. “Will and Mark saw it through the lens of a gay couple who wanted to be accepted as a family.”
Knoller, Olsen and Scheffer had to immerse themselves in a world that was foreign to all three of them – Mormonism and breakaway sects – to create the series. They interviewed Mormons, including those who had left the church, and read books in the hope of being as accurate as possible. They went so far as to recreate in detail certain Mormon ceremonies that are forbidden to all but the high-level Mormon clergy, which created some controversy among the mainstream Mormon church.
“Some Mormons liked the series because they felt that we showed that the Church of Latter-Day Saints is totally different from these polygamous communities,” he says. Others were more critical of the show.
“We tried to visit some compounds [similar to the backwoods polygamist community portrayed on the show] in Utah and Colorado, but we were driven off,” says Knoller, who adds that the show seemed to mirror the headlines when, not long after the show premiered, polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs was arrested in Nevada (and eventually convicted in Utah of rape). But the concept for the show really crystallized when, during their research, “Will and Mark came across this magazine, very short lived, for modern, educated, secular, not fundamentalist, polygamous families... And we knew it was for the kind of family we wanted to portray on the show.”
The cast was outstanding, and the actors playing the main family were joined by a group of veteran stars and character actors from the ’70s – including Oscar winners Ellen Burstyn and Sissy Spacek, Mary Kay Place, Bruce Dern, and, in an especially effective recurring role, Harry Dean Stanton as the evil compound leader, Roman Grant. Amanda Seyfried, currently one of the most sought-after young actresses in movies, portrayed Bill’s oldest daughter in the series.
While Knoller gives this wonderful cast its due, he feels another crucial part of the series’ appeal was that “you definitely feel weird when you care for a person you should despise. I don’t think you’re going to see it and say, ‘Polygamy is acceptable,’ but you understand why they’re doing what they’re doing and what they’re going through.
“I don’t think anyone walked away from our show thinking, ‘God, that lifestyle is great.’ I have heard women say ‘I would love to have a sister-wife,’ though,” he says, citing the term that polygamous wives use to refer to each other. “Bernie [Bernadette] Caulfield, she was my line producer, and she’s part of the family now, and you spend half of your life at work, so she and my wife, Wendy [Knoller, one of the producers of Friends], called each other sister-wives.
One was my work wife and one was my home wife. It became a big joke. I could call Bernie now or get her on Skype and she’d say, ‘Where’s my sister-wife?’” Although creators often have a hard time singling out certain parts of a project as their favorites, for Knoller, the choice is clear. “It was ‘The Affair,’” he says, referring to the episode in which Bill and Barb meet for trysts in motel rooms, rekindling their prepolygamous relationship. “I love it that they’re having an affair and they can’t tell anybody about it, but they’re married, because how do you have an affair like that?” Knoller grew up in Los Angeles, wanting to act. His parents weren’t in entertainment, but his father worked in “the other local industry,” aerospace, as an engineer who worked on Stealth bombers and other weapons systems around the world, although Knoller only discovered these details after his father’s death.
But after a brief career in acting, he decided that the lifestyle wasn’t for him, so he an moved into producing with Candid Camera and many other shows.
“I did a lot of reality shows, before they were called that, they were called variety,” he says. He has had a long, varied career as a producer and director, including live comedy specials, such as Billy Crystal Live in Moscow in the late ’80s, and then moved into scripted television.
“I love directing, I love working with actors,” he says.
But how do you follow an act like Big Love? While in the past he confined himself to producing and directing, he has recently started writing. “I feel I’m finding my own voice now and coming into my own,” in the years since his father died, he says.
While little is sure in the world of television, if Knoller has his way, he’ll be back in Israel again soon, not only for his son’s bar mitzva but also for a show he is developing with Gahl and Lior Sasson about the life of the biblical David. It’ll be about the real life of David, “one of the most complex figures in the Bible and, people say, the first one who was actually a historical figure.” He’s doing extensive research, not only into the biblical texts but also into the midrash and myths surrounding this figure.
The complex figure of the deeply flawed leader is familiar to readers of the Hebrew Bible, but may not be that well known to American audiences. If all goes well, Knoller’s King David will be unlike any ever put on film, down to his hair color. “If we can get an actor who is a redhead, or who can have his hair dyed that color, that’ll be the best,” he says.