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Thirty years passed between when lauded cartoonist Jules Feiffer wrote the screenplay for “Bernard and Huey” and when the movie was ultimately filmed.
The script about middle-aged pals and their fraught relationships with women could have remained unmade and in obscurity forever, if it wasn’t for a filmmaker who took the initiative to dig it up, dust it off and find financing for its production.
Mr. Feiffer, 89 years old and a longtime East End resident who recently moved from East Hampton to Shelter Island, penned “Bernard and Huey” in 1986, then moved on to other projects when it failed to get off the ground. But, a few years ago, Dan Mirvish—a co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival, an annual event in Utah highlighting low-budget independent films—became interested in making a Feiffer film, and he refused to be deterred by circumstances that appeared insurmountable.
The fruit of their labor will be screened on the afternoon of Sunday, April 29, at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, with Mr. Feiffer and Mr. Mirvish both in attendance to discuss the origins and the final product.
The characters Bernard and Huey debuted in Mr. Feiffer’s eponymous weekly comic strip in The Village Voice, which ran for more than four decades, from 1956 to 1997.
Speaking last week from Shelter Island, Mr. Feiffer explained that, in “Feiffer,” he often commented on the events of the day, the social mores and politics, and the mating habits of young men and women of his generation.
“And, out of that, I created these characters, Bernard and Huey,” he said. “And they were young men at the time. And Bernard was a nebbish, a guy who never made out with women, and always disappointed. And Huey was a big lug who made out like a thief—women just fell for him all over the place.”
In the 1980s, Mr. Feiffer recreated the characters for a comic strip in Playboy—though he described the strip as “anti-Playboy.”
“I used these characters as middle-aged, whose days of easy screwing were over, and were still desperate to make out,” he said. “And Huey was no longer the sexy guy he was—he was now bald and fat. And [I] took them into the years that the Playboy reader might’ve lived himself, but certainly did not fantasize himself as—and that’s what I brought to the pages of Playboy.”
Throughout their appearances in comic strips, the characters kept up in age with Mr. Feiffer. “They aged with me, and the generation I aged with, who had become older men obsessed with younger women: ‘One thing you didn’t want to screw was a woman your age,’” he said. “It’s basically picking about these characters. It’s not an attack on them; it’s just a humorous anthropological study of how things worked.”
Because the film is set during Bernard and Huey’s middle-aged days, with flashbacks to their post-college days, Mr. Feiffer had decades of source material he could draw from when drafting the screenplay.
“Many of the scenes in the movie are adaptations, by me, from the Village Voice strips, when they were young, and the Playboy cartoons, when they were older,” he said.
The film stars Jim Rash, who played Dean Pelton on television’s “Community,” as Bernard, and David Koechner, of “Anchorman” and “Thank You for Smoking,” as Huey. Twenty-five years after the last time they saw each other, Huey storms back into Bernard’s life. Huey not only shows up unannounced at Bernard’s New York apartment, he moves in uninvited.
The already uncomfortable situation is further complicated when Bernard starts sleeping with Huey’s daughter, Zelda, played by Mae Whitman. Among Ms. Whitman’s television credits are “Arrested Development,” “Parenthood” and “Good Girls,” and among her film credits is “The DUFF.”
In a recent phone interview, while he sat in a Los Angeles café near his home, Mr. Mirvish related how the film came to be.
He read an interview with Mr. Feiffer about five years ago in a Chicago newspaper that mentioned, in passing, that Mr. Feiffer had written several unproduced screenplays, in addition to his feature-length scripts that were produced: “Little Murders, “Carnal Knowledge,” “Popeye” and “I Want to Go Home.”
Considering that Mr. Feiffer had won numerous awards—a Pulitzer Prize for cartooning, an Oscar for the short film “Munro,” and Obie Awards for his “Little Murders” and “The White House Murder Case” scripts, to name a few—Mr. Mirvish decided that he wanted to get his hands on those screenplays.
He reached out to Mr. Feiffer, who said that all of his files were in storage, so try back in a few months. Mr. Mirvish did, but the files were still tucked away, so Mr. Feiffer asked him, again, to try back a few months later.
Mr. Mirvish said this went on for a year and a half. But then a friend told him that he recalled reading a script by Mr. Feiffer in Scenario magazine, “which was a magazine in the late ’90s that would publish, mainly, produced screenplays—but, every now and then, you got unproduced ones.”
The one library in America that still had archives of the defunct magazine was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills. “And, luckily, I live not far from there,” Mr. Mirvish said.
That’s where he found the script for “Bernard and Huey,” and he said he loved it. The magazine also published an article explaining the genesis of the script: The cable network Showtime commissioned Mr. Feiffer to pen a film. However, Showtime then changed ownership and direction.
“Showtime canceled the production, and the whole thing never saw fruition, until Dan Mirvish started going through a lot of my old unproduced screenplays,” Mr. Feiffer said.
Mr. Feiffer’s producing partner tried to get “Bernard and Huey” made as a big Hollywood film, but they didn’t have any luck with that, Mr. Mirvish said, adding, “So that’s why it sat on a shelf for 30 years.”
Mr. Mirvish called Mr. Feiffer to tell him that he had found the script, though Mr. Feiffer pointed out that the magazine published an abridged version. Mr. Mirvish recalled asking if perhaps Mr. Feiffer’s former assistant had the original. Or his agent. Or his lawyer.
Dead, dead and dead.
But Mr. Feiffer’s old producing partner, Michael Brandman, was alive and still had his archives, Mr. Mirvish said. “It took him a few weeks, but he found the original hard copy of the script.”
But in addition to the unabridged script was an even earlier finished copy: Mr. Feiffer had donated much of his personal archives to the Library of Congress. So Mr. Mirvish had a friend in D.C. go there and find the handwritten script. “Jules never, to this day, learned to type,” Mr. Mirvish pointed out.
“We got a copy of that, which was still a lot of fun, because it had a lot of doodles of Bernard and Huey, captions, dead lawyer’s phone number in the margins,” he said.
Once they could clear the rights to the script and characters with Showtime, The Village Voice and Playboy, all that was left was finding financing and the cast.
Mr. Mirvish launched a campaign using the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to fund initial costs of the project, such as hiring a casting director. “I tell people, ‘You should not expect to raise all the money through Kickstarter,’” he said. “It’s called ‘Kickstarter,’ not ‘Kickfinisher.’ But it was enough to kickstart the whole process.”
The campaign raised $27,946—small by Hollywood standards, but a hefty sum for initiating a low-budget indie movie.
Filming finally took place in October and November 2016. There were 12 days of shooting in Los Angeles—plus three days of rehearsal in Mr. Mirvish’s kitchen—and two days in New York, shooting scenes at exterior locations with Mr. Rash, Mr. Koechner and Ms. Whitman.
To keep the costs of making “Bernard and Huey” down, Mr. Mirvish asked Mr. Feiffer if it would be okay to set the film in present day rather than the 1980s, and to set the flashbacks in the 1988 rather than 1960.
“I told him, ‘It’s hard enough on my kind of budget to make one period movie, much less two period movies,’” Mr. Mirvish recalled. Mr. Feiffer was understanding, and obliged.
“He and I kind of tweaked the script a little bit, but the interesting thing is how little we really did change, I loved the original Feiffer dialogue … and I didn’t really want to change that,” Mr. Mirvish said.
While the plot and dialogue were left intact, there were some tweaks made to update the story for a new time period. Most notably, in the original script, Zelda aspired to be a cartoonist in the back of The Village Voice, and Bernard worked at The Village Voice. In the final version, Zelda wants to be a graphic novelist, and Bernard works for Norton, the New York-based publishing company that, in reality, publishes Mr. Feiffer’s graphic novels.
“If you think about it, in the mid-’80s, that was sort of the apex of cartooning,” Mr. Mirvish said of The Village Voice. “That was the cool hip thing to do, to be in the back of the alternative weeklies. And, now, the apex of cartooning is to do graphic novels—and that’s exactly what Feiffer himself is doing.”
Mr. Feiffer said that when he watched the finished product, nothing was antithetical to his approach or to what he thought the film should be about: “It was essentially what I wrote back then.”
He admitted that he did not expect that “Bernard and Huey” would make it onto a movie screen after such a long time.
“This was a complete surprise and a thrill,” he said. “And how nice that I had to do almost nothing to get it on there. That’s the kind of work I love these days.”
However, he rejected the suggestion that he ever lost hope.
“I don’t lose hope, I never lose hope, or I wouldn’t have chopped myself a very long time ago,” he said. “I’ve lived long enough to know that nothing is final and things come out of left field all the time. So, I’m thrilled by surprises—and I’m never surprised by surprises.”
Mr. Feiffer said he is looking forward to watching the film on a big screen and with an audience, which he will do for the first time during the Bay Street Theater screening.
“I’d like them to be entertained by it,” he said of the audience. “And also, like them to think seriously of how screwed up we are, in our time and in past times, in regards to the relationships with men and women. With the ‘me too’ generation, and the Harvey Weinstein business and others, there’s been a lot of talk of that. But having lived through different versions of different kind of talk over many generations, I know how easily and quickly men, in particular, put this stuff behind us and go back to their old habits.”
He went on to say, “The terrific thing about satiric comedy is that, when it works, it gets through people’s defenses and can hit them in vulnerable spots that an open criticism or an attack doesn’t do at all. I’d like [audiences] to come away a little thoughtful about what we have done, and what we continue to do in our time, which is not always admirable.”
“Bernard and Huey” will be screened at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Sunday, April 29, at 2 p.m. Ticket are $15. Call 631-725-9500 or visit baystreet.org.
on Apr 23, 2018