"Blues by the Beach": Jack Baxter on Filmmaking, Healing, and Grooving to the Music

Interview by David Horowitz

WJFFblog Editor David Horowitz spoke with filmmaker Jack Baxter about Blues by the Beach.

First of all, how is your recovery progressing? How are you doing today?

I'm feeling pretty good. I still have some aches and pains, and of course I'm not in the same shape I was in before I got blown up, but I'm doing all right.

What did it feel like, if you can describe it, to wake up and discover that the film project you had started was in progress by the others on the team, without you -- or, rather, with your role profoundly changed?

Well, it was encouraging - it made me feel that the film had now taken on a much greater immediacy and importance. Here I was, doing a fairly light-hearted look at Israel. Although I was touching on all these subjects of terrorism and suicide bombings, etc., with everybody that I was interviewing in the film, because the politics of the situation are always there when you talk to people in Israel. But when I realized the Marwan Barghouti story was not going to happen, and when I decided to do a story that involved spending time in a bar, taking a look at Israel from the angle of a free and open society, it was really great for me to be able to do that.

Of course, the suicide bombing changed the script. If you look in classical Greek tragedy, things are going along OK at the beginning of a story, and then all of a sudden something happens and changes the course of the story entirely. Here, we have a real-life tragedy that followed that same structure. So, I was glad to discover that the film project was going to continue, despite what happened.

You already had your two filmmakers on the team, you had hired them shortly before the bombing, right?

Well, I had hired them a couple weeks before, when I decided that I was going to see if I could do a documentary. I met [director] Joshua [Faudem] through [Mike's Place owner] Gal [Ganzman], whom he grew up with, and he was bartending at Mike's Place, and that was pretty much the way it happened. At the time, I didn't expect that it would turn into the years-long involvement that it has turned into, to be honest. If I had, who knows what kind of film it would have been, or the fact that we're continuing to screen this film for audiences around the world.

Because of the injuries and because of what happened, what role did you end up playing in the final film that resulted? Did your role change in some ways, or did you stay involved in the original way you intended?

Well, I went through many months of therapy when I first got back from Israel. For six to eight months, I was pretty much flat on my back, with my arm in a sling, recuperating. My wife and I decided that we were going to produce this film. We brought Joshua and his then-girlfriend Pavla [Fleischer], and an editor from Prague who had edited Joshua's previous documentary. We brought them into New York for the rough cut, and then we edited for about two months. About four or five months later, we went back to Prague, and we edited again. Then they came back to New York and we did more editing six months after that. Then I went back to Prague for the final edit, around April 2005, and that's the version you're seeing now.

And that version of the film that is being screened, would you say that it is still true to your vision of what you wanted to do?

Considering the arc of the story - the fact that I originally went there to do a story about Marwan Barghouti, and I went outside the courthouse and I met the parents of people who had been killed in suicide bombings - I didn't have the wherewithal, or the real knowledge of the situation's nuances, to take on that kind of documentary. I wanted to talk to some people about perhaps collaborating on something like that, I met with some people to see if I could do a film about the Passover seder bombing that had occurred a year earlier at the Park Hotel in Netanya. At the time of my visit, it was too soon and neither the hotel nor the survivors' families were comfortable discussing that kind of project. Then all of a sudden, I walked into Mike's Place and connected up with that story idea.

The politics of the situation in Israel are always floating around the outside, that's pretty much how life is over there. The way we look at it when we read about it in the paper or see something on TV, it's different from what life is like for the real people who live there. And I think the film captured that really well. But at the same time, it makes it superreal because of the bombing.

And some of the other films we're discussing in this year's Festival have that similar theme. Eytan Fox's new film, The Bubble, looks at the detachment that many urban Tel Aviv residents live with, which serves them as an escape mechanism from the everyday political realities. Sometimes it's in the back of one's mind, but the realities are always there. Certainly, the perception is different over here when one is considering going to Israel for a tourist or business visit. Your film helps us understand a lot about this issue, I think. Everyday life happens - it has to.

What would you say your personal reaction was, spiritually, to the process of making this film? Obviously, there were the physical injuries and the incident, but how else would you say the process of making the film affected you?

My wife and I have been through every emotion that you can go through. The main thing is that we wanted to keep going with this and make this film successful, and to make it something that would be iconic of what life was like during the worst days of the second intifada and how Israelis survived and how they managed. Years from now, when people look back at this film, this is the image that I would want to look at instead of seeing people running out of the Sbarro pizzeria bombing and screaming in the streets, and the terror and the horror. This film takes the terror and horror, and the tragedy, and turns it into something that can answer all of that in a bigger way.

We're very proud of it, we've shown this film around the United States. We still don't have a distribution deal for it, so it's not completely on the radar yet. We just won the Avignon/New York Film Festival Best Documentary Award two weeks ago. We've turned the film into a 35mm Dolby digital surround sound piece, which we're still working on financing. We're looking down the road with this film and shortly we hope to be able to distribute it more widely in theaters in the US. We're not just planning on keeping it on the festival circuit.

We're asking all our filmmakers this year, since we're in the US capital: if you had the opportunity to have one DC celebrity - political or otherwise - in the audience for your screening, who would it be and why?

I would want former Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Bush (Sr.), because I believe that now we're coming down to the wire with the question of whether there's going to be a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I would hope that perhaps with all of the credibility that the US can muster, with these former Presidents, if they could go over there and make a big-push, nonpartisan, concerted effort to try and solve things, we would at least know that if it can't be solved, we tried with our best efforts.

In terms of the others in the film, Pavla, Joshua, and Avi (the security guard), how are they doing now? Are you in touch with them?

Well, I went back to Israel this past March. I stayed for two months in Tel Aviv at Gal's apartment. I was in Mike's Place a lot. I met with Avi, who is now running a security company. When I was there, he was guarding members of the Australian Embassy. He's recovered, pretty much. He went through a lot of changes himself. He got married and he has a child. Joshua is with the film right now in Canada, he's been going around and showing the film at Hillel-sponsored events. Pavla, I believe, is in London, but she's back and forth between London and Prague. Downtown Dave was here in New York last night for a wedding. Mike's Place has expanded, and it's still happening. It's bigger than it was when I was there, and it's become the symbol of a place that caters not only to Israelis, Americans, and Westerners, but to Arabs as well. That's the perfect metaphor - it's a place and a situation where we put aside differences in politics and religion and everybody just grooves to the music.

I understand your wife is Jewish? How did your interest in Israel and the Barghouti story first develop?

I made a documentary in the 90s called Brother Minister: The Assassination of Malcolm X and of course that dealt with Malcolm X, who was - and still is - the most famous American Muslim. In dealing with that story, I went to a lot of mosques. Even though my wife is Jewish, I spent several years working on that story, and I had the experience of looking at it from an Islamic angle. After 9/11, this was my second time in Israel. I had been there in June 2002 to check it out. I rented a car and I traveled all over Israel by myself. I waited in the hot sun for a couple hours to enter the West Bank. I've been to Bethlehem and I've seen the posters of the shahids (martyrs, "religious witnesses") covering all of the walls in the West Bank. I even made my way down to Hebron.

I tried to see the situation from as wide an angle as I could, because I thought to myself, after Yassir Arafat was stuck in his bunker in Ramallah, and became discounted by Israel and the United States, that there had to be a Palestinian leader in the wings who was going to step up and become that Mandela-like figure for the Palestinian community. To me, that was Barghouti. I just thought that this might be the guy who was going to provide a sensible, realistic voice to the Palestinians. I still hope that's possible, but who knows what the future is going to bring over there.

The people who bombed Mike's Place were not Palestinians. They were British Jihadists who were supported by Hamas. There are, of course, wider questions of the connections between Hamas and al Qaeda and international terrorism, and it leads me to wonder whether one could set up places in the Middle East that could function much like the microcosm that Mike's Place is, and like Beirut used to be in peacetime? I'd like to see a Mike's Place in Jericho.

In terms of your film work, what is the next project that you're planning?

I'm thinking of an idea for a documentary that would look at a friend of mine, a Jewish comedian who's never been to Israel, who I would bring to Israel for a comedy tour, maybe during Passover 2007. There aren't that many comedy clubs in Israel, and I think it would be great for him to do his act in Israel. I'm still working out the details and he doesn't know about it yet, so that's all I want to say about it for now.

For more information about efforts in Israel to provide assistance to victims of terrorism, visit the Life After Terror Fund at http://www.mikesplacebars.com/lifeafterterror

Blues by The Beach screens at 4:30pm at the DCJCC's Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater on Sunday, December 3, 2006

Interview by David Horowitz