Rosenblatt isn't quite sure what his next movie is going to be. "I might do something about grief and loss," he says, then lets out a laugh, as if he's anticipating a so-what-else-is-new response. And there's also a recognition on his part of the public image of what experimental filmmakers have to fight against, mainly a belief that they're making inaccessible work that says nothing about anything except the artist himself. But his films aren't all sober and contemplative. In 1996, Rosenblatt collaborated with Jennifer Frame to make Period Piece, a documentary about menstruation that is built around interviews with women of various races and ages, talking about their personal experiences. The interviews are interspersed with footage from '50s versions of The Film the Girls Saw When They Made the Boys Go Somewhere Else, and for the first time, Rosenblatt played up their campiness (Mother: "Our daughter's becoming a woman." Father, dropping his pipe: "Whaaaat?!").
Anthony Pidgeon
Rosenblatt, with the tools of his trade, in his Castro District workshop.
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Though King of the Jews was the main work Rosenblatt presented at Sundance, he also screened his A Pregnant Moment, a light and charming "dog-umentary" that tracked the pregnancy of a neighbor's Rhodesian Ridgeback. And early next year, the Independent Film Channel will start screening Drop, a one-minute film by Rosenblatt and local filmmaker Dana Ciraulo, about a filmmaker's turmoil over getting the perfect shot -- a single drop of water, falling from a spigot.
Still, opportunities for small-time filmmakers have grown in recent years. Web sites now successfully screen shorter films, and there are a healthy number of venues in the Bay Area that can showcase the work. Ellen Bruno notes a lack of dog-eat-dog competitiveness among local filmmakers, and Rosenblatt himself cites the Film Arts Foundation -- which has regularly given him grants to complete his films -- as creating a support system. That doesn't mean his job is any easier -- grants run out fast, and it took lengthy discussions to get full-blown screenings of his short films in the Bay Area next year -- a process whose first hurdle is simply convincing the theaters that showing his movies is commercially viable. "I believe in art for art's sake too," says Rosenblatt. "But some of what fuels my passion is the same thing that led me to wanting to be a therapist, which is doing socially relevant work in an artistic way. There's a strong desire to make an impact."
For The Smell of Burning Ants, Jay Rosenblatt had edited his footage and written a script to match, but he needed a narrator. One of his students at Stanford suggested he get in touch with Richard J. Silberg, an actor who occasionally did voice-over work.
In the kitchen of Silberg's Berkeley home, Rosenblatt handed him the lines. After scanning over a few pages, Silberg ran across a curious phrase. "He is raised on concrete," read the script. "Boxball, stickball, punchball, slapball."
"Boxball," Silberg said, noting the uniquely New Yawk brand of sandlot baseball. "You're from New York?"
"Yeah," Rosenblatt replied.
"Where from?"
"Brooklyn."
"Me too. Where in Brooklyn?"
"Sheepshead Bay."
"Really? Me too. Say, how old are you?"
"Thirty-six."
And then things started getting weird.
"Me too," said Silberg. "What elementary school did you go to?"
"P.S. 194."
"Who did you have for fifth grade?"
"Mrs. Bromberg."
And then Silberg asked if Rosenblatt remembered Dick.
"Turn the page," Rosenblatt said.
"He learns early about the power and protection of a mob," the script read. "In fifth grade, they pick on this one weak kid -- Allen Dubrow [the boy's real name was changed for the film]. The boy has nothing against this kid, but he knows he will have to punch him. They push him around. They call him names: Dubrow, doofus, spastic, retard, faggot. Then, one by one, as if by performing some ritual, they each punch him, spit on him, and then run away."
Richard J. Silberg -- who in the pecking order of P.S. 194's fifth-grade schoolyard got to keep the name Richard -- had led the assault on Dick. As with Rosenblatt, the memory of the incident flooded back to him just as quickly, with the same anxiety and regret. And like Rosenblatt, he had moved 2,500 miles away from his boyhood home to work in the arts -- in Silberg's case, acting with the Shotgun Players and in other roles. "Working on that film made me aware of how my own childhood was shaped by being male," he says. "While I don't think it created the conflict it did with Jay, this film was about me. We talk about how girls are underrepresented, but we forget about how boys are handcuffed by their own training."
"I never dealt with it," he says. "But I never put it out of my mind."
