Dr Jew

couple's anger by using phony empathy and a mirroring technique, avoiding an undesirable refund and steering them instead to another film about to begin. The film was An American Tail 8/The Land Before Time 23: Fivel Goes Mesozoic , which they would later describe to their adult friends as "charming" and "so accessible for a sequel."
    But back in the Swine Trek theater the credits began to roll. Most of the audience awoke and left, not caring to listen to Glassdick's "Coat Hanger Sonata No. 3." One person did remain however. Eyes glued to the screen as names migrated up through the black into infinity, ever so slowly to synchronize their conclusion with the end of Glassdick's 26-minute piece, it went on like an interminable disease, a vast list with legions of lackeys and sub-lackeys, sucking life from the behemoth that had financed the enterprise only to incorrectly gauge the public's ever-fickle mood. How could so many guess so poorly? The answer was one man, not many. Sergio Simpatico had breathed it life, and his sway could outcharm any criteria for taste. With a track record swung madly out of control, he had been granted god-like powers (in Hollywood) and used and abused them to his utmost. Engulfed by the moment and the creative process, the film had inverted itself into a chthonic mirror of the potential it might have had if handled assiduously and edited to half its length. All involved in its whirlpool had been hypnotized through overexposure, their minds turned to apple sauce, sheer gravy, the weight of its world infecting the theater. How many times had the editors, producers, and Sergio himself sat through those four and a half hours and its variations, countless permutations left on the (metaphorical) cutting room floor in the interests of unity, continuity? The battles fought between Simpatico and the studio were legendary months before the film's release. A David and Goliath clash with the role of the artist at stake… when would "The Man" release his steel grip on the artistic impulse and allow creative freedom to reign?
    In an interview in Playboy released a week before the film's debut, Sergio Simpatico announced the outcome:
    Simpatico: Yes, we won. They finally caved. We resisted like the Jews in the wilderness and eventually they came around.
    PB: Jews? Are there Jews in Swine Trek ?
    Simpatico: What? No. Of course not. I'm just comparing –
    PB: For a second there I thought you had sneaked another Nice Nazis movie under our noses! [laughter]
    Simpatico: No, I'm done with those.
    PB: So there are absolutely no Jews in this film? You're sure of that?
    Simpatico: Absolutely. Not one damned Jew in this movie.
    This quote triggered a backlash in the Jewish community – a sizable chunk of his audience thanks to his other films – and he issued a formal apology just days before the film's release. And some Jews may have forgiven him, but the Jewish community at large chose to ignore his apology and staged an elaborate protest of Swine Trek . Film historians would blame this boycott for Swine Trek 's weak box office performance – that and the fact that it was horrible.
    But on that day , in that theater, one amateur film buff stayed in his seat until the final copyright notice and MPAA threat had risen, scouring the names of those with tenuous involvement in the film, until that final grouping of people, places, companies, and organizations appeared under the generic heading SPECIAL THANKS TO:
    Dot dot dot. And all those entities crawled up the screen, several thousand in all. A troupe of randomness that included among others the janitorial crew at the Captain EO theater at a California amusement park, the dolphin Shimpa, and Gary Coleman, whose involvement was mysterious since he had expired a few years earlier.
    But it came, it did, or something like it. Among that uncategorized stew it came. Near the bottom of the bottommost it sat, inauspiciously, and made me cough up a popcorn seed when its masked intention penetrated my consciousness and understanding. For if all these people were a party traveling to all these places ("the town hall of Bakersfield, California," for instance) and they managed a wobbly seemingness of congruity and veiled their natural inclination to ignore one another, there would still be a nail that stuck out among the lot, an oddity who would be as much an alien as the odd name itself in that list of Hollywood outsiders. I saw it: Doctor Joo .
    Doctor… Joo ?
    I laughed