Jack Abramoff, the notorious felon and “embarrassment to Orthodox Jews,” has been making the most of his first eighteen months in prison, according to his lawyers and friends who want him set free early. (Currently he has at least four years to go, and could have another eleven added next week.) Apparently, in addition to furthering his study of Judaism, he’s taught several classes to his fellow inmates, including “Cinema Studies” and “The Holocaust in Films.” The classes suggest that his devotion to filmmaking—once channeled into Red Scorpion, the right-wing stink bomb he produced in 1989—hasn’t flagged.
Two years ago I wrote about his attempts in the early ’90s to help produce a remake of what I called “the most ridiculed unfinished film project in Hollywood history”: The Day the Clown Cried, Jerry Lewis’s never-released 1972 drama about a circus clown at Auschwitz. The remake never got off the ground, but his prison activities give me hope. If his buddies can’t spring him anytime soon (might President Bush be considering an eleventh-hour pardon?), maybe we can expect his return to Hollywood in 2023.
Posted today on Nothing Sacred, my Nextbook movie blog.
