Vitality Stories

David Wachs and Jack Beers

an interview with

Director, David Wachs

Part One – Behind the Scenes

Who, What, Why

In October, I wrote about Jack Beers and the documentary of his life, Holes In My Shoes. And when I couldn’t get Mr. Beers out of my head, I also mentioned him here.

Vitality Stories captures the life stories of those who have lived and learned, so it’s not a surprise I was drawn to a feature documentary called Holes In My Shoes. 94-year-old Jack’s zeal for life heavily influenced me, and in large part, this is due to the man who met Jack Beers and recognized there was a vitality story to share, someone who had the vision and talent to deliver the documentary in a way that would, indeed, make it ‘An inspirational story for all ages,‘ and that man is Director, David Wachs.

I wanted to better understand the connection between David Wachs and Jack Beers, and as a person on her own creative journey, I was curious how and why Mr. Wachs chooses his projects, which are many and varied, ranging from pilots to children’s series, including We’re Puppeteers! for Nick Jr. He granted me an interview, and after a long conversation with Mr. Wachs, I was rewarded with a life lesson and inspiration as I learned more about his recent endeavors.

Yet, let’s start at the beginning of David Wachs’s career and watch the first short film he ever wrote and directed.  While he was attending New York University Film School, his short film script Rosey & Jonesy was one of 4 films out of 40 in the program selected for production.  He attended the renowned undergraduate film School between 1982-1984. Recognize the actor? You got it, he’s 74-year-old Jack Beers:

Connecting the dots

Rosey & Jonesy, a bittersweet comedy, highlights the importance of comradeship and companionship, and the need to feel purposeful and vital—a challenge for many people after retirement when they can no longer identify with a profession. As the gap between life and mortality crystalizes, purpose becomes caring for companions. Purpose becomes mutually beneficial friendships, such as the one between Rosey (an elderly Jewish man) and Jonesy (an elderly black man).  This short film ended up airing on PBS’s “American Playhouse” and won 6 international student film awards.

David Wachs was inspired by the strong connection to his grandparents and great aunts and uncles who were also native New Yorkers. They were “youthful, active, whacky characters.” They were involved in theater, music, poetry and had very creative personalities. They were always lively, dressing up and singing.

Mr. Wachs wanted to “…convey the message that there is a lot to get from older people.” Now, anyone who has been reading Vitality Stories knows how much I agree!

In addition to paying homage to senior citizens, Mr. Wachs wanted to cast a black actor in his film, as a nod to his dedication to racial equality.  Throughout his childhood, he was surrounded by intelligent, liberal activists, mainly because his mother (Etelle G. Wachs) was the executive secretary to Harvey C. Russell, Jr., the first black man to be a senior vice president in a Fortune 500 company. Mr. Russell was the Senior VP of Marketing at PepsiCo, and was responsible for public relations and outreach programs. He was a board member of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and helped develop the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.  David’s mother assisted Mr. Russell by organizing a variety of fundraising activities for the above organizations during the 60s and 70s.  Both his mom and Mr. Russell Jr. encouraged his sense of fairness and equality.

In 1983, David placed an ad for Rosey & Jonesy in Backstage Magazine for auditions, and in walked Jack Beers—wearing the same checkered shirt he would wear some twenty years later in Holes In My Shoes, and carrying his own film prop, a tool box from the 1940s!

David hired Jack for the role of Rosey. At this point, Jack was already a multi-millionaire (unbeknownst to David), and had been an ‘extra’ in hundreds of films, yet Rosey & Jonesy was the role of his lifetime—giving him the most lines he’d ever read in film. At 74, Jack landed his finest talking role.

Jack Beers and Dustin Hoffman, TOOTSIE

Rosey & Jonesy took two weeks to film. On the set, Jack would share stories about his life, and one night at a small, grubby hotel in midtown Manhattan (used as a film location), 74-year-old Jack showed off and grabbed a massive Manhattan telephone book that spanned the width of his hand, and he proceeded to tear the book in half, like a knife going through butter.  After Jack’s many strong man antics, and hearing his Forest Gump-like life stories, the crew was incredulous, and David recognized an opportunity. He said to Jack, “Okay, someday you and I are making a movie about your life.” And twenty years later, that’s exactly what they did!

Timing and a sliding door

David Wachs now lives near London with his wife and three sons. He moved to London almost 25 years ago. Over the course of our call, I would learn a ‘sliding door moment’ had everything to do with his current residence and more. (I like hearing about sliding door moments. Those moments where you have a choice, and the outcome changes the course of your future.)

In 1984, David was scheduled to perform stand-up for the first time ever in a comedy club in New York City, Improvisation. He was waiting for the evening to come around, but was too sick with nerves. Finally he thought, F@$#  this!, and he chickened out, giving up his spot.  In his apartment on the upper west side of NYC, he grabbed his friend’s arm and said, “Let’s get some pizza.”  On the 16^th floor, they entered the old-fashioned elevator—he remembered the operator’s name was Pedro. On the way down, Pedro stopped the elevator on the 10th floor to let a woman on. She was holding a film script, so David started talking to her about how he was a film director, and he told her she should come over and watch his new short film, Rosey & Jonesy. They were together from that point on, which was amazingly similar to how his own parents met and then married some 20 years before that, just 10 blocks away from where David met his first wife!

In 1986, they married, moved to LA, and then in 1990 moved to the United Kingdom where she was originally from. They have since divorced, but if David hadn’t moved to Britain, he wouldn’t be with his second wife of 20 years, and he wouldn’t have his three boys, and have the happy life he has in England.

Jack was already like a surrogate grandfather to David, and across the ocean, they stayed in touch.  Twenty years after filming Rosey & Jonesy, the timing became right and imperative for David to pursue Jack’s story now that Jack was in his 90s.  David followed his instincts and intuition and told everyone it was happening, his first feature.

David believes that speaking your visions out into the world helps make them a reality, and that’s a work philosophy that has carried throughout his career.  After Mayor Bloomberg personally answered David’s request for support in making the film with Jack, David knew it was going to happen. It’s worth noting David’s previous success came in the form of Picture Windows, and Emmy-winning Showtime TV series he was the original creator on (later to be co-producer and co-creator)—a show bringing famous paintings to life.  This concept stemmed from another ‘speaking your vision/follow your heart with no fear of judgment’ moments in his life when he created the first pilot.

In Holes In My Shoes, we learn Jack yearned to be a father, but his wife, who had known she was not able to have children due to a car accident, chose not to tell him prior to their marriage. Jack was devastated when he found out. David was inspired to do Jack’s story because he “wanted Jack to be appreciated, but as it stood, his extraordinary story was just going to evaporate.  I mean, here was the most famous man nobody ever heard of!”

In 2002, at the age of 92, Jack decided to take a writing course to help him create his autobiography.  David saw this was taking too long as Jack was writing it down by hand in pencil, word for word.  So, David bought a tape recorder and a box of tapes on the Internet and sent them to Jack to record his life story.  Jack recorded over 20 hours of his life story. David had the cassettes transcribed, and the 600 page autobiography was emailed to him—PRESTO!  From that transcript they created Holes In My Shoes, the feature documentary.

So, David helped create a lasting legacy of Jack’s life, and now people like me (and hopefully you) are enjoying Jack Beer’s vitality stories. He’s famous!

Behind the scenes

David got the support to make the film from (the then) Mayor Bloomberg, the Empire State Building, the Tenement Museum, Radio City Music Hall, Meryl Streep, and Woody Allen, amongst others.  He traveled back to New York City to do the film with Jack. He even lived with Jack for 3 weeks at Jack’s house—the house Jack built with his own two hands—in Greenwich, Connecticut. He felt so passionate about the film that David covered half of the documentary’s budget with personal savings.

They shot Holes In My Shoes in high definition with a top NYC film crew.  During the production, they drove around New York City and The Lower East Side to find the areas Jack had lived and worked, and David captured Jack’s candid and genuine reaction as he visited places for the first time in decades. These moments were powerful and sentimental, and Jack often brought David and the crew to tears.

Jack at Tenement House

David recalls their visit to a preserved 1920s tenement house that was very similar to one that Jack, his parents, and sister would have stayed in when he was a boy—a cold water apartment with 7 of them, 4 boys in a bed over 17 years. The crew was choking back tears as Jack recalled cherished and distant memories.  The tears kept coming as they visited his well-remembered playground and other homes.  Throughout Jack’s journey through his life, from 1910 to 2004, at the tenement house, at Radio City Music Hall, in Tennessee where the Manhattan Project originated from, at the very top of the Empire State Building, Jack kept saying,

“Boy, I wish my parents could see me now. I hope they do.”

An interesting thing to note; before the film entered production, Jack was filmed by David’s producer requesting a little on screen participation from some of the famous actors he had worked with: Walter Matthau, Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, James Cann, and Woody Allen.  At the end of this informal filming session, Jack spotted his archenemy—the Greenwich, CT telephone book.  He told David’s producer to keep the camera rolling, and at 94 and for the first time in 20 years (since the filming of Rosey & Jonesy), he ripped the phone book in half, then that half into half, and then he took one quarter and tore it in half—with his bare hands!

David said to me, “He was 94! And the smaller it got, the more impossible it seemed physics-wise.  When Jack succeeded, we cheered.”

David was so amazed when he saw the footage that he decided to start his film with this “…so that no one watching it could deny any of the extraordinary things that took place during Jack’s life.”

There’s a little Jack in all of us

“Jack was consistent. He was very engaged and present with whatever was in front of him. Whether it was ironing his trousers, making a salmon dinner, or working on the The Manhattan Project. Significance was irrelevant.”

Jack did everything to his best, and he’d accomplish it.  Jack recalls what his father said to him as a boy, which was (in a thick New York accent), “If you’re gonna sweep floors, I want you to be the best floor sweeper.  Anything you do, be da best at it.  Whatever you do, be da best.”  And so, Jack was not daunted by any challenge, whether it was at the age of 96 fixing his broken 1950s tractor or erecting the famous spire of the Empire State Building in 1950.

“So many of us now gobble up Ekhart Tolle—Jack was an amazing example of ‘living in the now’ in action, and over the best part of 99 years.”

And he was stubborn ‘in the now,’ too. David laughs as he tells me the story about a shouting and swearing incident they got into while Jack, at 94 years old, found himself occasionally driving on the wrong side of the road during a filming sequence.

David said he learned so much from Jack because Jack didn’t preach as much as he lived his life fully, as an example.

Jack passed on to his next adventure in 2009 at almost 99 years of age. In the five years after the documentary was released in 2004, Jack joined David at a number of festivals and screenings. Whenever Jack would go on stage to collect the Best Documentary Awards (of which, there were 4), David organized a live klezmer music band to play the theme tune from Holes In My Shoes.  Jack would mesmerize the audience with even more stories.

If you haven’t had the chance to watch Holes In My Shoes, I hope you will get a chance over the upcoming holidays. There are various ways to see it, but the options that support the filmmaker best are below.

A final word on Jack, check out this letter Jack wrote to the Greenwich Times, after his wife died. It is  incredibly poignant.

What’s next?

In the course of my discussion with David Wachs, I would learn about his motivation, how he chooses his projects, and about his latest endeavors, A Film for Life, and Mo Bourner’s Rap Against Racism —of which both foster posterity. His ideas are impactful and inspiring. I can’t wait to share the details about Film for Life and Rap Against Racism, and the remainder of our discussion with you next week along with his answers to the Vitality Stories Interview questions.

Stay tuned for Part Two with Director, David Wachs, but in the meantime, vicariously become a puppeteer in this 3 minute Nick Jr. Christmas TV Special (created and directed by David) of We’re Puppeteers!

Thanks for joining me on today’s newsletter. Have a great day.

Teri

Coming Up

• My newsletter series on Growing In Tokyo
• Part 2: A Vitality Stories Interview with Director, David Wachs, Holes In My Shoes
• An Update on TIGER DRIVE
• Artist, Erica McClain