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Mazursky in Blume
February 4, 2007

Filmmaker/actor Paul Mazursky is a talkative guy. A talkative, funny guy. I discovered that last week when I had the opportunity to speak with him on the phone for a few minutes. The main thrust of our chat

was his 1973 film Blume in Love, a serio-comic examination of an L.A. divorce lawyer named Blume (George Segal) and his complicated relationship with his ex-wife Nina (Susan Anspach).

As I humbly like to think of myself as another talkative, funny guy (well, the former, at the very least), I wasn’t surprised that our chat was filled with a whole lot of interruptions as we found ourselves frequently talking over each other.

Our conversational jumble included thoughts about L.A. vs. New York (the Brooklyn-born Mazursky was bi-coastal for 15 years, but now has a permanent residence on the West Coast), his feelings about studio executives (“I’ve got two or three scripts that should be made, but they just don’t know.”) and how he is most recognized by today’s audiences as a supporting player in Season Three of The Sopranos (When people come up to me, I always think it’s going to be for one of my films, but it’s because I was shot dead on The Sopranos.)

When I slipped in a question about Blume in Love, one thought that came through loud and clear from

Mazursky was his fondness for the film, which is receiving DVD release this week (Warner, $19.98).

“I saw it last night for the first time in many years and I found myself very emotionally involved,” said Mazursky, acknowledging that the film and its depiction of women at the time of the women’s liberation movement was a pre-cursor to one of his most successful movies, An Unmarried Woman (1979).

“I had been living in Europe for six months prior to making Blume and what it says about the women of that time was all about what I had encountered in Europe,” he said.

Mazursky is thrilled to see that Blume is finally coming out on DVD, though he wishes he could have recorded a commentary track for it.

“They could have a commentary from George Segal, [co-star Kris Kristofferson] and myself, but it was too late once they scheduled it for release,” he said. “The decision to put it out now for the first time probably came from someone at Warner who must have wanted a title for a Valentine’s Day promotion and they saw that the poster art had a heart on it!”

Mazursky’s latest project, Yippee, had its American premiere last month at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. Mazursky’s first-ever documentary finds the filmmaker turning his camera on an annual Rosh Hashanah celebration in the small Ukranian town of Uman, an event that draws some 25,000 of the region’s Hasidic Jews.

Mazursky still hasn’t secured a distributor for Yippee, which he co-produced and co-financed to the tune of $40,000.

Oy.

Posted by Laurence Lerman on February 4, 2007 | Comments (1)