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NATE BLOOM COLUMNIST
CROSSING THE SINAI
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ABC’s annual broadcast of the 1956 film, The Ten Commandments, willair on Saturday, April 3, starting at 7 p.m. It’s been quite some time since I wrote about the film. So, I am “rerunning” a few fun facts that you may or may not remember — and a couple of facts new to this column.
Most of the cast wasn’t Jewish, including Charlton Heston, a devout Christian (and big Israel supporter), who played Moses. Edward G. Robinson (as the evil Dathan) and Olive Deering (as Moses’s sister, Miriam) were the only Jewish actors with important roles in the film.
The only credited actor still alive is Joanna Merlin, 89. She played one of Jethro’s three daughters (not the one who married Moses). There’s a good chance you’d recognize Merlin from her scores of TV guest shots, including playing Judge Lena Petrovsky in 43 episodes of Law and Order.
Merlin’s sister, Harriet Glickman, died last year, age 93. A retired schoolteacher, she got a big N.Y. Times obit because in April 1968, after the death of Martin Luther King, she wrote Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, and urged him to put a black child character in his comic strip. Schultz wrote back and got her consent to share her letter with black friends and get their input. In July 1968, Schultz introduced Franklin, the strip’s first black character. On April 2, Hulu will begin streaming a new documentary, WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn. WeWork is an office-sharing company that attracted massive investment and then nearly financially collapsed in 2019. The company is currently valued less than the money that investors poured into it.
The co-founder and former CEO of WeWork is Adam Neumann, 41. For a time, he seemed like a Jewish role model: born in Israel and a veteran of the Israeli navy, he permanently settled in the U.S. around 2000. This handsome and charismatic guy is a religious Jew, has a smart Jewish wife (who is a first cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow) and together they have five kids.
WeWork wasn’t quite a scam, but it was way “oversold.” Fortunately, for Neumann, most of its debt was held by a Japanese bank that felt they had too much invested to let WeWork fail. They “forced” Neumann out in 2019, but he walked away with a $1.7 billion severance package.
The documentary was directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jed Rothstein, 47. (A dramatic mini-series about WeWork is in the works. It will co-star Anne Hathaway as Rebekah Neumann and Jared Leto as Adam, her husband).
THE VOICE OF DETROIT continued from page 39
— “rediscovering his voice during the 1960s and ’70s.” His love of monster movies led him to create Transylvanian Newsletter with a friend while they were in eighth grade. At Mumford, he started a magazine.
Joanna Merlin is the only credited Ten Commandments actor still alive.
NYU/TISCH
LOVE OF WRITING
While Ovshinsky was caught in the middle of his parents’ disputes, they each in their own way supported his love of writing. His mother, Norma, gave him a diary to encourage his writing, and when Harvey was 17, Stanley and Iris loaned him money to start The Fifth Estate, Detroit’s first alternative newspaper.
After his father died in 2012, Ovshinsky said he felt a sense of “relief and release and permission to tell my story,” he explains. “That first part of the book is letting the cat out of the bag. That’s central to the rest. That’s what brought me to the table.”
Once past his rocky childhood, Ovshinsky covers the early days of The Fifth Estate, taking us through the counterculture era of antiwar protests and hippies, including poet and marijuana advocate John Sinclair and the Detroit Police Department’s
Red Squad that compiled a thick file on Sinclair’s activities.
Always looking for the next creative challenge, Ovshinsky became a host and then news director at WABX, Detroit’s progressive rock radio station, at a young age.
He devotes considerable space to his television career — providing tips on finding and keeping a production job and most important, how to make stories relevant to viewers.
“Nobody cares about your story unless your story feels like theirs,” he says. The chapters about his less successful efforts to sell several screenplays and television series are less compel-
ling but perhaps useful to wouldbe screenwriters.
“Detroit was an excellent muse,” he says, looking back on his career. “Nobel prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote that every writer needs an address. For me, living and working in a city like Detroit, so famous for its genetically encoded apocalypse-resistant survival gene, has been great practice for how to endure the tumultuous peaks and valleys and challenges that come from attempting to live a creative life,” he states in the book.
In later life, Ovshinsky and his wife, Catherine, moved to Ann Arbor where they continue to live. “Detroit was my mother planet, and it was time to be in another,” he says.
Education has been the favorite part of his career. Ovshinsky has taught writing and creativity to young people and adults in a variety of schools and settings. “Nothing compares to helping young people find their own voice.” He describes it as “helping people make good noise.” Now he does some speaking engagements and says, “This book is my teaching.”
— HARVEY OVSHINSKY
Ovshinsky’s book is available at Book Beat in Oak Park, Literati in Ann Arbor, through the Wayne State University Press website and elsewhere.
