10 Questions: Naomi Foner GyllenhaalScreenwriter of Bee Season.by Steve Head November 9, 2005 - Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal has been a lot of things over the past thirty-five years. She was a content producer for the original Sesame Street, where she created short, animated films. She was a senior producer for The Electric Company, where she worked with Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader. She was the screenwriter of such films as Running on Empty, A Dangerous Woman and Losing Isaiah. And more than that, she's "Mom" to Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal. For her latest project, Bee Season, she adapted Myla Goldberg's novel for directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel. The movie, starring Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche, opens in limited release on November 11th. She says, "When I'm doing my best writing, I feel like I've done all the work in advance; I learn the things I need to learn, or see into things I need to see. You need to know who your people are down to the last detail. You need to know the world they're living in. You need to know the intentions of the scene. It's hard work, but when it really all comes together, it's as if you're not doing it at all. At that point it's easy. I love it when that happens."Being that the 10 questions are All About The Love, Mrs. Gyllenhaal was kind enough to share her favorites.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------1. What is your favorite piece of music?There's so much I love. My kids would probably be able to help me with this. There's so many and so many different kinds. Alright, well, this would be a top three. I really like The Goldberg Variations. I really like Paul Simon's album, The Rhythm of the Saints, and I really Django Reinhardt and Stephan Grappelli's work. I love the poetry of Paul Simon's music. The words and the music… the meaning comes through without any kind of logic. It's really poetry. I love the Goldberg Variations because the variations are simple and extraordinary. They just move me in some way. And the Glenn Gould performance of it is beautiful. Django Reinhardt and Stephan Grappelli I love for the history and the music. I can't really explain it any other way. It's the feeling of all the accumulated humanity in that music. 2. What is your favorite film?I have many favorite films, but I often say that the film that kind of changed my life when I was growing up was Jules et Jim. It's what drew me to love film. Then, when Truffaut died and I heard it on the radio, I pulled off the freeway, sat on the side of the road and cried. I didn't know Truffaut, but the reason that film moved me so much was because it gave me permission to be different. You didn't have to do everything the straight-and-narrow way, and you didn't have to do everything the way you were being told to you. There were alternatives, and it opened up the world to me. It wasn't so much that I love that film more than many others – and I've seen so many that have moved me – but it was the one that showed me the power of film.3. What is your favorite TV program, past or current?The West Wing. I'm so into it because it's like my fantasy coming alive. An actual, thoughtful, wise president who's running the country closer to my idea of how it actually should be running. (She laughs) What also makes it involving is the interesting complications of human beings as they try to be leaders. I just find the show fascinating. It the drama that so interesting; the ambiguity and moral choices and behaviors that are really human and complicated, and require you to participate in them. And there's some satisfaction in seeing your fantasy played-out so differently than in reality.4. What do you feel has been your most important professional accomplishment to date?I think I would probably have to say two. One is Running on Empty, and the other is the fact that I worked for ten years at The Children's Television Workshop doing Sesame Street and The Electric Company. That's where I was before I started to write screenplays. To me, I think all of us who worked there – and there were a lot of people: Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and Morgan Freeman, who was Easy Reader – all of us who were there in the beginning, we changed a whole culture with that show. We gave a common grounding to people across racial and sexual differences. It was so that everyone had some common experience that they'd never had before. I started out as a production assistant coloring sheep so they looked white on screen (she laughs), and I ended up working for many years doing the small films and animations for Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Then I was taken off to develop the The Electric Company as a senior producer, and I spent two years traveling the country, seeing all the different ways people were taught to read.5. Which project do you feel didn't live up to what you envisioned?(She laughs) I'll pin this one on my husband. My husband and I struggled with Losing Isaiah. I had hoped the Losing Isaiah would end-up being a little bit more about how being a parent had nothing to do with whether you birthed a child. But, it kind of got caught-up in a lot of other things. And I think, in the end, it was a little muddier than I had hoped it would be. 6. What is your favorite book?My favorite book in the world (She laughs) is Franny and Zooey [by J.D. Salinger]. I actually have two. I would say that one, and Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee – he won the Nobel Prize last year. Those two are books I go back to. I was in high school, I think, when I first read Franny and Zooey, and since then I still read it every five years. Each time I read it, it's different, and still wonderful, because I'm looking at it from a different place in my life.7. If you could change one thing about the industry, what would it be?I would like to see more first time directors get financing for their movies and I'd like to see I would have it story-driven instead of money-driven. (She laughs) I think when things are money-driven, you're not allowed to take risks. And when you can't take enough risks, you can't really do anything original, unusual or new because you might fail. You have to be able to fail to succeed. You always learn from failure. And if you can't fail because you won't be given another chance, then that can't happen.8. Who – or what – would you say has had the biggest influence on your career?Right now I would have to say it's Charlie Kaufman. I think he opened up a whole range of possibilities for screenwriters by de-constructing the screenplay, and making it much more possible to be original, visual, poetic and making it an original art-form. Whatever he's done, he's made it an original art-form, and he's allowed things to happen in more mainstream filmmaking that weren't really allowed before. For me, he has just been inspiring. 9. What is your next project?I have one that's about to have a director. It's in development. It's the story of Grace Metalious, who wrote the TV show Peyton Place. And I have a screenplay I'm working on. It's about Victoria Woodhull, who was a prostitute who ran for president in the 19th Century, right after the Civil War. 10. What is the one project that you've always wanted to do, but have yet to be able to?Actually, Victoria Woodhull is the one I've wanted to do for twenty-five years. It's sort of an untapped subject. There's a wonderful book about her by Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers. And one more for fun of it...11. Do you have a favorite movie that your kids have been in?Jarhead is just fabulous, isn't it? But, well, why don't we just say this: All my kid's movies are my favorite films. Everything they do is pretty great to me, because I'm their mother.
I just read your post about Naomi in Jake Jake Jake, and posted this there, but moved it here:The thing that got me really excited in your quoted IMDb list is "What about Naomi?" I REMEMBER that from The Electric Company. I loved that show 30 years ago, with Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader and the wonderful Rita Moreno. [youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u8MY7PjSXU[/youtube]
I just read your post about Naomi in Jake Jake Jake, and posted this there, but moved it here:The thing that got me really excited in your quoted IMDb list is "What about Naomi?" I REMEMBER that from The Electric Company. I loved that show 30 years ago, with Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader and the wonderful Rita Moreno.
Born in New York, NY; married Stephen Gyllenhaal (a film director); children:two. Career: Screenwriter and producer. Served as media director of Eugene McCarthy's campaign for president, 1968; Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), production assistant and researcher on staff of Sesame Street, beginning 1968; creator and co-producer of television series,The Best of Families. Awards, Honors: Academy Award nomination for best originalscreenplay, Golden Globe Award for best screenplay, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, PEN West Screenplay Award, all 1989, for Running on Empty.---Famous WorksCREDITSFilm WorkProducerA Dangerous Woman, Gramercy Pictures, 1993Losing Isaiah, Paramount, 1995Executive producer, Homegrown, Columbia TriStar, 1998 WRITINGSScreenplaysViolets Are Blue, Columbia, 1986Running on Empty, Warner Bros., 1988A Dangerous Woman (based on a novel by Mary McGarry Morris), Gramercy Pictures, 1993Losing Isaiah (based on a novel by Seth Margolis), Paramount, 1995Also author of the teleplay "Blackout," for the PBS series, Visions.Further ReferenceOTHER SOURCESPeriodicals:Cosmopolitan, November 1990, pp. 294-97. Entertainment Weekly, December 3, 1993, pp. 47, 50. Nation, October 31, 1988, p. 434. New Republic, October 10, 1988, pp. 26-27. New Statesman and Society, May 20, 1994, pp. 32, 34. New York, September 26, 1988, pp. 110, 114, 116; April 3, 1995, p.59. New Yorker, December 13, 1993, p. 125. Time, April 14, 1986, p. 104.*
TriviaMother of Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jake GyllenhaalShe received her M.A. in developmental psychology from Columbia UniversityShe received a B.A. in English from Barnard College in 1966.Is Naomi from the line "And what about Naomi?" in the "Love of Chair" segment from "The Electric Company" (1971).Eric Foner is sometimes incorrectly referred to as her brother (The Columbia Spectator, February 2006). He is actually her ex-husband.Graduate of Barnard College (Class of 1966).Granddaughter Ramona Sarsgaard, born October 3, 2006.Daughter Maggie Ruth Gyllenhaal, born November 16, 1977.Son Jacob 'Jake' Benjamin Gyllenhaal, born December 19, 1980.Grandmother of Maggie Gyllenhaal's daughter Ramona.Godfather of her son Jake Gyllenhaal is Paul Newman.Godmother of her son Jake Gyllenhaal is Jamie Lee Curtis.
Wow!If she had had a little more experience in 1968 when she was the media director for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign, the world might be a very, very, very, very, very different place right now. Can you imagine?
