BY ARI L. NOONAN
Exclusive to the Los Angeles Jewish Times
(Issue of May 8-14, 1998)


Is it possible to be Jewish and successful in Hollywood - if you are wearing your Judaism on the outside, not hiding it? Peering into the perceived darkness of a vast vacuum of values in movies, the young filmmaker David Notowitz believes he can make a difference by marrying his Jewishness to his skills with camera in hand.

He doesn’t flaunt it, but he’s proud. "I want my Jewishness and my business to work together, to work for each other," he was saying the other afternoon.

What makes him an intriguing study is that as someone who is openly Jewish, he is aiming for the top floor of show business.
"I want to write and direct feature films that affect people," he says, "films like The Graduate and Dead Poets Society, which have strong themes about individuals making dramatic changes for the better as they learn more about themselves."

Exactly how Mr. Notowitz’s strongly held values will fold into - or clash with - the prevailing values of Hollywood won’t be played out until the early years of the 21st century. Medium height, prematurely bald with owlish but friendly eyes, the inherently bashful Mr. Notowitz made his biggest breakthrough last week.

His 80-minute documentary, Carpati, about a fading Jewish community in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine, was nominated for an Emmy in the category of Arts and Culture/History, and he’ll find out the result on the last day of this month.
When San Carlos-born Mr. Notowitz graduated U.C. Santa Cruz nine years ago this month, his parents held their breath that their oldest of three sons, modest, the retiring type, might starve in a town filled with aggressive, hard-shell Hollywood types.
They resumed breathing long ago because they raised a son who stands on principle. He says he will quit or turn down jobs rather than compromise his Jewish values, and that may be a budding filmmaker’s most powerful weapon.

His smallish, crowded, nearly cluttered bare-wall office at home throbs with gadgets, with cabinets and shelves offering video and audio records of present and past projects.

Mr. Notowitz and his bride Jenni (pretty Jenni is a nurse for the L.A. County Health Department) keep their moral bearings anchored as Traditional Jews in the religious neighborhood of Pico-Robertson, close enough to sniff the agreeable fragrance of show business success but far enough away to sidestep any subtle temptations.

"I don’t want to be placed in the position of being forced to choose one over the other," he says. "I turn down jobs that take me away from my path."

You won’t find Mr. Notowitz making a motion picture about space bugs in the 25th century - he’s strictly interested in normal humans.

"I get great satisfaction knowing I’m creating a product that hundreds, thousands, maybe millions, will see someday," he says.

"I’ll tell you what animates me. I want to move audiences. I want to show them a world , in detail, that they normally don’t see."

At the present, he is a documentarian; which means that he and Jenni aren’t out Lexus-shopping these spring evenings, and they don’t have to move their savings to a new bank because the old one is too small. But he’s doing what he wants, and getting paid.

"Documentaries are about real life, not something made up," he says.

What Mr. Notowitz advocates isn’t the kind of stuff that lives inside movie magazines.

"Being flashy is important to many directors, but not to me," he says. A gentleman of opinion, he and Mrs. N paid cash to see "Titanic," and they’re still wondering what the fuss is about, speaking of flash and crash. "I’m not sure what value ‘Titanic’ had," he says. "As an editor, I don’t want to waste a minute of my audience’s time (by departing from substance). Most people see films as a distraction. I hope to change that view. I want to do films that are important to me."

Notowitz Productions