No Mob Mentality

“You know the most interesting thing?” says Richard Dreyfuss of Meyer Lansky, whom he portrays in a major new TV movie. “I became a fan.”

A fan? Of the infamous racketeer, bootlegger, casino owner and organized crime kingpin--that Meyer Lansky? Remarkably, it turns out that it is.

In Lansky, by Dreyfuss’ account, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter David Mamet has created yet another empathetic don. Mamet, it would seem, has drawn a relatively thin line between good and bad, us and them, with anti-Semitism cast in the role of demon, rather than a man capable of ordering the deaths of other men, which Lansky grew to be.

But then Hollywood has always savored its romance with the mob, long before Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” series created the wildly popular contemporary Mafia mythology. Then, too, a writer will often give a character some redeeming strain, something to help forgive the flaw that allows an actor to embrace even the most horrific of roles. In Mamet’s script Dreyfus found both anti-Semitism and the immigrant story to call his own.

“I really liked him,” Dreyfuss says. “Doing this film made me aware of the similarity between immigrant stories like my grandfather’s and immigrant stories like Lansky’s.”

In the HBO film “Lansky,” which premieres Saturday, the young Lansky is seen in early scenes as a child in Poland, experiencing anti-Semitism firsthand before arriving in America. Starring Dreyfuss as Lansky when the story hits adulthood, the film is directed by John McNaughton (“Wild Things”) from Mamet’s script.

“I don’t mean I admire [Lansky],” Dreyfuss says. “I wouldn’t raise my kids like him. I think he was emotionally screwed up. But I saw his story as a larger whole, a story about an immigrant to this country.

“He was one of many poor, starving immigrant Jews who hit New York’s Lower East Side in the first few years of this century and struggled. As Lansky says often in this film, he was a businessman. He ran gambling casinos. That was his business. My grandfather ran a candy store. That was his.”

Dreyfuss pondered his feelings about Lansky over lunch at an Italian restaurant in west London, near his temporary apartment. He is here to star in a West End stage production of Neil Simon’s 1971 play “The Prisoner of Second Avenue.” His co-star is Marsha Mason, who appeared with him in “The Goodbye Girl,” the 1977 film (also scripted by Simon) that won Dreyfuss an Oscar.

The actor has surely been encouraged in this charitable view of Lansky (who died in 1983 at age 80) by Mamet’s script. It stops short of actually glamorizing the gangster while painting a sympathetic picture of him. After the horrors of Poland, Lansky (played by Joshua Praw, Ryan Merriman, Max Perlich and Dreyfuss at various ages) learns to stand up for himself against tough Irish American street kids in New York. He enters the world of organized crime, swiftly rises through its ranks and then starts to advocate diplomacy rather than violence or muscle as a means of achieving business ends.

In his later years, his prized Havana casino, the Riviera, is seized by Fidel Castro. Hounded in vain by the FBI and attacked in congressional hearings, he embarks on a fruitless search for a country that will admit him as a resident, and is turned away from Panama and Paraguay. At the end of his life, Dreyfuss as Lansky is seen at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, awaiting the outcome of his attempts to become a permanent Israeli resident. The film’s end titles include the assertion that Lansky was never convicted of a major crime.

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Still, he wasn’t the kind of man about whom you’d expect someone like Dreyfuss to call himself a fan. Surely, it’s suggested to him, Lansky was no choirboy.

“Well, I don’t know how much of a choirboy he wasn’t,” Dreyfuss counters. “Mamet’s script asks why people like Joseph Kennedy, who was involved in gun-running, became American heroes and people like Meyer Lansky didn’t. Could it be that, like Richard III, he was handed a reputation that wasn’t deserved?

“I know a lot of stories about my own family. I’m named after an uncle, a car thief who worked for a huge Prohibition gangster. What’s the difference between him and Meyer Lansky?

“Yes, Lansky consorted with murderers. Yes, he had a terrible reputation. But when the U.S. government spends all that time trying to nail you and fails, maybe there’s a message there. And another thing--if he was chairman of the board, the guy who organized organized crime, where was the money?

“The end of his life was a pathetic story. He lived on a pension. He didn’t have a triumphant end. When Castro took over his interests in Havana, that was the end of his fortune. So there’s something missing about the story--something about the rep that doesn’t hold up.”

Dreyfuss concedes he is no expert on Lansky’s life. “I read a few things about him beforehand,” he says vaguely. “When I was thinking about who I was playing, it was more of a mythological image of my grandfather than anything else. He was from Poland too. But I know the man that Lansky is portrayed as by David [Mamet] because of the dialogue.”

But the film’s executive producer, Frederick Zollo, who has been involved with the Lansky project for four years, knows more about the man--and mounts an even fiercer defense of him.

“It’s a very personal statement,” says Zollo, speaking by phone about Mamet’s script. “[Lansky] saw anti-Semitism as a boy, and he had this very strong notion that no one was going to do that to him again. No one was going to burn his house down.”

Well, maybe. But it is never an edifying spectacle when Hollywood people with a movie to plug attempt to rewrite history, or tell the rest of us that wrong is right, and bad guys are likable or just misunderstood.

During his lengthy defense of Lansky, Zollo repeatedly cited the anti-Semitism Lansky witnessed in his early years as a defining moment in his life. Fine. But thousands of immigrants to America in this century from various parts of the world also experienced brutality and savage discrimination in their homelands. And they did not resort to gangsterism and racketeering as a result.

Zollo points out that Lansky was never convicted of offenses relating to gangsterism. True, but neither was Al Capone (who finally went down for income tax evasion), and few would deny he was a crime boss.

“Well, there’s no attempt to make him what he wasn’t,” Zollo says. “I just always wanted to do a thinking-man’s gangster picture. And this was a man on the public periphery of crime. He pushed himself away from the violent center of crime.” (At another point in the conversation, Zollo admitted he believed Lansky had had people murdered.)

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The film came about after ex-HBO executive Robert Cooper broached the idea of a Lansky picture with Zollo, who had produced Mamet’s short play “The Cryptogram” and suggested Mamet to write Lansky’s story. Cooper assumed Mamet would not work for TV, but Zollo persuaded him. Yet Cooper had reservations about Mamet’s script, and Zollo discussed the possibility of a full-length feature film of the project with Warner Bros. Al Pacino’s name was attached for a while.

Then a new echelon of HBO executives arrived after Cooper’s departure and were more enthusiastic about Mamet’s script. The project was back on with HBO.

McNaughton, also speaking by phone, recalls he had just wrapped “Wild Things” when Zollo sent him Mamet’s Lansky script. “I’ve been a big fan of David for a long while,” he says. “We both grew up on Chicago’s South Side. At one point I was going to direct the film of his play ‘American Buffalo.’ I read the script once and said, ‘Absolutely, let’s go.’ It took Mamet for me to consider making a TV movie. I didn’t want to take on some dumb bio-pic.”

Nor did Dreyfuss. But he is a lover of historical drama, and he has starred for HBO before, eight years ago, in “Prisoner of Honor,” playing a French army officer named Picquart, who blew the whistle on “the Dreyfus affair,” the scandal that rocked French society in the 1890s.

Despite his defense of Lansky, Dreyfuss was unhappy not to have been given rehearsal time and doubts he will see the film.

“I’m not sure,” he says and shrugs. “In a perfect world we’d have rehearsed for a week, maybe two. But I’d been doing a play [with Mason in Sag Harbor, N.Y.] and I started shooting three days after it ended.

“The way HBO makes films, there’s a certain budget they don’t go over, no matter what. [McNaughton said it had been $11 million.] And because of that [HBO’s] shows share the same quality. They have enormous imagination, much more so than anyone would have the right to expect. An overwhelming bulk of their material is stuff that could not, would not, will never be made as features. But they also have certain limitations on their production values.”

For all that, Dreyfuss was pleased to have had the experience of speaking Mamet dialogue. He recalled in his younger days as a drama student reciting a speech with every “umm” and “ahh” deliberately left in, purely as an acting exercise.

“That’s exactly how I felt about doing this,” he says. He had read Mamet’s books about acting with mixed feelings: “But what I’ve learned about his dialogue is that he doesn’t just have an eccentric take. He hears a truth, and I hadn’t appreciated that.”

Truth, of course, is subjective, and its portrayal is an issue that causes huge problems for movies that depict real-life people or events. Films as diverse as “Malcolm X,” “Hoffa,” “JFK,” “Braveheart,” “The People Vs. Larry Flynt” and, more recently, “Hilary and Jackie” have all come under harsh scrutiny for the treatment of their “true” subjects.

“More people will know their history from movies than from school,” Dreyfuss offers without apology. “And people will go away from ‘Lansky’ thinking that’s it. It happens.

“But I don’t think the film flies off the handle and says weird things from a historical point of view. It stays within most boundaries.”

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“Lansky” will air on HBO at 8 p.m. Saturday.