Catering to the Movie Racket

Bob Giraldi wasn’t complaining, but ... he did have to talk his way past the police barricades to get his scooter to his own restaurant in TriBeCa. Not some SUV, but a little wheel-along scooter, like a kid would use.

He wasn’t complaining about his sore throat, either, which might have been from a simple cold but was more likely due to the smoke still rising from the wreckage of the World Trade Center, just a few blocks below the restaurant, Gigino Trattoria.

“Now everyone’s talking about their throat,” he noted, “with this air we’re breathing.”

No, he wasn’t complaining--that’s out in New York these days, where everyday problems suddenly seem trivial. But with the politicians urging folks to get back to normal, a touch of New York grumbling would seem to be OK, if not patriotic.

Danny Aiello joins in the moment he arrives and takes a seat at Giraldi’s table. He is irked by how some of his fellow actors and celebrities show up at ground zero before waiting cameras.

“They’re the same ones that are in the paper every week, for every little thing,” Aiello says.

“This is New York, so it’s photo ops for everybody,” Giraldi agrees.

“Here in N.Y., there are five ... actors, and they’re nothing, they’re nobody, and they’re in the columns every day,” says Aiello, who was a bouncer and truck loader--and an announcer at a Greyhound station--before becoming an Oscar-nominated actor.

By now a 70ish couple, two tables over, is stealing peeks at the scene, trying to figure it out. They’ve seen the movie “Dinner Rush,” set right here in the restaurant, in which Aiello plays the owner pondering giving the place to his son, the celebrity chef, if a couple of mob goons don’t muscle in first. Now Aiello is sitting at the exact table he uses in the film--like maybe he really does own the joint.

But if there’s life imitating art, or vice versa, that’s not it. They need to be peeking at the 62-year-old Giraldi, the real owner, who also directed the indie film, which opens today in Los Angeles--it’s already playing in New York.

Giraldi notices several other patrons coming in, all with laminated picture IDs around their necks.

“You see what we’re getting now?” he says. “Rescue workers.”

Maybe they’ve seen the film, too, for they head to the upper level of the cozy, Tuscan-style restaurant, to what’s quickly become the most popular table--the one where two mob musclemen sit in the film.

That reminds Aiello of how he was speaking to an executive at Miramax, located nearby in TriBeCa.

“They said, ‘We have to sit at that table.’ And I said, “My table?’ ‘No, with the crooks!”’

The talk of the studio world reminds Giraldi, in turn, of a call he got from one mogul’s office.

“You know Hollywood--because they’re somebody, they have their assistant call up and say, ‘I heard this picture is terrific. Send it to me.”’

“It’s a very talked-about movie,” Aiello reassures him.

“But the audacity,” Giraldi continues. “Doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall. ‘Send it to me because I don’t want to go see it! And send me the print.’ A print!”

The pleasure of the rant is interrupted as the waiter brings a bowl of soup for Giraldi, barley pumpkin with beans and butternut squash. Aiello gets pasta with meat sauce, fully in character.

His restaurateur in the film is a spaghetti-and-meatballs sort with little stomach for the froufrou nouvelle dishes cooked up by his son, even if they do please the loopy, flattery-demanding food critic played by Sandra Bernhard.

While a mob story on one level, the film mostly revels in the peculiar subculture of such a restaurant, from the cramped food line in the basement kitchen to the oddballs eating the stuff above, like the snobby art dealer with his table of sycophants.

“Anyway, we’re staying in 10 theaters,” Giraldi tells Aiello, rattling off the locations in the New York run. “And they added Malverne. Where’s Malverne? Long Island?”

“It’s outrageous,” Aiello says. “If it was in 3,500 theaters, we’d be at $30 million!”

In reality, they don’t know whether the distributor, the Access Motion Picture Group, will take “Dinner Rush” much beyond the art-house circuit. “It’s all contingent on how it does in L.A.,” says a spokesman.

The film debuted at the Telluride Film Festival and was in the “new directors” series sponsored by Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, that showing prompting a laugh from Aiello. “New director!” he scoffs.

The Jersey-born Giraldi has been directing for 30 years--but mostly in advertising, shooting such high-profile campaigns as the comic Miller Lite spots featuring Rodney Dangerfield and Bob Ueker. He was an early player in music videos, as well, directing Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” among others. He also found time to make one previous film, “Hiding Out,” in 1987.

Terrorists Strike as Film Is About to Open

Giraldi won’t reveal the budget for “Dinner Rush,” but it was not a lot more than the $1 million-plus it costs to film many of his commercials. Scheduled for 25 days of filming, he completed it in 21. Even so, the shooting did cost him another way--a month’s business at the TriBeCa restaurant, one of a dozen he owns, including the top-rated Jean Georges in Donald Trump’s hotel off Central Park.

Though he did not think of the film as advertising for the restaurant, such exposure has been known to help an eatery, whether it’s a diner featured in “Seinfeld” or the romantic Greenwich Village restaurant where Aiello proposed to Cher in “Moonstruck.”

But just as “Dinner Rush” was to be released here, the hijacked jetliners struck the Twin Towers down the street. The restaurant closed while the soot was cleaned out. Giraldi then used it to cook food for rescue squads and the film’s opening became a fund-raiser. Another of his restaurants, located below the Trade Center site, remains closed. Barricades continue to bar regular traffic from the block where Gigino is located.

“We had a lot of Trade Center business,” Giraldi says. “At lunchtime this used to be packed.”

There are open tables at this lunch hour. But dinner is another matter, he says. “This restaurant is doing better than it ever has in a macabre way. You got gawkers, you got neighborhood people who want to stay in the neighborhood. And the movie. People come and say, ‘Can I see the kitchen?”’

He and Aiello are already planning their next film--about a troubled young woman in a group home who fantasizes that an over-the-hill actor is her father. “Two adults searching for different things and they find each other,” Giraldi says.

“I’m playing the actor,” says Aiello, “unshaven, dressed like a pig, one of those, drunk all the time, ex-Broadway, ... he’s doing regional commercials now.... But I get to dance in it, and sing. ‘Give My Regards to Broadway.’ ”

Giraldi checks his watch and sees he’s late for an appointment. He rises to find his scooter and head off. As Aiello stands, also, the couple two tables over speaks up, calling him over to say how much “we loved your movie,” the one about those crazy characters you find in a restaurant like this.”