Ad Man Gives His Bitter Divorce a Happy Ending--in a Film Fantasy

Go ahead. Laugh at Steven Dworman’s messy divorce. He wants you to.

Dworman, who runs an infomercial and advertising business, turned the story of his marriage’s breakup into a cathartic comedy called “Divorce, the Musical.”

The novice filmmaker bankrolled, wrote, directed and starred in the $1.5-million, 86-minute movie. And now he has rented a Santa Monica theater--five blocks from his ex-wife’s home--and blanketed the Westside with fliers and signs on the sides of buses to entice people to see it.

To the surprise of some, more than 3,000 have bought tickets in the last two weeks--some returning to see it more than once.

The movie chronicles the hard-luck story of a man’s acrimonious divorce and his subsequent effort to win the affection of his teenage daughter. For the 46-year-old Dworman, it’s almost autobiographical.

In the movie, the lead character is a television infomercial producer who tries to make his daughter like him by producing a musical that will showcase her talent in singing and acting. He decides that the subject of the musical will be divorce. And the show’s cast will be made up of children.

Dworman’s character spends so much time putting the show together that his advertising business starts to suffer as his relationship with his daughter continues to languish. By the end of the movie, however, the business is bouncing back. And his daughter loves him, he has a new girlfriend and his ex-wife respects what he has done.

In real life, none of that last part has happened.

He and his ex-wife don’t speak, and he hasn’t seen his 17-year-old daughter in two years, Dworman said.

“To my knowledge, they haven’t seen the movie. But they live here in the neighborhood. I know they know about it. I know they got a postcard advertising it. Everyone in Santa Monica did,” he said.

Dworman said his daughter read part of the script to “Divorce, the Musical” 21/2 years ago. But she was put off by the script’s depiction of the mother as having a lizard’s face, he acknowledged. (In the movie, the ex-wife character sheds the lizard look in the end and is shown to be a beautiful woman.)

Dworman’s ex-wife, Nancy Griffin, could not be reached for comment.

Dworman said he got the idea for the musical five years ago after taking his daughter to a children’s production of “Oklahoma!”

“It came in a flash: Why not do a movie with a children’s view of divorce? Kids are bitter and angry about divorce. But this could be funny and heartwarming--about a man being reconnected with his daughter,” he said. “Was it wishful thinking? Absolutely.”

Dworman, of Brentwood, sold a portion of his business to finance the movie. It has a cast of 60 and was shot over 19 days at a dozen Los Angeles-area locations in 2000.

Production of the comedy was not always a barrel of laughs, however. Actress Anneliese van der Pol, who was 14 when she portrayed the daughter, was hospitalized in the middle of the shoot. Part of the crew staged a walkout to protest 18-hour workdays. One of the two cameras used to photograph the musical numbers was defective and inserted an optical line in every scene.

Because the young actors had to return to school and could not re-shoot the scenes, Dworman said, he had to pay a special-effects lab to manually remove the line, frame-by-frame.

He has spent another $41,000 advertising the movie (bikini-clad skaters have even handed out fliers along Venice Beach), which runs nightly through Thursday at the Aero Theater, 1328 Montana Ave. Free admission is available to those who show divorce papers dated April or May, Dworman said.

The movie contains nine song-and-dance routines--including an overhead, Busby Berkeley-like scene in which young dancers resemble eggs and sperm. It has been praised by some who have seen it.

“It was very funny. It made me cry at the end. Anyone who has gone through a divorce can relate to it,” said Victoria DeLaGuerra, the owner of a West Los Angeles skin care salon.

Darla Michelle, a Westside classical music flutist, said she has seen it three times. “There were funny lyrics to the songs that I missed the first time because I was with a crowd laughing a lot, so I went back,” she explained.

Times film reviewer Kevin Thomas was less charitable, dismissing the film in a brief review as “wholly inept and unfunny.”

Dworman, who was married to Griffin for 31/2 years, says the movie is not a slap at his ex. “It isn’t revenge. I didn’t do it to get even,” he said. He said he hopes his daughter sees the film and recognizes it as “a positive” reaction to a difficult time in his life.

For now, he is looking for a distributor who will release it to a wider audience. And Dworman--who briefly remarried after divorcing Griffin--is working on another script.

No, it will not be “Divorce, the Sequel,” he pledges.

So you can relax, Diana Twomey of Atlanta--ex-wife No. 2.