Captured at the point of origin

“There’s the judge,” Andrew Jarecki says outside the Clearview Squire Cinemas, with a nod at retired Judge Abbey Boklan, who sentenced two of the main characters in Jarecki film to prison for sexually abusing young boys.

“The prosecutor’s here, too,” Jarecki says as the crowd heads into the small theater complex. “And there’s one of the families.” That’s the Georgalis family, whose son, Ron, was among the scores of local kids who went to the basement of a home less than a mile from the theater to take $10 computer classes from a popular high school science teacher, Arnold Friedman, who would later be described in court as “a monster.”

“He took like four courses, and I took courses myself,” says his mother, Margalit. “I was there every Wednesday, at four in the afternoon, and at six, then back at eight. And I can tell you this -- it didn’t happen.”

Then another woman says, “I was their neighbor, and I could tell you stories -- if you could get me in.” They hadn’t even entered the sold-out premiere, but the debate already was underway among the people who lived through the events at the heart of Jarecki’s documentary, “Capturing the Friedmans.”

The movie had been shown previously at various festivals -- such as Seattle’s, Sundance and most recently Tribeca -- but Friday was opening night of its real run at select theaters in New York, including this one in the affluent suburban village that was the scene of one of the mass sex abuse scandals of the 1980s. (The film opens June 13 in Los Angeles.)

The Friedman case was the East Coast’s version of California’s notorious McMartin Pre-School case, with one big difference -- while the mother and son accused in the McMartin case were eventually exonerated, and the charges exposed as the product of mass hysteria, the father and son in the Friedman case pleaded guilty in 1988. Arnold Friedman, who later killed himself in prison with an overdose of antidepressants, faced 107 counts, while his youngest son Jesse, then 19, accepted a plea bargain while facing 245 counts.

Though he is now free on parole after serving 13 years in prison, Jesse did not attend Friday night’s screening in Great Neck. But another Friedman did make the event that had been billed as a “town meeting” on the happenings that once brought unwelcome headlines to this Long Island community.

Among those filtering in was the oldest of the three Friedman sons, David, the one who first drew the interest of novice filmmaker Jarecki because of his unusual job -- as a successful children’s birthday party clown in Manhattan. Only later did Jarecki discover his clown’s unusual family history, along with another secret -- that the Friedmans had made extensive home videos even as two of them were being demonized by the world outside as inhuman sexual predators.

Now, 15 years later, the oldest son returned to what others saw as the scene of the crime and said, “This film is the trial we never got.” Jarecki himself called it returning to the “belly of the beast,” in part because he knew what it meant for him. If “Capturing the Friedmans” does provide a trial of sorts for a family that never got one, the director inevitably would face pressure to do something he carefully avoided in his film, which is to sit as a juror himself -- to say whether he personally believes the Friedmans “did it.”

Backing off

When he began working on the project that would take him three years to research and complete, Jarecki thought he might make himself part of the film, serving as the classic outside narrator who invites his audience along on his journey for the truth. The most prominent documentary filmmaker of the moment, Michael Moore, does this in the extreme, making himself the central character -- and agent provocateur -- in “Roger and Me” and “Bowling for Columbine.”

But when Jarecki began filming such a personal “companion narrative” himself, telling how he started documenting this birthday clown and was drawn into the inner world of a scandalized family, he sensed that his own story was “so pedestrian,” especially when contrasted with the film’s “emerging lyrical quality.”

He also sensed that such an approach gave audience members an easy out -- they could react to him, and his positions, rather than to the Friedmans or the law enforcement officials who pursued them.

“If you don’t impose too much explanation, the audience has to do the work,” Jarecki concluded. But if you came on too strong, they could say, “I don’t have to do this because the filmmaker has done it for me.”

So Jarecki basically took himself out of the film. Though his voice is heard occasionally asking a question, he is never seen during the 107 minutes that are dominated by the Friedmans telling their story, and the cops and others telling theirs, and by the home movies from over the years, the early ones showing an idealized family, with bouncing babies and vacations at the beach, and the chilling later ones showing the Friedman clan coming apart.

That approach won Jarecki the grand jury prize at Sundance and praise from critics across the country, who have seen his film as a subtle meditation on facets of life beyond the criminal case that had the Friedmans in its vortex, from the meaning of family to the tricks played by memory. Some characters can’t remember molestations that almost certainly happened to them, while others recall ones that most likely did not.

The film also invites audiences to ponder the interplay of memory and memorialization, particularly through photographs and film. Is it the childhood experience we remember, or merely the picture of the moment that is hung on our wall?

Jarecki recalls -- though not in the film -- how his own mother once grew frustrated with the messy room of his brother, who kept denying that it was a disaster area. So his mother took pictures of the piles of clothes and junk and placed them on the dining room table for his brother.

“And he came back and we were having dinner, and he started moving his head around in a manner that would keep him from looking at the photographs,” Jarecki recalls. “There are certain truths that people can’t see.”

That’s the kind of truth that his film forces audiences to confront, even as it reminds them of the elusiveness of truth.

But however profound the “Rashomon” insight that different people see the same event different ways, it goes only so far when confronting real-life events that sent two people to jail and devastated a family and a community -- this community.

Jarecki says he is far from an absolute relativist, and that at some level it can’t just be a matter of he said-she said when it comes to the question of whether neighborhood boys were abused in the Friedman home. “Is there objective truth? I think there is,” said the filmmaker, about to face the audience that would want to know where he stood.

A film overwhelmed

Dressed in jeans and a blue windbreaker, Jarecki addresses the crowd briefly before the lights go out. “Hopefully it makes you think,” he says.

But later he acknowledged that “sometimes the case eats the film,” and that this was doomed to be one such night.

While the law enforcement side of the community is represented by the prosecutor and the retired Judge Boklan, supporters of the Friedmans have them outnumbered: from Arnold Friedman’s former principal at Bayside High School in Queens to a man whose father performed with him in an earlier career, when Arnold was the pianist in a band that worked the Catskills. The audience also included close friends of the Friedman boys, both from the time of the incidents and now.

“Capturing the Friedmans” provides plenty of ammunition for both sides, though often from unlikely sources. In the film, the law enforcement officials come off as earnest but overzealous, whether it’s the postal inspector who tried for two years to get Arnold to mail him a pornographic magazine, or the local investigators who were convinced that “mass [sex] games” went on for years in the computer classes, though no children reported them to their parents. One former student, whose grand jury testimony became the basis for dozens of counts, also comes across as unpersuasive, describing how he recalled the abuse only after hypnosis sessions.

But then comes the damning testimony, most against Arnold, from people who would be expected to be on his side. There’s wife Elaine, recalling how he eventually admitted to having sexual contact with one boy -- not in his classes, but earlier, at a vacation community. He then changes the story to make it two boys he abused.

Then there’s the lawyer for the younger Friedman, Jesse, telling of hearing the father confide in prison to being aroused by the sight of a young boy visiting another inmate nearby.

In the home movies, Jesse Friedman desperately declares that he didn’t do anything to his father’s students and doesn’t want to take a plea bargain. But he wavers as it seems to be the only way to avoid risking a lifetime in prison, and then comes the TV videotape of him in court, tearfully telling the judge that, yes, it happened, and “I wish there was something I could have done to stop it sooner.” Then comes a remarkable moment in the home movies, when Jesse says into his brother’s video camera, “Today is the day before I went to jail,” as if he’s speaking, even then, to some future audience.

When the film is done and it’s time for the audience to ask questions, some want to know why so much was left out: how the mother ran a children’s play group in the home, say, or how a friend of Jesse Friedman’s also was charged and was ready to testify against him. And why did the cops believe the kids’ stories of naked games of “leapfrog”?

Jarecki suggests the cops approached the potential witnesses expecting to hear horror stories, noting how one investigator spoke of “alleged victims” to question, when it merely was the list of computer students.

But he invites the judge, in the audience, to speak her mind.

She says, “I cannot just sit silently by and not protect the credibility of many of the victims.... They were children at the time and I can’t bear to see them victimized once again.

“This is a beautiful film,” the judge adds. “But....” And the evening free-for-all is underway. A friend if Jesse’s calls out, “Shame!” and says the judge already had her say when “she sent him to jail for 13 years.”

“Let her finish!” someone else calls out.

The judge then cites evidence not in the film, such as a “close-out statement” given by the elder Friedman, in which he admitted to various crimes in return for prosecutors’ pledge that they wouldn’t add more charges.

From the front of the auditorium, Jarecki offered a competing explanation -- that Arnold Friedman’s lawyer advised him to “say he had done everything” merely to keep authorities from piling on charges.

One member of the audience pleads that they “stop talking about guilt or innocence but about the movie itself.” That draws only modest applause, however, and soon someone else is pressing the director for his verdict, saying “any good documentary takes a stand.”

Jarecki tries dodging it, saying, “We just tried to be as open as possible.” But over the next hour, as he is pressed some more, he gives at least the outlines of an answer: It’s clear to him, he says, that Arnold Friedman was “a practicing pedophile” who should not have had children in his home.

But the elder Friedman also may have been, he suggests, accused of “the wrong felony.” Jarecki suspects that if a camera was focused on the classes all those years, it might have picked up touching beyond what Arnold’s sons can let themselves acknowledge -- but nothing like the wild sex games the investigators alleged. At the same time, in three years of investigation, he says he never saw any direct evidence of involvement by Jesse.

Jarecki does offer this, if not a verdict: “I don’t think this family had a chance.” He tells the crowd, “Is it worse to be a pedophile, I would ask, than to manage a botched police investigation and send somebody to jail for 13 years?” After a scattering of applause, he adds, “I’m not defending pedophilia, God knows, and I would never apologize for it.”

After the question-and-answer session, most of the crowd lingers, continuing the debate. The judge answers questions, defending the investigation and cursing herself for forgetting one point earlier. “Jesse went on ‘Geraldo’ after he pled and announced to the world that he was guilty. Yes. I knew there was something I forgot to say.”

Elsewhere in the theater, David Friedman shook the hand of the principal, who recalled how many students turned out for his father’s retirement party.

“I am gleefully surprised that there was an overwhelmingly positive response to the film and especially my family,” the eldest Friedman son said.

“The reason I gave him the home videos that I shot was because we have nothing to hide,” he added. “[And] it makes it a better movie.”

Then it struck the eldest Friedman son, “There was very little discussion of the film tonight.”