'Tehrangeles' Rising -- Iranian- Americans Make Their Mark in Hollywood
New America Media, News Feature, Behrouz Saba, Posted: Nov 29, 2005
Editor's Note: Iranian-Americans are behind and in front of the camera in Hollywood in increasing numbers. But it takes more than financial success, the writer says, for an immigrant community to begin to tell its story.
LOS ANGELES--One day Hollywood will make an Iranian-American "Gone With the Wind." All the epic elements are there. Extended, deeply rooted families in Iran become fabulously wealthy during the oil boom of the mid-1970s, only to see their lives shattered by the Islamic revolution late in the decade. Fleeing to Southern California in droves, they begin to carve out for themselves a niche of wealth and promise they proudly call Tehrangeles.
What is more, Iranian-Americans are gradually gaining the capital, clout and skills necessary to become Hollywood players themselves, and to fashion their own screen images as earlier immigrants have succeeded in doing.
Iranian-American actors, cinematographers and makeup artists are earning credits on major Hollywood films, while two producers who have become wealthy in the real estate and hospitality industries are launching ambitious film careers.
Tehran-born Sam Nazarian lives the flashy lifestyle that qualifies him as a reincarnation of an old-fashioned Hollywood mogul. The owner of the two trendiest nightclubs in Los Angeles, he is buying and restyling hotels and restaurants here and abroad while backing such films as "The Beautiful Country," about the search of a Vietnamese-American for his father, and "Waiting," a comedy about a staff of underachievers at a chain restaurant.
Nazarian's father, born in the impoverished Jewish neighborhood of Tehran, became a wealthy manufacturer who had to start life here anew after most of his fortune was confiscated during the revolution. Dropping out of the University of Southern California, Nazarian, 30, started out in cell phone retail, making his first million in short order on a small investment in his early 20s.
The films he has produced don't yet point to a coherent style. "The Beautiful Country" is too earnest to be moving. Variety characterized "Waiting" as a "plotless series of tepid gags" and "somewhere below a 'Porky's' sequel."
More circumspect but no less determined is producer Bob Yari. One of his earliest film credits is as an assistant in "Checkpoint" (1987), a work by the pioneering director Parviz Sayyad, who made low-budget, independent films about Iranians in America in the revolution's immediate aftermath. Knowing that money speaks the loudest in today's Hollywood, Yari went on to become wealthy in Southern California's booming strip-mall real estate. He is now back, investing in numerous, far-reaching projects to produce and distribute films.
Yari is a backer of "Crash," which depicts frictions among blacks, Latinos, Koreans and Iranians in Los Angeles. Its cast includes Sandra Bullock and Don Cheadle. Tehran-born actor Shaun Toub, who was discovered as he worked as a real estate agent in Los Angeles, plays an Iranian shopkeeper who is victimized when he is thought to be an Arab.
Though well received, "Crash" overtly dramatizes prejudices, misunderstandings and divisions that are all the more devastating as they seethe just beneath the surface in Los Angeles.
Among those who work behind the camera, quite literally, Darius Khondji has succeeded as the director of photography for such films as "Se7en," "Evita" and "The Interpreter," easily stealing the show in works that have been less than critical successes.
Born in Tehran in 1955 and raised in his mother's native France, he found himself at UCLA in the heart of Tehrangeles, where requirements for entering film school weren't nearly as restrictive as those in Paris. Yet he soon sensed cliques and exclusions in America's seemingly open educational system and returned to France after another short stint at NYU. Following nearly a decade of working on French films, he came back to town to make his mark.
In "The Interpreter," about an assassination plot at the United Nations, Khondji shows the landmark building as a readily recognized symbol of world peace, then moves inside to reveal a sleek warren of political intrigue. His work deserves an Oscar nomination, if not the award itself.
For immigrants in America, however, success alone does not necessarily equal genuine assimilation or acceptance. Nazarian, as the most visible in the group, is the subject of a merciless profile in the Sept. 26 New Yorker magazine. Writer Dana Goodyear portrays an unabashed arriviste who boasts about getting drunk and buying original art that he doesn't understand, brags about the acceleration power of his numerous cars and shows off in his bathroom a plastic loofa that once belonged to Jennifer Lopez. (It came with the furnished mansion that he purchased from the celebrity.)
As with many other immigrant groups, Iranians generally believe that Americans are most impressed by wealth, only gradually realizing that selfless people with a dedication to service are the true backbone of any country. This would be a great theme for an Iranian-American "Gone With the Wind" to explore, as it steers clear of the racial clichés that mar its 1939 prototype.
Behrouz Saba, a Los Angeles-based writer and a native of Iran, earned a Ph.D. in film history and criticism from USC. He is writing "Geniuses Need Not Apply: A Cautionary Memoir of Film School and Hollywood."
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