Jewish Community News

News: November 2007

San Jose filmmaker Todd Yellin tells how a script makes it off the shelf

Filmmaker Todd Yellin with his wife Jennifer Copaken, son Oliver and daughter Samara.

By Cecily Ruttenberg

San Jose filmmaker Todd Yellin, whose movie “Brother’s Shadow” recently opened  the San Jose Jewish Film Festival, says there are three ways people break into directing. They move from some other aspect of the industry (script writing or acting); they begin with smaller projects to gain name recognition; or ...they are just a guy with an idea, who works like hell to make it happen. Yellin’s category? You guessed it, number three.   “You leverage everything you have,” he says. “It’s like creating your own business. You have to be the terrier that won’t let go of the pants’ cuff.”
    Seated in a cozy armchair in a conference room at his employer Netflix on Winchester in Los Gatos, Yellin doesn’t appear a wild risk taker. Granted his pink, yellow and orange striped shirt is a tad dangerous, but everything else about him is relatively unassuming. Until, that is, you consider how many scripts and great movie ideas die on people’s shelves, and how his script “Brother’s Shadow “did not.
    Yellin says he has always possessed an intense focus to make things happen. After graduating University of Southern California film school in 1990, for example, Yellin tells how he was on a quest to shoot something to get himself on the map.  He ended up finding his idea after watching a Dalai Lama documentary one night, which briefly showed how refugees traveled thousands of miles for a moment with this spiritual figure. “Plenty of documentaries have been done on the Dalai Lama, and they’re very worthwhile, but I decided ‘wouldn’t it be interesting to follow these people?’”
     Yellin dove into researching Tibet. He contacted refugee organizations, obtained military maps of the region and studied the political history.  Soon he found himself in Tibet, posing as a tourist and traveling (with a hand-held camera) alongside a group of refugees, who were escaping over a 19,000-foot Himalayan pass.
   In the end, Yellin’s documentary got picked up by some British television stations. And while he enjoyed it, Yellin says writing and directing “Brother’s Shadow,” which premiered at the Tribeca film festival and has since played at festivals around the world, ended up being even more satisfying to create.
    “Brother’s Shadow” stars Scott Cohen as Jewish ex-con and master wood craftsman “Jake,”  who returns to his family home in Brooklyn after his identical twin brother dies. His father, played by Judd Hirsch, makes no effort to hide his disdain of Jake and feels that the wrong brother died. Add in a grieving sister-in-law and teenage son who are drawn to Jake because of his genetic similarity to their dead family member.
    The film shows its Jewish stripes with scenes of the family sitting shiva for Jake’s late brother, and in another scene, Jake and his dad ditch Rosh Hashana services to pitch pennies outside shul.
    Yellin wrote the script with Ivan Krim in the late 1990’s while living in New York. He pulled it off the shelf in 2003 for a rewrite and then faced his first major hurdle--raising the money.
    Approaching his former boss Jonathan Kaplan, CEO of the San Francisco based photography company Pure Digital. Yellin said, “so Jon, how does it sound being the executive producer of a movie? Don’t answer this question, call me tomorrow.”
    Bashful about the exact number, Yellin and Kaplan agreed to raise something less than $2 million and more than half a million to produce the film.  From here, Yellin soon found himself in his own heaven, in a New York director’s chair.
     “The number one place I like to be in the universe, probably tied with playing with my kids is on a movie set,” Yellin said. “There’s no greater rush.”
     So how does a day job at Netflix compare? “I wouldn’t call it just a day job. I’ve had every imaginable job having to do with film and this is another in a long line. I enjoy it, and work hard at it.”
     Still, without skipping a beat, Yellin says he will be back in the director’s chair in the next two to three years. Right now he’s just watching a lot of movies, investigating possibilities.
     Yellin says he probably watches about three movies a week. He and his wife enjoy the 9 to 11 p.m. showing together after the kids knock off, “and sometimes there’s the 11 to 1 a.m. showing after Jen goes to sleep,” Yellin admits.
   Yellin lives in San Jose with his wife Jennifer Copaken, 3-year-old daughter Samara (who attends the APJCC Preschool) and 14-month-old Oliver.  While he tells of his own Jewish upbringing as inconsistent, he says his wife and young children have inspired him to make his way back.
   Yellin grew up on Long Island in a very secular Jewish family. “We never went to synagogue unless it was someone’s Bar Mitzvah.” Around age eight however, his parents decided to send him to an Orthodox Hebrew School to prepare for his Bar Mitzvah. “It gave me resentment about Judaism,” Yellin admits, “because I went from one extreme to the other.” Still one of Yellin’s best memories of his Jewish upbringing was watching his 75-year-old grandfather tear up while he read his haftorah. “I was resentful at my parents but very happy I could do this for my grandfather,” he said.