It only took a minute for Tony Kushner to make a lasting impression on Freida Lee Mock.
The award-winning documentary filmmaker was in the audience at her daughter’s graduation from Wesleyan when the acclaimed playwright stepped to the microphone to address the Class of 1999.
Kushner was allotted exactly 60 seconds, and his rapid-fire speech was both funny and inspiring. “I was drawn to his ideas, his ideas as beautifully expressed in words, and his facility to take those ideas and engage his audience,” Mock recalls on the phone from her Los Angeles office.
Mock always has a long list of projects in various stages of production, and the idea of a movie about Kushner didn’t occur to her immediately. A few years went by, in fact, before she wrote him a letter proposing a film.
“Things stick in the back of your mind,” Mock explains. “There was something in that speech that stayed with me. He’s very charismatic and very engaging.”
Mock is alluding to one of the little secrets that audiences don’t know: Casting is as important to documentary filmmakers as it is to Hollywood producers.
Kushner effortlessly commands the screen with wit and charm in Mock’s doc, “Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner.” The feature-length film has its Bay Area premiere June 23 in frameline30 (aka the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival) and will also screen in Berkeley in early August as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
“Wrestling with Angels” is intimate and admiring without fully succumbing to hagiography. It follows the playwright in the months after 9/11 through the 2004 election, from his Jewish wedding to longtime partner Mark Harris through rehearsals for “Caroline, or Change,” to his work with Maurice Sendak on “Brundibar” to volunteer duty outside a Florida polling place.
The film contains no mention of the recent furor over Kushner’s screenplay for a certain Steven Spielberg movie, for good reason.
“‘Munich’ was not even on the radar,” Mock recalls. “When I finished principal photography, he was doing a rewrite. I didn’t even know the title.”
In the most revealing segment, Kushner visits Lake Charles, La., where he grew up and was a champion debater in high school. He gives a (pre-Katrina) tour of the synagogue where he was bar mitzvahed, and relates how the family lumber and building materials business his grandfather founded now has an African-American partner.
Kushner comes across as proudly Jewish and gay, with deep connections to both the social-justice aspect of black-Jewish relations and contemporary New York intellectual life. “Wrestling with Angels,” in other words, reveals a brilliant talker who walks the walk.
Although the playwright is unflaggingly outspoken, and a target of criticism in some Jewish circles for co-editing the 2003 anthology, “Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israel-Palestinian Conflict,” the documentary avoids controversy.
This is largely due to Mock’s filmmaking style, which values craft over a strong point of view. She received an Oscar in 1995 for best documentary (to go along with her four career Academy Award nominations in the short documentary category) for “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision,” which profiled the Asian-American architect whose unorthodox design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial provoked a hail of criticism.
Mock’s approach both on that film and “Wrestling with Angels” suggests she’s more comfortable focusing on the artist’s process than the response the work engenders. But she rejects the notion that she cut out scenes of Kushner’s detractors, and dismisses the idea of soliciting alternate voices.
“If it’s there organically, I would include it,” Mock says. “But the idea of going out and getting pro and con is a different style of filmmaking. ‘Wrestling with Angels’ is not a news show. I’m trying to tell the story of this artist.”
“Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner” screens 6 p.m. Friday, June 23 at the Castro Theatre as part of the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, and will also screen Aug. 3 in Berkeley at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Tickets: $9-$10. Information: (925) 866-9559 or www.frameline.org.