Comedy, mystery and music
Akiva Schaffer, 38, Andy Samberg, 37, and Jorma Taccone, all Berkeley natives, often work together under the collective name the Lonely Island. They created and are producing “Party Over Here,” a Fox comedy series that premieres at 11 p.m. March 12. With subjects ranging from pop culture to politics, the show will mix filmed segments with sketches in front of an audience.
“The Family,” an ABC series that airs its second episode at 9 p.m. Sunday, March 6, was created by Jenna Bans, 40, a “Scandal” writer. Joan Allen stars as Claire Warren, who is running for California governor as the show begins. Her younger son was murdered as a child, only to show up as an adult very much alive as the campaign starts. Claire’s older son is played by Zach Gilford, 34 (Matt Saracen in “Friday Night Lights”). The other tribe member in “Family” is Margot Bingham, 26. She plays Police Sgt. Nina Meyer.
A source told me that Bingham is the daughter of an African American Methodist father and a Jewish mother. I located a 2013 YouTube video interview in which Bingham says: “I am a flat-out Jew. I had a bat mitzvah and all.” If you watched “Boardwalk Empire,” you know her as “Daughter Maitland,” who lit up the screen with her terrific singing voice. “Boardwalk” was set in the 1920s and she did great covers of period songs in a nightclub setting. You can find many of Bingham’s singing clips on YouTube.
“Vinyl,” which began on HBO on Feb. 14, is about the world of rock ’n’ roll in the 1970s and has garnered good reviews. It stars another “Boardwalk Empire” star, Bobby Cannavale, as a record exec trying to revive a label. Paul Ben-Victor, 50 (“The Wire”), plays Maury Gold, a slick Jewish record company owner. Max Casella, 48, plays another Jewish character. I just became aware of a fairly obscure 2013 interview with Casella in which he shared that his father is a “Jew from the Bronx” and his original name is Max Deitch. He took his Italian American mother’s last name as his stage name. His first big role was in 1989 in “Doogie Howser, M.D.” as the title character’s teenage best friend. More recently, he was a “Sopranos” regular.
At the movies
“Knight of Cups” opens March 11. It stars Christian Bale as a successful but unhappy screenwriter who finds his only solace in women. Natalie Portman, 34, plays a woman whom the screenwriter wronged in his past. Opening the same day in the Bay Area is “Bleak Street,” a Mexican crime film. The director is the very talented Arturo Ripstein, 72, a Mexican Jew. Arturo’s father, the late Alfredo Ripstein, was a film producer who helped launch the careers of Salma Hayek and Gabriel García Bernal. By the way, the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa was a customer of Alfredo’s parents’ clothing store and, by chance, he was the first man to carry the infant Alfredo in his arms.
Trump’s ‘Jewish base’
It’s fairly well known that Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, 34, converted to Orthodox Judaism not long before marrying Jared Kushner, 35, the head of a New York-area real estate development company. They have two children with a third on the way. A friend just informed me of another Jewish connection in the presidential hopeful’s family: Tiffany Trump, 22, half-sister of the candidate’s oldest child, Donald Trump Jr., 38, has been dating Ross Mechanic, 21, for several months. Both are University of Pennsylvania students. Mechanic’s father works — you guessed it — in New York real estate.
Columnist Nate Bloom, an Oaklander, can be reached at [email protected].