Bean, Henry (Schorr) 1945-

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BEAN, Henry (Schorr) 1945-

PERSONAL: Born August 3, 1945, in Philadelphia, PA; son of Donald (a lawyer) and Fahny (Schorr) Bean; married Nancy Eliason, January 3, 1968 (divorced, February 14, 1970); married Leora Barish (a writer), March 23, 1980; children: Max. Education: Yale University, B.A., 1967; Stanford University, M.A., 1973. Politics: "Left." Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES: Home—Venice, CA. Agent—Molly Friedrich, Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency, 708 Third Ave., 23rd FL., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Monte Vista High School, Danville, CA, teacher of English and journalism, 1969-71; writer, 1971—. Has also appeared in, directed, and produced films.

MEMBER: Writers Guild of America, West.

AWARDS, HONORS: First book of fiction award from PEN—Los Angeles, 1983, for False Match; The Believer won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, 2001.

WRITINGS:

False Match (novel), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1982.

The Believer: Confronting Jewish Self-Hatred (screenplay and essays), Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Also author of screenplays, including "Desire" and "Labyrinth Nine," both with wife, Leora Barish; "Who You Know"; 1988: The Remake, 1977; Running Brave, 1983; Golden Eighties, 1986, released as Window Shopping, 1992; Internal Affairs, 1990; Deep Cover, 1992; story for Venus Rising, 1995; and The Believer, 2001. Cowriter on films including Mulholland Falls and Enemy of the State.

SIDELIGHTS: Harold Raab, the protagonist of Henry Bean's False Match, is "a dropout from the 1960s who can only connect with the world around him through the exercise of fantasy," explained Bruce Allen in the Chicago Tribune Book World. "Some readers may find False Match excessively mannered," Allen continued, "[but] for me, its steely concentration and understated emotional force make it a thoroughly successful experiment."

Bean had already written screenplays when False Match appeared in bookstores in 1982. He returned to focus on screenwriting afterwards, and attained some level of mainstream success in the industry for his solo and collaborative efforts on suspense films such as 1990's Internal Affairs, which starred Richard Gere and Andy Garcia, and 1992's Deep Cover, which featured Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum. Bean's 2001 script The Believer (which he also directed), however, is the project that has gained him the most attention, praise, and controversy he has seen thus far.

The Believer, which took the 2001 Grand Jury Prize at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, is based on the true story of a Jewish man who abandoned his faith and became a member of the Ku Klux Klan. In Bean's version, the main character, Danny, begins as an Orthodox Jew who obtains a yeshiva education, but nevertheless becomes a skinhead and joins a neo-Nazi group. Though The Believer greatly impressed audiences at Sundance, it was not approved by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the resultant controversy made finding a distributor for the film difficult. After Bean had accepted an offer to have it premier on the cable network Showtime, Showtime delayed the premier in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, feeling that audiences would not welcome such heavy drama at that time. Showtime did air the film in March, 2002; this was followed by a theatrical release in May. Coinciding with the first Showtime presentation of the film, Bean published the script, along with some essays about its subject matter as The Believer: Confronting Jewish Self-Hatred.

"The key to understanding Danny's transformation from Orthodox Jew to neo-Nazi," according to Daniel Steinhart, reviewing The Believer for Film Journal International, "lies in his passionate debates peppering the film." Steinhart went on to call Danny "one of the most complex and compelling screen characters in recent memory," and praised the film as "undeniably powerful and always fascinating." Similarly, Todd McCarthy in Variety explained that "The Believer is not just about hate, but addresses the peculiar manner in which [Danny's] religious training brought him to the tragically paradoxical point of thinking as a Jew and a Nazi at once." He noted further that "Bean deals with the core elements of this odd, and oddly compelling, situation with admirable frankness and intelligence." Marisa Guthire in the Boston Herald concluded that "hate and love collide in an intensely beautiful conflagration" in The Believer.