New York Mirror

Liev Schreiber has to make it drizzle rosebuds as Orson Welles in HBO's RKO 281, a role he told me was much harder to tackle than Hamlet (which he's currently trying to be-or not to be-at the Public). "Everyone knows Welles and they think I'm gonna be him," lovable Liev moaned at the premiere. "What were they thinking, hiring a Jewish guy from New York? And now his friends and family are all here!" So were Schreiber's; he tried not to tell them about the event, "but there were so many goddamn posters up, they found out about it!""

`Rko 281': Orson Welles Gives Them the Willies

By Bernard Weinraub

HOLLYWOOD -- Liev Schreiber is nervous, and who can blame him? This 32-year-old actor, who plays Orson Welles in the Home Box Office drama "RKO 281," about the making of "Citizen Kane," gained 25 pounds and spent weeks reading about Welles and watching videos of his performances and interviews. Schreiber soon began to walk and sound like him. 

"Was I scared about playing someone who is playing someone so imprinted in our consciousness?" Schreiber said.  "Every single day." 

Schreiber is not the only one uneasy about the response to the film, which will be shown Sunday. It focuses on the almost Shakespearean clash between Welles and William Randolph Hearst over the creation of Welles' 1941 masterpiece, "Citizen Kane," and depicts a Hollywood of the 1930s shadowed by anti-Semitism, a Hollywood where the confluence of wealth and power were used -- as they still are -- as weapons. 

"What appealed to us about doing this movie was partly to recapture the old Hollywood, the intrigues of power and money that were part of that world and still have echoes today," said HBO chairman and chief executive Jeffrey Bewkes.

The drama, which takes some fictional license, is based partly on "The Battle Over Citizen Kane," an acclaimed documentary from the PBS series "The American Experience." Welles, a 24-year-old genius, and William Randolph Hearst, the 76-year-old media titan, clashed over the 1941 movie's depiction of the character based on Hearst as monstrous and lonely. (RKO 281 was the production number assigned to the film by RKO studios.) 

The HBO movie, adapted by John Logan, who has written the screenplays for two major films opening in the next few months, Oliver Stone's "Any Given Sunday" and Ridley Scott's "Gladiator," was initially offered to Hollywood studios with a cast of well-known actors who had expressed interest in it: Edward Norton as Welles, Marlon Brando as Hearst and Madonna as Marion Davies, Hearst's mistress. Scott would have directed it. 

But studios passed over the project because they did not view it as commercially viable. HBO quickly picked it up. Scott and his brother, Tony Scott, also a director, are executive producers. The HBO film's director, Benjamin Ross, previously made the independent movie "The Young Poisoner's Handbook." 

Aside from Schreiber, who has the title role next month in the New York Public Theater's new production of "Hamlet," the cast of the HBO drama includes James Cromwell as Hearst, Melanie Griffith as Marion Davies, John Malkovich as Herman
Mankiewicz, the brilliant, but alcoholic, writer who helped Welles write "Citizen Kane," and Brenda Blethyn as Louella Parsons, the gossip columnist used by Hearst to intimidate the studio chiefs. 

In fact, the film asserts that Miss Parsons terrified and blackmailed studio chiefs like Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Jack Warner and Samuel Goldwyn by telling them that unless they crushed the film and destroyed every print, she would spread the word that Hollywood was dominated by Jews. At the same time Hedda Hopper, another gossip columnist, said she would distribute photos of the moguls in sexual situations. The studio moguls agreed -- except for the RKO chief, George Schaefer (played by Roy Scheider). 

Logan, the screenwriter, said the details came from books about Hearst and Welles. Logan said earlier drafts of the screenplay also involved FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who was close to Hearst and Miss Hopper. Hoover's involvement was dropped from the final script, Logan said, because it detracted from the main story. 

"Hoover was very active as well as Louella in terms of procuring files that were derogatory," Logan said. "And the studio chiefs were terrified of the Jewish issue. They were terrified that if America heard that mass entertainment was controlled by Jews, the country would be horrified. So they caved completely." 

It was only the support of Schaefer, the RKO chief, who was a Roman Catholic, that led to the release of the classic film after a plea by Welles to the RKO board. "Schaefer had given Welles this incredible contract of total freedom and a lot of money," Logan said. "If Welles went down, it would have reflected poorly on Schaefer. He truly believed in this mad kid." 

What animates the documentary and the film based on it is the notion that Welles and Hearst, as much as they loathed each other, were quite similar in their grandeur, in their megalomaniacal personalities, in their ambitions. "They both had a tremendous need to make contact with the common man," Schreiber said. "And they felt totally dissociated from common people. Both of them came from very privileged families, both of them were separated from their families at an early age and both had been told they could do no wrong." 

Perhaps surprisingly, the film depicts Hearst and Marion Davies somewhat sympathetically; they adored each other. Hearst is portrayed as a driven if tormented figure. "I was actually surprised to find myself liking him," said Ross, the British director. "The challenge was to make a film about Orson Welles and the artistic and visual legacy of 'Kane' without being swamped by it. The danger was to make a film and become overly enamored with the subject matter. Welles had plenty of flaws too." 

Why Welles' career and personal life seemed to slide after "Citizen Kane" and why Hollywood never trusted him again are only hinted at in the drama.  

People were offended by the size of his achievement, Ross said. "It shamed the studios. And his claims of artistic authority and genius were offensive to the studios. Welles was a bad winner at that stage of his life. And he carried his brilliance badly." 

Schreiber said that in preparing to play Welles, he was struck by the tragedy of his life. The actor grew obese and sold products on television. "There was a huge void he was trying to fill," Schreiber said. "As he became a deeper and deeper artist, he became aware of that void. 

"It's not easy to be touted as a genius when you're 8 years old and internationally famous in your early 20s. Where do you go after that? Living up to that mantle is an intense and very risky endeavor." 

Playing Hamlet, Welles said, reminded him of playing Kane. "Amazing parallels," Schreiber said. "Both seem to be confronting the same issue: in the service of truth, what sacrifices do we have to make?" 

by David Handleman

When Liev Schreiber answers the door of his sunny loft in New York City’s NoHo dressed in a white undershirt and black suit pants, he could almost be mistaken for a waiter. The 32-year-old actor only compounds this impression when he graciously lays out a breakfast spread of pumpernickel bread, cream cheese, lox, grapes and juice. “The bread is really good toasted,” he recommends.

 This low-key attitude is a far cry from the energy he radiates playing Orson Welles—a role for which he gained 25 pounds—in the new HBO drama RKO 281. Costarring John Malkovich, Melanie Griffith and James Cromwell, RKO 281 (RKO Studios’ designated production number for “Citizen Kane” while it was filming) dramatizes the controversy behind the making of the 1941 classic that Welles cowrote, directed and starred in when he was only 24.

 Specifically, the movie explores how Welles, following his success in New York theater and radio, went to Hollywood to make movies but was stymied until he got the idea of fictionalizing the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (Cromwell)—as well as how Hearst attempted to prevent the finished film from seeing the light of day.

 Liev (pronounced “Lee-Ev”) thinks he got the part because “I have some things in common with Orson. I’m big [he’s 6-foot-2], have a deep voice, [am] classically trained, a Shakespeare buff.”  Schreiber’s also funny and smart: He was a semiotics major in college and graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 1992. (He wanted to apply as a playwright, but a teacher advised him he’d have a better chance as an actor.)

 “Liev’s not a standard leading man,” says RKO director Benjamin Ross. “He reminds me of the leading men of the 1970s, like Gene Hackman—antiheroes, complicated people.”

 Welles is certainly a challenging figure to tackle. He was a prodigy, florid in his speech, ferocious in his appetites and his hubris. “Welles operated on a speed that is 150 times faster than the average person,” Schreiber says. “He had a deep-seated insecurity that manifested itself as tremendous productivity.”

 Schreiber’s own pace has been fairly ferocious over the past few years. He has appeared in everything from independent films (“Big Night”, “A Walk on the Moon”) to studio movies (“Scream 2”, “Sphere”). He is about to put the brakes on his screen career, however, to play Hamlet at New York’s legendary Public Theater. “I decided no more movies for a while,” he says. “Weird lifestyle.” (He is currently single, having recently broken up with a longtime girlfriend.)

 But his childhood, which blended hippie impoverishment and intellectual richness, sounds weirder. He was born Isaac Liev Schreiber in San Francisco; his father, Tell, was a theater actor who costarred in the 1976 movie “The Keeper” with Christopher Lee. When Schreiber was a year old, the family moved to a farm in Canada, and his parents divorced when he was “4 or 5.” His mother, Heather, a painter, brought him to New York, where she drove a cab, and they lived as squatters in an empty building that had no hot water or electricity. “To my mother, that was cool; poverty was relative,” Schreiber recalls.

 Heather—who now lives on an ashram in Virginia—taught him to read, eventually giving him works by Gorky and Chekhov when he was still very young. “I was supposed to be the genius,” Schreiber says. “She tried to make me play violin and piano.” She also forbade him from seeing color movies. Instead, he’d go to the nearby revival house and devour the black-and-white films, especially Charlie Chaplin.

 Schreiber didn’t start acting in earnest until he attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he performed monologues he’d written about Lower East Side characters: Greek diner chefs, taxi drivers. “Eric Bogosian was a big influence on me,” he says. “I totally ripped him off. But that’s my process. Where else would I get an idea?”

 Dustin Hoffman, Who met Schreiber while making “Sphere” and later, as a producer, cast him in  “A Walk on the Moon’” views him differently. “After I saw him in ‘The Daytrippers,’ I said, ‘You could have played my part in ‘The Graduate.’ And he told me, ‘I’ve been ripping you off for years.’ But I don' get that—I think he’s very individualized.”

 Cromwell agrees. “Liev is a real actor,” he says. “He didn’t try to mimic Welles. Instead of choosing to do just the self-promotion, he shows the more vulnerable side. Liev stresses his humanity.”

 It was what director Ross wanted. “We were interested in capturing the spirit of Welles,” he says. “I was keen not to do a look-alike picture like The Rat Pack.” And Schreiber lives up to his subject: He’s audacious, utterly compelling.

 Welles “was inspirational,” Schreiber says. “The sacrifices he made as an artist, the crap he went through in public and private life, the tenacity with which he hung on to his ideas about art. And his ambition is irresistible.”

 Recently, Schreiber’s ambition had him directing an as-yet-untitled documentary about making the upcoming movie “Spring Forward,” with Ned Beatty. Bravo will air the documentary when the film is released.

Liev Schreiber—actor, writer, director? Clearly, playing Welles has rubbed off on him.

Article transcribed by Angie Strother

Knowing When to Stay

DISCLAIMER: The Liev Schreiber Site acknowledges that the following story is fabricated. Mr. Schreiber has himself confirmed that he did not ever say  these words.

by Leah Garchick

At a premiere party in New York for HBO's ``RKO 281,'' which will be broadcast Saturday and concerns the making of ``Citizen Kane,'' Liev Schreiber, who plays Orson Welles, talked about his career:

``My name is pronounced `lee-ev.' When I auditioned for `Scream,' I had just broken my ankle and I was getting around on crutches. I was the last person in the casting waiting room. The assistant came in and said, `They just told me to tell you to leave.' I thought maybe Hollywood casting was that rude. I hobbled down the block.

``She came running after me shouting that she had misunderstood when they mispronounced my name `leave.' Without the crutches I would have been out of there so fast I would have lost the `Scream' part. So that's what I call a lucky break.''

Liev Schreiber decodes 'Kane' creator

by Elizabeth Snead

HOLLYWOOD - Talk about a daunting role for a young actor.
 
Liev Schreiber was, oh, just a tad nervous about playing mythic moviemaker Orson Welles in HBO's film RKO 281, the tale of the making of his cinema classic Citizen Kane and his battles with media mogul William Randolph Hearst, whose life inspired the film.
 
"I have friends who worked with Orson, who knew him, and I knew they might hit me with rotten vegetables if I do this," the actor says over a mountain of oatmeal at Chateau Marmont.
 
"But, ultimately, I decided this is a fascinating story with interesting characters, conflicts and issues of censorship, art and commerce, passion and filmmaking," Schreiber says. "So I thought I'd give it a shot."
 
Expect no mimicry. Instead, the 6-foot-2 Schreiber, best known for small roles in big movies such as the Scream series, Ransom (with Mel Gibson), Jakob the Liar (Robin Williams) and the upcoming Hurricane (Denzel Washington), captures the spirit of Welles, the brash young genius who struggles to make his film, runs afoul of powerful men and has his career ruined.
 
RKO 281 (referring to the working title given to Kane to protect its secret topic) reveals media mogul Hearst's fury when he finds out about the film and tries to stop its release. But to Schreiber, Kane was not really about Hearst. It was about Welles.
 
"First, I don't think he scandalized Hearst at all. He made him human and told a touching story of a man from an impoverished background, no mother or father, who rises to incredible success, then loses control of his life and ends up dying alone," Schreiber says.
 
"But I think Orson saw himself in Hearst and chose him to tell his own story."
 
Welles, hailed as a genius at 24, was brought to Hollywood to make a film of his scandalous radio program War of the Worlds. But nothing worked as planned.
 
RKO's creators call it "a fantasy" about these two larger-than-life men's battle and make no apologies for artistic license. A fictionalized opening scene shows Welles and pal writer Herman Mankiewicz (John Malkovich) at a dinner with movie stars at Hearst's ranch, San Simeon.
 
But Schreiber says the final scene, in which Hearst and Welles meet and exchange barbs in a New York elevator, may indeed be true. "Orson himself used to tell that story," Schreiber says.
 
RKO 281 transcends the Welles-Hearst battle to look at art-vs.-commerce issues that continue to brew in Hollywood between those who make movies and those who make money off them.
 
San Francisco-born, Manhattan-bred Schreiber, 32, began his film career in no-budget indie films (The Daytrippers, Big Night, A Walk on the Moon). But that silly slasher Scream made him famous.
 
"Scream changed everything for me," Schreiber says, having just finished Scream 3 the night before. "Those films have been my bread-and-butter for three years and afford me the opportunity to do plays and films that I really want to do."
 
Now onstage in New York playing Hamlet, the classically trained actor will next play Laertes to Ethan Hawke's Danish prince in a Hamlet film to be released by Miramax next year.
 
Schreiber notes similarities between Welles' ways and today's indie scene. "It's funny to me how film critics overanalyze Kane and say, 'Oh, Welles borrowed this lighting or this camera move from the German industrialists,' " Schreiber says. "The reality was he was shooting an independent film, very fast and very cheaply."
 
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Even Playing Welles, Schreiber Tries to Blend In

by Bart Mills

Orson Welles didn't always shill for sherry. He wasn't always bloated with might-have-beens. Once, in 1941, he was a 25-year-old "boy genius" making the splashiest film debut ever engineered.

HBO's Saturday (7 p.m.) premiere, "RKO 281," named for the production number of Welles' "Citizen Kane," tells the story of the prodigious director-writer-actor's perilous onslaught on Hollywood. Liev Schreiber, heretofore known mostly for playing unassuming, thin ordinary guys, plays the portly spotlight-grabbing Welles.

"Welles was a synthesis of poet and showman," Schreiber says, his voice and manner denying that he's either. "Here was a guy who'd been told since he was 10 that he was a genius. He lived with the burden of matching his billing. Being a genius became habitual behavior."

Executive producer Ridley Scott originally hoped to make "RKO 281" as a feature. The film tells the backstage story of Welles' collaboration with writer Herman Mankiewicz (played by John Malkovich) on "Kane." The film was a thinly veiled attack on media magnate William Randolph Hearst (played by James Cromwell), who fought a nearly successful campaign to keep the film from being shown. Genius will be served, but it will pay a price.

Schreiber, whose most recent roles were Diane Lane's unambitious radio repairman husband in "A Walk on the Moon" and Robin Williams' friend in "Jakob the Liar,"  found a way to relate to Welles: "He accomplished greatthings, true, but he was an isolated man. He lived in the shadow of his own image. I play him honestly and naturalistically."

For all of Schreiber's romantic-loser, softy-villain and second-banana roles in "Ransom," "Scream," "Sphere" and more than a dozen independent films, he's actually on the hunky side. At 6'2", he fills his black T-shirt nicely, even if some of his bulk is the residue of his temporary Wellesian flab. He gained 20 pounds for the role, following an "eat whatever you want, whenever you want" diet.

The Yale Drama School graduate, 32, who also trained at England's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, has played numerous Shakespearean roles on stage. He won an Obie this year for his performance in "Cymbeline," and he plans to give New York's Public Theatre his "Hamlet" later this season.

 "The people at the Public called me up and said they wanted me to do Shakespeare again for them. I suggested `The Winter's Tale.' They said, `Too bad, we were thinking of "Hamlet." ' I said, `Give me half a second to think about that.' "

 Oddly enough, in the upcoming modern-dress film of "Hamlet," starring Ethan Hawke, Schreiber plays Hamlet's rival Laertes. Other upcoming Schreiber films are "The Hurricane," in which he plays a crusader agitating for the release of boxer Hurricane Carter from prison, and "Spring Forward," a drama with Ned Beatty that he produced himself.

Schreiber grew up in "a rough neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York City. My mother, who left my father when I was 4, was very into yoga and still is. I used to spend a lot of time at the place where she studied. I lived on an ashram for a couple of years.

"There were always extremes with my mother. I always had to be at one end of the spectrum or another, which is probably responsible for my choice of vocation. I was a sit-in-the-window kid, an observer. When you're whipping between extremes, you have interesting people to stare at."

Schreiber, who is a yoga practitioner himself, joined with his brothers to buy their mother "some property near the ashram" in Virginia. His father, once an actor and director, now works as a carpenter near Seattle.

"The most important male figure in my life was my grandfather," Schreiber says. "He was a cellist and a painter who delivered meat. My mother always let me sleep over at his house. To me, he was the epitome of a mensch, a real man."

Schreiber strives to play "average Joe characters," he says, "because I feel most comfortable as one. I'm one of those people who aspire to blend in. The most interesting stories to tell on film are the simplest. That's the way I approach any character, with the idea that being human is one of the most heroic things you can do."

by Bart Mills

HOLLYWOOD -- It was never a big Canadian cause to get Rubin "Hurricane" Carter out of a New Jersey prison, says Liev Schreiber, who plays one of the Canadian activists who finally sprang the number-one contender for the middleweight boxing crown after years in jail on a decades-old murder rap.

"My character, Sam Chaiton, was one of a group of environmentalists living a commune lifestyle in Toronto," Schreiber says of his role in Norman Jewison's The Hurricane. "They got connected with this fifteen-year-old kid ("Lazurus" Martin) from Brooklyn who had decided he wanted to get Carter out of prison. So they moved down to Jersey, unravelled this case from years before, and got Carter out. And Chaiton wrote a book (Lazurus and the Hurricane) about it."

The Yale Drama School graduate, 32, who also trained at England's Royal Academy of the Dramatic Art, seems to be moving into a heroic phase now after years of softy-villain, romantic-loser and second-banana roles in films such as Ransom, Scream, Sphere, and A Walk on the Moon. Schreiber recently played Orson Welles in the HBO movie RKO 281 and appeared opposite Robin Williams in the Holocaust drama Jakob the Liar.

Actually on the hunky side, at six-foot-two, he has played numerous big Shakespeare roles on the stage. He won an Obie this year for his performance in Cymbeline and he plans to give New York's Public Theatre his Hamlet this fall. Oddly enough, in the upcoming modern-dress film of Hamlet, starring Ethan Hawke, Schreiber plays Hamlet's rival, Laertes.

Schreiber has excelled in playing "average Joe character," he says, "because I feel most comfortable as one. I'm one of those people who aspire to blend in. The most interesting stories to tell on film are the simplest. That's the way to approach any character, with the idea that being human is one of the most heroic things you can do."

Article transcribed by Angie Strother

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