Ramblings of a Faded Screen Idol
At a July 12 party sponsored by the Hallmark Channel, Daniel Fienberg, a writer for the entertainment Web site zap2it.com, bumped into 1980s screen star Steve Guttenberg (“Diner,” “Police Academy,” “Short Circuit”). Asked what he has been up to, the actor could scarcely contain his enthusiasm: “I’m doing something, it’s actually called ‘Jew Fever.’ It’s this kind of a cool Hallmark show that I think is going to be sort of a… it’s actually coming from the right, but it’s really cool. It’s about this family, you know. They live in Ohio and they’re farmers and pretty conservative, pretty rightwing, and this Jew comes in, actually comes in from space. I guess he lands on some sort of… I don’t know exactly what the story is. I just thumbed through it. I wasn’t able to bring the script home. But I guess this Martian, sort of like ‘Mork & Mindy.’ He lands in their backyard, big like ‘Superman’ thing, and they run out there and they pop open this egg, and this little Jew jumps out. Now I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not very Jew-y looking. I’m sort of semi-Jew-y looking. I could be maybe Italian? You know, in the right position? But I could be Jew-y, too. So I come out, and I look kind of Jew-y…. I come out as a baby, you know, like a little baby, and I come out and I do sort of a couple minutes with them and I grow up and I sort of jump and you see me doing incredible things like reading the Torah really fast and kissing the mezuza like a thousand times, stuff like that. He’s just a Jew, and he’s just a nervous Jew. And he works in the yeshiva and puts out a yeshiva newsletter, and there he meets Esther.”
A representative of the Hallmark Channel curtly told the Forward that there is no such program in the works.
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