Upon nearing the tail-end of its 10-day run, the Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF) felt keen on covering staples of the local experience with its “Views from Long Island” programming.
October 11’s six-part short series resonated; particularly, the Hauppauge and Islip Town Hall-set dealings depicted in Joanna Rothkopf’s documentary featurette, “Pet Store.”
Rothkopf and her crew gained more than a day’s worth of intimate access at the ‘Sloth Encounters LI’ petting zoo site located on Veterans Highway in Hauppauge—through which they got to know the former and future pool store and its zany owner, Larry Wallach.
Notoriety befell Wallach as he began housing exotic wildlife and offering petting-themed birthday parties on the premises, to the chagrin of local leaders out of the county offices just across the highway. He was hit with sanctions and hit pieces until he could be hit no more; Sloth Encounters was shut down in April, well after the events in the documentary took place.
“This is such a crazy story,” Rothkopf shared during the post-screening Q & A. “Basically, I emailed him and he called me 10 minutes later, and said, ‘come on Friday!’"
The crew planned on discussing the ongoing battle with activists over unsanitary conditions and purportedly illegal business practices. They didn’t count on getting to show it as grandly as they did; an altercation between a volunteer assistant “reptilian expert” and a buttoned-up Sloth Encounters protestor nearly turned violent on the Islip Town Hall lawn—and the cameras were rolling for every moment of it.
Moreover, their subject matter was always bringing more to the table, just by being him; “He kept putting animals on me and the camera guy and the sound guy,” Rothkopf quipped, “he’s very ‘The Larry Show.’”
A few days before “Pet Store’s” grand opening, a pair of A-List actors gathered for a more civil correspondence than any Wallach would hope to have with a scene partner in the documentary—the “hug-first” sloths themselves notwithstanding.
“Ray Donovan” actor Liev Schreiber was awarded the Dick Cavett Artistic Champion Award for his “man on the street” philanthropic efforts in Ukraine.
In conversation with Alec Baldwin at East Hampton Middle School on Saturday, October 5, Schreiber recalled: “I was sitting with my kids on the couch after 8 years of ‘Ray Donovan,’ thinking, ‘I’ve been working a lot.’ We’re watching this war unfold… What can I tell my kids?”
“At the time, I felt there were things happening in the world of politics that were so polarizing,” he added. “I had this thing in the back of my head about values: 'has my work expressed that?'”
Speaking on his methods as an actor and as a man, Schreiber cited his co-star from earlier in his career, Oscar-winner Alan Arkin, as a major influence. The late actor helped pull Schreiber back from the brink with his own take on the “plenty fish in the sea” routine.
“As an older man, how he talked to me about pain without getting too involved in it… and how he talked to me about everything. He was nuts. Incredibly talented. I was miserable because my girlfriend broke up with me, and he was sitting there… ‘Well, you’re young.’”
Schreiber advises others on the come-up with the same sage Arkin instilled in him: “Do the work.”
“Mean what you say. Commit to the things that you love. And I stand by it. If you screw up, you screw up. So what? Keep going.”
While corroborating an audience member’s inquisition as to whether or not his fascination with the morbid, the macabre, and all things rom-comically oddball like 1971’s “Harold and Maude,” Schreiber went one step further—pontificating on why he so regularly gravitates toward playing villains.
“If I can identify with that, if he can identify with that, there’s nothing about me that’s going to write him off, not go along with him on it… that’s the core for ‘Ray Donovan,’” he said. “He feels such tremendous shame… the whole drive of that character.”
“The deeper the thing is. The closer you feel, I think. ‘Well if he’s not hiding that from me, he’s not going to hide anything.’”