Eytan Bayme is a graduate of McGill University and a former stage actor.Here he dreamcasts an adaptation of his new memoir, High Holiday Porn:
High Holiday Porn is set within the New York City Jewish Modern Orthodox community in the late 1980s and 90s. It’s an insular world with religious rules and rituals, but also connected to secularism through education, culture and proximity to the metropolitan area. I grew up in a religious household, studied at a religious school and attended synagogue weekly, yet I was fascinated by the outside world and all it had to offer, particularly relating to sex. For this reason, I think it’s important that the film version of High Holiday Porn be placed in the hands of a director (or directors) who’s comfortable with subtly unique settings and time periods. Joel and Ethan Coen, specifically, would be ideal choices. All their films take place in slightly unfamiliar times and places (1930s Art Deco New York in Hudsucker Proxy, 1970s New York folk scene in Inside Llewyn Davis) and I think the Coens would handle the particularities of Modern Orthodox New York - caught between tradition and the modern world - with the same careful and considerate detail. In addition, in their depiction of suburban Conservative Judaism in A Serious Man, they incorporated the role and influence of community over its members— a theme that constantly comes up in High Holiday Porn— and I think it would be really interesting to see their interpretation of urban Orthodoxy.Visit Eytan Bayme's website.
While actors like Jesse Eisenberg, Michael Cera, Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill have all brought wit and sensitivity to roles relating to youth and sexual awakenings, I would cast High Holiday Porn slightly differently because, well, I can.
Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the most interesting actor alive today. Even the not-great films he’s worked on deserve second and third viewings, if only to watch how absorbed and buried in layers his performances can be. He hasn't acted in anything since 2012, and he tends to choose roles that lean towards historical fiction, but I’m playing casting director and think his intensity and seriousness, along with the content of the book, would make for a film unlike anything produced before. It would also be pretty cool to have him shadow me in preparation for the role, as he is famously known to do for months before filming. The only problem is that, according to IMDB, he’s fifty eight years old and High Holiday Porn spans my life from age six through eighteen. So it would have to be Daniel Day-Lewis as a youth, but with no loss of acting ability in his younger and less-experienced state. And to ensure he was up for the part, I would have him audition from the scene in the book where I’m reading a sexually charged section of talmud, in my ninth grade all boys school, while trying to not to become visibly aroused.
--Marshal Zeringue
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