That magic moment: Film looks at Jewish hitmakers of ''50s and ''60s

If you're somewhat north of age 45 and south of 65, you owe the soundtrack of your youth to a gang of Jewish teenagers from Brooklyn.

Starting in the mid-1950s, songwriters like Neil Sedaka, Doc Pomus, Carole King and Gerry Coffin, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil cranked out hit after hit, filling the pop music charts with countless classic songs.

Even a small sampling of their titles reads like a cheat sheet from the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame: "You've Lost That Loving Feeling," "Chapel of Love," "Up on the Roof," "Splish Splash," "Hound Dog," "This Magic Moment," "On Broadway." The list, like the beat, goes on.

With his 2001 documentary "Hitmakers: The Teens Who Stole Pop Music," director Morgan Neville has done the near impossible. Though he doesn't break any new cinematic ground, he did make a film about the music business that isn't the least bit boring.

The film screens multiple times at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

The film's title is a slight misnomer. Those music-mad kids who invaded Manhattan's famed Brill Building never stole a thing. They were all original talents who borrowed black-, Broadway- and rock influences to master the art of the No. 1 single.

Using interview footage, home movies and delicious TV performance clips, Neville's film puts into context the post-war rise of the teenage consumer. "What," asks a music publisher from the time, "do we write for kids?"

The answer came from songwriters like Lieber and Stoller, whose love of African American music formed their perky pop tunes. They wrote "Hound Dog" when they were 19, helping to launch Elvis Presley and rock n' roll itself. Says critic Greg Shaw in the film: "It was the most authentic R&B white Jewish guys ever wrote."

In fact, for Brill Building song pluggers, black artists were often the first takers. Pomus' "Save the Last Dance for Me," Goffin and King's "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" and "Natural Woman," and Burt Bacharach's "Walk on By" typify period crossover hits by black artists thriving in the tumultuous Civil Rights era.

But was it mere coincidence that all of the great Brill Building songwriters (and their boss, music publisher Don Kirshner) were Jewish?

The film doesn't try too hard to answer that question. Sedaka opines that "Jewish people are prone to be pushy and to better themselves." Producer Brooks Arthur wonders whether "it could have been the latkes. It could have been the water."

It may not have been either, but there was something about Jewish Brooklyn then that gave rise to so much talent. Local high schools like James Madison and Erasmus produced not only the profiled hitmakers, but other greats — Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond and Woody Allen.

Of course, not everything the hitmakers produced was of enduring quality, and director Neville does not pretend otherwise. Jeff Barry, who with then-wife Ellie Greenwich wrote great songs like "River Deep, Mountain High" and "Be My Baby," also went on to write "Sugar, Sugar" for the Archies.

But even the latter song bespeaks a teenage innocence laid waste by the hip-hop revolution.

There's something sweet about watching Mann and Weil (now married 40-plus years) and Goffin and King reminisce around a kitchen table like four alter kochers at a deli. It's as if all their artistic success did nothing to expunge their inborn Brooklyn Jewish roots.

King indeed proves to be the most interesting person interviewed in the film, not only for her memories and insights, but also because she was by far the most successful artist among the hitmakers. Her 1971 album "Tapestry" became one of the best-selling records of all time, and clinched King's transformation from anonymous Tin Pan Alley cat to cultural phenomenon.

She also was a living link in the music industry's migration to Los Angeles in the 1970s. That move, along with the British invasion, the Motown influence, hard rock and a million other cultural streams, brought an end to the age of the Brill Building hitmakers. But the songs written there will live for ages hence.

As Brooks Arthur says near the end of the film: "We were pups. We didn't know we were making history."

He similarly may not have realized that they were making Jewish history as well. While names like Bernstein, Copeland, Sondheim, Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein often come to mind when thinking about the great Jewish American composers, "Hitmakers" should help augment the list. n




"Hitmakers" screens at 6 p.m. Thursday, July 29, at the Castro Theatre, S.F.; 6 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 1, at the Mountain View Century 16; 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 4, at Wheeler Auditorium, Berkeley; and 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 7, at Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. Information: (925) 275-9490, or www.sfjff.org.




SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL