summer camps
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Jewish Summer Camp Movies: Indian Summer (1993)


There isn't much the 1993 film "Indian Summer" is remembered for. One of the stars, Kevin Pollak, used to mention the film in his comedy act, saying "Thank you for seeing it" to uncomfortable laughs from the audience, who did not see it. Pollak, who is a world-class impressionist, only has one story from the film: He used to call costar Alan Arkin's voicemail and leave messages in Arkin's voice, reminding him to buy food for the dog, which must have been bewildering for the older actor, who would not remember ever having made such a call. There is a thin line between comedy and gaslighting.

I don't know that I get to include "Indian Summer" in my list of Jewish summer camp movies. With something like "Meatballs," even though the camp in the film wasn't explicitly Jewish, it was made by filmmakers who attended Jewish camps, and so it's possible to argue that the film's camps are secretly Jewish. Not so with "Indian Summer" -- it's based on a real camp in Ontario, Camp Tamakwa, and Camp Tamakwa is not a Jewish camp. As far as I can tell, Tamakwa is instead the Platonic idea for summer camps, the real-world equivalent to the Khaki Scouts camp in "Moonrise Kingdom." It has the rustic cabins on a scenic lake, the faux-Indian mythology, the rugged American and Canadian back-to-natureness of the whole thing. There are no mezuzahs on the cabins, no guitar players working their way through "Ani V'Ata," no youth rabbis coming out on shabbos to lead services.

And yet there is a pervasive Jewishness to the whole thing, reflected in the film. The place was founded by a naturalist named Lou Handler, a Jewish former prizefighter from Detroit, and a Canadian outdoorsman named Omer Stringer. Although the camp is nondenominational, it has long drawn a significant number of its campers from the Jewish community -- even to this day, the camp's website says that "Most of the campers and staff are Jewish," and there are nondenominational services for the sabbath, but they are Friday night, when Jews have their shabbos services.

And, I must say, I find something Jewish in the sheer muchness of the camp, if you will. There is something exceptionally second-generation to it, to its dedication to an idealized vision of summer camp. This was a generation that often worked overtime to show they were as American as the next guy, and the results were that they were often more American than the next guy. So it wouldn't be enough just to go to camp. American Jews had to go to Camp, capital C, the most camplike camp ever.

"Indian Summer" was made by Mike Binder, who has had an unshowy but respectable career in Hollywood, and was a longtime veteran of Camp Tamakwa. As a result, of all the films I have written about so far, "Indian Summer" is the one that most carefully details the experience of campers, who are usually just sort of left in the background of these sorts of movies as the counselors and counselors-in-training get into R-rated hijinks. The film is essentially an essay of the folk traditions of Camp Tamakwa, from their private language to the various physical activities the counselors put the campers through.

There are, I should note, no actual campers in the film. Instead, the story is about former campers, invited back for a week by the film's Lou Handler, who is even called Lou Handler in the film, and is played with typically delightful and subdued eccentricity by Alan Arkin. Like at the real camp, the returning campers are a mix of Jews and non-Jews, although it can be hard to suss out who is who. The film's female cast is largely non-Jewish, but for the terrific Julie Warner, but they are the sorts of actresses who have played Jews, and who you're tempted to go to IMDb to see if they might not be Jewish after all: Diane Lane, Elizabeth Perkins, and Kimberly Williams-Paisley.

The men are less ambiguously Jewish, including Pollack, Meatballs-veteran Matt Craven, and even Italian-American Vincent Spano playing a character named Berman. The strangest casting choice is film director Sam Raimi as a klutzy camp gofer, although it did lead to me discovering that Raimi is Jewish and attended Tamakwa. (This may explain why his Spider-Man movies felt the most Jewish of all, despite starring Irish-American Tobey Maguire, and despite the fact that the next Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield, actually is Jewish.) Also on hand is Bill Paxton in the middle of trading in the unimpeachable weirdness of his early roles for the aw-shucks Texas leading man of his middle career, and nobody would mistake him for a Jew.

I don't really know what to say about the plot of the film itself, which is sort of like "Love Boat" at a summer camp, in that each of the characters has some sort of romantic entanglement. I don't think the film passes the Bechdel test, in that I don't think there is a scene where the film's women aren't talking about men, but, weirdly, the film's women are much more interesting than the men. With the exception of Pollak, who is a prankster, the remainder of the male cast are mostly amiable nobodies, while the women are generally sharp-witted and believably wounded. I don't know if there is an equivalent of the Bechdel test for a movie where the women are more interesting than the men, but this passes.

If I don't have much to say about the film's plot, I do find myself obsessed with the costume design. Writer/director Mike Binder takes great paints to render the awesome physical beautiful of  Algonquin Provincial Park, the location of the camp, as well as the rustic tweeness of the camp, and somehow found wardrobe that perfectly represent this. Arkin in particular is frequently seen in a striped duffle jacket that just seems like the coziest thing ever. The whole place doesn't so much look like a camp as a set designer's version of a summer camp, with characters dressed in a costume designer's version of summer camp wear. Apparently the wardrobe choices are accurate, so much so that former campers assumed Arkin was wearing Lou Handler's old clothes.

There is a thin line between Jewish camping and glamping, I guess.

Jewish Summer Camp Movies: Gorp (1980)


When a film is not very good, I sometimes like to go back and see what people said about it at the time. Take "Gorp" as an example: This 1980 American International Pictures' release, the last they ever made, was not well-liked. Joe Leydon of the Dallas Morning News wrote that the film's gags "belong in a garbage can." He continued: "No one in his right mind could accuse Gorp of being a good movie," although he allowed the film had an "oddball charm."

I am not going to accuse "Gorp" of being a good movie, but I am going to focus on its oddball charm. But first let me get a few criticisms out of the way. Although Dennis Quaid and Rosanna Arquette are frequently listed as the film's stars, they are minor characters. The film made the poor choice to cast as its leads Michael Lembeck, most famous as the son of AIP stalwart Harvey Lembeck, and Philip Casnoff, who since has had a reputable career on Broadway and television. Both have a sort of rough charm about them, but it does not compensate for the fact that, as written, their characters are utter heels.

Set in a Jewish summer camp, the film is remarkably chaotic, but returns again and again to Lembeck and Casnoff, two staffers hired to work in the camp's kitchen. The two are sex-obsessed, and their amorous moves rarely rise above harassment, and sometimes fall below it to outright assault, including scenes in which they roofie the camp nurse and expose themselves to a sleeping assistant counselor. Even in the 1980s in a sex comedy, this behavior was decidedly creepy; by modern standards it is criminal.

Fortunately, they are surrounded by cast mates who fare far better. Quaid and Arquette are fine, and Quaid gets the showier role as a military obsessed maniac, which he limns without a shred of self-consciousness. Arquette is barely in the film as an assistant counselor dating a Puerto Rican staffer, but it's nice to see her in a film where her character is Jewish, as Arquette actually has a Jewish mother. Also on hand is David Huddleston, who is most famous for playing the big Lebowski in in "The Big Lebowski." Here he plays an opportunistic camp director, and his performance isn't that far removed from his role in the Coen Brothers film, and he is an actor who knows how to make bluster amusing.

This is also one of the earliest film roles for Fran Drescher, and she's typically delightful. She's sort of a corrective to the two main characters, in that she's also sexually aggressive, but only on her own terms, and when the two male leads get out of line she is the first to scream at them and drive them away. However, she's not in the film enough to really offer any correction, and ends up being shoved into a locker, and you sort of get the sense the filmmakers think she deserves that fate.

The film frequently wallows in crudeness, and I suppose if you have a taste for that sort of comedy, you won't mind it. I'm not fond of it, but there is an additional, absurd anarchy that fills the frame that seems inspired less by, say, "Meatballs" than by "Mad Magazine." Examples: Once character, called Dracula Kesselman, actually looks like Dracula, and briefly reveals himself to have fangs; another character seems to have moved into one of the bathroom stalls and, over the course of the film, increasingly decorates it like it is a small apartment. A lot of the smaller roles are filled by actors that look less like real people than like Jack Davis caricatures, and they are forever in the background of scenes, just sort of doing crazy things.

The filmmakers obviously consider the camp's Jewishness to be part of this absurdity. A lot of time is devoted to the camp rabbi, played by character actor Robert Trebor, who is less a youth rabbi than a too-young rabbi, and the film repeatedly stops to show him reciting prayers in a sonorous voice. Otherwise he is mostly ignored, even by the camp director, who fights with him over whether the camp should serve pork.

However, the filmmakers apparently didn't think the experience of camp was especially worth exploring. The day-to-day experience of the camper is as short-shrifted here as it is in "Meatballs," and we barely spend time with the film's assistant counselors, except during occasional raids on their cabin. Instead, almost the entire film is spent with the kitchen staff, mostly in their remote cabin where they plot to wage war on each other or in the horrifically unhygienic kitchen. They only interact with the campers during mealtime (and generally the campers abuse them) and otherwise are left on their own.

So this is one of the most explicitly Jewish summer camp films in this series, and yet barely spends any time with anything we associate with summer camps. I'd puzzle about this, but, with "Gorp," once you start puzzling about artistic decisions, man, there is no end.

Jewish Summer Camp Movies: Wet Hot American Summer (2001)


Some of these essays will be about rediscoveries. As an example, there was a 1980 American comedy called "Gorp" that was set in a Jewish summer camp, and, when I get around to writing about it, not only will I be the first critic to have seriously addressed the film since its debuted, but I will likely be the first critic ever to seriously address the film. It was not well liked and is not well-remembered.

This is not the case with "Wet Hot American Summer." While the film received lukewarm reviews and box office when it first debuted, it's gone on to be a cult hit, and, by now, a mainstream success, with a recent mini-series prequel lensed for Netflix and a documentary about the making of the film, also available on Netflix.

I'll presume you have seen it, and so need not have me detail its episodic plot, nor describe the film's jagged, manic mix of comedic styles, from absurdist nonsense to straight parody to anti-humor. I also need not introduce you to the cast and filmmakers, some of whom were graduates of MTV's The State, others established comic actors, and two first-timers who went on to be legitimate movie stars.

I will say that this is less a single summer camp movie than it is a sort of mad collage, a series of summer camp moments that feel essentially iconic, but distorted through the lens of comedy, each in their own way. The actors tailor their performances to their specific scene, and the result is that sometimes performers seem to be in entirely different movies. SNL's Molly Shannon, playing an arts and crafts teacher, has a surprisingly realistic emotional meltdown as the result of a recent divorce, and is nursed back to mental health with the assistance of sympathetic -- and unnervingly mature -- campers. In the meanwhile, camp cook Christopher Meloni makes constant references to a perverse private life, has conversations with a sentient can of mixed vegetables, and provides an appropriately deranged performance. Shannon and Meloni never share a scene, and it is hard to imagine they share the same universe.

The creative leads behind the movie were David Wain, who cowrote the film and directed, and Michael Showalter, who cowrote the film and plays one of the main characters. And while the film clearly borrows from -- and mocks -- some of the conventions of 80s summer camp comedies, its roots are in actual Jewish summer camps. Both Wain and Showalter attended these camps as boys -- Wain went to Maine's Camp Modin while Showalter went to Camp Mohawk in the Berkshires. Wain, in fact, was so obsessed with his camp experience that when he aged out of being able to work as a counselor, he formed a rock band (the Rockin' Knights of Summer), performing and teaching music at summer camps.

 As a result, a lot of the film is grounded in Wain and Showalter's memories, even the stranger stuff. One of the film's oddest moment has womanizer (and secret virgin) Ken Marino spontaneously drive a van into a tree while singing "Danny's Song," and this was based on Wain actually totaling a van when he was a counselor, under conditions almost identical to those in the film.

 And so while "Wet Hot American Summer's" Camp Firewood doesn't spend a lot of time addressing the fact that it is a Jewish summer camp, it doesn't shy away from the fact either. Roughly half the cast is Jewish, and Jewish names abound: Gerald "Coop" Cooperberg, Abby Bernstein, Professor Henry Newman. In one scene, camp director Janeane Garofalo rattles off the names of campers, and they are all Jewish, absurdly so: "Amanda Klein, Jessica Azaria, Ira ... Stevenberg, Sol Zimmer ... stein ... uh, David ... Ben Gurion ..."

 The film is full of absurd little Jewish grace notes. When the camp's nerds must build a device to prevent SkyLab from crushing them (don't make me explain), they quickly huddle and pray together in Hebrew. A filthy child who hosts an imaginary radio show also informs listeners that he can be heard on Jewish day school radio. When Showalter confesses his love to a fellow camper, he tells her he doesn't mind that she's occasionally late to shul.

Perhaps the largest hat-tip to the fact that the film is set in a Jewish camp happens at the start and end of the film's climactic talent show. Firstly, the show is emceed, for some reason, by a low-rent Borscht Belt comic named Alan Shemper (also played by Showalter), whose routine consists entirely of jokes about how old he is, and who absolutely kills.

And then we get a musical number, produced by the camp's two most goyish staffers, drama instructors Amy Poehler and Bradley Cooper. For some reason, the two have decided to direct a musical number from "Godspell," the musical in which clown/mimes act out parables from the Gospel of Matthew. As the number end and the stage goes dark, a single cross appears on the camp's back wall.

And the audience boos it.

That's how you make a film set in a Jewish summer camp, folks.

Jewish Summer Camp Movies: Marjorie Morningstar (1958)


I'm including the 1958 film "Marjorie Morningstar" in this collection of essays just to be a damn completest, because while the title character does attend a Jewish summer camp in the movie, it's all of about two minutes before she paddles across the river to a Borscht Belt summer resort, meets Gene Kelly, and falls madly in love.

But this is likely the first representation of a Jewish summer camp in film history. I don't know how much more of the camp was represented in the original novel by Herman Wouk -- from what I gather, not much. He provided a much more detailed look at camp life in a novel called "City Boy: The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder," published in 1948 and detailing a Jewish boy from the Bronx who goes to camp with characters named Yishy Gabelson and Ted Kahn. This was also made into a film, 1951's "Her First Romance," but I won't be covering it because it was so stripped of Jewish content as to be useless. Herbie Bookbinder was not only changed into a non-Jewish girl for the film, she was played by Margaret O'Brien.

"Morningtar's" camp scenes were lensed at an actual upstate New York camp, Camp Cayuga, which is not a Jewish camp. It nonetheless looks like it might be Jewish in the film, as it features a scowling camp director who could be the father of Morty "Mickey" Melnick, the camp director from "Meatballs." But Wouk drew from his own experiences at largely Jewish camps and resorts for this book, including Camp Copake, where he met Elinor Glenn, the Brooklyn-born daughter of a Jewish suffragette and a Jewish union tradesmen who reportedly was the model for  Morningstar.

The film's Morningstar wants to be an actress, and this is why she lands at summer camp, in a position as drama teacher. She is played by Natalie Wood, looking coltish and fragile as usual, and here she is the daughter of upwardly mobile Jews from the Upper West Side. Specifically, her parents are played by Claire Trevor and Everett Sloane, the former doing a credible impression of an oppressive Jewish mother, the latter, well, being Everett Sloane, which is about as Jewish as anyone has ever been on film this side of Fyvush Finkel.

The film doesn't short-change the family's Jewishness either. There is both a bar mitzvah scene, where Marjorie's brother not only accurately chants a haftarah portion but managed to swing it a little, and a Passover scene. (More about that in a moment.) Even if there isn't much Jewish camp in the film, it's nice that there is so much Jewishness, even if about half the cast is not Jewish -- and the Jews they do have are superlative, including Ed Wynn, Martin Balsam, and George Tobias.

Unfortunately, the film loses interest in Marjorie's career as an actress as quickly as he loses interest in her summer camp, which barely even gets named -- it's Camp Tamarack, which we mostly know because the campers and staff all have adorable crew shirts with the name emblazoned on it.

Instead, the film sends Morningstar to the nearby resort, where she meets a deftly drawn but rather depressing type, played by Gene Kelly. He's a struggling songwriter and playwright who manages to be quite a big deal during the summer theatrics at the resort and quite a nobody for the rest of the year. Marjorie falls for him instantly, and the rest of the film is about the emotional labor he demands from her. Marjorie essentially ends up babysitting him as a full-time job, blinded by her affection for him to faults that are obvious to everyone else. He is unstable, unhappy, and unlikely ever to accomplish anything, and he has nothing to offer Marjorie except a romantic fantasy where she is helping a tortured soul.

Kelly plays it pretty straight, and, as a result, is a genuine bummer. His character is also Jewish, but the only way you know it is that he rankles at any mention of his father, a well-respected New York judge, and looks quite bored during Passover, both of which feel like the most authentically Jewish moments in the film.

Marjorie helps Kelly get a musical produced, and, in one of the film's few really sharp comic scenes, we know it's a flop because his friends enthusiastically tell him how great the scenery is. In the end, he just sort of fails his way back to the summer resort, which is where he belongs, and Marjorie ends up with a playwright with real talent who has held a torch for her for years.

I don't know if Marjorie gets back to acting after the final scene -- there is no reason to think she does, and Wouk's original novel ended with her married and settled in as a notably ordinary housewife. It's a shame, too. If the character was based on Wouk's old friend Elinor Glenn, she wound up acting in a troupe that appeared in union halls, which led to her cofounding and leading a women's labor union in Los Angeles. Hers was a notable and decidedly not ordinary story, without the years wasted acting as unpaid emotional support for a talentless hack, and I would sort of like to see that story told.

In the meanwhile, I'd also like to see versions of the Camp Tamarack crew shirts made available for purchase. We don't get much Jewish camping from this film, the least we can get is a stupid t-shirt.

Jewish Summer Camp Movies: Meatballs (1979)


I know that the subject of Jewish camp movies is a little afield from the main theme of this blog. There certainly were summer camps where Yiddish was used, but not so much in the genre of summer camp movies. In fact, there isn't even much Jewish content to most of them, and I must instead go through them with an eye for small but telling details and subtle references, in the way that author Vito Russo teased out gay subtext in classic Hollywood films in his book "Celluloid Closet."

So let's call this a side-mission, if I may use the language of video games. I'm doing it because it is summer, so it's a good time to watch summer camp movies. I'm doing it because I am a product of Jewish summer camps, in my way. I attended a JCC day camp when I was a boy, then a succession of YMCA overnight camps, and then, when I got old enough, returned to Jewish camps as an assistant counselor and eventually songleader. So I am both predisposed to liking summer camp movies and sensitized to Jewish content in them, even when it is well-hidden.

Let's take "Meatballs" as our first example, which is sort of the ur-text of summer camp movies. (Or, I should say, summer camp comedies; there is another genre of summer camp movies that developed at the same time, the summer camp horror film.) "Meatballs" is a minor example of the slobs-versus-snobs style of comedy filmmaking that was then popular, in which rough-but-likable outsiders took on privileged elitists and won. "Meatballs" came directly on the heels of "Animal House" and shared a lot of DNA, including Harold Ramis as a writer and Ivan Reitman, who had produced "Animal House" and directed "Meatballs."

"Meatballs" likewise acted as a showcase for a Saturday Night Live actor -- John Belushi in "Animal House" and Bill Murray in his first starring role here. But there's a reckless meanness to "Animal House" that is absent here, a legacy of the so-called sick humor of National Lampoon Magazine, who produced the earlier film. The heroes of "Animal House" might be slobs, but they are no less privileged than the snobs, and they are especially awful toward women, who are casually used and discarded.

"Meatballs" is a sweeter film, although Bill Murray does have a bullying quality to his flirting that would continue in "Ghostbusters," which was also an Ivan Reitman film. Mostly, "Meatballs" focuses on Murray, as a summer camp's head counselor,  mentoring a shy young camper, played by Chris Makepeace, and, in total, it adds up to a nicely detailed one-act play about the friendship between an adult who is holding on to childhood a little too much and a child who is uncertainly at the cusp of exiting it. It's also the least Jewish thing in the film.

The rest of the movie looks at an assortment of assistant counselors, here called CITs, or councilors-in-training. They are quite young, most just a few years older than Makepeace, but they've reached young adulthood in the way people did in movies in the 70s, with a focus on partying, pranking, and exploring the other gender. In fact, the movie's staff of counselors and campers are relegated so much into the background that they barely appear, visible occasionally behind the main characters or wandering into the frame once in a while, often oddly.

The storylines for these CITs was truncated to make more room for the Murray/Makepeace story, and so they sometimes just seem sketched in, with two of them, a nerdy fellow and a fat fellow, mostly playing "nerd" and "fat." Even still, by the standard of the films of the era, this is a pretty charming group. The women especially are written and lensed less as objects of desire than partners in fun, and they have a lot of sexual agency. There is one scene where two male CITs act as peeping Toms, and in a film like "Porky's" this is used as an excuse for showing a lot of female pulchritude. Here, the boys witness nothing, are pretty quickly caught, and are driven away. Instead it is the women who pick who they want to be with, and often set the terms. The most striking example of this is a female counselor that Murray aggressively hits on, played by actress and playwright Kate Lynch. She rebuffs his more aggressive behavior while still encouraging him, and clearly communicates that she's interested in Murray, but only when he's not being so cartoonishly Bill Murray. By the end of the movie, he's a lot more subdued with her, and a lot more honest about what he wants from her, and she appreciates it.

"Meatballs" is unmistakbly set at a Jewish camp, although it's pretty well camouflaged. The film was created almost exclusively by Canadian Jews, including director Reitman, who was the Czech-born son of Holocaust survivors, as well as writers Len Blum (whose Zionist mother traveled back and forth between Canada and Israel), Daniel Goldberg, and Harold Ramis, who was a Chicago native but had moved to Canada to work on SCTV. The cast is filled with Jewish actors and the characters have Jewish names. And the film was lensed at an actual Jewish camp, Camp White Pine, in Ontario, and was reportedly shot while the camp was in use, so the campers and counselors seen in the background were often actual campers and counselors. The script was originated by Reitman, who was a graduate of Jewish summer camps, and he specifically contacted Blum and Goldberg because of their experiences at summer camps.

The film was intended for a general audience, and so Reitman downplayed both its Jewishness and its Canadian-ness, although co-author Ramis would later be upfront about what he saw as the essentially Jewish content of his collaborations with Reitman, telling interviewers that he was looking to create a Jewish comic character that was the opposite of the hapless schlemiel and was more heroic. You can see these sorts of characters throughout his career as a film writer, clearly coded Jewish, but not defined by neurosis or oppression: Peter Riegert 's character in "Animal House," Rodney Dangerfield in "Caddyshack" and "Back to School," and Ramis's own delightfully weird performance in "Ghostbusters."

"Meatballs" captures a lot of the day-to-day details of summer camping. The camp director, played by the marvelously oblivious Harvey Atkin, even wears a t-shirt that reads "When the hand goes up, the mouth goes shut," an expression that is about as common to camps as poison ivy. There are campfire singalongs and weird post-meal rituals in massive wooden mess halls. There are gangs of parents arriving to visit homesick children on Parent Day and sobbing girls hugging each other on the last day of camp. The film was written by people who attended camp and remembered it, and so much of it feels authentic, even when nothing much is happening, like when the CITs lazily float along on canoes singing some improvised song on ukulele.

But the camp experience has also been edited. Jewish camps featuring a lot of Jewish content, including frequent use of Hebrew phrases (campers are often silenced with the Hebrew words "sheket bevkasha," which is met with a pair of handclaps). All-camp events inevitably include Hebrew singalongs, and camps are often invaded by visiting Israelis, who seem impossibly mature and alien. Depending on the camp, there may be a few or more very Orthodox campers, who wear yarmulkes and sometimes have visible fringes under their shirts. Reitman and his writing staff certainly remembered this, and chose to leave it out. This will mean nothing to the casual observer, but to somebody whose experiences mirrored those of the filmmakers, the film's Jewishness feels elided, as though there were scenes that should have been in the film but were just skipped over.

It's as though there might be a longer take of "Meatballs" somewhere, in which a scene at lunch doesn't begin when the food is eaten, but before, when the camp says grace in Hebrew, and scenes in which campers weren't in the background, but instead carried a pretend passport on an imaginary trip to Israel, where the Israeli councilors feed them falafel and send them away with gifts of Bazooka Joe gum with all the jokes written in Hebrew.
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