By Jesse Serwer
He can say that again. Starring Danny Aiello as a wizened Italian patriarch struggling to save his third-generation family seafood business, the film is a not-so-thinly-veiled dramatization of the director's own father, Bill Jordan's, effort to retain Jordan's Lobster Dock, the Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn seafood institution that's been in the family since the late '30s.
"We made this movie to save the actual store," Jordan says, speaking for himself and his younger brother, Darren, who co-produced. "The bank that had given a loan to my father to build a 350-seat restaurant went under and things went in a direction that made my father have to become a lawyer and diverted the attention away from the lobster business."
As his father was in court battling FDIC foreclosure, Jordan began filming at Jordan's, a one-of-a-kind combination retail store, clam bar and distributor on Brooklyn's Shell Bank Creek. Other scenes were shot at the homes of family friends in Rockville Centre and the soon-to-be-shuttered and rarely filmed Fulton Fish Market, thanks to some useful connections in the seafood industry.
While the name "Giorgio" is substituted for Jordan, and the film stars professional actors like Aiello, Jane Curtin and Daniel Sauli (who plays the "Kevin" figure, Michael), The Lobster Farm's supporting cast reads like a family tree.
"Everybody in my family including my new wife, Aimee, is in it," says Jordan, a product of South Side High School and NYU Film School grad whose writing and directing credits include 1999's "Goat on Fire" and "Smiling Fish" 2001's "Feather Pimento," and "Antitrust: Edison v. Laemmle," a 2002 documentary.
"My family have been in my movies since my student films ‹ they are free actors and they are not bad. My grandmother is a diner patron. Darren plays someone working for the FDIC. My father played one of the shady people trying to swoop on the property, and my mother was in a party scene singing at the piano."
Rockville Centre was also "kind of our own mini studio," added Jordan, who shot his NYU senior thesis at South Side and cast his drama teacher, Larry Waxman, in one of the roles alongside Donald Faizon, who now stars in the TV sitcom, Scrubs. "We shot at our old house on Dorchester Road and two of the other homes in the film were on Harvard Avenue." Even the film's casting director, Phyllis Huffman, has Rockville Centre roots.
While it's a "little" film made on a small budget, Jordan is making a push to bring "The Lobster Farm" to the wider market, and he's got some big friends on his side: namely Martin Scorsese, who lent his name to the film ("Martin Scorsese presents"), and Robert Deniro, who pulled strings to get the film shown during last month's Tribeca Film Festival after it missed the entry deadline.
"He had given me a scholarship that helped pay for my senior year at NYU, and we've stayed in touch," Jordan said of Scorsese. "When the shoot was done I showed him my rough cut. He gave editing notes and offered to officially present the film to help bring attention to it."
When Danny Aiello found out that "The Lobster Farm" hadn't made the Tribeca Film Festival's entry cutoff date, he called up his friend and festival co-founder Robert DeNiro.
"He usually takes a day or two to get back to me but he called me in 10 minutes," Aiello said. "At a moment's notice, he got us a screening in the middle of the festival at the Tribeca Cinemas."
With a giant balloon depicting Santa Claus on a lobster ‹ a prop from the film ‹ placed on heavily-trafficked Canal Street, pedestrians scratched their heads, walked in and "The Lobster Farm" became one of Tribeca's most talked about films without being officially entered or in its promotional materials.
The filmmakers have not yet secured a national distribution deal, but a foreign financier, Geneva Capital Group, has agreed to fund a 10-15 city release in September. The producers recently brought the film to Cannes, where it is being sold on the foreign market.
For his part, Aiello urged distributors at a recent preview screening at Regal Union Square Cinemas in Manhattan to take a chance on Jordan's small film, likening it to the 2002 surprise hit, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."
"There aren't movies like this in the U.S. very often but the right people handling this movie could really do something with it," Aiello said. "My Big Fat Greek Wedding made 300 million because they did such a good job of promoting it. I am not saying this is the same movie, but I think it taps into something similar. It's My Big Fat Italian Lobster."
Jordan said he has already begun planning for a film festival-style premiere with director and actor Q&As in both Rockville Centre and Sheepshead Bay when the film is released commercially.
As for the future of Jordan's Lobster Dock, it still hangs in the balance. "We are waiting for a private refinance," says Jordan, who still fills in at the clam bar occasionally on weekends. "We are going to keep the positive thoughts. I wrote a happy ending on our situation and we are going to will it into existence."
Comments about this story? JSerwer@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 221
