Screenings: Romance and Cigarettes, Mac

Initially a stage actor, Brooklyn native and Yale Drama School graduate John Turturro has become a favorite of film aficionados with his unconventional looks and mannerisms. His long standing collaborations with Spike Lee include unforgettable performances in Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Jungle Fever (1991), Clockers (1995), Girl 6 (1996), He Got Game (1998), Summer of Sam (1999), and She Hate Me (2004).

Turturro has also worked extensively with the Coen Brothers, appearing in Miller’s Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), The Big Lebowski (1998), and most recently O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).

Best remembered for roles with an ungainly physicality, the tall and athletic performer his wistfully admitted in interviews that he wanted to be Fred Astaire. A versatile artist with an impressive array of international acting awards and nominations, John Turturro has also made his mark as a writer and director of audaciously independent films. In Mac (1992), he plays his own father, a short-fused Italian construction worker whose driven ambition precludes a happy family life. With playwright Brandon Cole, Turturro adapted a farcical stage play in Illuminata (1998), starring Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken, and his cousin Aida Turturro (Janice from The Sopranos). That same stellar cast returns, along with James Gandolfini, Kate Winslet, and Steve Buscemi, for Turturro’s latest feature, Romance and Cigarettes, a raucous, earthy, blue-collar musical set in Queens.

Turturro began writing the screenplay for Romance and Cigarettes on the set of Barton Fink. Playing the part of the eponymous scriptwriter, he decided he may as well create an authentic story. Initially scheduled for a 2005 release date, the quirky film initially had trouble finding a distributor. At a recent New York screening, Turturro declared that he felt like Odysseus; jubilant after years of traveling the globe with his labor of love to finally bring his work home. The New York Times welcomed him with a favorable review praising the film’s “bawdy audacity.”