PROJECTS & CREDITS




“The Oscars”
Steve Lipman - Short Takes

The worst day in Terri Randall's life was a phone call in 1989 an independent filmmaker, she was in Los Angeles doing a documentary when she learned that her father, Max, had died in a New York hospital.

The best day in her life was a phone call earlier this month when she learned that a film she produced last year about her mother's remarriage and the Randall family's reaction to the simcha was nominated for an Academy Award in the short subject documentary category.

It's the first Oscar nomination for Randall, 43.

"It's very exciting," says the Upper West Side resident. "I never expected to be nominated. If I don't win, the nomination itself is enough."

Her half-hour film, "Daughter of the Bride," tells about Max and Pearl Randall's 42 years together in South Orange, N.J., about Pearl's joining a widows and widowers support group at the MetroWest Jewish community center after Max's death, and about her courtship and marriage under the chupah of Temple Beth El in South Orange to Seymour Lehrhoff, whom she met at the group. The documentary, which Randall narrates, deals with the siblings' feelings about their mother's remarriage barely a year after their father died.

"It was very hard for us. this happened so quickly," she says. "The hardest part was what happens to my father's memory when another man takes his place."

"Seymour is my mother's husband," Randall says. "He's not replacing my father."

"I knew other people were also going through this," she says. After the film appeared last November on HBO, "a lot of women came up to my mother and thanked her for sharing her story. She felt good about it."

Randall, whose credits include "To Know Where They Are," a 1989 documentary about her return with her father to her grandfather's shtetl in southern Poland, financed most of her latest film herself.

"I though about giving up several times because I couldn't raise the money" during the last nine years, she says. Her husband, Avner Tavori, convinced her to keep going.

A grant from HBO last year helped her complete the project.

Randall, who has been nominated for an Emmy Award, will attend the Oscar presentation ceremony in Los Angeles on March 23.

Her mother, "a private person," is delighted with the nomination. "She told me, ŒI just wish your father was here. Because I know he would be so proud of you."