PROJECTS & CREDITS




“A Daughter’s Wedding Gift”
By Jerry Krupnick, The Star Ledger

For Pearl Randall-Lehrhoff, tonight's television showing of "Daughter of the Bride," a poignant, sweet, funny and touching documentary about her second marriage, at last provides her with a sense of closure.

"If my daughter (documentarian Terri Randall) came to me now, five years later, and suggested we do it all over again, the answer would be, "No way!'

"I'm a very private person," the South Orange woman says, "and the experience in making the film has been like living in a fishbowl. Now, it's complete and we can all go on from there."

It's not that the no-longer-newlywed is unhappy with what her daughter hath wrought. "The movie is like a wonderful wedding album," Randall-Lehrhoff says, "filled with memories and pictures I never want to forget. It's just that there were some moments that were difficult for all of us, but they were moments we all learned from."So this film has been a marvelous, loving present, and I am very proud of Terri's skills and accomplishments. Her film has added very much to the happiness of the past five years."

The documentary goes back far beyond that, of course, first establishing the 42 years of happily married life Pearl enjoyed with her first husband, Max Randall, and their three children, Fred, Beth and Terri.

Fred, the firstborn, Terri recalls, was carefully named so that his initials would be FDR, after the President her parents so admired. "And I was the last child," she says in her ongoing narration, "so I would forever remain the baby."

Suddenly, her father died, "and our world was shattered," Terri says. "If there was anything in life I could count on, it was that my father would always be there."

Her mother, desperately afraid of the sorrow and loneliness to follow, joined a local support group which consisted of 12 other women in similar circumstances and, much to her surprise, a lone widower named Seymour Lehrhoff.

"I was totally disinterested in Seymour, at first," Pearl says, even resenting his presence there as an inhibiting factor. But soon he asked her out "and we became friends," sharing experiences, comparing notes.

"He would tell me about the women he was dating," she says, "seeking my approval or disapproval. `You're lucky,' I would tell him. "Men have a candy store because there are so few independent women. So you have the opportunity to taste all the chocolates.' "

Eventually, Seymour asked her to invite her family to a weekend brunch "to meet my new friend." It was their first intimation that this man was in love with their mother and wanted to marry her.

Fred's initial reaction? "I don't think any of us wanted to know about it."

Beth's comment? "That's really nice. We are happy for both of you. Let's eat."

Later, when her mother sought her children out in private to get their reactions to this new event in their lives, Beth added:

"I think that you are lucky to have found Seymour. I think life would have been empty without him and that you'll have a full, happy life...and there will always be an element of "what's wrong with this picture.' "

All this is related in a montage of home movies, family photographs and interviews by Terri with her siblings, her mother's supportive sister Elaine, with the easygoing but determined Seymour, and with other women in the support group, who provided a sort of Jewish-Greek chorus as helpful onlookers to the entire Seymour-Pearl relationship.

Randall is a very accomplished filmmaker and has the Emmy and Oscar nominations to prove it. But this documentary obviously comes more from her heart than most. And it is done with care and caring.

The filmmaker had done several previous projects for HBO and approached Sheila Nevis, who executive produces all of the cable TV network's projects, for her possible interest in this one.

"It just took my heart," Nevis says, "even though it wasn't finished when Terri first told me about it. I knew it was something I wanted for HBO."

What Nevis likes best was that there is no sense of staging or artificiality about the final result. Everything is real and everybody is outspoken, and Pearl in particular is rewarding in expressing her mixed emotions and her sometimes surprise that this was happening to her.

Many of the scenes are moving, but there is one in particular that will set the tear ducts flowing. Pearl has bought a wedding dress, but is torn between wearing the gold necklace Seymour has given her or the strands of pearls Max had bought her during that first marriage. She asks her husband-to-be's advice, and Seymour's answer leaves no doubt that this is a marriage that will have a solid future.

Randall-Lehrhoff ("I hyphenated my last name, just like in today's modern marriages") told us the other day that the reactions of her children were very important to her own decision and that things may have gone differently if they had expressed total dissatisfaction about her romance with Seymour.

"But they accepted the situation and realized that he loved me and brought me great happiness. Still, it was a very trying time doubt, joy, fear, discomfort we touched all the emotions."

Eventually, as Terri's film shows with sensitivity and humor, they were wed; Seymour broke the traditional glass and vowed to love and take care of her mother forevermore. And, as everyone said, "Mazel Tov."

It is now five years later "five wonderful and fulfilling years," Pearl says happily. Her son, Fred, whose initial upset shows the most in the film, has accepted Seymour and has asked him to be grandfather to his new children. "We are the same family, but even more so."

"Terri's film was an eye-opener," Pearl concludes. "We all learned from it, learned more about each other and where we were coming from. There's no right or wrong time for what happened to us, it is an individual matter. Still, I hope others in the same circumstance will watch it and perhaps get more understanding of what a second marriage means to everybody concerned.

"For me, it has meant a second life."
Perhaps because "Yearbook" is continuously being shot and edited—"evolving" is the word writer-producer Gorfain uses—the third and fourth episodes show measurable improvement. In the context of the then approaching Middle East conflict and the clashing opinions it generated at Glenbard, last week's "War and Peace" focused on two sympathetic, interesting and paradoxical seniors.

One is a a dedicated Marine reservist, a big crewcut boy enthralled by weapons. But in simple, direct strokes, "Yearbook" also portrays him as a tender member of a white family that includes a younger adopted black son and another black foster child. There is warm, easy devotion among them and within the tough-looking senior an unfaked gentleness all the more touching for seeming somehow out of character. The rest of the half hour is dedicated to an original, animated girl outspokenly opposed to war but whose boyfriend, a recent Glenbard graduate now in the Army, is liable to be sent to the Persian Gulf at any moment.

Like "War and Peace," the upcoming and engaging "I'm Seventeen" is loosely shaped around an idea and driven by closely watched characters. This weekend's show ("Yearbook" is now repeated on Sundays) is about the dreams that sustain a couple of highly motivated seniors, a curiously singleminded girl who plays goalie on the boys' hockey team and a talented boy who sheepishly confesses he prefers dancing with his hip-hop group to playing basketball or even dating.

''Yearbook" appears to have found a format: straightforward snapshots of young people lurching toward the shadow line of adulthood. If the pictures remain clear and unretouched, "Yearbook" might yet work.

In the wasteland of entertainment programming on the networks, honesty and simplicity would be distinction enough. Gorfain says that Fox is committed to five more episodes of the show and that ratings will determine whether the network commissions any beyond that.

Should "Yearbook" succeed, all of a sudden TV might become a showplace for documentaries that are not necessarily pegged to breaking news. Some worthy films would get made and widely shown. An undersupported art form might thrive.