nothin From Lender’s Bagels To Hollywood | New Haven Independent

From Lender’s Bagels To Hollywood

Best Served Cold Productions Photo

Filmmaker Jay Lender on the set of “They’re Watching.”

Born into a family that revolutionized American breakfast culture by popularizing the bagel, Jay Lender — whose feature film debut, They’re Watching, comes out in limited release on Friday — knew from an early age that he wanted to be an artist.

The son of Murray Lender, the innovative, long-time marketing director for New Haven’s Lender’s Bagel Bakery, Jay found succor for his budding creative interests in watching one of his father’s employees illustrate the marketing campaigns that helped bagelize America.”

Now a writer, director, and animator with over two decades of experience working in Hollywood, Lender came onto a recent episode of WNHH’s Deep Focus” to talk about his early interest in animation, his long career working in television, and the new They’re Watching.

Because we had the bagel factory, we had an advertising agency in house,” Lender said, reflecting on a crucial artistic influence from his childhood. And, for the first ten or so years of my life, that agency was just one man: Willie Evans. He was a guy who came out of poster painting, and he had this incredibly appealing, easily accessible art style. It just felt like the neighborhood, and it made everybody smile.

When [my family] would visit the factory, we’d watch the factory line and I’d see the bagels whizzing by for a couple of minutes. And, when that got boring, I would sneak upstairs to Willie’s office, which was at the back of a supply closet, and I would just sit at his feet and watch him draw and absorb everything that I possibly could.”

From that unexpected tutelage blossomed Lender’s lifelong interest in illustration and animation.

After the sale of Lender’s Bagel Bakery to Kraft Foods in 1984, Jay, relieved of any responsibility to the family business, pushed ahead with his ambition to become a visual artist. Studying animation at Rhode Island School of Design and then at California Institute of the Arts, Jay moved to Hollywood and landed a job at Nickelodeon, where he spent two decades working on such popular animated shows as Spongebob Squarepants and Phineas and Ferb.

Now looking to make the transition from television to movies, Jay and co-director Micah Wright recently completed their feature film debut, They’re Watching.

The movie is a satirical first-person thriller that follows an American film crew for a home improvement reality TV show as they travel to a small village in the Eastern European country of Moldova. They are hoping to record the miraculous transformation of a crumbling stone house purchased by a wide-eyed Los Angeles potter 6 months earlier. When they arrive, they discover not just a refurbished house and an ebullient owner, but also a community deeply suspicious of outsiders and wracked by fear, paranoia, and superstition.

Although the majority of the movie plays out as a workplace comedy, following the antics of the American crew as they embarrass themselves with their pride and cultural obliviousness, the final act delivers an explosive supernatural catharsis that is hinted at from the very opening scene. Lender, channeling the focus, precision, and visual flair developed through years as a professional illustrator, brings the skills and work ethic he first saw practiced by the advertising designer at Lender’s Bagel Bakery to his film debut. 

The beauty of an animation career, and the training you get out of an animation career, is that you learn how to plan,” Lender said. When we do anything in animation, we have to be absolutely positive that what we are about to make is what we intend to keep.

And that skill set really served us well when we made [They’re Watching], because we were on such a tight schedule and we had so little money to play with. When it comes to the final 12 to 15 minutes of this movie, I made 550 drawings that detailed everything: the lighting, where characters go in, where they go out, what they look like, camera moves, all of it. So, when we dragged 80 Romanians out into the forest at 3 in the morning in 35 degree weather, we all knew exactly what it was we were trying to achieve. Anything less than that and we would have ended up with shots missing, and the movie might not have come together at all.”

It is that combination of craftsmanship, concentration, and hard work that Lender sees as essential for creative success, a lesson that could just as easily be applied to building a pioneering bagel company as it does to completing a first movie.

You don’t get the skills by doing one thing incredibly well,” he reflected. You get the skills by doing something so many times that it becomes rote to do it well.”

To listen to the entire interview, click on the audio player below or download the episode via the WNHH Arts Mix podcast.

They’re Watching will be available through a limited release in theaters and on demand starting March 25.

Tags:

Sign up for our morning newsletter

Don't want to miss a single Independent article? Sign up for our daily email newsletter! Click here for more info.


Post a Comment

Commenting has closed for this entry

Comments

There were no comments