Who ever heard of Hank Greenspun? Unless you grew up in Las Vegas sometime between the ‘50s and ‘70s, or paid close attention to the machinations of Israel’s founding, you probably haven’t.
But that didn’t stop Hollywood screenwriter Scott Goldstein from working with the Greenspun family to create a riveting documentary of the late journalist and tough guyWhere I Stand: The Hank Greenspun Story, that has gotten attention from such heavy hitters as HBO.
Greenspun got his start in the 1940s as a publicity guy in Las Vegas, but became well-known for his big mouth and creative stunts. Eventually he struck out on his own and founded the Las Vegas Sun, his newspaper and bully pulpit that still operates today, though as a shadow of its former self.
Goldstein mentioned that during production the film was nicknamed Zelig 2, after the Woody Allen character who showed up at so many pivotal moments in history. It seems almost impossible that one man nearly nobody’s heard of could have: Raided a weapons depot in Hawaii and pilfered the guns that helped the Hagana take Jerusalem in its war for independence; convinced billionaire Howard Hughes to revitalize Vegas in one of its darkest hours; brokered a top-secret peace deal between the Arab world and Israel, only to have it unraveled by the upstart dictator Saddam Hussein; allegedly possess papers in his safe that could implicate President Nixon led to the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, which resulted in every political scandal now having the suffix “gate” added to it.
But unless you were at the Sunday afternoon screening of Where I Stand during the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, you’re probably pretty unlikely to see this film. As the director Goldstein told us, partly due to restrictions from the soundtrack and footage rights, he has been unable to find a distributor. And, in what was likely a rookie mistake — Goldstein’s got decades of screenwriting experience, but not so much in the business end of the film industry — allowing the film to show first at a Jewish film festival shut him out from places like Toronto, Sundance and Cannes. And direct to DVD won’t work if nobody knows the film exists.
Despite its presence at SJFF and elsewhere, this really wasn’t a Jewish film. The Greenspun family doesn’t go to shul in this documentary (and didn’t so much in real life, either). Greenspun’s father was a devout Jew, but the only references to any kind of religious belief by the star of the show are a few points in the film where Anthony Hopkins, as the voice of Greenspun, talks about “something watching over me” after escaping any number of hairy situations, and the moment when Joe McCarthy, who Greenspun railed against during the red-baiting senator’s visit to Vegas, called the journalist a blight onto his people. And, of course, the gun running for the Hagana, which he did because of the image etched into his brain of the survivors of the Holocaust he found while serving in the armed forces.
I’m confident Goldstein did his homework, and he is admittedly smitten by how much Greenspun was able to accomplish. But what the documentary is missing is the journalist’s dark side. This was Vegas in its mob days: Sure, he worked for Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel before the mobster took a bullet to the brain, but aside from that, the only connection we hear about is in Greenspun’s trying to uproot gangsters from his city. In a scene with Greenspun’s four grown-up kids, they reminisce about how they thought it was natural for people to have “the” as a middle name, and that every kid took a different route home from school every day.
A man who made himself as many dangerous enemies as Greenspun did should have ended up in a ditch, unless he had some powerful friends to protect him. According to the director, who spoke after the film, Greenspun’s connections with the mobbed-up elements of Vegas society as well as some of its most powerful — and often corrupt — leaders didn’t get included in the final print.
That inclusion would most certainly have taken away from the important work Greenspun and his typewriter fought for on so many issues over the years, but it would have given us a bit more balance of the man who would likely have otherwise become another forgotten hero.
Greenspun never struck it rich in the news business, but he had the foresight to purchase hundreds of acres in a valley that eventually became the suburb of Henderson, Nevada. That land, as much as it pained his wife to see him spend the money when they were living paycheck to paycheck, became a gold mine. His children and grandchildren, despite this current deep recession that has battered Vegas, have lived quite comfortably off the proceeds of that foresight.
One final note: The Jewish Federation there, which owned the Las Vegas Jewish newspaper, has fallen upon very hard times, and they eliminated the paper a few months ago to reduce their budget. As I thumbed through their second-to-last issue, I turned to the page with the masthead. The board president of that Federation was Danny Greenspun — Hank’s son.
A cruel irony, if I ever heard one, that the son of this hard-nosed journalist and newspaper editor would have the guts to kill a newspaper. Hank Greenspun the journalist would have been upset, but Hank the tough guy — and he was a tough guy — probably would have understood the need in the bigger picture. Still, he wouldn’t have gone down without a fight.
The best movie you’ll probably never see
