Article from Entertainment Weekly - March 9, 2001

Believer...Or Not

Veteran screenwriter Henry Bean's feature directorial debut about a Jewish skinhead, The Believer, won rave reviews, explosive buzz for star Ryan Gosling, and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance - so why hasn't the drama been able to find a distributor? According to Bean, an interested studio became spooked after the film got a thumbs down from Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean at L.A.'s Simon Wiesenthal Center, which screened the film shortly after its showing at Sundance. "I heard the next day that Rabbi Cooper called an executive at the company who wanted to buy it, and said it was a primer for anti-Semitism.... After that, people backed away," Bean says. While Cooper says the distributor in question called him, he acknowledges that he offered his opinion. "American History X worked," says Cooper. "This film failed." One studio executive who passed on The Believer says, "The film is really well done, but you have to look at the box office struggles of this movie's cousins - Romper Stomper and American History X - and you have to consider the tough road ahead to motivate people into theaters." Bean says he's still in talks with major studios, adding, "This film will get distribution."

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