Full Description
Leila Wascowicz is a 28-year old Jewish chick living on the Lower East Side. Flat broke and unhinged by the recent death of her mother, Leila convinces her acerbic, underemployed girlfriends to join her in a life of disorganized crime. Before you know it, they've opened a sports betting parlor in their tenement kitchen. While the bookmaking babes learn to chat up their gambling clients and make a fast buck, their love lives have faltering odds. Leila is obsessed with Sammy, the smoldering but remote Jewish bookie boss, but thwarts the advances of Bruce, the mensch who's in love with her. The neophyte bookies go down, but not without some raucous fun and a good look at what it means to be young and sexy, smart and funny, poor and hip in New York. Director Eve Annenberg's feisty debut feature, DOGS is a rough-edged screwball comedy that lovingly celebrates neurosis, sisterhood, and the mother-daughter bond. 1996 Rotterdam Film Festival.
Filmmaker Bio(s)
I graduated from the Acting Program at the Juilliard School. I studied with Michael Kahn and Eve Shapiro, Robert Williams and Timothy Monich. I did one and a half years of film school at Columbia before dropping out. It was frighteningly expensive if you don't have that kind of money. I am a Boston Latin graduate, and that is only of interest if it was Sumner Redstone's alma mater, which I have yet to determine. (I did not graduate the same year as Sumner Redstone).
I am currently single, reside in an East Village hovel with my cat, Max, and am interested in the Arad Arts Program in Israel, or in any country that subsidizes film production. I am finishing a big-budget buddy picture script with my insanely funny writing partner, Stephanie Sharpe, and starting another script for possible production in Summer 1997. It is another irreverent ensemble about New York's feckless, insolent and impoverished restaurant laborers.
My favorite response to DOGS from the San Francisco viewing public was this: I was sitting shyly in the last row as the huge Castro audience filed out. I can sit among 800 laughing clapping people and still convince myself they are just being polite, as two women, at 68 years of age, walked past me. One of them said to the other: "They should have locked them up and thrown away the key." I could've kissed her. This quote elicited from my mother, who can picture me-- vividly --behind bars-- a howl of laughter.
