Acid Test

Director Dan Klores breaks down the methods behind Crazy Love's madness.

by Sam Adams

SPECTACLES: Linda Riss (left) and Burt Pugach, the twisted subjects of Dan Klores' Crazy Love. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

It's two days after Dan Klores' Crazy Love became the first major sale of this year's Sundance Film Festival, and Klores doesn't look entirely happy. A veteran New York publicist who turned filmmaker with 2003's The Boys of 2nd Street Park, Klores has nailed down distribution for each of his four films, a track record that would make most budding cineastes beam. But, you see, at the screening, there was this guy ... well, let's let Klores tell the tale.

"I always sit in the last row," he says. "There's a guy in front of me the entire screening with his BlackBerry on. I was so distracted, bummed out, it was unbelievable. I did the New York thing, kicking the chair, and he went back to doing it. And I felt, a guy that rude, if I say something to him, he'll turn around and say something to me. So I was in pain. I really was. I felt everyone hated it."

If that sounds a little neurotic, it's nothing on Burt Pugach and Linda Riss, the star-crossed couple at the heart of Crazy Love. A self-styled playboy of 1960s New York, Pugach wooed Riss with lavish nights on the town, but when she grew tired of waiting for him to leave his wife, Pugach retaliated by a hiring a man to throw lye in her face. Astonishingly, Riss not only forgave him, but after Pugach emerged from his 14-year prison term, the two were married and remain so to this day. (And that, believe it or not, is not the story's final shock.)

This isn't the first time the Pugachs have told their story. In 1976, they authorized a biography called A Very Different Love Story. For Klores, "the challenge was going deeper. When you interview someone, it's filled with feints and jabs and taking chances. Can you ask someone about their suicide attempt? Can you ask someone to hold up their wrists and show you the scars where they tried to cut them? You have to be able to go there and risk taking chances."

The charismatic Burt is an obvious narcissist, which raises the question of whether putting him on screen might be giving him just what he wants. But Klores says that the longer Burt is on screen, the more his facade wears away. "The first 10 minutes you meet Burt, you think he's a charming man who likes to talk too much. But then he goes on and on and on, and you clearly see he's disturbed," Klores says.

Burt and Linda's story has consumed untold gallons of tabloid ink, and Klores even remembers reading about them as a child in Brooklyn. But it wasn't nostalgia or sensationalism that drew him in. "This touched a base for me," he says, "an emotional base. At first, it's a film about all the things we do when we're hurt, things we never talk about it. But then I realized, no, it's not just that. It's what we do in order not to be alone."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Crazy Love opens Friday at Ritz Five. See Sam Adams' review on opposite page.