By Bruce Klauber
Several fine movies have been made about Atlantic City going back to the silent film days. The best-known of these are “Atlantic City,” and “The King of Marvin Gardens.” Coming in a close second are “Snake Eyes,” “Owning Mahowny,” and maybe even the “Atlantic City” from 1944, a ‘B’ musical starring Constance Moore. We could include the television series, “Boardwalk Empire,” but with an asterisk as the program was filmed mainly on a film set in Brooklyn.
Not on any list of Atlantic City movies, probably because few have heard of it and even fewer have seen it, may be the quirky, somewhat eccentric and off-the-wall picture called “The Lemon Sisters,” released briefly in 1990, and not to be confused with the Lennon Sisters singing group which appeared on television with Lawrence Welk.
“The Lemon Sisters” was beset by problems and personality clashes almost from day one, and the critics savaged it when it finally played in theaters. As one example, Caryn James of The New York Times wrote: “‘The Lemon Sisters’ inspires dazed disbelief that professional filmmakers could have made such an amateurish movie.”
It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Diane Keaton, the film’s producer and one of its stars (Carol Kane and Kathryn Grody are the other principals) wanted to make a modestly-budgeted film about the lifelong friendship between three women, and how that friendship evolved amidst a changing Atlantic City. Those qualities made it to the screen, but only to an extent, as the final cut is quite different from what was originally intended.
The film was shot on a six- or seven-week shooting schedule which began on Sept. 26, 1988, at various spots on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, including Caesars and in and around several homes on Ridgeway Avenue, a few blocks away from where the Warwick Condominiums stand.
Upon its release, the producers used these two descriptions to promote the picture: “A comedy about one of life’s great challenges…staying friends.” The other was a good description of the film’s charming wackiness: “They met when they were 9. They’ve been through 1,352 Monday meetings, 27 bad haircuts, 12 blind dates, five vows of celibacy, 3,004 late-night phone calls, 14 miracle diets and one major misunderstanding.”
The plot is pretty simple. Three young girls vow to be lifelong friends and to meet every Monday night to rehearse their singing act. As youngsters, they know they’re headed for stardom. As they mature, that goal becomes more unrealistic, and as grownups, two of the girls realize that stardom will never happen.
As adults, their lives and careers all center on the Boardwalk gradually dominated by casino/hotels. Keaton runs her late father’s failing museum of old television artifacts. Grody’s husband, played nicely by Elliott Gould, runs the family’s failing saltwater taffy business. The flighty Kane, however, is still pursuing the dream of becoming a singing star. Sounds great, right?
The film, which sat on the shelf for about two years, barely resembled what Keaton and screenwriter, Jeremy Pikser, first had in mind.
I was fortunate enough to catch up with Pikser, who wrote the screenplay for the Academy Award nominated film “Bulworth,” and is now creative director of the Screenplay Lab at Johns Hopkins University. He was astonished that I liked the film.
“The Lemon Sisters” was, Pikser said, “The first script I wrote that got produced. It was commissioned by Diane Keaton with only these instructions: set it in Atlantic City, try to capture the changing nature of the place in the 1980s, and have equally starring parts for Keaton and her two best friends, Kathryn Grody and Carole Kane. I loved doing it and I loved the script I wrote.
“It languished unproduced for a number of years, but (with) the confluence of Diane’s success in ‘Little Drummer Girl’ coupled with the Writers Guild strike of 1988, there was a need to get Keaton to do a film with an already written script. She had ‘The Lemon Sisters’ in hand and Miramax agreed to do it.
“For reasons I never really understood, Joyce Chopra, who was hired as director, changed the script to make it bigger. Also, the production team felt it would be a good idea to get A-list designers, whom Diane knew, from Hollywood. Their designs, in my opinion, were completely wrong for the characters and setting.
“The opening scene, for example, was set in a neighborhood bar off the Boardwalk in what had been a depressed town. They built a huge, gorgeous bar with giant fish tanks with tens of thousands of dollars worth of tropical fish. They dressed the neighborhood girls, who sang only on Monday nights in a small rundown bar, in floor-length sequined gowns. So, by the first scene, the basic nature of the location and characters, sent entirely the wrong message to the audience.”
Then there was the issue of budget. The film was to be a modestly budgeted “small” film, but the Hollywood designers that came in put an end to that.
“It put the film so far over budget after only one week of filming that the bonding company came in and required over 30 percent of the script to be cut,” Pikser explained. “Director Chopra told me that since the audience, in her opinion, would be more interested in the women’s relationships with their men than in their friendships with each other, that most of the cuts would come from scenes where the three ‘sisters’ were together. That, in my opinion, was an utter disaster.
“When the first cut was shown to a test audience, they didn’t know the three girls were supposed to be friends. And the whole film was supposed to be about their friendship. It made no sense without that. As far as I was concerned, it was an overall botch job, despite some wonderful scenes and performances. If you can see it, it has a great heart at its center.”
Unfortunately, for a small film that was supposed to focus on friendship, there was some palpable ill will on the set during the short shooting schedule.
Joyce Chopra was noted for her expertise as a director of documentary films with a feminist focus. Prior to “The Lemon Sisters,” she had directed only one mainstream feature film, “Smooth Talk” from 1985, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival that year. She may not have been the best choice for “The Lemon Sisters.”
In an interview with Chopra conducted for IndieWire in 2022, it’s evident that the director is still somewhat bitter about her experience with “The Lemon Sisters.”
“I was very friendly with co-producer Joe Kelly,” she remembered. “And he suddenly called me into his office and said, ‘Diane Keaton would like you to quit.’ That way, they wouldn’t have to pay me. If they fired me, they would’ve owed me my whole salary. They couldn’t afford to do that. And in one of the meetings, another producer said, ‘Go away, no one wants you here.’ Who’s ever said that to you? I thought, ‘How did I get to this point in life that somebody would say that to me?’”
Note: Since this unfortunate experience, Chopra has directed several more documentaries and network television series, including “Law and Order,” and more than a dozen television movies.
When the film was finally released, the principals must have known that “The Lemon Sisters” was not the film everyone envisioned. Only one of the actresses, Carol Kane, did promotion for it, and only for a local New York television station. Kane talked about her character in the film, Frankie D’Angelo:
“You know, she grew up in Atlantic City and she was named after Frank Sinatra. I think she took it a little too literally and decided she would be Frank Sinatra one day. I love the music and the singing and the dancing in the movie.”
And that ends the tale of “The Lemon Sisters,” a sometimes delightful, obscure film about Atlantic City which, as the screenwriter said, “Has a great heart at its center.”
Note: “The Lemon Sisters” can be viewed in its entirety, at no charge, via YouTube.
Bruce Klauber is the author of four books, an award-winning music journalist, concert and record producer and publicist, producer of the Warner Brothers and Hudson Music “Jazz Legends” film series, and performs both as a drummer and vocalist.
