Next Year in...L.A.

Excerpts from

Next Year … the L.A. Power Seder
Larry David, Chris Rock, Warren Beatty All Want to Know: Why Is This Night Different?

On this Wednesday, April 12, some 30 people will gather in a cramped West Hollywood apartment for the raucous Passover Seder of Jeffrey (Z-Dog) Zarnow, a former producer who now owns the liquor company Starr African Rum. It is, Mr. Zarnow said, a “debaucherous affair” that begins with a “blaring rock ’n’ roll song”—usually by the Foo Fighters, a nod to one guest, Nate Mendel, a bassist for the group. Prior attendees (there’s a waiting list in the event of cancellations) have included actors Matthew McConaughey and Rachel Bilson; Josh Schwartz, creator of The O.C.; and a bunch of executive types who first met and mingled in the CAA mailroom.

“Everyone brings a bottle of wine, and one of the rules is that no one can leave until all the bottles are empty,” Mr. Zarnow said. Besides wine, “milk-and-honey cocktails” are served—honoring the Promised Land, if not Passover per se. Close enough!

Welcome to the Haggadah of Hollywood—a place where Passover is an excuse to orchestrate a production worthy of a credit roll. In this respect, you might say it’s a night not so different from any other night.


For many Hollywood goyim, meanwhile, Passover is when the town shuts down. “It’s like dead everywhere,” said one agent of the Christian persuasion. “It’s kind of like being left alone at college when everyone goes home for Thanksgiving. You’ve got nowhere to go.” Once, he was invited to the Seder of a prominent studio executive—a rather catholic affair, for lack of a better word. “It was a mixture of family and kind of like the strays,” the agent said. “It wasn’t super-religious. We ran through the thing in like 10, 15 minutes. It was like, ‘Bless the food, bless the meat—let’s eat!’”

And at least one Hollywood veteran has scaled back and is thinking about a more sober Seder. “The last time I did a big one was maybe 10 years ago,” said producer Peter Guber, who ran Columbia Pictures in the 1970’s. “Once or twice I turned it into a circus, and I felt like it was blasphemous. There were too many business people. The four questions that were asked were: Why don’t I have the deal? Why is this deal not as good as my friend’s deal? Am I going to have a better deal next time? And what can you do about my agent’s deal?

“I realized it had become something other than what it was supposed to be,” Mr. Guber continued, adding that, to him, Passover is now “a spiritual renaissance—something that has personal, emotional meaning to me.”

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