Filmmaker Dan Klores' history is a bustle of contradictions. But his life's accidents and choices have made him one of the most skillful and provocative documentarians around. A fan of high shoe-leather journalism, he's empathic and deft at filling in the context of so-called tabloid stories.
Klores' Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story, dug into the psychological effects of Griffith's killing Benny "the Kid" Paret in a title boxing match, just as his new film, Crazy Love delves beneath the surface of the bond between Burt Pugach and the woman he scarred for life, Linda Riss.
As Klores explains over the phone from New York, journalism, scandal, publicity and second and third acts - all the stuff that makes his films compelling - have been part of Klores' background, too.
A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., he studied journalism at the University of South Carolina, but Klores admits that, through his teens and young adulthood, all he cared about was "playing ball, getting high and girls."
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Klores says, he was becoming "a pretty good writer," freelancing for New York-based publications about sports and "cops and robbers" stuff - a lot of "white-collar crime before it was called that, like pyramid scams." But he soon realized that a $250 payday could be all he had to show for a week's work, an unused piece could result in a minuscule "kill fee," and a $4,000 check from New York magazine was a rare gold mine.
Clean of drugs for seven years, he decided he had to make steady money. He took a job doing public relations in a political campaign, and, at 29, earned his first regular paycheck. He started working 15 to 16 hours a day and building a business of his own, Dan Klores Communications. His firm specialized in public relations for clients in crisis: an airline that has a crash, a candidate with messy personal issues, a celebrity in any kind of "major jam," a hospital or a bank accused of bad practice or fraud.
He's happily married to his second wife, Abbe, and they have three kids. But he suffered a crisis eight or nine years ago.
Making delayed payment for drug abuse in his teens and 20s, he developed Hepatitis C.
"I had to do the treatment that involved taking Interferon, and it wasted me, physically and emotionally, for a year," Klores says. "It was the weirdest thing: The doctor tells me over the phone that if I don't take the treatment, I'll die in four years."
