A funny thing happened to Scott Marshall when he turned 13. During the 1980s, his Jewish friends began celebrating their bar and bat mitzvahs, so lots of party invitations began arriving in his Los Angeles mail box.

Michael Yarish
Scott Marshall drew on childhood experiences.
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"I never really knew what Hebrew School was. Everybody was going to temples and just really fun parties with Madonna impersonators," he recalled in a recent telephone interview.

While Marshall, who is not Jewish, attended many of his schoolmates' parties, he still felt left out. He sensed that while his schoolmates had learned how to chant the Torah in Hebrew, the celebration marked a more significant rite of passage.

"All these kids suddenly became a man," Marshall said, which made him wonder, "Was I a man or not? There was no defining moment like all these kids had."

To some degree, those experiences prepared him for the task of directing "Keeping up With the Steins," a 90-minute comedy about the tension among three generations of a Jewish family when it's time to plan Benjamin Fiedler's bar mitzvah.

Marshall -- the son of actor/director Garry, who plays Irwin Fiedler in the film -- still remembers the first bar mitzvah party he attended. After the service at the synagogue, guests rode a double-decker bus to the Roxy nightclub on Sunset Strip.

"It was a really hot, happening club. They had the whole club rented out, and Blondie's band without Deborah Harry. It was just so impressive, so over the top," he recalled.

When he was in the seventh grade, Marshall also played bass in a band with Dweezil Zappa, son of Frank Zappa. So, when the keyboard player was bar mitzvahed, the band played a song at the party.

"We weren't very good. It's a very awkward time in your life," Marshall said.

For the role of the grandfather in "Keeping up With the Steins," Marshall sought out Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, but neither wanted to do the skinny-dipping scene with Daryl Hannah.

So, his father kept reading the part with younger actors auditioning for the role of the grandson, Benjamin.

"The producers liked him," Scott Marshall said, adding that once his father learned he could skinny dip with Hannah, he agreed to be in the movie and insisted that there be no body double.

"It was tough directing him that day," Scott Marshall said.

Finding a temple proved to be a challenge, too. Mark Zakarin, the film's writer, wanted to shoot the bar mitzvah scene at a synagogue in Brentwood.

"We couldn't get the Brentwood temple because 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' was filming there with Larry David," Marshall said, adding that the scene was shot at Adat Ariel, a synagogue in Burbank, Calif.

The cantor in the film is Chayim Frenkel, who is based at Kehillat Israel, a synagogue in Pacific Palisades, where Zakarin belongs.

Rochelle Shapell, one of the film's executive producers, is an Orthodox Jew and worked to ensure accuracy.

"She really cared about the bar mitzvah scene in the temple. It was a real temple. It was a real Torah," Marshall said. "There was some question of whether my dad could hold it because he isn't Jewish. We couldn't afford to make our own Torah. ... We tried to be as accurate as possible."

First Published: June 9, 2006, 4:00 a.m.