In early September, the Hollywood producer Lawrence Bender — known for his work with Quentin Tarantino on films including “Pulp Fiction” and “Inglourious Basterds” — had what he later described as “a really tough conversation” with the investors in “Red Alert,” an Israeli miniseries that dramatizes the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.
With just weeks remaining before the anticipated release on the second anniversary of the attacks, the show, produced by Israeli mass media company Keshet Media Group, was struggling to secure distribution outside of Israel. The news environment was far from favorable: Israeli fighter jets had just attacked a residential compound in Qatar, and a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions that were “implicated” in the genocide in the Gaza Strip had collected thousands of signatures in Hollywood.
“No one’s going to want to buy something from the Israelis,” Bender, an executive producer of “Red Alert,” told the investors, as he recalled on stage at a Jewish National Fund–USA conference the following month. Among those investors was the Israel Entertainment Fund, which JNF–USA established last year with the Israeli streaming service Izzy to produce television and film for international audiences, with a focus on projects filmed in the “Gaza Envelope” region of southern Israel. “We were pretty stressed about what we were going to do,” Izzy CEO Nati Dinnar, interviewing Bender on stage, recalled.
According to its backers, “Red Alert” is essentially a work of Israeli propaganda at a moment when a majority of Americans view Israel’s government unfavorably. The Israel Entertainment Fund, in a slide deck featuring “Red Alert,” says that its projects benefit Israel by “educating viewers and altering perceptions.” Bender said that “our purpose” in making the show was to “change the conversation” about Israel among Americans, Europeans, and other viewers abroad.
A deal to reach that crucial international audience materialized only after Bender encountered David Ellison, the upstart Hollywood mogul, at a memorial service in September. With financing from his tech billionaire father, Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison, David Ellison had recently merged his Skydance Media with the old-line movie studio Paramount. “It would be my honor to be a partner in this,” he emailed after watching “Red Alert,” according to Bender. “In Hollywood, that’s a rare thing,” Bender said at the JNF–USA conference, describing the studio head as “a big supporter of Israel.”
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