Director Robinson finds family roots in crime film

By Bob Tourtellotte

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Even by Hollywood’s often wacky standards, filmmaker Todd Robinson’s tale of rooting out the story for "Lonely Hearts" is a strange one, circuitously drawn from his family’s history.

As Robinson met with a producer to hear ideas for movies about serial killers, he was given for reference a book that highlighted a gruesome murder story involving a man the writer-director knew well -- his own grandfather.

From that meeting sprang the crime drama "Lonely Hearts," which debuts in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, and which can be downloaded two weeks later at ClickStar.com, putting it among a wave of films testing Internet releases.

Robinson said he knew his grandfather, Elmer Robinson, was a New York detective on the case of the 1940s-era Lonely Hearts killers, but he never knew the extent to which the crimes made newspaper headlines or how tracking them affected his family.

"To be honest, I thought we were the only people on the planet who even knew about the story. I had no idea that, at the time, it was a tabloid sensation," Robinson told Reuters.

"Lonely Hearts," starring John Travolta as Elmer Robinson and James Gandolfini as his police partner, revolves around the strange case of a husband and wife (Jared Leto and Salma Hayek) who bilked single women .....continued below

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But in his movie, the filmmaker chose to focus less on the crimes and the killers than on the impact they had on others, specifically the elder Robinson and his family.

Elmer Robinson became so caught up in the investigation that he neglected his family. His wife committed suicide and he became estranged from his own son.

"As men in this culture, we tend to define ourselves by what we do, and yet what we do often has a collateral effect on the people we care about the most," Robinson said.

"This gave me the opportunity to explore my grandfather’s relationship with my father and my dad’s reflections on his father," he added.

FACT AND FICTION

Robinson calls "Lonely Hearts" a work of fiction because it blends his grandfather’s real story with elements of drama. He said much of his family’s history went unspoken for years, making it difficult to uncover the truth of the tale.

But he said he tried hard to capture the real issues of loss and love that his grandfather, father and other relatives faced, and he added that no family stories were too sacred -- or secret -- to be kept from the film.

The writer and director said he got much of his insight from his mother who, because she was not directly related to Elmer Robinson, had a more objective view of his family.

"The truth of issues in my family are valid, and they are authentic in the movie," Robinson said.

"Lonely Hearts" is his first feature film, but Robinson has made several documentaries including "Amargosa," which won an Emmy, a top U.S. television award, and "Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick," about film director William Wellman.

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