In the work of Jack Garfein - Holocaust survivor, theater and film director, key figure in the formation of the Actors Studio - past and and present freely intermingled to contribute to memorable stage productions and in two films, many which were ahead of their time in tackling such issues as homosexuality, race and violence. Powered by his vivid recollections and augmented with readings by Willem Dafoe, The Wild One traces Garfein’s life: his Czechoslovakian youth, his family’s fleeing the Nazis, surviving in Auschwitz and other camps, his 1946 arrival at 16 in New York and coming under the wing of Lee Strasberg, Hollywood, his marriage to actress Carroll Baker.

The Wild One

In 1950, 33-year-old black actor Sidney Poitier starred for the first time in Hollywood history in a film by Joseph Mankiewicz with the prescient title "The Door Opens". When he made his film debut a decade earlier, the self-taught young man, who grew up in the Bahamas before emigrating to New York as a teenager, was not allowed to eat his meals with the rest of the uniformly white studio staff. His character as a young surgeon confronted with racism revealed the hero's potential in a man who, until then, had only played the subordinate roles assigned to "people of color". With just a few carefully selected roles, Sidney Poitier, a staunch activist for the civil rights movement alongside his friend Harry Belafonte, became a star.