Saintly cinema

Melissa Schorr

Thursday, Sept. 25, 1997 | 9:30 a.m.

Byron Pickett squinted in disbelief through his camera lens as Jetsumna, the 17th-century reincarnated saint, was paraded down the streets of Katmandu.

Miles down the road, monks were throwing themseves down on the ground as she sailed by on a throne and mothers held out their babies to be blessed.

All had turned out to see Jetsumna, the exaulted saint, returned to them in another form -- a holy hairdresser from Brooklyn.

As he watched the procession, Pickett knew that his own instincts had been right.

This was the story of a lifetime. Or, as the Buddhists would have it, of two lifetimes.

More than a year later, Pickett sits back in Las Vegas, and with the demeanor of someone who has had to repeat the same synopsis over and over -- and still over again -- to financiers and film producers, he quickly dispenses with his well-honed pitch.

"The film is called 'The Buddha from Brooklyn' " he explains. "It's a true story about a half-Jewish, half-Italian hairdresser from Brooklyn who got discovered as a reincarnated Buddhist saint."

Pickett, a Las Vegas film director whose oeuvre so far has been selling shampoo and salsa, has finally found himself a story born for the silver screen.

Executives at Warner Brothers agreed: "The Buddha from Brooklyn" will soon be a major motion picture starring Susan Sarandon, and, if financing comes through, also a thoughtful documentary that Pickett hopes will launch his own career to a higher level of consciousness -- the public's, that is.

Jetsumna, the only Western woman ever declared to be a "tulku," or reincarnated saint, had been approached by producers before but turned them away.

Instead, on little more than $100 and a handshake, she agreed to place her trust, her secrets and her story in the hands of this particular man.

Resume of a saint

Jetsumna was born Alyce Zeoli, the daughter of a poor family and one of nine children.

After a failed first marriage, she and her second husband moved to Poolesville, MD., where, like the stereotypical beautician, she would dispense bits of wisdom on life's little crisis to her clients.

But unlike other curl and dye experts, her pithy advice turned into homegrown weekly rap sessions in the basement, full of inspirational meditations. Soon, it had expanded into a center where followers were mounting a 24-hour peace vigil.

Little did she suspect that her own musings were about to be declared the teachings of Buddhism, naturally divined to her through her previous life.

Alyce's work helping a Tibetan acquaintance find sponsors for 20 Tibetan orphans somehow made its way back to his Holiness Penor Rinpoche in India, who runs 400 monasteries and is the highly revered head of the Nyingmapa lineage, the most conservative branch under the Dali Lama.

While visiting the United States for an interfaith conference, he visited her center and abruptly decided to stay with her for the weekend.

Not realizing that any one of his monks would give any of their non-existent worldly possessions to spend 10 minutes with him, Alyse did what any All-American hostess might do: she threw him a now-legendary barbecue, the local equivalent of entertaining the Pope by taking him to see the volcano on the Strip.

But His Holiness didn't seem to mind, inviting Alyce and her husband to India, where he finally confirmed his suspicions that she was Jetsumna, the reincarnation of the saint Ahkon Norbu Lhamo.

When the news came out in 1988, Jetsumna was promptly splashed on the cover of People magazine and was the subject of countless articles marveling at the irony of this most orthodox lama dubbing this "big-haired, red-nailed" lady a saint.

It all was a bit much for Jetsumna. While it somehow "made sense" to her, it didn't to her husband, who hadn't exactly signed on to be sleeping with a saint, and left her soon after.

Her two sons found monks hanging around the house and bowing to their mother difficult to explain to their school chums. The town wasn't quite ready to accept this "robe-wearing freak" running the PTA.

But Jetsumna was not about to become your typical saint.

While she threw herself into her works, teaching Buddism at the local prison and studying with the kempos (highly learned teachers), she also was a saint who was on the prowl, dancing on tables and going on dates, figuring she had never taken the vows her monks had. She was a saint who remarried a younger man, a musician, and did, in fact, a saintly yet human thing: adopted a third child, a daughter.

Jetsumna was a saint who also ran a business, developing a new beauty product, called Ladyworks, and hawking it on QVC, once again preaching to anyone who would listen, but this time with a different message. "No matter how busy you are," she pitches, "there's always time for beautiful hair."

Says Pickett: "As a filmmaker, its an incredibly interesting topic. "Why should it be the saint or the whore? Why can't you raise your kids and be a spiritual leader and run a business and do it all? But it disturbs people.

"People keep asking me, 'What do you think, is she real or is she a fake?' I don't know," he admits. "It seems there are so many miraculous things that have happened, and you really get this magical feeling just being around her, and then other times, you're thinking, man is she something. This is a Brooklyn broad who's working it pretty good. She has all these people bowing -- literally -- and tripping over her."

Evolution of a film

Pickett met Jetsumna when one of her followers who had admired some of his TV documentary work called him with a request: Would he be interested in accompanying them on a pilgrimage to India and filming a promotional video for her center?

Pickett, who had traveled around the world to film in Africa and Germany, figured -- why not? He flew east to meet with her, but by the fourth day, he realized that he was sitting on top of an incredible story-in-the-making.

Instead of filming her for a promotional video, he told her he would pay for his own way and raise the money on his own if he could make the film for himself, with his own artistic control and rights to her story.

She agreed, and in a month he had enough of the initial funding to hop on the plane to India -- barely. "It was a real act of faith," he says. "I was calling people from India saying, 'You have to put the money in the account, wire it to me today!' " he recalls. "Raising the first dollar is the hardest. The fact that it happened at all is a miracle in a way."

With his footage, Pickett put together a half-hour version of the documentary for last month's Sundance's Film Institute's "No Borders" screening, a New York film festival still looking for completion money.

Pickett needs another $300,000 to finish the film on his own terms, before having to partner with other producers eager to join the bandwagon for a share of the rights. From the festival, he met with a litany of distributors who have written to him expressing interest when he is finished, which he expects to be by the fall of '98.

Saintly questions

The story, he realized, went much beyond the standard Hollywood comedic fare of "How would you adjust if you were suddenly declared a saint" route. Instead, his documentary asks deeper questions about about the actual meaning of being a saint:

Can someone who is a "normal" person be part of the sacred? And if there is sanctity in this woman from Brooklyn, what does that say about the rest of us? More cynically, how can the leader of a religion that teaches non-materialism and selflessness drive a flashy convertible and stay in world-class resorts?

"She looks like Melanie Griffith in the beginning of 'Working Girl,' " Pickett says with a laugh. "She's very concerned about her appearance, which the Tibetans aren't at all -- that's the reason you shave your head and everyone wears a robe."

But even though the documentary puts Jetsumna under somewhat critical scrutiny -- showing her putting on mascara and wiggling her polished nails at the camera -- she somehow still emerges as a likeable character.

"Why do I have to become something that's phony to me, just to honor my spirituality?" she wonders in the film. "That's who I am."

Meanwhile, the Tibetans have oddly encouraged her to go with her instincts, figuring there must have been some cosmic reason for a saint to have been reincarnated as a Western woman with a taste for Motown and romance novels.

"Most Buddhists are people who listen to Allan Ginsberg, who you need a Ph.D. just to understand the vocabulary that they're using," says Pickett. "With Jetsumna, her teachings are incredible, but she still uses that vocabulary from Brooklyn. Most of her followers are really blue collar."

As she says in the documentary: "It's not difficult for me to have one foot in both cultures. Although when I'm with the Tibetans, I'm at home with them, I long to go back and sit on the stoop with those old ladies with the big gold earrings."

Hollywood beckons

Because Jetsumna had given Pickett and his company, Meridian Films, the five-year exclusive screen rights to her life story, he was able to get an agent at the powerful CAA firm for the film project and shop it to various producers.

"One said, 'We really see it as the 'Sister Act' of Buddhism, with Fran Drescher in a lama suit,' " he moans. "It will be comedy, to relieve the spiritual depth from getting too heavy and preachy. But she trusts me that I'm going to fight for her, and not make it into a joke."

Finally, Pickett approached Denise De Novi, who produced "Batman" and "Little Women." She agreed to produce the film with an appropriate tone for Warner Brothers, coinciding with a slew of Buddhist-themed movies, from Brad Pitt's "Seven Years in Tibet" to Martin Scorsese's "Kundun," making it "the year of Tibet," shrugs Pickett.

While Pickett hopes the documentary will pave his way into future Hollywood directing jobs, the cruel truth is that he will be executive producer, but not director of his own film, having to defer to A-list director Ben Stiller of "Reality Bites."

He claims that this is understandable. "I'll get out of their way, because that's what I'd expect them to do for me. Besides, when this documentary comes out, and I go with an offer from, say, Miramax, it will be a lot easier for me the next time. If you've directed a film for Miramax, people will take your calls.

"And being executive producer will help a lot, so knock on wood, after this year, I'll actually have a career in Hollywood," he says. "I have one now -- but I keep having to remind people."

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