The first time I talked to Ron Silver was in January of 2005. Executive Producer Dave Bossie had brought me in to produce, write and direct a feature-length documentary on the United Nations as it neared its 60th anniversary. Ron would be the narrator, but as I soon found out he would be much more. As everyone knew Ron was passionate and held strong opinions, and he wanted to hold the UN to the fire over many human rights issues and especially over their treatment of Israel. We decided to call the film “Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60.”
Over the phone from his New York apartment, Ron rallied me to the cause. He told me that as a kid, as a native New Yorker, how proud he was of the United Nations. He loved all the flags out in front, and reminded me that this was the world’s institution for peace when it was created out of the ashes of World War II. We both fondly remembered the work that Audrey Hepburn and Danny Kaye did for UNICEF. And we both knew that that UN no longer existed.
Ron would send me books and articles and late night emails. We finally met at the iconic UN headquarters on First Avenue and 46th Street in May. We had obtained a rare invitation to film inside the UN, and guess what? Ron charmed everyone, while pointing out oh-so-diplomatically the institution’s many failings – in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in the Congo, and, in Israel. They never knew what hit them.
We filmed through the summer of 2005. I went to Israel to film the security fence and interview Natan Sharansky about the UN partition that helped create Israel. Ron later went to the memorial for the dead at Potocari, near Srebrenica in Bosnia, where UN peacekeepers sent over 8,000 men and boys out of the ‘UN safe zone’ to their eventual death at the hands of Serbian forces.
Ron would call me often and talk about my script. One night we had dinner at this favorite Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. There were martinis, lots of them, and wine with dinner. The next morning I dragged myself to his apartment on Park Avenue and there he was, making coffee, and bursting with ideas and energy and outrage over some particular UN scandal that I absolutely had to include in the script.
He kept it up right into the voice-over booth, long after the film, and script, had been locked. He wanted to make sure we’d given it our all – that this documentary was fair, and yet brutally honest.
That’s the Ron Silver I remember. He never quit.
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