The David Whiting Story

Winner, LA Film Critics Douglas Edwards Experimental/Independent Film Award

Winner, DC Independent Film Festival, Best Experimental Film Award

The David Whiting Story
Directed by Walter Reuben, Produced by Walter Reuben and Andrew K. Sachs

A surreal black comedy which combines actual documentary interviews; staged portrayals of larger-than-life figures Ayn Rand, Mike Wallace, Cesar Romero, Lee J. Cobb and others; telephone interviews and aged newspaper clippings; and the proverbial Google search – all in an effort to solve several lifelong mysteries: who was David Whiting, who died mysteriously in an Arizona motel during a Hollywood film shoot, and what was the mythic so-called “Cesar Romero joke” – which all of the film-maker’s classmates still remember as being utterly hilarious but which nobody can recall what the joke actually was?

How did David Whiting die? What led to a tragic phone call in which a father and mother wished their son dead? And why did a friendship with a legendary film critic inexplicably end so horribly?

Starring Zach Luna, Ashley Morey, Woolsey Ackerman, Jerry Kutner

Cinematography by Andrew K. Sachs

Edited by Francois Maurin

Music by Dan Ring

Full Credits on IMDB

Review in The Austin Chronicle

The David Whiting Story, or The Cesar Romero Joke is ambitious and assured. . . . Watching his earlier films, it is so obvious from where this one comes. Whether you like it or not, it strikes one as the work of a mature filmmaker at the top of their form, not a re-engaged cineaste. The production values are striking.

There is a terrible assault and equally horrific celebration of textuality and narrative, reminiscent of Jacques Rivette. Reuben wants to bore you and engage you so irritatingly that you are forced to think about how narratives work and how movies make meaning. Not that this film is stylistically similar to Rivette, but it shares the same level of sophistication, playfulness, and accomplishment.


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