Pomegranate Seed

Elizabeth Sidney, Oscar-winning actress and grande dame of Hollywood, known to all her friends as Liza Jane, is eighty. She isn’t ready to go. She doubts that she ever will be, but she feels the tug as if someone is trying to hand her a rail ticket and the crowd is pushing her down the platform. So she’s making her will again, because this time she knows what she wants to say...

An assortment of family and friends assemble for the funeral in a small town an hour from Los Angeles, leading to the spontaneous combustion that only the forced gathering of movie actors, actresses, directors, old and new flames, a rock star, and post-divorce combatants can produce. What follow, in this tragicomedy, are discoveries that will leave them all changed forever.

Among those who are most affected is Liza Jane’s neice, Libby Novak, who leaves her “normal” life in the East and returns to the turbulent and ephemeral world that encompassed her youth. Alex Murray, a Pittsburg undercover cop, finds his life upended when he is summoned to California as one of Liza Jane’s heirs. Producer-director Ben Zenovich and screenwriter Mike Rosen arrive to mourn the passing of their greatest star — and closest friend. The entanglement of their lives with Liza Jane’s produces consequences they could never have forseen.

Liza Jane is revealed through reminiscence and in a series of flashbacks that are as deft and as surely grounded as the character's indomitable spirit. From the days of silent film through the “blacklisting” of the McCarthy era, and beyond, the characters are richly portrayed, the setting vibrant, and the story poignant and familiar. For Liza Jane is, after all, a passenger on our train.