One of the craziest real-life love stories ever

For Worse and for Better: Documenting an Obsession – by ALLISON HOPE WEINER/NY Times

LOS ANGELES — There are no electric cars in “Crazy Love.” No presidential candidates. No cautionary tales about eating too much fast food and no penguins. Instead this latest offering from Dan Klores, the longtime New York publicist turned documentarian, looks squarely at something many of his peers have avoided of late: simple human emotions.

Well, maybe not so simple. In an era when weighty issues and the animal kingdom have loomed large in documentaries, “Crazy Love,” which is in competition at the Sundance Film Festival, examines a contorted love affair between Burt Pugach, a 32-year-old lawyer when the liaison began in the late 1950s, and the woman he pursued, a much younger Linda Riss. (A spokesman for Magnolia Pictures said on Sunday that the company had acquired rights to distribute the film in North America.)

When the pair first met, Mr. Pugach was married, and Ms. Riss, then 21, was a single beauty living with her mother in a modest Bronx apartment. Although she initially enjoyed Mr. Pugach’s attentions, which included gifts and evenings out at New York nightclubs, she eventually tired of his hollow promises to divorce his wife.

Ms. Riss became engaged to someone else and tried to end the affair with Mr. Pugach, who reacted by stalking her; he then hired three men who threw lye in her face, leaving her blind. During 14 years in prison for the crime, he remained obsessed with Ms. Riss, sending her letters and eventually persuading her to meet him after he was released in 1974. The two were married that year, and are still married today.

But there was more. A widely publicized trial in 1997 found Mr. Pugach back in a courtroom, defending himself against charges that he had sexually abused another woman and threatened to kill her. Standing by his side this time was Linda Pugach, who not only proclaimed her husband’s innocence, but also took the stand in his defense.

A jury found him not guilty of making threats against his ex-mistress, but guilty of one count of second-degree harassment, which drew a sentence of 15 days in jail.

After prison he returned home to his wife. Hence the title.

Despite extensive news coverage of the 1997 incident, Mr. Klores said he was drawn to the subjects of “Crazy Love” by what he recalled of the original trial and of the Pugachs’ marriage. “Why did it stay with me?” Mr. Klores asked during an interview in Los Angeles. “I connect to that isolation and that anguish.”

Like his first three documentaries — “The Boys of 2nd Street Park” ; “Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story,” about the boxer; and “Viva Baseball!” — the Pugach story is told through old photographs, home movies, newspapers clippings and brutally honest interviews. His other films deal with sports, but Mr. Klores insisted that “Crazy Love” was not really a departure.

“Injustice and isolation — that’s the theme that runs through all of them,” he explained. “I’ve really gone significantly inside Burt, which perhaps helps to explain how he got to this point. I did that with the characters in ‘Boys.’ I did that with Emile Griffith in terms of his childhood — the beatings he endured, separation from his folks. So that’s what I’m interested in. Burt’s the same thing. It’s not different. He’s just a less sympathetic character.”

The isolation to which Mr. Klores refers has affected both the Pugachs. In the film friends of Linda Pugach recall the beauty of her eyes before the attack, but no one quite explains how she could marry the man responsible for it. Mr. Pugach’s friends speak about the assault as if it were committed by someone they didn’t know. In the end only the victim and the perpetrator seem to have reached any real understanding of it.

In coming to terms with the special craziness of “Crazy Love,” viewers get help from Mr. Klores’s refined sense of context. The movie uses shots of nightclubs, big Cadillacs and beautifully dressed women on the arms of tuxedoed men: hallmarks of an older New York that harbored different notions about sex and marriage.

“Dan is really good at capturing the sense of that period,” said Fisher Stevens , a co-director of the film. “You really get the feel and flavor for it back then, the glamour, the nightclubs — and then, you hear how Linda couldn’t even get the police to guard her even though he was threatening her” before the attack.

In one of the story’s more peculiar twists, Margie Powers, a policewoman assigned to guard Ms. Riss while Mr. Pugach awaited trial, played a role in Ms. Riss’s decision to marry him. On screen Ms. Powers tells Mr. Klores that she convinced the blinded woman to renew her affair with Mr. Pugach out of concern that she would end up old and alone.

“The fact that she’s forgiven him — the insanity of it all is beyond belief,” said Deborah Schindler, a producer who bought rights to Mr. Klores’s “Ring of Fire” as material for a possible dramatic feature. “It’s like watching a car wreck.”

Mr. Klores interviewed Linda Pugach for hours at a time in the couple’s dilapidated Queens apartment without her husband present. “She didn’t want him there,” Mr. Klores said. “She wanted to talk. The only thing she wouldn’t do was take off her glasses.” Getting Mr. Pugach to stay away from the interview proved difficult, however.

“I told Burt not to come back for seven hours,” Mr. Klores recalled. “And every hour, his key would be in the lock, and he’d be coming in, and I’d tell him to go away.”

With Mr. Pugach shooed out of the way, the discussion opened a view of New York that has informed each of Mr. Klores’s films: that of a city filled with ordinary people with extraordinary tales.

“My New York is a small place,” he said. “It’s not Fifth Avenue. It’s not the Thanksgiving Day Parade. It’s people in gray, and it’s working class people. It’s a different New York, and it always was. ”