The fundraiser? An online auction, the third such event hosted by the Fordham College Alumni Association (FCAA), with a novel twist this year: celebrity alumni. Several offered virtual face time to the highest bidder, helping to propel the event far beyond its usual total.

The auction “gets bigger and better every year,” with all proceeds going toward scholarships and grants for students, said Debra Caruso Marrone, FCRH ’81, the association’s president.

It’s one of several events sponsored by the FCAA each year, complementing the broader efforts of the Fordham University Alumni Association, the Office of Alumni Relations, and other groups that serve students and the alumni community.

Founded in 1905, the FCAA is the University’s oldest alumni organization, and primarily serves Fordham College at Rose Hill students and alumni.

Contacting Celebrity Alumni

The idea of featuring celebrity alumni in December’s auction was driven in part by the pandemic, which put the kibosh on, say, auctioning off event tickets. “We really had to pivot,” said Christa Treitmeier-Meditz, FCRH ’85, who spearheaded the effort to reach out to various prominent alumni.

In the end, they were able to auction off a virtual comedy writing lesson with Saturday Night Live writer Streeter Seidell, FCRH ’05 (someone bought that for his wife, an aspiring comedy writer, Treitmeier-Meditz said). They also got help from some prominent alumni thespians: Golden Globe winner Dylan McDermott, FCLC ’83, contributed a virtual meet, and Golden Globe winner and former Oscar nominee Patricia Clarkson, FCLC ’82, contributed a virtual master class and a post-pandemic in-person engagement—dinner out and tickets to the next Broadway show she appears in.

People also contributed various items, memorabilia, or experiences, such as a master cooking class or a trip around Manhattan by yacht. “It’s everything and anything,” Treitmeier-Meditz said. “The Fordham alumni community is very generous.”

Other planned events were canceled due to the pandemic lockdown last year: a sit-down for a dozen alumni with John Brennan, FCRH ’77, former CIA director and counterterrorism adviser to President Barack Obama, and an event with sportscasters Michael Kay, FCRH ’82, and Mike Breen, FCRH ’83.

Through such events, the association has raised money for various funds, including a summer internship fund for journalism majors, recently renamed for Jim Dwyer, FCRH ’79, the New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner who died in 2020. A new scholarship fund named for Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, is for students who reach new heights of academic achievement after arriving at the University.

The association provides other important support such as funding for undergraduate research and for student travel, noted Maura Mast, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill. “I’m so pleased to see how that support has grown over the past several years,” she said. “I am grateful for their commitment to the college, to our alumni, and to the larger Fordham family.”

The association’s Giving Day gift—a matching gift—was split between two scholarship funds: the FCAA Endowed Legacy Scholarship, a need-based scholarship for legacy students, and the Rev. George J. McMahon, S.J., Endowed Scholarship, awarded to students at Fordham College at Rose Hill and the Gabelli School of Business.

Serving on the board is a labor of love, Caruso Marrone said. “We’re doing something good: we’re raising funds, we’re helping students go through school,” in addition to bringing alumni together at events, she said. “The members of our board [are] of various age groups, various backgrounds, various careers, [and] we all come together and do this work and enjoy it immensely. We have just a great group of people who are dedicated to Fordham.”

And then people saw the movie he co-produced in Miami. Released last fall, it was acclaimed as one of the year’s best films, breathtaking and groundbreaking, “a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces,” according to The New York Times. It won dozens of awards, including the Golden Globe for best drama, and it’s in the running for eight Oscars—including best picture and best director—at the 89th Academy Awards on Feb. 26, which Hevia plans to attend.

The movie is Moonlight, a drama about the tribulations of a young black man growing up in a struggling Miami neighborhood known locally as Liberty City, where the movie’s Oscar-nominated director, Barry Jenkins, grew up. Hevia, who earned a master’s degree in media entrepreneurship at the Gabelli School of Business, spoke to FORDHAM magazine from his home in Los Angeles about the importance of making movies like Moonlight that show a locale’s true character.

How did you become involved in the making of Moonlight?
Barry Jenkins and I both went to Florida State film school for undergrad, and one of my best friends was co-producer on Medicine for Melancholy, Barry’s first feature, which he shot in San Francisco in 2007 while I was living there. I loved the idea that they were filmmakers from my program who were actually making films from the ground up, outside the studio system. When it became clear to me that Barry had made a movie about San Francisco that people later talked about as the definitive San Francisco film, because of the look and feel of it, it bothered me on a level that is not rational that Barry wasn’t making that movie in Miami about Miami. I made it my goal to get Barry back to Miami to make a movie.

Then, in 2010 or 2011, Tarell Alvin McCraney gave me a copy of his unfinished play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue—the story that eventually became Moonlight. I introduced him to Barry, gave Barry a copy of the play, and told him, “This might be the thing you make in Miami.” Time passed, Barry digested it, then the veteran producer Adele Romanski got wind of it, and she and Barry got Plan B, Brad Pitt’s production company, and the distributor A24 involved. They told me, “You’re the Miami guy. You should come on as co-producer.” I went to Miami after graduating from Fordham to start laying the groundwork.

Why did you feel so strongly about having Barry Jenkins make a movie in Miami?
When people think about Miami, they think about media produced by people from outside Miami, which often misses everything about the city that makes it such a strange and unique and wonderful place. An organization I co-founded in Miami 10 years ago, the Borscht Film Festival, is devoted to telling Miami stories—ideally, stories that go deeper than the South Beach or Miami Vice portrayal. One of the great things about new media is that more diverse voices can speak up for themselves, and communities can speak for themselves, so the goal of Borscht was to build that for Miami, a city of diverse voices. Again, one of my goals was always to get Barry back, and I did—in 2011, we produced a short film called Chlorophyll, in which Barry explored Miami with new eyes after growing up there and then finding his “voice” as a filmmaker in San Francisco.

What do you think Moonlight does for perceptions of Miami, particularly the Liberty City neighborhood?
I think this movie shows a part of Miami that is overlooked in mainstream media and the dominant consciousness. We had this happen a lot on the film—we would talk about Liberty City with people and they’d say, “Oh, you mean like The First 48,” a reality show that portrayed murder investigations in Liberty City and other Miami neighborhoods. If that’s the only story coming out of the neighborhood, that’s the public perception of the neighborhood. One of our goals was to make a film that showed a different side of Liberty City and showed what it was like to actually live there.

Naomie Harris has talked about being reluctant to play the mother of the main character, because so often, images of black women as crack addicts tend to be stereotyped characterizations of bad mothers. And one of the reasons she’s nominated for best supporting actress for it is that she fully rounded out that person and made it a real characterization of a woman who loves her child but is also struggling with this other problem. So you have the complicated messiness of actual life, not a simple, stereotyped version of bad people doing bad things.

What did you do as co-producer?
As a co-producer, my job description was basically “help Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski get the movie made.” During early pre-production, I was local to Miami, so I did a lot of the ground-level things like finding community partners and setting up casting events a few months before the rest of team arrived. During production my job description was a lot more flexible. On any movie, especially a small one, there are so many things you can’t control that you always need someone to help deal with the unexpected. That was me. I was a fireman, and my job was to solve problems and find solutions. It was a fantastic job and it was a privilege to work with this team. 

After Hong Kong, I went to Ecuador for two months to do another film, a family drama that takes place in Quito, under the cloud of an erupting volcano. I really like the specificity of place; it helps tremendously when stories make the effort to be authentic and grounded in actual places. It makes stories specific and personal.

Why do you think Moonlight has been so well-received?
Partly because it takes things you think you know and it pushes deeper. It tells a hidden story sincerely and with real feeling. It’s been amazing—I was at the International Film Festival Rotterdam recently, and I was talking to a blond Dutch girl who was telling me that she and her friend watched it and what they thought about it, and I’m thinking, this is so far from the demographic I had ever thought would see this movie, let alone have strong opinions of it, let alone talk about it like it was a necessary, urgent thing for her to have seen.

And that was a wonderful experience. I crossed an ocean, and they’re talking about this movie that takes place in this little neighborhood that has been marginalized and ignored by the dominant conversation for decades. When the international press describes it as a movie about the Miami you never see, to me, that’s mission accomplished.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Chris Gosier.

Watch the official trailer for Moonlight:

Washington, a two-time Oscar winner, was nominated for best actor. Viola Davis, who plays Rose, was nominated for best supporting actress. And the late August Wilson, who adapted his 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning play for the screen, is nominated for best adapted screenplay.

If Washington wins his third Oscar on Feb. 26, he’ll join a select group of actors—so far, nine—who have won a best actor Tony and a best actor Oscar for playing the same role. He originally played Troy Maxson on Broadway in a 2010 revival of Fences. Producer Scott Rudin had approached him about creating a film version of the story, but Washington demurred, saying he wanted to bring the play to the stage first.

After Fences became an award-winning success on Broadway, taking home three Tonys, Rudin followed up with him again about bringing it to the screen, Washington said in an interview with Good Morning America producer and livestream host Will Ganss, FCRH ’14.

“I ran for another four years until he cornered me,” Washington joked, “or until I felt comfortable enough to give it a shot.”

Washington called Wilson a “brilliant, brilliant writer” in the interview with Ganss. “It’s a gift to be able to interpret his material, to bring it to film.” And he said he’s seen some strong emotional reactions to the story. “You just don’t know how it’s going to affect people or where it touches them.”

One of Washington’s co-stars in the film is Stephen McKinley Henderson, who taught at Fordham last fall as the University’s Denzel Washington Chair in Theatre—an endowed position Washington created with a gift to his alma mater. While Fences was written in 1987 and is set in the 1950s, its story is timeless, Henderson said last year in a Fordham News interview.

“It was clear [Wilson] saw the beauty in people, and he wanted to make sure the rest of the world saw what he saw,” Henderson said. “It’s a classic, and a classic is something that is never finished saying what it has to say.”

One morning decades ago, James B. Donovan and his daughter were sharing a cab on the way into Manhattan, where she attended high school, when she noticed him rubbing his hands together.

“I said, ‘Dad, what’s going on? Is this something big?’” said Donovan’s daughter, Jan Donovan Amorosi. “He said, ‘Yes, but I can’t talk about it.’”

That vignette emerged at a Feb. 9 Fordham event that showed what it was like to grow up with a father whose pursuit of duty and high principle took him deep into the world of closely guarded Cold War secrets.

Donovan was apparently good at keeping them: “That was literally the only hint I ever had that something … very big was coming up,” said Amorosi.

She spoke as part of a panel discussion and screening of Bridge of Spies, the Oscar-nominated Steven Spielberg film starring Tom Hanks as Donovan, who was a 1937 Fordham graduate.

Donovan was a nationally prominent insurance lawyer who faced heated criticism—including threats and charges of being a “commie lover”—when he agreed to represent accused Russian spy Rudolf Ivanovich Abel. He successfully argued against the death penalty for Abel and, later, traveled to East Berlin to negotiate the swap of Abel for Americans being held in the Soviet Bloc—after telling his wife he’d be visiting friends in Scotland.

By putting Abel’s due process rights above both his own and the country’s anticommunist sentiment, Donovan showed that he “truly was a man of principles,” said Jim Jennewein, Hollywood screenwriter and artist in residence at Fordham, one of the panelists.

“That’s one of the reasons why … his story is so interesting,” Jennewein said. “He is as bound by his principles as he is by his patriotism, so he’s in constant conflict between these two poles.”

Also on the panel were Donovan’s son, John Donovan; his granddaughter, Beth Amorosi; and Fordham history professor Christopher Dietrich, PhD.

There were lighter moments, as when John Donovan described an exchange between his parents about all the time his father was spending on his work. “My father said to her, ‘If you are accused of a capital crime, I will reverse the division of my time,’ and then she said, ‘You’ll find that difficult if you’re the victim of a capital crime,’” Donovan said, to laughter.

There’s a strong Fordham connection in the Donovan family, John Donovan said, noting that his great-uncle attended Fordham Law School and his great-grandfather was an adjunct at the medical school Fordham operated early in the 20^th century. And on his mother’s side of the family is Archbishop John Hughes, the founder of Fordham, he said.

Donovan was “profoundly influenced by his Jesuit education,” John Donovan said. Beth Amorosi said the movie very effectively portrays her grandfather’s “humanitarian instincts in approaching very complex and quite difficult situations and quite difficult people with competing ideologies.”

After negotiating the spy swap, Donovan met several times with Fidel Castro to secure the release of Cubans captured in the United States’ failed Bay of Pigs invasion. And his career of service began with another seminal event, the Nuremberg trials, where he served as an assistant prosecutor and played a key role in assembling film footage of Nazi atrocities.

“If we hadn’t had those films, the question arises: Would our memory have faded much sooner of the horrors of World War II?” Jennewein asked. “That is part of Jim Donovan’s legacy.”

Donovan, FCRH ’37, was a New York lawyer who successfully argued against the death penalty for a convicted Soviet spy and later negotiated the swap of that spy for Americans being held behind the Iron Curtain. The event will begin with a panel discussion about Donovan, followed by a screening of Bridge of Spies, the Oscar-nominated movie about Donovan directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks.

Sitting on the panel will be John Donovan and Beth Amorosi, who are Donovan’s son and granddaughter, respectively, and Jim Jennewein, Hollywood screenwriter and artist in residence at Fordham. Christopher Dietrich, history professor at Fordham, will moderate.

Register here for the event, at 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 9 in the Costantino Room at Fordham Law School.

Donovan’s story is notable for his decision to stand up for the due process rights of an accused Soviet spy—Rudolf Ivanovich Abel—at a time of fervent anticommunism in the United States, Dietrich said.

“The ability to act morally in a period where the ideological debate was so heated, and clouded so many different people’s decisions is why we’re still thinking about that story today,” he said. While Donovan makes decisions that run against the country’s anticommunist fervor, “in the end he has a clear conscience, and he knows he’s stood up for a value that’s greater: the right to an attorney and the right to a fair trial,” Dietrich said.

Dietrich also noted how Donovan’s arguments against the death penalty included both principle and the practical consideration of possibly using Abel in a prisoner swap with the Soviets at some later date. When that scenario came to pass, “people in positions of power, including President Eisenhower, [were]very grateful that he was willing to take a stand,” Dietrich said.

“What for [Donovan] was a moral stand actually ends up being a good strategic decision, and that relation between strategy and principles is what this story is really about,” Dietrich said.

Studying this and other Cold War episodes shows how ideology and geopolitics work together to shape our lives, he said. “It is important to understand the kinds of questions that these historical figures dealt with and how they dealt with them in a way that, in this case, quite frankly is marked for its strong sense of morals and clear analysis,” he said.