“Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions … Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the ‘new, wonderful good society’ which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean ‘more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.’”

n Roman statesman Marcus

Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

It was in the lobby of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

Gerald R. "Jerry" Molen was visiting with Branko Lustig and other reception guests linked through the monumental 1993 Steven Spielberg film, "Schindler's List."

Molen, a native Montanan and full-time Bigfork resident today, and Lustig had co-produced the film chronicling German businessman Oskar Schindler's impassioned efforts to save Jews from Nazi gas chambers.

Lustig, a native-born Croatian, had survived two years as a boy in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen death camps.

Across the room, Molen noticed, an elderly gentleman had watched their conversation intently for some time. Molen wasn't sure what to expect when the man hoisted himself out of his chair and, leaning heavily on his cane, made his way across the room toward him.

"You're an American?" the man asked. Molen confirmed he was. The question was repeated with Lustig.

"I'm one of the only survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto," came the man's admonition. Nazis were able to kill the Warsaw Jews, he told them, "because they took all our guns. Don't you ever let them take away your guns."

It was a moment frozen in time after an emotionally charged film project for Molen.

Long a staunch advocate for the freedoms found uniquely in America, it confirmed what he had long believed: A free people must continually fight for their freedoms.

Now he's fighting for his four grandchildren and for his four - soon to be five - great-grandchildren. He attended one of the local Tea Party protests. He spoke at a rally to support traditional American values. He lets lawmakers know his opinions.

"I want my grandchildren to have the opportunities I had," he said, the opportunity to work hard and be rewarded for the effort - and to avoid growing up in a welfare state.

"Once people get a taste of something for nothing," initiative quickly drains away, he said. "I want people to have the opportunity to excel."

Molen, 74, was born east of the Rockies to parents who put their 80 acres to wheat and sugar beats. When the government rescinded their homestead deed as part of a consolidation that carved out economically viable 120-acre farms, the family moved off the farm and his dad hired on at the Black Eagle smelter at Great Falls.

Later, his California-based sister coaxed them southward. They landed in North Hollywood where his mother opened The Blue Onion cafe just outside the gate of one of the major movie studios.

"As a 12-year-old boy, every day I was seeing all the same people I would see on the screen," movie stars stopping in for a meal at the cafe, he said. "But for me as a kid the exciting thing was the studio itself."

There he and his brother hunkered down behind straw bales and covered wagons, where studio guards managed to hide the boys for a back-stage view of shooting.

"There was a feeling I got on the sound stage," Molen recalled. "The big arc lights, they used carbon in them. They had a smell. There was a certain ambiance."

He was hooked. When a high school friend introduced him to the cinematic arts of makeup and camera work, he knew what he'd eventually do for a living.

After graduation and three years in the U.S. Marine Corps, he found a job manufacturing generators before hiring on as a driver for Republic Studio. That parlayed itself into a shop mechanic's job, then Molen found himself at Universal Studio in 1959 and its head of transportation by 1967.

His life as a transportation coordinator in the motion picture industry put him in the front seat of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 thriller "Psycho." With Hitchcock himself calling the shots from the back seat, it was Molen who drove Marion Crane's car up the hill to the Bates Motel.

He joined the Directors Guild of America in 1979 and, over his career, collected credits in a score of major films as production manager, associate producer, executive producer, co-producer and producer.

He was coaxed to the other side of the camera for a few scenes during shooting, doing cameos as Dr. Bruner in "Rain Man" and a doctor tending to a sick triceratops in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park."

The name "Molen" was inscribed in a cauldron in Spielberg's "Hook."

He first crossed paths with Spielberg in 1985 on the set of "The Color Purple," and eventually took over as head of production for Amblin Entertainment, working on several of Spielberg's projects.

Standing head and shoulders above them all, for Molen, was "Schindler's List."

They had started preparations on "Jurassic Park" in January 1992, for filming in August. But Spielberg wanted to catch winter scenes for his next project, so after wrapping up in December the company headed straight to Poland. Filming in Krakow began in March, the Jerusalem graveside scene was shot in May, and "Schindler's List" was released to critical acclaim that Christmas.

"That was the most emotional movie I ever worked on," said Molen, an Academy Award-winning producer for the film. "Not a day didn't bring emotion to the crew … It was the most powerful movie experience I ever had."

As for Spielberg himself, "the greatest compliment I can give him is he's a storyteller, with a capital S."

"Schindler" captured 15 industry awards, chief among them the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1993.

"We got totally unexpected accolades for the movie afterward," he said. "We had just been making a black-and-white film about a guy who made a difference."

A Survivors of the Shoah Foundation project followed, documenting the stories of 50,000 Holocaust survivors.

As he filmed the project, Molen watched as one survivor after another was linked with family members they thought had died 50 years earlier - a woman in Ukraine was reunited with her twin sister just 11 miles away; Lustig, Molen's fellow producer on "Schindler's List," learned his mother, too, had lived.

The experience shook Molen's world.

So did a Northridge, Calif., earthquake in the late 1990s. From New York, Molen got the morning news of the quake centered in the very town where he and his wife, Pat, lived. Unable to reach family by phone, he flew home by 3 p.m. and, walking up his front walk heard a strange scraping sound from inside. He opened the door to find Pat with a shovel in her hand, scooping away the broken glass of a quarter-million dollars in damage.

"It gave us a little different perspective on 'stuff,'" Molen said. They escaped the high life of Hollywood and eventually landed back in the Flathead in their long-held home at Ferndale. They moved to Woods Bay and now are settled full-time in Eagle Bend outside Bigfork.

He commutes as necessary to work on movie projects. He most recently finished producing Spielberg's "Minority Report" and now is working on "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever," a projected Christmas 2010 release through White Light Media Group, a company he formed with a friend to promote family movies.

He treasures the family he and Pat have built over their 55 years of marriage. Their son and daughter each raised two children and now grandchildren and great-grandchildren are part of daily life in the Molen household.

"I've always been a very strong advocate of the American way," Molen said. He saw a stark contrast with that way when filming in Poland, and it galvanized his deep-rooted patriotism.

"It's still the greatest country," he said of the United States. "I don't care what anybody says, it's still the greatest country."

He takes exception to trends he sees in the United States now - President Obama's "apology tour" through Europe soon after his inauguration, people who learn how to "game the system" of welfare instead of clinging to the American work ethic.

"We have problems here, but we're working on them," he said, and health care is a prime example.

"I do not want to see the government take it over. It hasn't worked in any country … But we do need to fix the system."

And, he said, the education system needs fixing, common manners need polishing, discipline needs a renewed emphasis.

"We have become a ruder society," he said. "I think we need to come back to the basics."

Politically, he's concerned about many developments in the nation. He wants to see the rank-and-file citizen ask the hard questions, and persist until answers surface and fundamental change is made. Personally, he's pressing Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., as to whether he will become a part of a health care system he crafts and remove himself from the realm of privileged health care enjoyed by members of Congress.

"Ask the question, 'why,'" he encouraged.

"There are no simple answers to many questions in our country. That is what we should be dedicating ourselves to. Not ideology."

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com