Bob Golub's movie, "Dodo the Docu/Comedy," opens with a tender scene between father and son as they're fishing.

The Mayberry moment is a fantasy forcing Mr. Golub to acknowledge: "If I laid my head in my dad's lap, he'd have kneed me in the throat." Yes, his home life in Sharon, Mercer County, wasn't exactly the stuff of a 1960s sitcom goosed by a laugh track.

Describing how a poor family of 10 shared a tiny house, with five children sleeping in one room, he says in the narration: "It was like 'The Brady Bunch' if Mike Brady had been a one-eyed drunk who beat his family and all the brothers were on crack or speed or something."

"Dodo" was the nickname of the filmmaker's father, Donald E. Golub Sr., who died in 1997.

"Dodo" the movie is darkly comic, disturbing and bracingly honest about everything from funeral-home fisticuffs after their mother's death to the size of the Steelers logo on their father's headstone and how Roberto Clemente's death moved their dad to rare tears.

Mr. Golub, 52, is bringing his docu-comedy to Pittsburgh Saturday for a show at the Rex Theatre on the South Side that will include a half-hour of stand-up comedy along with the movie and a question-and-answer session afterward.

Doors open at 8 p.m., show starts at 9 p.m. Tickets are $10 in advance (call 412-381-6811) or $12 at the door.

"It's a way for people to see the film and then see some stand-up, so they'll get a feel of me and the family and what I'm trying to achieve. I did break the cycle."

Married and the father of two sons and a daughter, Mr. Golub can tell his children he loves them, and they effortlessly say it back. "I tell my kids every day I love them. The 4-year-old says, 'I know you love me.' "

A one-person show evolved into plans for a movie, first with actors and then with the actual people in Sharon. A version played during the 2006 Three Rivers Film Festival, but Golub later tweaked it, adding a segment with a brother who had been in jail.

Mr. Golub was the third of eight children, raised by a onetime boxer whose hopes were dashed by a ball field accident that blinded him in one eye. His father, unable to work in a steel mill or join the military, became a self-employed roofer who drummed up business in bars.

"My dad did the best he could. I don't justify it," he says of physical and emotional abuse that happened. "He never took a penny from anyone, he worked his ass off, he supported 10 people, he never went on welfare. ... He had too much pride."

Mr. Golub, who bills himself as "The Polish Madman" and has acted in everything from Guinness beer commercials to the movie "GoodFellas" in which he played a truck driver, is taking his combo act on the road, even as the "Dodo" DVD will be available for sale or rental Tuesday.

He also hopes to spin his experiences into an edgy, funny TV series that he would like to shoot in Sharon. The premise: "I find out my father's dying, I go back to spend time with him, he doesn't die, I'm stuck back in a place I left, with a dysfunctional family."

In the meantime, though, he has come to realize what a hospice worker once told him: "You get through it, you never get over it," and he understands his predecessors but doesn't excuse some of their behavior.

His stand-up routine will touch on a mix of topics, from religion and politics to growing up in Western Pennsylvania and West Hollywood playdates. "This is my year, all the hard work is going to come together this year. ... I'm writing better jokes than ever."

And convincing audience members to call their dads and, for the first time in their lives, tell them they love them.

April is definitely not the cruelest month for Pittsburgh native Margie Balter.

One of her songs is used in the movie "Date Night," she has a screen credit for coaching Greg Kinnear with his piano playing in "The Last Song," and she supervised some flute lessons for Al Pacino for his turn as Jack Kevorkian in an HBO movie premiering this month.

Ms. Balter's song, originally called "Bluesie" but retitled "Why Me?" for the movie, appears early in the comedy when Tina Fey and Steve Carell go to a favorite local haunt for dinner.

"It's the first song of my CD that is in a big movie like this, so for me, it's fantastic," Ms. Balter said this week from Los Angeles. She had licensed three solo piano pieces from her CD, "Music From My Heart," to a company called Crucial Music which then landed the placement.

Ms. Balter strolled the red carpet for "Last Song," starring Mr. Kinnear and Miley Cyrus as father and daughter. She had given Mr. Kinnear a crash course in piano playing in May and early June 2009.

"It's all about piano, all the big moments for her, the connection between her and the dad. She plays, he plays," said Ms. Balter, one of three piano teachers credited on the movie.

She also supervised some of the flute sessions for Mr. Pacino for HBO's upcoming "You Don't Know Jack" about the man called Doctor Death. "He has one flute-playing scene, it was beautiful," Ms. Balter said, after seeing a preview of the film in which Mr. Pacino plays part of a Bach sonata.

"It works so perfectly as a statement of what's really going on. Al is brilliant in it. I went on the set when I was in New York last summer. ... he was electrifying."

Ms. Balter, a former Squirrel Hill resident who graduated from Winchester Thurston and studied jazz with Nathan Davis at the University of Pittsburgh, will appear at a Pitt in Hollywood event next week.

She will talk about her Hollywood experiences, such as coaching Holly Hunter for "The Piano," at 3 p.m. April 23 in the Cathedral of Learning, room G-24, on the Pitt campus. It is free and open to the public.

• Grove City College graduate Jim Van Eerden will be back on campus Saturday for a showing of "The Perfect Game" and subsequent question-and-answer session. He is executive producer of the PG-rated movie, about impoverished children from Mexico who made Little League World Series history, opening in theaters.

The event in Crawford Hall Auditorium is free and open to the public. Free popcorn and soft drinks will be given out and children are encouraged to wear their favorite ball caps or jerseys.

• A screening of Chilean films from the 17th International Festival of Short Films, Santiago, at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Melwood Screening Room, 477 Melwood Ave., will benefit victims of Chile's Feb. 27 earthquake. Donation, $10, includes Chilean food and beverages. Go to www.pghfilmmakers.org for information.

• Penguin Bookshop, 420 Beaver St., Sewickley, will celebrate Earth Day with showings of "A Sense of Wonder" about pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson in the final year of her life. It will screen at 7 p.m. Tuesday, 1 p.m. Wednesday and 7 p.m. Thursday, which is Earth Day.

• A free sneak preview of "Emulation," a homegrown action thriller featuring a nine-minute car chase on the parkway, will be held at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Assembly Room of the William Pitt Union at Pitt.

Tom Getty, a 22-year-old senior at Pitt, made the 84-minute movie which he says features Pittsburgh prominently and is in the vein of "The Fugitive" and "Enemy of the State."

He writes: "It was made absent any funding and only through the efforts of friends and family. Professors and students of University of Pittsburgh also helped greatly." See http://vimeo.com/4007984 for a trailer.

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