tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69560702024-03-07T13:04:53.737-05:00Something Old, Nothing New<b>Thoughts on Popular Culture and Unpopular Culture <br>by Jaime J. Weinman (<a href="mailto:weinmanj@gmail.com">email me</a>)</b>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.comBlogger2203125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-61333639960500262942012-08-26T21:18:00.000-04:002012-08-28T09:11:33.524-04:00He who blogs and runs away<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:View>Normal</w:View>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves/>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:DoNotPromoteQF/>
<w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther>
<w:LidThemeAsian>KO</w:LidThemeAsian>
<w:LidThemeComplexScript>AR-SA</w:LidThemeComplexScript>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:SnapToGridInCell/>
<w:WrapTextWithPunct/>
<w:UseAsianBreakRules/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/>
<w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/>
<w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/>
<w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/>
<w:Word11KerningPairs/>
<w:CachedColBalance/>
<w:UseFELayout/>
</w:Compatibility>
<w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel>
<m:mathPr>
<m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/>
<m:brkBin m:val="before"/>
<m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/>
<m:smallFrac m:val="off"/>
<m:dispDef/>
<m:lMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:rMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/>
<m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/>
<m:intLim m:val="subSup"/>
<m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/>
</m:mathPr></w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
DefSemiHidden="true" DefQFormat="false" DefPriority="99"
LatentStyleCount="267">
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="0" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Normal"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="heading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="35" QFormat="true" Name="caption"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="59" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0in;
mso-para-margin-right:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0in;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span class="line-no"></span><i><span class="line-text" id="poemline-128">He settled </span></i><span class="line-text" id="poemline-128">Hoti</span><i><span class="line-text" id="poemline-128">'s business--let it be!--</span></i><br />
<div class="poemline">
<i><span class="line-no"></span><span class="line-text" id="poemline-129"> Properly based </span></i><span class="line-text" id="poemline-129">Oun</span><i><span class="line-text" id="poemline-129">--</span></i>
<br />
<div class="poemline">
<i><span class="line-no"></span><span class="line-text" id="poemline-130">Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic </span></i><span class="line-text" id="poemline-130">De</span><i><span class="line-text" id="poemline-130">,</span></i>
<br />
<div class="poemline">
<i><span class="line-no"> </span><span class="line-text" id="poemline-131"> Dead from the waist down.</span></i></div>
<br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">A few years back, there was a blog I read every day. Then I noticed that
the author of the blog was posting infrequently after years of posting almost
every day. Then he wasn't posting at all, and some random blog entry was at the
head of the page every time I clicked on it. And then the blog was gone, shut
down, and I wondered why he stopped writing it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">So, having followed that same pattern myself -- less frequent posting
followed by hardly any posting at all -- I should do what I wished that other
guy had done, and write a post explaining why I'm no longer blogging here (though the archives will hopefully remain up as long as Blogger does).
Except I'm not sure I can explain it, and to the extent I can explain it, it's
not all that interesting. It comes down to the reason most people stop
blogging: they use up the ideas they're aching to write about, and then
blogging becomes work. A personal blog is not work, and once you can't generate
ideas for it, you have to ask yourself if you should keep trying, or find
something else to do in your spare time. I think I should try to do the latter,
partly because I think I might be able to write better that way.</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> </span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">(I should strongly emphasize that this post is
<i>only</i> about this blog, <i>Something Old, Nothing New</i>. This has nothing to do with professional work, only personal after-hours blogging.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Looking back on my work at this blog, I don't think I used up all my
ideas right off the bat, although many of the posts I still find valuable are
the early ones, where I was talking about things I'd thought of but hadn't
heard mentioned much, in print or online. (<a href="http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.ca/2004/10/bad-sitcoms-with-good-writing.html">"Bad sitcoms with good writing,"</a>
where I awkwardly tried to argue for a different definition of a well-written
TV show, is one.) The most valuable
thing about blogging is that it allows you to find pieces written from narrow
but highly-focused expertise: I would never be able to write a book on
<i>all</i> of movie history or comics history or theatre history,
but I was able to write a bit about the things that a book would have to skip
over in a couple of paragraphs.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Everyone has their own idea of where a blog goes right and wrong, and my
own opinions on this blog's strengths and weaknesses aren't necessarily the
correct ones. However, I think the blog was strongest when most enthusiastic,
worse when trying to evaluate something from a sense of duty, and worst when
being negative. It's not that negativism is always bad. Some of my favorite
writers are at their best showing you what's bad and what could have been
better. But maybe because this is a fan blog, created mostly to talk about the
things that excited me, I sometimes sounded ridiculous and petty when trying to
do negative criticism. My "things that suck" series of posts is
embarrassing; half the time I'd be beating up on something for flaws that don't
even matter, and the other half I'd be bashing something that clearly does not
deserve it. For example, I don't care for Harvey comics, but comics that
employed Ernie Colón and Warren Kremer don't "suck," and I understand
that now.</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> The worst thing about online criticism is that it's helped revive a
certain kind of snarky, superior judgment that was once more common in print;
it's a tone that suggests that the work in question is so obviously beneath the
critic that he doesn't even owe it the courtesy of taking an interest in what
it's doing. I'm better at discussing <i>everything</i> as if it's
interesting, even the bad stuff. At least the "Why I Hate Family Guy" post, which is probably the most-read post I ever wrote, was passionate rather than snarky. I don't even hate that show any more (I don't like it, but I don't hate it) but at least the tone of the post is not dismissive. I no longer care for dismissiveness.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">The thing I liked best about this blog was that I was sometimes able to
analyze something in a way that made sense - if that makes sense. Maybe because
I was turned down for the PH.D program in English, I tended to avoid an
academic style in my writing. (I think I went to the opposite extreme and used
language that was too simplistic; I sometimes feel like my first inclination is
to write like the captions in a corporate children's picture book). I think it
doesn't matter if something was intended by an artist, as long as it's there.
But I don't enjoy reading something that doesn't take any of the circumstances
behind the work into account, or reads things in that aren't consistent with
the shape or form of the work. The question I try to ask myself is: if a work
has a certain effect on me, why does it have that effect? Where does it come
from? What am I responding to and how can I explain that? Sometimes I can
explain it, sometimes I can't, but I think at least some of what I've said can
be justified by the works themselves, and I'm glad about that.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">On the other hand, I wished I could have found a more dynamic writing
style for this blog. Right from the beginning I worried that the format would
make it seem too much like a lecture. I decided I couldn't really help it, so I
chose to keep going, pick the things I wanted to write about, and then say what
I had been thinking about them. Because of the mix of fact and opinion - the facts
I had read about various subjects (and I read a lot about some of them)
combined with my own opinions - it could sometimes seem like I was speaking
from authority when I really wasn't. I know a few readers felt I was too
inclined to sound like everything was the definitive history of everything,
when it wasn't. In some cases, that helped: to write anything that hasn't
already been written about some of these things, you have to be willing to
extrapolate. Someone once told me that a post I did was very accurate about
what went on in the room when that project was being developed; I never would
have gotten that close to the truth if I hadn't been willing to do some
educated guessing. (If there are interviews with the people involved, you have
to do even <i>more</i> guessing to reconcile them and figure out
what was going on.) But educated guessing is still guessing. If I had had a
more poetic or fanciful writing style, that would have been more appropriate
for some of the posts. I could never quite shake off that tone of being the guy
who tells everything he's ever read or thought on a particular topic. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Well, that's just the kind of person I am, and after all, that's what a
personal blog is - a reflection of who you are. I'm not, as this blog probably
makes clear, very good at writing about my own personal feelings, but your
personality emerges even if you never give a single detail from your own life.
This blog seems like the work of someone who's prone to getting excited about,
and doing lots of research on, things that are relatively minor, while
sometimes losing sight of the bigger picture of life and art. My favorite poem
is Robert Browning's <a href="http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/grammarians-funeral">"A Grammarian's Funeral,"</a> about a man who spent his entire life researching a
few trivialities of Latin grammar. The poem can be read as a warning -- don't
waste your life on such things; don't say you'll live it up when you've
finished your work, because you might die before you finish. But it can also be
read as praise for the people who look at these trivialities, since it's
implied that without people like the anonymous grammarian, we might never have
had the Renaissance. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">My evaluation of myself is a little closer to the second, more positive
view of the Grammarian. In this sense: I think I've occasionally managed to say
things that haven't been said very often, even at the risk of being focused on
trivial things. Archie Comics is an example. I wouldn't demand any prizes for
being able to look at an old Archie comic and figure out who wrote it, but hardly
anyone anywhere had mentioned Frank Doyle, let alone identified any of his
uncredited scripts, and the general idea was that Archie comics were all
written in the same style. Now there is slightly more awareness of a few of the
key figures at that company and the individual styles there. I wasn't the main
contributor to that awareness, and it's not the most important thing in the
world, but it's like a small article of Latin grammar: helping to call
attention to the little things can feel surprisingly good at times.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Now, when you focus a lot on small things, and combine that with a
slightly contrarian take on -- not everything, but some things -- you run the
risk of focusing too much on things that don't really matter. That's the
downside of the Grammarian's life. One reason why I don't think I would make a
good episodic TV reviewer, and why I so admire the people who do it well, is that it requires confident judgment and a genuine
enthusiasm for the new. Enthusiasm for the new is the quality I envy in a lot
of people I know, because I think that the new stuff is really what matters
most. Not that new stuff is the <i>best</i>, though (as I've said
before) it seems like a new-is-best attitude is becoming more prevalent even as
older stuff is more easily available. But new stuff is what makes art go. When
great new works stop being created, as in opera, the form becomes decadent and
resorts to desperate tricks and gimmicks to make the older works seem
"relevant." So while it's great to call attention to the great old
work, the most valuable thing a critic can do is build enthusiasm for the great
new work. That just doesn't seem to be my thing. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">I sometimes have a delayed reaction to new work, catching up with it a
while after it comes out. Other times I'll get more enthusiastic about a new
work I can't really recommend as a whole, just because it has something that
interests me, while not being able to muster up much enthusiasm about something
perfectly solid. A lot of television, film and other work falls into that
latter category for me, now and always. But it's a particularly tough time to
enthuse about television, because so much of the work falls into one of two
categories: quality shows that wear their quality and their themes on their
sleeve, and don't really have a lot of layers to peel (there's not much depth
to some of the HBO things that keep indicating, in every scene, what they're
supposed to be about), and populist shows that are poorly-made or bland.
My heart seems to lie with things that are too cheesy to be high art, yet have
too much artistry and power to be dismissed as mere cheese. But those are hard
to come by at the moment, except maybe in the better reality shows. And it's
probably true that that kind of thing is easier to spot in hindsight anyway: if
I had been alive in the '50s, I doubt I would have noticed that the best
American movies were being made by the likes of Ray and Sirk. If you ask me ten
years from now what the best shows of the 2011 were, I think I'll have a better
answer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">(When it comes to TV, I also find - and have said before - that I focus on the three-camera studio audience sitcom to
the point of monomania, though more on Twitter than on the blog. I do it
because, honestly, I think it's one of the few things where I have a unique
perspective: there aren't many people online who are that big a fan of that format,
or as unenthused by the one-camera, no-laugh-track format. But I should think
it's really irritating to hear a particular point repeated too often, and
that's one of the basic problems of blogging and tweeting. If you have a point
to make, you almost have to repeat it over and over, if only because you're not
guaranteed a large audience for any one of the individual statements. But it's
bloody repetitive and creates the feeling that I won't let go of the subject, I
realize that.) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Anyway, you can't force yourself to be enthusiastic about anything, and
in some cases, a lack of fandom can produce better writing, or allow something
to be approached from a different angle. I sometimes do my better work when I'm trying to illuminate a point, rather than trying to say that this show is great or terrible. Still, I love enthusiasm; it is, let
us say, the thing I'm most enthusiastic about. And that's part of why I think I
should stop writing <i>Something Old, Nothing New.</i> Because I
think some of the enthusiasm has gone out of my approach to the stuff I love,
and not writing about it might help me to get it back. Sometimes you like something
so much that you want to tell everyone that you like it, and why you like it.
And the great thing about the internet is that it made it easier for us to do
that, without joining fan clubs or, god forbid, meeting other fans in person
(if there are any). But it also requires you to explain why you like something,
maybe sometimes defend it against people who don't like it. </span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">This isn't new;
that's been a part of my experience since I've been online (it'll soon be 20
years that I've been posting stuff online, and wow, that seems like a long
time). But I find lately that I'm watching things I love through other people's
eyes, trying to feel how it might seem to <i>someone else</i> - a
potential reader, the theoretical modern viewer, anyone - not to me. I find
myself looking for the flaws, trying to think of how to explain why the piece
works in spite of those flaws. That's all wrong. If the flaws matter to you,
that's one thing, but if the piece works for you, if it makes you laugh, then
are they really flaws at all? Well, yes, they are flaws <i>if you're
discussing them</i>. In evaluating something, you have to weigh the good
with the bad and explain why it works for you. But that's why discussing
something can feel like picking it apart. There are times when I haven't been
able to approach something with the same open-wide enthusiasm after blogging
about it, not because of anything anyone said in response, but just because I examined it
too closely. Maybe the universities were right, and we were meant to study only the things we don't really like.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Maybe because of the impulse to pick things apart and figure out how I'm
going to talk about them, I find myself having less of an attention span,
experiencing old movies and shows in a technical, piecemeal sort of way. I
think if I don't blog about them, don't tweet about them, just keep them as
pleasures for myself and anyone who happens to be unlucky enough to be around
in person, I can get back to experiencing these old works the way I did when I
was younger: not as "old" works, not as representatives of a time and
place, but just things that show me a different way of looking at the world, or
have a resonance that goes beyond a simple description of their genre tricks.
Unexpected depth, maybe that's the term. Depth can be found in the strangest
places, but one can sometimes be self-conscious about saying so, and
eventually, one devolves into a self-parody. <i>The A-Team</i> does
have more depth than <i>Boardwalk Empire</i>, but saying so at
length is not really of much use to anyone. If you're deeply moved by some Bob
Merrill Broadway song, it almost does the song a disservice to subject it to
paragraphs of analysis to find out why. Sometimes this works, and I'm quite
proud of, for example, my shot-for-shot analysis of why that goofy dance scene
from <i>Bye Bye Birdie</i> has always seemed so powerful and
thrilling to me. But I don't think that's necessary for everything, and
sometimes it's counter-productive. The effect something has on you does not become
less powerful if you can somehow prove that it was a great work of art.</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">So my solution is to try and get back into the experience of the stuff I like, concentrate a bit more on experiencing it and a bit less on explaining it. And a lot less on basically irrelevant things like how many other people like it or whether kids today are less interested in old stuff than kids of the '80s, or whatever else. There comes a point where if your enthusiasm is being swallowed up by the analysis, the analysis has to go, and blogging has to give way to other, more immediate forms of shared experience - like organizing screenings. (Back in college I screened VHS copies of some of my favorite Warner Brothers and Tex Avery cartoons. The screenings could have been better done; they ran too long; but that kind of local, direct way of sharing the experience is still probably more useful than asking people to check out something on YouTube. And I love YouTube; I just know that you still need to get people into rooms to watch things or discuss them.) And as enthusiasm rekindles, I think writing improves.</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">I want to thank everyone who has read and commented on <i>Something Old, Nothing New</i> since 2004. Like many bloggers, I learned a lot from people who commented and emailed. I became smarter about certain things, less naive about others. With one good comment, I could discover that what I thought I knew about something wasn't necessarily the only way to look at it, and that was wonderful to find. And in 2005, when I was articling as a lawyer, writing this blog in the evenings was incredible training in the discipline of writing every day in a style that non-lawyers could understand. When I'm asked how to get into journalism, one of the more useful pieces of advice I can give is to blog - it just trains you to write fast and clear, to take reader response into account. I don't know if the term "blogging" will even survive the decade, but the act of writing every day in a personal space, for people who can see it and may not necessarily know you, will always be with us, and that's a good thing. I'm certainly glad I did it.</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/_OKNJLcnGh4" width="420"></iframe> </span></div>
</div>
</div>
Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-44053930096411740672012-04-22T23:13:00.005-04:002012-04-22T23:32:53.808-04:00Jule Styne's Big BreakI was just watching this clip from the movie <I>Sis Hopkins</I>, starring Judy Canova, and was reminded that Jule Styne claimed (in Max Wilk's book <I>They're Playing Our Song</I>) that this was the film that turned his career around. Having decided that he wanted to dedicate himself to songwriting instead of arranging, Styne was composing for low-budget movies at Republic, and the way he told it (which may not be the way it was) he asked Republic to borrow Frank Loesser from Paramount to be his lyricist on this picture. Loesser, a rising star as a lyricist, was (according to Styne) not happy about being loaned out to a "B" studio, but he liked a tune Styne had lying around, and told him <I>not</I> to use it in <I>Sis Hopkins</I>, but to save it for a future project. <br /><br />When Loesser went back to Paramount, he got them to borrow Styne, and the two of them wrote the song up as "I Don't Want to Walk Without You," which became a major hit and made Styne one of the most in-demand composers in the business. As he told it, once he'd written a hit while on loan-out, he was suddenly treated with respect at Republic, teamed with Sammy Cahn as his regular lyricist, and freed to write an astonishing string of pop hits.<br /><br /><blockquote><br />"When I come back to Republic with two hit songs at Paramount, you know, it's a whole different ballgame. They now <I>ask</I> me, and now they're recording there with forty-six men! They never paid a flute $135 for a date before. The music contractor says, 'Why do we need a flute? We never used a flute here.' I said 'It's a very important instrument.' 'Harps? We're walking in the mud and you want <I>harps</I>?' They're paying $10 a page for orchestration - always paid $3. They were kind of shaken, but they went with me because it must be right. I must be right if I'd written songs with Frank Loesser."<br /></blockquote><br /><br />This song from <I>Sis Hopkins</I> by Styne and Loesser is pretty good too, and makes me want to see the rest of the picture just to hear what else they came up with. One thing that struck me is that it's a song in a subgenre of entertainment that was particularly big in the years 1939-41, during World War II but before America entered the war. That is: left-wing patriotic entertainment. This is a rah-rah America song, but with a distinctly liberal, populist, Rooseveltian message about the glory of working people and the value of what they do -- and it ends by connecting the celebration of the working man to the celebration of the military, which is getting ready to defend America from the coming storm. This strain of left patriotism is all over movies like <I>The Grapes of Wrath</I> and <I>The Devil and Daniel Webster</I>, and songs by the likes of Yip Harburg and Loesser. This would be less common after the U.S. got into the war, since the messages had to be more about the necessity to win, and after the war, of course, came the Cold War and the end of this kind of populist (or, depending on who was writing it, Popular Front) style.<br /><br />Here's the number, staged by the director -- or the second-unit director -- with an obvious nod to Lubitsch's "Beyond the Blue Horizon."<br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VufH2hJjHlY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-18029158676399019992012-04-19T16:33:00.015-04:002012-04-19T18:16:32.358-04:00The Gingerbread ChroniclesIn 1970, <I>Life</I> magazine sent its reporter Richard Meryman to cover the tryouts of Neil Simon's <I>The Gingerbread Lady</I>, and I recently read <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=LUAEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA75&dq=%22neil%20simon%22%20%22Gingerbread%20lady%22%20life&pg=PA59-IA4#v=twopage&q&f=true">the complete article, courtesy of <I>Life</I>'s free digitized archives. Here's the link to the piece; let me know if the link doesn't work properly</a>. <br /><br />Though the number of advertising interruptions makes a modern TV show look smooth by comparison, it's a good article, and Meryman was lucky enough to get in on the most problematic tryout Simon had had up to that point. <br /><br /><I>The Gingerbread Lady</I> was the darkest play Simon had ever written, a very self-conscious attempt to be as serious as possible while still retaining the form and style of his comedies. Both Simon and his longtime producer, Arnold Saint-Subber, got cold feet after the Boston reviews were bad, and they considered closing the show. Simon has argued that this was Saint-Subber's idea alone, but the article suggests that the Boston reviews brought out all of Simon's insecurity, and that he also wanted to close it unless he could think of a way of fixing it. Saint-Subber also wanted to close it, though, because he wanted to "protect" Simon: after an uneven producing career, Simon's plays had made him one of the few consistently successful producers of the '60s, and the fear was that a flop in New York would damage Simon's brand.<br /><br />Finally, after much lobbying from the actors, Simon decided to rewrite, and he did so by eliminating a lot of the darkest material in the play. The play is about a self-destructive alcoholic named Evy Meara (Maureen Stapleton) who returns from rehab and gets the perfect chance to redeem herself: her beautiful, witty and all-around perfect teenage daughter Polly (Ayn Ruymen) moves in with her mother to help her get her life back on track. In the second act, Evy's self-destructive impulses and the personal problems of her friends Toby (Betsy Von Furstenberg) and Jimmy (Michael Lombard) drive Evy off the wagon, and she ends the second act by going out to meet a violent ex-lover, who beats her up. The original third act was going to have Evy finally prove herself to be irredeemable. <br /><br />In the rewrite, her most degrading behavior was eliminated, there was a suggestion that she could give helpful advice to one of her hanger-on friends, and the play ended on a hopeful note. These revisions disappointed some of the actors, who were rooting for Simon to go all the way and not cop out with a happy ending. This was always an issue that surrounded Simon from the moment he started getting more serious. It actually started with <i>Plaza Suite</I>. He originally thought it was going to be a full-length play about a man and woman's marriage dissolving. He wrote the first act and then realized that he couldn't write a happy ending without making it seem contrived -- so he ended it ambiguously, and made it the first of three one-act plays. <I>Plaza Suite</I> essentially was a show that got happier as it went along: the first play was very dark, the second was bittersweet but lighter than the first, and the last act was pure farce ("an entertainment piece," Simon called it somewhat condescendingly) that sent the audience out happy. <I>Gingerbread Lady</I> was going to play this process in reverse, getting darker and darker as it goes along from beginning to end.<br /><br />Not having read the original version, I have no idea how it would have played, but it certainly doesn't seem like a play that lends itself to such a dark third act. You can see where the original version might have had more bite. In particular, there are two characters who appear in the first act, were originally supposed to come back in the third, and who just vanish from the play in the version that reached Broadway. But the play as it now exists does seem to be leading up to a happy, or at least hopeful, ending. To sustain a sad ending, a lot of the weight of the play would have to be on Polly, the daughter who tries to be a mother to her own mother. She can either get fed up and leave, or Evy can kick her out for her own good, or they can reconcile and work together to make things better. And Polly is such a weak character, as written, that the only thing she seems capable of doing is coming back and working to redeem her mother.<br /><br />It's hard to write about a Neil Simon play without somehow reviewing the audience -- ever since at least <I>The Odd Couple</I>, what a critic thinks about Simon is partly what he thinks about the middle-aged New Yorkers who are perceived to be Simon's core audience. I'm trying not to do that here, but when I read Polly's part, I do feel like she is the teenager a 1970 theatregoer <I>wished</I> he had, instead of his own. She has no apparent wants and needs of her own, no life of her own; she just wants to help her mom. She talks like she's at least 20 years older than she is, with occasional teenage references thrown in: "I'll never take another drop in my life. From now on I'm sticking with marijuana." (I used to say, as many people do, that all of Simon's characters talk alike. I no longer think that's true, but I do think that when he doesn't know what a character would think or feel in real life, he reverts to a sort of default style that could fit in any character's mouth, and that's what happens with Polly; he doesn't know, or won't write, what a teenager would talk about, so she talks like a generic Neil Simon character.) Simon and director Robert Moore fired the original Polly during rehearsals, and it seems like it was a part they never really licked; this weighs the play down, because it's basically weighted toward the relationship between Evy and Polly, yet Polly is not a convincing character at any moment. And the only thing she could convincingly do is keep trying with her mother; that's all she exists to do.<br /><br />The play works better when dealing with Evy's two friends, who make sense as the sort of hangers-on a moderately successful showbiz personality would have around her. Jimmy, Simon's first gay character, who seems a bit reminiscent of Simon's <I>Last of the Red Hot Lovers</I> star James Coco (maybe I'm just saying this because of the name and the fact that Coco played the part in the film version), is a convincing portrait of an old young actor, the kind of guy who never got a break and is increasingly furious at having to grovel to directors who are younger than he is. And Toby (Betsy Von Furstenberg) is an aging-beauty-queen type of character who gets some very good aging-beauty-queen speeches. Simon's plays sometimes leave you wishing they had fewer characters; his next play, <I>The Prisoner of Second Avenue</I>, is a gripping two-character comedy for the first few scenes, and suddenly loses steam when new characters turn up in the second act. And <I>The Gingerbread Lady</I> seems to work best as a three-character play about Stapleton, her two friends, and their unhealthy mutual dependence.<br /><br />The <I>Life</I> article doesn't deal with the play beyond the New York reviews, but while it wasn't a hit, it wasn't the embarrassment Saint-Subber feared (Saint-Subber would be dumped as Simon's producer one play later). The reviews were respectful enough, it ran 193 performances, Stapleton won the Tony, and Simon eventually sold it to the movies, where he rewrote it as a vehicle for Marsha Mason under the title <I>Only When I Laugh</I>. The experience of writing the play probably also informed his next two comedies, <I>The Prisoner of Second Avenue</I> and <I>The Sunshine Boys</I>, which are two of his most durable plays; the experience of writing a darker show informed his comedy writing in some interesting ways. (Though his attempt at an out-and-out black comedy, <I>God's Favorite</i>, is beyond redemption.) So his decision -- bring the show into New York but rewrite it to be less bleak -- probably worked out for him, and for Stapleton.<br /><br />This was also Simon's last three-act play, and he held out with that structure as long as he possibly could; nonmusical plays were switching to two acts all throughout the '60s (and even, in some cases, just cutting out the intermission altogether). The three act form in American commercial theatre is a bit like the two-act form in the American television sitcom, which is currently dying out in favor of more or fewer act breaks. The idea in both cases is to have a long first act that sets up everything we need to know about the characters and the situation, so that the writer can pile on a lot of complications very fast after the break. The second act is where all the complications get really bad, and the third act is where they're resolved. (In a two-act sitcom, you have the second act as a sort of combination of complication/resolution, sometimes followed by a tag where things calm down a bit.) The advantage of this structure is that it perfectly mirrors the three-part structure that almost every story follows: exposition/complication/resolution. The disadvantage is that the first act is almost all exposition, which means that the longest act is one where not much happens. It's not surprising that plays moved toward two-act or one-act forms, where the playwright could grab the audience early and not send them out again until something "big" had occurred.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/nT6sFqCInMs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-70060838120015344292012-03-23T13:07:00.002-04:002012-03-23T13:14:14.510-04:00Obscure Musicals: DONNYBROOK!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGDZYVtEu8WIqATvrLb0YNTzHq9H0f1-G4XqmGu6kEooxnHwSq3jWk-CnxVXrO1iEDxKqerxtj7RNg3sY94VJ87LNPCeHRnDNEpCLOk_i6Vcjd6kTRJssZOV6yglB2OI56V9AG/s1600/49dc305a12aa3_53443n.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 290px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGDZYVtEu8WIqATvrLb0YNTzHq9H0f1-G4XqmGu6kEooxnHwSq3jWk-CnxVXrO1iEDxKqerxtj7RNg3sY94VJ87LNPCeHRnDNEpCLOk_i6Vcjd6kTRJssZOV6yglB2OI56V9AG/s400/49dc305a12aa3_53443n.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5723123851292287442" /></a><br /><br />People often complain that too many musicals are based on popular movies. I don't really agree with the complaint -- a movie is, in many ways, more appropriate for musical adaptation than a play. (The biggest argument against adapting a movie used to be that Broadway shows made a lot of their money from starting a bidding war for the movie rights, which you can't do if a movie studio already owns the property. Once movie sales dried up, that argument was no longer compelling.) But however you feel about this practice, it really took off in 1961. That year, two new musicals premiered on Broadway that were based on films less than a decade old (unlike <I>Silk Stockings</I>, which was based on an older film). One of these shows, <I>Carnival!</I> was based on 1953's <I>Lili</I>, and was a hit. This is the other one.<br /><br />It's based on <I>The Quiet Man</I>, a movie that had many things going for it as a musical property. A romance, a picturesque setting, merry villagers, and a story structure that lends itself to the two-act format of a Broadway musical. It also has some drawbacks that become clearer the closer you look at it: it doesn't have much plot, and what little conflict it has is building to a resolution that is telegraphed far in advance; it's an atmosphere film, a charm film. The musical version was, accordingly, what William Goldman has called a "charm show." Not a big show with gigantic production numbers (like <I>Carnival</I> or the same director's <I>Hello, Dolly!</I>, small stories given a busy production that makes them feel important enough for an evening). A little show with no big stars, that hopefully sends the audience out feeling warm and happy.<br /><br />The book was written by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/15/nyregion/robert-e-mcenroe-82-dies-wrote-popular-40-s-comedy.html">Robert McEnroe</a>, who wrote a successful Broadway comedy called <I>The Silver Whistle</I> but hadn't had a play produced since then. The score was by Johnny Burke, a great pop lyricist (Bing Crosby's favorite lyricist, of "Swinging on a Star" and much more) here trying to pull a Frank Loesser and write his own music. Adding to the Loeserian feel, two of the actors were from <I>The Most Happy Fella</I> -- Art Lund in the John Wayne role, and Susan Johnson as a widow created for the purposes of the then-obligatory comic subplot. Barry Fitzgerald's part went to Eddie Foy Jr. And the Maureen O'Hara part was taken by Joan Fagan, a dancer who had never created a role on Broadway before; she got her big break during the Philadelphia tryout when the original lead, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0358002/">Kipp Hamilton</a>, was stricken with pneumonia. But when Hamilton recovered, she took over the role; Fagan is on the cast album, though. <br /><br /> This very non-starry cast was in the hands of Jack Cole, a great choreographer doing his first and only shows as director that year (the other was <I>Kean</I>). In other words, a creative team consisting of a lot of people doing things for the first time (writing a musical, directing a musical, writing music).<br /><br />For a "charm show" to be a hit, it has to be pretty much perfect all the way through and include some real standout performances -- like <I>Bye Bye Birdie</I> the previous season. <I>Donnybrook!</I> apparently was not one of those shows. It received generally good reviews, but that just proves that good reviews don't help a show if they are respectful, unexciting reviews; nothing short of raves will convince people to go see a show with no stars and no big hook. <I>Donnybrook!</I> wasn't the sort of show to get raves, so it closed after 69 performances.<br /><br />I haven't read the book; people who have read it or seen it say it wasn't very good. Burke's score is another matter. He was an exceptionally skilled lyricist, whose words had an unusual quality that Sammy Cahn described as "lacier and more fragile" than the average pop lyric. Burke was also an alcoholic, and his drinking was apparently what caused both Crosby and his composing partner, Jimmy Van Heusen, to cut him loose in the '50s. (Van Heusen replaced Burke with Cahn, who was more reliable though less individual and interesting.) He had always longed for a successful Broadway show, although his efforts with Van Heusen had been flops. When he took up composing for <I>Donnybrook!</I>, he was only in his 50s, and he claimed to have given up drinking, but he was only three years away from death. Yet the score doesn't sound like the work of an amateur composer, nor the work of a man near to death; there are some dud songs, but there are several songs that are clever, tender and above all, charming. It's a "charm" score.<br /><br />The charm is apparent in the first song, probably the only one that's had any life outside the show (there's a YouTube video of students performing it). "Sez I" is a type of song that every heroine has been singing almost literally since musicals were invented: she announces that the man for her hasn't come along yet, but when he does, she'll know it right away. How do you make this sub-genre of song interesting again? By casting it not as a ballad, but an energetic up-tempo number punctuated by hand-claps, where the refrain alternates with a contrasting section ("There's an old, old sayin'...") that's almost a separate song in itself.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vAzk_k9sB_o" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />"Sad Was the Day," the introductory number for the big, beautiful belt voice of Susan Johnson, was one of the songs Stephen Sondheim put on his list of "Songs I Wish I'd Written." I can see why; it seems on the surface like a peppy one-joke comedy song, but everything about it is a little unusual. The music is remarkably tricky, with many changes of rhythm (the trickiness isn't just for its own sake, either; it works dramatically, conveying the subtext of the piece). The lyrics go through just about every rhyme for "died" that you can find in the rhyming dictionary. It manages to tell the story of an entire marriage and a husband who wasn't evil, just a bore to live with. It gives us a complete portrait of the character who sings it even though she never comes out and directly states the point of the song (that she's happier now that she's alone), it has an arc to the story it tells, it incorporates choral commentary -- which has its own subtext, different from the singer's -- and it ends with a perfect little pun: Johnson's "Ah, men!" followed by the chorus's "Amen." It's such a difficult piece that I don't know if anyone but Susan Johnson could have pulled it off, but luckily Burke had Susan Johnson.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/8gUlnhaA_8E" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />As part of the secondary couple, Johnson also got two delightful duets with Eddie Foy: "I Wouldn't Bet One Penny," another example of Burke rhyming more heavily than he usually did (he could rhyme; most good lyricists can; but in his pop lyrics he preferred to keep things as simple as possible), and a song that actually describes itself in the title, "Dee-Lightful is the word." <br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mWmhVzcHuXE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />But here we see a possible problem: apart from the heroine's opening number, most of the songs that come to mind as highlights are charm songs for the secondary comic-relief couple. This would be like if Will and Ado Annie dominated <I>Oklahoma!</I> Where's the big duet for the lead couple? Where are the songs that make us root for their romance? There don't seem to be any. The leads don't have a duet at all, and while Lund gets one nice ballad, "Ellen Roe," his other songs are among the weakest in the show. This song, for example, is deadly; if "Sad Was the Day" is an example of how effective a song can be when people don't sing what they feel, "A Quiet Life" demonstrates why a song should <I>not</i> just summarize the character's situation for us.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Tr4PW_8QY3o" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />Fagan and Hamilton were luckier than Lund; in addition to "Sez I," the heroine gets a lovely ballad in Burke's fragile poetic pop style, "He Makes Me Feel I'm Lovely." The song is a bit weakened by a dull, expository verse, though. (Introductory verses almost separate the Broadway pro from the amateur: the great composers knew how to make them musically interesting, while middling composers wrote verses that make you tap your fingers waiting for the refrain.)<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/W2HRxuzeZ_M" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />An Encores! revival of <I>Donnybrook!</I> is probably not in the cards, since it does seem to be a fragile, wispy show that might not stand up to the scrutiny of a big concert. But the cast album, with Robert Ginzler's great orchestrations (after his success with <I>Bye Bye Birdie</I>, Ginzler -- formerly a TV arranger and Don Walker's uncredited assistant -- suddenly became one of the busiest orchestrators on Broadway before his own untimely death in 1963), is a fun listen for its charm, its sweetness, and those flashes of the unexpected. Just grit your teeth through some of Lund's material and the title song, which nobody seems to like.<br /><br />There's never been a CD release or proper digital remaster, but in 2011, after it went out of copyright in some areas, some LP transfers became available to buy digitally; I don't know which of the digital versions is the best, or if there's any difference between them.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ey1-Kvk-jH0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-60449871526361900142012-01-20T18:00:00.007-05:002012-01-23T16:42:00.711-05:00Obscure Musicals: "Golden Boy"<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/N79T9GK8h8Q" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />This one is less obscure than some of the other shows I've written about on this site. It had a run that normally qualifies a musical as a hit: 569 performances. But it didn't make money, one of two shows in 1964 that ran over 500 performances and lost money (the other was <I>What Makes Sammy Run?</I>, which I've written about before). This had never happened before around 1961, and it was a sign of the new economic gap on Broadway, where the profits in a smash hit were greater than ever, but there was no money to be made in a musical that <I>wasn't</I> a smash.<br /><br />The young producer of <I>Golden Boy</I>, Hillard Elkins, decided to make a musical from Clifford Odets's play. His idea was that if the Italian-American boxer from the original play were changed to an African-American, he could have a timely show, and a great vehicle for Sammy Davis Jr. Odets was signed to write the show, and for the score, Elkins got Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, who had done one hit (<I>Bye Bye Birdie</I>) and one flop (<I>All American</I>). According to Strouse's autobiography, <I>Put On a Happy Face</I>, one of Davis's conditions for signing was that he would have approval of every song in the show. "This was the kind of agreement," Strouse writes, "I would advise any author or composer to decline."<br /><br />Odets died after writing the show but before it was ready to go out (Wikipedia says that he died during the tryout, but he actually died some time before), and it's a sign of <I>Golden Boy</I>'s tryout problems that going into tryouts without a writer was not one of its top problems. After Paddy Chayefsky turned him down, Elkins got William Gibson (<I>Two For the Seesaw, The Miracle Worker</I>) to take over on the road. Gibson didn't care much for musicals, but he considered Odets a friend and mentor, and found the original play still powerful. During the tryout, while Gibson, Strouse and Adams were rewriting, the original director stepped down: Peter Coe, one of several hot British directors named Peter (Glenville and Brook and Hall were the others), fell out with Davis and left. Gibson asked Arthur Penn, who had staged <I>The Miracle Worker</I> and <I>Two For the Seesaw</I>, to take over, and Penn did; it was the only Broadway musical he ever got credit for directing, though he was fired from a couple of others.<br /><br />Gibson's rewriting of the show required that it move farther away from Odets's play. Odets's original draft changed the race of the lead character but otherwise, apparently, stuck fairly close to what he had written earlier: a young man from the wrong side of the tracks, whose parents would prefer him to go into a culturally-respectable line of work, decides to get into boxing as a way of making a fast buck. Davis felt that the show was not timely enough, didn't deal forthrightly enough with contemporary race issues, and tiptoed around the interracial romance between his character and the character of Lorna (Paula Wayne). All of these criticisms were correct, and all of them Gibson and Penn tried to fix, trying to sharpen the interracial romance theme and take Davis's suggestions on how to make the show reflect the real black experience. By the time the show came in, it was the first musical that ever dealt with these issues in anything but a superficial way. <br /><br />The big production number, "Don't Forget 127th Street," was the most conventional Broadway number in the show, and yet it was a sign of how different it was: a big song-and-dance set piece where the star is celebrated by the ensemble, it is sort of this show's "Hello, Dolly!," except that it's bitter, sardonic, and mocks the whole idea (not unfamiliar in musicals) of poor people being content with their lot and loving the slum where they live. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7AxSDEQg-k">This is a production number about, and against, the happy world of Broadway production numbers.</a> It also shares a certain autobiographical resonance with other moments in the show; this one was seen almost as Davis's response to charges that he had sold out by "sipping champagne with high class white friends."<br /><br />So Davis was influencing the show in the right direction a lot of the time, and he was, of course, Sammy Davis -- a big draw and an incredibly talented man, if a bit too old for the part. But the trouble with a star having veto power over everything that happens in a show is that stars have to be as concerned with their own image as with what's right for the show: the show will end, but the star's brand has to remain intact. So much of what happened in the show was geared to allow Davis to show off the things he could do, and that his fans expected him to do. Elliot Lawrence, the musical director, recalled that Davis's entourage kept telling him "you're not doing enough of this, you're not doing enough of that." <br /><br />So tough and serious moments stood shoulder-to-shoulder with moments that could have come from Davis's nightclub act (his previous musical, <I>Mr. Wonderful</i>, had literally incorporated his club act as part of the evening). This seems to have gone on more as the show went on; a reference to Bing Crosby in one of the songs was turned into a Dean Martin shout-out at some point. <br /><br />Strouse, who saw <I>Golden Boy</I> as his chance to really stretch himself as a composer, was frustrated with what he saw as Davis's smoothing-out of the music. Particularly Davis's first number, "Night Song," Strouse's own favorite song and possibly the best in the show. Strouse felt it was an art song, but Davis wouldn't sing it that way, threw out several arrangements, and finally wound up doing it as a fairly conventional I-want introductory song. "I couldn't help feeling that, somewhere along the way, my harmonies and rhythms were washed and dried out in that bright-shiny-money-back-guaranteed washing machine known as Sammy Davis Jr.," Strouse complained. "Was it my imagination, or did it sound like he could have been singing almost <I>any</I> song?" On the other hand, Strouse has also admitted that the number worked the way Davis did it, that people seemed to like it.<br /><br />There was a lot else to like in the show, including an opening number that Penn helped craft. "We changed it into a number where someone was punching a bag to one rhythm, someone else was shadow-boxing to another rhythm, someone else was skipping rope, and so on," he recalled. As a number that relied almost entirely on rhythm -- musical, verbal and physical -- it was like a more serious version of "Rock Island" from <I>The Music Man</i>, and an acknowledged highlight of the show. The cast album can only preserve the audio portion of it, but at least that's something.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0dWVWAi92iY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />The final version that came into Broadway was one that didn't shy away from controversy or innovation, but it wasn't a unified show: it had been so frantically reworked during tryouts and provoked such divergent audience reactions (sometimes from night to night) that there was a little bit of everything thrown in. Also, Davis was working so hard on the show -- Penn, unlike Strouse, seems to have gotten along with him and admired his dedication to the character -- and had so much to do in the show, that his voice sometimes gave out. (This was not uncommon for club or recording stars in a Broadway theatre without amplification; the producer apparently did mike the show when Davis started encountering vocal trouble.) This was very apparent on the original cast album, but more about that in a second.<br /><br />The show lives on through its score, which is, as I said, Strouse and Adams' attempt to get more ambitious than the light material they had done so well in <I>Bye Bye Birdie</I> (and not quite as well in <I>All American</I>). Strouse got to show off not only his great melodic gifts, but to write a type of moody jazz music that had hardly ever been heard in a conventional Broadway score. The result is not only the team's most ambitious score, but probably also their best overall. "Night Song" is one of the best I-want songs ever written (in any version). "I Wanna Be With You," the big love duet, is as un-contrived a statement of passion as I've ever heard in a musical: Broadway love songs tend toward cuteness and prettiness, but this is raw and powerful, a song for a love affair that won't end well. Billy Daniels, as the unsubtly named gangster "Eddie Satin," got another great nocturnal jazz song, "While the City Sleeps." There's a big angry gospel number in "No More," a number that's a bit overlong but makes brilliant serious use of a type of music that Broadway usually uses only for parody purposes. And there are some great songs in Strouse and Adams' lighter vein, like the ode to vice "Gimme Some."<br /><br />The score does have a couple of problems that reflect the whole show being such a patchwork. One, again, it's not unified; Joe expresses himself in so many different styles -- heavy and light, jazz and pop -- that it feels sometimes like he's anything Davis wants him to be at that particular moment. And second, even as it's not unified, it's not varied; some of the songs overlap with each other in what they're like and what they're saying. (The female lead's two songs, "Lorna's Here" and "Golden Boy," are practically the same song.) It's still one of the most extraordinary scores of the '60s, not always a great time for Broadway scores that truly dazzled; this one did dazzle, and Strouse and Adams never quite matched it again.<br /><br />The cast album is available on iTunes, though it's never existed in a really satisfying form. The strain in Davis's voice was very plain when he made the album, and exacerbated by the way cast albums were made (in one marathon recording session). He sounded hoarse on a lot of it. He later tried to fix this by re-recording a bunch of the numbers, but this had its own problems, because by then he was performing the songs more as himself and less in-character. Example:<br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/kxJXQLCz5AM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /> It's the second version of the album that is available on iTunes and all CD releases; some collectors hang on to their versions of the original LP (which I unfortunately don't have, so I can't share it with you); but none of them do full justice to the score. It could use a new recording that separates the score and the character from Davis a bit -- <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/23/theater/theater-review-a-dated-musical-whose-music-is-never-out-of-date.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm">an Encores! version in 2002,</a> starring Alfonso Ribeiro, was very well-received.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/54VoB3hG4vE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-3209767880237602752011-12-17T18:38:00.005-05:002011-12-17T20:46:43.962-05:00Come to the CabretI just got back from seeing <I>Hugo</I>, a charming and frustrating experience in equal measure, though I suspect that the charm will stay with me longer than the frustration -- not least because the frustrating stuff mostly is from earlier in the film, while the second half leaves you with a warm feeling.<br /><br />Still, that feeling would be even warmer if I didn't feel worn out by the time we get to the end, and this brings up the question of when a movie is too long. It's a common complaint about recent movies, so common that I almost feel like I'm jumping on the bandwagon by making it. And 128 minutes isn't <I>that</I> long. Still it felt long in this picture. Maybe it's not so much a question of length as economy. Some movies are extremely long but economical in their storytelling, in the sense that every scene performs an important function (not necessarily a plot function) and stops before it starts repeating itself or previous scenes.<br /><br />I think you could argue that <I>Hugo</I> is an economical movie; certainly the scenes don't drag. But in the early part of the movie especially, I felt like there was some redundancy, with certain points being hit over and over again, points (like Hugo demanding his notebook) that made scenes overlap with each other. This kind of repetition would have troubled me even if the notebook had been as important to the story as this treatment made it appear to be.<br /><br />Maybe some of the occasional sense of slackness also comes from the editing. <a href="http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2009/06/when-did-movies-start-to-become-over.html">This is one of the things I can never quite get used to,</a> even though the idea that a two-shot is a special or unusual effect has been mainstream for most of my adult life. And Scorsese has been into heavy editing and massive amounts of coverage for a long time. Maybe it's the juxtaposition with silent movies that made me so conscious of all the cutting. But while it's supposed to help tighten up a scene (by giving the director and editor more control over pacing) sometimes I feel that constant back-and-forth cutting can slacken a scene by constantly changing the focal point of the scene. Also I think this may be more of an issue in 3D because every shot has more things to adjust to in terms of how much 3D is used, how much of the background is out of focus, and so on.<br /><br />(Digression # 1: Gregg Toland died before 3D became operational, but in an article he wrote, he was very enthusiastic about it, much more than color, which he more or less dismissed as a gimmick. And when you remember how Toland liked to shoot, in long front-to-back takes, you can imagine what he might have done with 3D. I feel like the format is still looking for its own Gregg Toland, or at least someone to do new things with all the different levels of a 3D shot, instead of just putting all the burden of the shot on whoever happens to be delivering the line.)<br /><br />(Digression # 2: There has been some recent discussion about over-editing as it applies to action sequences, which I'm starting to think almost has it backwards. Yes, there are some action sequences in today's film where you can't tell what's going on, but that's more about planning and staging than cutting; a lot of cutting in an action sequence can help to give it an emotional or visceral charge, as long as we know where everybody is. But constant cutting is sometimes a bigger problem in dialogue sequences, because those are the sequences where all the emphasis is on the actors' performance, and cutting on every line, or using every possible angle within a scene, can chop the performances into dust.)<br /><br />All of that would be a minor issue for me if I had been swept up in Hugo's adventures -- as I mostly was, once the plot started to become clear. Early on, though, I wasn't caught up, and I think part of it may simply be the boy himself. Not so much Asa Butterfield in the part; maybe he could have been more fun, but the way the part is written doesn't provide a lot of opportunities for fun, and that's the point. Like so many children's stories about young boys in a big city (or a big chocolate factory), <I>Hugo</I> has a lead character who is a bit of a cipher. He does things, but he doesn't have a lot of personality, something that's all the clearer because the other kid character, played by Chloë Grace Moretz, is given plenty of personality and specific character traits. Hugo is more like Oliver Twist or the young David Copperfield (mentioned by Moretz's character). He has enough moxie to keep us following him, but his main purpose is to be the everykid through whom we experience the world.<br /><br />Which is a familiar way to structure a story, and not an ineffective one. The problem for me is that for the first half-hour at least, I wasn't observing much through his eyes except a notebook and a cranky old man. Moretz's character is so much more alive -- with qualities of curiosity, intellectual pretension, and charm -- that she can make these things interesting, just by being interested in them. I don't think Hugo can, any more than David Copperfield can make things interesting by his mere presence. If something incredible is not happening around him, then nothing is happening. So by the time I got to what I found to be the interesting stuff (starting roughly around the point where Hugo and Isabelle go to see <I>Safety Last</I>) I felt like I had already spent too much time with this kid. <br /><br />That all makes my reaction sound more negative than it is. The movie (and presumably the book) has a lot of interesting things to say that go beyond a simple tribute to the magic of the movies, though it certainly is the most expensive brief ever made for the importance of film preservation. It's also about technology and machinery, and the magical qualities they bring to everyday life. The movie is sort of a fantasy, or at least has a fantasy atmosphere, but the story keeps sticking to something resembling reality. So Scorsese almost tricks us into expecting the "magical" moment, the point where the weird stuff that happens will turn out to be supernatural, and what we see instead is that machines are magic: they connect us with the past, bring messages from dead people, give new hope to damaged people and turn people's lives around. Since a key plot point in the movie is World War I, where technology proved how destructive and horrible it could be, this story is like the flip side of that, the good and enchanting power of technology.<br /><br />Add to that the technical virtuosity of the film (and nobody's ever denied Scorsese's abilities as a technician) and you have a movie that's intriguing and ever timely -- but especially timely now, when we're going through a more-marked-than-usual period of technological upheaval, and when we know that technology is going to change our lives but don't exactly know how yet. It's hard not to be inspired by the optimism of <I>Hugo</I> about technology as a tool for preserving, rather than obliterating, the past.<br /><br />But, again, all of that is wrapped up in 128 minutes focusing on a hero who seems to me more a collection of plucky-little-orphan-boy characteristics than a character. Maybe I'll feel differently when I see it again, or maybe, with a better idea of where things are going, I'll enjoy the first part of the film more without the disorienting sense of wondering why we're being told all this. (Sometimes stories work better when they've been spoiled.) For now, I think <I>Hugo</I> incorporates some beautiful ideas and shots, which don't exactly add up to a story or scenes.<br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-61366237461404870982011-12-08T22:43:00.005-05:002011-12-09T01:02:07.898-05:00Back To 1988, By Way of 1986One of the few sitcoms I watched at the time and then never revisited again (that I recall) was <I>Dear John</I>, the 1988 adaptation of a BBC sitcom from <I>Only Fools and Horses</I> creator John Sullivan. I watched the pilot when it first aired, because I was watching just about any sitcom on NBC at the time, and I thought it was funny enough to watch a few more times. But like many people, I didn't follow it after it moved away from <i>Cheers</I>; it survived for four years, but was never really a hit, and had almost no syndication life. It turned up here in reruns briefly a couple of years ago, following <I>Taxi</I> reruns on a channel that was showing filler during a transition to a new format. But I didn't watch it then either.<br /><br />What got me watching it again was reading <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/02/magazine/anatomy-of-a-sitcom.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm">this article, "Anatomy of a Sitcom," from the New York <I>Times</I> during the show's first season</a>. It really paints a bleak picture of what it's like to make a television sitcom, though that's pretty typical of the way television was profiled back then: behind-the-scenes looks at the making of TV were less reverential, because there was less reverence for TV than there is now. Even mass-market TV publications like <I>TV Guide</I> would often capture the self-doubts of TV producers and stars, or get into the sausage-factory nature of making network TV. The truth is probably somewhere in between that dark perspective and today's happier perspective, where increased media scrutiny (not to mention DVD commentaries) have trained showrunners to talk happier: you would rarely catch a showrunner doubting himself as openly as Ed. Weinberger does here.<br /><br />That was what interested me about the show, because it was a Paramount TV production smack in the middle of a great period for Paramount TV -- which unfortunately has been folded into CBS and no longer exists. The TV division was still benefiting from the MTM people who jumped ship to do <I>Taxi</I>: Jim Brooks had left, but Glen and Les Charles were still there doing <I>Cheers</I>, and some of the writers they helped train would soon do <I>Wings</I> and <I>Frasier</I>. And then in the middle of this, Ed. Weinberger, another of the <I>Taxi</I> people, came back to Paramount to do a show with his <I>Taxi</I> star -- and the result wasn't a flop, just not anything special.<br /><br />"Not anything special" describes a lot of Ed. Weinberger's work after <I>Taxi</I>, which is a bit surprising because he was such a talented guy. When he took over as producer of <I>Mary Tyler Moore</I> in the third season, he instantly infused it with a new energy. The creators of the show, James L. Brooks and Allan Burns, both had a background in single-camera sitcoms and (in Burns's case) advertising and animation, and they specialized in rather "soft" jokes. Weinberger was an experienced writer for stand-up comedians and variety shows, able to write hard jokes and big block comedy scenes, and he brought other writers for stand-ups and talk shows (including Bob Ellison and the great David Lloyd) onto the show. The mix of Weinberger and Brooks was what gave <I>Mary Tyler Moore</I> its shape from then on, and the same mix of hard and soft jokes was all over <I>Taxi</i>.<br /><br />Weinberger's first act after <I>Taxi</I> was canceled was to create a talking-chimp sitcom, <I>Mr. Smith</I>; it was almost like a performance-art act of contempt for what sitcoms had become in the 1983-4 doldrums. <br /><br />Then Weinberger seemingly bounced back in a big way by co-creating <I>The Cosby Show</I>. "Seemingly" because while he had co-creator credit, he wasn't with the show after the pilot. (Cosby, for whom Weinberger also created <I>The Bill Cosby Show</I> in the '70s, went through a lot of writers before settling on a few he could work with.) His projects after that seemed a bit scattershot, and often sounded better when you heard the cast list than when you saw the show. <I>Mr. President</I>, starring George C. Scott, probably should have been better than it was. And the <I>Times</I> article suggests that <I>Amen</I> was created by Weinberger almost as an attempt to thumb his nose at Cosby and prove he could do his own all-black show. Again, there was more potential in that subject (there are few American shows about the church, a subject that the British know how to mine for comedy) than <I>Amen</I> got out of it; it was all right in the first season because David Lloyd wrote half the episodes, but it was not a special show.<br /><br />And then came <I>Dear John</I>. You can see what attracted Weinberger to the UK show: the story of a bunch of divorced people who hang out at a support group, it assembles a group of disparate losers headed by one guy whose pain is more raw than the others but who sees the world more clearly than they do. In other words, it's very <I>Taxi</I>. Here's the pilot of the original series:<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ghUlGMIxFPc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0ni9daYN_0Y" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />And here's the U.S. remake, produced by Weinberger, Ellison and Peter Noah. <br /><br /><iframe frameborder="0" width="480" height="358" src="http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xmuwyv"></iframe><br /><a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmuwyv_1-pilot_fun" target="_blank">1 Pilot</a> <i>by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/carpalton" target="_blank">carpalton</a></i><br /><br />As you can see, once John gets to the meeting, the script is mostly the same as John Sullivan's version. (In fact, Sullivan's scripts were used almost verbatim for a few early episodes of the U.S. version.) The biggest difference is at the end. The original pilot just sort of ends on a big laugh -- a common way for UK sitcoms to end. The U.S. version feels a need to have some moment of resolution or hope, so it tacks on a new scene suggesting a) the possibility of sexual tension and b) a moment of redemptive connection between two supporting characters. It doesn't really work, and it may be a hint of why the U.S. version was never going to be on a level with <I>Cheers</I> and <I>Taxi</I>; the heart, the soft stuff, had to be tacked on and wasn't organic.<br /><br />I may be over-thinking that, and I'd have to watch more of the episodes from later seasons to really know why this one was forgotten. I recall Jere Burns, as Kirk, being the one who made the most impact in the U.S. version; it's a showy part, and he played it more physically than the original actor. On the other hand, the leader of the group (a woman with an unhealthy interest in everyone's sex life) is less funny as a chirpy weirdo than the seemingly normal woman she was in the original. And Judd Hirsch was probably wrong for the part because he was too right for it, if that makes sense: the backstory of the character is close enough to Alex Rieger that he can't help seeming like he's playing the same guy all over again. <br /><br />And that's how the show comes across in what I've seen of the original episodes: kind of like <I>Taxi</I> but not as sharp and fresh. Like a lot of filmed sitcoms from the late '80s -- <I>Designing Women, Major Dad</I>, <I>Murphy Brown</I> -- it also comes off as being at an uneasy transitional point between the MTM style (the foundational style at that time for any "grown-up" live-audience sitcom shot on film), and the faster-paced style that would soon come to dominate the filmed sitcom (with shorter running times, shorter scenes, and more stories per episode).<br /><br />Weinberger did one other show while <I>Dear John</i> was running, a gruesome <I>Look Who's Talking</I> adaptation called "Baby Talk," where he was apparently very difficult to get along with: George Clooney fought with him and was dropped, Connie Sellecca left the show before it started, and finally Weinberger himself was let go after the first season. He made a comeback with a couple of other unsuccessful shows in the '90s. But if (like most TV producers) he wasn't able to keep producing hits indefinitely, the '80s and '90s were sitcom era that he did a lot to create -- through the shows he produced and the writers he hired, not to mention his role in keeping the sitcom alive with <I>Cosby.</I> <br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-48098708414038111672011-12-01T17:26:00.007-05:002011-12-01T18:02:49.788-05:00Harry and SamArguably the best thing about IDW and Archie comics releasing "Best of Harry Lucey" and "Best of Samm Schwartz" hardcover collection can be seen <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Archie-Best-Harry-Lucey-1/dp/1600109934/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322778395&sr=1-1">at the Amazon page for the Lucey collection</a>, which has customer reviews from Lucey's daughter Barbara as well as his nephew. The Schwartz book also has an afterword by his daughter, Joanne. These artists, like many comic book artists, were mostly unappreciated and uncredited in their own time, so it's pleasing to see their family members taking some pride in this new recognition. (It would be more pleasing if their estates got royalties for some of these reprints, of course, but this is the comics industry we're talking about here.)<br /><br />The Lucey and especially the Schwartz books both have their flaws. Fundamentally, we're not talking about "best of" collections exactly, but more a selection of stories for which original art was available. (Some of the best comics stories from this don't seem to exist in art that can be reproduced in a high-quality fashion; some of the stories in the "Best of Archie Comics" book the publisher put out -- a good cross-section of its work, by the way -- are just scanned from comic books.) Granted, there's no scholarship on Archie the way there is for other comics, and therefore there's no panel of experts to consult on the best stories; granted too, most of these stories are pretty similar, and choosing a "best" can be difficult. But there are some stories I would like to have seen in there, like "Actions Speak Louder Than Words."<br /><br />Also, with Lucey, the book suffers from being only five and six-page stories (plus a few one-page gags). A lot of the work that endeared him to readers occurred not only in covers, but -- maybe most of all -- in the in-house ads. He was Archie's primary in-house ad man until the early '70s, continuing with it even a few years after he was no longer allowed to do covers. And as an Amazon reviewer notes, maybe in too much detail, Lucey's work on the girls was particularly memorable in those ads, since he was dressing and posing them to maximize sales. I hope volume 2, if they are able to do one, has a section for ad pages and covers.<br /><br />The Lucey volume is still a good deal for Lucey stories from a particular period (1959 through 1965), and has several famous ones including "Woman Scorned," the story that has contributed the most to the "Betty is crazy and murderous" meme, mostly because it portrays Betty as crazy and murderous.<br /><br />The Schwartz volume covers the same period, and is therefore less essential. This is actually a period when Schwartz often wasn't doing his own inking and lettering, presumably because of the volume of work he was taking on -- he and his friend Bob White had editorial responsibilities at the company in addition to doing a huge amount of drawing work. The stories in this volume are often inked by Marty Epp (one of Lucey's regular inkers into the '70s) and Dan DeCarlo's brother Vince. The stories that Schwartz <I>did</I> ink and letter himself stand out by comparison and make it clear why he was always his own best inker; his Jughead just doesn't have quite the same magic in anyone else's hands. If volume 2 comes out I hope it focuses more on Schwartz's work on <I>Jughead</I> in the '70s and '80s, when he adopted his sparer style and mostly stopped working with other inkers.<br /><br />The majority of the stories are once again by Frank Doyle, with a few George Gladir scripts thrown in (Gladir's work on <I>Jughead</I> was always some of his best, with monsters and witches and pop-culture spoofs in the spirit of his <I>Mad House</i> and <I>Bats</I> material). I was one of the first to write about what a work horse he was, but even I sometimes understated the case: the amazing thing to me is not just that he wrote so many, but that so few of them are out-and-out remakes of previous stories. They're working within a narrow range, of course, but there's usually some sort of angle that gives the artist something fresh to work with.<br /><br />Here, for example, is a story that is not in the Lucey book, but which would have been on my "best-of" list just because it's one of those stories that sticks in one's mind as a kid and never goes away. From <I>Pep</I> # 134, it's called "On the Trolley," and has a premise Doyle used a number of times in a number of ways: some phrase or idea gets stuck in people's heads and drives them crazy. This allows various characters to react in different ways, and keeps the story moving as one character after another is pulled into it. And it provides Lucey with an opportunity to do the strong posing and comic emoting that he's now known for -- and should have been known for at the time.<br /><br /><a href="http://s839.photobucket.com/albums/zz311/tobiagorrio/?action=view&current=Pep_134_02.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i839.photobucket.com/albums/zz311/tobiagorrio/Pep_134_02.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://s839.photobucket.com/albums/zz311/tobiagorrio/?action=view&current=Pep_134_03.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i839.photobucket.com/albums/zz311/tobiagorrio/Pep_134_03.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://s839.photobucket.com/albums/zz311/tobiagorrio/?action=view&current=Pep_134_04.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i839.photobucket.com/albums/zz311/tobiagorrio/Pep_134_04.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://s839.photobucket.com/albums/zz311/tobiagorrio/?action=view&current=Pep_134_05.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i839.photobucket.com/albums/zz311/tobiagorrio/Pep_134_05.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://s839.photobucket.com/albums/zz311/tobiagorrio/?action=view&current=Pep_134_06.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i839.photobucket.com/albums/zz311/tobiagorrio/Pep_134_06.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://s839.photobucket.com/albums/zz311/tobiagorrio/?action=view&current=Pep_134_07.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i839.photobucket.com/albums/zz311/tobiagorrio/Pep_134_07.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a><br /><br><br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-80184311330198600522011-11-11T17:54:00.000-05:002011-11-11T17:54:58.798-05:00Hollywood and Classical UpliftOne book I recently read for the first time (I don't know why I didn't before) is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Studio-John-Gregory-Dunne/dp/0375700080">John Gregory Dunne's <I>The Studio</I></a>, his account of a few not-very-good months in the life of Twentieth Century Fox. Because he happened to be there while the studio was previewing <I>Dr. Dolittle</I>, shooting <I>Star!</I> and planning <I>Hello, Dolly!</i>, he got a look at the three big, disastrous roadshow musicals that would sink the Zanuck regime at the studio and condemn Fox to near-irrelevance until 1977. <br /><br />The book is rather short, and doesn't dig very deep into what was happening in Hollywood in 1967 -- Dunne notes early on that the Zanucks were trying to operate as if the studio system was still in effect, and there are some hilarious examples of their failed attempts to revive it (like their training program for new stars, which is run as if star behavior and public taste in stars hasn't changed since Darryl's heyday), but the sense of why studios choose the projects they do, and how (or if) they respond to changing public taste, isn't always clear; the people Dunne talked to were so completely in the Studio bubble that he sometimes seems to be in there with them. This is why, although Dunne was trying to create a <I>Picture</I> for the '60s, he didn't quite achieve it; we now know that Fox was on the verge of crumbling the way early '50s MGM was on the verge of crumbling, but the things that would sink Fox are not fully present in the book. Except for the deservedly famous chapter on the horrible premiere of <I>Doctor Dolittle</I>, it pokes around the edges of a studio in trouble rather than showing it; it's more of a supplement to what we now know about the end of the Zanuck era. Maybe Dunne just came to the studio at the wrong time -- if he'd been there a little later, to see the studio thrown into panic by the collapse of the big roadshow musical, then the book would be different.<br /><br />Perhaps the most memorable scene in the book is the one Dunne himself said he was "troubled" by, when <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0467396/">Henry Koster</a>, the veteran director, comes in to pitch a movie to Richard Zanuck. (With Koster, though not speaking as much, was Robert Buckner, a writer-producer almost as old as Koster.) Koster's pitch is literally thirty years out of date, an idea similar to the Deanna Durbin vehicles he had directed in the '30s. <a href="http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/2011/03/anecdote-of-week-im-just-little-afraid.html">Self-Styled Siren quoted from this passage a few months back</a>, and it's a really brutal scene. Koster piles one Old Hollywood cliché on another, somehow condensing his 30-plus years of sentimental family films into one pitch; Buckner speaks up only to show that his idea of popular music involves "jazz joints"; Zanuck gazes "unblinkingly" at Koster while waiting for him to finish so he can let him down easy.<br /><br />Zanuck's reply is a lesson in the art of rejecting someone's idea without directly telling him how bad it is (instead he sort of puts the blame on himself and the studio: it's not right for them because they don't need another musical, because they can't sell a classical story). Of course, since he was putting all that money and promotion into <I>Dr. Dolittle</i>, he wouldn't really have had much of a right to tell anyone that their story was too creaky and old-fashioned. Besides, Koster had done a lot of work for Fox, including <I>The Robe</I>. <br /><br />Dunne later wrote that the scene is an illustration of how "people are used and discarded like so many wads of Kleenex" in the movie business, but I think the book shows how much respect and power Old Hollywood people still commanded in the studio system at this point. Not just the fact that Koster got a meeting, but that Fox had brought over two veteran MGM producers who had been cut loose by MGM, and neither of whom really had much to offer. (Actually, Joe Pasternak, the veteran producer of sentimental schlock -- including Koster's Deanna Durbin vehicles -- seems reasonably with-it despite working on a bad film; he is a cynic who doesn't have much regard for the young audience he's trying to appeal to, but he knows what he's doing and he understands how public tastes have changed. Pandro Berman, a producer with a better track record of quality, comes off as clueless.) <br /><br />Fox in the post-<I>Sound of Music</I> era had more of an Old Hollywood style to it than any other studio of the era, probably because of Darryl Zanuck's involvement and the larger-than-usual number of studio employees it had (which allowed it to get Oscar nominations for movies like <I>Dolittle</I> through the votes of its employees), and because it tried to cultivate a roster of stars and directors, including trying to turn Richard Fleischer into something like what Henry King had been at Zanuck's old Fox: the all-purpose director of major projects, from musicals to war pictures to true-crime. What was happening at Fox in this period was almost an attempt to rebuild the old system and put the brakes on the independent producers; this didn't last beyond the departure of Richard and Darryl Zanuck, and Richard wound up as a successful independent producer.<br /><br />But back to Koster, the thing that gives the scene more weight and interest than most in the book is that it's one of the few scenes where the changes in the movie industry, and the world, really break through and become clear. (Another one is the frustrated comment of one of the people in charge of finding new young stars: he points out that Fox is still looking for beautiful people like Tyrone Power, as if nothing had changed at the studio since the '30s, even though the actual stars of the period are unconventional-looking people like Streisand and McQueen.) Koster's pitch sounds awful because it's caught in a time warp, based on a certain set of assumptions about what appeals to movie audiences. He seems genuinely enthusiastic about bringing "a story of great music" to the public, and this is an idea that went over well with movie studio executives <I>and</I> audiences for the first 25 or so years of sound movies. It just becomes absurd cringe comedy when it's delivered to a studio executive in 1967.<br /><br />It does seem weird now -- and must have seemed weird even in 1967 -- that American entertainment executives were so enthusiastic about classical music for so long. Sometimes the classical movies bombed (<I>Fantasia</I> flopped, and Lawrence Tibbett didn't work out that well as a Fox star), but that didn't dim the enthusiasm of producers and directors, partly because they loved the music, partly because music appreciation was considered something of a cultural duty, and partly because classical crossover movies were often big hits. But after Mario Lanza, the classical movie faded away pretty fast, and classical had a boom-bust cycle on television -- Koster pitches Leonard Bernstein as the star of the film, seemingly unaware that Bernstein was no longer a bankable TV personality, let alone a movie personality. The assumption that most people knew and liked certain elements of classical music (if only a few pop-concert pieces and arias) was part of movies for a long time, and a lot of cartoons and comedy routines were created on the understanding that we already knew Brahms' "Hungarian Rhapsody" or various Wagner bleeding chunks. And then suddenly that was gone, and the only thing left was Henry Koster, in the Fox office pitching a collection of sure-fire ideas (sentimentality, cute children, classical uplift) that weren't sure-fire any more.<br /><br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-48710355068428215542011-09-15T17:24:00.003-04:002011-09-15T23:02:01.302-04:00Revisicals RevisitedThe controversy over the revised version of <I>Porgy and Bess</I> was a bit unexpected to me, since "revisals" have been par for the course for a long time (since 1962, when Guy Bolton rewrote the book of <I>Anything Goes</I> for a successful revival, there have been many revivals and rewrites of that show, but never a revival of the original). I used to be rather strongly against revisals. But then I sort of came to accept them as superior to what goes on in the world of opera, where revisionist productions are done with no changes whatsoever to text or music, essentially making the text irrelevant. Changing the text, in an odd way, respects the power of the words more than simply ignoring them.<br /><br />But <I>Porgy and Bess</I>, which was routinely done with heavy revisions for about 40 years after Gershwin died, seems to have set off some sparks. Stephen Sondheim, offended by the director's comments about the original, sent off <a href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/stephen-sondheim-takes-issue-with-plan-for-revamped-porgy-and-bess/">a now-famous <I>New York Times</I> letter to the editor</a>. And that letter has brought the issue of revisions, respect for the past, and all the rest of it back into the spotlight, as <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-fight-over-retrofitting-classics-for-modern-tastes/2011/09/08/gIQAczJqSK_print.html">this article in the <I>Washington Post</I></a> discusses.<br /><br />As I said, I'm more tolerant of revised or shortened books than I used to be. (More tolerant than of, say, the actors playing their own instruments onstage.) I do think that revisals usually do it wrong; no matter how much rewriting they do, they rarely seem to work better than the original books, which at least have the benefit of period charm. One of the biggest problems when it comes to musicals, I think, is that the books are rewritten around the songs, which are sacrosanct -- the ones that are left in, anyway. But the way an original musical is written is different. The musical numbers are shaped in conjunction with the book. One of the "revisals" that really made an impact was the 1971 <I>No, No, Nanette</I>, and in that show, not only was the book rewritten (very hastily, out of town) but the whole project had a sort of overall concept: to make this '20s musical sound like an old Hollywood musical, sort of a '40s dream of what the '20s were like. That idea was applied to the staging of the numbers and the sound and look of the show. I've seen other revisals of older musicals that had no such overall concept, and so the book scenes were in a different world from the songs.<br /><br />With musicals done before the 1940s, there's an even bigger issue: except for operettas, or musical comedies with operetta influence (like <I>Show Boat</I>), there was almost strict division between dialogue, dance and music. Look at a musical comedy from the '30s and you'll see that there is very rarely any talking once a musical number starts; the pattern of a scene was speech, leading into song, leading into a dance. The post-<I>Oklahoma!</I> musical changed the shape of a typical number: now you'd often have dialogue <I>during</I> the song, or a new refrain after the dance break, or some other way of blending the elements together. And one advantage of this idea was that it could make a number feel like it finished in a different place from where it started. <br /><br />A song like "Send In the Clowns" has that shape: Desiree sings the refrain to Fredrik, there's a dialogue scene where he excuses himself and leaves, and then she sings the last part of the song alone. The words have been slightly changed for the ending, but they still make the same basic point as before -- yet the meaning of the song seems to have changed a lot because the stage situation has changed. Once you have dialogue within a number, the number doesn't feel static. <br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/iQDiKGRut80" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />But <I>Pal Joey</I>, to give a random example of an important old musical, rarely does this: numbers are closed off from dialogue, and dance is closed off from song. So while many of the songs are theoretically integrated into the story, they don't play that way, because as written into the show, they're completely static numbers: a song that makes one point for four or five minutes (and 32-bar songs can rarely make more than one or two points: either they say one thing, or they add in a twist at the end) is not a theatrically-exciting song.<br /><br />My point, I suppose, is that rewrites of old musicals may often need to go beyond the book; in fact, sometimes the book may not even be the problem. (A great song can sometimes hold up a show more than a corny but effective book scene.) Re-shaping of numbers, re-mixing and blending of different elements, may be required to really get a show into shape. Can this be done without destroying the songs? Would the estates even allow this? I don't know. But I think it's a mistake that revising of musicals focuses mostly on the dialogue scenes, as if they're completely separate -- they're really not, even in frivolous and loose musicals.<br /><br />With rewrites of <I>Porgy</I>, I always find a separate but related problem: when you remove the recitatives and replace them with dialogue, you find the show doesn't have enough big musical numbers to sustain it. (Of course <I>Porgy</i> used the dialogue format for its successful '40s and '50s revivals and the movie,so it can work. I'm just not sure it works for me.) Because Gershwin wrote it as an opera, he didn't intend most of the songs to be stand-alone numbers, and accordingly, most of them are quite short: they come out of the musical texture, happen, and go away. The finale, "I'm On My Way," is extremely short, but the brevity gives it its power (also the fact that it's a new tune being introduced at the end, mixed with statements of songs and motifs we've heard earlier in the evening). But coming out of a dialogue scene, it would just seem short. Porgy's first solo, "They Pass by Singin," is not a song at all, just a little <I>arioso</I> that is set up by -- and in a way is part of -- the recitative that precedes it. "I Loves You, Porgy" is a short number that seems to start out of nowhere when (as in the movie) it starts with dialogue.<br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/65TNhnTirP4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />Only a few numbers, like "It Ain't Necessarily So" or "My Man's Gone Now," have the length and the structure that we associate with a stand-alone Broadway number. Making some of the other songs work as stand-alone numbers, I think, really requires some re-thinking: adding dances, interludes, dialogue, things that can give them a satisfying wholeness that they don't need to have in the original context. That's something I'll be more worried about, in the new version, than the act of rewriting or changing the setting.<br /><br />The one thing I definitely agree with Sondheim on is that the Gershwin estate's insistence on billing it as "The Gershwins' <I>Porgy and Bess</I>" is ridiculous. They started this sometime in the '90s, and I thought it was stupid then -- Ira Gershwin, who was for many years the only living writer of the show, never asked for that kind of billing, and would have considered it absurd. It was always billed as "George Gershwin's" <I>Porgy and Bess</I>." After Ira died, the Gershwin estate started to push harder for him to be recognized as an equal contributor to the songs he wrote with his brother, and that is totally fair in the case of individual songs or scores. Not with this score, which was George's project first, DuBose Heyward's second, and where Ira never claimed to have contributed more than he did. (He actually downplayed his contributions a bit: though "Bess, You Is My Woman Now" is an Ira Gershwin lyric, he gave Heyward co-lyricist credit on it because the title, and some of the phrases, were taken from Heyward's libretto.) Sondheim is very invested in the idea that all the best lyrics in the show are by Heyward. And it's certain that Heyward, who wrote "Summertime" and "My Man's Gone Now" alone, should be recognized for that. But even for Ira Gershwin admirers like myself, the knee-jerk equal billing devalues the work where he and George <I>were</I> equal partners.<br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-11187714288582388642011-09-09T20:52:00.004-04:002011-09-09T21:14:44.332-04:00Unforgettably Ugly SongsSpeaking of flop musicals that the team of Feuer and Martin produced after their golden '50s period... Well, first, I don't want to make it sound like they never had another good show. They did have another big hit when they reunited with Abe Burrows and Frank Loesser on <I>How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying</I>, and their show <I>Little Me</I> (with Sid Caesar, Neil Simon, Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh) is one of the funniest musicals of all time even though it doesn't completely work. The team specialized in a kind of brash, heavily comedic musical that was hard to find elsewhere in the '50s and '60s (unless the show was set in the distant past, like <I>Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum</I>). But without Burrows, they didn't have many hits.<br /><br /> <a href="http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=3264">"Skyscraper"</a> had more ingredients for a hit than <I>Whoop-Up</I>: it was based on a good source for a musical, Elmer Rice's play <I>Dream Girl</I> (about a young, cute, female Walter Mitty), it had Julie Harris as the star -- she couldn't really sing, but at least she tried -- and Peter Stone doing the book after his success with <I>Charade</I>. But it substituted a rather awful new plot for the simpler plot of the play, and the score, by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, was mediocre; it was on a more professional level than the bad pop score of <I>Whoop-Up</I>, but Cahn and Van Heusen had been together too long and were no longer writing their best stuff. They did turn out a better score for Feuer and Martin's next show, the Hobson's Choice musical <I>Walking Happy</I>, but neither was a really good theatre songwriter, and they seemed to be trying too hard to re-create the success of their pop standards.<br /><br />Anyway, the only song from the score of <I>Skyscraper</i> that ever stuck in my head was one of the worst in the show, one that I couldn't get out of my mind because it sounded so ugly. I heard it on the radio twenty years ago, only heard it again the other day, but certain bits of it were lodged in my memory. The song itself has only one joke, and not a good one: a raspy-voiced man in his mid-'40s (the ubiquitous and delightful Rex Everhart) sings about high fashion and the crazy kids these days with their clothes and hair. It's not a good song, but it's bad in a normal enough way. What made it hard to get out of my brain is how unattractive it sounds: the melody, for one thing, sounds punchy and angry, the word "Haute" almost spat out like a curse.<br /><br /> The orchestrations demonstrate the dangers -- which a lot of Broadway shows fell victim to at this time -- of trying to import the brassy sound of '50s mainstream pop recordings to theatre. And most nightmarishly of all, the vocal arranger or somebody decided it would be a good idea to have the men of the ensemble sing the vamp: "Da-da-da-da-DA!" An angrier male chorus I never have heard. And that's hard to forget.<br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="345" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/y97TVgbJEv8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-48560855056968402322011-08-31T21:27:00.013-04:002011-09-01T08:38:20.809-04:00Who Was Bill Vigoda?Craig Yoe's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Archie-Celebration-Americas-Favorite-Teenagers/dp/1600107540/ref=pd_sim_b_4">Archie history book</a> is a good contribution to this neglected field of fanmanship (maybe not a word, but I like it better than "scholarship"), though as a semi-official history there are things it had to leave out as well as leaving in. (Starting, obviously, with the controversy about who created Archie and when exactly John Goldwater started claiming that he did it.) There are also some artists who didn't make it into the book, likely due to space reasons, and I thought I should try to give what background I can on some of them.
<br />
<br />The one to start with would probably be Bill Vigoda, because he worked for the company for over three decades and drew the Archie character almost from the beginning. He's best known, of course, as Abe Vigoda's brother.
<br />
<br />I don't know much about him beyond what I read in two of Jim Amash's invaluable <I>Alter Ego</I> interviews with comics veterans who knew him. He was one of the young artists who joined MLJ Comics and was working there when Bob Montana started doing the Archie character. His earliest credits -- again, like the others -- are on MLJ superheroes like the Hangman.
<br />
<br />Joe Edwards, creator of <I>Li'l Jinx</I>, told Amash that he brought Vigoda over to MLJ, though this may be one of Edwards' claims that isn't backed up by other sources:
<br />
<br /><blockquote>
<br />He lived near me in Brooklyn, and his wife Anita was friends with me, so she begged me "can you bring Bill in?" Bill was a terrific artist. "Well, I'll try to talk to Harry [Shorten], try to get him a position." So Harry looked at his work and said, "Well, it's not what I want right now." And I said, "Gee, the guy can use the work." When you've got a foot in the door, you can be stronger. Anyway, Bill was very broks... I brought Bill up there, and they were glad to get him because the war broke out.</blockquote>
<br /></blockquote>
<br />
<br /> When Montana, Samm Schwartz, Harry Lucey and others were in the army, Vigoda seems to have taken up some of the workload on the comic books. When "Wilbur" was spun off in 1944 as the company's first Archie clone title (John Goldwater believed, according to Joe Edwards, that they needed to get some imitations out there to head off the flood of Archie-alikes that their competitors were coming out with), Vigoda was the main artist, and that same year he became the main artist on Archie's title.
<br />
<br />Vigoda continued to be the primary artist on "Archie," often signing his work, until about 1950, when a lot of the work shifted to George Frese. But the wild, slaptsticky, often rude '40s stories that many comics fans consider their favorite Archie material (yes, even Archie, which did more than any other company to get all the other companies censored, got toned down in the '50s), were frequently drawn and signed by Vigoda.
<br />
<br />After 1950, though credits are spotty -- and signatures started going away in the '50s - I don't think Vigoda ever had his own book except for a few periods where he was a temporary replacement for some other artist. (When Samm Schwartz left to join Tower Comics, Vigoda replaced him on "Jughead" and also did most of the superhero spinoff title, "Captain Hero." But when Schwartz came back, Vigoda was taken right back off "Jughead.") He was mainly a utility artist, doing back-up stories, stories in Annuals and other special issues, covers that the main cover artists (in the late '50s and early '60s, mostly Lucey, Schwartz and Bob White) couldn't get to. He even did one issue of "The Fly" after Simon and Kirby left and before Richard Goldwater -- who didn't like the artists Simon and Kirby had lined up for the title -- signed full-time superhero artists who were to his liking.
<br />
<br />Here, from Amash's interview with Richard Goldwater's assistant (and successor as editor) Victor Gorelick, is some more background on Vigoda:
<br />
<br /><blockquote>
<br />
<br />I think [Paul Reinman] enjoyed comics. I'll tell you the guy who didn't enjoy it, and that was Bill Vigoda. Vigoda was also a fine artist and he was a sculptor. If you ever needed an example of a hippie, he'd fit the bill. He was the younger brother of Abe Vigoda.
<br />
<br />He had a medical condition that kept him from military service, so he was around in the 1940s when the other artists went to war. Between him and Bill Woggon, who did a lot of <I>Katy Keene</I> comics, they did a lot of work for Archie. Vigoda used to do sketches on the backs of his pages and they looked like Burne Hogarth's work. He drew men with big muscles and sometimes nude women. In later years, I saw some of his oil paintings and they had some very strange content. A psychiatrist would have had a field day with that work!
<br />
<br />One time I sent some Archie pages to the Comics Code. There was this woman who worked there and said, "I don't know what's going on in your artist's mind, but the artist who did this story drew something horrible on the back of the page. It should be taken out and erased." And on the back of one of the pages, Bill Vigoda had dreawn a nude woman impaled on a bull's horn. That was quite a piece of artwork, I can tell you.
<br />
<br />He was married and had kids and couldn't make a living as a fine artist. He told me he felt stuck doing comic books because he had to earn a living. He was a very creative person and loved opera. He smoked a pipe when he drew and was a funny man. He had a great sense of humor.
<br />
<br /><B>JA:</b> <I>He's gone now, isn't he?</I>
<br />
<br /><b>GORELICK:</b> Bill passed away many years ago. He became a diabetic and had a heart condition. He went to the hospital and they took a couple of his toes because of the diabetes. He never came out of that hospital. I was really devastated by his passing. I didn't really expect him to go. I was very close to many of the artists. He worked in the office, as did many other people. There was always a place for people to work there if they wished.</blockquote>
<br />
<br />Vigoda was versatile, then, and he turned out a lot of pages for the company from the '40s until his death in 1973. I would not say he's one of my favorite humor artists, though. It sometimes seems to me (and Gorelick's interview quoted suggests this too) that he would have been happier working in a less cartoony style. His best work, in the '40s, was before Montana changed and streamlined the look of the characters, a style Vigoda and the other artists then had to follow. The Veronica in this Vigoda story, from <I>Archie</I> # 27 (1947), still looks like an improbably mature woman, and Vigoda gets a lot of expression out of this early Archie who still looks like a buck-toothed ugly kid. There's also some male nudity on page 7, surprisingly common for the '40s.
<br />
<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheFC74t-sNtUa7BZ5COXsrh3W6Yu-swJ7tlcHVDI5SZGpUp_IK7LEqTZSgYGAiqKZFTpzszv6ZQIs6WDWZIomKy1rOU8EKyCHVFTUkQhQrNTa5pfWtoGQK8cL_FZM_HVdITNQu/s1600/archie27+003.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 140px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheFC74t-sNtUa7BZ5COXsrh3W6Yu-swJ7tlcHVDI5SZGpUp_IK7LEqTZSgYGAiqKZFTpzszv6ZQIs6WDWZIomKy1rOU8EKyCHVFTUkQhQrNTa5pfWtoGQK8cL_FZM_HVdITNQu/s200/archie27+003.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647217605932579762" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYtxub58DPSiw3dETq1otolO3dv69bqQFm0gzhxX_7Vhyphenhyphenl5q68Ph1uAdAwoVLsbkaTO66fAwvazRPeBwGmtIM0fa3ieNJQMTEahn2IULl5jxkDjdXLRfaa4Vmps7DEBMZ-rwb4/s1600/archie27+004.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 143px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYtxub58DPSiw3dETq1otolO3dv69bqQFm0gzhxX_7Vhyphenhyphenl5q68Ph1uAdAwoVLsbkaTO66fAwvazRPeBwGmtIM0fa3ieNJQMTEahn2IULl5jxkDjdXLRfaa4Vmps7DEBMZ-rwb4/s200/archie27+004.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647217491929650770" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtX-3MgvxTT2Dj_YSYIFU1RdBaCWzyzQfjsXqIK0S_TUJTxDhIKRaikfOQJRoHdb7jBSdWwD_Q12CvfPkXkmXPe0bYxGL8CA4rlWELJo7zJ5WKz3dYjTugP5j6w56kIXf3GUkY/s1600/archie27+005.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 142px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtX-3MgvxTT2Dj_YSYIFU1RdBaCWzyzQfjsXqIK0S_TUJTxDhIKRaikfOQJRoHdb7jBSdWwD_Q12CvfPkXkmXPe0bYxGL8CA4rlWELJo7zJ5WKz3dYjTugP5j6w56kIXf3GUkY/s200/archie27+005.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647217481350147458" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJfz6Vyw4AEXNhpJ4XE91NkrafqBTB1BBaNR36EOPNpKPi70uRQlsjjiXb9xcfpu8YnkYeXXJM59snNsMJfnqJabrkDYMnYiUA4Bp3KpeWNluBV86u-zxRlgfZBKG6ZVEp9O5S/s1600/archie27+006.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 140px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJfz6Vyw4AEXNhpJ4XE91NkrafqBTB1BBaNR36EOPNpKPi70uRQlsjjiXb9xcfpu8YnkYeXXJM59snNsMJfnqJabrkDYMnYiUA4Bp3KpeWNluBV86u-zxRlgfZBKG6ZVEp9O5S/s200/archie27+006.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647215283988662610" /></a>
<br />
<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_KNsRu5Ob_qNw0bZFy6Mr7vOHngtRc0AmtcUyGG-EhpzXlmL1cCUWu0TB696QMCJdA5WtC1-Ai9_dJToE_jV9NAVyUZtpbHJsuyUly9p5VdnOiUo4m0iw2swPNBnDShO6ZCRD/s1600/archie27+007.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 141px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_KNsRu5Ob_qNw0bZFy6Mr7vOHngtRc0AmtcUyGG-EhpzXlmL1cCUWu0TB696QMCJdA5WtC1-Ai9_dJToE_jV9NAVyUZtpbHJsuyUly9p5VdnOiUo4m0iw2swPNBnDShO6ZCRD/s200/archie27+007.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647215281819171218" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYXPlz8qyTr9cc3ypht2PsDkFS9EbxWE1jZpIcIlOFnkGfhz-KLXAa04qtxpy3aFv_KjkpOtn-B6gBMNXvczyYNvtVAup4XNw9_QH7FbfqgZjcTYoR_pHkiEtVuLkG7xYWU3gL/s1600/archie27+008.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 142px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYXPlz8qyTr9cc3ypht2PsDkFS9EbxWE1jZpIcIlOFnkGfhz-KLXAa04qtxpy3aFv_KjkpOtn-B6gBMNXvczyYNvtVAup4XNw9_QH7FbfqgZjcTYoR_pHkiEtVuLkG7xYWU3gL/s200/archie27+008.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647215269342278562" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiozNeZ73YLqslgR-XAmKgU1MFY5flSAKCB_hvfBd_IVK_EB0WYySXoHYi6qBR3ofbPl3DFw-0rFGAuxGv8dx7k9RejKIR-4Rw4uYRRie8T5MrY64qtFHPUdIL29YUuFq34iub_/s1600/archie27+009.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 142px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiozNeZ73YLqslgR-XAmKgU1MFY5flSAKCB_hvfBd_IVK_EB0WYySXoHYi6qBR3ofbPl3DFw-0rFGAuxGv8dx7k9RejKIR-4Rw4uYRRie8T5MrY64qtFHPUdIL29YUuFq34iub_/s200/archie27+009.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647215257762114258" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfmXPujHPwUbqOWsJkL5g6I4QSLbKdIu12r-XmDViVDmYW6a4ifqkAEapG4o4OGOlNFf3HoZmy8wdw4lizyRZ5_WPni0dscGTcGsrrpTCoW9XsB54WmZNLFPcCfMTJwdPuwyTq/s1600/archie27+010.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 142px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfmXPujHPwUbqOWsJkL5g6I4QSLbKdIu12r-XmDViVDmYW6a4ifqkAEapG4o4OGOlNFf3HoZmy8wdw4lizyRZ5_WPni0dscGTcGsrrpTCoW9XsB54WmZNLFPcCfMTJwdPuwyTq/s200/archie27+010.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647215261787766274" /></a>
<br />
<br />But by 1961, when he did this story in <I>Archie Annual</I> # 13, he was working with the cartoony Betty and Veronica and the more presentable-looking Archie, and he never seemed to be at ease with these versions. (Frank Doyle scripted this one; I don't know who did the '40s stories, though Bill and Abe's brother Hi was a comics writer and may have done some of them.) The girls have a rather square-jawed look, and Vigoda had a tendency to give all the characters this white-mouthed, uni-tooth look at all times.
<br />
<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhccrdwkhD3-OR273in0BGJEZ_a6ECSta70h5Xizh27dr4WL3Kh3kMwMmS2X41Ntx_6FZ2xAuDbAw1pr8zmrIrnBPH_xKYNdLYOfSHQqrrYVYw3IP4i7tyEIecQVWittjd4Ilbb/s1600/aa13-61.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 140px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhccrdwkhD3-OR273in0BGJEZ_a6ECSta70h5Xizh27dr4WL3Kh3kMwMmS2X41Ntx_6FZ2xAuDbAw1pr8zmrIrnBPH_xKYNdLYOfSHQqrrYVYw3IP4i7tyEIecQVWittjd4Ilbb/s200/aa13-61.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647228162615282066" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUfJ3r31AiZwDW58WgCvpcqcbAp3ym25BkAalvt4yupzVcxYmLqBrbvm7agsZlxx5VrMf1LRsE9Q9_4ORAG6DbJS5NbfrXLw1WnbiJ_phsFtz8RTYW40tibXhXB5UqPBcJ5jjg/s1600/aa13-62.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 140px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUfJ3r31AiZwDW58WgCvpcqcbAp3ym25BkAalvt4yupzVcxYmLqBrbvm7agsZlxx5VrMf1LRsE9Q9_4ORAG6DbJS5NbfrXLw1WnbiJ_phsFtz8RTYW40tibXhXB5UqPBcJ5jjg/s200/aa13-62.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647227910734125138" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8s0goK0jZT6C2YIs7n6jNH7gjPAh15xP5tLamV5W_XhQxIwHvZ7V6j1UXXgTOP0XUMaTpIX4AXPz1OieV_-tWU0385eygZ5sKHDrN_UhpUJZTXLJsyCa4GTSSuh6bwgT4YjnF/s1600/aa13-63.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 141px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8s0goK0jZT6C2YIs7n6jNH7gjPAh15xP5tLamV5W_XhQxIwHvZ7V6j1UXXgTOP0XUMaTpIX4AXPz1OieV_-tWU0385eygZ5sKHDrN_UhpUJZTXLJsyCa4GTSSuh6bwgT4YjnF/s200/aa13-63.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647227907579751906" /></a>
<br />
<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSHjdN9MiNE5L4nXOTF6tmvSdbogX9D5ioftIC6jD4uR9Nl20EZlNE-wx7sLO0a4fe7kERyyZhyphenhyphen62fbOHyzgHVYCDMRd5blVnL7prT3ov4WPwiSer6w_FxJnYwR47qgw134wHw/s1600/aa13-64.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 140px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSHjdN9MiNE5L4nXOTF6tmvSdbogX9D5ioftIC6jD4uR9Nl20EZlNE-wx7sLO0a4fe7kERyyZhyphenhyphen62fbOHyzgHVYCDMRd5blVnL7prT3ov4WPwiSer6w_FxJnYwR47qgw134wHw/s200/aa13-64.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647227903403068626" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-dhlv8krzLc1eDrkQ8w80htFOIc4-uKvk4OHdqkPjEtdK8BNNXlUH_lvaSgH-3V5ra4LExbtdDlJtMmROj8F1_d4CVMVjODsu3YFZcmAVhLTA2FvJW2uykU9-2XqDheNSFUws/s1600/aa13-65.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 139px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-dhlv8krzLc1eDrkQ8w80htFOIc4-uKvk4OHdqkPjEtdK8BNNXlUH_lvaSgH-3V5ra4LExbtdDlJtMmROj8F1_d4CVMVjODsu3YFZcmAVhLTA2FvJW2uykU9-2XqDheNSFUws/s200/aa13-65.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647227899419075810" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7GVfGH-zp2Zg-mXA1i-azLBF-f7wx8GE37AES3mYoAXWbl8XWhK34_MQDYO241botpwBe8ahYvwEGoa9Fwk4SukQGCGpINi2uv-N4tSNK44L_SSqcwc7qf5wTETI_RNOceKNq/s1600/aa13-66.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 140px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7GVfGH-zp2Zg-mXA1i-azLBF-f7wx8GE37AES3mYoAXWbl8XWhK34_MQDYO241botpwBe8ahYvwEGoa9Fwk4SukQGCGpINi2uv-N4tSNK44L_SSqcwc7qf5wTETI_RNOceKNq/s200/aa13-66.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647227890680808034" /></a>
<br />
<br />His inker on that story, Terry Szenics, was also inking for Harry Lucey at the time, so the style can't really be blamed on her; Lucey's stuff also has the uni-tooth and other similar touches, but the devices are less over-used in his stories and the characters look more appealing.
<br />
<br />Here's another Vigoda story (from <I>Laugh</I> # 164 in 1964; Doyle scripting again; I don't know who the inker was) I remember very vividly from my childhood, mostly because it was the first time I'd ever heard of the old "I walked into a door" excuse. (This was a story that Doyle re-did at least one other time, maybe more.) It's certainly not badly executed, but at the end, I remember thinking that Archie's pain looked real and, well, painful, rather than funny.
<br />
<br />Also, I seem to have found two straight stories, from the same writer and artist several years apart, where Archie gets angry and frightens the girls off. Never mind Superdickery.com, where's the Archiedickery site?
<br />
<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh46J-ZVepRREskJg40of5jrGczX0bjZIgXqBpjRuP5EYxsWCdHJHUk61l0v3fSFCKy6kDZiylu7l0yscyBd0Al250cwZXGsuBoYDQZzL_DEiSEo7vJwwogFTUjDtBvWPWz8DPW/s1600/lau164+002.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 132px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh46J-ZVepRREskJg40of5jrGczX0bjZIgXqBpjRuP5EYxsWCdHJHUk61l0v3fSFCKy6kDZiylu7l0yscyBd0Al250cwZXGsuBoYDQZzL_DEiSEo7vJwwogFTUjDtBvWPWz8DPW/s200/lau164+002.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637100401140921746" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha2oOk3EyJDRUB8BrXjF4YnuW3gVnXKwq3OMBw5eg_x_vxIWdDlidkhoxX4rch1V4992CHKv1EZw31CLtdZtAZo-Bq4vdRq6rcRrQSOP5K3vxxNaayP8llbHMsiHcBGuTAK_JJ/s1600/lau164+003.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 139px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha2oOk3EyJDRUB8BrXjF4YnuW3gVnXKwq3OMBw5eg_x_vxIWdDlidkhoxX4rch1V4992CHKv1EZw31CLtdZtAZo-Bq4vdRq6rcRrQSOP5K3vxxNaayP8llbHMsiHcBGuTAK_JJ/s200/lau164+003.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637100315615275954" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZTSMqrQrWehejPWyY2EgN72INDe9gD_KGtfNeqgquCzxpD8FTH7zqSgvGmfE5xj1z65Igt4xvO5BSPumKgcw_EYgMFUaNw4dlu1YhYCltuwrMt3ef_zQlQjV_Z0p2TfCFcV3N/s1600/lau164+004.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 139px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZTSMqrQrWehejPWyY2EgN72INDe9gD_KGtfNeqgquCzxpD8FTH7zqSgvGmfE5xj1z65Igt4xvO5BSPumKgcw_EYgMFUaNw4dlu1YhYCltuwrMt3ef_zQlQjV_Z0p2TfCFcV3N/s200/lau164+004.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637100310915839410" /></a>
<br /><br>
<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4X6apNBkoZ3ja1jUrAK6ZBsgIDPzxiu12JINvUyOOHuEoPKst8WgewzTDdoHjhVBTPoxHGkH-hw03j8nleBW_TSaH3eajmjWfaWK06xs4VZmkJABhRKrQk7joF4CbCNwhjxuB/s1600/lau164+005.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 138px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4X6apNBkoZ3ja1jUrAK6ZBsgIDPzxiu12JINvUyOOHuEoPKst8WgewzTDdoHjhVBTPoxHGkH-hw03j8nleBW_TSaH3eajmjWfaWK06xs4VZmkJABhRKrQk7joF4CbCNwhjxuB/s200/lau164+005.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637100300063738002" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQoWPFBZRU1z4YLjYVgooBMC7_EAfCQI557kTNtIJH6Ol4Af1jcUNhuBooVqnx3nBGVnyX2r_FOMo3Mw1kBtpFltznZ0h1SqVuPJPEnN-HtKb2QkV9BUNfTELs30fMR7O3lA6-/s1600/lau164+006.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 138px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQoWPFBZRU1z4YLjYVgooBMC7_EAfCQI557kTNtIJH6Ol4Af1jcUNhuBooVqnx3nBGVnyX2r_FOMo3Mw1kBtpFltznZ0h1SqVuPJPEnN-HtKb2QkV9BUNfTELs30fMR7O3lA6-/s200/lau164+006.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637100287353588082" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAHFgl3F5VLwMB4Fty_6HKKRzLCwJCEST0ke5SWpelN9YBchsJqqKqhkWQjal5P31GD236EYMer07HRfPf5298Y0I74YXMJVmQWyDcRBOfCbo7uXln2k0y2DO-Vg5x9dHbxtaE/s1600/lau164+007.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 140px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAHFgl3F5VLwMB4Fty_6HKKRzLCwJCEST0ke5SWpelN9YBchsJqqKqhkWQjal5P31GD236EYMer07HRfPf5298Y0I74YXMJVmQWyDcRBOfCbo7uXln2k0y2DO-Vg5x9dHbxtaE/s200/lau164+007.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637100278299923554" /></a>
<br />
<br />My suspicion that Vigoda would have been happier doing serious comics is strengthened when I see some of his occasional ventures into horror stories. There was a <I>Captain Hero</I> story, which I can't find, about monsters who come out of the telephone, and Vigoda drew some of the most horrifying monsters I've ever seen in comic books; it was written as a spoofy comedy, but Vigoda drew creatures who weren't supposed to be funny, just really scary. I had nightmares about them as a kid. And here's Vigoda enjoying himself on one of Sabrina's short-lived forays into EC-style horror comics (Doyle, a "Dark Shadows" fan, seemed to enjoy this sort of thing too):
<br />
<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4UPwv5Cs7xZIaVK0ECyDEWxInLqImj4DlmSesglIzdCYeddOAxnMcyAj-956KcmoulxDjdkf1qBA3fc5t-qaPmVoJrP5y7g4FjVGj4Qj-ckL2Sh-wShFY6FmUg1o8pYbkffMD/s1600/sabrina08+037.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 136px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4UPwv5Cs7xZIaVK0ECyDEWxInLqImj4DlmSesglIzdCYeddOAxnMcyAj-956KcmoulxDjdkf1qBA3fc5t-qaPmVoJrP5y7g4FjVGj4Qj-ckL2Sh-wShFY6FmUg1o8pYbkffMD/s200/sabrina08+037.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647230576107470226" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrffrlkrEvEdGD3Wy5t6Q100Up1WyLR58TNXS0E62wwPAiAdxovOLAJ5wTEk7mmGaJelkcQE_By_1z9nj6OsOmLrzwJSamsiBSAPO5G5RLOgdwqOv16lycZEGqKWvoMrju8j5O/s1600/sabrina08+038.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 138px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrffrlkrEvEdGD3Wy5t6Q100Up1WyLR58TNXS0E62wwPAiAdxovOLAJ5wTEk7mmGaJelkcQE_By_1z9nj6OsOmLrzwJSamsiBSAPO5G5RLOgdwqOv16lycZEGqKWvoMrju8j5O/s200/sabrina08+038.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647230560833537954" /></a>
<br />
<br />So in writing about Vigoda, I'm not saying he was an undiscovered great; quite the opposite. There <I>are</I> undiscovered greats, in Archie-style comics and every other type of comic, and some of them are starting to be discovered. Vigoda, I think, was more of a solid contributor whose work was at its best when the "house style" was more realistic and less cartoonish. His '40s work is his best by far, so the stuff to check out is the stuff he actually got to sign.
<br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-62383712772787679392011-08-24T18:21:00.004-04:002011-08-24T22:45:14.685-04:00When It Comes to Bull EventFans of bad musicals have a particular soft spot for <a href="http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=2729"><I>Whoop-Up</I></a>, a 1958 show that seemed to demonstrate just how wrong a producing team could go when they decided to do more than produce. Specifically, Feuer and Martin, the most successful musical producing team of the '50s due to their partnership with people like Abe Burrows on <I>Guys and Dolls, Can-Can</I> and <I>Silk Stockings</I>, started moving more into the creative side of things: on <I>Whoop-Up</I> Feuer not only directed the show (he'd already begun moving into directing, though with assistance from Burrows on <I>Silk Stockings</I>) but he and Martin co-wrote the book, from a novel later adapted for Elvis Presley's film <I>Stay Away, Joe</I>.
<br />
<br /> And after successful shows with Frank Loesser and Cole Porter, they took a chance on young songwriting talent -- unfortunately, the young songwriters, Moose Charlap and Norman Gimbel, turned out a mostly awful score. (Charlap had written the better songs in <I>Peter Pan</I>, though he and lyricist Carolyn Leigh were fired during the tryout. Gimbel was a mediocre pop lyricist mentored by Loesser, but despite the mentorship he remained a mediocre pop lyricist. A successful one, mind you: "Girl From Ipanema," "Killing Me Softly With His Song" and many TV themes.) Even the titles are bad: "Love Eyes," "Till The Big Fat Moon Falls Down."
<br />
<br />The cast album is a bit of a cult item for several reasons. One, so many of the songs are so cheesy and in some cases tasteless. Two, it's got the great Susan Johnson in one of her few true lead roles. And three, the CD of the cast album went into print and out of print in about five minutes, making it a semi-legendary collectors' item. It's been said that Larry Lash from Polydor released it on a bet.
<br />
<br />Also, because it was a Feuer and Martin production and they had never had a failure yet, hopes were high for <I>Whoop-Up</I>, which meant many artists were sent into recording studios to record cover versions of the new show's songs. Lash's CD release of <I>Whoop-Up</I> included these as a supplement: weird '50s arcana like Rosemary Clooney duetting on "Flattery" (one of many imitation-Loesser duets written in this era) with her husband José Ferrer, or Connie Francis trying to sound sultry and suggestive on "Love Eyes."
<br />
<br />But the greatest find of the album, and possibly the weirdest cover version of all time, was of one of the very worst songs in a musical. "Nobody Throw Those Bull" was a song for the French-accented father (Romo Vincent) of the male lead, explaining how proud he is of his son's bull-riding prowess. This is probably not a promising subject for a song under any circumstances. With Gimbel, Charlap and the very generic orchestrations by Phil Lang (Broadway's all-purpose purveyor of a certain type of basic, un-adorned arrangement) it sounds like this:
<br />
<br /><iframe width="560" height="345" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BLuLxHQ5Tlo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<br />
<br />You wouldn't think this would be a song anyone would cover for a pop version, but novelty songs were still around in 1958, and somebody at the record company got the idea of giving it to Maurice Chevalier. The result is almost indescribable. Chevalier always tries to sound happy, but he also sounds raspy and bored, like he's working overtime to keep that smile in his voice. What he does isn't exactly singing; it's more of a heavily-accented, barely-notated cry for help.
<br />
<br /><iframe width="420" height="345" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/IZ0twA6t2uA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<br />
<br />To end this post on a somewhat more positive note, a better song -- though nothing special at all -- is "When the Tall Man Talks," a showcase for Susan Johnson's singing voice, perhaps the greatest Broadway belt voice. Even the worst songs she gets (the worst is "Men," a blatant ripoff of the pattern numbers in <I>Music Man</I>) sound better with her full, warm, beautifully controlled voice.
<br />
<br /><iframe width="560" height="345" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BLhie6h0-_s" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-79091270935156309542011-08-18T23:57:00.014-04:002011-08-21T18:27:29.193-04:00The Name "Sloat" is Fun To SayI recently read the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Soon-major-motion-picture-multimillion-dollar/dp/0030535913/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1313716185&sr=1-7">"Soon to be a major motion picture: The anatomy of an all-star, big-budget, multimillion-dollar disaster"</a> by the late Ted Gershuny, a maker of low-budget horror movies who interned on Otto Preminger's next-to-last movie, <I>Rosebud</I>. It turned out to be one of Preminger's worst films, and essentially ended his career (he made one more movie, <I>The Human Factor</I>, but he couldn't get studio financing for it and wound up having to spend a lot of his own money). I don't think the book did much business, given that it came out five years after the making of a film that nobody remembered or liked. But it seems to be frequently referred to in biographies of the director, since it's one of the most in-depth chronicles of one of his famously turbulent shoots.
<br />
<br />As usual with Preminger, he bought the rights to a big potboiler novel with a topical edge: a French best-seller about the attempt to free five rich girls kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists, and the attempt by all sides to use the media and public opinion to their advantage. Also as usual with Preminger, he fell out with an actor during the making of it: Robert Mitchum was the original star, but he walked off the picture and was replaced by another fading star with a drinking problem, Peter O'Toole. And like most of Preminger's later movies, it flopped, and deserved to flop.
<br />
<br /><object width="400" height="325" id="ep"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://i.cdn.turner.com/v5cache/TCM/cvp/container/mediaroom_embed.swf?context=embed&videoId=178145" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" /><embed src="http://i.cdn.turner.com/v5cache/TCM/cvp/container/mediaroom_embed.swf?context=embed&videoId=178145" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="325"></embed></object>
<br />
<br />Preminger made lots of movies that don't work; two of them, the infamous <I>Skidoo</I> and the somewhat less infamous (but if anything more ridiculous) <I>Hurry Sundown</I> just came out on widescreen DVDs for the first time. <I>Rosebud</I> is less entertaining than usual for a bad Preminger movie, though. Even though it's a fairly expensive movie with lots of location shooting, I recall it looking cheap and small in a way that a lot of mid-'70s movies do when they don't work. (The James Bond movies of this period, <I>Live and Let Die</I> and <I>The Man With the Golden Gun,</I> also have that look: they're not cheap movies, but they look a little tawdry in a way that <I>The Spy Who Loved Me</I> or <I>Star Wars</I> or <I>Superman</I> -- big-budget movies of only a few years later -- do not.) But the picture was always doomed, because Preminger essentially began making it without a script.
<br />
<br />Like <I>Skidoo</I>, Preminger's <I>Rosebud</I> disaster is tied to his desire to bond with Erik, his son by Gypsy Rose Lee. He finally met Erik in the late '60s and adopted him, and <I>Skidoo</I> is often seen as his effort to connect with his newfound son and his generation. With <I>Rosebud</I>, he decided that this would be Erik's big break as a screenwriter. <I>Rosebud</I> probably wouldn't have worked even with a better script (Preminger's previous movie, <I>Such Good Friends</I>, has an Elaine May script, and it still doesn't work), but <I>Rosebud</I> never had anything close to a workable screenplay, and it headed into production without even a decision on who the villain would turn out to be.
<br />
<br />It seems like the film went into production largely because the Patty Hearst kidnapping suddenly made the subject topical. "We were hooked," Gershuny writes. "<I>Rosebud</I> was contemporary, vital -- now. All they had to do was finish the script." But they never really did. For most of the book's length the Premingers are trying to figure out who the bad guy should be: in the novel the kidnappings are organized by a self-hating Jew, in an early draft it was a German, then they came up with an English bad guy whom they named "Sloat," and finally decided that he should be a crazy Arabist, a Lawrence of Arabia gone wrong. No one was happy with this, though Preminger did get Richard Attenborough to play the part at the last minute as a personal favor.
<br />
<br />The book is not brilliantly written and is not a full-scale account of every aspect of the production; it's mostly from Gershuny's point of view, and mentions the things he observes. Whether Mitchum quit or was fired isn't really revealed, and it's not really the point. We just see a drunk, bored Mitchum arrive, do his patented I-don't-give-a-damn routines, including this bizarre moment with Lalla Ward, one of the five ingénues:
<br />
<br /><blockquote>
<br />Lalla informs him over lunch that he has been acting silly, which makes him lean across the table in the hotel and fix her with his menacing gaze.
<br />"Heeeyyy..." he drawls.
<br />"Yes?"
<br />"You -- want -- me -- to -- kill -- you?"
<br />"Well, no, actually, I'd rather you didn't."
<br /></blockquote>
<br />
<br />Another famous moment during the shoot was when Peter O'Toole got a fake bomb threat, which turned out to be a joke played by Kenneth Tynan. O'Toole went to Tynan, making sure to bring backup, and beat the critic up. In the book, we get this incident from the point of view of people who have to be on the set every day; it's something that happened offstage, and from the crew's vantage point it's not so much horrifying as interesting, a sign that the calm, reserved O'Toole has more rage in him than his performance has been showing.
<br />
<br />That's one thing I found interesting about the book, that it's very much focused on the crew, and a particular kind of crew -- the people who worked on big international productions, going from project to project and country to country. In 1974, many countries essentially had no national cinema: the British film industry was collapsing, and most countries were not what they were during the '60s. (One exception: West Germany was doing better than it was in the '60s. Preminger's assistant on the film is Wolfgang Glattes, the likable epitome of the efficient West German.) Some movies benefited from the international approach: I'm not a big fan of <I>Cabaret</I>, but it was a success, and the production's mix of American, British and German was perfectly suited to the subject. Other movies from the same era, though, showed the strain we might have expected from the mishmash of styles and languages among the cast and crew.
<br />
<br />A movie like <I>Rosebud</I>, financed by United Artists, doesn't have the financial problems that other, similar co-productions have -- in one chapter we meet Judd Bernard, one of those producers who mostly scrounges for money to make little movies that don't get much distribution. Preminger, for the last time in his career, can raise the money he needs from a studio, but he's still making a film with no national identity: since there's no "home base" where the interiors are shot, every location brings with it its own mix of actors, crew approaches and linguistic problems. A love scene early in the picture is bad enough because of the bad writing but even worse because of the actors' problems with English.
<br />
<br />All this makes the book a look at a type of filmmaking that gets its money within the studio system but mostly spends it outside. In the '70s the studio system was starting to re-assert itself, but the way to make a big movie was often to get the money and talent wherever it was available, go where the tax breaks were (there's a lot of talk about the correct national identity for tax purposes) and the sheer logistical issues involved in making a movie in several countries at once. Preminger is equipped to handle that, at least, having done it before. But it's a type of moviemaking that seems devoid of glamour to anyone who participates in it -- it doesn't even have a costume coordinator (Preminger's wife Hope usually did this) because most of the actors are just told to wear what they usually wear.
<br />
<br />That everybody knows it's going to be a bomb -- or almost everybody, since there are occasional moments when something goes right and people revert to a natural state of optimism -- makes the situation grimmer. But crew members in the book talk about good productions (like <I>Lawrence of Arabia</I>, the gold standard for what can be achieved when a studio says "here's your money, now go to another country and make it") with somewhat similar memories. Movies have almost become big television shows, where the key thing is just to find appropriate places to shoot and people who will shoot them there. The production described in <I>Rosebud</I> combines the pressures of indie and studio filmmaking in an almost depressing way. It sort of makes you understand why the glitzy soundstage film came back in such a big way later in the decade. Though of course the international co-production is still a huge part of the cinema and always will be.
<br />
<br />I first heard about the book in a Preminger biography, where Preminger's widow objects to the way Gershuny portrays him. I'm not entirely sure why. Preminger actually comes off better in this book than he does in most, including that biography (Foster Hirsch's). We do hear about Preminger's famous red-faced temper tantrums, of course, but if anything, the book downplays this side of his personality and plays up his dogged professional side, his determination to get the movie finished on time and on budget. Preminger cuts and simplifies things ruthlessly; by the time they get to the final destination, Israel, he's throwing out any attempt to make this a coherent movie (it can't be) and is just trying to stick to his schedule. He does it, too, as he usually did.
<br />
<br />In fact, the author clearly likes Preminger even though Preminger's anger and cutting sarcasm are sometimes trained on him. Andrew Sarris's <I>The American Cinema</I> was a recent book that Gershuny quotes, and American cinema fans were starting to realize that Preminger had a very distinctive style, and that his preference for long takes was about style, not so much about his famous cheapness. Plus <I>Laura</I> had become a key film of the nostalgia boom and the rediscovery of <I>film noir</I>. Preminger had been an independent filmmaker since the '50s, but as an all-powerful tyrant director who occasionally mentions old movie stars (he famously told Kim Cattrall "you remind me of Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak, not in looks, but in the number of takes"), he's like the production's only link to old-fashioned moviemaking glamour, a larger-than-life figure in a drab production.
<br />
<br />So as a young movie fan, and someone who is trying to learn about the complications involved with making a big movie, the author seems to be rooting for Preminger. It's Preminger's fault that the movie can't work, because he chose the writer and signed off on the bad script decisions. But once the film is under way, he's going to use every trick he knows to get it finished. We can see his frustration mount as the things he did successfully in other movies go wrong in this one: bringing in a political figure to act as a publicity gimmick (New York Mayor John Lindsay) brings only minor publicity and Lindsay can't act; Preminger favourite Peter Lawford can't remember his lines and does 13 takes of a scene, with Preminger urging him to just make something up and Lawford unable to do even that. But with all that, he's going to get it done. Throw out script pages, cut out scenes that can't be shot properly, but it's getting done.
<br />
<br />That sets it apart from most other "disaster in the making" movie reports. Most such movies go way over budget, and that's what marks them as disasters. Despite having to replace a star in the middle of production, <I>Rosebud</I> kept costs low. The sense of mounting desperation comes not from the budget but from the fact that so few scenes seem to work while they're being shot. There is some hope that it will come together and be better than the script looks, but that hope is destroyed take by take, bad performance by bad performance. (Gershuny does point out in an afterward that Isabelle Huppert turned out to be much better <I>after</i> the film than anyone had anticipated. And the American girl, Kim Cattrall, did poorly in this movie but built a successful career anyway. So the trailer's statement that the girls are "stars of the future" isn't that crazy.) The feeling that you're running all over the place, putting together this huge international production team that will break up as soon as the picture's finished -- and all to have it come to nothing when the scenes are so bad -- is painful, but as much a part of moviemaking as the <i>Heaven's Gate</I> type of production. "On <i>Rosebud,</I>" Gershuny realizes, "Preminger can make right choices, wrong choices, any choices. Things simply <I>will not work.</i>" That's got to be more painful than just having a promising story that could go either way.
<br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-46402605124889052092011-08-09T23:04:00.004-04:002011-08-09T23:46:46.181-04:00Movie Knowledge: At Historical NormsRoger Ebert linked to <a href="http://www.soundonsight.org/the-%E2%80%9Cgray-ones%E2%80%9D-fade-to-black/">Bill Mesce's post "The 'Gray Ones' Fade to Black"</a>, about a subject I've touched on a lot: people who came of age in the '60s, '70s and '80s did so at a time when television was filled with old movies as cheap filler programming, and so old black-and-white movies grew up unusually familiar with movies (and TV shows and animated films) made before they were born. Today, it's much easier to get programming that suits your particular tastes at any time, so it's much less likely that someone today will grow up watching Humphrey Bogart or Abbott and Costello.
<br />
<br />Mesce goes into a lot more specifics about how television made old movies into a part of the cultural conversation for Baby Boomers and even successive generations. (There were lots of late movies when I was a kid in the '80s, and it was as late-night filler that I first saw everything from MGM musicals to Ingmar Bergman movies.) And he explains how and why TV stations, and then cable networks, mostly gave up the black-and-whites. It's worth reading.
<br />
<br />Now, having said that it's worth reading, I feel a little uncomfortable with the implication that today's young people have unusually little knowledge of old movies. Probably the truth is the other way around: the '60s through the '80s were the exception. And even that era had huge gaps in its cultural knowledge. Silent movies didn't turn up on TV all that often, and as one of Mesce's commenters pointed out, today there's <I>much</I> more interest in Pre-Code movies than there was before. (The Pre-Codes inspired a huge amount of interest in part because a lot of them didn't play on TV very often.)
<br />
<br />But anyway, movie studios have always known that young people -- and old people too -- would prefer something new. So have TV networks, publishing companies, popular song publishers. (When old stuff eclipses the popularity of the new stuff, that's a sign that the form is dying, like opera has been mostly dead for the last 50 years or more.) And there has always been an assumption that audiences won't get references to old stuff in the same form: one of the reasons <I>Sunset Blvd.</i> was such an unusual film at the time was that it was filled with references to the past of movies -- movies of less than 25 years ago! -- and the theme of the film is that the public and industry alike have forgotten all about people like Swanson, Stroheim and Keaton.
<br />
<br />Television, art-house revivals (not to mention the arrival of old American movies in bunches overseas) and the early '70s nostalgia boom helped to change that, but it wasn't a normal state of affairs. Concentrating on new stuff, in a recognizably contemporary style, is the normal way. A contemporary style can be assimilated naturally. Experiencing older styles is like work. And that work is, in a way, harder for "entertainments" than for works that are supposed to be difficult. <I>Last Year At Marienbad</I> is recognizably an early '60s movie in style, and the modern viewer has to adjust to that, but it was always intended to be something the viewer had to work at. But a great American commercial film was supposed to be easily accessible, and as time goes by and styles change, it's no longer easily accessible. So the point of a great American commercial picture -- that it is both a simple entertainment and something with resonance beyond that -- is lost. For a lot of viewers it no longer works on the simple entertainment level, and until it works on that level, it won't yield deeper meanings either. A John Ford Western doesn't start to seem profound unless it first works as a conventional Western.
<br />
<br />So I can't criticize people for not growing up as old movie buffs; I don't think that's normal. I think it helps to adjust accordingly, don't assume film students know who Humphrey Bogart is, explain who he is and why they should care, just as we would explain who any old dead guy was and why he was great. Explain the grammar of old movies and other things they may not expect. For example, and to go back to John Ford for a minute, his visual style makes more sense if it's explained the way he himself explained it to Steven Spielberg -- he was a painter who tried to set up shots with a painter's eye. People can learn about older ways of doing things, they just won't grow up being used to them, that's all. That was abnormal.
<br />
<br /><iframe width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tfiCdpmuFUE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-28828855106708990292011-08-04T22:32:00.003-04:002011-08-04T22:54:24.699-04:00Looney Tunes Continue to Appear In Physical MediaTV Shows on DVD has <a href="http://tvshowsondvd.com/news/Bugs-Bunny-Looney-Tunes-Comedy-Hour-Platinum-Collection-Volume-1/15768">the complete contents for the Looney Tunes Blu-Ray set</a>. <br /><br />It seems like an uneasy combination of a best-of set and a family-oriented nostalgia release: the first disc and the first part of the second disc are mostly made up of all-time favorites (covering most of the major characters and most of the major directors except Tashlin), while the rest of the second disc consists of the complete cartoons for a number of post-1948 characters: Marvin the Martian, Tasmanian Devil, Mark Anthony and Pussyfoot. This is where most of the new-to-DVD cartoons appear, since the bulk of Marvin and Taz's cartoons were held back from previous DVD releases, and "Feline Frame-Up" was never on DVD. (If "Cat Feud" counts as a Mark Anthony/Pussyfoot cartoon, then this disc doesn't have their complete adventures. But "Cat Feud" already appeared on one of the Golden Collection DVDs.) So it's mostly a high-def sampler of the DVD contents, but there are some cartoons and featurettes that suggest what we'd have gotten if the Golden Collections had continued. There's also one cartoon on disc one, "Lovelorn Leghorn," that wasn't on the other sets.<br /><br />I'll buy the set. I think cartoons, properly presented, can really gain a lot from the high-def presentation. I worry that <a href="http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/2011/04/whv_screwed_up.php">some of Warners' Blu-Rays have been inferior to the DVD versions</a>, with too much tinkering and over-saturation apparently applied to increase the "wow" factor. (Artificially brightening <I>All the President's Men</I>, which is was never intended to look spectacular, probably creates the illusion that Blu-Ray is making it look different somehow.) Except for the ones that had DVNR, I was generally happy with the restorations of the Looney Tunes -- the colors weren't always the same as in the prints we're used to, but those prints don't always tell the story of how the films were supposed to look. But if the color saturation is increased for Blu-Ray, they'll look wrong.<br /><br />It would be nice if for the Blu-Ray, WB could fix some of the things that were wrong with the earlier releases: "Rabbit of Seville" (along with a few other cartoons that aren't on this set) used a soundtrack that seemed to be pitched too low. And several other cartoons used the "Blue Ribbon" openings where original openings exist ("For Scentimental Reasons," "Scarlet Pumpernickel," "Fast and Furry-ous.") I don't hold out hope that these things will be repaired for high-def, but if they were, that would be an inducement to buy these cartoons again.<br /><br />Whether there will be other sets beyond this one (and the Tom and Jerry set coming out before that), or whether this is just the last gasp for physical media, I don't know. Old films don't sell well on Blu-Ray. There was a time when the same could be said about DVD, but the difference there was that DVD eventually entered most homes, and fans of old movies started to buy them in that format. Blu-Ray is not as big an advance over DVD as DVD was over VHS. People who had movies on VHS would (and did) buy the DVD to get them in better quality copies and in the original widescreen format (though that doesn't apply to Looney Tunes; I certainly hope there won't be any cropped widescreen versions in this set). Those same people still have those DVDs, and they're not worn out yet, and the Blu-Ray versions are usually taken from the same prints that were used for the DVDs. I have to say that I see these collectors waiting for more non-physical options rather than Blu-Ray.<br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-49249919795209005162011-07-29T21:51:00.007-04:002011-07-29T22:11:36.011-04:00Grudge Match: Little Lotta vs. Herbie PopneckerThis one was suggested by <a href="http://suitablefortreatment.mangabookshelf.com/">Sean Gaffney</a>, the ultimate face-off of comic books' two greatest advertisements for obesity. Who would win a slow slugfest between<br /><br /><b>Little Lotta</b> (Harvey Comics), <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Lotta">a girl whose obesity gives her superhuman strength</a>, <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEIihCCGI5Amutho4RmC4FfLg7AGjTK3QB4-rWuKnfSK1S4L0VEqjbRgMv8gPzlTYe8do_pFAPJeDCZk_gRjADlUnE1J9UuKuLGtlGNk1L2gSSMAmWyvZdEZXaTUs8uj31q5Oc/s1600/0578.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 142px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEIihCCGI5Amutho4RmC4FfLg7AGjTK3QB4-rWuKnfSK1S4L0VEqjbRgMv8gPzlTYe8do_pFAPJeDCZk_gRjADlUnE1J9UuKuLGtlGNk1L2gSSMAmWyvZdEZXaTUs8uj31q5Oc/s400/0578.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634962013978752386" /></a><br /><br />and<br /><br /><b>Herbie Popnecker</b> (<I>Forbidden Worlds</i>), an obese boy with <a href="http://perlypalms.com/herbie/imgbar.pl">superhuman strength and any other power the story requires</a>.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFPvR6PZ4H9-nhczyEMuk47PYCg9DekGwDwhRBcAdbplnP8oe1zpt4VJGLzEUrUKEOVI1cslZBmhTJMUYCkio0Afdk4Ug-_lnxvLprtfwUEAHEJajohkcOn5vofNXaPNbfsn4g/s1600/06b-11.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 398px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFPvR6PZ4H9-nhczyEMuk47PYCg9DekGwDwhRBcAdbplnP8oe1zpt4VJGLzEUrUKEOVI1cslZBmhTJMUYCkio0Afdk4Ug-_lnxvLprtfwUEAHEJajohkcOn5vofNXaPNbfsn4g/s400/06b-11.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634961005123220738" /></a><br /><br />The smart money has to be on Herbie, simply because he has more powers and, as you can see at the link, can do literally anything. However, there is a case for Lotta, and it goes like this. As demonstrated in her comics, Lotta can beat up anyone. There is not a single superhero who would stand a chance against her; the girl has defeated entire armies.<br /><br />Now, on the other hand, we're not talking about her going up against any old superhero here. Lotta would easily beat Superman, but Herbie would too, after first scaring the crap out of Superman with his icy glare. Herbie is basically the comics predecessor to (or since he appeared after the short story was published, equivalent of) that kid in "It's a Good Life" from <I>The Twilight Zone</I>: he has absolute God-like power and all adults are terrified of him.<br /><br />But the argument for Lotta is that Lotta is simply too stupid to be scared of anybody. She once defeated lions and the Ancient Roman army without ever realizing she was doing it, because she is such a moron that she didn't know it was impossible. Up against an opponent who is too stupid to scare, Herbie may find himself at a loss.<br /><br />As I said, Herbie probably wins this, but there's a chance that Lotta simply grabs a bus and crushes him with it, before he realizes what's going on. An alternate scenario is that they team up to take over the world, but then we'd be looking at a future where every important government post on earth is held by one of Little Dot's uncles.<br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-49660595163296922912011-07-28T18:40:00.005-04:002011-07-28T19:43:20.499-04:00Two Billsa comment on my last post on this blog (a long time ago):<br /><br /><blockquote>Over a month without new postings? Are you even pretending to give a damn about this blog anymore?</blockquote><br /><br />Ouch. But fair. I haven't been able to think of much to post here, and I'll admit that's partly because of over-use of Social Media™. If I want to link to something I wind up doing it on the Twitter Box, and then I feel like I can't do it here, because I've done it there. <br /><br />Also I thought the tone of this blog was becoming a bit predictable, or going over past territory: I would pick a subject and then pontificate. Talking at people is part of blogging, I guess, but I grew more fond of other ways of talking, and I didn't really know how to incorporate them here. <br /><br />I considered (see below) re-posting old posts expanded and with repaired links. But I wrote up a couple of reworked posts and didn't feel they quite worked. Maybe I just got self-conscious.<br /><br />Anyway, one thing I sometimes still talk about here that I don't talk about much elsewhere is the Show Tune. (I actually get more call to write about classical than show tunes.) So I'll briefly illustrate something I was talking about the other day in a verbal, and therefore ephemeral, conversation.<br /><br /><b></End of navel-gazing; beginning of actual post></b><br /><br />------------<br /><br />The song "Bill" from <I>Show Boat</I> is one of the most famous examples of a "trunk song": Jerome Kern had written it for a musical in 1918, it was cut from that show and one other, and Kern interpolated it into <I>Show Boat</I> in 1927. It works, in part, because in the second act of <I>Show Boat</I> most of the "show-within-a-show" numbers are real songs from the period, and the slightly old-fashioned sound of "Bill" (in a gentler style that Kern had abandoned for a richer sound) sounds about right as an example of something Julie might have been singing in her stage career.<br /><br />To put the song into <I>Show Boat</I>, though, Kern rewrote the music a little bit, which required Oscar Hammerstein to add some new lyrics to P.G. Wodehouse's original. Here are the lyrics (unearthed by John McGlinn, though not included in his huge three-disc <I>Show Boat</I> recording; he did it on his "Broadway Showstoppers" disc instead) originally written by Wodehouse for <I>Oh, Lady! Lady!</I><br /><br /><iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/sMKI8L3G8wA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />And here's the <I>Show Boat</I> version made famous by Helen Morgan:<br /><br /><iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/3HeasqkO1Ko" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />As you can hear, most of the lyrics are Wodehouse's. There used to be some confusion about that, and both Wodehouse and Hammerstein had to correct people who said that Hammerstein rewrote the whole thing. The verses are all Wodehouse and the endings of both refrains are Wodehouse. But Kern rewrote the melody to give each "A" section a less clunky ending: instead of both "A" sections ending the same way (just with different modulations), Kern created a longer melodic line that flowed into the "B" section. Instead of a short melodic line ("of all the men...") the more mature Kern substituted a longer one ("You'd meet him on the street and never notice him"). Hammerstein wrote the new words to go with the new melody.<br /><br />The other thing Hammerstein did was to make the lyrics a little more sentimental. "Bill" is famous as a torch song, but in neither version is it actually a torch song; it's a classic example of a number whose meaning comes from its context. But the original song, as Kern and Wodehouse wrote it, is a light comedy number with a tone familiar from almost any Wodehouse novel: a sensible, cute girl loves a young man of no particular accomplishments, someone whose very name ("Bill") suggests blandness. She loves him "because he's... I don't know," and Wodehouse first has her compare him unfavorably to classical heroes:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />In grace and looks,<br />I know that Apollo<br />Would beat him all hollow</blockquote><br /><br />And in the second refrain, she criticizes his dancing skills, with a couplet that was one of Ira Gershwin's favorite Wodehouse lyrics:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />Whenever he dances,<br />His partner takes chances.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />The school-level classical references and the joke about a clumsy but lovable hero are very Wodehousian, of course, and they wouldn't have worked in the <I>Show Boat</I> version. The dancing couplet, in particular, wouldn't work because it would get a laugh, and laughs are not what you want when Julie sings it in <I>Show Boat</I>. So Hammerstein changed them to lines that are less comical in tone:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />And yet to be<br />Upon his knee<br />So comfy and roomy<br />Feels natural to me.</blockquote><br /><br />(I once heard someone criticize Wodehouse as a lyricist for the line "Are not the kind that you/Would find in a statue," because of the mis-accenting of "that." Not realizing that that was a Hammerstein contribution. But the Wodehouse original has the mis-accented "oppo<I>site</I>." No lyricist is immune to mis-accenting, I guess.)<br /><br />There has not been a lot of work, particularly since McGlinn died, on rediscovering Wodehouse's work for the theatre; the Wodehouse cult that's grown up around his books hasn't really spread to his musicals, even though he and Guy Bolton stuffed them full of the same jokes and themes he used in the novels. (He actually turned <I>Oh, Lady! Lady!</I> into a rather good novel, "The Small Bachelor.") I wouldn't say they're up to the standard of his best novels, since he was a more skilful prose stylist than playwright or lyricist -- and arguably his strongest work as a lyricist, for the musical "Sitting Pretty" (which McGlinn recorded) is married to a duller-than-usual Kern score (suffering, I think, from being right in between Kern's early period and the heavier <I>Show Boat</I> sound he was transitioning into; it doesn't have the light charm of his early work, but it doesn't have the melodic forcefulness we're used to from Kern, either). Still, Wodehouse and Kern and Bolton were a wonderful team, and it's good that "Bill" at least has managed to preserve one partial example of the Kern-Wodehouse collaboration for all time.<br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-36178942561651482932011-06-25T15:13:00.003-04:002011-06-25T15:26:14.293-04:00Charles Gerhardt ReturnsI finally got around to listening to one of the remastered/reissued titles in <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/10/idUS149062+10-Feb-2011+PRN20110210">Sony/BMG's reissues of Charles Gerhardt's Classic Film Score series.</a> The decision to re-release these recordings was long overdue, but the reissues didn't do them the kind of justice I was hoping for. When most of them were prepared for CD release, they were remastered in fake Dolby Surround, which didn't always do justice to the orignal sound. <a href="http://www.audaud.com/article?ArticleID=8660">According to this review</a>, the new remasterings have kept the Dolby Surround encoding. <br /><br />Before Gerhardt died he was working on a set of CD reissues which would have expanded the original albums. RCA released an expanded Franz Waxman CD and a Korngold CD where the suites from <I>The Sea Hawk</I> and <I>Of Human Bondage</I> were fleshed out with excerpts used on other Gerhardt albums. But after that, RCA reverted to the original LP contents, remastered in Dolby. The new reissues also use the original LP contents, so you have to buy two albums to get all the <I>Sea Hawk</I> music Gerhardt recorded. The expanded Korngold and Waxman CDs are out of print (I have the Korngold) but if you happen upon used copies, get them. To my ears they preserve more of the original sound than the Dolby versions, listenable though those are. (The engineer for these recordings was Kenneth Wilkinson, the top engineer for the Decca Record company, and they recorded them in Kingsway Hall, England's best location for classical recording -- the place whose acoustics were so good that EMI engineers preferred to record there than in their own Abbey Road studios.)<br /><br />The <I>Classic Film Scores</I> series was one of the many projects that fueled the movie nostalgia boom of the early '70s. Some of the composers whose music Gerhardt recorded, like Korngold, were dead. (The project started with Korngold, whose music was starting to be rediscovered: Gerhardt, an RCA producer, teamed up with Korngold's record-producer son George, who produced most of the series.) In fact, many of the most prolific older composers died around the same time: Franz Waxman in 1967, Alfred Newman in 1970, Max Steiner in 1971. But others were alive and were having trouble getting work, like Miklós Rózsa and Bernard Herrmann. Somewhat like today, a preference for less bombastic music on the soundtrack and the newfound popularity of pop music in movies (using actual pop recordings was almost unheard-of until <I>Blackboard Jungle</I>, and wasn't common for a decade after) had pushed that kind of symphonic, operatic movie score to the side.<br /><br />This backlash was understandable -- I guess backlashes often are. Hollywood music in the '30s through the '50s was famous for having too much of a homogenous style -- the basic string-heavy, loud, Wagner/Strauss late-romantic style was all over the place, whether from composers who were great practicioners of that style (like Korngold) or solid musicians who could write a good tune (like Max Steiner). There were other composers with a less Germanic style: Rózsa's style has obvious Hungarian elements while Herrmann and Raksin wrote in what was considered the mainstream American symphonic style of the time - a little edgier and less Romantic than the Korngold style. But even if the styles differed, they were writing on similar principles: a big, loud theme for the opening titles, lots of music throughout the film (except comedies). Even Herrmann, one of the most "modern"-sounding of these composers and the least reliant on big tunes, turned out a score for <I>Vertigo</I> that is openly indebted to Wagner's <I>Tristan</I>; there was a sense that Hollywood music was stuck in the late 19th/early 20th century, and it was inevitable that younger directors and producers would demand a different kind of music (or no music at all).<br /><br />The success of Gerhardt's Korngold album, and subsequent releases in the series, fit in with an ongoing rediscovery of and nostalgia for the old type of Hollywood music. It was around this time that Herrmann started getting work in Hollywood again, from younger filmmakers who admired his work with Hitchcock (by the time Gerhardt did his Herrmann album, Herrmann had already made his big 1973 comeback working for Brian DePalma), and in the late '70s, Rózsa became in-demand again for filmmakers wanting an Old Hollywood sound. Even before <I>Star Wars</I> revived the Korngold style, there was a new awareness of and interest in the musical value of old film scores, and Gerhardt's series contributed to that.<br /><br />Part of the idea behind some of these recordings was an idea that has been kicked around for a long time: that movie scores are worth performing as stand-alone concert pieces, and more philosophically, that the great concert music was being written not for concerts but for films. This hasn't really caught on all that much, even now: though there are still attempts to perform Waxman or Korngold or Rota's film music separately, these composers still get more performances for actual concert pieces that they created for that purpose. (Korngold is an obvious example: his Violin concerto, completely created from themes he wrote for Warner Brothers movies, is extremely popular, and it's more common to hear that on a program than a suite from his films.) Prokofiev is one of the few film composers whose work really makes a lot of formal sense divorced from the images - and even Prokofiev rearranged his scores into suites so they could be done in concert. When you take Korngold's <I>Of Human Bondage</I>, one of his best scores for a not-so-good movie, and listen to it as stand-alone music, you're aware of the beauty of the themes, but also that it can sound a bit repetitious -- something that isn't a problem when it's combined with images and words. <br /><br />As part of the attempt to place these scores in the American musical canon, Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic (a nonexistent orchestra, which he helped create for recording purposes and which played on many classical and film recordings of the '70s) made them sound bigger and lusher than they ever did on the soundtracks -- not just because he was working with big broad stereo sound instead of scratchy mono, but because he deliberately gave them more expansive readings. The original recordings had to be fairly lean in texture, so they could be combined with dialogue and sound effects, and the tempos were often very fast, to fit the pace of the movie. Here's Herrmann's own recording of the theme for <I>White Witch Doctor</I>, another not-great movie with a great score. It's incredibly, almost incoherently fast, but he had to play it that way to fit the credits.<br /><br /><iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/58p6R7mHcHo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />On Gerhardt's recording, the tempo is slower and the prelude sounds more like, well, music. He felt no need to do the music exactly as it had been done in the films; the point was to make the best possible case for them as "pure" music.<br /><br />I don't know if you have favourite entries in the Gerhardt series. My own favourite, the one I bought (in CD form, mostly because I like the liner notes) is the Herrmann disc. By the time it was recorded, Herrmann had been rediscovered by Hollywood, so there was not as much need to make the case for him as a composer. But Hollywood mostly knew him from his work with Hitchcock, and it was as a suspense composer that he was mostly hired after he split with Hitchcock. After Hitchcock, Herrmann was probably best known for his fantasy scores for Harryhausen pictures, because Herrmann himself had done some recordings of that music. So Gerhardt and George Korngold devoted a whole disc to Herrmann's earlier music, from the '40s and '50s, when he was freelancing for RKO and Fox -- <I>Citizen Kane</I>, of course, but also <I>White Witch Doctor</I>, <I>Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef</I> and <i>On Dangerous Ground.</I> <br /><br />The disc not only showed off Herrmann's range but his ability to do work in classic forms: the theme-and-variations at the breakfast table in <I>Citizen Kane</I>, the aria Susan Alexander sings (here given a performance by a young Kiri Te Kanawa) and the piano concerto in <I>Hangover Square</I>, which is the climax of the whole work. (Stephen Sondheim has cited <I>Hangover Square</I> and Herrmann's score as a big inspiration for <I>Sweeney Todd.</I>) A very well-chosen program that helped to show off a side of Herrmann that everyone, including him, had kind of forgotten about.<br /><br />On the flip side, I always thought the inflated, symphonic style of these recordings didn't do great favors to composers like Max Steiner and Alfred Newman -- the ones who were first-rate musicians but not necessarily first-rate composers. Steiner at least has one thing that carries him through every single recording of his work: he was a very talented melodist, and the <I>Now, Voyager, Big Sleep</I> and <I>Gone With the Wind</I> tunes sound great in stereo. But I remember the Newman album being a bit of a chore to get through, because he always knew the right musical gesture to make for a particular moment (big wordless choruses for religious stories; bustling music for a bustling airport) but seemed to be working in terms of gestures rather than having any style of his own -- particularly compared to Herrmann and Raksin, two composers who often worked for him at Fox. (To be fair, though, Herrmann and Newman worked together on the score for <I>The Egyptian</I> and I can't remember offhand who did what; and there are some Herrmann scores at Fox that I might mistake for Newman scores.)<br /><br />The question of style and personality seems to be the biggest one when it comes to whether a film composer's music "holds up" outside of the movie. Just as a writer doesn't (and often shouldn't) get to show much individual personality in writing a film, a composer's personality often has to be subordinate to the needs of the director. Having <I>too strong</I> an individual personality can make a composer hard to pair with a strong director. Korngold, who certainly had a style all his own, never found one of those great composer/director partnerships like Prokofiev/Eistenstein, Morricone/Leone, Rota/Fellini or Herrmann/Hitchcock. At Warners he mostly didn't work with strong directors, and after 1943 he didn't work on many strong films, either. Other composers with less personality could adapt more easily to different approaches. One of the things that makes Herrmann so exceptional is that he had his own unmistakable style, but one that was adaptable enough to fit the demands of directors as powerful as Welles and Hitchcock and Scorsese.<br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-71178616911093495062011-05-30T17:47:00.013-04:002011-06-02T13:36:42.952-04:00Ghosts On BroadwayI don't know what inspired me to ask this question now, but: has there ever been an in-depth, authoritative examination of all the rumors about ghost songwriters for Broadway shows -- which rumors are true and which aren't?<br /><br />Interpolations have always been a part of Broadway musicals; only a select few songwriters were ever powerful enough to have it in their contracts that only they would write the songs. But in many shows, particularly from the '40s through the '60s, the rule was that only the lead songwriters would be <I>credited</I>, no matter who else contributed. And also in the '40s through the '60s, some of the leading songwriters increasingly started getting into producing and publishing. And if you're Frank Loesser, and you have a stake in a show, wouldn't you help out with some uncredited doctoring as needed?<br /><br /> Loesser seems to be the center of a lot of these rumors, because after <I>Guys and Dolls</I> he became very hands-on in promoting young or new-to-Broadway talent and getting the publishing contracts for their shows. <I>Kismet</I>, <I>The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees</I> and <I>The Music Man</I> are shows he was involved with in this way. <br /><br />With <I>The Music Man</I>, the one section Loesser is often thought to have written is the opening and closing section of "My White Knight," a quasi-operatic arioso that sounds a bit like the music and lyrics he had turned out the year before in <I>Most Happy Fella.</I> When <I>The Music Man</I> was adapted for the screen, Meredith Willson dropped that section and wrote a new song (but kept the "White Knight" interlude, the one that starts "all I want is an honest man..." which everyone agrees Willson wrote), which gave extra credibility to the idea that this was the one non-Willson part of the score. On the other hand, rumors can be unreliable; people have sometimes identified "Till There Was You" as a Loesser song, which it most certainly is not (Willson had already written a version of it before <I>The Music Man</I>).<br /><br /><b>Update:</b> John Baxindine writes:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />There is not even the slightest possibility that Loesser wrote the melody of "My White Knight." It fits neatly into counterpoint with "The Sadder But Wiser Girl," and the two were originally to have been reprised that way in the footbridge scene.<br /><br />What he may have done - this is Jon Alan Conrad's theory, as I recall - is suggest to Willson that he transform the original, patter-based number into a ballad. (The original version is recorded on Barbara Cook's Carnegie Hall album.)</blockquote><br /><br /><I>The Pajama Game</I>, by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, is the center of a lot more rumors. They were young pop songwriters whom Loesser recommended to the producers, and he acted as both their publisher and mentor. It was such a confident score for two first-time theatre songwriters that there was always going to be a lot of talk that they needed help. But the big hits from the score are actually usually thought to be theirs. The rumors I've heard about Loesser's contributions are usually focused on two songs that <a href="http://www.mkstage.com/pajamagame/raitt%20remembers.htm">John Raitt identified as Loesser's</a>: novelty/country duet "There Once Was a Man," which does sound a bit like Loesser in its parodic edge, and "A New Town Is a Blue Town," which is one of the dullest songs in the score.<br /><br /><iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Bzv4jOTuwjw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />Loesser has also been rumored as the author of some of the other songs, but short of clear evidence of Loesser or Adler/Ross writing these, it's hard to say -- their work is (obviously) very much influenced by Loesser, so anything they wrote themselves could sound like it was his. ("I'll Never Be Jealous Again" appears to be one of theirs, but like a lot of light duets in '50s musicals it's influenced by Loesser's "Baby, It's Cold Outside" and other Loesser duets where the two singers step on each other's lines.) Steven Suskin's "Show Tunes" book also suggests that "Her Is" might have been Loesser's, but Hal Prince, who produced the show, suggests that it was Adler and Ross, and I think that one sounds very much unlike Loesser.<br /><br />There are fewer rumors about Richard Rodgers, because most of the shows he worked on were his own (he produced <I>Annie Get Your Gun</I>, but there's never been any suggestion that Irving Berlin needed help). He is said to have written one song, "The Guy Who Brought Me," from <I>Best Foot Forward</I>, which he produced for his protégés Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. Jule Styne produced a few shows by other composers, and Steven Suskin's <I>The Sound of Broadway Music</I> reports that Styne definitely ghost-composed a few songs in a flop called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_More!"><I>Something More!</I></a><br /><br />In other shows, the contributions of ghosts are more definitely known but the extent of their contributions are in doubt. On <I>Hello, Dolly!</i> it is known that David Merrick, the producer, called in Bob Merrill (whom he'd worked with on two previous shows) to write new songs, and that the songs were "Motherhood" and "Elegance." Jerry Herman, the show's songwriter, has admitted that the ideas -- lyrical and melodic -- came from Merrill on those two songs, but claims that he finished the songs himself. Others say Merrill claimed to have written both of them all the way through. (Not, again, that "Motherhood," the ultimate filler song that sort of works in context but nowhere else, is a particularly great credit to have.) Merrick also got Charles Strouse and Lee Adams to write a song called "Before the Parade Passes By," leading to years of confusion about who wrote the song used in the show: consensus seems to be -- based on the style of the song -- that Herman wrote a song of his own with Strouse and Adams's title. Whether any of the Strouse and Adams version remained in Herman's, or whether Herman's was completely new apart from the title, no one will know until the earlier version is discovered.<br /><br />Herman himself was called in that same year to help out on a show called <I>Ben Franklin In Paris</I>, with a score by two first-time songwriters. Herman wrote two or three songs, with program credit for additional material. And the writers of 1964's other big smash, <I>Fiddler On the Roof</I>, worked in the same capacity on the Sherlock Holmes musical <I>Baker Street</I>. On those shows, it's a bit easier to tell the ghost contributions: Bock and Harnick's <I>Baker Street</I> songs have a dry wit that the rest of the score doesn't, and Jerry Herman is, well, Jerry Herman, credited or not.<br /><br />The early-to-mid '60s seems to have been a busy time for ghosts. When the Mary Rodgers/Martin Charnin musical <I>Hot Spot</I>, a misbegotten vehicle for Judy Holliday, was in trouble in 1963, Stephen Sondheim came in -- a friend of both Rodgers and Charnin, and not yet box-office poison. Holliday's first number, "Don't Laugh," is usually jointly credited to Sondheim, Rodgers and Charnin, though I've heard several versions of who wrote it. Steven Suskin's book <I>Show Tunes</I> says it's music by Rodgers, lyrics by Sondheim with revisions by Charnin; others say it's Sondheim's own song. <br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/HMR4gdss-2E" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />Of course on any of these shows, there are always whispers that someone in the music department might have covered for -- or composed for -- the credited composer. One known instance of this is on <I>Silk Stockings</I>, where Cole Porter was sick and unable to be with the show full-time during the tryout. Needing a dance number in the second act, the producers got the show's orchestrator, Don Walker, to compose it: the song was called "Red Blues," and it managed to make it into the show and the movie version. (<b>Update:</b> John Baxindine says that Porter himself asked Walker to compose the piece, because Porter couldn't come up with something "sufficiently square.") On a 1959 musical called <I>Saratoga</I>, with a very disappointing score by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, Arlen was sick during the tryout and Mercer wrote his music for a couple of the songs.<br /><br />This isn't even getting into whole other category of numbers that someone else, often the dance arranger, creates. (An example is "Rose's Turn" from <I>Gypsy</i>, which was worked out by Sondheim and Jerome Robbins and then finished with Jule Styne, but all based on Styne's themes. And then there's the "Small House of Uncle Thomas" ballet, an original composition by dance arranger Trude Rittmann.) But that's not really ghost-writing.<br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-13967299839721555932011-05-05T12:18:00.003-04:002011-05-05T12:22:13.211-04:00Why It's Hard to Write For Bugs Bunny<i>(Cross-posted from the </i> TV Guidance<i> blog)</i><br /><br />Having written enough about <a href="http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman2/publish/TV_Reviews_21/-The-Looney-Tunes-Show-full-of-bugs-.asp"><em>The Looney Tunes Show</em></a> and Looney Tunes reboots in general, I don't want to say any more about that particular show, which could still eventually turn out to be okay. But I was asked why Daffy Duck, rather than Bugs Bunny, is usually the main character of these reboots (Daffy got more screen time than Bugs in <em>Looney Tunes: Back in Action</em>, and one of the better reboots was Daffy's <em>Duck Dodgers</em>). Part of the answer, I think, is that Bugs Bunny is extremely hard to write for, and the reason he's hard to write for goes to the heart of why these characters are so hard to revive effectively.<br /><br />A Bugs Bunny cartoon goes against all the rules of what we - and writers - now think of as well-made screen storytelling. There are many variations on those rules, but most of them are based on the familiar three-part structure: Give your protagonist a problem, complicate it, and resolve it. This is a structure that is followed in many Daffy Duck cartoons, especially the ones from the '50s, but even some of the earlier ones where he wasn't a loser. In the dream sequence that makes up the bulk of "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery," Daffy's detective persona Duck Twacy has a problem (stolen piggy banks), faces complications (getting to the gangster hideout and meeting all the gangsters) and resolves it (defeating the bad guys and getting the piggy banks) before waking up.<br /><br /><br />There are a few Bugs Bunny cartoons that follow this structure, and they all sort of can be broken down into problem-complication-resolution. Except most of them don't really play that way at all, because Bugs Bunny rarely takes the problems or complications seriously. The classic Bugs Bunny structure is sort of prologue followed by extended resolution: someone bothers Bugs (hunting for him or otherwise pissing him off), and Bugs spends the rest of the cartoon finding escalating ways to display his superiority over the opponent. Moments when Bugs loses the upper hand are very rare, and his opponents are almost always morons who pose no serious threat. (Yosemite Sam was created to be more threatening than Elmer Fudd, but Bugs rarely actually considers him threatening; it's supposed to show how cool Bugs is that he's not afraid of Sam, even though everyone else seems to be.)<br /><br />One of the most famous Bugs Bunny story formulas was created by Chuck Jones for "Case of the Missing Hare." Bugs is minding his own business when an obnoxious magician comes along and treats him bad. Bugs literally declares war, invades the magician's home turf, and spends the next five minutes dishing out one bit of retribution after another. There is no suspense about the outcome, and once Bugs has declared war, the structure of the film is based more on the pacing and arrangement of the gags, not on the story, which is only going in one direction from here on out.<br /><br /><iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/HZaBSruTf48" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />It's hard to do a film like that, with an invincible hero, without making the hero obnoxious. (The death of Mel Blanc probably hit Bugs Bunny the hardest out of the characters <a name='more'></a>because while some of the other voices are easy to replicate, Bugs is not - even Blanc couldn't always get it right after the '60s - and without being voiced really charmingly, he can be a bully like Woody Woodpecker.) So that contributes to the low success rate of post-1964 Bugs Bunny cartoons: Bugs can come off as a jerk if you write him the way he was written in most films, but if you make him a loser, he just doesn't seem like the character. (Yes, there were a few cartoons where he lost, but they were either fairly early films or clear changes of pace, like "Falling Hare." It's still a change of pace when Bugs is genuinely afraid of his opponent or has to struggle to find a way to win, while this is much more a part of the characterization of even the early, crazy Daffy.) But most of his films also belong to a type of comedy - loosely plotted, consequence-free and with no character arc or attempted character depth - that is not currently in favour, particularly on TV.<br /><br />And yet Bugs Bunny cartoons do need to have a strong story and a strong structure, making them different from Road Runner cartoons, which are fairly easy to do well (even now) because all you need is a succession of good gags of more or less the same type. A Bugs cartoon does need a story, and it needs some variety in the type of punishment he dishes out. Like his first meeting with Yosemite Sam, written by the great Mike Maltese. The outcome is so little in doubt that the ending basically up and admits that any attempt to create suspense is a complete lie. But there is a lot of variety in what Bugs does to Sam and how Sam reacts to it.<br /><br /><iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/b9K5L-UgKpc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />So the writer of a "traditional" Bugs Bunny cartoon usually has to come up with a strong story where the protagonist's victory (or even the <em>nature</em> of his victory) is never in doubt, where the protagonist rarely takes the antagonist seriously, and where the story stops moving forward as soon as the protagonist decides he wants to win. There's not a single aspect of a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon that wouldn't be thrown out of a screenwriting class, or that would get past an executive giving notes on good story structure. So the classic-style cartoon might be unrevivable, not because there aren't people who can do it, but because no TV network would accept it in that form.<br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-29921038102446808592011-04-09T11:20:00.002-04:002011-04-09T11:53:10.342-04:00Sidney LumetSidney Lumet, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/movies/sidney-lumet-director-of-american-classics-dies-at-86.html?_r=1">who just died at the age of 86</a>, was probably the most famous of the first generation of TV directors to move into film -- him or John Frankenheimer. In a Hollywood where movies had come to look stodgy and static, he was one of several young directors who helped bring a new vitality to visuals and performances in Hollywood film. <br /><br />A lot of his early movies were based on stage or TV properties, didn't have a whole lot of money to work with, and featured long static speeches. Many directors, then and now, think the only way to make something like that "cinematic" is to open it up, take it outside, find something to break up the monotony. Coming from live TV, Lumet understood that one person standing in a room giving a speech can work extremely well on the screen, as long as the performance is right and the camera catches it in the right way.<br /><br />So it is in this scene from <I>The Pawnbroker</I>, one of Lumet's most influential movies (not just for getting Production Code approval for nudity, and thus pushing the Code one more step further toward complete collapse). Lumet was rightly acclaimed for getting the very best out of Rod Steiger, an actor who could go over the top unless he was extremely well directed. But he also catches this speech in a long take that doesn't have any sense of show-offiness. It's a long take that's claustrophobic and, once it settles on the medium close-up of Steiger, increases the intensity of the scene by its refusal to let us take our eyes off him until the speech is over. <br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5qWqizV_puk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-27840119103114910862011-03-12T16:29:00.008-05:002011-03-13T00:02:49.999-05:00Until Then, We'll Have To Muddle Through Somehow<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/oCVz84FiF9g" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />I couldn't say I'm surprised <a href="http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2058594,00.html">that Hugh Martin died</a>; he was 96, after all, and the one time I was lucky enough to finally talk with him (late last year) he didn't sound well. He still remembered a lot and could talk for a long time under the right conditions; when I tried to cut the conversation short because I was worried about him, he said "it's because of the frog in my throat, isn't it?," got his second wind, and kept on answering my questions. He even answered some follow-up questions later in the day when I didn't have a couple of things I needed <a href="http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/12/09/xmas-mr-martin/">for a short article I was doing.</a><br /><br />But I am sad that he's gone. As I've said many times, Martin was one of my favorite people in American popular music. I mean, quite apart from the fact that he was alive and still able to talk about that era in Broadway, Hollywood and pop; even if he hadn't been one of the last living representatives of that period, I'd still have considered him one of the greats. <br /><br />He didn't achieve quite the level of success that his talent would have justified, partly because he so good at so many things that he didn't concentrate on just one (his career as a vocal arranger gave him less time for composing) and partly because he didn't always do his best work in the best circumstances. For <I>Look Ma, I'm Dancin'!</I>, his first Broadway score as sole composer lyricist, he did some outstanding work, including "Little Boy Blues," a comic/sad song full of tricky harmonies and rhymes. But he also did some work that wasn't quite up to his best, and <a href="http://www.playbill.com/news/article/148728-Hugh-Martin-Composer-of-Meet-Me-in-St-Louis-Dies-at-96">as he recalled in his liner notes for a cast album reissue</a>, "I got a false sense of security and instead of working hard, I relaxed a little. As a result, there are songs that are, well, OK, but not up to the standard of a George Abbott, Jerome Robbins, Nancy Walker musical. I wish I had tried harder."<br /><br />Whereas some of his best songs were written for projects that had no real value other than his work: "An Occasional Man," which I've praised many times, was written for an awful movie where it received an awful staging.<br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tYqspy3LVSg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />And <I>Athena</i> has one of the best ballads in movie musicals of the '50s <a href="http://fan.tcm.com/_Love-Can-Change-the-Stars/audio/798598/66470.html">("Love Can Change the Stars")</a> stuck in one of those films that MGM made primarily to burn off people's contracts. The original songs for <I>Meet Me In St. Louis</I> are a rare case of Martin's best work meeting everyone else's best work -- also the stage version of <I>Best Foot Forward</I>, which really deserves a concert staging with the original Don Walker orchestrations.<br /><br /><object width="480" height="406"><param name="movie" value="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/video/x3yb32?theme=none"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/video/x3yb32?theme=none" width="480" height="406" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />And then there's the vocal arranging. <I>Gentlemen Prefer Blondes</i> was the first cast album where the vocal arrangements simply blew me away; sometimes the choral sections (which often involved substatial original work from Martin, in music and lyrics) were more fun than the refrains. Obviously he was influenced by Kay Thompson, and as he said, she got annoyed at him because "she thought I imitated her, which I did." But he had his own take on her style, and his arrangements at MGM sometimes sounded more effective than hers in the mouths of studio choristers and fictional characters. And he was the first person to bring that sound to the Broadway theatre. <br /><br />Before Martin, vocal arrangement on Broadway was almost nonexistent, except in operetta where there might be more classical-influenced arrangements going on. People would sing the refrain, then again, then again. Richard Rodgers, looking for a "girl group" sound for "Sing For Your Supper" in <I>The Boys From Syracuse</I>, let Martin arrange it. He had the singers do the refrain "straight" the first time, then embellish it with bits that sounded (but weren't) improvised, then really embellish it the third time around. And he had to do this, mind you, not for jazz singers but for Broadway singer/actors who didn't have experience with this kind of arranging, meaning it had to be simple enough for the performers to learn quickly. What he came up with launched his career on Broadway (Rodgers gave him more vocal work and eventually hired him and Ralph Blane to write the score for <I>Best Foot Forward</I>) and changed the sound of Broadway; it was such a successful arrangement that it was used more or less unchanged in every version of the show from then on -- the script was rewritten, the orchestrations changed (though this recording, from 1953 uses the originals), but the Martin version of refrains 2 and 3 was usually kept.<br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/JUD3IXI0BH8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-41609992562625690692011-02-28T23:59:00.007-05:002011-03-01T01:23:19.292-05:00The Return of Elwy YostI've been hoping TV Ontario would put some of its old material online, and they recently created a site to do just that, a "Public Archive" with selected episodes of some of its older shows. In particular, they cleared the rights to <a href="http://archive.tvo.org/program/119641">some of the 16 mm filmed interviews conducted by Elwy Yost</a>, host of "Talking Film" and "Saturday Night at the Movies," who built up one of North America's biggest libraries of interviews with actors, directors, writers and technicians from old Hollywood. <br /><br />And most of the interviews were incorporated into the show in very large, long chunks without too much editing; it's a style that will be familiar to viewers of public television from the '70s and '80s (when a lot of these interviews were shot) but which I like better than the way such interviews are usually done nowadays -- either interspersed with a lot of clips and stills, so that we can't see the interviewee think before he or she talks, or cut up into really small snippets.<br /><br />So for example, in this half-hour compilation of interviews about the (then) modern British film industry, the interview with Ken Adam, starting at around 11:30, goes on for more than 10 minutes. It's edited down, but it's edited down less than you'd get almost anywhere else.<br /><br /><object id="flashObj" width="480" height="360" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,47,0"><param name="movie" value="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><param name="flashVars" value="videoId=292386692001&playerID=63470006001&playerKey=AQ~~,AAAABDk7A3E~,xYAUE9lVY98sZuR8hPqcKW53BLxRuCch&domain=embed&dynamicStreaming=true" /><param name="base" value="http://admin.brightcove.com" /><param name="seamlesstabbing" value="false" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="swLiveConnect" value="true" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><embed src="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" flashVars="videoId=292386692001&playerID=63470006001&playerKey=AQ~~,AAAABDk7A3E~,xYAUE9lVY98sZuR8hPqcKW53BLxRuCch&domain=embed&dynamicStreaming=true" base="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="flashObj" width="480" height="360" seamlesstabbing="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" swLiveConnect="true" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"></embed></object><br /><br />Here for another example is the show with Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng; they don't say much that's new, but hearing the contours of their speech and seeing their expressions while they speak is the interesting part.<br /><br /><object id="flashObj" width="480" height="360" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,47,0"><param name="movie" value="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><param name="flashVars" value="videoId=292361541001&playerID=63470006001&playerKey=AQ~~,AAAABDk7A3E~,xYAUE9lVY98sZuR8hPqcKW53BLxRuCch&domain=embed&dynamicStreaming=true" /><param name="base" value="http://admin.brightcove.com" /><param name="seamlesstabbing" value="false" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="swLiveConnect" value="true" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><embed src="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" flashVars="videoId=292361541001&playerID=63470006001&playerKey=AQ~~,AAAABDk7A3E~,xYAUE9lVY98sZuR8hPqcKW53BLxRuCch&domain=embed&dynamicStreaming=true" base="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="flashObj" width="480" height="360" seamlesstabbing="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" swLiveConnect="true" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"></embed></object><br /><br />And for one final example, here's one of the videotaped in-studio interviews TVO periodically did, this one with John Huston. They have a couple of other in-studio segments, including a two-parter with the New Deal documentarian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pare_Lorentz">Pare Lorentz</a>. <br /><br />One of the in-studio interviews I most remember from <I>Saturday Night at the Movies</I>, though it's not on the site, is the one where Eddie Bracken claimed to have directed a scene from <I>The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek</I> while Preston Sturges was unavailable for the day. It was the scene where Trudy meets Norval again after her big night, and Bracken claimed that he panned down to the "JUST MARRIED" sign in imitation of Sturges' love for doing things in one shot. Was the story true? I have no idea; probably not. But I loved that someone could come into a studio in Canada and make that claim. There are all kinds of interviews I saw where people said things I may not have agreed with but were interesting; for example, writer Nat Perrin, who worked on <I>Duck Soup</I>, arguing at length that the movie didn't work. That's just something you won't see on most making-of documentaries.<br /><br /><object id="flashObj" width="480" height="360" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,47,0"><param name="movie" value="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><param name="flashVars" value="videoId=215629393001&playerID=63470006001&playerKey=AQ~~,AAAABDk7A3E~,xYAUE9lVY98sZuR8hPqcKW53BLxRuCch&domain=embed&dynamicStreaming=true" /><param name="base" value="http://admin.brightcove.com" /><param name="seamlesstabbing" value="false" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="swLiveConnect" value="true" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><embed src="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" flashVars="videoId=215629393001&playerID=63470006001&playerKey=AQ~~,AAAABDk7A3E~,xYAUE9lVY98sZuR8hPqcKW53BLxRuCch&domain=embed&dynamicStreaming=true" base="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="flashObj" width="480" height="360" seamlesstabbing="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" swLiveConnect="true" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"></embed></object><br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6956070.post-66852190196686178222011-02-10T23:24:00.007-05:002011-02-11T10:47:55.546-05:00A Response, Over Five Years Too LateI was reading over <a href="http://www.sterow.com">Stephen Rowley's blog</a> and came across a fine 2005 post that I remembered reading before (when his blog was "Cinephobia") but hadn't really thought to respond to: <a href="http://www.sterow.com/?p=452">"Better Than Ever,"</a> a response to critics who pine for the good old days of movies. Rowley argues that recent movies have an advantage: the larger range of techniques available due to the innovators that came before it. So an older work might be notable due to the technique that it invented or developed, but a newer work can take that and build on it. He's not saying that older films (or older anything) are obsolete, just that each innovation adds to a medium and the works that follow are richer for having a greater range of options open to them:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />Look at this way: cinema is a young medium. It’s barely over one hundred years old, and cinema with sound is less than eighty. Many of the film classics we know are developmental works, famous because they were the first to utilise a particular technique. The technical capabilities of cinema continue to expand, and as they do so the artistic boundaries expand concurrently. Filmmakers are still exploring the limits of the medium, which is part of what makes filmgoing so fun. This means that more recent films are at least potentially able to draw on a richer heritage of filmmaking experience. Think of it like a language: as the language matures, the vocabulary available to its speakers increases.<br /><br />Which is not to say that any older film is inferior to a more recent film: few films (old or new) make use of the full possibilities the medium presents, and the form was mature enough by about the forties that good filmmakers could achieve results that still look exceptional today. (Citizen Kane, for example, is still astonishing as both a technical and artistic achievement). Yet if you believe that something was added to cinema by the French New Wave, or the “New Hollywood” of the seventies, or the Hong Kong Cinema of the eighties and nineties, or any of the other important filmmaking movements of the last fifty years, then don’t you have to believe that the artistic possibilities open to a filmmaker today are richer?<br /></blockquote><br /><br />I think it's a good argument, and a true one in some cases. I don't quite see eye-to-eye with it, as you might expect from someone who started a blog to write mostly about old stuff and who is constantly arguing for the validity of older works, older styles. While I think new works <I>can</I> be richer for the range of options available to them, I don't think they always are.<br /><br />The easiest example to use here is not movies but music, because its new techniques are based on almost scientific principles (and therefore it's sort of possible to quantify innovations in music). As the history of Western music progresses, you can see that pattern of artistic development, at least broadly. Orchestras get bigger, there are more instruments and more sounds, harmonies get more complicated, and composers become open to more influences from around the world. There's no question that the history of music has benefited from all this. <br /><br />But does that mean that the language of music matured or even got richer at any particular time? It depends on what you mean by richer. Sometimes Western music would become more advanced in one area, like harmony, while getting simpler and squarer in another area, like rhythm. Early music has a spikier sound than Romantic music that sometimes makes it sound <I>more</I> "advanced" in certain respects. Pop music is the same way, sometimes becoming simpler than what came before it and limiting, rather than expanding, the range of choices available to it. It's not about getting better or worse -- but while there's always a style that can be identified as contemporary and current, it's not always possible to say that it embraces all the historical possibilities of the form, or that it builds upon its predecessors to be more technically advanced in every area.<br /><br />The same applies to movies. There are a lot of choices open to filmmakers thanks to the longer history of the medium -- in theory. In practice, most movies at a given time tend to share a common basic grammar, which means that certain choices will usually be made and others not made, almost instinctively. As I've said in the past, the two-shot, with two characters interacting and communicating in the same frame, was one of the basic units of film from the silent era and for decades after. Now putting two characters in the frame together without cutting between them is almost a special effect; it's still done, but it cuts against modern filmmaking instinct.<br /><br />What I guess I'm saying is that, in a medium with any current popularity, the creator makes a lot of stylistic choices, but others are almost made for him or her, unconsciously. That's why the music or literature of a particular period tends to share certain stylistic traits in common, even as the great artists add their own voice to the prevailing style. Same with movies. Like the structure and sound of a popular song, the style of a movie is defined partly by the filmmaker but partly by the time period.<br /><br />Which means that the range of choices open to the filmmaker is never <I>quite</I> as broad as it might seem, no matter how much history comes before it. A Coen Bros. movie is a Coen Bros. movie, but it's also a '80s or '90s or '00s or '10s movie, and if you break it down beat by beat and shot by shot you'll see a lot of choices that are similar to other movies of the time, just as even <I>Citizen Kane</i> has plenty of moments that mark it as an RKO movie from 1941. <br /><br />And this is as it should be, because a) art has a large instinctive component, and instinct is shaped by the time one lives in, and b) an artist who actually wants to put his or her work before the public usually has to create something the public will recognize as contemporary. Most movies <I>exclude</I> certain choices that would be seen as belonging to the past. Unless it's a crazy stunt like <I>The Good German</I>, and even that has a ton of contemporary visual style in it. But anyway, many things an older film, even a <I>recent</I> older film might have done, can't really be done today. They belong to another time when a combination of instinct and intellect made those particular techniques possible. <br /><br />Which is why I don't think we really build on the past to a great extent. We do sometimes, but so much of what artists do is set in stone by the prevailing style that a look back to the past seems instantly anachronistic -- like Mozart dipping into the Baroque style and quoting the "Hallelujah Chorus" in his Great Mass in C minor, or Altman in <I>The Player</I> parodying (or paying homage to, but mostly parodying, I think) the heavy-footed camera moves of <I>Touch of Evil.</i> <br /><br />Artistic boundaries expand, but they also contract, and perhaps with the exception of the occasional visionary, particularly the Charles Ives or Emily Dickinson who doesn't feel a need to put his or her work in front of a broad public, any artist is a prisoner of his or her era. That's fine, but it means the choices aren't really broader except in an almost mechanical sense: quicker and smoother camera moves, less obvious rear projection. And even the mechanical improvements arguably have their disadvantages -- or at least you can't say that an earlier film, which found a perfect way to use the equipment available, would have done better if it had had the later equipment. It would have done the shot differently, not always better.<br /><br />It means, as I see it, that we can't usually look at an older work and say that a later work is more advanced, even in raw technical terms. For it to be more advanced, the later work would have to do the same thing the earlier one does, only better or more complex. And the later work can never do that, just by virtue of belonging to a different time. The early work is not "better" in technical terms (unless we're comparing a great work to a not-great one), but it is precious because it can never truly be surpassed. The game has changed.<br /><br>Jaime J. Weinmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15128500411119962998noreply@blogger.com6