Something Old, Nothing New

Obscure Musicals: "Golden Boy"

2012-01-20T18:00:00.007-05:00

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 What Makes Sammy Run?, 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 wasn't a smash.

The young producer of Golden Boy, 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 (Bye Bye Birdie) and one flop (All American). According to Strouse's autobiography, Put On a Happy Face, 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."

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 Golden Boy'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 (Two For the Seesaw, The Miracle Worker) 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 The Miracle Worker and Two For the Seesaw, 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.

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.

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. This is a production number about, and against, the happy world of Broadway production numbers. 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."

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."

So tough and serious moments stood shoulder-to-shoulder with moments that could have come from Davis's nightclub act (his previous musical, Mr. Wonderful, 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.

Strouse, who saw Golden Boy 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 any song?" On the other hand, Strouse has also admitted that the number worked the way Davis did it, that people seemed to like it.

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 The Music Man, and an acknowledged highlight of the show. The cast album can only preserve the audio portion of it, but at least that's something.

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.

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 Bye Bye Birdie (and not quite as well in All American). 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."

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.

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:

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 -- an Encores! version in 2002, starring Alfonso Ribeiro, was very well-received.

Come to the Cabret

2011-12-17T18:38:00.005-05:00

I just got back from seeing Hugo, 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.

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 that 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.

I think you could argue that Hugo 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.

Maybe some of the occasional sense of slackness also comes from the editing. This is one of the things I can never quite get used to, 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.

(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.)

(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.)

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), Hugo 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.

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 Safety Last) I felt like I had already spent too much time with this kid.

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.

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 Hugo about technology as a tool for preserving, rather than obliterating, the past.

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 Hugo incorporates some beautiful ideas and shots, which don't exactly add up to a story or scenes.

Back To 1988, By Way of 1986

2011-12-08T22:43:00.005-05:00

One of the few sitcoms I watched at the time and then never revisited again (that I recall) was Dear John, the 1988 adaptation of a BBC sitcom from Only Fools and Horses 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 Cheers; 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 Taxi reruns on a channel that was showing filler during a transition to a new format. But I didn't watch it then either.

What got me watching it again was reading this article, "Anatomy of a Sitcom," from the New York Times during the show's first season. 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 TV Guide 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.

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 Taxi: Jim Brooks had left, but Glen and Les Charles were still there doing Cheers, and some of the writers they helped train would soon do Wings and Frasier. And then in the middle of this, Ed. Weinberger, another of the Taxi people, came back to Paramount to do a show with his Taxi star -- and the result wasn't a flop, just not anything special.

"Not anything special" describes a lot of Ed. Weinberger's work after Taxi, which is a bit surprising because he was such a talented guy. When he took over as producer of Mary Tyler Moore 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 Mary Tyler Moore its shape from then on, and the same mix of hard and soft jokes was all over Taxi.

Weinberger's first act after Taxi was canceled was to create a talking-chimp sitcom, Mr. Smith; it was almost like a performance-art act of contempt for what sitcoms had become in the 1983-4 doldrums.

Then Weinberger seemingly bounced back in a big way by co-creating The Cosby Show. "Seemingly" because while he had co-creator credit, he wasn't with the show after the pilot. (Cosby, for whom Weinberger also created The Bill Cosby Show 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. Mr. President, starring George C. Scott, probably should have been better than it was. And the Times article suggests that Amen 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 Amen 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.

And then came Dear John. 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 Taxi. Here's the pilot of the original series:

And here's the U.S. remake, produced by Weinberger, Ellison and Peter Noah.

1 Pilot by carpalton

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 Cheers and Taxi; the heart, the soft stuff, had to be tacked on and wasn't organic.

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.

And that's how the show comes across in what I've seen of the original episodes: kind of like Taxi but not as sharp and fresh. Like a lot of filmed sitcoms from the late '80s -- Designing Women, Major Dad, Murphy Brown -- 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).

Weinberger did one other show while Dear John was running, a gruesome Look Who's Talking 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 Cosby.

Harry and Sam

2011-12-01T17:26:00.007-05:00

Arguably the best thing about IDW and Archie comics releasing "Best of Harry Lucey" and "Best of Samm Schwartz" hardcover collection can be seen at the Amazon page for the Lucey collection, 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.)

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."

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.

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.

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 did 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 Jughead in the '70s and '80s, when he adopted his sparer style and mostly stopped working with other inkers.

The majority of the stories are once again by Frank Doyle, with a few George Gladir scripts thrown in (Gladir's work on Jughead was always some of his best, with monsters and witches and pop-culture spoofs in the spirit of his Mad House and Bats 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.

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 Pep # 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.

Hollywood and Classical Uplift

2011-11-11T17:54:00.000-05:00

One book I recently read for the first time (I don't know why I didn't before) is John Gregory Dunne's The Studio, 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 Dr. Dolittle, shooting Star! and planning Hello, Dolly!, 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.

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 Picture 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 Doctor Dolittle, 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.

Perhaps the most memorable scene in the book is the one Dunne himself said he was "troubled" by, when Henry Koster, 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. Self-Styled Siren quoted from this passage a few months back, 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.

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 Dr. Dolittle, 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 The Robe.

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.)

Fox in the post-Sound of Music 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 Dolittle 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.

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 and 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.

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 (Fantasia 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.

Revisicals Revisited

2011-09-15T17:24:00.003-04:00

The controversy over the revised version of Porgy and Bess 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 Anything Goes 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.

But Porgy and Bess, 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 now-famous New York Times letter to the editor. And that letter has brought the issue of revisions, respect for the past, and all the rest of it back into the spotlight, as this article in the Washington Post discusses.

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 No, No, Nanette, 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.

With musicals done before the 1940s, there's an even bigger issue: except for operettas, or musical comedies with operetta influence (like Show Boat), 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-Oklahoma! musical changed the shape of a typical number: now you'd often have dialogue during 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.

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.

But Pal Joey, 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.

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.

With rewrites of Porgy, 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 Porgy 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 arioso 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.

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.

The one thing I definitely agree with Sondheim on is that the Gershwin estate's insistence on billing it as "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess" 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" Porgy and Bess." 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 were equal partners.

Unforgettably Ugly Songs

2011-09-09T20:52:00.004-04:00

Speaking 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 How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and their show Little Me (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 Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum). But without Burrows, they didn't have many hits.

"Skyscraper" had more ingredients for a hit than Whoop-Up: it was based on a good source for a musical, Elmer Rice's play Dream Girl (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 Charade. 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 Whoop-Up, 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 Walking Happy, 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.

Anyway, the only song from the score of Skyscraper 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.

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.

Who Was Bill Vigoda?

2011-08-31T21:27:00.013-04:00

Craig Yoe's Archie history book 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.

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.

I don't know much about him beyond what I read in two of Jim Amash's invaluable Alter Ego 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.

Joe Edwards, creator of Li'l Jinx, 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here, from Amash's interview with Richard Goldwater's assistant (and successor as editor) Victor Gorelick, is some more background on Vigoda:

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.

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 Katy Keene 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!

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.

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.

JA: He's gone now, isn't he?

GORELICK: 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.

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 Archie # 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.

But by 1961, when he did this story in Archie Annual # 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.

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.

Here's another Vigoda story (from Laugh # 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.

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?

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 Captain Hero 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):

So in writing about Vigoda, I'm not saying he was an undiscovered great; quite the opposite. There are 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.

When It Comes to Bull Event

2011-08-24T18:21:00.004-04:00

Fans of bad musicals have a particular soft spot for Whoop-Up, 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 Guys and Dolls, Can-Can and Silk Stockings, started moving more into the creative side of things: on Whoop-Up Feuer not only directed the show (he'd already begun moving into directing, though with assistance from Burrows on Silk Stockings) but he and Martin co-wrote the book, from a novel later adapted for Elvis Presley's film Stay Away, Joe.

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 Peter Pan, 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."

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.

Also, because it was a Feuer and Martin production and they had never had a failure yet, hopes were high for Whoop-Up, which meant many artists were sent into recording studios to record cover versions of the new show's songs. Lash's CD release of Whoop-Up 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."

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:

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.

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 Music Man) sound better with her full, warm, beautifully controlled voice.

The Name "Sloat" is Fun To Say

2011-08-18T23:57:00.014-04:00

I recently read the book "Soon to be a major motion picture: The anatomy of an all-star, big-budget, multimillion-dollar disaster" by the late Ted Gershuny, a maker of low-budget horror movies who interned on Otto Preminger's next-to-last movie, Rosebud. It turned out to be one of Preminger's worst films, and essentially ended his career (he made one more movie, The Human Factor, 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.

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.

Preminger made lots of movies that don't work; two of them, the infamous Skidoo and the somewhat less infamous (but if anything more ridiculous) Hurry Sundown just came out on widescreen DVDs for the first time. Rosebud 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, Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun, also have that look: they're not cheap movies, but they look a little tawdry in a way that The Spy Who Loved Me or Star Wars or Superman -- 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.

Like Skidoo, Preminger's Rosebud 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 Skidoo is often seen as his effort to connect with his newfound son and his generation. With Rosebud, he decided that this would be Erik's big break as a screenwriter. Rosebud probably wouldn't have worked even with a better script (Preminger's previous movie, Such Good Friends, has an Elaine May script, and it still doesn't work), but Rosebud 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.

It seems like the film went into production largely because the Patty Hearst kidnapping suddenly made the subject topical. "We were hooked," Gershuny writes. "Rosebud 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.

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:

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.
"Heeeyyy..." he drawls.
"Yes?"
"You -- want -- me -- to -- kill -- you?"
"Well, no, actually, I'd rather you didn't."

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.

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 Cabaret, 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.

A movie like Rosebud, 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.

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.

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 Lawrence of Arabia, 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 Rosebud 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.

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.

In fact, the author clearly likes Preminger even though Preminger's anger and cutting sarcasm are sometimes trained on him. Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema 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 Laura had become a key film of the nostalgia boom and the rediscovery of film noir. 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.

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.

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, Rosebud 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 after 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 Heaven's Gate type of production. "On Rosebud," Gershuny realizes, "Preminger can make right choices, wrong choices, any choices. Things simply will not work." That's got to be more painful than just having a promising story that could go either way.

Movie Knowledge: At Historical Norms

2011-08-09T23:04:00.004-04:00

Roger Ebert linked to Bill Mesce's post "The 'Gray Ones' Fade to Black", 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.

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.

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 much 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.)

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 Sunset Blvd. 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.

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. Last Year At Marienbad 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.

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.

Looney Tunes Continue to Appear In Physical Media

2011-08-04T22:32:00.003-04:00

TV Shows on DVD has the complete contents for the Looney Tunes Blu-Ray set.

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.

I'll buy the set. I think cartoons, properly presented, can really gain a lot from the high-def presentation. I worry that some of Warners' Blu-Rays have been inferior to the DVD versions, with too much tinkering and over-saturation apparently applied to increase the "wow" factor. (Artificially brightening All the President's Men, 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.

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.

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.

Grudge Match: Little Lotta vs. Herbie Popnecker

2011-07-29T21:51:00.007-04:00

This one was suggested by Sean Gaffney, the ultimate face-off of comic books' two greatest advertisements for obesity. Who would win a slow slugfest between

Little Lotta (Harvey Comics), a girl whose obesity gives her superhuman strength,

and

Herbie Popnecker (Forbidden Worlds), an obese boy with superhuman strength and any other power the story requires.

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.

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 The Twilight Zone: he has absolute God-like power and all adults are terrified of him.

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.

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.

Two Bills

2011-07-28T18:40:00.005-04:00

a comment on my last post on this blog (a long time ago):

Over a month without new postings? Are you even pretending to give a damn about this blog anymore?

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.

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.

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.

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.

------------

The song "Bill" from Show Boat 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 Show Boat in 1927. It works, in part, because in the second act of Show Boat 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.

To put the song into Show Boat, 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 Show Boat recording; he did it on his "Broadway Showstoppers" disc instead) originally written by Wodehouse for Oh, Lady! Lady!

And here's the Show Boat version made famous by Helen Morgan:

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.

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:

In grace and looks,
I know that Apollo
Would beat him all hollow

And in the second refrain, she criticizes his dancing skills, with a couplet that was one of Ira Gershwin's favorite Wodehouse lyrics:

Whenever he dances,
His partner takes chances.

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 Show Boat 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 Show Boat. So Hammerstein changed them to lines that are less comical in tone:

And yet to be
Upon his knee
So comfy and roomy
Feels natural to me.

(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 "opposite." No lyricist is immune to mis-accenting, I guess.)

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 Oh, Lady! Lady! 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 Show Boat 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.

Charles Gerhardt Returns

2011-06-25T15:13:00.003-04:00

I finally got around to listening to one of the remastered/reissued titles in Sony/BMG's reissues of Charles Gerhardt's Classic Film Score series. 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. According to this review, the new remasterings have kept the Dolby Surround encoding.

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 The Sea Hawk and Of Human Bondage 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 Sea Hawk 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.)

The Classic Film Scores 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 Blackboard Jungle, and wasn't common for a decade after) had pushed that kind of symphonic, operatic movie score to the side.

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 Vertigo that is openly indebted to Wagner's Tristan; 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).

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 Star Wars 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.

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 Of Human Bondage, 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.

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 White Witch Doctor, 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.

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.

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 -- Citizen Kane, of course, but also White Witch Doctor, Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef and On Dangerous Ground.

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 Citizen Kane, the aria Susan Alexander sings (here given a performance by a young Kiri Te Kanawa) and the piano concerto in Hangover Square, which is the climax of the whole work. (Stephen Sondheim has cited Hangover Square and Herrmann's score as a big inspiration for Sweeney Todd.) A very well-chosen program that helped to show off a side of Herrmann that everyone, including him, had kind of forgotten about.

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 Now, Voyager, Big Sleep and Gone With the Wind 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 The Egyptian and I can't remember offhand who did what; and there are some Herrmann scores at Fox that I might mistake for Newman scores.)

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 too strong 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.

Ghosts On Broadway

2011-05-30T17:47:00.013-04:00

I 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?

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 credited, 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?

 Loesser seems to be the center of a lot of these rumors, because after Guys and Dolls he became very hands-on in promoting young or new-to-Broadway talent and getting the publishing contracts for their shows. Kismet, The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees and The Music Man are shows he was involved with in this way.

With The Music Man, 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 Most Happy Fella. When The Music Man 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 The Music Man).

Update: John Baxindine writes:

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.

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.)

The Pajama Game, 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 John Raitt identified as Loesser's: 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.

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.

There are fewer rumors about Richard Rodgers, because most of the shows he worked on were his own (he produced Annie Get Your Gun, 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 Best Foot Forward, which he produced for his protégés Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. Jule Styne produced a few shows by other composers, and Steven Suskin's The Sound of Broadway Music reports that Styne definitely ghost-composed a few songs in a flop called Something More!

In other shows, the contributions of ghosts are more definitely known but the extent of their contributions are in doubt. On Hello, Dolly! 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.

Herman himself was called in that same year to help out on a show called Ben Franklin In Paris, 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, Fiddler On the Roof, worked in the same capacity on the Sherlock Holmes musical Baker Street. On those shows, it's a bit easier to tell the ghost contributions: Bock and Harnick's Baker Street songs have a dry wit that the rest of the score doesn't, and Jerry Herman is, well, Jerry Herman, credited or not.

The early-to-mid '60s seems to have been a busy time for ghosts. When the Mary Rodgers/Martin Charnin musical Hot Spot, 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 Show Tunes says it's music by Rodgers, lyrics by Sondheim with revisions by Charnin; others say it's Sondheim's own song.

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 Silk Stockings, 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. (Update: 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 Saratoga, 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.

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 Gypsy, 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.

Why It's Hard to Write For Bugs Bunny

2011-05-05T12:18:00.003-04:00

(Cross-posted from the TV Guidance blog)

Having written enough about The Looney Tunes Show 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 Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and one of the better reboots was Daffy's Duck Dodgers). 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.

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.

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.)

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.

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 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.

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.

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 nature 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.

Sidney Lumet

2011-04-09T11:20:00.002-04:00

Sidney Lumet, who just died at the age of 86, 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.

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.

So it is in this scene from The Pawnbroker, 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.

Until Then, We'll Have To Muddle Through Somehow

2011-03-12T16:29:00.008-05:00

I couldn't say I'm surprised that Hugh Martin died; 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 for a short article I was doing.

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.

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 Look Ma, I'm Dancin'!, 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 as he recalled in his liner notes for a cast album reissue, "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."

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.

And Athena has one of the best ballads in movie musicals of the '50s ("Love Can Change the Stars") stuck in one of those films that MGM made primarily to burn off people's contracts. The original songs for Meet Me In St. Louis are a rare case of Martin's best work meeting everyone else's best work -- also the stage version of Best Foot Forward, which really deserves a concert staging with the original Don Walker orchestrations.

And then there's the vocal arranging. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 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.

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 The Boys From Syracuse, 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 Best Foot Forward) 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.

The Return of Elwy Yost

2011-02-28T23:59:00.007-05:00

I'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 some of the 16 mm filmed interviews conducted by Elwy Yost, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Pare Lorentz.

One of the in-studio interviews I most remember from Saturday Night at the Movies, though it's not on the site, is the one where Eddie Bracken claimed to have directed a scene from The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek 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 Duck Soup, arguing at length that the movie didn't work. That's just something you won't see on most making-of documentaries.

A Response, Over Five Years Too Late

2011-02-10T23:24:00.007-05:00

I was reading over Stephen Rowley's blog 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: "Better Than Ever," 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:

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.

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?

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 can be richer for the range of options available to them, I don't think they always are.

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.

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 more "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.

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.

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.

Which means that the range of choices open to the filmmaker is never quite 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 Citizen Kane has plenty of moments that mark it as an RKO movie from 1941.

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 exclude certain choices that would be seen as belonging to the past. Unless it's a crazy stunt like The Good German, and even that has a ton of contemporary visual style in it. But anyway, many things an older film, even a recent 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.

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 The Player parodying (or paying homage to, but mostly parodying, I think) the heavy-footed camera moves of Touch of Evil.

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.

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.

Mulling Over a Change

2011-02-09T06:53:00.001-05:00

It's not a secret that I haven't posted here very often lately. (And I'm not exactly the first blogger who can make that claim.) That said, I don't want to stop posting. I was wondering if it would make sense to re-post some earlier material from the blog, perhaps revised a bit and outfitted with things like illustrative clips that weren't available when I started the blog in 2004. The nature of this blog is that almost none of the material is topical, so a post about an older movie, play or show isn't really dated unless I've changed my mind in the interim -- and if I have, maybe I can comment on why I changed my mind since then.

I don't know if that's what I'll do; I'm just thinking aloud here, and trying to figure out a good way to do some new(ish) posts.

Meanwhile, here's something I was thinking of incorporating into one of my earlier Archie-comics posts but didn't get around to using: when I wrote about Frank Doyle's writing, I was planning to do this little structural analysis of a five-page story I've always liked since childhood. It's not really a complete post, but I thought I'd put it here anyway.

Someday I'd like to do a fuller explanation of the structural strength of these stories compared to all the competitors -- even the best of them, like some of Stan Lee's humor titles. Lots of "teen" comics had simple or minimal plotting, but few of them did it with a feeling that the story was actually going somewhere, no matter how little was happening. Also, just the fact that lame jokes are acknowledged in-story as lame jokes gives this kind of story a slight sophistication boost over its competitors.

Art: Harry Lucey
Script: Frank Doyle
Inks: Terry Szenics
From Archie # 124

This is a surprisingly well-constructed story despite an almost total lack of plot (in common with many Frank Doyle scripts). It's based on a very simple premise, but in only five pages the premise is fully worked through and put through several variations:

Page 1: Doyle makes sure, as usual, to have the first joke on the first page, and not waste panel time as many humor comics writers do.

Page 2: The premise, introduced briefly on page 1, is fully elaborated on and even leads to a punchline (she was calling him just so he could pull that stupid joke on him). Note also the trademark Lucey reaction -- the circles of surprise coming out of the head. Then she leaves, and Jughead arrives, setting up the next variation.

Page 3: The variation is that whereas Betty was trying to set Archie up for the stupid joke, Jughead gets the idea right then and there. Then he goes on, doing his own verbose version of the reply. Then we get a bit of violence.

Page 4: Variation # 3: the old lady who doesn't even seem to be replying this way as a joke, but genuinely thinks he was calling her.

Page 5: Archie is finally driven 'round the bend by the rule of threes, leading to opportunities for the artist to draw running and hiding poses, so it's not just a static story. And then, in the last two panels, as always, we get the little twist ending and a great facial expression from Lucey.

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

So it's a really basic and simple story but a lot of craftsmanship went into it, and that's the difference between the Archie comics of this era and their many failed competitors -- there is a really solid comedy foundation to the scripts and drawing, which even the best competitors (like Stan Lee's team on Millie the Model) often lacked.

Most importantly, the story is constructed to maximize the visual possibilities. Even though it's just people talking about not much, there are all kinds of chances for the artist to do different types of reactions, gestures, physical actions. Good comics writing is done with a view toward telling the story in pictures.

Is This By Dan Gordon?

2011-01-31T23:59:00.009-05:00

Update: In comments it's suggested that this might be by a different comics great, Jack Bradbury.

----

There have been some good posts on cartoonist Dan Gordon lately, including this one from John Kricfalusi and this one from Thad K. Having seen those, I'm wondering if this could be another Dan Gordon story.

It's from Little Archie # 5, an issue that used a number of artists (including Bill Vigoda) to do the half of the stories that Bob Bolling wasn't doing himself, and there's this one four-page story that looks very different from the rest of the comic -- and is much more exuberant and cartoony than the Bolling or Vigoda material. Dan Gordon was very briefly at MLJ/Archie working on Super Duck -- also in a different style from anyone else. This might be his tryout on "Little Archie"; it might not be him, but adjusting for the difference in house style, it could have come from the guy who did "Cookie" and most famously "SuperKatt". Take a look:

Whoever it is, it might have been nice if he had stuck around on this title. I'm a big Bob Bolling fan, but pure comedy isn't really his thing; even his slapstick stories have a subdued, melancholy feel to them. Supplementing his work with a more laugh-out-loud funny cartoonist would have been an ideal arrangement. Instead the other artists (some of whom are very hard to identify) left the title by # 8 and it became entirely shared between Bolling and Dexter Taylor.

How To Understand This Terrible New Road Runner Disc

2011-01-26T21:05:00.005-05:00

I've sort of given up on Warner Bros. DVD releases of its cartoons: I accept that we're not going to get much of value until a) Blu-Ray becomes popular enough to spawn some Looney Tunes collections in that format, or b) That elusive Censored 11 set finally becomes a reality. (There's also online streaming, but frankly, while I want to see more older material in that format, I want to own good-quality copies, and always will. But that's another post.) But I had to say something about This Road Runner/Coyote DVD they're releasing, where the selection is so bad that it seems like a joke. And, who knows, maybe it'll turn out to be another list of cartoons that was prematurely leaked, except the corrected version almost always turns out to be worse than the leaked list.

Update: The list has been confirmed as real. Good lord.

Anyway, the list that TV Shows On DVD has consists entirely of Road Runner cartoons from after the original studio shut down, meaning: Rudy Larriva shorts, made-for-the-web cartoons (the "New 2010 Roadrunner" ones), Chuck Jones' two TV cartoons, Larry Doyle's Road Runner opus, and finally the two that I can actually enjoy watching again, "Chariots of Fur" and "Little Go Beep."

The conspiracy theorist in me wants to think that this is a way of making the upcoming "Looney Tunes Show" look good by comparison -- if kids are watching these cartoons, the CGI Road Runners Cartoon Network is preparing will look brilliant. I should add that I have no idea how good or bad "The Looney Tunes Show" will be, and wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be all right. Point is, it would still look worse by comparison with a bigger-budget pre-1964 cartoon.

The sensible side of me just thinks that maybe they're still hoping to save the "real" cartoons for when the home video market comes back. Or that this batch of cartoons was put together before the home video department agreed to include fullscreen options for the cartoons, and that the Larrivas were considered more "expendable" when it comes to cutting off the top and bottom. I don't know. I just know it's not much of a list.

One thing: though the Larriva years are evidence to the contrary, later on it seems like Road Runner cartoons managed to achieve adequacy more often than other types of Looney Tunes revival cartoons. "Chariots of Fur," which kicked off the series of Chuck Jones Productions cartoons, isn't up to the pre-1964 cartoons but is one of Jones' better late films. "Little Go Beep" turned out to be perhaps the best of the Kathleen Helppie-Shipley productions, and even "Whizzard of Ow" is one of the more tolerable Larry Doyle shorts. Maybe because the formula is so simple, or because it's one of the few series that doesn't lose anything from Mel Blanc's death, Road Runners seem to be the easiest to make in an acceptable way.

The Professionalization of Voice Acting

2011-01-15T23:32:00.003-05:00

Well, time for another post full of probably incorrect assumptions, but a shorter one. I've always meant to mention this, but to my surprise I can't find an animation-related post where I brought this up: I've always wondered why Tedd Pierce and Michael Maltese, two Warner Brothers cartoon writers who also did voice acting, more or less stopped acting after about 1951. They continued to write cartoons for the studio, but Pierce's last known voice job at the studio -- maybe there's a later one I didn't notice and didn't make it onto IMDB -- was in 1951, and so was Maltese's. It's particularly surprising in the case of Pierce because he was a really good, versatile voice actor who performed in other people's cartoons (like the Babbit and Catsello cartoons), not just his own.

Thinking about this, I recalled that Tex Avery was another cartoonist/performer who didn't do much voice work after about 1950. So it may have been an actual trend at the time, toward a more professional approach to the art of voice acting. Thanks to Mel Blanc and others, voice acting had already become much more of a profession than it had been in the early days of sound cartoons, when voices were as likely to be performed by an animator or writer as by a full-time actor. In the late '40s into the '50s, it seems like the studios shifted even more strongly toward hiring professional actors for everything. So if there was a small male part at Warner Brothers that Mel Blanc wasn't doing, it might have gone to Pierce or Maltese in the '40s -- but in the '50s, it would have gone to Stan Freberg or, later, Daws Butler. Just as in Avery cartoons, the parts he once did himself probably went to Butler or Don Messick in the '50s.

This isn't a trend that lasted, since the non-professional voice actor actually came back -- mostly in TV animation. (Bill Scott didn't get to do much voice work at Warners or UPA, though he did get to do the funny-animal voices in the UPA cartoon sequence in the movie The Girl Next Door. But in television, he became as prolific an actor as he was a writer.) I just wanted to make a note that there does appear to have been an "actors act, writers write" idea in the later years of theatrical short cartoons.

Here's my favorite Mike Maltese voice job, in 1948's "A Feather in His Hare" (though the first sounds the character utters are not from Maltese but Mel Blanc, who was called upon to do the screaming).

The Art of the Orchestrator

2011-01-14T18:29:00.003-05:00

Update: This post is sort of an example of why one shouldn't post in too much of a hurry -- the post is likely to contain some assumptions that haven't really been thought through. Noel Katz explains in comments why the post below is probably based on incorrect assumptions.

----

Speaking of musicals, again: orchestration has always been one of the aspects of musical theatre that I've been most interested in. I always used to look at the cast album to see who the orchestrator was, and formed a very vague idea of what different orchestrators' "sounds" were. I later found out that the idea was even more vague than I knew, since nearly all orchestrators had to use uncredited help, sometimes just for incidental music, but sometimes for major numbers. Steven Suskin's recent book "The Sound of Broadway Music" was the first to give a comprehensive idea of who orchestrated what on each show, which finally made it possible to discuss individual styles with any accuracy.

What the book doesn't fully explain -- it spends some time on that, but maybe not as much as I hoped -- is how much actual composing an orchestrator does. If you listen to a song on a demo recording, before the orchestration is done, and then listen to the final version, there's often a lot of musical material that the composer didn't put into the melody or the accompaniment. Bits of orchestral commentary between the stanzas, countermelodies, even quotations from other composers (the orchestrator of A Little Night Music, Jonathan Tunick, threw in a quote from Rosenkavalier as an in-joke near the end of the first act). Some of the additional musical ideas in these arrangements probably come from others -- the dance arranger, or the composer's assistant, and maybe sometimes even the composer himself. (Sometimes it's the conductor: on Li'l Abner the conductor, Lehman Engel, got a credit for "musical continuity" for writing everything except the actual tunes.) But at least part of an orchestrator's job seems to be adding to the song, rather than just arranging it as it appears in the rough piano version.

Here's a random example, just because a piano demo happens to exist. This song from Stephen Sondheim's Anyone Can Whistle is supposed to be sung by an uptight nurse pretending, unconvincingly, to be a French seductress and trying to seduce a mental patient who's pretending to be a doctor. It was that kind of show. I don't think much of the song except for one line: "I like your, 'ow you say, imperturbable perspicacity." Though that one line is so good it makes the whole song worthwhile.

CPWM 2 - kewego
CPWM Two

Mots-clés : cpwm one

Video de tobiagorrio

And here's the song in the orchestrated version by Don Walker. Walker is probably my favorite Broadway orchestrator, even though many songs he's credited with were actually ghosted by others. (He took on so many shows in the '50s that he adopted a "factory" system, hiring multiple assistants and farming multiple numbers out to them. By the '60s, his assistants were off doing their own shows, and he reduced his workload.) He started with a reputation as a jazzy orchestrator, and mostly did musical comedies in the '40s and '50s, but what he loved best was lush, romantic shows that allowed him to conjure up a unique sound-world: among his favorite jobs were Carousel, Most Happy Fella and She Loves Me.

Anyone Can Whistle was Walker's only show for Sondheim, and he apparently thought that the score was needlessly complicated. The former Walker assistants who orchestrated Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Forum felt the same way: Irwin Kostal is quoted in The Sound of Broadway Music that Sondheim nearly ruined "Love, I Hear" by giving him a sketch with pointlessly complex accompaniment and insisting that all his accompaniment ideas be used in the orchestration. (Luckily, Leonard Bernstein heard the arrangement during previews and bawled Sondheim out for it, shaming him into changing it: "Who do you think you are? Me?") By the time Sondheim emerged as a successful composer with Company he had improved a lot as a composer, or at least figured out how to make his clever ideas feel organic to the song. His later success as a composer naturally reflects back on his early work, but I don't think Anyone Can Whistle is as good a score as many that were being written in the early '60s.

In the case of the Whistle number, anyway, Walker and the dance arranger (who I'm assuming is responsible for some of the ideas in the dance breaks at least) don't change much about the music. It's more a question of trying to liven it up and support two performers who aren't really singers (Lee Remick and Harry Guardino), finding different "fills" and decorations for each stanza, to give each repetition the feeling of being somehow different in color and tone from the one that came before it. The overall effect is to make Sondheim's music sound more conventionally Broadway, but that's what this number needs to make it work.

The other thing about Walker's work here is how he pulls off a very strange choice of instrumentation. Forum was one of a few shows without violins, but Walker here went his trainees one better and also cut out violas -- the string section consists of five cellos, plus a bass. He handles this so well that you hardly notice the absence of higher string instruments, but it gives a subconscious dark, creepy feel to the whole show.

CPWM 1 - kewego
CPWM One

Mots-clés : cpwm one

Video de tobiagorrio

Liv Ullmann Sings!

2011-01-13T00:52:00.008-05:00

The latest find at Bluegobo.com is from Richard Rodgers' last musical, I Remember Mama. This was a natural subject for a musical, and since Rodgers and Hammerstein actually produced the John Van Druten play, they must have at least considered doing it as a musical.

The show got poor reviews and ran into lots of trouble out of town (leading to the firing of Martin Charnin as both lyricist and director), and this Tony performance certainly suggests it was not a very good show. It's not just that it's old-fashioned, but it's rote old-fashioned, going through all the tricks of the Rodgers and Hammerstein style musical -- the chirpy line delivery, the broad gestures, the device of having a dialogue interlude that gives a new context to the song when it's repeated. (Mama sings that you can achieve anything by giving "a little bit more"; in dialogue, the family works out a way to get extra money by doing just that; in a reprise of the same song, they celebrate their success in giving a little bit more.) The style of the show appears to have been somewhere between Annie, which the lyricist and book writer had just done, and The Sound of Music.

Liv Ullmann was the star, and she doesn't seem as bad as the reviews suggested. There have been lots of non-singing movie stars who did musicals, and she's by no means the worst; she actually tries to sing the notes. And at least she's the one acting, instead of just gesturing.

The other redeeming feature is Rodgers' music. His work in the last decade of life shows a definite falling-off in inspiration (few people have ever written a great musical after the age of 70, unfortunately). This is not a melody to compare with anything he wrote from the '20s through the '60s, and it feels like the composer imitating himself. But the musical style is still so unmistakably Rodgers, so right for the situation, that I almost feel like it would work better as an instrumental, without the drab, imitation-Hammerstein lyrics. (These lyrics are by Ray Jessel, a TV writer and Broadway composer-lyricist who was brought in to write with Rodgers after Charnin was fired.) The lyrics try to lecture us on never giving up hope and striving, but the music sells the idea much better than the words do.

Department of Things I Should Remember But Don't

2010-12-26T23:59:00.010-05:00

Does anybody recall which Warner Brothers cartoons used the song "A Gal in Calico" on the soundtrack? I know at least one of them did -- I even remember the arrangement -- but the name of the cartoon I heard it in escapes me for the moment.

The song, by Arthur Schwartz (music) and Leo Robin (lyrics) was the biggest hit from Warners' 1946 musical The Time, the Place and the Girl (another successful song, "A Rainy Night In Rio," was famously sung by Bugs Bunny in "Long-Haired Hare"). Warner Brothers tended to have rather good original songs in its musicals -- think of Schwartz and Frank Loesser's terrific score for Thank Your Lucky Stars, or the batch of fine Jule Styne/Sammy Cahn songs in Doris Day's star-making Romance on the High Seas -- though they were weaker than most of the other studios when it came to staging musical numbers; after Busby Berkeley left, they rarely had directors and choreographers who could do more than just make the number look like a replica of a middling stage play that never existed.

The movie is also a reminder that Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan were the studio's big musical stars until Day came along. Which is another sign of a studio that doesn't quite have the roster it needs to put together top-flight musicals: Morgan and Carson were pleasant personalities, but not really above-the-title stars on the level of the people the other studios could offer. It seems that until they started investing heavily in stage musical adaptations (see below) Warners didn't really put a high premium on the production of musicals after Berkeley left (and with occasional exceptions like Yankee Doodle Dandy and the Gershwin and Porter biopics); stars who were good musical performers, like Ann Sheridan, Jane Wyman and James Cagney, were (mostly) kept away from musicals. (Carson and Morgan were in non-musicals too, but in non-musicals it was made clear that they were not major stars.) Things were different at Fox, which would star an actor in both musicals and non-musicals if he could sing (Don Ameche) and even if he couldn't (Tyrone Power).

Update: I guess posting this was what I needed to jog my memory, because now I remember the cartoon that used this song: "Slick Hare," which came out less than a year after the movie did. It might have been one of those cases where Stalling was tipped off about a potential hit song from a movie that hadn't actually been released (or maybe even finished) yet.

I'm sorry about the idiotic captions the uploader has inserted into the cartoon (just as "A Gal In Calico" starts to play, yet) but it was the only upload I could find on YouTube.

Jack Warner and Stage Adaptations

2010-12-10T23:54:00.004-05:00

The Man Who Came to Dinner is on as I write, an adaptation of a stage play that sticks as close to the original as a movie can get away with: though it "opens up" the play by adding some outdoor scenes or moving some scenes to different rooms in the house, it carries over large chunks of the play unchanged, and doesn't try that hard to disguise the fact that the whole play (like most stage comedies of the era) took place on a single set.

I'm not saying this to criticize the movie, just to make an observation about stage adaptations from this studio, Warner Brothers: it seems to me like when Jack Warner bought a play, he preferred to adapt it for the screen with as few changes as possible. At WB in the '40s, '50s and '60s, Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptations often included a relative minimum of changes to the structure or story of the original play, and frequently used people from the original production.

The same year as Dinner, WB also adapted James Thurber and Elliott Nugent's play The Male Animal. While this adaptation was tinkered with more than most (the ending was changed to something more upbeat), a lot of it is very faithful, and Warner hired the play's original writer and star, Elliott Nugent, to direct the film. The Voice of the Turtle, also based on a play that starred Nugent, has to do some rewrites because of censorship, but is still pretty recognizably a filmed play.

Then you have the '50s Warner productions that are almost like co-productions with the original Broadway production. It started with A Streetcar Named Desire: same director as the original, much of the same cast, with one principal role (Blanche) re-cast with a movie star. This pattern was used in the two George Abbott adaptations, The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees: everybody from the Broadway show except one star. (I hate to say it, but Pajama Game might be better off if more of the Broadway cast had been replaced. John Raitt and Carol Haney don't come off well on the screen.) When director Mervyn LeRoy came back to Warner Brothers, most of his work was on extremely stagey stage adaptations like Gypsy and Mary, Mary.

There are some WB stage adaptations that take bigger liberties. Arsenic and Old Lace makes some real changes to the play, probably because the director, Frank Capra, had more say over the script. But on the other hand, when Alfred Hitchcock made Rope and Dial M For Murder for Warners he didn't even bother including the obligatory outdoor scenes.

Other studios had a range of attitudes about how to adapt a play. MGM tended to be pretty faithful to stage plays (especially if George Cukor was directing) and less faithful to musicals. While over at Fox, wholesale rewriting was often the rule -- look at Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which has almost nothing to do with the play. Compare Warner's My Fair Lady to Fox's The Sound of Music the following year. The former uses almost the same exact script as the original play, all of the same songs, and even similar sets and costumes. The Sound of Music, even before the director came onto the project, had been rewritten and re-shaped quite a bit.

That this was a Warner preference seems to be confirmed by his biggest project after he left his studio: He may have decided to re-cut 1776, but it was also his decision to do most of it on one set with most of the original Broadway cast.

I don't know if this preference for more-or-less faithful adaptations is addressed in any Warner biographies. It might just be part of his economy-mindedness: don't waste time adding things to a script that's already been successful, and don't build a lot of new sets or go outdoors more than necessary. When his lieutenant Hal Wallis went out on his own, he had an approach to stage adaptations that was a lot like Warner's (in Boeing Boeing and other such claustrophobic films based on successful plays), so it might be part of the whole studio's aesthetic.

Jon D'Agostino

2010-12-06T17:58:00.006-05:00

As the local Archie buff I should say something about the death of artist, inker and letterer Jon D'Agostino. His best-known credit is probably lettering the first Spider-Man story. He also did a lot of work as a penciller, including Charlton's Archie rip-off "Freddy." But his most distinctive and interesting work came after he joined the exodus to Archie -- following Dan DeCarlo but preceding his Marvel trainee Stan Goldberg -- where he mostly worked as an inker.

D'Agostino's inking style is similar to, though just distinguishable from, that of his friend Joe Sinnott; in fact, Sinnott spent several years moonlighting at Archie, picking up some of D'Agostino's workload and inking some of D'Agostino's own pencils. I have trouble describing it technically, but it's distinguished by a very solid and slick look, a less cartoony approach than most humor-comics inkers took.

The artist D'Agostino inked most frequently was Goldberg, whose pencils can sometimes be unsteady or "swimmy" because he works so fast. (Al Hartley was the same way. Dan DeCarlo was the only one of the ex-Marvel guys who could produce consistently good-looking work while turning out that much material, and he's the only one of them whose work looked more or less the same no matter who was inking.) With D'Agostino, Goldberg's art never looked that way, because he polished it up and gave it a sense of weight.

D'Agostino was Goldberg's main inker on most of the crazy adventure stories in Life With Archie and Archie at Riverdale High did in the '70s and '80s. He also inked for Gene Colan on the equally bizarre Jughead's Time Police, and for Bob Bolling on a number of stories (making Bolling's pencils look astonishingly like Goldberg's).

Here is an excerpt from one of the stories from perhaps the weirdest of the many weird experiments at Archie in the '70s: the attempt to transform Betty and Me into a soap-opera parody in the style of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Frank Doyle did the writing as usual (having characters repeat stuff we already read in the captions was a joke he got mileage out of for 45 years), Goldberg did all the pencils, and D'Agostino did all the inks.

Happy Non-Canadian Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T02:22:00.003-05:00

Generally, I like cynical or at least disatrous Thanksgiving stories better than sentimental ones, and I prefer present-day Thanksgiving stories to stories of the Pilgrims. So it's no wonder I've always liked Art Davis's "Holiday For Drumsticks." Like a number of his cartoons it gets by more on the wackiness of the animation than the actual gags or the way they're timed, but that's fine. And the casually violent old hillbilly couple (both voiced by Mel Blanc) are really funny.

Rescued From the Trunk

2010-11-23T13:12:00.007-05:00

I recently got to talk to Hugh Martin (Meet Me In St. Louis and much more) on the occasion of his autobiography, which was quite a thrill for me. In preparation, I listened or re-listened to a few of his scores, and came away impressed as always by how talented he was in every area -- though because he could do so many things, he never produced as large a body of work as he might have if he'd stuck to songwriting. And of course many of his best songs were written for projects that didn't do well, though that's a common problem. "An Occasional Man," a song I've written about several times, appeared in a movie called The Girl Rush that Martin calls the worst he was ever involved with.

Another fine Hugh Martin-Ralph Blane score (mostly Martin, it seems) was written for a not-terrible but not-exactly-good movie called Athena, a typical product of mid-'50s MGM when they were starting to ease up on the musical business and basically burning off contracts for musical performers they'd signed up. Esther Williams conceived the story, of a girl from a family of fitness fanatics, as a vehicle for herself, and was upset when the studio took the story away from her and gave it to Jane Powell instead. The rest of the cast was a mix of regular MGM contractees (Debbie Reynolds) and new signings who never really worked out for the studio (Vic Damone, Edmund Purdom). It's a mess, but the score has two of Martin's best songs, the ballad "Love Can Change the Stars" and the uptempo "I Never Felt Better."

Another song, "Faster Than Sound," was cut from the final print of the film, though it turned up as a bonus on a soundtrack CD in the '90s. It was written for Damone, and it was a song about the Jet Set and the way air travel was making the world smaller (with a wink, in the verse, to the new promise of space travel). If it had made it into the film, it would have ranked as one of the best Jet Set songs of the era; unlike "Come Fly With Me," which is about using air travel to lend some spice to monogamy, "Faster Than Sound" is about the hedonism of the Jet Set life, where you can go anywhere, do anything, and lead multiple lives with multiple sexual partners. It's a male version of "An Occasional Man" in that way. I find Damone's performance a bit somnolent, which may help explain why it was cut -- it's a long song and he makes it sound long.

Martin liked the song and didn't want to lose it, so ten years later, when he wrote the musical High Spirits, he re-worked the song so it could be sung by Tammy Grimes' character to describe the joys of being a ghost. Apart from some transpositions and adjustments to the melodic line, the lyrics are revised to eliminate references to jet travel, and to reflect the fact that it's being sung by a woman.

The original version has the better orchestration, the second version has the snappier tempo (plus a Martin choral arrangement, which helps). But I don't think it really works as a song about a ghost, because it sort of kills the point of the song, as well as being at odds with the point of the show -- when Elvira sings about doing physical things and enjoying the company of men, that conflicts with the fact that she's trying to kill off her living husband so she can be together with him. (In one of the songs actually written for the show, she sings that "I'm merely thin air/When we're sharing a kiss.") So it's an awkward fit. I asked Martin about it, briefly, and he agreed that the original version was better.

But that's how "trunk songs" -- written for one show and used in another -- often work: the lyrics can be adjusted to fit the new show, but the point often winds up being awkward or not quite relevant. Which is why trunk material, very common in the '30s, became less and less common as shows became more integrated (Leonard Bernstein re-used a lot of unused music in West Side Story, but always with new lyrics).

Staging an Animated Song

2010-11-17T11:04:00.010-05:00

I was looking at "Gay Purr-ee" again the other day, a movie that is less than the sum of its parts but will always have a following because the parts are so interesting (Judy Garland fans, Harold Arlen fans, Chuck Jones fans, and UPA fans can all find something of value in it even though it's none of those people's best work). One thing that occurred to me this time is that staging a song for animation can be surprisingly tricky.

The temptation in a cartoon musical, and one that Abe Levitow and Chuck Jones and the rest of the team didn't really avoid here, is just to illustrate the lyrics. So in the "Money Cat" song, there's a physical image to match most of the images in the lyric, including "bottle poppers" and having your "heart set" on something. It's like a live-action musical number where the singer acts out everything he or she sings about, and much of it is redundant: if they're singing about it, we don't need to see every bit of it illustrated.

This is a particular problem with these songs, because Yip Harburg was known for packing his lyrics with images that are at once very specific and hard to translate into physical terms -- in fact, that's arguably a problem with the score, that unlike Arlen and Harburg's songs for The Wizard of Oz, these songs don't have deceptively simple images and can seem over-sophisticated for a movie about talking cats. (In that they reflect the tone of the movie, which is also trying to load on more sophistication than the story can handle.)

If you compare the staging of "When I See an Elephant Fly," a song with (by its nature) lots of specific physical images, the crows don't act out a lot of the images -- and when they do act them out, it's in a simple way, by gesticulating; they don't contort themselves into the shape of baseball bats. The staging works with the song rather than just mimicking it.

Of course, to stage a song that way you more or less have to have full animation -- if the characters can't act in an individualized way, then they can't do much that isn't in the lyrics. With Gay Purr-ee, a movie that emphasizes layout and design over animation, the option to concentrate on acting and characterization may not have been available; certainly "Roses Red, Violets Blue" (an Arlen/Harburg song so typical of their work that I'm kind of amazed it was newly written for this film) seems a little lost when it comes to patches in the lyrics that don't led themselves to illustration -- when that happens, it's just Mewsette standing there and singing, or long shots of the countryside.

An Uninformative Trailer

2010-11-15T21:17:00.002-05:00

Thad knows (as do most people within earshot) how much I love Artists and Models, so I thank him profusely for uploading the trailer after he bought a copy off ebay; here's his own post about it.

As he notes, and as you can see below, the trailer doesn't really tell you much about the film. Most trailers try to oversell the story, but this does the exact opposite, leaving out most of the satire and all the crazy Cold War spy stuff from the last third. It even soft-pedals the film's status as a cheesecake calendar come to life, which you'd think would be the absolute first thing a trailer would want to play up -- but to do that, they would have had to include Eva Gabor in there, and she only appears once the spy plot starts up.

It makes me wonder if the missing plot points from the spy section, which I've written about before, might be a sign that they weren't even sure about including that part in the movie at all. With a few reshoots it would actually have been possible to create a different ending for the picture (maybe right after the title number at the ball). Or maybe not.

But I do get the impression the studio -- or Wallis -- thought the movie's weaknesses were concentrated in that final section, which would explain why it was allowed to go with several sequences written but not shot, and why it doesn't appear in the trailer. Many people agree that the movie falls apart once the spies come in, so they wouldn't have been far out if they had believed this, but I personally feel like the "fever dream" aspect of the film is enhanced by the fact that it gets crazier as it goes on, until by the end it resembles one of the nonsensical comic books that have destroyed Jerry Lewis's mind. That steadily increasing lunacy, after starting like a sort-of-normal Martin and Lewis movie, is one of the things that made it so influential for the French New Wave.

The trailer doesn't include any "outtakes" either - none of Shirley MacLaine's "The Bat Lady" number, which was described in some of the publicity (she was supposed to do it while "flying" on wires) but never seen, and possibly never shot at all. As I said, it's a long movie and it was over budget, despite being part of a series that was supposed to turn a big profit on relatively small investments (like Wallis's later series of Elvis movies, though those were even cheaper). It might be that they just ran out of money or time and pulled the plug on that musical number, as well as various plot points.

What About Paul Mazursky?

2010-11-06T02:54:00.002-04:00

Sad about the death of Jill Clayburgh, who I really liked in An Unmarried Woman. She was one of a number of unlikely female stars of the '70s; a notoriously bad time for female leads in movies, the women who got those few juicy parts were often not larger-than-life personalities or stunning beauties, but performers like Clayburgh and Diane Keaton who seemed as close as movies get to presenting average, cute, charming people.

Since Unmarried Woman was probably her best role, the news gets me to thinking: why isn't the film's writer-director, Paul Mazursky, mentioned more often as one of the great directors of the '70s? Not that he's exactly forgotten; the L.A. Critics' Association just announced that they're going to present him with a lifetime achievement award. But when people talk about the '70s generation, I don't hear Mazursky's name come up very often, even though in my opinion he's one of the most interesting directors of that era. Maybe he suffers from the fact that his debut, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, is probably his best-known film and one that's obviously dated (though no more so than the other seminal films of that year, like Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy and even Wild Bunch).

But his '70s films are often quite wonderful and rarely less than interesting; unlike Woody Allen he has the gift of examining characters who aren't exactly like him, and character studies like Harry and Tonto and Unmarried Woman still work very well for me. And of course he was a fine director of actors. Art Carney won an Oscar for Harry and Tonto, yet hardly anybody talks about the movie, which I really like.

His career took a more commercial turn in the '80s and flamed out in the '90s, but neither of these things -- going Hollywood and burning out -- are unusual for directors of the '70s generation. (Some of his '80s films are pretty good; they're just slicker and more studio-ish -- more '80s, in other words.) Maybe his rather pompous public persona has obscured his moviemaking, but that hasn't stopped Peter Bogdanovich's early films from being appreciated. And the fact that he's a familiar presence as an actor might also get in the way of his reputation as a director, though I don't think this is a situation like with Sydney Pollack, who was genuinely more distinctive as an actor than director.

It may be that except for Bob & Carol he doesn't really have a "signature" film the way Allen had Annie Hall -- he could direct actors to Oscars and nominations but never got nominated for Best Director. But I think Mazursky is an uneven but important New Hollywood director whose work is waiting for a second look.

A Stan Goldberg Request

2010-11-06T00:32:00.017-04:00

A reader asked me if I had this comic story, and I do: Reggie and Me # 28 (March 1968), an issue-length story that probably represents some of Stan Goldberg's earliest work for Archie comics. With Archie having crushed most of its humor competitors and Marvel phasing out its humor titles after the short-lived attempt to convert them to romance comics, Goldberg followed the Dan DeCarlo path and started to move from Millie the Model to Archie. Though he would continue to contribute to Millie and other Marvel titles for several hears, he asked Marvel to credit the art to Sol Brodsky so he wouldn't officially be moonlighting with them; in effect, he was part of the Archie stable from 1968 onward and has continued to be there to this day.

Around the same time that Goldberg came over from Marvel, Al Hartley also moved from Marvel to Archie, and for the same reason: the non-superhero work was drying up at Marvel and he wasn't a superhero artist. (Stan Lee tried Hartley on one Thor story, and it was clear that superpowered action was not his thing any more than teen hijinks were Steve Ditko's.) And also around this time, Archie editor Richard Goldwater decided to change the system for assigning covers: whereas each artist had usually gotten to do a certain number of covers, starting about 1967 Dan DeCarlo became the main cover artist for nearly all the company's major titles, no matter who was drawing the contents of the book. After they added some new titles, Goldberg was given a lot of covers too, presumably because his style was the closest to DeCarlo's. Other artists would only get to do a cover when DeCarlo or Goldberg simply weren't available. In fact I don't know that Samm Schwartz, who had done many covers in the '50s and '60s, ever got to do a cover for a single issue of Jughead after he came back in 1970; it was always DeCarlo or Goldberg.

So it's this period, 1967-8, that really created what is now thought of as the "Archie House Style," defined as the DeCarlo style. By giving the covers to DeCarlo and bringing over two of his Marvel colleagues, the Goldwater family was obviously trying to standardize the comics and give them an overall look. (The prolific veteran artists, Harry Lucey and Samm Schwartz, were "grandfathered," allowed to keep working in their accustomed styles; but new artists were apparently told to draw like DeCarlo.) Hartley certainly DeCarlo-ized his style a bit when he went to Archie; his Marvel style, on Patsy Walker, was more realistic and less cartoony.

Goldberg, of course, is a chameleon, someone who can always adapt to whatever style his company needs. When DeCarlo left Millie to work full-time at Archie, Stan Lee put Goldberg on the title, and he turned out work that was... not DeCarlo, not even a DeCarlo imitation exactly, but something close enough to make the reader feel like there hadn't been a change in style. When Millie went soap opera, Goldberg completely changed his style, only to change back when it went back to comedy. Like I said, a chameleon.

Back to Archie, though, the DeCarlo-ization of the style had its good and bad points. The good was that with Goldberg and Hartley on board, two men almost as fast as DeCarlo himself, Archie was able to meet the new demand created by a) the collapse of its competitors and b) the success of Filmation's cartoon series. (The Archie regulars were not generally as fast as the Marvel people. Harry Lucey was not slow, but according to Victor Gorelick, he wasn't a workaholic: he would do as many pages as he needed to get the amount of money he needed. Bob Bolling was, by his own admission, a slow and methodical worker.)

The problem from a comics fan's standpoint is that standardization is just that, standardization, and a comic isn't as much fun to look at when everybody's trying to draw like the one head guy. (This is also one of my problems with Harvey Comics, where everything -- with the exception of some of Ernie Colón's wilder stuff -- either is Warren Kremer or looks like Warren Kremer.) This is a much bigger problem for me in humor comics, where much of the fun and variety is in the drawing styles, than in superhero comics.

Another thing about the Marvel infusion was that it seemed to point up the Goldwater family's weakness at developing talent. I may be too harsh, since many comics companies had trouble adding to their talent base. It's like animation, for that matter: Warner Brothers cartoons depended almost completely on the talent base that Leon Schlesinger assembled in the '30s. And at Archie Comics, the talent base was primarily Harry Shorten's; as editor of MLJ/Archie, he brought in most of the important artists and writers. It wasn't a talent pool put together all at once; first there was Bob Montana, Harry Lucey, Samm Schwartz, Joe Edwards and Bill Vigoda -- the young men who joined in the '40s and created or developed the humor titles. Shorten hired Frank Doyle as a writer in 1951 (on the recommendation of another writer, Ray Gill) and got Dan DeCarlo on a part-time basis the same year. Finally he signed up Bob Bolling, Bob White and Dexter Taylor just before quitting, reportedly because John Goldwater refused to make him a partner.

When Richard Goldwater took over as editor, he clearly had some good ideas; in fact, the quality of the monthly titles probably improved overall under Goldwater's editorship. (Shorten treated them more as grab-bag titles, while Goldwater moved more toward giving each title its own regular artist and its own distinct look and feel: Betty and Veronica became DeCarlo's title, Archie became mostly Lucey's, and so on.) He also expanded the brand by introducing adventure titles (Life With Archie) and oddball humor (Mad House). But in terms of bringing in new talent, he doesn't seem to have had Shorten's track record, except on Mad House where he hired George Gladir to write and the young Orlando Busino to do a lot of the art. This is partly because superhero comics were taking off again and young artists were more interested in doing those. (Neal Adams was an Archie discovery, but he'd come there to work with Simon and Kirby on The Fly and only did the regular Archie pages after Simon wouldn't hire him. As soon as superhero work became available elsewhere, he took it.) But a lot of the new artists and writers who did emerge at Archie in the '60s and '70s were either mediocre (Dick Malmgren, Gus LeMoine) or DeCarlo clones (DeCarlo's son Dan Jr.). And so the Archie company was dependent on two talent pools -- Shorten's and Stan Lee's -- but didn't have new people coming in to freshen things up.

Now, the Goldberg story itself. Goldberg started out working mostly on low-selling titles, of which Reggie and Me was undoubtedly one of the lowest. (Poor Reggie; he's never really had a successful title of his own. Even Veronica now has her own reasonably popular title, and he doesn't.) They tried several things to make the title work, never really settling on a style for it; with this issue, the idea apparently was to do a book-length story, though it's really more four separate stories that happen to be linked.

The uncredited script is clearly the company workhorse Frank Doyle, though it's neither one of the best nor worst of his 10,000 Archie scripts. It's pretty standard stuff, maybe a little more campy than usual, and a few more puns than usual from a writer who wasn't usually very inclined toward puns. (A lot of Doyle's stories around this time were trying to be more over-the-top wacky, to respond to the success of campier, wackier entertainment, particularly on television.) I do like the line about "the Jolly Green Clyde," whatever that means, but otherwise the main point of interest is the Goldberg art.

That art as you'd expect based on his Millie work -- it's like DeCarlo except a bit looser and less slick. Plus the women are a little less voluptuous than in DeCarlo's art, and the men tend to hunch over a lot, like they have bad backs. Goldberg also sometimes draws the characters in circle instead of square panels, which he later stopped doing but which I like, since it's sort of a '50s throwback.

Here, for comparison, is the issue's cover, by DeCarlo:

And here's the story, by Goldberg:

Under-Recorded Musicals

2010-10-25T19:39:00.013-04:00

As a fan of musicals, I long ago learned to accept that many of the pre-1943 musicals are unlikely to receive a full-fledged cast recording: these shows were created before Oklahoma! popularized the Original Cast Album in the U.S. (original cast recordings had been much more common in England up until then) and before the LP made it possible to record most of the important numbers in a score. Some shows have been reconstructed and recorded in their original form, mostly when someone is willing to pay for them -- the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization has paid for several Rodgers and Hart musicals to be recorded (though not enough of them; most of their '20s scores lack full recordings) and the Gershwin estate often does the same with musicals by George and/or Ira Gershwin. But this is always going to be an under-recorded part of musical history; the supply is too great and consumer demand for recordings too small.

There's another category of under-recorded musical, which is a post-Oklahoma! musical that was recorded but, for one reason or another, never really got a fully satisfying recording. Usually this happens with musicals that have extremely long scores that couldn't be contained on a single LP; they had to undergo cutting and pruning for that purpose.

The show whose lack of a really complete recording is most frustrating to me is Carousel. It has probably the longest score of any Rodgers and Hammerstein show (as well as possibly the best), and no single-disc version could accommodate it. The original cast version, on 78s, really gives only a vague idea of what the score was like -- and it also incorporates several arrangements that were thrown out soon after the recording was made. (Robert Russell Bennett's original version of the "Carousel Waltz," used on the recording, was replaced with a more symphonic version by the show's main orchestrator, Don Walker, and it's Walker's version that's the basis for most stand-alone performances of the suite.) The movie soundtrack incorporates all the cuts and changes that were made for the movie version. The Lincoln Center cast recording, from 1965, has nearly-complete versions of some numbers -- notably the bench scene, perhaps the most ambitious musical scene ever undertaken in musical theatre up to that point -- but had to drop or truncate other numbers to make room for them.

In the '80s, when studio cast recordings of old musicals were briefly popular, there were plans to do a complete Carousel, but it never happened. MCA did do a recording with Samuel Ramey as Billy, but due to some kind of rights issue they were not allowed to use the original orchestrations, and had new (and not very good, as I recall) ones specially made for the recording.

Since then, there have been two cast recordings based on Nicholas Hytner's 1993 London stage production. They have their good points, but the vocalism isn't always up to what the score needs. More importantly, they had to re-orchestrate for smaller orchestras, and that's a bigger problem for Carousel than most musicals: it was scored for one of the biggest orchestras in Broadway history. It used a 39-piece orchestra, including 22 strings. That's bigger than some orchestras that play Mozart, never mind Broadway. It can be done with a smaller string section (it's hard to tell, but it sounds like fewer strings in the clip above), but when you cut down the strings to the level of modern pit bands, the music's impact is reduced even more than for the average re-orchestrated show.

At least the 1994 recording based on Hytner's production (after it moved to New York), though with some re-scoring, uses a string section that's large enough to do some justice to the score -- though even with the longer running times of CD, it had to make some cuts to avoid spilling over onto two discs.

What Carousel needs is a recording of two discs, with a full orchestra. But though there were a bunch of recordings like these in the '90s, from John Yap's TER/Jay company (which recorded every note of dance music and transition music for many classic musicals, marketing them to schools and amateurs who wanted to learn all the music prior to performing it), Carousel never made it onto the list of recorded shows; I'm not sure why. The Rodgers and Hammerstein organization recently paid to make a two-disc complete recording of Allegro, but I honestly think Carousel needs it more.

Another big show that needs another recording is Follies, though that's a show that actually has had nearly all its music recorded in its original form; it's just that it's never had a really satisfying recording. There have been four recordings of Follies, and all of them have something wrong with them:

- The original cast recording has (of course) the best cast, but the record company refused to give the album two LPs. To get it onto one, nearly every song was truncated.

- The 1985 "Follies in Concert" recording has the usual problems of live recording at the time -- it's not a great-sounding album. More importantly, it's not a satisfying cast overall; hardly anybody is exactly right for his or her part. (Barbara Cook is a great singer; Sally was never really her kind of part -- it's not a part she would have done on the stage.) And even this version left out or changed some bits of the score.

- The 1987 London cast recording preserves the "revisal" that Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman created (on suggestions by the producer, Cameron Mackintosh) for this production, revisions that were eventually withdrawn because hardly anyone liked them. Though this was the only production of Follies that has ever been a commercial hit, so frankly I would think they'd be worth looking at more closely. Still, the recording preserves the worst ideas from the production: dropping a very important song ("The Road You Didn't Take") and adding mostly mediocre new songs from a Sondheim who had forgotten how to write a concise 32-bar song. (The new climactic number, "Make The Most of Your Music," is one of Sondheim's most overlong and repetitive songs.)

- The 1998 recording based on the New Jersey Papermill Playhouse production includes nearly the whole score plus some cut numbers, with the original orchestrations and a cast that at least had performed the thing on stage. While I'm glad to have it just for the completeness and archival value, it's a very unexciting recording -- maybe because Jonathan Tunick, the orchestrator, stepped in to conduct it. He's a great orchestrator but a dull conductor, and the whole thing is too low-energy to make much of an impact.

It's too bad the 2007 Encores! production of Follies didn't get a recording, but again, if no one wants to step in and pay for one, you can't blame record companies for not doing it; most show albums are money-losers. There's a production of Follies coming next year with Bernadette Peters as Sally, and that might get a recording if it does well -- but I fear that this might use a reduced orchestra too, and this (like Carousel) is a show that needs the original orchestrations more than most.

Finally, the post-Oklahoma! musical that is done least justice by its recording is probably The Golden Apple, John LaTouche and Jerome Moross's monumentally ambitious, weird, goofy and kind of brilliant Americanized take on The Odyssey. As one of the first true through-composed musicals -- a show that's sung almost from beginning to end but calls for musical-comedy, not opera, voices -- the single-disc cast album can't give more than a taste of the score, but because it wasn't a big hit, there's never been a full recording. Except that because there's no full recording, it's hard for people to discover it, and therefore hard for the show to get as many performances as it probably deserves.

The Ann-Margret Unbalancing Act

2010-10-24T23:04:00.003-04:00

TCM showed The Pleasure Seekers tonight (they've been getting access to more and more Fox films, presumably -- I don't get the channel -- as the Fox Movie Channel phases older films out). I've written a couple of times before about how this terrible film is the perfect cheesy, prematurely-dated example of all the problems old-school popular culture was facing in 1964. The visuals, the attitude to sexual freedom, and the music are all clearly the products of people who wanted to appeal to the Youth Market but had no idea what young people were like. The Bossa Nova version of "Blue Moon" at a dance for wealthy Jet Setters is still one of the definitive 1964 moments.

Pleasure Seekers was followed by another Viva Las Vegas showing, which I didn't watch (that's a movie that works better in excerpts, anyway). But two 1964 Ann-Margret movies in a row got me to thinking about her again. I always liked her, at all stages of her career, and never got why critics in the mid-'60s seemed to dislike her: in The Cincinnati Kid she's actually very good (granted that it's not a difficult part for her to play) and her bad movies aren't bad because of anything she does. But though she probably would have become a big movie star if musicals had been more in fashion, it occurred to me that there's something most of her early movies have in common: they're almost all unbalanced by her presence, tilted in her favor either more than the story warrants or more than the actual star wanted.

The early Ann-Margret movies, apart from Kitten With a Whip where she's sort of the star and Pocketful of Miracles where she wasn't well-known yet, all seem to beef up her role to some extent:

- State Fair increases her role's importance compared to the same part (as played by Vivian Blaine) in the previous movie version.

- Bye Bye Birdie, of course, is one of the era's most famous examples of a movie where the director threw more and more material at a part that was supposed to be supporting. It culminated in the legendary opening and closing scenes (shot after all the other production had wrapped), effectively turning it into her movie and her story, since the real arc of the film becomes how she goes from screechy teenager to sultry woman.

- Viva Las Vegas, same thing (same director as Birdie); there's a famous story that Colonel Parker insisted on the scrapping of some of the material that was planned for her, though this may not necessarily have been only because she was stealing the movie from Elvis -- apparently what really bugged Parker was that Sidney was going way over budget, and the whole point of the Parker/Presley strategy was to make movies very cheap, so that they could always make back their cost no matter how bad they were. In any case, the movie has a weird structure because her part sort of drops away to almost nothing after "My Rival," and yet she still dominates the movie because she's a much more natural movie performer than Elvis is.

- The Pleasure Seekers is another version of the Three Coins In the Fountain story, where the three girls are usually supposed to be about equal. Here, though the other two girls actually have marginally more substantial stories (I said marginally; they're all kind of terrible, and Carol Lynley is stuck with a scene that the film's producer would recycle in Valley of the Dolls), A-M gets four solo musical numbers -- written by the Jimmy Van Heusen/Sammy Cahn team, who had no idea how to write for her -- once again tipping the movie to her.

- The Cincinnati Kid isn't really tilted that much toward her; it's just that both the young female parts are a bit irrelevant (that was one of Sam Peckinpah's problems with the project, apparently) and A-M plays her part much better than Tuesday Weld plays hers, thereby making her the definite female lead when it was probably supposed to be Weld, or neither of them.

A lot of these examples have to do with directors and producers tossing extra material at Ann-Margret because either they were infatuated with her, or really thought she was great (with George Sidney it seemed to be a combination of both) or because they thought she was destined for stardom and wanted to get in on it. But the way these movies use her, they probably didn't help her become a star; they seemed to suggest that she was an outsize personality who was always trying to dominate any scene she was in, and couldn't do a normal co-starring role with another actor. I can barely think of an early A-M scene where she's not completely in control of the scene, whether the story calls for it or not.

All of this, as I said, just shows that she needed to be in musicals, where everybody is always trying to upstage everybody and the more you try, the more fun it is (sometimes). And of course starting in Carnal Knowledge she proved she could tone it down and re-invent herself as a character actress who could stand still and let someone else have the scene. But in her early years, at the height of hype -- hype which I think was well-deserved -- her movies are all written and shot in such a way as to make it clear that no one has a chance to be noticed when she's on screen.

Which, paradoxically, I think made it harder for her to establish herself as a star. After the Elvis experience, there was really no way for her to get male co-stars of any stature for a while (except Alain Delon in Once a Thief, and in an English-language movie he wasn't exactly a star), because there was no reason to believe a male co-star wouldn't get eaten for lunch. Which is why her few '60s movies as an attempted star mostly have male co-stars who are used to getting eaten alive by leading ladies. Like Tony Franciosa, Hollywood's man of choice when you needed a guy who understood that when he was onscreen with A-M or Raquel Welch, nobody would be looking at him. This may also explain why she was passed over for parts in the big musicals that dominated the '60s; she was considered for Mrs. Molloy in Hello, Dolly!, but even assuming Streisand would have accepted it, she would have been way too outsize a personality for that rather little part.

That's a bit too much writing about one starlet from the '60s, even one I think was more genuinely talented and interesting than we usually got to see in movies. (I've compared her, and still do, to Anna Karina: they had the looks, the distinctive personality, the obvious fascination they inspired in their directors, and even the ability to sing and dance -- but they didn't always put it all together in the same film.) I just find it intriguing that it doesn't necessarily help a potential star to have supporting parts inflated for her (or, perhaps worse, to inflate them simply by being on the screen); it just gets you a reputation as someone who isn't enough of a team player to be a star.

AYPWIP

2010-10-23T21:04:00.002-04:00

I tried to make a video like this myself a while back, but this one is much better and more complete -- as far as I can tell, it's all of Pinky's responses to the "Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?" question from "Animaniacs" and the spin-off series. I think they did the routine a couple of times on "Pinky, Elmyra and the Brain" and in the "Wakko's Wish" movie, so it's not one hundred percent complete, but it's all the responses from the commercial DVD sets.

They're not arranged in order, which makes it less clear, but there was an evolution in the kind of answers Pinky gave. Originally it was something that implied he was "pondering" a solution to the actual problem he and Brain were dealing with, but that his idea was something weird or potentially obscene. Midway through the spinoff, it changed to become a random thought on popular culture or some other issue that happened to be on Pinky's mind ("But 'Tuesday Weld' isn't a complete sentence").

There was also at least one "pondering" that was written in and redubbed at the last minute. A longtime fan (I think it was Ron "Keeper" O'Dell, the keeper of the most important "Animaniacs" online resource) suggested "I think so, Brain, but she'd never leave Mickey." It was apparently recorded, but the Warners legal department ordered it out because of the knotty compensation issues involved -- you're not supposed to use unsolicited ideas, even if they give you permission. So it was changed to "But then my name would be 'Thumby.'"

Created in the Studio

2010-10-17T21:16:00.002-04:00

I just wanted to highlight this post about the matte shots in The Love Bug (supervised by Alan Maley, though the king of mattes, Peter Ellenshaw, came back to do some, including the famous shot of Dean Jones' nighttime search for Herbie). The Disney company's determination to do as much studio and as little location work as possible -- substituting the matte department, the Ub Iwerks sodium process, and other special effects gimmicks for location shooting -- was just an extreme version of a common tendency for old-school studio films in the '60s: as the '40s and '50s vogue for location shooting started to recede, older producers and directors were interested in controlling costs by staying in the studio.

Also, I think some producers may have felt that the visual appeal of location shooting had become diluted. Two of the biggest hit movies from 1964, Warners' My Fair Lady and Disney's Mary Poppins, both elected to tell turn-of-the-century English stories entirely on Hollywood studio sets, and while it's hard to know whether this saved a lot of money (especially on My Fair Lady, which was insanely expensive for a film with few locations and a relatively small cast), but it made the films look more distinctive and spectacular than the real London would have looked at that point.

In any case, I think The Love Bug has some of the best uses of matte paintings ever; like those TV shows today that use green screen to fake many locations, it uses mattes in places where you're barely aware of them. And yet the overall effect is to create a San Francisco that is an idealized, misty, magical version of the city -- a place where the crazy story seems plausible. Extensive location shooting (there was some, but not much) would have made the story seem much harder to accept.

Disney and the Copyright Police

2010-10-07T14:40:00.003-04:00

That Donald Duck remix cartoon also reminded me of something I don't think I've mentioned before: despite its reputation as an extreme copyright hawk -- there's a reason "Disney lawyer" is a term all its own -- Disney probably cracks down less on YouTube postings of its classic material than almost any other company.

I won't link to examples for fear of jinxing it, but there are clips of Disney cartoons, or songs from Disney animated features, that were uploaded soon after YouTube got popular and are still there, years later. There are some that have gotten pulled, I'm sure; recent material quite rightly gets a harder time, and not all classic clips stay up forever -- though some of them may be due to account deletion (from other things that got pulled) rather than Disney complaints. It may be that they've done what other companies do and simply arranged to get YouTube to give them a piece of the ad revenue in exchange for keeping those clips up. I don't know the details, though I'm going to try and find out.

But if you compare it to Warner Brothers, it's a whole different thing: Warners is constantly cracking down on classic cartoon uploads, taking them down almost every time they appear. The few that are still there are exceptions, clips that WB hasn't noticed yet for some reason or another, or public domain cartoons. Disney either has a laissez-faire attitude about classics on YouTube, or just doesn't have a system in place for taking the stuff down.

Whether this is a conscious Disney policy or not, you'll be unsurprised to hear that I think it's a good policy. As I've complained many times, by taking its classic cartoons off YouTube, Warner Brothers cuts off its best hope of introducing young people to these films; they're constantly trying to figure out how to rebuild the Looney Tunes brand, but cracking down on uploads that get hundreds of thousands of views for these characters. Whereas kids who want to see Donald Duck can see him all over YouTube; there are some real Donald Duck cartoon uploads with millions of hits. That's got to be good for Disney's branding and marketing, even if it's not legal.

Spot the Donald Duck Cartoons

2010-10-03T11:50:00.005-04:00

I know many others have linked to it already, but this mashup video, "Right Wing Radio Duck" -- where Donald's unemployment and economic insecurity make him receptive to the Glenn Beck show -- is today's viral video, and rightly. The creators deserve some kind of prize for finding a way to tell a complete, coherent story with almost nothing but actual Donald Duck cartoon clips and actual radio voice-overs.

It's been a while since I watched a lot of Donald cartoons, so I'm not sure, for the most part, which clips the clips come from (except for the obvious ones like "Der Fuehrer's Face," a few clips from "Window Cleaners," and the José Carioca bits). Maybe someone will put together a list of sources.

Update: As pointed out in comments, I originally confused José, who is not used in this cartoon, with Panchito Pistoles, who is. Maybe José can be saved for the sequel about Donald confronting the Brazilian menace and the secret Stalinist plot behind FDR's nefarious Good Neighbor Policy.

The Most Over-Rhymed Song

2010-10-02T16:39:00.005-04:00

I was listening the other day to a 1948 musical called Look Ma, I'm Dancin'!, about ballet, with a score and vocal arrangements by one of my living heroes, Hugh Martin. The show doesn't represent his very best work, as I believe he's admitted; it's possible that his easygoing style wasn't quite a perfect fit for the director, Jerome Robbins, here making his debut as a director/choreographer of musicals. In any case, the promise of the idea -- Nancy Walker stars as an heiress who decides to finance a ballet company -- doesn't really come through in the songs, which are all pleasant but could mostly fit into any situation.

Still, I never heard a Martin song yet that wasn't at least fun to listen to, especially when he's doing the vocal arrangements. One song from the show, "Gotta Dance," would have been perfect for Gene Kelly in an MGM musical; sung by Harold Lang (sort of the guy Broadway got for Gene Kelly parts after Kelly left), it was still impressive enough that Stephen Sondheim put it on a list of songs he wished he'd written.

And one song, "Shauny O'Shay," is at least slightly notable as an example of... maybe I shouldn't have said over-rhyming, since that's a pejorative term and I don't know if the rhyming kills the song. But it's certainly one of the most ambitiously packed rhyme schemes I've ever heard, with tons of internal rhymes, quadruple rhymes, and trick rhymes ("limits/dim, it's"). It may show Martin, writing a score alone for the first time -- he'd previously split songwriting duties with fellow composer-lyricist Ralph Blane -- trying too hard to show off, since I don't know that all the rhyming fits the laid-back mood of the song. But it's certainly worth hearing for fans of tight rhyming.

Incidentally, Steven Suskin's The Sound of Broadway Music says that this show was one of the first that involved the work of Robert Ginzler (Bye Bye Birdie), who became the busy Don Walker's primary "ghost" orchestrator for the next ten years. The book doesn't say which numbers Ginzler orchestrated, but some parts of this number sound like they could have been his work.

Another thing about "Shauny O'Shay" is that it's an example of the tricky relationship between pop music and musical theatre. According to Billboard, the actual character of Shauny O'Shay was eliminated from the show during tryouts, so the song went with him. But the creative team was informed that "Shauny O'Shay" was considered the only song in the score that had potential to get on the pop charts (it didn't, but nothing did from this show). So "it was finally put back to keep the disc jockeys and record companies happy, but didn't prove the potential hit it seemed to be at first." This was pretty common back in the days when pop hits came from Broadway shows, and when a pop hit was a huge plus for a musical's box-office; the producers had to think of the "exploitation" possibilities as well as the dramatic ones.

The article also mentioned how "If I Were a Bell" had been cut from the then-recent Guys and Dolls for a while, and that it was put back in after two weeks in part because it had already been recorded several times in anticipation of the opening. Though that song, at least, was not out of place in the show (and Frank Loesser claimed in the article that he never intended to leave it out entirely, just to revise it).

Here also is the "Gotta Dance" song -- much more normally rhymed -- that I mentioned before. You can see what I mean about how it would have been a perfect Gene Kelly song.

It Shoulda Been on a Golden Collection

2010-09-23T15:31:00.002-04:00

I'm not going to complain any more than I already have about the state of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies on home video. I just wish, looking back, that the final Golden Collection had included more "mainstream" cartoons. The idea of having a Bosko/Buddy disc was that there would never be another chance to get them out on DVD, and that seemed like a reasonable thing -- except it turns out there may never be another chance to get many of the great Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck/pre-1954 Foghorn Leghorns either.

Here's a decent-looking (though slightly sped-up) print of a cartoon I would have loved to see on a DVD collection: "The Unruly Hare," the first of only two Bugs Bunny cartoons Frank Tashlin directed. It's not the Bugs cartoon I would most like to have in a properly restored print, though; that's "Racketeer Rabbit," which I've already written about.

One thing about "The Unruly Hare" that I always like to point out is that it reflects how much less violent WB cartoons were in the early-to-mid-'40s than they later became. There's some violence and shooting, but nowhere near the level of Bugs/Elmer cartoons from the '50s. And the final part of the cartoon is devoted to a dynamite gag where the dynamite doesn't blow anybody up. If you look at cartoons from this period you'll often see that: dynamite that doesn't blow people up, characters walking off a cliff and then running back to safety without falling. The level of cartoon violence got amped up exponentially in the late '40s, maybe because of the Tom and Jerry influence.

Claude Chabrol Obituaries

2010-09-12T10:15:00.002-04:00

I don't have much time to discuss the death of Claude Chabrol, but here are two of the longer obituaries that have appeared so far:

- The Guardian, by Ronald Bergan

- The Daily Telegraph

I don't have sound at the moment on my computer, so I'm watching clips of Chabrol films silent -- and in silence, it's even clearer that his debt to Hitchcock wasn't just thematic; in terms of compositions (often very tight), camera moves, and combinations of both (keeping the camera close on someone while he's walking), the Hitchcock influence is genuine, but Chabrol made the style very much his own.

This is over-generalizing, but there were arguably two approaches available to New Wave directors drunk on genre films and wanting to do something different from the well-made establishment cinema. One was to try and make a different kind of film every time, another was to try a narrower focus. Chabrol and Demy always struck me as two directors who -- while they certainly didn't make the same movie every time -- seemed to try to "brand" themselves by specializing in a certain kind of film with a certain kind of look. And of the directors of his generation, Chabrol was the most successful in branding himself while also giving himself (like Hitchcock) the freedom to make different types of movies and stories within the overall style he'd adopted.

Fixing the "Superman" Musical

2010-09-02T23:58:00.005-04:00

One of the first obscure musicals I wrote about here was It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman, so I've been interested to see what's been happening with its attempted "Revisal" by the Dallas Theater Center. A version of the show with a new book by playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa opened there a few months ago; it was an expensive production clearly done with an eye on a Broadway transfer, but not much seems to have come of it yet. Of course things might be different if the Spider-Man musical turns out to do better than people expect.

This is a description of the revised production, and Aguirre-Sacasa talked to Comic Book Resources about the approach and the songs that were dropped and added. (The added songs mostly come from a pool of cut songs that Strouse and Adams recorded as demos, and which can be found as an appendix to the CD release of the original cast album.) DC wouldn't allow them to include the Superman characters that the musical left out -- so Max Mencken the columnist was changed to Lex Luthor, but then changed back to a version of Max who acts very much like Lex Luthor. But the setting was changed to the period when Superman comics began; the plot was changed; the tone made less campy; and so on.

Not having seen the revisal, I'm not going to try and pass judgment on whether it worked or not. I will say that revisions of failed musicals often seem to start from a one-size-fits-all attitude toward what makes a musical fail. The idea is always that the songs are great and the original production was fine but was dragged down by the book. (The book always gets blamed for everything.) In the case of Superman that's probably not true at all. The book, written by David Newman and Robert Benton at a time when they had already written their then-unproduced script for Bonnie and Clyde, is funny and smart; someone I know who saw it on Broadway described it as one of the funniest books ever written. It has its problems now, mostly because its approach -- viewing comic books ironically -- is no longer in fashion. But the show had bigger problems than the scriptwriting per se, though some of its larger problems are inseparable from script problems. Director Hal Prince clearly was not engaged by the material (he admitted as much in his memoirs), and Jack Cassidy threw off the proportions of the show by being too big a name for what should have been a small part.

My problem with "revisals" generally is that it's very hard to fix a show after the fact. It's incredibly tempting, given the benefit of hindsight and more time than the creators had during the hectic tryouts, but nothing seems to help all that much. Even Candide, which has just been announced for its millionth revised version, has (in my opinion) never arrived at a version as good as the original Lillian Hellman book -- that has its problems, but it's one with the score in a way that none of the subsequent versions are. It's the difference, I suppose, between a book that's created in conjunction with the score and a book that's created around it.

But at least Candide has a legitimately great score that you can't help wanting to save. In Superman, while there are some fantastic songs from Strouse and Adams in their prime -- just after they had created perhaps the greatest Broadway score of the '60s, for Golden Boy -- a lot of the weakest moments come from the score, not Benton and Newman's book. In particular the team could never figure out how to characterize Superman in song. I don't blame them: it's almost impossible to write songs for a character who is simultaneously a hero and a parody of one, and who has no sense of irony about himself. The closest character is, strangely enough, Candide -- and Bernstein and his lyricists solved the Candide problem by giving him songs at mostly un-ironic moments. But Superman's songs aren't goofy enough to be funny and they're not serious enough to work un-ironically, so the score is a big reason why there's a void at the center of the show. I actually like his big eleven o'clock number, "Pow! Bam! Zonk!" (written before the Batman TV show, I might add) -- but it's just not strong enough to make him the star of his own show.

One solution someone suggested to me years ago was to take Lois's ballad "What I've Always Wanted," about how she's longed for domesticity and settling down, and give it to Clark Kent and/or Superman. It would fit him quite well with only a few lyric changes, give him a more substantial musical moment, and make Lois a less sappy character as well. But while the revisal cut "What I've Always Wanted" it didn't hand it over to anyone else. So it will probably remain a show where the best song goes not to Clark or Lois or even the villain, but a gossip columnist's secretary trying to seduce Clark Kent.

Oh, well. I should add again that the original orchestrations of Superman, by Eddie Sauter, are some of my favorites ever. Sauter wasn't the first orchestrator to do without violins (this was actually a minor fad at the time, with shows as diverse as Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Forum and 110 in the Shade letting violas do the main string work instead, and Don Walker even eliminating violas and using only cellos in a couple of shows), but he created a sound for this show that was like none other, a combination of brassy, romantic and otherworldly; in other words, perfect for Superman. His Entr'acte is one of the best of all time, so good that it was recorded for the cast album (Entr'actes aren't usually recorded because they tend to be very similar to the overtures):

Update: From comments, reader "MSPote" has seen the revised version and has a fuller description of it:

Hi -- Interesting post. I did get to see the revisal/revival, and it was fantastic. It "worked" beautifully. I wasn't privy to any behind-the-scenes information -- just a regular theater-goer -- but it didn't seem to me that "everything was blamed on the [orginal] book." As you mentioned, some songs that originally had been cut were added; and not every song that made the cut back in 1966 was left, or even left untouched. "Doing Good" was abbreviated and put in Pa Kent's mouth in a brief Smallville prologue. "You've Got Possibilities" was given to the character of the gossip columnist, who is now herself the columnist, not a columnist's reporter. And it now helps set up a fabulous twist near the end of Act II. "Pow! Zam! Bonk!" is still there, largely untouched so far as I could tell. "We Don't Matter" is now a duet between Sharpe (the gossip columnist, who is "more cynical than Lois," says Clark) and Clark Kent (who takes what used to be Lois' lyrics, sticking up for humanity and its potential). The Entre'Acte was still there (no overture though), although Lois' sappy ballad has been cut from it (since it no longer appears in the show).

If you ever get the chance to see this new version in regional theater, which I think is where it will be heading (if anywhere -- DC, sadly and I think unnecessarily, doesn't seem too supportive of future productions) I urge you to do so. I think you will find that, other revisals aside, this one is a great one.

Insufficiently Silly Love Songs

2010-08-22T23:55:00.011-04:00

One post I've gotten some (polite) adverse feedback on is my "Why Sondheim can't write a love song" post, where I argued that Stephen Sondheim's ballads tend to suffer from vague, non-specific, generalized lyrics that could be about anything. As the comments noted, I was the one who was over-generalizing, and that's a fair point to make. (It's also a fair point to make that I over-indulged in jokey contrarianism for its own sake, blurring the line between serious points and over-the-top ones.)

Still, I can't say I've really changed my mind on the subject since reading Sondheim's first volume of collected lyrics, "Finishing the Hat." (It covers most of his produced shows from 1954-1981, with a second volume -- featuring the later shows and hopefully an appendix of other lyrics -- due out later.) I don't want to say anything about the book just yet, so this post won't quote anything from the book or Sondheim's annotations. But the lyrics are almost all familiar quantities, so I have to say that it still strikes me that he shuts down and goes bland whenever a ballad is called for.

There are lots of examples that jump out at me but the one that really struck me this time around was the climax of Anyone Can Whistle, a ballad called "With So Little To Be Sure Of," the most sincere moment in a surreal show and therefore the key moment in the evening. And while I've never cared much for the song (or the show), the incredible vagueness of the lyric stands out for me; there's really not an actual concrete image in the whole thing:

With so little to be sure of,
If there's anything at all,
If there's anything at all,
I'm sure of here and now and us together.
All I'll ever be I owe you,
If there's anything to be.
Being sure enough of you
Makes me sure enough of me.
Thanks for everything we did,
Everything that's past.
Everything that's over too fast,
None of it is wasted,
All of it will last,
Everything that's here and now and us together...

And so on. Now a moment like this arguably calls for vagueness because the characters aren't supposed to be three-dimensional; the show was a fable and there were very few "real" things in the show that could be incorporated into the lyric. But it's not just in that show; it happens in ballads all through the book, as early as West Side Story and as late as Merrily We Roll Along. But also, that's the kind of moment when other lyricists compensate for thin characters by finding other images and concrete ideas that can flesh out a typical subject; half the art of traditional lyric writing was finding some new image to express an old idea. It's what made Yip Harburg portray love as literally a force of nature in "Right as the Rain" or Sondheim's bete noire Larry Hart compare loneliness to being adrift on the ocean ("guided by just a lonely heart"), or even a less distinctive ballad like "Lost in Loveliness" calls forth a number of powerful images from Leo Robin, all of them describing what the singer does, not just what he feels (looking, going mad, reaching for a star, closing your eyes, walking away, dreaming, praying). Possibly because of his rule that nothing outside the show is relevant to a song, Sondheim often spends important numbers putting nothing but the familiar (abstract feelings, mostly) into a lyric. Which is how you get a lovely Richard Rodgers tune slightly weighed down by this fairly typical Sondheim idea (though at least it's got some hugging and holding in there to keep it from floating away into total abstraction):

Take the moment,
Let it happen,
Hug the moment,
Make it last.
Hold the feeling
For the moment
Or the moment
Will have passed.

He's hardly the only great lyricist who does this, of course. Still, I think one reason "Send In the Clowns" became a hit is that even though many listeners weren't sure what the title meant, it still conjures up something outside of the song -- a physical image, and even something happening (the clowns are already here). "Not a Day Goes By," which people keep trying to make into a hit ballad (they can't, because it's a rather poor song), is just a laundry list of feelings and abstract emotions in both its "happy" and "angry" versions -- though, typically, the angry version is a bit more concrete -- and doesn't have that kind of physical hook that can set it apart. Whereas "Losing My Mind," a song with some currency outside of the show, has all kinds of actual things, objects, actions, for the singer and the audience to latch onto and feel that there's a world being conjured up by the song.

While I'm at it, I should say a couple of things about Sondheim's criticisms of older lyricists -- and here, again, I'm going to stick to things he's said in the past, rather than direct quotations from the book. The things he's said about Larry Hart have always been fair, up to a point. That is, when he points to an example of mis-stress or awkward verbiage in Hart's lyrics, he's usually right, though he doesn't always distinguish between minor mis-steps and ones that actually hurt the song. (As an example of the latter: "Love Never Went to College," the song I quoted in my other post, is almost crippled by the fact that Hart sets Rodgers' tune with a strong accent on the first syllable of "never," making that syllable more strongly accented than "love," which is the actual subject of the song. The fact that this song never became popular probably has something to do with the fact that it's so terribly awkward to sing due to Hart's foul-up.)

My problem with Sondheim's comments on Hart are threefold. One I just mentioned, that he always tends to give the impression that all technical lapses are equally bad. This principle isn't a problem for his own lyrics -- at least not a big problem; it can lead to bloodlessness -- but isn't great for encouraging younger lyricists to take the kind of wild risks (with language, imagery, sound and sense) that can produce distinctive talents. I wouldn't really want someone conducting a songwriting workshop on that principle, but it's my impression that a lot of people do (which obviously is not Sondheim's fault; he's more a symptom than a cause). So you get the current situation where pop lyricists, with all their flaws of technique, are willing to put more weird and wild ideas into their songs than most theatre lyricists. And it doesn't have to be that way.

Another is that his comments, repeated often over the years, have helped create a portrait of Hart as an irredeemably sloppy technician. Now, again, that's not really Sondheim's fault; he's a contributing factor, but the main problem is that the Rodgers and Hart shows that get revived most often -- particularly Pal Joey and Babes in Arms -- include some of his worst work along with some of the best. By the late '30s and early '40s, for various possible reasons (drinking, growing apart from Rodgers, increasing involvement with book-writing and other tasks), Hart's work had become very uneven, and could go from technically brilliant to very sloppy in the same show or even two refrains of the same song. There are some shows from that period where Hart's work is great almost all night, but they're often flops like Higher and Higher (a much better score, song for song, than Pal Joey). And if you look at Rodgers and Hart's shows from the '20s, up to and through their stint in Hollywood in the early '30s, Hart's work is much more consistently sharp; even though he was rhyming even more heavily then, he usually managed to do it while keeping the lyrics clear and singable. (Look at "Manhattan," an early Rodgers/Hart song where the lyric maintains is colloquial style amidst a barrage of rhymes and jokes.) Basically a close look at Rodgers and Hart's work would show that Hart got sloppier as he got closer to death -- which doesn't let him off the hook for sloppiness, but is a bit different from saying that he was always sloppy. Though I may be biased because I think Rodgers and Hart's best work was in their '20s shows and movies like Love Me Tonight; by the time they split up, it was probably time for both of them to move on and find new partners (Rodgers did, of course; Hart died before he could find someone else to work with).

And the final thing is it just encourages a sort of culture of nit-picking which has become the bane of all pop-culture discussion, but has also infected the way Broadway buffs discuss lyrics: I'm always hearing "worst lyrics" discussions where most of the examples are gotcha-type examples of words that aren't real words, or images that couldn't exist in real life. (This isn't a Hart example, but seriously, can we stop making fun of the lark learning to pray? Have you seen the show? That's exactly the image that this character would come up with.) Which again helps perpetuate the idea that the best lyrics are sensible, technically perfect and realistic ones, an aesthetic that doesn't leave much room for a Hart or a Bob Merrill or many other great lyrics that don't follow every rule of lyrical technique. Again, some criticisms of technique -- bad stress, bad rhymes, unclear sense -- are fair. When it turns into critiquing lyrics for its own sake, irrespective of whether they work or not, it becomes limiting.

Hassan (Would Have Gotten) Chop[ped]!

2010-08-19T12:11:00.003-04:00

I didn't have much to add on the "Looney Tunes All-Stars" DVDs and the decision to present all the post-1954 cartoons in widescreen format (that is, with the top and bottom cut off). But Thad has some comparisons of screenshots from the fullscreen and widescreen versions, showing that compositions -- and sometimes even the ability to read signs -- aren't helped by the cropping.

I'll add a couple of things: starting in 1957 or so, the films seem to have gotten a little bit better about composing for the possibility of matting. I saw "Ducking the Devil" and a Road Runner cartoon ("Zip n' Snort," I think) in widescreen in a movie theatre, and they looked all right that way. "Ducking" looks OK on the DVD too. And you'll notice that even in that screenshot from "Mad as a Mars Hare," Jones made sure to keep the "Earth" sign in a spot where it wouldn't be cut off. Many of the 1954-1956 cartoons, however -- cartoons that were either made or begun before the studio shut down -- look quite bad in the fake widescreen; not only are the compositions bad but there's a feeling that the cartoons have been blown up or zoomed in.

The most irritating of all is "Lumber Jack Rabbit": the credits were not made with widescreen in mind, so WB has to present them in fullscreen (otherwise, as Thad says, they'd lose the copyright information), and then they switch to matted widescreen for the cartoon proper. And all of this without giving us the 3-D version that justifies this film's existence.

This thing does answer my question about why WB's "family entertainment" division was, according to rumor, reluctant to release any cartoons made before 1953. I wondered "why 1953?" Now we have our answer: they don't want to release cartoons in fullscreen. Yes, we're seeing a transition away from the days of pan n' scan to something arguably even worse: an insistence that all films shown on TV or home video must fill up the new widescreen TVs. I say this is even worse because it will effectively make it even more difficult than it is already for older films to get home video releases. Companies are now worried that customers will not accept a film that has those black bars on the sides.

Abbey Lincoln, 1930-2010

2010-08-15T13:32:00.003-04:00

She had an exceptional, multi-layered career. As the obituary notes, the early phase of her career culminated in her appearance in The Girl Can't Help It, where her outfit was recycled from Marilyn Monroe's wardrobe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. (There's at least one other Blondes costume that turns up in the film; medium-budget studio films got the most bang for their buck by re-using glamorous sets and costumes from earlier films.) She's one of the few non rock performers in the movie, yet she makes one of the biggest impressions.

To Melodrama And Back Again

2010-08-11T00:34:00.006-04:00

I've been asked by a couple of people what I think of the new Life With Archie magazine, which continues the Archie "marriage" flash-forwards from last year's famous arc. (For more details on the first issue, see Albert Ching's review at Newsarama and Chris Sims' review.) I may not be the absolute right person to ask, since although I'm a genuine Archiephile, I haven't really followed much of the company's recent output.

From what I do know, I think their work has improved in the past few years -- they no longer ask everybody to draw like DeCarlo; Jughead is no longer being given personality makeovers to make him more appealing to girls -- but there still hasn't been much, in art or writing, to compare to the era when they had some of the best humor comics in the business. (As I've said elsewhere, if you compare Frank Doyle's scripts for Betty and Veronica in its prime -- the late '50s and early '60s -- and compare them to the Stan Lee scripts Dan DeCarlo was illustrating for Marvel at the same time, you'd conclude that Archie was a better company than Timely/Marvel. And for humor comics, it was.) It's partly about an inability to get the best people, or perhaps an unwillingness to pay for them. (Though I don't want to disparage some of the people who are there: at least two writers, Kathleen Webb and Craig Boldman, do fine work in the Frank Doyle tradition.) But mostly it's just that they're not funny enough.

Now, Archie has been getting genuine buzz in the last year for the first time in a long time, and it's a sign that Jon Goldwater's aggressive new approach is working. (The aggressiveness is all a means to an end, of course: trying to increase awareness of the franchise to the point that they can finally, at last, get that elusive movie.) But most of this approach is based on comics that aren't really humor comics. The marriage arc that started all this was alternate-universe melodrama. Archie's romance with Valerie from Josie and the Pussycats: more soapy melodrama. Tom DeFalco's current arc in Archie is solidly in the franchise tradition, but it's light tongue-in-cheek action in the style of the original Life With Archie title. The only pure comedy stunt was getting Robot Chicken's Tom Root to write an issue of Jughead, and that didn't make as much noise as the others. (Unfortunately Jughead under Craig Boldman and Rex Lindsey, which has been the company's best title for some time, hasn't sold terribly well -- proof, perhaps, that funny doesn't sell any more.) This is still a humor comics company, but it's less of one than it was.

Now, I think it's mostly the extreme restrictions they've put on themselves in terms of what the characters can do. When Dan DeCarlo was booted out, he was free to complain that Betty and Veronica had lost the distinctive personalities that made them fun to draw: specifically, it had been years since Veronica was allowed to act really mean. (This was an ongoing process; Betty had been getting nicer, sweeter and less crazy -- and less funny -- since the '60s at least.) Bob Bolling said in his 2004 interview in Comic Book Artist that "I get these scripts that are nothing but heads talking... I got two stories recently that were exactly alike." Which is a consequence of the limitations on comic violence, anti-social behavior, and so on. It's not just Archie; nearly all of children's entertainment now suffers from gigantic self-imposed restrictions on what you can do and say. But since a funny Archie story, like a funny animated cartoon, depends on behavior that is mean or anti-social if you really look at it carefully, it's not surprising that it's hard for the comics to be funny.

So, given the fact that it's hard for kids' comics to be funny these days, and that funny isn't a great sales proposition anyway, it may make sense for their output to move more toward drama and romance and adventure. Which is what's good about this Life With Archie magazine: unlike the marriage arc, which felt like a bit of a stunt and had a lot of sloppy drawing, this one actually sort of feels like a concept that could work and has something new to say about the characters.

A lot of this has to do with the art, by Norm Breyfogle. He's using an art style that feels right for this franchise: it's dramatic and atypical of Archie in layouts and angles, but the characters all look like themselves, and their physical personalities are as we've come to expect after 70 years. This is a much better "Archie as drama" approach than the realistic new-look stories (which Breyfogle also worked on). In the melancholy feel and specific sense of place, it sometimes has a Bob Bolling feel to it, though more polished and with a less tongue-in-cheek sensibility.

The influence of Bolling seems pretty strong in Archie lately, not surprising given that Mike Uslan is a big fan and Victor Gorelick has tended to champion his work. Bolling's Mad Doctor Doom and Chester are the villains in the current Archie story, and in a key moment in Life With Archie, Archie meets a grown-up version of Ambrose, illustrated with bits from the 1958 one-shot "Little Ambrose" comic.

(Incidentally, Ambrose says here that he met the Martians Abercrombie and Stitch; that would be a so-called continuity error except that Bolling himself did a story a month ago where he brought those characters back to meet the young Ambrose. I don't know if that was deliberately co-ordinated.)

Second, while the stories are crazy melodramatic, they are at least sort of plausible -- unlike that To Riverdale and Back Again TV movie (and Gene Colan's comic-book spinoff, done in a realistic style). The way the familiar characters develop, in both stories, usually fits what we know about them, and it's a way of thinking about how permanently-young characters might grow up, if they were allowed to grow up.

And finally there's the already-infamous device of tying together not only the two stories, but literally the entire 70-year history of the franchise, by suggesting that there are parallel universes and that every Archie world is "real" within its own universe. This is nutty, but it's also kind of brilliant, because it's got something for everyone:

- For people whose interest in the franchise is mostly historical, like me, it allows for lots of shout-outs to history from a company that used to want to downplay how old the characters are. (One of the new characters owns a banking firm called "Mirth of a Nation," a reference to Archie's old tag-line.)

- For comic book fans, who don't usually read Archie, it gives them something to talk and argue about. It also brings the franchise in line with the modern requirement that they have continuity (something that was never necessary in the classic comics, any more than in Looney Tunes cartoons) while not forcing them to disown any of the nine zillion variant versions.

- And for kids, it's potentially a way of guiding them to other titles or at least the concept that there are other forms of this comic to explore.

I don't know how any of this is going to hold up in future issues; Paul Kupperberg takes over the writing in issue # 2, but I don't know what he has planned or if this conceit can be sustained. But for now, it's the first comic of the new run that has the potential to justify the move to melodrama: it has certain similarities to Marvel's soap-opera retools of Millie the Model and Patsy Walker (and let's not get into Patsy's superhero makeover), but unlike them, it doesn't reject the original purpose of the characters and therefore has room to move without alienating existing readers.

All in all, it's pretty impressive that they've made something interesting of this, given how bad it sounded. It was originally announced as two separate comics, which sounded like a silly attempt to keep the marriage publicity alive. Then it was announced as two comics in one magazine, which just seemed like a way of avoiding the inevitable lower sales for an "Archie Marries Veronica" comic. But there actually seems to be method to most of the madness: the magazine format is getting them back onto news-stands where they belong, and the presence of Justin Bieber on the cover might be worth it. They may sort of know what they're doing, which would be the first time in a while that you could say that about this company.

Patricia Neal, Like Marcia Jeffries, Has Left

2010-08-09T00:37:00.003-04:00

Another classic film actress is gone: Patricia Neal, who was 84.

Of all the many difficult parts she took on and did brilliantly, one of the most difficult may have been the one that made her a star in the first place: Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest, her prequel to The Little Foxes. The part of the young Regina Hubbard called for a young, relatively inexperienced actress who could be convincing as the character Tallulah Bankhead and Bette Davis had already made famous. It's too bad Neal wasn't chosen to do the film version, but the movie was made by Universal and Neal was under contract to Warner Brothers. (Universal gave the film to a former Warner Brothers player, Ann Blyth; I guess they were figuring she could do what she did in Mildred Pierce.)

Neal came to Warner Brothers at probably the worst time to be a contractee at that studio: most of their best people were leaving (directors, producers and stars) and they had little ability to develop young actresses into stars -- Doris Day managed it, but she had her singing career to help force Warners into giving her starring roles, plus her first starring film was a hit. New contractees seemed to get one shot at stardom and if it didn't take, the studio seemed to give up on them: so as Neal said, when The Fountainhead flopped, her chance to be a big star was over. (Even though she did what she could with a terrible part.) Her other Warners films didn't make much of an impact; The Hasty Heart was based on a good play -- her role in it isn't much, though -- and I remember liking The Breaking Point, which was Warners' attempt to do a To Have and Have Not movie that (unlike Hawks's) had something to do with the book.

Her career after leaving Warners follows a typical arc for the '50s: one good film as a freelancer, The Day The Earth Stood Still; some other not-so-successful freelance films, and more emphasis on theatre and New York-based TV, plus the occasional film that utilized a lot of New York talent (A Face In the Crowd is a Hollywood film, but made with mostly New York-based actors). Her theatre work helped get her back into a film industry that had more respect for theatre and TV success, until she suffered the strokes that derailed her career in its prime.

The Italian Screenwriting System

2010-08-03T20:01:00.003-04:00

Thinking about Suso Cecchi D'Amico, the prolific Italian screenwriter who just died at the age of 96, it occurs to me: while it's often complained that U.S. screenwriters don't get enough credit, writers in other countries' film industries were in some ways even more anonymous.

When I became interested in old movies, the names of some U.S. screenwriters sort of leaped out at me from repeated viewing, but it was much more difficult to learn the styles of Italian or Japanese screenwriters -- and not just because of the names themselves. Italian movies usually credited the screenplay to a committee of writers, making it difficult to single out one particular writer as worthy of attention.

And outside the U.S. (and to a lesser extent England) it was much easier for a director to get a writing credit on a film: there are many directors from France, Italy and so on who were credited as writer-directors for contributions that would never have earned them a writing credit in the U.S. I'm not saying, mind you, that these directors didn't deserve writing credit or that their contributions to the writing were negligible. But some of them were not full-scale writer-directors like a Bergman or a Sturges; they hired writers and worked with them.

So in English-speaking countries, a director like Hitchcock or Lubitsch might put his stamp on every bit of the scripting process without being billed as a co-writer, whereas in other countries they (along with others who contributed) would get a screenplay credit. And when the director is listed as one of the writers, even if he's only one of five or six writers, it's hard to pay much attention to the other names. There were some directors who were not writers at all, and whose movies tended to be clearer (both in credit and style) about who the writers were; Alain Resnais, who rarely takes writing credits, is an example.

Add all this up and I think it's rare that a screenwriter -- with rare exceptions of genuine star screenwriters like Jacques Prévert -- gets much critical attention. Of course this is to some extent the way it should be: the writing of a film is usually done by several people, all supervised by and writing toward the goals set by one person (preferably the director). But I do think it's a gap in my knowledge that I don't fully understand what D'Amico brought to the films she worked on, and I think I need to find out more about that.

Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Will Be Ours (Except On Sunday)

2010-07-24T23:19:00.004-04:00

Who'd have thunk, there's an actual comics announcement from the San Diego Comic-Con. (Well, they have to happen every once in a while to fill time in between big network TV show panels.) And this announcement happens to be a very good one: Fantagraphics is going to bring out reprints of Floyd Gottfredson's "Mickey Mouse" comic strip. They're only going to print the dailies for now, with the Sunday strips -- which told separate stories -- possibly held over for later; here's an interview with Fantagraphics' Gary Groth where he talks some more about the project.

I've said it before, but I can't think of another case where the comics spinoffs improved the characters quite as much as they did for the Disney stars. Normally even so-so cartoon characters are watered down for the comics, where there were more restrictions on things like violence (at least for cartoony, kid-friendly characters). Casper the Friendly Ghost was arguably more successful as a comic book star, but I think he had slightly more of an edge to him in the cartoons. But Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were much more interesting characters outside of animation, under Gottfredson and Barks respectively, than they were in their films, even with all the added (theoretical) advantages of being able to move and talk.

A Salute To The Unknown Bad Dancer

2010-07-23T00:13:00.005-04:00

When I saw this episode as a kid, I was mostly fixated on Potsie's poor singing and the weird new Arnold's set (just before Ron Howard left, Garry Marshall ordered Arnold's burned down so the set could be rebuilt in a style that '80s kids could relate to). Now I'm fixated on something else: the uncredited guy in the blue sweater, whose dancing is prominently featured in this clip. It may be the worst dancing I've ever seen on a TV show, except for dancing that is intentionally supposed to be terrible. I guess it's possible that Jerry Paris told him to dance that way to add some comedy to the scene, but it doesn't really come off; it's just bad spastic hair-coiffing dancing.

But he dances so badly with so much enthusiasm that he's almost a predecessor of Jeff from Mr. T's "Be Somebody Or Be Somebody's Fool." Never have I found it more unfair that a show could get away with not crediting someone if it didn't give him any lines. This man deserves to have his name, and his shame, preserved for posterity.

Loud as a Chanticleer

2010-07-18T21:18:00.002-04:00

This is (for now) one of the few flop musical clips from the Ed Sullivan Show that's still online, after Bluegobo.com had to divest itself of all its Sullivan material. (Of course the copyright owners have no apparent intention of making anything available except a few select clips from hit shows.) It's Lucille Ball and Paula Stewart performing the big hit from Wildcat, written by N. Richard Nash (The Rainmaker), directed by Michael Kidd, with a score by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh.

The cast album of Wildcat is one of the ones I listen to a lot despite the fact that the singing is very unpleasant to listen to: specifically, Ball can't sing, and while she at least tries to sing the notes (which puts her one up over Katharine Hepburn or Rex Harrison), the result can't really be said to do justice to them. Still, this is one of only two scores the great Coleman/Leigh team wrote for the theatre -- Little Me is the other -- and while they were better suited to pop than theatre, there is nothing like the combination of Coleman's nervous, rambling, constantly "busy" music with Leigh's colloquial, laid-back, yet brilliantly-rhymed lyrics. Encores! really ought to do this show (with someone who can sing better than Ball).

Laugh-Out-Loud Songs In Musicals

2010-07-09T23:21:00.010-04:00

I've been listening to some old musicals lately, and one thing they've gotten me thinking about is the difficulty of writing a really laugh-out-loud funny comedy song. Of course most comedy songs are funnier in the theatre, with an audience, than they are on a record, so I'm not judging them fairly, but even in the theatre it's hard for a song to make me laugh as hard as funny dialogue or physical action -- there's just too much going on for a joke to "land" even in a first-rate song. "I Cain't Say No" is a funny lyric, but there are no spots for audience laughter, and the point is more to make us smile than laugh.

Also, while comedy songs are often loaded with rhymes and puns, those things don't always get laughs. If you look at the original cast performance of "Please Hello" from Pacific Overtures, in ten minutes of dazzling rhymes, there aren't many laughs from the audience except at the simplest jokes: the repeated "Don't touch the coat," and the first mention of "Detente" where the audience gets the topical joke. (Stephen Sondheim has also said that the song "Barcelona" gets its biggest laugh right at the beginning, with the simple exchange "Where you going?" "Barcelona.")

The songs that get the biggest laughs are, first of all, songs that have some built-in laugh pauses (either a literal pause or a repetition, like of the song's title, where we don't need to hear the lyrics). And they're often songs that don't have a lot of big jokes in them, but have some overriding comic idea. "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" is, in my experience, a song that gets big laughs even on a record -- but only if it's sung by the kind of voice it was written for, a legit soprano voice. The gag is the contrast between the carnal sentiments of the lyrics and the sweetness of the melody and voice; when it's sung breathy and sexy, it is (again, in the performances I've heard) not a big laugh-getter.

And then there are some songs from unsuccessful shows that make me laugh harder than even comedy songs from some of the great shows. That's what got me thinking of this: I was listening to the cast album of the 1964 failure Bajour (about a band of Gypsies pulling an elaborate con on a naive anthropology student and her mother), and I was reminded that the song "Honest Man" always makes me laugh out loud.

It was added on the road as an eleven o'clock number for Herschel Bernardi (as the leader of the main Gypsy tribe) and Herb "Golden Girls" Edelman (as the leader of the Newark tribe). It's built around basically one joke, the "echo" joke where the characters repeat the last few words with a different meaning. But, because of the timing and the placement of the jokes, plus Bernardi and Edelman's delivery, I always, always laugh. And I bet I'd have laughed even harder with some of the visual business, like both actors taking off their hats as they sing "I swear by every hair on my head."

Are there any musical-theatre songs that always make you laugh?

Bajour is a pretty interesting show, though unrevivable since it's almost entirely built around negative ethnic stereotypes. It had great choreography by Peter Gennaro (who choreographed "America" and some of the other Sharks dances in West Side Story). The score, by a newcomer named Walter Marks, is quite good overall, entertaining even in the weaker songs, but Marks faded into almost complete obscurity after writing one other musical later in the decade (Golden Rainbow for Steve and Eydie, which produced Marks' only hit song, "I Gotta Be Me"). I think he wrote some material for Carol Burnett, and wrote the Merchant-Ivory flop movie The Wild Party. There were a lot of talented newcomers in the Broadway of the '60s who didn't quite make it, like Milt Schaefer (Drat! The Cat!), but Marks just sort of seemed to vanish, though I believe he's still alive.

The show was not an out-and-out flop, managing a run of about half a year. The problem with it, according to musical director Lehman Engel, was that it had two female stars, Chita Rivera (as a gypsy in charge of pulling the con) and Nancy Dussault (as the conn-ee). Rivera was better known, and you'd think that the "bad girl" would have the best material. But in fact, Dussault's material was generally better, and she was so good that she stole the show from Rivera. A lot of the tryout period was apparently spent trying to build up Rivera's part rather than fixing the fact that the male characters (except Bernardi) were weak.

Dussault and Bernardi proved they had the goods in another number that always makes me laugh, "Words, Words, Words," essentially a Vaudeville word-association sketch in musical form.

And, not comedy-related, but here's a sample of Gennaro's choreography, Chita Rivera dancing the title song. In this clip she sings it as well; Bernardi's character sings it on the cast album and in the script.

Wanda WTF

2010-07-08T09:39:00.001-04:00

Sorry for not posting recently; I think I'm going to return to posting a clip or story here until I can get some longer posts in the pipeline.

In my Bob Bolling post a couple of weeks ago, I didn't mention one story from the same period (mid-'80s) that I have never really understood, though I think I kind of like it in a weird sort of way. It's the five-page "Wanda Wunderbuss," which appeared in Pep in 1984, written, drawn, inked and lettered by Bolling. I know the omnibus titles Pep and Laugh did a few pilots for potential series that didn't take off (Jack Kirby even contributed a failed pilot to Laugh in 1947, called "Pipsy"). I guess this was one of them, but I can't quite believe anyone thought there was series potential in a story about a news reporter whose boyfriend turns out to be a robot, at a news station populated primarily by robots. It reads as one-third a parody of soap operas, one-third a parody of inane pretty-boy newscasters (three years before Broadcast News) and one-third just plain strangeness.

Adding to the strangeness is that Wanda's last name has clearly been changed to "Wunderbuss" from the original "Wunderbust" (the original name slips through at one point). Bolling sometimes tried to turn his fondness for puns into an attempt to get stuff by the editors, but I guess they caught this one.

Wanda Wunderbuss in"The Noose Behind the Nightly News, Or It Was a Real Hang-Up"
Script: Bob Bolling
Art, Inks and Letters: Bob Bolling
Coloring: Barry Grossman

Alan Jay Lerner Hates the '80s

2010-06-28T17:42:00.009-04:00

I've been wanting to write something about Dance a Little Closer, possibly the biggest musical flop of the '80s (even more than Carrie) and Alan Jay Lerner's last completed musical.

Like every show Lerner did without Fritz Loewe, it was unsuccessful (though Coco, probably his worst, actually made some money due to the presence of Katharine Hepburn) and like almost all of those shows, it has some wonderful things in it side-by-side with embarrassing things. In this case, the embarrassing things were apparently the staging -- Lerner directed it himself, creating a show that every critic condemned as ugly -- and the book, Lerner's over-ambitious attempt to update Robert Sherwood's anti-war comedy Idiot's Delight to the nuclear era. Critics also said that one of the embarrassing things was Lerner's subplot, about two gay men who ask a clergyman to marry them before nuclear Armageddon hits. But this subplot, which was attacked as Lerner's hopeless attempt to seem with-it, now seems ahead of its time.

Also, Lerner cast his umpteenth and last wife, British actress Liz Robertson, in the difficult lead role; Charles Strouse, the composer, wrote in his autobiography that a show should never have one man on songs, script and direction, and especially not if he's in love with the lead actor.

The good thing about the show, at least relatively, was the score. That's true of most of Lerner's shows; no matter how frustrating he was to work with, composers understood that he got good work from them. Burton Lane hated working with Lerner, in the middle of his Dr. Feelgood period, on On a Clear Day, but the score they produced was so good that Lane came back to him for Carmelina (and turned out another fine score for a flop show). Leonard Bernstein's score for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has some of the best music he'd done since the '50s, even for some songs where Lerner provided awful lyrics. John Barry's music for Lolita My Love was the best he ever produced for a stage show.

Charles Strouse's music for Dance a Little Closer doesn't stand out as much if only because he'd done better scores recently (Annie) and would do a better score right after (Rags). In my opinion Strouse is the most talented musical theatre composer of his generation -- roughly including Cy Coleman, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman, John Kander, and so on -- a wonderful melodist with an eclectic style that somehow never sounds like anyone other than Strouse. Some of the songs in Dance a Little Closer are cheesy or sleazy, particularly the faster songs. But the ballads are frequently gorgeous.

"There's Always One You Can't Forget," the last song in Act 1, would have become a big hit if it had been in a show that ran more than one performance, even though Len Cariou, the star, has some trouble with it. (It's been speculated that Cariou over-extended himself by playing Sweeney Todd; this score, which was more within his normal range, had his voice sounding ragged a lot of the time.) The orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick are excellent here, as they are throughout the show -- a reminder of how much of the Stephen Sondheim sound is Tunick's as well, since portions of the score sound a lot like A Little Night Music without being melodically similar.

The Sherwood play, about an entertainer in a hotel in the middle of a war zone, appealed to Lerner for two reasons. By updating the story to the 1980s (though in turning the villain into a parody of Henry Kissinger, he betrayed the fact that he started writing it in the '70s), he was able to write a show that combined topical social commentary with nightclub numbers that commented on the action, like his ambitious 1948 failure Love Life.

One of the better numbers in this vein is "Mad," a number where Harry (Cariou) complains about all the things that bother him, while his backup singers comment on what's really bothering him. (The way Strouse and Tunick manage to combine two completely different moods in one song is a tribute to their skill as theatrical musicians.) The song is so clearly Lerner's own complaints about stuff that bugged him circa 1983 -- "Whoever made Atari should be hung by his thumbs" -- that it's a strangely enjoyable time capsule; I like finding out what was pissing off cranky 60-something writers in the '80s.

The other thing Lerner clearly liked was the romantic plot of the play: the hero meets a woman he recognizes as the one who left him years ago because he couldn't give her the life she wanted; she's now pretending to be a high-class Englishwoman, and is the mistress of the wealthy bad guy who's behind the upcoming war. After My Fair Lady, every show Lerner wrote -- except Camelot and maybe 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue -- is about the same thing: a woman who either is made over or makes herself over into someone else. In On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, the hero falls in love with the person the heroine was in a past life. In Coco, Gabrielle Chanel has transformed herself into "Coco." The guy even made a musical out of Lolita for heaven's sake (it closed on the road).

The heroine's decision to transform herself gives rise to a song that's had a certain amount of life outside the show -- Robertson has sometimes performed it and it gets done in auditions and musical-theatre recitals. "Another Life" is a weird song because it's a classic, by-the-numbers "I Want" power ballad, complete with big orchestral climax, yet the lyrics are completely materialistic and bitter. It's a big romantic song about preferring money and security to romance. The fact that Strouse's melody sounds a bit like "I Remember It Well" creates an additional level of weirdness here.

No one will ever revive Dance a Little Closer (nicknamed Close a Little Faster at the time). But we can be glad that it was given a cast recording after it closed; there's more worthwhile material in it than in most '80s musicals, and as with many of Lerner's shows, I can't help thinking that it could have been good if only someone else had had more control over it. (Lerner was all right when working with a strong director who could force him to cut and change, as Moss Hart did on My Fair Lady and Camelot.)

To close this off, here's the song where the issue of gay marriage was discussed for the first time in a musical. It's actually not a very good song; the lyrics are goofy doggerel (a lot of Lerner's shows have these types of lyrics in them) and the tune and ostinato accompaniment are the sorts of things Strouse could turn out in his sleep. However it does segue into another nice ballad, "Anyone Who Loves," which, again, would be an anthem by now if the show had been a hit.

Update: In comments, Griff, who saw the show in previews, gives some more details on why it was such a disaster.

Regarding DANCE A LITTLE CLOSER's "embarrassing" subplot with the gay couple who wished to be married, well, this was just handled so poorly (and cluelessly) by Lerner as director, one wanted to just look elsewhere in the theatre, think of other, better shows, hope for a sudden power failure. It could probably have be reworked and handled well by another director (who might have, of course, also suggested certain key revisions to the scenes) but it came across as altogether flatfooted -- indeed, painfully so.

I had no issues with the idea of the Kissinger-like villain, which didn't so much betray the '70s origin of the libretto as the fact that it was penned by a New Yorker with a long memory; I daresay that this is one aspect of Lerner's book that has not really dated, at least not for many residents of Manhattan.

Some of the songs are lovely. But the overall effect of the show, which I saw in previews, was stultifying; it made one want to flee the theatre. It wasn't just bad (my date regretted that we had attended the damn thing) -- I was actually surprised that the show did indeed open.

Perfectly Frank (And Dan)

2010-06-24T16:45:00.006-04:00

I'll have more to say about IDW's Best of Dan DeCarlo: Volume 1 collection later, but for now I'll note that -- as first pointed out by Sean Gaffney, and confirmed when I got the book -- the table of contents includes credits for every story. They're in very small print, but they're there.

Because all the stories in the book are Betty and Veronica stories from the period of 1958 through 1969, nearly all the "written by" credits are, of course, for Frank Doyle. There's one story by George Gladir, one by Sy Reit, and one ("The Original") where the credit is "Writer Unknown," though it sure reads like a Doyle script to me. There are one or two stories where I'm not completely sure that the writing credit is right, and a couple of others where the inking credit is hard to figure -- Rudy Lapick is credited for most of them, but I thought there was a period in the '60s where DeCarlo replaced Lapick with his brother, Vince (who usually did DeCarlo's letters until his untimely death in the late '60s). Still, most of the credits look right at a glance.

I wouldn't say that every story here represents the best of DeCarlo or Doyle from this era, though some of them do, and anyway I would assume that the choice of stories was dictated to an extent by what original art was available. Anyway, more on that later.

Update: Here are the stories selected for this book.

All scripts are by Frank Doyle unless otherwise noted:

1. “Birth of a Notion” (Betty and Veronica # 37, July 1958) – The boys toss around a doll and fool the girls into thinking they’re tossing around a baby. (Script: Sy Reit)

2. “Flip Flopped” (Betty and Veronica # 38, September 1958) – Veronica signs up for the cheerleading squad.

3. “Sheep Skinned” (Betty and Veronica # 44, August 1959) – The boys accuse the girls of being “sheep” for following the latest, unattractive-looking fashions.

4. “A Choice Choice” (Betty and Veronica Annual # 8, 1960) – Archie has to break his date with Veronica to take his mother out on her birthday.

5. “Something to Remember” (Betty and Veronica # 63, March 1961) – Veronica is peeved because Archie can never remember what she wears.

6. “The Reader Knows Best” (Betty and Veronica # 63) – Archie tries to do the same task for both Betty and Veronica, while assuring the reader that he knows what he’s doing.

7. “The Bluest Angel” (Betty and Veronica # 63) – Betty feels guilty about exploiting a misunderstanding between Archie and Veronica.

8. “Gambler’s Luck” (Betty and Veronica # 65, May 1961) – The girls toss a coin to see who gets Archie.

9. “Snob Sister” (Betty and Veronica # 69, September 1961) – After Betty berates her for being a snob, Veronica argues that everyone is a snob about something or other.

10. “Switchcraft” (Betty and Veronica # 69) – When Betty has a date with Archie, Veronica thanks her for taking the dull boy off her hands.

11. “The Original” (Betty and Veronica # 77, May 1962) – Veronica explains that she doesn’t wear real jewels in public, just copies of them. (Credit reads “Writer unknown,” though it might also be Doyle)

12. “Commercial Caper” (Betty and Veronica # 83, November 1962) – Betty blows up “Archie Loves Betty” balloons and sends them floating all over town.

13. “Glad To Help” (Betty and Veronica # 86, February 1963) – Archie tries to use Betty to make Veronica jealous, and she’s only too happy to be used.

14. “Dear Diary” (Archie Giant Series # 23, September 1963) – Betty writes her version of the day’s events in her diary, while we see what actually happened.

15. “Sugar Doll” (Betty and Veronica # 103, July 1964) – Veronica tries to make candy, and both she and Betty get tangled up in the sticky goo.

16. “Heat Wave” (Betty and Veronica # 106, October 1964) – Archie, Betty and Veronica spend a hot day squirting each other with hoses.

17. “Bully Girl” (Betty and Veronica # 106) – Veronica shows off her new martial arts skills by beating up everyone in sight.

18. “The Midas Mess” (Betty and Veronica # 112, April 1965) – Everything and everyone Betty touches turns to gold.

19. “Prize Package” (Betty and Veronica # 112) – Betty tells Archie he’s won a “most popular boy” contest.

20. “Message Center” (Betty and Veronica # 116, August 1965) – Betty has to break her date with Archie when she sees a message on the bulletin board saying Miss Grundy wants to see her after school.

21. “The Phenomenon” (Betty and Veronica # 117, September 1965) – Betty and Archie discover that when Veronica stands on her head, her speech balloons are upside down.

22. “Rhyme Time” (Betty and Veronica # 119, November 1965) – The narrator re-introduces us to the Archie gang, in rhyme.

23. “Do No Evil” (reprinted in Archie Giant Series # 137, January 1966 — but from the look of it it’s clearly an earlier story, probably from 1960 or so) – After the girls accuse them of being slobs, Archie and Reggie try to avenge themselves by ruining the girls’ clothes.

24. “Feed Deed” (Betty and Veronica # 130, October 1966) – At the beach, Veronica tries to outdo Betty’s cooking. (Script: George Gladir)

25. “Wing It” (Betty and Veronica # 155, November 1968) – Betty impresses the boys with her great throwing arm, but Veronica gets more results by throwing badly.

26. “Drive To Distraction” (Betty and Veronica # 167, November 1969) – Archie uses a beach umbrella to give Veronica some shade in his car.

Armond White, Rotten Tomatoes and General Hilarity

2010-06-19T01:37:00.011-04:00

You may have noticed that Armond White, whose contrarianism and combination of unpredictability and utter predictability (he's loved every Spielberg movie since god knows when) were once known only to a few film buffs, has become more widely-known lately. But not in a good way. There's even a petition to ban him from Rotten Tomatoes.

As movie fans have gotten obsessed with Rotten Tomatoes rankings -- rooting for their favorite action/animation/sci-fi movies to get 100% positive rankings -- they've noticed that White frequently goes against the critical consensus (though not always), and that he single-handedly stands in the way of getting Toy Story 3 a perfect score. And so they're enraged. Since I think a collective critical ranking is kind of useless, particularly a numerical one, I kind of enjoy seeing him screw it up.

And it's also interesting to witness the anger of people who think The Dark Knight is the last word in cinema but can't stand a single contrary opinion. It's as if they don't have full confidence in their own opinions. White fills his contrarian reviews with references to other movies, often very worthwhile ones (I may not agree with his pan of Toy Story 3, but I agree that Small Soldiers is an underrated film), and obviously knows a lot about movies -- not just recent Hollywood movies either, but movies from all places and time periods. That gives his writing a certain authority that can make a person very uncomfortable; I think some (not all) of the people who get really angry at White are worried that he may be right. It's a bit like I used to get angry at John Kricfalusi for his opinions on cartoons I liked, because I wasn't secure enough in my own likes and dislikes. I'm now at the point where I know enough to agree or disagree.

Of course White is not right, or at least I find it very difficult to believe that he means what he says all the time. He denies that he's going out of his way to offer the opposite opinion from other critics, but since it happens so often, it almost comes off as a parody of criticism, a bit of performance art designed to show how meaningless critical buzzwords are. He uses the same words lots of critics use, and makes them argue the exact opposite from what the rest of them are arguing.

I also wonder if White's increasing weirdness is just based on his lack of interest in most current Hollywood movies. As a regular reviewer he has to be, officially, interested in every movie that comes out, and especially the big Hollywood releases. Except I doubt he cares very much about most Hollywood blockbuster sequels, whether it's Transformers 3 or Toy Story 3. And if he doesn't care, he might as well argue the opposite of other critics. Especially when it gets a rise out of the kind of filmgoer who is his natural enemy -- the filmgoer who is almost exclusively interested in current Hollywood product.

That's not really a defense of White. The thing I can say in his defense is that he still can and does write interesting pieces on small, foreign and past films -- that is, the kind of films where no one cares about the Rotten Tomatometer. Those are the films that he clearly gives a damn about, and if you look at his reviews with the new Hollywood movies filtered out, he looks a lot less bizarre.

But, of course, if he really is just having a lark with contrarian reviews of movies he doesn't care about, that's not a defense either. I'm sure it can be a chore to find something to say about every new movie, but his criticisms are so non-specific that I can't help thinking (again) that they're just some big joke on criticism.

Still, I can't help but feel a bit of enjoyment at watching the reaction to a critic who refuses to consider movies important just because they're big and new. I mean, if you look at the famous list of movies he hates and likes -- yes, the hates are sometimes weird and the likes equally so. But I don't think most of the movies on the "hate" list are immortal masterpieces, and his hatred of them isn't that much weirder than the reviews that proclaim these movies to be four-star perfection.

Most movies, then and now, don't matter that much in the long run. And the ones that do turn out to matter often aren't the ones that get the four-star reviews at the time. That, at least, is something that White keeps pointing out in his own strange way. And while everyone should like what they like, there's a weird sense of entitlement in some of his attackers, the idea that not only did they think Toy Story 3 was great (a perfectly good opinion) but that because it's the biggest movie of the week, everybody must validate this opinion. White's performance art is suggesting that most of these big movies are just the flavor of the week, and it doesn't matter much what critics say about them. I'd prefer this suggestion to be coming from a regular critic who actually discusses the movies, not a distant idea of what they are, but at least he's goading people into questioning some assumptions about what the "important" movies are at a given moment.

Update: In comments, Bwolowitz has a different perspective on where White is coming from:

I've read enough Armond to believe that he truly considers himself to be the savior of a diseased film culture. He constantly lashes out viciously against critics and so-called "hipsters" (White's favorite pejorative that's utterly meaningless in his hands) who have taken film culture in the wrong direction. And only he can right the course. So what we see as contrarianism, he sees as corrective measures. (And sometimes - rarely nowadays - he's right.)

Talking Owls, River Rats, and a Wolf Named Kanyook

2010-06-09T05:45:00.009-04:00

I discovered some interesting comics and contributions during last year's bout of Archie Comics research, but one of my favorite discoveries was a run of comics I actually remembered reading as a kid: Bob Bolling's two-year run as the writer and artist on Archie and Me, from issue # 141 through issue # 152. Since today is Bolling's 82nd birthday, I thought I'd write a bit about this run, probably his best contribution to the regular Archie comics and one of the more personal, idiosyncratic creator runs of the '80s.

The background is this: Archie and Me was a title launched in the '60s, and the "Me" was Mr. Weatherbee; all the stories had Weatherbee in them and were mostly about his relationship with Archie. It was one of the titles that Bolling was assigned to after he was forcibly removed from his own creation, Little Archie; he drew several issues in the mid-'60s, though from Frank Doyle's scripts, not his own. From the late '60s through the early '70s, the title was mostly written and drawn by the late Joe Edwards (creator of Li'l Jinx), who tried to do longer and more sentimental stories than you'd find in the other books; and then Al Hartley did some that were unbelievably preachy even by his standards. By the late '70s, though, the book became one of many titles that was just an "inventory" book: it had no style or consistent artist of its own, and the editors would just fill it up with four stories that happened to feature Mr. Weatherbee.

This continued up until 1982, when the Archie company contracted heavily (the collapse of the newsstand and subscription markets threatened to kill them off). All their titles were changed to bi-monthlies; many of their artists were temporarily laid off, and when they started producing new stories after several months of getting by mostly on inventory, they were determined to try and make the comics a little more relevant and hip. (I said a little.) This was the period when they switched back to the larger number of panels they'd used in the '50s and early '60s -- trying to "give the kids more for their money," as editor Victor Gorelick put it -- introduced new characters like Cheryl and Jason Blossom, and gave a makeover to a number of their lower-selling titles.

Bolling was originally assigned to Sabrina the Teenage Witch, with a mandate to include more fantasy and adventure elements rather than the humdrum domestic comedy stuff. He produced some excellent stories in this vein, but the title was canceled soon after he started, and most of the stories were burned off in other comics. Little Archie had also been canceled as a regular title (though Bolling and Dexter Taylor would continue to do stories for the digests and special issues), so Bolling wound up being given Archie and Me as his regular beat, writing and drawing an issue every two months (while also illustrating other people's scripts for the other comics).

It was his upcoming work on Archie and Me that Bolling was talking about in 1983 when he told an interviewer that he was "trying to bring Archie into today" and "give him some problems to wrestle with." Because this was Archie comics, that didn't really mean anything big or shocking, and Archie remained the good all-American boy who always does the right thing. But in many ways, Bolling's Archie and Me stories were different from anything the company had done. The only rule they followed was that Weatherbee was in every one of them (though he plays only a small part in a few).

The look was different: instead of the bright, light style of the usual Archie comic, these stories were filled with melancholy shadows, characters seen from a distance, and very specific evocations of nature, the seasons, and the times of day. The distinctive feel of all these stories comes from the fact that Bolling is usually quite specific about when a scene is taking place: many comics have just "day" and "night," but Bolling tried to give a different look to dawn, dusk, the time you walk to school and the time you walk home.

The range of subject matter also broadened. As most of you know, regular Archie comics basically had two modes: comedy and adventure. The comedy stories were in the tradition created by Bob Montana, and the adventure stories were the very melodramatic, slightly tongue-in-cheek kind created by Bob White and Sy Reit for Life With Archie. But most of Bolling's Archie and Me stories don't fit into either category. There are adventure stories, but much more serious and earnest than the Life With Archie material. And there are stories that play more as straight drama, like "The New Teacher" (about a meek teacher who turns out to be haunted by his failure to save his buddies in Vietnam) or "Heart's Desire" (Archie buys an obviously stolen tape player, and feels so guilty about it that he can't enjoy anything). There's even a sad, quiet Twilight Zone-ish story about a ghostly girl Archie meets, called "Jogger Jill." And yeah, there are a few regular slapstick stories mixed in there.

All of this is not much like a normal Archie comic, but it is a lot like Bolling's Little Archie, and that's what this run basically was: for the first time, Bolling was doing Archie stories that exist in the same world -- tonally and continuity-wise -- as his own Little Archie creation. The stories are flooded with references and characters that Bolling created in Little Archie and that no one used except him. Spotty, Little Archie's dog, becomes big Archie's dog as well. A guy who tries to rob the school is Chester Punkett, formerly Mad Doctor Doom's teenage assistant. In a Little Archie mystery story, Betty's brother Chick went to work for Kindly Mother Kelly's bakery, run by the unseen but rapacious and evil capitalist Kindly Mother Kelly; when Archie goes to get a job with her in Archie and Me, she's become "Kindly Mother Kelly Industries," with her corporate headquarters guarded by vicious dog. Even the throwaway references are tied into things that only regular Bolling readers would remember; when we see one of the places Malcolm Meeks worked after leaving the army, it's "Dreggs" gas stations, a Lodge-owned gas chain that Bolling created in the late '60s.

Partly because its references only existed within Bolling's stories (though some of them have been taken up by other writers/artists since then), this entire run sort of exists in its own world. Another reason is that the run has its own separate continuity. Archie comics didn't usually have continuity (and they didn't need them; humor comics, like cartoons, regenerate in every story), but Bolling's Archie and Me, while consisting of self-contained stories, does have some continuing threads: Archie gets his wrist broken in one story, spends the next story in a sling, and his recovery becomes a major plot point in the next issue.

And many of the characters act differently than they normally would outside Bolling's world. Archie is much more like Little Archie, the earnest kid who frequently gets into trouble but is incredibly plucky in a crisis; the love-triangle stuff is almost absent here. Jughead is almost totally absent, appearing only in cameos and getting like one line in the entire run. (Jughead didn't appear that much in Bolling's Little Archie stories either; I don't think he's really that into the character.) Instead, Reggie becomes Archie's closest friend, and while they're still in competition over spots on sports teams and the like, it's more of a competition between two friends who have different personalities; this Reggie is Archie's more self-confident, slightly cooler pal.

Given the freedom to turn this comic into his own private world, Bolling responded with the best writing he had ever done for "big" Archie stories. Normally he would over-indulge in bad puns (perhaps a defense mechanism against accusations that his scripts didn't have enough hard jokes), and there are a few stories early in the run that do just that. But for the most part, the punning is kept to a minimum and he turns in the kind of work he had done on his Little Archie stories of 1956-1965 and 1979-81: excellent characterization, sentimentality that doesn't go over the top, and a really personal way of looking at the world, nature and fate ("I knew this tree was here for a purpose," Archie says when he uses a tree to save a bus full of students -- Bolling's stories have no religious content, but they have a lot of quasi-mystical content). There are also some strange framing devices, reminiscent of the talking toys in his classic "The Long Walk." One story appears to be narrated by the wind; another is quite literally narrated by a talking owl (who had actually appeared, though not talking, in some Bolling-drawn stories from the '70s).

Though Bolling probably inked the first couple of issues in this run, most of the others were inked by Chic Stone. Stone, who had been one of the best inkers for Jack Kirby, was working as Harry Lucey's inker when Lucey had to retire; this gave him the chance to draw Archie, but his work as a penciller was frankly awful. (Stone's pencilling on Archie, I mean, was awful; some of his other stuff is better.) As an inker, though, he was tops, and he's one of the few inkers Bolling ever had who doesn't diffuse the rough charm of the pencils.

The last story in this run appeared in Archie and Me # 152. After that, the title went back to a grab-bag inventory title for a few years (Bolling drew but didn't write a few stories in this period) and then was canceled. I don't know how well the Bolling run did, though lasting two years is pretty good considering the Archie company's tendency to get cold feet about everything. I remember as a child being very impressed by "Jogger Jill," but puzzled by this story, "Blue Saturday": I wondered why Spotty was there when I'd never seen him in any of the big Archie stories, where Jughead was, since when Mr. Svenson had a cat named "Loki" (Bolling, who adores cats, likes to give them to any character who could plausibly have one) and why the whole thing gave such a sad, melancholy -- that word again, I know, but it always seems to fit with Bolling -- air to what was otherwise just a normal Archie story. I don't know if my reaction was typical, but I'm not sure if we were ready to see Archie as a regular bittersweet coming-of-age tale.

(An added reference to an earlier story: "Any room in there for me?" is what Archie's father said to Spotty in a Bolling Little Archie.)

If I had to pick a favorite story from Bolling's Archie and Me, it would be the issue-length Lonely Lobo, about Archie's encounter with a wolf at Mr. Lodge's mountain retreat (which, again, is cross-referenced with a Little Archie story). It's got the obsession with nature and the animal world, and Bolling's objective attitude toward the cruelty and danger inherent in that world; it's got a sad but semi-mystical ending that hints at something much bigger than the story we just read.

The Lost Continent of Alanis

2010-06-08T18:18:00.007-04:00

I've said a few times that the late '90s (really, mid-to-late '90s, starting in 1995 or so) have their own very distinctive culture, and that when I watch a show or a movie from that era, certain obsessions seem to stand out and define the era. Other patches of years don't have that kind of identity as I see it, and others are defined only by the clothes or the style of music, but works from the late '90s seem to form their own weird little world.

One example that came to mind when I was re-watching some '90s TV shows: Alanis Morissette. It's not just that she was a phenomenon of the era, with Jagged Little Pill being played, talked about and imitated everywhere. It's that her success created a new archetype that became huge on TV for about three years: it seemed like everyone was making jokes, sketches, or whole episodes about angry young women singing songs about how much they hate men. Alanis jokes are still popular, come to think of it, since she's become comedy-writer shorthand for "man-hating." But in the late '90s, they were like a way of life.

I don't know if this stood out for anyone else, or if anyone remembers particular examples of pop culture's Alanis obsession. I can't actually name as many specific examples as I thought I could, because I remember several jokes or Alanis-like characters without remembering the source. (That's the problem with trying to reach back 15 years and remember what you saw: you can remember seeing it, you can't always remember where.) One I remember, because I saw it recently, was an entire Duckman episode where Bernice becomes a star by singing about how much she hates Duckman. Another example is below. Still another example is the French and Saunders bit "Bless U," though this one doesn't fit as clearly, because it's a parody of a song from a later album, rather than a response to the success of "Jagged Little Pill." I'll try and find some other examples from the era, or someone else can refresh my memory. But I definitely think it was a real phenomenon, because I remember seeing it in several different places.

It's not a big thing; I just find it very representative of the time. Everyone, everywhere, seemed briefly obsessed with the idea of the young woman who becomes a star by turning angry. I guess if you want to analyze it more, you could note that it's a bit sexist (young men singing angry songs are all over the place, but a young woman singing about her jerky ex-boyfriend is a freak), but lots of obsessions are. It just seems now like a very late '90s thing for writers to be preoccupied with.

Of the Morissette send-ups I remember -- and if you have any other examples from the '90s, refresh my memory -- the best was a Boy Meets World, where Will "Why Isn't This Talented Guy Doing More Non-Voice-Over-Work" Friedle meets a singer of sappy, cutesy songs (Leisha Hailey). When he breaks up with her, it drives her to write angry songs about him, and it makes her an instant star. "Planet Flaflooga" and "That's a minor chord!" are among the lines I have been quoting ever since this thing aired in 1996. It was written, incidentally, by Jeffrey C. Sherman, son of songwriter Robert B. Sherman of Sherman Brothers fame.

It's just me, I don't deny that; but to me, this clip just yells out "1996," just like many episodes from the seventh and eighth seasons of The Simpsons. Anything made in that era is just so redolent of its time, whereas something made in, say, 1992 or 2001 doesn't have as many clear cultural identifiers.

William A. Fraker

2010-06-02T23:29:00.004-04:00

Having written about Frank's Place the other day, I'm sad to see that the man who helped create the distinctive look of the show died this Monday: the great cinematographer, Bill Fraker.

Though he didn't shoot as many successful films as some of his contemporaries, Fraker was, in my opinion, one of the best of the new generation of cinematographers that took over Hollywood in the late '60s and early '70s, when nearly all the old-guard cinematographers were forced into retirement around the same time. He combined the new look and new techniques with a bit of that old larger-than-life glamour; that's what made him a great choice for movies with an element of fantasy, whether it was Rosemary's Baby or Heaven Can Wait or 1941 (not a fantasy per se but certainly not at all realistic).

He didn't usually do TV, but he shot the Frank's Place pilot as a favor to Hugh Wilson (they'd worked together on the movie Burglar) while another film was delayed for some reason. He didn't do the other episodes, but the cinematic look of the show -- the "steam and smoke and food" -- followed the template he set in the pilot.

Terrifying Donkey Music

2010-05-31T22:07:00.002-04:00

I'm sure this has been featured elsewhere, but it's the first time I saw it: the transformation scene from Pinocchio with only the music, no sound effects or dialogue.

What we learn from the scene in this form is pretty much what we knew before: it's terrifying even without Lampwick's cries of "mama!" (though the dialogue and effects certainly do make the scene even scarier) and Leigh Harline was good at writing horror music, as he would prove when he moved to RKO and scored some of their horror and noir films (including Val Lewton's Isle of the Dead). I've always thought of him as one of the best of the "utility" composers in Hollywood, the guys who were not assigned to big projects and had to work -- sometimes uncredited -- on anything that wasn't handled by the department heads or the more in-demand composers (like Herrmann or Rosza or Waxman). At Fox, for example, he doesn't seem to have been first choice for anything, but on a modestly-budgeted movie like Pickup On South Street he turned out a score whose nervous energy matches the director's.

The Show With a Spin On It

2010-05-29T19:31:00.003-04:00

Those who read this blog know I'm a fan of Hugh Wilson, who is sort of a more humanistic version of the man who brought him into MTM, Jay Tarses -- a very personal style, a tendency to make shows that don't go quite the way networks or audiences expect them to, and an unusual, off-center take on the classic MTM comedy style. Some of his stuff is outright great, like WKRP and Frank's Place, and some of it doesn't really work but is a wonderful experience if you're in sync with his style, like Rustler's Rhapsody. (That movie is so arch and self-conscious that it violates every rule for making a good comedy, yet there's something about it that I find fascinating -- maybe because the script is so clearly the voice of one writer working out his feelings about Westerns, movies, and drama in general.) From the '90s onward, except for his brief success with The First Wives' Club, he's mostly done movie projects that didn't get made and pilots that didn't get picked up -- none of which I've seen, though I heard at least one of them (The Contender, a boxing drama set in Baltimore) was good. And of course an additional bit of bad luck is that his two best pieces of work, WKRP and Frank's Place, are impossible to re-release in their original form because of all the music issues.

All this is leading up to the fact that Wilson was apparently the big hit of a recent New Orleans Frank's Place event. It was put together by Tim Reid, who was there filming a guest role on Treme, and the producers of Treme, who know that Frank's has a reputation as the most authentic Hollywood show about the city. Reid, who bought the master tapes to keep them from being destroyed, screened three episodes -- "Frank Returns," the first show after the pilot (good move: the pilot is good, but it's very exposition-heavy and a little slow; the second episode is a better introduction), "The Bridge," and "Dueling Voodoo." The event was sold-out even though the auditorium seated 600, and as the comments to that article show -- and backed up by other comments I've heard on Twitter and elsewhere from people who were there -- Wilson did a lot of the talking about the show, and impressed almost everyone by how funny he still is.

I hope the renewed attention given to Frank's Place will lead to some kind of home video release; it's marginally easier than WKRP because, a, there's only one season and b, the original master tapes at least exist. (WKRP not only has the problem of paying for the music, but the problem that no one even seems to know where the uncut masters are.) I could see it happening if Treme goes on a few more years -- and I like Treme a lot, so I hope it does.

Good as Frank's Place was, the most disappointing thing about its early cancellation is that it actually had a lot of room for improvement. (Even Wilson's The Famous Teddy Z, which was not in a class with his other two shows, seemed to be finding itself when it was canceled, in comparison to its disappointing early episodes, and probably would have gotten good if it had had a second year.) There were a number of things that I think kept it from taking off, and it wasn't just the lack of a laugh track or the fact that audiences didn't know if it was a comedy or a drama. A number of the characters were a bit vaguely sketched (not Tiger or Bubba, but some of the others), so that after 22 episodes you still didn't know exactly who they were beyond a few basic quirks. (Daphne Maxwell-Reid's character was particularly ill-defined; even though she got billed pretty high, she didn't appear in all that many episodes, presumably because it was hard to find excuses to get her over to the restaurant.) And Frank spent maybe too much of his time doing bug-eyed reactions to whatever was going on; it was clearly a star show rather than an ensemble show, yet the star didn't always seem to be in control the way he was on Bob Newhart's shows.

That would have been ironed out in a second season, presumably. Which means that like most comedies that lasted only one season, Frank's Place is as much about its potential as its achievement; the episodes that exist are great enough, like "The Bridge," but another 22 episodes would have been even better.

Count Zarth Arn, Watch Out!

2010-05-25T18:04:00.003-04:00

Starcrash (or Star Crash, or Stella Star, or whatever you want to call it) on DVD. On Blu-Ray, yet (part of Shout! Factory's deal to release films owned or distributed by Roger Corman). The bad hair will look even better in digital clarity, and John Barry's score will blast from our speakers, and the very experience of watching it again will... all together now... "halt the flow of time!"

The German Movie Musical, Circa 1961

2010-05-24T22:31:00.011-04:00

Warning; the following post is for those who, like me, watched the "Yes, we have no bananas" scene in One, Two, Three and wondered what they were singing on the other side of Berlin.

I don't have a lot to say about these clips from a movie called So liebt und küsst man in Tirol, a German (West German) movie musical from 1961; I don't know if it's typical of the German film industry at the time, though the print looks surprisingly well-preserved. But here they are anyway. I came upon them while doing some Google-based research on René Kollo, a moderately successful German pop singer who used his earnings to take operatic voice lessons, and became a highly successful Wagnerian tenor in the '70s and '80s. And this appears to be one of the few movies he ever appeared in during his pop years, but he has two numbers in this film.

The first, which is more or less normal, is a heavily reverb'd pop song about how great love is, lip-synched by Kollo, playing the singing bartender.

The next one is Kollo performing his most successful record, a German-language cover of Ricky Nelson's "Hello Mary Lou." I don't know who the blonde dancer is, and having only read a brief plot synopsis, I don't know who the generic Sheiks are supposed to be. The director appears to lose all interest in Kollo midway through the number and devote himself to close-ups of the dancer and the guy ogling her.

And finally, weirdest of all, is the film's title song, performed by the star, Vivi Bach, sometimes known as "Die Dänische Bardot" (the Danish Bardot). (That might also be her dancing in the other clip, but I'm not sure and I'm not going to watch the whole movie to find out.) The song itself isn't weird, it's the frequent cutaways to guys in lederhosen slapping each other. I honestly wasn't aware this was done in a movie outside of the famous stock footage.

I'm not really intrigued enough to learn more about the West German movie musical in the early '60s, but if this was what it was like all the time, it's... actually, not that far from what I would have imagined, given the era's combination of Old German nostalgia and U.S. pop influence, like a combination of Franz Lehár and Pat Boone.

Anyway, here's the last clip I could find, from what was apparently the biggest name in the movie, singer Fred Bertelmann (a big name in West Germany, I mean; I can't find an English-language bio). He comes off as somewhat frightening.

Update: Thanks to "Jim," in comments, who has some great information about German movie musicals and performers, both the low-budget quickie musicals of the '50s and '60s and the more elaborate (and memorable) productions of the early sound era, like this elaborate production number of Lilian Harvey singing "Das Gibt's Nur Einmal". One thing I notice from that 1931 clip is that UFA already had developed the technique of post-synched musical numbers -- though the technique of lip-synching was not yet perfected -- whereas in U.S. musicals, they were still mostly shooting musical numbers with direct sound. Jim notes that a Hollywood musical would never have had such an elaborate tracking shot at the time, but that's because they hadn't yet figured out that you could shoot a whole musical number without sound (and therefore a freely-moving camera).

Producers, Do Your Job

2010-05-22T00:09:00.003-04:00

You may have already seen William Martell's much-discussed post on how the intriguing script "Nottingham" became the unintriguing movie Robin Hood. It's a classic showbiz story where an idea starts as one thing and winds up as something totally different; Ridley Scott plays the Jack Buchanan role from The Band Wagon, the director who listens to the writers' pitch, claims to love it, and then takes a lot of time and money to do something else.

What I like about the post is that while it can be seen as a "protect the writer's vision" argument, and a lot of screenwriters' advocacy groups (the ones that sometimes seem strangely wrong about what screenwriters actually do) are framing it that way, it's not really that kind of argument. Well, it is to a certain extent, since he talks a lot about movies he wrote that didn't wind up on screen the way he wrote it, but let's say that's not the only argument he makes. The interesting part is the argument that the producer of a movie should do his job and not let the production get out of control.

A producer's job is vaguely-defined, but it definitely involves putting the project together and making sure it doesn't end up being worse, or more expensive, than it should have been. The story of how Nottingham became Robin Hood appears to be that the producer was so deferential to the star and director that the movie got delayed for years, went way over budget, and wound up with a script that was completely different than the one the producer bought.

Traditionally, on a big Hollywood blockbuster movie, that's not supposed to happen. Once the producer has the script he wants and casting has been done and pre-production has begun, it becomes very expensive to make big changes. Which means that either the director figures out how to make the script work for him on the sets and locations that have been agreed upon, or he gets fired and replaced by another director. It's one thing if the director is attached to the film during the development of the script, and can make or suggest changes then. But in the case of Robin Hood, Scott came in with a release date already set by the studio, meaning that the project was at a point where delays are expensive. And at that point it becomes the producer's job to stand up for his judgment about whether a script is ready to shoot.