Alan Jay Lerner Hates the '80s

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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.

Past n' Present

While still on the subject of past vs. present, I thought I would transcribe the opening of maybe the definitive essay by my favorite living critic (of anything), Conrad L. Osborne. This is "A Plain Case For the Golden Age" from the October 1967 issue of High Fidelity, and it was and still is a controversial piece, because he does something I probably would never have the nerve to do: argues openly and at length that artistic standards have gotten worse. (Of course he can get away with this partly because he's talking about an art, classical singing, where the style and most of the actual music was very remote from his own time. When it comes to movies or books, I don't think an argument like that is legitimate, unless it's applied to specific genres.)

But in the opening of the piece, he rather charmingly anticipates the main argument against him: that he's just being nostalgic, like those old sports fans who insist -- with no proof whatsoever -- that the players of their time were better. And he not only anticipates it, he sort of embraces it. But then he makes a crucial distinction between nostalgia and criticism: nostalgia is based on fond memories, but his essay is going to be based on recorded evidence and analysis of good technique. But mainly the passage is a look at a New York adolescence, and the link that exists between sports fandom and opera fandom, with a mix of nostalgia, especially for the old Met that was torn down, and self-mocking irony. He conveys more in these few paragraphs than most critics could convey in a life's work. I have been using the term "garrulous old dribbler" for many years, thanks to CLO.

When I was a stripling in the lower right-field stands of Yankee Stadium, my compatriots always advised me to stay away from the garrulous old dribbler who sat up near the back, burbling about how Billy Johnson wasn't fit to soap up Tony Lazzeri's glove, or about how Bill Bevens' sore arm wasn't no excuse -- in the old days, a man'd pitch a doubleheader with a sore arm, no whines or alibis.

And I always planted myself alongside the old bore, because he didn't bore me. I liked hearing tales of baseball when it was baseball, and I more or less believed them, too.

In those days a stripling could lead a sensible stripling existence. The baseball season was 154 games, not 162, and didn't keep you up nights, and the opera season was twenty weeks, not thirty; the two dovetailed, and didn't stumble and sprawl all over each other as they do now. So when the World Series had ended and there had been a short period for the application of one's thoughts to things like first-year algebra, I moved from the lower right-field stand to the left-field upper deck (alias Family Circle standing room) of the Metropolitan Opera House -- the one, you remember, down near the Crossroads of duh Woild, where for so many years it impeded the Progress & Development of the Borough of Manhattan, Inc. And there would be another garrulous old dribbler (or mayhap the same one, I couldn't be sure), burbling about how Stella Roman didn't deserve to powder Elisabeth Rethberg's wig, and about how things were in the days when opera was opera. And there was everyone else, moving on down the rail to get away, and me, sitting there listening and believing.

When it comes to opera, you can be reasonably sure that it wasn't all fantasy. It is just possible that Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb weren't a whit better than Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle, but Pinza and Chaliapin were sure as hell better than (enter name of your favorite bass), and all that is required to prove it is the lowering of a stylus into a groove. That proposition is, approximately, the subject of the present article.

It is tiresome, of course, to listen to someone who merely prefers the way it used to be. I crave your indulgence, and confess my bias: I was dragged up on the records of Caruso, Chaliapin, Galli-Curci, Gigli, Ruffo, Battistini, Pinza, Ponselle, and a few others, and it always hit me as sacrilegious that when music could be sung that was, it could also come out sounding as it did on the radio at two o'clock on Saturday afternoons. You might with some justice say that I was a garrulous old dribbler at the age of twelve.

But a lot of hot air has blown through the tunnel since then, and here I am, a little punchy but possessed of a certain queasy equilibrium, and still getting a stronger signal from (see above) than from (enter names of your favorite singers). There have been times, especially since I began my career as Keeper of the Flame and Upholder of the True and Living Art, when the goggles have fogged over a bit. A few months of new record releases in tandem with live performances can truly make it seem as if it has always been this way, is now, and ever shall be. Then I will dig through the pile to an LP of re-pressings from the Messrs. Rococo, or Olympia, or Eterna, or Odeon, or RCA Victor, and plunk it on. A couple of seconds of scratch, and then -- Qual lampo! -- it comes to me again: the incredible expressive capabilities of the human voice, as developed in Western Europe in the last couple of centuries -- its capacity for a true legato that cannot be obtained by any instrument, its wealth of emotional color, its extraordinary power and flexibility.

Later, in the more in-depth and technical section of the article, Osborne also gives his simplest and yet fullest explanation of what good singing and good criticism are about:

Speaking broadly, vocal training has two goals. The first is to cultivate a desirable combination of tonal beauty, range, flexibility, and size. The second is to create a functional situation that will serve the singer well over a period of many years. Although the two things are of course interrelated, this does not mean that a singer who succeeds in one area will necessarily succeed to the same degree in the other; we can all think of singers who produced attractive, large, and exciting tone, whose voices were wide-ranged and capable of certain technical feats, but whose singing prime was of short duration. And none of us is at a loss to call to mind singers whose voices seem to endure forever without marked deterioration, but who have never produced truly beautiful sound or astonished anyone with bursts of technical brilliance. The very greatest singers, of course, combine exceptional achievements in both areas — these are the artists who sing unusually well for an unusually long time.

Still, keeping in mind that, like all generalizations, this one has its exceptions, the voices that sound best are the ones that tend to endure the longest. Our reasoning becomes a bit curved here, for the more one learns about singing, the more one tends to listen to the way a voice works; consequently, sounds that one might have accepted and even cherished lose much of their appeal if they are functionally precarious. That is true in any discipline: one's taste is strongly influenced by the state of one's knowledge. And that is why mere taste, however refined, is a poor guide in such matters. One can say (on grounds of taste) that a wobble is not really so offensive; some people can't stand it, others are willing to put up with it in the presence of other virtues. But the matter does not end there, for a wobble represents a malfunction as well as an unfulfilled musical possibility. The casual listener may ignore it if he chooses; he will not be hearing it for long.

There are, of course, many factors influencing vocal longevity, among which the most important is health, mental and physical. That is why it is a bit dangerous to inflate the importance of longevity as a standard of technical perfection. What can be said is that any audible perfection stands for some technical malfunction, and that whenever a voice does begin to deteriorate, early or later, the deterioration will almost invariably take the form of an intensification of that imperfection.

And how do we decide what constitutes an imperfection? I suppose we must answer, by a combination of imagination and cumulative hindsight, plus the context of European musical culture. (I append this last simply to acknowledge that we are not dealing with an absolute. The artists of the classical Chinese opera, for instance, cultivated a kind of sound and technical capability markedly different from that demanded by Western operatic music, and worked out functional systems that supported those requirements.) That is, the technical method which enables a singer to operate to the greatest effect for the longest time within the framework established by our active literature is the one we would call closest to perfection.

These requirements have not led to a universally agreed-upon method, but they have led to a set of descriptive rules which more or less summarize the goals of such a method. This working description has not altered much since the eighteenth century, and it might be written down this way: if a voice can negotiate a firm, smooth, even-tempered scale over every note of its required range, on each of the pure vowel sounds, and if it possesses the capacity to swell and diminish between a legitimate pp and a legitimate ff without waver or break on each of those pitches and vowels, then the technique is perfect. This may not sound like such a large order but I can assure you that it is. I can assure you that there are many admired singers at the top of their profession who could not execute such a scale really well on even two or three of the five pure vowels, and who could not execute a proper swell and diminish (the messa di voce) on more than a few semitones in a restricted area of the range. In fact, there has probably never been a singer who could meet all the conditions stated. Such a singer would be capable of rendering in a technically efficient manner any piece of music written for his general voice range.

One last quote: before getting into the meat of the article, the play-by-play analysis of recordings that represent the best in vocalism, he once again anticipates an argument against him and once again embraces it:

Anyone who has done any reading in the literature of vocal pedagogy (a literature in which the diversity of unsupported assertions, unfounded assumptions. nonconsecutive arguments, and illogical conclusions is matched only by the near-illiteracy of their authors) is well aware that every generation of singers and deachers since the time of Tosi has complained of the faltering standards and abominable taste of the oncoming bunch -- "tutto declina... non c'è più virtu," as Boito's Falstaff remarks. This fact is frequently cited as evidence that there has been no progressive deterioration, only changes of taste or fashion. Personally, I am perfectly prepared to believe that things have been getting steadily worse for two or three hundred years now, but the actual evidence dates back only to the beginning of this century.

When Were Movies Invented? 1977? Or Later?

Earlier today I was discussing the fact that on most areas of the internet, movie history is basically about 25 years long. This also applies to a lot of movie magazines, critical videos, and so on: you'll get people discussing movies in historical context, or making lists of the greatest movies or movie moments, but only from 1985 onward (if that). If an earlier movie shows up, it's almost a freak occurrence. An example is this guy, who makes great videos about movie clichés and corny lines, but includes very few movies from the '50s, '60s or even '70s.

I don't mean this as a "these kids today, why don't they know their movie history" kind of thing. For one thing, it's not just The Kids™. For another thing, you can't blame people for not being familiar with a lot of older movies. As I've said in the past, the only reliable way to learn about old movies (get used to the grammar and acting choices and all the rest) is by osmosis, watching them for entertainment and letting the style become something we naturally understand and accept. That's what the easy availability of old movies on TV used to do for us, just as the presence of "oldies" on the radio makes us familiar with pop-music styles from the '50s onward. (So someone who doesn't know much about '50s movies might know, if not a lot more, at least more about '50s pop music. It's in the blood.) But now the afternoon or late night black-and-white movie is a rare thing, except on specialty channels like TCM.

Without that, the only way to get into old movies is if you actively decide to learn about them, and you can't blame anyone for not wanting to sit through movie after movie as a learning experience. That's not what they were intended to be, anyway, and they don't come off well in that context. I kind of wish people felt guiltier about not getting into older movies (or pre-Sopranos television, or whatever), the kind of Boomer guilt that is visited on people who don't know the great pop acts of the '60s. But I'm not going to do the guilt tripping; if you don't have the style in your blood from an early age, a movie can be a chore to get through.

What I'm wondering is where the dividing line is: where does "movie history" now begin for the average film enthusiast? I used to think it was 1977, the year Star Wars invented movies. But it was pointed out to me that Star Wars may actually belong with The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and other movies in the freak category: "old" movies that people have heard of, exceptions to the rule. (These movies often tend to be kid-oriented movies like the three I've just named; people don't notice that Star Wars is in an older style because, when you're exposed to a movie at a young age, the style seems like a very natural thing.) There aren't a whole lot of movies from 1977 through the early '80s that are on the current radar.

It was suggested that the starting point for modern movie history is Terminator 2, the epitome of the modern masterpiece: a sci-fi special effects epic that takes itself too seriously. But I think that's placing it too late. You at least have to go back to Die Hard, the action movie that is still considered the foundation of all modern action movies (no one can do an action-movie spoof without spoofing Die Hard at some point).

So I would place the beginning of movie history in 1985, when The Breakfast Club came out. John Hughes' death, and the over-wrought celebration of his work at the Oscars, confirmed that his movies are genuinely part of the cultural consciousness; more than that, they're considered masterpieces of film comedy. They aren't anything of the kind, and that's my problem with the condensed version of film history that seems to be taking hold.

I'd compare it, in a strange and debased way, to the views of critics like James Agee who felt that movies had never really recovered from the introduction of sound, and that there was something special about the silent era that the sound era was struggling to recapture. If a critic thinks that the key period in movie history is a relatively short period, he will wind up over-rating a lot of movies from that period. And sure enough, silent-firsters were maybe a bit indiscriminate about what films they considered masterpieces. I get the feeling that the current trend is going beyond this; a lot of movie fans now remind me of a PBS old-movie host I used to see who refused to watch movies made after four-letter words were introduced. If someone is mostly comfortable with films made in his or her lifetime, and finds it a chore to sit through most older movies, then that's understandable, but it isn't any more understandable than someone who doesn't like movies that aren't "clean." And the result is similar; a world where there isn't much movie history is inevitably going to be a world where Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a masterpiece. Who knows what movies will be masterpieces ten years from now, when movie history begins in 1999 (much like TV history begins in the late '90s)?

Despite my plague-on-both-your-houses attitude in the last paragraph, I know this post comes off cranky. I guess it is. I would like to repeat that I understand why viewers wouldn't run around spending money and making special efforts to immerse themselves in movie or television history. Being historically-inclined, and maybe a bit more sympathetic to older film grammar (i.e. I still think movies today are over-edited, just as someone else would find an older movie to be under-edited), I have to kick myself and force myself sometimes to keep up with new developments; some viewing experiences come naturally to me, and others I have to work at. I don't blame myself for liking what I like, and so I don't blame anyone else for it either.

So the feeling is not so much crankiness, let alone blame, as sadness at something inevitable and unavoidable: movie history, and perhaps all of pop-culture history, is going to contract. There has never been a greater amount popular culture history accessible, in the sense of being there for anyone who wants to see it. But it's been a long time since there has been less popular culture history accessible in the other sense, of being something that the average person can assimilate without a long, hard slog.

I was going to say there has never been less interest in pop-culture history, but that's not true at all. Traditionally, people have been more interested in new books, plays, music. The idea of gathering to listen to a concert of old music, or building an entire repertoire of old plays, is fairly new. So maybe the current situation is simply the way it ought to be.

Carl Barks Playing For the Other Team

The invaluable Doug Gray, who has pretty much my favorite comics blog), has Carl Barks's venture into the opposition camp, the Porky Pig story "Porky of the Mounties." Bugs and Porky weren't characters he liked, and the story isn't one of his best, but just seeing Barks work with the Warner Brothers characters is kind of strange and fun. I would say it's like a Marvel guy working for DC, except they all did work for DC and vice versa.

It's also a reminder that whereas the comic book form added a lot to the Disney cartoon characters, it didn't really do the same for the WB characters. There are some characters who maybe have more dimension in the comics than they do in the cartoons, like Porky (who has Petunia as his regular girlfriend, and isn't quite as big a patsy as he is in the animated shorts), but I don't feel like they're improved as characters the way Donald and Mickey were improved in the comics. And that's to say nothing of all the WB characters who were watered down, because they couldn't be as violent and vicious in comics as they were in films.

In part this may just be about the general superiority of WB shorts to Disney shorts, at least during the period when these comics were popular. The WB directors would add things to a story and make it better than it would have been in comic book form. I can't find it, but Thad Komorowski once posted a Michael Maltese comics story (non-WB, as I recall) that he also used, with some variations, for A Pest In the House. The comics story was funny, but Chuck Jones's cartoon was much funnier, and contained better-motivated and more well-rounded characters. In Disney, that kind of excellence was more likely to come from a Barks or a Gottfredson than most of the animation directors.

Carmen, The Greatest Dead End of All Time

If you don't mind my doing another music-related post, I wanted to follow up something I wrote in an earlier post, which is that Carmen, The Magic Flute and Porgy and Bess are the three great dead ends in the history of music theatre (because they pointed the way toward a fusion of popular and serious musical theatre, but their composers all died young without writing another opera).



(Yes, the most recent televised Carmen is on period instruments. There's actually a better period performance of the Carmen preludes on a disc of Bizet instrumental music by Marc Minkowski -- but unfortunately he hasn't recorded the whole piece.)

A commenter rightly noted that the influence of Carmen was felt in the brief wave of so-called verismo operas, dealing with lower-class passions and subject matter. But the influence there was mainly in terms of the non-musical material: once Carmen became popular, there were a bunch of other operas about characters who were not "noble" either in rank or in the emotions they expressed. And even that didn't last long. (The actual verismo movement burned out sometime in the '90s, replaced by operas about aristocratic characters, like Tosca, or exotic locales, like Madame Butterfly.) The verismo operas didn't show much musical influence from Carmen; instead, composers continued to do what they had been doing since the '60s: try to come to terms with the influence of Wagner.

Puccini became the most successful composer of the post-Wagner era because, apart from his talent, he hit on a way to write operas that were both "Wagnerian" and traditionally Italian: La Boheme and Tosca make room for more or less traditional arias and ensembles, but they also use the Wagnerian style: there are motifs that are repeated and developed throughout the evening, the music is continuous with no "recitatives." But Puccini's success reinforced the idea that the Wagnerian style was the way to go; he proved that the style didn't have to be Teutonic and could be made specifically Italian-sounding, but he also demonstrated that you were nowhere unless you had fully absorbed the lessons of Wagner. (Verdi, in his last years, went for something a little different from both Puccini and Wagner; he built his last opera, Falstaff, out of a collection of little bits of sung melody that are rarely repeated -- the opposite of the lush Wagner style, but something that was not easy to imitate.)

But Carmen, coming at a time when Wagner was being recognized as the model for all musical theatre (Verdi was in semi-retirement at the time, so there was literally no active composer who could compete with Wagner's influence), was something else again. Carmen was an "advanced," modern work at the time, but one that was built out of all the formulas that Wagner had rejected. Carmen, being an opera-comique with spoken dialogue, is a pure "numbers opera," which was the form that Wagner had rebelled against: Wagner had eliminated all separate numbers, and even applause breaks within acts, and turned every act into a continuous piece of music. Carmen is divided into solos, duets, ensembles, choruses, most of them strictly separated and coming to applause-baiting endings before the dialogue begins.



Whereas Wagner advocated putting more of the musical interest in the orchestra, often letting the orchestra carry the melody while the singer filled in something else on top of it, Carmen is full of old-fashioned song, with the singer's part dominating over the orchestra. And Bizet, like Verdi, prefers to come up with fresh melodic material for each new development in the piece, rather than using the Wagnerian method of developing themes we heard before. Bizet will quote an earlier theme only as a sort of mnemonic, a reminder of an idea; so he has a "fate" theme that he quotes a few times, just as Verdi had a "fate" theme in La Forza Del Destino (which may have been where he got the idea), but like Verdi and his hero Mozart, he considers each section a new test of his power to characterize it with a specific, appropriate tune.



By applying all these old-fashioned techniques to a sensationalistic subject, Bizet did something new with Carmen, but what was really new was that he made all these techniques seem fresh again. Just because Carmen's music is so good, so powerful and immediate, and such a brilliant mishmash of serious and popular, Bizet suggested that the pre-Wagner techniques weren't obsolete at all, as long as they were used with his kind of imagination (since almost none of the numbers are just simple songs; Bizet plays around with the forms he's using). And the immediacy of the characters and the plot seemed inseparable from the deceptively accessible tunes and forms that Bizet employed. It was as if the use of closed forms and songs was perfect for characters who were to emerge as people, rather than the symbolic figures that Wagner specialized in. That's one of the key benefits of the populist style of Carmen; because the characters express themselves in music that sounds less high-flown than the usual opera, they have an immediacy and relatability that wasn't usually associated with the operatic form. That helped lead to the modern musical that uses popular musical forms for ambitious purposes; that in turn was what Oscar Hammerstein paid tribute to when he turned Carmen into Carmen Jones.



So that's what Carmen seemed to suggest: that there was an alternative, musical and theatrical, to Wagnerism. And the whole thing fell apart because Bizet died, and no one knew how to follow it up. Some people, like Tchaikovsky, learned from Bizet's manipulation of the traditional numbers form; Tchaikovsky didn't like Wagner very much, and probably drew on the lessons of Carmen (which he loved) when he was working on Eugene Onegin. And others learned from the idea that you could incorporate folk and popular elements into opera (not that Bizet was the first to do this, but along with The Bartered Bride from a few years earlier, it helped to re-acquaint international audiences with this approach). Still others liked the idea of slumming it with the subject matter. But putting it all together -- sort of a Mozart approach to music combined with a populist approach to subject and characters -- was not something anyone tried to do until, well, Porgy and Bess. And, as I said, the composer of Porgy met the same fate as Mozart and Bizet: he died before he could write a follow-up.

And I think, though I don't have time to look for examples, that it may be the follow-up that really matters in terms of influence. That is, one truly unique work is very difficult for others to imitate. Once the same artist produces something else in a similar style, he creates a sort of template -- or at least he demonstrates that you can learn from the original without producing a pale copy.