Obscure Musicals: SUPERMAN

The actor who played Superman on Broadway recently wrote a book, coincidentally entitled Superman on Broadway. I haven't read it, but Jerry Beck recommends it, saying that "this book collects all his memories of the experience, clippings, stills, TV appearences, just everything... plus the story of his showbiz career before the tights and cape - and his subsequent business in home design." Holiday's other Broadway appearances included a supporting role in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello! produced by the producer-director of Superman, Harold Prince.

Superman was one of those shows that seemed to have everything going for it and still flopped. It had a score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams; after their moody jazz score for Golden Boy, this score brought back the bright playfulness of Bye Bye Birdie, with songs ranging from mid-'60s pop (one of the songs, "It's Superman," is written in such a way that it can be, and is, sung either as a conventional Broadway ballad or an uptempo song with a vaguely rock/pop beat) to '30s pastiche ("You've Got What I Need," a duet for the villains, is a Cole Porter takeoff that even directly references "You're the Top"). The big hit was "You've Got Possibilities," one of those show tunes that starts quietly and then gradually builds to a loud, belt-heavy climax.

The book, by David Newman and Robert Benton -- the team that would write Bonnie and Clyde for Hollywood the next year -- was a very funny take on the Superman story and comic-book mythology in general. It wasn't a campy parody like Batman, which premiered while Superman was playing on Broadway. It was more of a comic re-examination of Superman: let's see what happens to this character when we put him in '60s New York, among a completely new set of characters (the only other characters retained from the comic book are Lois, Perry and Jimmy), and let him be plagued by '60s self-doubt. That's Superman's biggest problem in this story; when he fails to stop a building from being blown up and the town starts to shun him for his failure, he becomes depressed:

Why must the strongest man in the world
Be the bluest man? Tell me, why?
Don't they know the strongest man can cry?

The villain, Abner Sedgewick (Michael O'Sullivan), now puts his master plan into effect by talking to Superman and, basically, analyzing him the way a pop-culture commentator analyzes a comic book; telling Superman that his persona is just a symbol of his need for love, and that the Superman/savior pose is unacceptably arrogant and kind of fascist ("Who told you we needed a Superman"). Unable to deal with this kind of complexity, Superman collapses, and is only brought out of it by realizing that things really aren't that complicated: there really is evil and it's realy his job to stop it. Superman saves the day, of course. Other adversaries include a Winchell-esque columnist named Max (Jack Cassidy) and a troupe of Chinese acrobats who are upset that no one's impressed with them now that Superman is doing amazing stunts for free.

The show got a rave review in the New York Times, but it only ran for 129 performances. The biggest problem was that, though the show was called "Superman," Superman was really more of a peripheral character. He doesn't get the best songs or the best lines. The biggest star in the cast, Jack Cassidy, played a wisecracking, amoral guy who likes Lois Lane and dislikes Superman; this basically should have been a minor part, but Cassidy was so good, and such a well-known actor on Broadway, that this became practically the central role, and would have been even bigger if a long musical monologue called "Dot Dot Dot" (a parody of Winchell's writing style) hadn't been cut. (Lee Adams recalled that no one knew why the song bombed with tryout audiences. I think it's obvious why it bombed: the audience was impatient to get to Superman stuff, and didn't want to sit through four minutes of irrelevant Winchell-isms.) The best song, "You've Got Possibilities," went not to Patricia Marand's Lois Lane -- who mostly got deliberately square-sounding ballads -- but to Linda Lavin, playing Cassidy's secretary. This meant that in a musical about Superman, much of the focus was on characters who had little to do with the plot and nothing to do with the Superman mythology. I sometimes get the feeling that a more sensible producer/director than Prince would have said "It's called Superman, so Superman has to be the star." But it doesn't seem like anybody said that, and I don't think Superman will ever be a success, despite the fine book and score, because of that problem of focus.

The Original Cast Recording is still available and hugely entertaining, except for a really stupid song called "It's Super Nice." There are also some pictures from the original production. The show is sometimes revived, though not on Broadway; the Encores series was supposed to do a concert version of it, but it was cancelled when September 11 made one of the plot twists (a building being blown up by the villains) distasteful.

Anthony Trollope, Blogger

I'm currently trying to re-read some of the classic novels I could never read while I was an English major. (I read a lot of classic English literature in high school, when it wasn't assigned; but when I got to college, I found that I was so busy reading the assigned stuff in the various courses that there was no time for reading anything else. Which means that, like many literature students, I found there was no time for reading while enrolled in a literature program.) I've re-read most of Dickens' novels, and am now trying to get through a novel I constantly tried and failed to crack: Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now.

Trollope's a writer I often find more appealing in to talk about than to read. His virtues are easy to recount: his realistic characterizations of both men and women; his ability to convey a sense of what life is really like among small-town clergy or Members of Parliament; his no-nonsense storytelling and prose. He's the anti-Dickens, and in his Autobiography, he made sure everyone knew it:

I do acknowledge that Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, Pecksniff, and others have become household words in every house, as though they were human beings; but to my judgment they are not human beings, nor are any of the characters human which Dickens has portrayed. It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man’s power, that he has invested, his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature... Nor is the pathos of Dickens human. It is stagey and melodramatic... Of Dickens’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules—almost as completely as that created by Carlyle. To readers who have taught themselves to regard language, it must therefore be unpleasant.

That's all pretty accurate, but the things that drive Trollope crazy in Dickens' novels are the things that make them such good reading: the exaggerations, the melodrama, the willingness to make up his own rules of grammar and language. Trollope doesn't defy grammar, doesn't deal in stagey farce and melodrama, doesn't turn his characters' dialogue into some kind of surreal parody of the way real people speak. He has a story to tell and he tells it, as simply as possible; when he addresses us directly it's not to confuse us as to how we should read the story (which is what Thackeray's authorial intrusions do) but to reduce ambiguity by telling us how he wants us to read it. If the story is a good one, and The Way We Live Now certainly has one of his better stories, it's entertaining reading. But because of the plainness of his writing style, of his narration and dialogue, there's not a lot there to hold the interest if the story lags, and at Victorian-era length, they often do lag. I think that's why Trollope's novels have been so successfully turned into mini-series; the TV shows may not do justice to the novels, but they're effective because if you separate the story and characters from the prose, with Trollope, you haven't really lost much. Whereas with Dickens, if you lose that distinctively ungrammatical writing, you're left with the outline of standard farce or melodrama, which is why adaptations of Dickens' work often make it seem so... well... unimpressive.

Anyway, to explain the title of this post, I'm thinking of Trollope's famous explanation (again in the Autobiography) of how he managed to write so much while working a full-time job as a surveyor for the Post Office:

By beginning at that hour [5:30 a.m.] I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast. All those I think who have lived as literary men,—working daily as literary labourers,—will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then he should so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours,—so have tutored his mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas. It had at this time become my custom,—and it still is my custom, though of late I have become a little lenient to myself,—to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went.

A guy working at a full-time job, who writes a certain amount every day before he goes to work? He may have written about fictional people, but then, most of us bloggers are writing about people we don't know (politicians, celebrities). I think A.T. would fit right into the blogging culture.

Finding an equivalent in modern popular culture, I guess you could say that Anthony Trollope is King of the Hill -- realistic, down-to-earth, deceptively simple -- while Dickens is The Simpsons -- wackier, given to flights of fancy and wild exaggeration. It's not a perfect analogy because I like KotH a bit better than The Simpsons, but it'll do. I guess that since William Bulwer Lytton has become a byword for bad writing, he can be the equivalent of Family Guy. That's unfair to WBL, who was actually a good writer, but I just wanted another chance to bash Family Guy.

Who? What? Where? When? How?

James Lileks, in the process of generously giving my hit-rate a boost, reminds me that I haven't really explained who I am or why I'm doing this. That's been number two on my list of "things I've been meaning to do but haven't," along with adding more links (which I really will do soon). Anyway, to make this at least mildly interesting, I'll make it multiple-choice. I am one of the following:

a) I am a substitute teacher of Espanol at Tom Landry Middle School. I started this blog because those cretins at the local paper would no longer run my musings. Apparently they think my thoughts on crocheting were too incendiary.

b) I am a former English major, former law student, and former writer of occasional entertainment articles for the beloved cheapskates at Salon.com. Overeducated, underemployed and with access to a computer: that describes a lot of us bloggers, just as a few years ago it described a lot of us usenet posters. I started this blog because everybody and his sister had a blog, and there were a few things I wanted to write about. That's really the only reason to start a blog at the moment, though eventually there will be ghostwritten blogs to promote every new movie and book, and those fake blogs that purport to be by movie stars will suddenly become "official." You have been warned.

c) I am Leo Strauss, the late University of Chicago professor. I started this posthumous blog to try and explain my ideas and why nobody who writes about me understands what I wrote, but then I realized that even I don't understand what I wrote, so I wrote about entertainment and arts instead.

d) I am a genetically altered lab mouse attempting to take over the world. I started this blog to get back at that awful show Family Guy for ripping me off.

The correct answer is probably b. d will get you partial credit. And I really don't understand a word Leo Strauss ever wrote.

"Baby, I Don't Care"

I watched the new DVD of Out of the Past last night (also available in the five-disc Film Noir Collection. The last time I saw it was when I was in high school, and while I remembered it fondly, I didn't actually remember much about it except the basic plot setup, the fact that Robert Mitchum smoked a lot of cigarettes, and a generally fatalistic, doom-laden atmosphere. That's what stays with you in a good film noir -- not so much the plot, which is often impossible to follow, but the atmosphere, the feeling that we're all going to die and get double-crossed, not necessarily in that order. That and the cigarette smoking.

A long review of Out of the Past can be found here, part of a page devoted to the work of the director, Jacques Tourneur. I just want to make a few semi-random obvservations about the film:

- You might notice that the rules of the Production Code (tm) do not apply as strongly to this film as we've come to expect. The Jane Greer character gets to live in sin with not one but two men in the course of the picture. The reason, of course, is that she's the Bad Girl, and the Bad Girl was allowed to do things the heroines weren't. Another example is Miriam in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train: she's a married woman who's pregnant with another man's child. You could get this by the Production Code because she's, again, the Bad Girl, and she's going to pay for her transgressions. The Production Code, by the '40s, wasn't so much an instrument of moralism as a defensive mechanism for making sure that movies wouldn't offend anybody anywhere (as I've said before, the Production Code collapsed once it was no longer possible to make a movie that appealed to everyone everywhere, which in turn meant it was no longer necessary to make sure that it wouldn't offend anyone's sensibilities). The popularity of the film noir was in part, I think, a way of increasing sex and violence in movies -- sex implied rather than shown, of course -- without violating the rule that movies had to be moral and uplifting. A film noir shows or implies all kinds of debauchery, but then adds that all the debauched people get punished in the end. (Or in the case of The Big Sleep, gets the audience so confused that they can't tell who committed which act of debauchery.) It's the equivalent of those early Cecil B. DeMille movies where two hours of orgies are followed by five minutes of spiritual uplift.

- Out of the Past's equivalent of the DeMille "spiritual uplift" moment is its positive portrayal of life in the small town where Mitchum is hiding out. It's not portrayed in an idealized way -- Ann's parents are narrow-minded prigs -- but with their beautiful location shooting, much of it done in the daytime to look like the antithesis of noir, these scenes leave no doubt that this is a good place to be, compared to the nasty, violent world of the Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas characters. It almost seems like Out of the Past is a cousin to all those Westerns about the old violent ways that have to die out so the West can be civilized; Mitchum is like John Wayne in The Searchers, wanting to be part of the new postwar world but unable to do so. I think that Out of the Past definitely comes off as an attempt to synthesize the two types of post-WWII movie, the bleak despairing noir and the optimistic film about postwar lives. It's not exactly a synthesis, of course, because nobody really cares about the small town or the infuriatingly understanding Ann or whether she'll end up with that guy who's loved her "since I fixed her roller skates." It's all about the dark side. But the fact that Out of the Past has that "good" side in it makes it a bit different from some later noirs, which apply that noir cynicism universally.

- One other thing about Out of the Past is that it packs so much plot into such a short running time: 97 minutes. When it was remade in 1984 as Against All Odds, it was 128 minutes; now it would probably run something like two and a half hours. The difference, I think, is that moviemakers today feel a need to be more sensible and explain everything. Out of the Past glides over a lot of plot details or leaves them unexplained; it keeps the scenes short and the dialogue clipped, even if it means giving short shrift to the exposition. Today's dialogue scenes tend to be a lot longer and heavier on the exposition (this applies even to moviemakers like Quentin Tarantino, who use complicated storytelling techniques but usually feel a need to let the characters explain what's going on within the scene itself). Out of the Past doesn't really feel a need to explain why Mitchum falls for Greer: he sees her, he likes what he sees, and that's about it. Movies of the era used a kind of movie shorthand, playing on our prior knowledge of the conventions: you didn't need to show how the leading man falls for the leading lady, because we just automatically accept that he will; it's part of the rules. Movies today are often accused of being slaves to convention, but sometimes the problem is that they don't trust the conventions enough, and rely on extra dialogue to convey the things that we could easily accept without explanation, as long as we're enjoying ourselves. And part of the reason there can't be a movie this cool nowadays is that to be as cool as Robert Mitchum, you have to say very little and smoke a lot. Today's stars get lots of dialogue and they don't smoke, so what can you do?

- Finally, note how often Mitchum has his back to the camera in this picture. A lot of the shots (and there are quite a few long takes in this picture) show Greer on one side of the screen talking to Mitchum with his face turned toward her, away from the camera; his face is partly obscured by shadows, her face is fully lit. I can't say much about Mitchum's coolness that hasn't been said already, but it takes someone really cool to dominate a scene when his face is deliberately obscured.

Timpani Sticks and Stones

The best current reviewer of classical music recordings isn't in the print media and doesn't, as far as I know, have a website. He's Simon Roberts, an Australian who lives in Philadelphia and works as a lawyer (yes, a Philadelphia lawyer), and in his spare time posts to the usenet newsgroup rec.music.classical.recordings. Roberts isn't a guide to everything; he doesn't care for most French or Russian or American music, which means that most of his posts are about German music of the 18th and 19th centuries. But if you go to Google Groups advanced search, enter Simon Roberts in the "author" field, and do some searches on posts he's written on the great German dudes (Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Haydn), you'll find that he has a broad knowledge of available recordings and exceptionally interesting things to say about them. His posts have alerted me to some great recordings that were ignored by most of the standard classical magazines (things are a little easier now that classicstoday.com reviews a lot of less-widely-distributed product). For instance, there was a recording a few years ago of Haydn's opus 33 string quartets by the Apponyi Quartet, a group that made only two recordings and may not even exist any more. The recording was not reviewed in Gramophone or the Penguin Guide, and I'd never heard of it until Roberts proclaimed on rec.music.classical.recordings that these were "the best performances of any Haydn quartets, HIP or
otherwise - remarkably alive and imaginative." I ordered the recording from Germany (the only place it's still available), and found that Roberts was absolutely right: even with all the good recordings of Haydn quartets, these stand out for terrific playing and willingness to make Haydn sound bold and brash rather than just cute and "elegant."

That kind of sums up Roberts' taste in recordings in general; he likes performances and recordings that take chances, are exuberant and extroverted and not afraid to make a lot of noise. He doesn't have much use for "understated" or "subtle" performances. I like that, because first of all it means that a recording he recommends will almost never be dull; this puts him at the opposite extreme from many major classical-music critics, and from the people who run the major labels. (There was a guy who posted on rec.music.classical.recordings, a fellow Canadian, who was involved with A&R for the Philips label. The guy turned out to be a loon, a rabid anti-Semite, and rude to boot... but perhaps worst of all, he turned out to have the blandest taste imaginable, preferring artists who were so "subtle" as to be dull and denigrating artists who actually produced attractive or entertaining sounds. No wonder the "major" labels are collapsing, when they put such people in charge.) His favorite conductors include Toscanini, Scherchen, Klemperer, the younger Bernstein (before he left the New York Philharmonic), Harnoncourt, Rene Jacobs, Frans Bruggen -- guys who take a lot of chances and make music sound excitingly rough and tough.

But what's most interesting about reading a lot of Roberts' posts about orchestral music, and what I barely heard about before I started reading him, is his emphasis on balances. You hardly ever hear about balance in the Penguin Guide or Gramophone; a conductor is praised for generic stuff -- "shaping," "sense of line," etc., but there's rarely much reference to the specific things the conductor makes the orchestra do: does he make the trumpets stand out? Does he go for a string-heavy balance, as Ormandy did, or does he emphasize the woodwinds, as Klemperer did? And so on. Balancing is perhaps the most obvious way for the conductor to shape the way the orchestra sounds, and yet you rarely hear about it. From Roberts, you hear about it all the time; he's particularly concerned with the timpani, preferring that they should play out and make a real racket. (This is particularly important with composers like Haydn and Mozart and the baroque composers, who didn't always include timpani parts; when they did, therefore, you have to assume that they wanted the timpani to be heard and have a real impact.) When you listen to conductors' recordings this way, you can not only learn more about their styles of conducting, but find that their styles are sometimes the exact opposite of the way the "standard" critics describe them.

An example is the late Georg Solti. Based on his brass-heavy, nervously energetic performances of Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler, Solti is mostly considered a high-energy conductor, given to "driving too hard" and letting the orchestra make too much noise. But Roberts pointed out that in pre-Wagner music, in Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, Solti was the exact opposite of the stereotype; his problem was undue restraint in balancing, making the brass and timpani play softly and daintily and going for a generically pretty sound. This is definitely true of most of Solti's recordings of those composers (though his first recordings of The Magic Flute and Cosi Fan Tutte, both with Pilar Lorengar, are still excellent), and you'd never know it from reading the reviews in the standard record-review journals and books. It took a lawyer posting on the internet to point out that a conductor's problem was not that he made too much noise but that he didn't make enough -- and that's because Roberts describes what specifically happens in a performance or recordings, whereas many critics don't describe much of anything.

A Man Can't Sleep When He Sleeps With Sheep

I promise not to let this turn into a DVD announcements blog, but with so many older movies coming out on DVD it's hard to find a time when there's not a notable DVD announcement. Anyway, the latest one is a new DVD of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; it's due out on October 12 and includes:

Disc One:
Audio Commentary by Stanley Donen
MGM Jubilee Overture (1954 MGM "30th Anniversary" Theatrical Short Subject shot
in CinemaScope and Technicolor, featuring the M-G-M Symphony Orchestra, led by
Johnny Green, playing a medley of eleven well-known songs used in some of the
studio's best-known musicals. Presented in a new 16x9 2.55 anamorphic transfer
with 5.1 digital audio)
Stanley Donen Trailer Gallery: On the Town 1949, Royal Wedding 1951, Singin' in
the Rain 1952, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers 1954, It's Always Fair Weather
1955, The Pajama Game 1957, Damn Yankees! 1958

Disc Two:
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Rarely-seen 1.77:1 alternate Widescreen Version
Updated and revised cast and crew documentary Sobbin' Women: The Making of
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, hosted by Howard Keel and featuring new
interviews with Jane Powell and Jacques D'Amboise
Radio City Music Hall Premiere - July 22, 1954
MGM's 30th Anniversary (1954 MGM Newsreel)

Seven Brides was one of a number of early CinemaScope movies that was simultaneously shot in two versions: the widescreen CinemaScope version and the "flat"-screen version, made in case CinemaScope didn't catch on. The two versions involved separate takes for separate cameras, with the result that they are two separate, independently-existing versions of the film. The Robe was filmed this way too, as was Brigadoon. And Oklahoma! had two separate widescreen versions, one in the then-new Todd-AO process, the other in CinemaScope.

I haven't seen the "flat" version, but I'm looking forward to it, because I think the use of CinemaScope is a weakness of the usually-seen version of Seven Brides. While CinemaScope soon became standard for musicals, it's not really a congenial format; that wide, wide screen is too big for the standard musical-comedy number with one solo singer or two people in love. Directors and choreographers forced to shoot a musical in CinemaScope would often resort to putting extra furniture on opposite sides of the frame just to fill the space. Now, with Seven Brides you can argue that the 'Scope format is more appropriate because it allows all seven brides and/or seven brothers to be seen in the same shot, but personally I'd trade that for the opportunity to see Jane Powell sing without acres and acres of set on either side of her. So I have a feeling it's the "flat" version I'll be watching more often.

I guess I shouldn't let this go without mentioning the Monty Python sketch where a school performs its own version of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. "Right, do you four boys take these two girls to be your seven brides?" "We do." "Right, go and do your prep."

Hail, Hail Freedonia

You say you want all the Marx Brothers movies on DVD (not counting LOVE HAPPY)? You like the recent WB release of their MGM/RKO pictures but now you want the earlier, crazier Paramount Movies? Well, what have we here...

The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection

No announcement yet on what the bonus materials will be. I have to admit I'm not crazy about the new vogue for having a bunch of movies in one set with all the bonus materials on the last disc; this was obviously started by the Indiana Jones box, but really, when I'm watching a movie I usually want the special features specific to that movie to be on the same disc. Minor point, of course.

I wouldn't expect much from the transfers; these movies are not in good shape, and the original negatives are, I believe, gone. There's little chance of getting back the bits that were cut from Animal Crackers on reissue due to the Production Code (Groucho's sung line "I think I'll try to make her," gone forever), or the frames that are missing from every battered print of Horse Feathers (not due to the Production Code, just a badly-preserved film). But the films are the thing, especially Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup. These movies are not only the wildest Marx movies, they're the most cinematic; unlike the first two movies, which were adapted from the stage, or the MGM movies, where the routines were often tried out on stage in front of an audience, these three movies have relatively short routines that actually seem to be delivered for the camera rather than an unseen audience. Groucho's trademark pauses are not as long as usual, for example.

Addendum: Turns out that on the same day as the Marx Brothers collection, Universal (which owns the Paramount catalogue, just as WB owns the MGM films and MGM owns the films of United Artists... confusing, no?) will release The W.C. Fields Comedy Collection, with five of his movies for Paramount or Universal: International House, It's a Gift, The Bank Dick, My Little Chickadee (with Mae West), and You Can't Cheat an Honest Man. I'm not quite as big a Fieldsian as I am a Marxian, but nevertheless, this collection is great news for those of us who agree with the adage that anyone who hates small kids and dogs can't be all bad. (And the scenes with the blind man in Its a Gift prove that the South Park generation didn't invent the comedy of really bad taste.)

Hollywood Prestige

I wrote:

The industry itself tended to assume that great aspirations equalled great art, which explains how movies like HAMLET and GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT managed to win the Academy Award: the “worthy” movie was the Hollywood ideal of a great movie.

To follow up on this: one way you can get an idea of what Hollywood thought of itself, and what it thought of as the best it had to offer, is by looking at the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture. It's often noted that the Best Picture winners tend to be middle-of-the-road, "worthy" pictures; the stuff that Hollywood did best -- like musicals, screwball comedies, swashbucklers, gangster pictures -- rarely managed a win or even a nomination. And that's exactly the point: in the industry, the genre stuff was thought of as bread-and-butter commercial work, rather than Art. And Hollywood's idea of Art was something that dealt directly with serious issues, preferably based on a novel (because a story conceived by a successful novelist was thought to be of more value than a story pitched out by a mere screenwriter). But you'll also notice that very few open "message" pictures won Best Picture. Gentleman's Agreement is an exception, but in general, the Academy tended to avoid pictures that were openly built around a message. Stanley Kramer, thankfully, never won a Best Picture award; in 1968, the Best Picture was not Kramer's rotten "message" picture about race, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, but an entertaining detective picture about race, In the Heat of the Night. Which is to say that the Academy's selections have been middle-of-the-road and kind of bland, but they're not as bad as they could have been, because the industry voters at least recognized the need for a movie to be entertaining and well-made; hence they ignored the openly preachy or badly-made movies that the New York Times critics used to praise. Put it this way: West Side Story is the ultimate Best Picture winner: middlebrow, impersonal, a genre picture that tries desperately not to be a genre picture, a picture with a good humanist message. But at least it beat out Judgement at Nuremberg, which just plain sucked.

One other example of Hollywood self-evaluation comes in one of my favorite movies, The Bad and the Beautiful, directed by Vincente Minnelli, produced by John Houseman and written by Charles Schnee. The main character of the movie is a movie producer played by Kirk Douglas, who is mostly modelled on David O. Selznick but whose story also borrows from the lives of various other producers, including Val Lewton, producer of the Cat People movies. At one point in the movie, Douglas and his director friend (Barry Sullivan) finish making "Doom of the Cat Men," and find that the studio now expects them to make a sequel. Frustrated with making cheap horror movies, Sullivan declares: "Enough practicing. It's time we made one for real," and pitches his dream project: an adaptation of a big thick novel called "The Faraway Mountain," which appears to be a big, serious picture that demands to be shot on location in Vera Cruz. Douglas takes all the credit for the idea, produces the picture with someone else directing, and wins an Academy Award. The implication throughout The Bad and the Beautiful is that the best Hollywood pictures are the biggest, and that the Douglas character is great because he produces big, ambitious, Selznick-type pictures. That's a weakness in the film, because it's hard to agree with that evaluation of Selznick, and by extention Douglas's character. As one critic pointed out, we know now that "Doom of the Cat Men" would probably turn out to be a better and more entertaining picture than "The Faraway Mountain."

Howard Hawks, Critical Guinea Pig

I have an ambiguous attitude toward the films of Howard Hawks. In part, it comes from embarrassment over having overrated him before. I mean, I love many of Howard Hawks’ movies. The man made so many great movies in so many different genres that it would be hard to find a movie buff who doesn’t count at least one Hawks film among his or her favourites. But when I come back to some of Hawks’ movies now, I’m struck more and more by how flawed they seem, and, what’s more, flawed by some of the things that I had considered virtues before. I used to think it was interesting and wonderful the way he repeats lines, gestures and story points from film to film; now I just find it, well, repetitive. I guess the moment you fall out of love with Hawks is the moment when hearing the term “Good enough” (which recurs, sometimes several times, in most of his action movies) makes you wince instead of cheer.

Hawks made some great movies, and he’s definitely one of the best American film directors. But some of the purple prose written about him is pretty hard to take even by the terrifying standards of post-‘60s film criticism. To read a critic like David Thomson or the guys in the Time Out Film Guide is to be transported into a world where repetitiveness is proof of artistry and where Hawks is excused or even exalted for the same things that Hollywood in general is condemned for (rehashing the great RIO BRAVO as the not-so-great EL DORADO; the cop-out ending of RED RIVER). But then, criticism about Hawks, especially criticism written in or just after the ‘60s, isn’t just about Hawks. The battle over Howard Hawks - or, more specifically, over Hawks’ stature as a filmmaker - was part of the larger battle, waged in the ‘60s, over the purpose of film criticism and over what kind of films could be considered art.

Traditionally, it was assumed that the further American movies got from conventional genre pictures, the closer they would come to being worthy of consideration as “art.” This meant that a Western could be considered a major achievement only if it had an obvious political message (HIGH NOON), used some kind of storytelling gimmick (HIGH NOON again), or deliberately went against the conventions of its genre (whaddya know... HIGH NOON). The movies we now think of as the best Hollywood has to offer - the musicals, Westerns, gangster pictures, monster movies, thrillers, screwball comedies - were usually condescended to or ignored by the people who reviewed movies and the people who gave out awards.

American critics were divided into two camps: there were the middlebrows, like the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, whose idea of a great movie was something with a great message (WEST SIDE STORY, for example, or something by Stanley Kramer). Then there were the highbrows, whose ideal filmmaker was Ingmar Bergman and who assumed that American movies were just not quite for grown-ups; John Simon, the movie critic for people who hate movies, bluntly stated that “America has produced much cinematic entertainment but very little cinematic art.”

The industry itself tended to assume that great aspirations equalled great art, which explains how movies like HAMLET and GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT managed to win the Academy Award: the “worthy” movie was the Hollywood ideal of a great movie. In movies and novels about Hollywood, you can often find an indication of what insiders thought of as the best the industry had to offer; it’s mostly the same kind of stuff Bosley Crowther liked. In Budd Schulberg’s novel WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN, John Ford’s THE INFORMER - one of the most self-consiously arty films ever made - is cited as the great movie that makes up for all the junk the industry is putting out. In the movie THE BIG KNIFE, made in 1955, Ida Lupino’s character runs down a list of the best directors in Hollywood; the list includes Wyler, Wilder, Stevens, and I think Kazan and Zinnemann (I haven’t seen the movie in a while). An OK list, but - with the possible exception of Wilder - a list of “prestige” directors whose movies were considered Events rather than mere movies. By that time, Ford was considered a disappointment, having abandoned the arty style of THE INFORMER to make a lot of John Wayne westerns; critics routinely wrote that Hitchcock had never lived up to the promise of his English movies (which weren’t particularly different from his American movies, but they were European and therefore assumed to be better); and Hawks, of course, wasn’t on the critical or Academy radar at all.

But if the new breed of French-influenced critics - the auteurists, they were called - were to succeed in proving that American genre directors could be artists (and, at the same time, that the big prestige movies weren’t so great), Hawks was the guy to start with. Hawks wasn’t well known outside of the business. (Andrew Sarris, the doyen of American auteurist critics, recalled that established critics used to say “Who the hell is Howard Hawks?” only to say “I like that one” every time you mentioned a film he’d directed.) And yet he didn’t fit the stereotype of the Hollywood director as studio hack. For one thing, he’d never stayed under contract to any one studio; much like directors today, he worked on one or two-picture deals, moving from studio to studio and retaining a lot of freedom to choose his projects. Another stereotype of Hollywood directors is that they were just traffic managers, getting scripts handed to them and doing what the producers told them. Hawks didn’t fit this stereotype either; he produced most of his own pictures, initiated a lot of projects himself, chose writers he liked to work with (favorites included Jules Furthman, Charles Lederer and science-fiction writer Leigh Brackett) and made substantial uncredited contributions to the scripts, reflected in the fact that certain “Hawksian” lines turn up no matter who the credited writer was.

With other auteurist favorites - Nicholas Ray, for example - auteurist critics had to go to extreme, sometimes comical lengths to demonstrate that the director’s personality was reflected in some of the projects they did. (To argue for Nicholas Ray as a great artist you have to argue for PARTY GIRL as a work of art. It’s just very tough to write about the artistry of any film produced by Joe Pasternak.) Still other auteur directors had clear personal styles but didn’t make a lot of good movies - Frank Tashlin was an auteur but, by his own admission, most of his movies (apart from ROCK HUNTER) were too compromised to be completely successful. Hawks was the perfect test subject for the auteur theory because he was unquestionably an auteur, and because he’d made a lot of great movies.

In other words, Hawks was where the battle-lines were drawn. If Hawks wasn’t a cinema artist, then no Hollywood filmmaker could be considered an artist. And by winning the battle over Hawks, the auteurists won the battle for Hollywood. Essentially, the battle I’m talking about here was the same one that Preston Sturges portrayed in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. Traditionally, both critics and Hollywood filmmakers had John L. Sullivan’s attitude to movies: a great movie is something that’s based on a novel and has a socially-conscious message. Sturges concluded, no, Hollywood really helps people more when it makes movies like “Ants in Your Plants of 1939.” The new critics went one step further, demonstrating that “Ants in Your Plants” is actually a greater work of art than “Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?” And Hawks was the perfect test subject for this, because he made almost nothing but genre pictures - “Ants in Your Plants” pictures - and yet it’s obvious that his films had more interesting things to say about people and life and morality than an “Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou” filmmaker like Stanley Kramer or Fred Zinnemann.

Another thing about Hawks that made him a godsend to auteurist critics is that he put his stamp even on the acting of a film. Some directors didn’t much worry about what an actor was doing unless he was doing something wrong; directors like Hitchcock or Minnelli focused on composing the shots, and let the actors have free rein within those careful compositions. So there’s really not a “Hitchcockian” style of acting. But there is a “Hawksian” style of acting; his actors - particularly the women - have certain tics of body language and line delivery that they could only have picked up from the director, since they’re more typical of Hawks than the actor in question. (Compare Lauren Bacall in TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT and Angie Dickinson in RIO BRAVO; not only are they playing similar characters, they even move somewhat similarly when, say, getting up from a table.) In some ways, this isn’t exactly a good thing; Jean Arthur in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS is so obviously being forced into the mold of the Hawks Heroine that she isn’t able to do the things that make her so appealing in other movies. But it is something that a critic can pick up on and identify as part of the filmmaker’s style; it’s another critical talking point.

But a movie that makes for good criticism doesn’t always make for good viewing. Hawks’ later movies - the ones after RIO BRAVO, which I think was his last great movie - offer a lot to write about, a lot of “personal” touches. They’re also sloppily made, haphazardly cast and slow as hell. HATARI! is a case in point. You can’t possibly call this a bland corporate Hollywood product; it has almost literally no plot, just a series of vignettes about the rough and tough life of people who trap animals (for zoos) in Africa. It’s a highly personal film about masculinity, professionalism and being “good enough” - all the Hawks trademarks. It is 100% the work of an auteur. But it’s also a two-and-a-half hour movie with no freakin’ plot. This may not be any worse than when Jacques Rivette does it, but it sure isn’t any better.

So I'm increasingly coming to value Hawks more as an auteur than as a filmmaker. No director so conclusively proves that personal art can be created within Hollywood genre movies -- but I do find, at least at the moment, that I prefer other filmmakers in each of the genres Hawks worked in. I say "at the moment" because my tastes go back and forth on this, and the day will probably come when I can hear the phrase "Calling Barranca" with pleasure again. Calling Barranca... Calling Barranca...

She Has Very Soft Paws...

The official "Peanuts" website is running strips from 1970, and they're currently running one of my favorite of Schulz's multi-week stories, involving politics, war, and romance. It starts here.

The reason behind the riot at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm -- "War dogs being sent to Viet Nam, and then not getting back" -- is, I think, based on a real story that was in the news at the time: people were donating their dogs to the war effort, and then discovering that the dogs got left behind in the jungle, put to sleep, or given to the South Vietnamese army.

Why I Don't Dig Dylan

There's a new book on Bob Dylan, Dylan's Visions of Sin, that analyzes his work the way a professor with too much time on his hands would analyze the work of a poet: pretentiously, in great detail, and at absurd length. The reviews of the book have mostly focused on whether it makes sense to give Dylan the sort of analytical treatment usually reserved for poets. Myself, I'm happy to see Dylan's work discussed this way: the more he's seen as a poet, the less he's seen as a songwriter. And the ideal of Dylan as a songwriter has done incredible damage to the craft of songwriting.

Note that I said "the ideal of Dylan," not Dylan. I'm not a great fan of Bob Dylan, but I can't deny his talent. Besides, he inspired one of the all-time great parodies, Paul Simon's "A Simple Desultory Philippic," and as I said about Marlon Brando, when someone can be so devastatingly parodied, it's actually a tribute to the uniqueness and individuality of his style (you can't parody something that's bland). No, my problem is that Dylan, in the '60s, came to represent an ideal, or rather two ideals: that of the singer-songwriter, and that of "authenticity" or "rawness" in songwriting. And that's what effectively killed off the profession of songwriting.

From the turn of the 20th century up until the '60s, American popular songs were mostly written by professional songwriters. People who chose music or lyrics as a job, sold the songs they wrote, honed their craft. Some songwriters were talented performers; Johnny Mercer certainly was, and so was Hoagy Carmichael. But they were not primarily performers, and they certainly didn't write songs primarily to sing themselves; they either wrote songs that had some general possibility of being hits, and thereby performed by others, or they wrote songs for specific performers (in a musical, a movie, or a record album).

Bob Dylan's songs could be, and were, recorded by others. But they were primarily written to be sung by Bob Dylan; they reflect his own preoccupations, his own personality. When you "cover" a Bob Dylan song, it's implied that you are expressing Bob Dylan's sentiments, whereas a traditional pop song expresses sentiments that sound right coming from anyone, that aren't attached to the personality of the songwriter. You can see the difference if you compare the early Beatles stuff to the songs they wrote in the late '60s, after they got into the Dylanesque fake-folk groove. The early Beatles songs are traditional pop songs, expressing feelings that could come from anyone: a desire to hold someone's hand, for example, or the startling revelation that money can't buy love. The later songs are increasingly about personal obsessions: celebrity, drugs, Penny Lane, drugs, political issues, drugs. (The earlier songs are mostly in the A-A-B-A structure of old-fashioned pop, while the later stuff has the verse-chorus structure that the fake-folk movement brought in to replace the traditional pop refrain.) I don't mind saying that I prefer the early Beatles songs, and that general style of songwriting: I like to feel that a pop song expresses what I am feeling, but the singer-songwriter movement shifts the emphasis instead to telling me what someone else is feeling. Traditional pop creates a somewhat active listener who projects his or herself onto a song; Bob Dylan sings for a passive audience: listen up and I'll tell you what I'm feeling.

But what's worse about the singer-songwriter movement is that it essentially killed off the professional songwriter, and the very idea of professionalism in songwriting. It's often said that rock n' roll destroyed the Tin Pan Alley professionals, but that's not really true. Some pros couldn't adjust to rock n' roll, it's true. But others could, and many of the rock n' roll hits of the '50s and early '60s were written by professional songwriters, guys who wrote for performers, rather than for themselves. Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller are the most famous of the rock n' roll pros: they were basically traditional pop songwriters who decided to write for the new market, and came up with "Jailhouse Rock," "Hound Dog," all The Coasters' stuff.

But by the mid-'60s, there was an increasing idea that for a performer to be really "authentic," he or she had to write his or her own songs. The most famous flap about this was the Monkees brouhaha, when a "rock group" specially created for TV a) was castigated for singing songs by professional songwriters, rather than writing its own stuff, and b) started to insist on being allowed to write its own material. The idea was that if a performer was performing only songs by other people, he or she was cheating, not communicating directly with the audience, not being Real.

Now, ordinarily I'm as open and tolerant of divergent views as the next person. This is an exception. So: The idea that a performer should write his own songs is basically stupid. It's like saying an actor should write his own plays. It's like saying that a concert pianist should write his own music. A performer performs. A writer writes. The jobs are separate and they require separate skills. The singer-songwriter cult has created a monstrous conflation of talents that don't necessarily have a lot in common with each other, leading to a situation where talented performers wind up performing dreck they wrote themselves, while talented songwriters who can't sing have an inordinately tough time selling songs to people who can. When Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera find it necessary to at least claim they write some of their own songs, you know that there's no respect for songwriting as a profession.

Which brings me to the other point: the post-Dylan era has been one where craftsmanship and skill are basically not valued in songwriting. Dylan was, as I said, a talented guy. Some of his songs can claim to be works of art. But as craft, as opposed to art, his songs are basically terrible. Rhymes that don't rhyme, lines that don't scan, words that don't sit well on the music, endless repetition of musical phrases with no musical relief in sight, lyrics that repeat the same proposition over and over without developing it (why are the times a-changin'? can you give me some specific examples, please?), all of these are staples of the post-Dylan song. Again, the early work of Lennon and McCartney, or Brian Wilson -- guys who weren't exactly professional songwriters but were certainly prodigiously gifted amateurs -- had their share of sloppy rhymes, but you could still hear the influence of old-style pop on song structure and on certain details of craftsmanship, especially the attempt to create singable, comprehensible lyrics. It wasn't until the late '60s that bad craftsmanship became elevated to proof of artistry, that the ideal of a song became not to give the impression that the writer had worked hard on it, but that it was pouring out of him spontaneously. The ideal of professionalism had been replaced by the fetishization of the amateur, the idea that songwriting was something that just anybody could do if he had "something to say." The idea of taking a week to write a lyric, of agonizing over every word and whether it fit the music, of all the little tricks of which vowels go best with which notes... these things just didn't matter much.

And yes, there was plenty of bad craftsmanship in the era of professional songwriting. But the thing is, in professional songwriting, bad craftsmanship was usually a tell-tale sign of a bad song. The best songs were written by composers who had unusual ideas and developed them inventively, by lyricists who had fresh images and clever rhymes. But post-'60s, you get a situation where there is no correspondence between craftsmanship and quality; a songwriter who sets out to write a great song, at a higher level than the average pop song, does not feel a need to avoid rhyming "world" with "girl" or splitting a word between two musical phrases. There are exceptions, as always; Don McLean's "American Pie" is a song with a high level of craftsmanship. But when you find a well-crafted pop song now, it's almost a freak occurrence, a random thing; no value is placed on craft. And I think that is most easily traced back to Bob Dylan, professional poet and amateur songwriter.

By the way, Dylan is long before my time, as is the age of professional songwriting. I am a young fogy.

And to quote Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys, on a dead songwriter: "Lady he rhymes with baby! No wonder he's dead!"

By the way...

...My score on Terry Teachout's Cultural Concordance Index is about 45% (out of the questions I answered; my opinions on painting can be summed up as "I don't know much about art and I don't know what I like"). Of course these things change, and I dare say that everybody who took the Test would have different answers at different times. For example, I used to prefer To Have and Have Not to Casablanca, and probably will again some day, but right now I'm going through a phase where if I see one more of Howard Hawks' endlessly repeated gimmicks -- "I'm hard to get [fill in name of movie hero], all you have to do is ask me" -- I'll punch a hole in the screen, so Casablanca it is.

One of Teachout's readers commented that the list seems to go for the "light" (in the first column) and the "heavy" (in the second column). You could also give it a political slant: the good, solid '50s-loving modernists going to the ballet and listening to neoclassical Stravinsky while watching deliberately retro movies like Chinatown, instead of those atonalty-loving hippies with their Marlon Brando movies, incomprehensible long novels, and Rolling Stones records. Or not.

I remember a somewhat similar exercise being done when it came to classical composers. The writer noted that throught the history of music, it has often happened that two major composers will be working at the same time, one of whom is facile, a speedy worker, and immediately popular, the other of whom is a slower worker, less well-known in his own time and less easy to enjoy. These pairings included (the more facile, popular composer is listed first in each case):

Handel -- Bach
Richard Strauss -- Hans Pfitzner
Stravinsky -- Schoenberg
Britten -- Tippett

I think there were some others I'm leaving out. Anyway, I found I always preferred the facile, easily-accessible composer. What that says about me, besides "superficial city, man," I don't know, but then, you don't have to be superficial to prefer Britten to Tippett, just non-British...

The '80s-est Movie

I saw Trading Places the other day, a movie I'd seen before, but mostly in bits and pieces (it's on TV constantly, so if you're home flipping channels on a Sunday you might see the ending one week, the beginning another week). It's a funny movie that deserves its popularity; it's also perhaps the ultimate '80s movie, or at least the ultimate '80s comedy. Let's do a checklist of the ways in which this picture embodies all that is '80s in film comedy:

- Saturday Night Live alumni as stars
- Lots of semi-famous people making cameos: Jim Belushi, Al Franken, Frank Oz
- A plot dealing with corporate raiding and insider trading (the story of Mortimer and Randolph Duke is based on a couple of brothers who unsuccessfully tried to corner the market in something or other in 1980)
- A wholesome prostitute
- Lots of references to the decadent lifestyles of the rich, from huge mansions to butlers to country clubs. At a time when the rich in America were starting to live more and more like they were in denial about being rich (it was at this time that we saw the annoying phenomenon of rich people who like to pretend that they're still ordinary computer nerds), the movies were increasingly fixated on the Scrooge McDuck lifestyle.
- The rich are portrayed as evil, heartless, and cruel. The Dan Aykroyd character learns virtue and compassion by living on the street for a few days. But...
- At the end, all the good guys become rich and all the bad guys wind up poor. This was the big thing in the endings of '80s movies. As opposed to the '70s, when most movies ended with everyone being miserable, or the '40s, when characters were more likely to end up poor but happy. In a true '80s movie, nobody winds up poor or miserable.
- The Ralph Bellamy character has a photo of President Reagan on his desk. This was a prop used in countless '80s movies and TV shows to demonstrate that a character was evil, greedy, heartless, etc.
- Swearing and nudity are included in such a way as to be totally irrelevant, so that they can be easily removed for the "clean" TV version. There were a lot of '80s movies that were basically "clean" movies but included one or two things to get them an R rating and therefore seem edgy. (This even happened in kids' movies; E.T. had the phrase "penis breath" in it solely so it would get a PG rather than G rating.) This doesn't happen as much nowadays, partly because of the institution of the PG-13 rating and partly because dressing up conventional material with a few "naughty bits" is now mostly the province of cable TV shows.
- Like many '80s movies, Trading Places is a "loose and baggy monster," rambling, unstructured. It basically abandons its main plot about two-thirds of the way through, and devotes itself instead to a favorite '80s trope: the good guys team up to teach the bad guys a lesson. The fact that this doesn't have much to do with what the movie was supposed to be about is not supposed to be important. And I suppose it really isn't.

The fun of a good '80s comedy is the looseness, and the amount of room it has for schtick by the performers. If the performers are sufficiently talented, and Eddie Murphy and even Dan Aykroyd certainly were at this time, it's good to see them given an opportunity to do all their routines, including dressing up, doing funny accents, and laughing very loudly. One of the reasons movie comedy was so dismal in the '70s -- and for all the Golden Age talk, the '70s was not a good time for film comedy -- was that the director-oriented, serious-minded New American Cinema couldn't get its film-schooled head around the idea of getting a performer in and turning him loose. Say what you will about John Landis, he could do that, and, in his brief period of in-demandedness, that's just what he did.

"I am Nanja Iboko, exchange student from Cameroon!"

More Cartoons on DVD

The always-vigilant TV Shows on DVD has the official press releases for two new Warner Brothers box sets of cartoons, covering the work of Hanna-Barbera. The first is the long-awaited Tom and Jerry collection, featuring a format similar to the Looney Tunes Golden Collections except with 40 cartoons on only two discs. It doesn't have a complete list of cartoons, but these will be from the duo's Golden Age at MGM, not those crappy nonviolent made-for-TV cartoons. I can't say I'm the biggest T&J fan -- I prefer Warner Brothers' "Rhapsody Rabbit" to T&J's "The Cat Concerto", which had the same plot and was released at the same time (nobody knows who came up with the idea first, but it was "Cat Concerto" that won the Oscar) -- but it's great to have them on DVD nonetheless, and hopefully a Tex Avery collection will follow in due course.

The other set is a TV-on-DVD collection, all 34 episodes of Hanna-Barbera's version of The Great Race, Wacky Races. One of the last "comedy" Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons, before they got into superheroes and kids solving mysteries; most of the episodes were written by Mike Maltese, best known for the many cartoons he wrote for Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng; you can definitely tell, from the failures of Dick Dastardly, that it's from the guy who wrote most of the Road Runner cartoons.

By Strauss - Coda

In my post on Strauss's Emperor Waltz I mentioned an article on this piece by David Hamilton. I finally found the article, "The Secret Life of a Waltz": it's in the October 1975 issue of High Fidelity and was also included in the book High Fidelity's Silver Anniversary Treasury, which includes other memorable articles like Conrad L. Osborne's "A Plain Case for the Golden Age," Milton Babbitt's "Who Cares if You Listen?" (on the idea that advanced modern music is a specialized discipline, like advanced mathematics), H.C. Robbins Landon's "A Pox on Manfredini" (on the '50s vogue for second-rate baroque music) and the totally incomprehensible "Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould About Glenn Gould." Well worth picking up a used copy, just to get a taste of what was the best music magazine in America, and probably the world.

Here's an excerpt from Hamilton's analysis of the Emperor Waltz, writing about the march introduction:

The first sounds we hear in Johann Strauss's Emperor Waltz are surely those of marching, rather than dancing, feet. The steady alternation -- one, two, one, two -- of soft string chords leads to a modest tune, its lightly military rhythm underlined by the rustle of the snare drum. Four bars in the woodwinds are answered by a pendant in the violins, then repeated in a slightly fuller setting (with the merest soupcon of a martial gesture from the trumpet), answered by a different pendant. Indubitably a march, but on a very special scale: perhaps a bird's-eye view of the parade ground, or toy soldiers at drill -- the specific metaphor doesn't really matter, rather the sense of distance and of proportion that it conveys.

Two bars of vamping trumpet and snare drum lead to another tune, still tiny and cheerful, not unrelated, in its trills and general shapes, to what has gone before. Then a fuller sound -- a throbbing in the bass, melody in strings, horns and bassoons -- transforms the initial march tune into something broader, more sweeping. Insistent fanfares urge it into a crescendo. Now the original march is close upon us, in the full splendor of C major, and its pendant swings down proudly in the violins before the putative marchers move away, fading into quiet plucked-string sounds and eventually leaving behind only an echo of rhythm in the snare drum -- over which, however, our ears surely supply the remainder of the melody.

The point of the article is to show how much is going on, in terms of musical craftsmanship, even in a piece of so-called "light" music, and how much goes into a good performance of it. As Hamilton writes: "Light music is not merely less well-made 'heavy' music, but music with an entirely different purpose, crafted (at its best) with equal finesse. It's worth keeping this in mind -- not so that we will treat light music more solemnly, but so that we should widen our perceptions, not miss any of its special distinctions."

Uncle Future

Comics.com is now running one of the most famous Li'l Abner stories of all time: the 1952 story where Li'l Abner is told that his destiny is to marry Daisy Mae. Without giving too much away, let me just say that this one is worth following for all the twists and turns, not to mention all the great "Fearless Fosdick" strips it incorporates.

The story is also a great exercise in meta-humor; Al Capp teases his audience by acknowledging -- through the characters, and in particular their comments, on the strip-within-a-strip, "Fearless Fosdick" -- all the devices comic-strip artists use to keep people reading. The strip refers to and mocks every single device that Capp has used over the years to trick us into thinking this might be the time Li'l Abner gets married. And then there are the indirect references to the strip's audience and its popularity; as Abner says in the strip they ran today: "Lots o' folks thought ah was gonna git married, lots o' times, but ah allus wriggles outa it!"

Whether or not this story was the shark-jumping moment for Li'l Abner is an ongoing debate that I won't get into here, in part because I'm not all that familiar with the strip after the early '50s. (I do think, from what I've seen, that the strip's decline had more to do with Capp's decreasing involvement with drawing it, along with his increasingly bitter and humorless mood.) But the story itself represents Li'l Abner at its best. By all means follow it.

Toons. Gets 'Em Every Time.

I still haven't been able to find or rewrite my last piece on the Warner Bros. TV cartoons of the '90s, so until I do, my short history of those cartoons will have to have "And then WB animation collapsed, the end." However, I did watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit again recently, the movie that kicked off all those Spielberg-produced cartoon nostalgia projects. Terry Teachout, isolating the only sane part of my Tiny Toons piece, has some comments on the film and the way it rekindled interest in the artistry of Hollywood animation.

What struck me on watching Roger Rabbit again is that it works so much better than all the live-action/animation hybrids that preceded or followed it, and that the reason is not one of technique (though the technical achievement was remarkable) but of characterization: this is probably the only live-action/animation movie where the live-action characters are the most interesting. The central character of the movie is not Roger but Eddie Valiant; he's the one who drives the plot, he's the one who changes. Similarly, the most important and memorable villain in the movie is played by a human actor, Christopher Lloyd.

Normally, live-action/animation movies are built around the animated characters; indeed, many of them, like Looney Tunes: Back in Action, use live-action only because the studio didn't have the guts to bankroll an all-animated movie. Looney Tunes: Back in Action was proudly described as a Bugs/Daffy movie that happened to have humans in it, as opposed to the awful Space Jam, where they were just foils for Michael Jordan. But despite the good intentions, it's almost impossible to make the animated characters the "stars" of this kind of movie, for a logistical reason: the live-action is all shot first, and the animated characters are added in to what the live-action director has already shot. So it's the live-action director who's in control, and it's the human actors who define what the animated characters will be doing: the animation is created in response to the movements of the humans, to make eye contact with the humans, to fit in with the live-action backgrounds. And that means that if the humans are boring, as they are in Back in Action, then the cartoon characters will come off as boring too, because their actions are generated in response to, well, not much of anything.

In Roger Rabbit, the scenes work because Roger is reacting to a character (Eddie) and an actor (Bob Hoskins) who does interesting things and therefore creates the potential for an interesting response by the animated character. That's one reason I'm glad that Robert Zemeckis wound up doing the film instead of the wilder directors who were considered, such as Joe Dante (who later wound up doing Back in Action) and Terry Gilliam -- these guys are more imaginative directors than Zemeckis, but what a movie like this needs is not wild imagination, but the discipline to create a solid, well-structured live-action film with good characters who can inspire good character animation. You just know that Dante would have lost interest in Eddie Valiant, just as he loses interest in most of his nominal heroes, just as he has no interest in the human characters of Back in Action. Zemeckis clearly got that Eddie Valiant had to be interesting or the animated characters wouldn't be interesting either.

Crosby > Sinatra

High Society is one of those movies that has every reason to be good, and isn't. It's got a Cole Porter score. It's got three big stars: Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. It's got a supporting cast that includes Celeste Holm and, as himself, Louis Armstrong. It's got a script by the fine Broadway playwright John Patrick (The Hasty Heart, The Teahouse of the August Moon) and direction by dependable MGM musical veteran Chuck Walters. And yet the whole movie is just as flat as can be: no one seems to be at his or her best, the musical numbers are mostly unmemorably staged. Probably most of the blame goes to the producer, Sol Siegel, a Fox veteran producing his first movie for MGM; in this and his follow-up movie with Porter, Les Girls, he seemed to be almost embarrassed about producing a musical, choosing instead to make a couple of longish comedies with music thrown in here and there, instead of the big attention-getting production numbers we'd expect from an MGM musical. (Odd, since Siegel had produced his share of musicals at Fox, including Call Me Madam, but maybe he just felt, as many did in 1956, that the exuberance of old-style musicals was no longer "sophisticated" enough.) But I prefer to place the blame on Grace Kelly, who is just dull from begining to end and gives no indication of why we should care about this pretty but boring, enervated person.

But the one interesting thing about watching High Society is this: as the movie goes on, you start to notice that Bing Crosby is cooler than Frank Sinatra. Much cooler. Much, much cooler. This is not Crosby at his best; he sleepwalks through a lot of the picture, throws away a lot of lines that Cary Grant nailed in the original. And this is not Crosby in his prime; in 1956 he was past his peak both as a singer and a star, while Sinatra was a superstar. And yet Sinatra just looks and sounds like kind of an amateur next to Crosby. As a singer, Crosby still has much the better voice and knows much more about what to do with it. Sinatra can do his "swooner" act, which he does with two not-that-great Porter ballads in this film ("You're Sensational" and "Mind If I Make Love To You"). And of course he can do his "swinger" act, though this movie doesn't give him much of a chance. Crosby can do real swinging, and as he reveals in his duet with Louis Armstrong -- the best part of the movie -- he "has jazz." And he can take a not-that-great Porter ballad, sing it with a non-singer (Kelly) and make it into a huge hit single: "True Love." As an actor and a singer, he can actually be likable, whereas Sinatra is at his best when he asks us not to like him but admire him for his hipness or his moodiness.

So why else do I think Bing Crosby is cooler than Frank Sinatra? Top ten reasons:

10. Crosby's favorite lyricist was Johnny Burke, a wonderful craftsman who wrote deceptively simple lyrics that linger in the memory ("Moonlight Becomes You," "Swingin' On a Star"). Sinatra's favorite lyricist was Sammy Cahn, an efficient but bland lyricist whose lyrics are often most notable for not making a lot of sense (even Cahn admitted that an ant would never try to move a rubber tree plant).

9. Crosby took little liberties with the melodic line, but did it in such a way that it enhanced the effectiveness of the song. Sinatra took little and often not-so-little liberties with the lyrics, for no good reason at all (You're supposed to sing "Night and Day," Frankie, not "Day and Night").

8. Crosby could work with other talented people. He duetted with the aforementioned Armstrong and Kelly; he recorded with the Andrews Sisters; he had that whole partnership going with Bob Hope. Sinatra was no good at partnering; his "Rat Pack" collaborations were a bust, his "Duets" are a joke, and his most notable duet record was "Mama Will Bark" with Dagmar the Dog.

7. Crosby could make a freewheeling, silly movie with Bob Hope, and it was fun. Sinatra tried to make freewheeling, silly movies with Dino, and it was something like Four for Texas.

6. In Warner Brothers' cartoon "The Swooner Crooner," directed by Frank Tashlin (who later directed a movie starring Crosby), Porky's hens are distracted by a chicken who sounds like Frank Sinatra, but a Bing Crosby chicken comes along and the hens like him even better. Therefore, even Looney Tunes admit that Bing beats Frankie.

5. Singers who imitated Bing Crosby included Dean Martin and Elvis Presley. Singers who imitated Frank Sinatra included Vic Damone and Matt Monro.

4. Crosby introduced more great songs than Sinatra. A lot of Sinatra's big hits are old standards, and a lot of the ones that aren't are essentially novelty songs tailored to his personality by Sammy Cahn, rather than songs with any particular universal appeal ("Come Fly With Me" is a good song, but you can't sing it without sounding like a Sinatra wannabe). Sinatra didn't have a "White Christmas," and I'd take "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" over "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning."

3. Sinatra was married to Ava Gardner. Crosby... okay, Sinatra wins this one.

2. After rock n' roll took over everything in the '60s, Sinatra desperately tried to keep being cool, even when he clearly was not. Crosby just accepted that he was now uncool and continued to play to the happily uncool segment of the audience. There's nothing less cool than a performer who continually tries to be cool.

1. Crosby just plain had a better voice. I know that doesn't guarantee coolness. But it doesn't hurt.

Accent-uate the Negative

The discussion of Marlon Brando's bad accents leads me to the question: what criteria do we use to determine the worst movie accents of all time?

The definitive study of bad accents in movies is Joe Queenan's article "If You Can't Say Something Nice, Say it in Broken English," which is in his book If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble. Queenan stipulates that a truly bad accent must "take a film prisoner," making it impossible to concentrate on anything else when the bad-accented actor is talking. This is fair enough. There are other points I would make about bad accents:

- Bad accents in dramas are worse than bad accents in comedies. Dick Van Dyke's Cockney accent in Mary Poppins is truly atrocious, but it's in a movie with talking penguins and tea parties on the ceiling. The silliniess of the accent just adds to the fun of the movie, in other words. Nor would anyone complain about intentionally bad accents like Chico Marx's. But in a movie that's not supposed to be funny, from an actor who is trying to give a serious performance, a bad accent is disastrous.

- A bad accent is less distracting when that character is the only one in the movie who talks that way. John Qualen's stock Scandinavian accent in various John Ford films ("Yes, by golly!") is annoying as heck, but he is supposed to be playing a heavily-accented Scandinavian in a movie otherwise populated by people who talk like John Wayne. So we accept the accent as one of those tiresome "comedy" touches we have to put up with in John Ford films, in between the good stuff. But what happens when you put Jennifer Jones in a movie full of English actors, and tell her to play an young working-class Englishwoman who dreams of being a plumber? Well, you get Ernst Lubitsch's Cluny Brown, a delightful movie with a very good performance by Ms. Jones. But you also get Ms. Jones doing an "English" accent that is practically Kevin Costnerian in its tendency to fade in and out, and this is all the more obvious because she's playing so many scenes with real English accents by the likes of C. Aubrey Smith and Peter Lawford.

- To follow up on the above rule, bad accents are even more distracting when everybody in the movie is speaking with a foreign accent. I have never understood the tendency to have people speak with German accents in a movie set in Germany (Schindler's List) or Spanish accents in a movie set in Spain, and so on. I mean, they're all speaking English, right? So why would they speak English to each other with German accents? Are we to infer that they are really speaking German to each other, but with bad American accents? Or that if they didn't use these accents, the viewing public would have no way of figuring out where the movie takes place? The worst example of this that I've heard is not from a movie, but a Broadway musical: on the cast album of Zorba, a moderately successful 1968 musical produced and directed by Harold Prince, almost every cast member speaks and sings with a fake Greek accent. Apparently Prince thought this was the way to provide local colour in a musical. Proving, as does the whole career of Hal Prince, that directors should not be allowed to produce their own shows, because a director needs a producer around to force him to drop the cockamamie Greek-accent idea.

- Finally: The very worst accents are fake English accents in movies that are not set in England. It has often been pointed out that, in Hollywood movies, the English accent is the generic accent for the distant past. Romans in Hollywood movies don't speak with American accents; nor do they speak with Italian accents; they speak with English accents. This English-accent fetish is so ingrained that when Milos Forman made the movie version of Amadeus with mostly American actors, and sensibly let them use their own accents, some critics complained that the American accents were distracting. You just know that there wouldn't have been this complaint about English accents or German accents, neither of which would really have made any more sense in this context. Because of this Accent Anglophilia, many actors tie their tongues in knots trying to do English accents in contexts where there's really no need for them. Which brings us back, as discussions of bad accents always do, to Brando. Why is he doing a bad English accent in Superman? He's supposed to be from Planet Krypton, not Planet Albion. But Krypton is supposed to be a distant planet in a galaxy far, far away, and that's pretty much the way Hollywood views England, too, so the choice is a natural one. (Also, to be fair, most of Superman, like Star Wars and the Indiana Jones movies, was shot in England, so when everybody around you sounds British it's only natural to get into the act.)

I've mostly been talking about American movies, which is sort of unfair, because movies in other countries are no slouch when it comes to bad accents. Have you ever heard a good American accent in a European movie? A European actor, told to play an American, tends to do so by making every "r" sound like an engine malfunctioning. Bad French accents are a staple of every country's movie industry, including France's. All of this is almost enough to make you long for the days of silent movies, when the only thing you had to worry about was the possibility of a misspelled title card.

Oh, and while we're not talking movies here, there's a line in Puccini's La Boheme where the singer playing Schaunard is supposed to do an English accent; it's amazing how many Italian singers can't do it, settling for a generic funny-voice instead.

Brando

My favorite Marlon Brando credit is his appearance in the play "I Remember Mama" as Nels, the brother. I really don't know why.

Brando was the perfect movie star for the '50s; with the collapse of the studio system and the rise of television, the movies were desperately looking for something new, something to distinguish themselves from television. They came up with CinemaScope, the long-overdue loosening of the Production Code, location shooting -- and Marlon Brando. His acting style was "in" both with critics and audiences. (It's been pointed out that many of Hollywood's favored genres of the '50s -- the epic, the gritty shot-on-location drama, the stage adaptation -- were more or less "midcult" genres, an attempt to make Hollywood movies the respectable, higher-class alternative to the "lowbrow" televsion programs. Co-opting the ultimate midcult acting style, the Method, was just part of that whole process.) Even his easily-parodied mannerisms of speech and movement were all to the good, as a star who can be parodied is a star who is distinctive, and Hollywood was having trouble coming up with distinctive new stars, people who really stood out. Method Acting is easily parodied today because we're in a better position to understand its limitations, and to celebrate the old-school, "just get on with it" style of screen acting. But in 1951, that style of screen acting seemed just too hopelessly old-fashioned, too closely identified with the lost studio-system era. Brando offered something fresh in a film industry that had lost confidence in the old ways. He would lose his way, as a star name, when he signed his first exclusive contract with a studio, a disastrous deal with Universal in the '60s. Brando wasn't cut out to be a studio contract player; his mystique was dependent on his independence.

I haven't seen a lot of his movies recently so I can't really comment on what I think of his individual performances. I certainly think his performances in Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront are excellent, though among Elia Kazan's movies I'd rather see a DVD of A Face in the Crowd (starring a very non-Method actor, Andy Griffith). He's really not all that embarrassing in Superman, and like many people I'd like to see a recut of Superman II with Brando's scenes restored (many important scenes were removed by the producers after they fired the original director, Richard Donner). The Freshman, which Brando famously condemned as a piece of trash while he was filming it, is a wonderful comedy that testifies to the onetime promise of Andrew Bergman, though Brando's performance is not one of the better things in it.

Joe Queenan nominated Brando's accent in the remake of Mutiny On the Bounty as "the single worst accent in cinema history," noting also that Brando and Laurence Olivier were the two all-time great masters of the truly bad accent. Queenan ultimately gave Brando the edge for "the utterly serendipitous nature of his bad accents," since while Olivier's terrible accents were usually at least somewhat related to the character he was supposed to be playing, Brando's bad accents often made no sense whatsoever, in that you couldn't always tell what country he thought he was supposed to be from or why this particular character would ever talk like that. With Brando and Olivier both gone, the art of the bad accent may never be the same.

The 95352nd TV-on-DVD post

There have been a lot of articles recently on the success of television shows on DVD. The basic story is familiar by now: No one in the industry expected TV to sell on home video until Fox hit it big with the complete first season of THE SIMPSONS. (Even with that show, Fox was initially hesitant to release the first season first, fearing that the different drawing style of the first season would put people off from buying it.) Since then, almost every major show has been released or atleast considered for release on DVD, and tvshowsondvd.com has become one of the most popular upcoming-releases sites on the internet.

But one thing that hasn’t been discussed much is this: How, exactly, is TV-on-DVD different from TV-on-TV? Before THE SIMPSONS, people used to assume that no one would pay to see a show they could already see every day in syndication; why were they wrong, and why do we pay?

The first and most obvious difference between DVD and syndication is that shows on DVD are presented uncut, a concept previously unheard of in American TV reruns; a show like M*A*S*H loses three minutes from every episode in reruns, often eliminating entire plot points. Just watch the hacked-up reruns of sitcoms on TV Land and you’ll understand why we need more shows on DVD: to save them from syndication.

Along with letting us see all the scenes, DVD allows us to see all the episodes in a season whenever we want, and by doing so, it can change the way we experience a show. When it’s being broadcast, a show is evaluated on a week-by-week (or, in syndication, daily) basis. By giving us a full season all at once, a DVD set lets us evaluate the whole season as a unit. If we want, we can also watch the episodes in a different order, or watch only parts of every episode. This isn’t to say that DVD somehow makes us into “active” viewers – we’re still sitting there watching – but it does mean we have more options as to how to watch. On TV, the only really important question about a show is whether it makes us want to tune in again next time; the point of cliffhangers, sexual tension, and so on is to get us to come back for the next broadcast. On DVD, because we choose when and how to watch the episodes, these same-bat-time same-bat-channel gimmicks become less important; the question is not whether the show is exciting enough to hold our attention over the course of a year, but whether it’s interesting enough to hold our attention on repeated viewings.

What this means, too, is that shows that succeed on network TV can bomb on DVD, and expensive failures can somehow turn into huge moneymakers in the new format. The difference has to do with numbers: On network TV, a million loyal viewers is not enough to keep something running. But if those same million viewers buy that show on DVD, it’s a best-seller. By selling the shows directly to the people who are interested in it, rather than to the viewing audience as a whole, DVD changes the definition of what a hit is. This isn't exactly new to DVD; a show like BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER was no kind of a hit in terms of overall numbers but (fortunately) survived for five good years and two lousy years based largely on its success with a young demographic. Indeed, the networks' obsession with "young" demographics may actually be increased by TV-on-DVD, because that's where youth demographic has the most power.

Conversely, even if a show is extremely popular in its network run and in syndication, that doesn’t mean it will sell on DVD. THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW proved that. When Fox (which acquired this and all other MTM-produced shows several years ago) released the complete first season, they did a terrific job: Beautifully remastered prints, a new in-depth documentary, commentaries, promos – it was a beautiful, and expensive, set. Since MARY TYLER MOORE had been hugely popular for over 30 years, there seemed no reason to think that it wouldn’t be similarly popular with DVD buyers; the head of Fox’s DVD marketing division, Peter Staddon, even said “To be honest, I know it will sell well. There is no downside.”

As it turned out, there was a big downside: The DVD set did what THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW had never done before – it failed. A few months after its release, Staddon cancelled plans for the second season, revealing that the show didn’t sell enough to justify the cost of releasing more sets. What happened? Part of the problem was that a portion of MARY TYLER MOORE’s fan base doesn’t have a DVD player yet; older viewers are less likely than young ones to capitulate to the latest technological fad. I suspect that if Fox ever gets around to releasing season 2, it will sell better simply because more MTM fans will have DVD players than two years ago. Then, too, the first season wasn’t quite on a level with the later seasons of the show, a problem that some shows are now trying to get around by releasing their later episodes first (SCTV is starting with its more famous, and more in-demand, NBC episodes rather than its early half-hour shows.) And perhaps most importantly, the set was overpriced: M*A*S*H, with no extras, has been released at a much lower price and has sold so well that all the seasons are going to make it to DVD.

But another problem is with the nature of THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW’s appeal: It was a low-key comedy that deliberately strove to be quieter and more character-based than the average loud, brash American sitcom. It eschewed the loudness of ALL IN THE FAMILY and even the slapstick of THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW (which just became one of the first "classic" series to have all of its seasons released in the DVD format). In syndication, this makes it the ultimate in “comfort TV,” the sort of show you tune into knowing that you’ll get to see likable characters in well-written scripts every time. But when taken all at once rather than one a day, MARY TYLER MOORE’s first-season episodes seemed to suffer from a kind of sameness: One episode after another dealt with similar themes, included similar jokes from the supporting characters, and featured similar guys falling in love with Mary. In a serial format, this use of repetition is just part of the way the show works. The new DVD format, by taking MARY TYLER MOORE out of the week-by-week format the creators were working with, failed to do justice to the show. The shows that are big hits on DVD – like BUFFY, THE SIMPSONS, and M*A*S*H – are often the ones that do many different kinds of episodes, from farce to comedy-drama to adventure. When buying a whole season of a show as a package, what you want within that season is not familiarity but variety.

And so, ultimately, the biggest difference with the TV-on-DVD experience is not so much how it sells but how we experience it. On TV, a show is something you watch to pass the time, not something you pay for like a movie or a play (not even HBO shows, except for those who subscribe to the channel specifically to see a particular TV show). On DVD, a TV show is an investment; it’s something you pay to watch over and over again, like a favorite movie. Having to pay to watch a show (or at least watch it uncut) changes the standards a bit; it has to be more than just a time-killer or whatever TV usually is. It’s not that mediocre shows can’t sell well on DVD; the FAMILY GUY cult is going to look pretty embarrassing once the ‘80s references become incomprehensible and the show has to be evaluated on the basis of the stuff it did badly (writing, animation, characters). But it’s fair to say that no show can sell well on DVD unless it has a lot of viewers who think that show is *really* good, just as worthy of being paid for as a good movie or a good book. Television is a medium that has rarely been taken seriously, but in some ways the very act of buying a show on DVD is a way of taking it seriously. Yes, even season 1 of SAVED BY THE BELL.

FREAKAZOID!

I seem to have misplaced my Pinky and the Brain post, so instead I present another in my almost-nonexistent series on Warner Bros. TV cartoons of the '90s: Freakazoid!, which premiered on the WB network in 1995 and ran two short seasons, 24 episodes in all. It is still seen sometimes on the Cartoon Network in the U.S.

While I loved Freakazoid!, I don't have much room to actually talk about why I liked it, because there's so much background to give on the strange way the show came into being. Originally, Steven Spielberg and Warner Brothers decided that their next collaboration should be on an action-adventure show, something like Warners' Batman: the Animated Series. The idea for Freakazoid was pitched to WB and Spielberg by two key Batman: writer Paul Dini and director-designer Bruce Timm. Their idea was for an original superhero show with a more contemporary look and lighthearted tone than the dour Batman. The premise was that a mild-mannered teenager is sucked into the Internet -- whose existence the TV industry was only just then starting to acknowledge -- and transformed into a crazy, wisecracking superhero.

Spielberg liked the idea, as did Warner Brothers, and the show went into development; many of the Batman artists were assigned to work on designing and directing Freakazoid! But as development continued, Spielberg, who had enjoyed the nuttiness of Animaniacs, started pushing the new show in that direction, as Timm recalled:

It started out as an adventure show, but it ended up turning into more and more of a comedy show; every time we'd have a meeting with Steven, the concept would kinda change, and it kept leaning more &and more towards zany comedy. It really started out almost like Spider-Man, on that level of, like, a teenage superhero. And it reached a point where it became a comedy -- with the Tiny Toons/Animaniacs kind of humor. I don't have anything against that; I just don't have a flair for it, so I bailed — I just hung out here while my staff had to do the show.

Jean Macurdy asked Tom Ruegger, producer of Animaniacs and Tiny Toons (and who also, according to Dini, played an important role in the development of Batman) to try and come up with a new concept for the project that would fit in with Spielberg's desire for a comedy. In Ruegger's words:

I do recall it was pouring in LA in January, about eight months before the premier of Freakazoid, when I finally landed on an approach that felt like fun...a sort of 'Hellzapoppin'' of comedy superhero sketches and segments, some short, some long, some full stories, some blackouts, but all including this nutty teen superhero character, Freakazoid. I wrote a bunch of them up -- including the Senor Wences hand puppet girl friend bit ["Handman"], the retired super heroes deli sketch ["The Legends Who Lunch"], most of the 'Boron' material, all the alien attacks and Clinton material in Washington, almost all the blackouts that were used during the first season -- gave them as sort of absurdist order, then printed this batch of stuff up as one 85 page script, easily enough stuff for at least two episodes. Jean liked it very much, sent it along to Steven, and he was happy, but he did think it was a bit too wacky and far out. Maybe we needed to tone it down a bit.

By this time, Timm had quit the project, though some of his character designs remained on the show, including that of the title character. Paul Dini contributed a few scripts, including one with a chubby, obsessive "Fanboy" who was determined to become Freakazoid's sidekick ("To join the battle against crime, to uphold the truth, and most important, to handle the overflow babes!"). Most of the best material was written by two Animaniacs writers, Paul Rugg and John McCann, both originally recruited from L.A.'s ACME Theatre troupe; Rugg also became the voice of Freakazoid. Rugg and McCann eventually wound up running the show and writing or re-writing most of the scripts.

Because the show was changed so late in the development process, almost anything was thrown in to get the first 13 episodes ready in time. One of the best segments, "Toby Danger" (an elaborate, dead-on parody of Jonny Quest), had originally been written and storyboarded for Animaniacs. Nearly all the stuff from Ruegger's initial 85-page script was rushed into production, even when it didn't quite mesh with the style of the material that was written later, so straightforward superhero-parody cartoons alternated with segments influenced by Monty Python and Hellzapoppin'; some of the segments -- particularly those written by Rugg or McCann -- were extremely fresh and funny, while others were really just recycled Animaniacs bits (like a lame running gag with a "network censor" getting anvils dropped on her head). The visual style was never entirely consistent either, a result of the fact that the artists had been hired to work on an action-adventure show and then ordered to do a wacky comedy instead. Some of the artists hated the experience; Ronaldo Del Carmen, a Batman artist who directed a few Freakazoid! episodes, called it the worst experience of his professional life, and others had similar things to say (ironically, some of these directors would win an Emmy for Freakazoid!, which took home an "Outstanding Special Achievement in Animation" statuette after it was cancelled).

Freakazoid! did all right initially, well enough to get picked up for a second season, but it was not particularly well-liked at the network, as Ruegger recalled:

On Saturday morning it was the hightest rated cartoon show -- for guys over the age of 14. Very big with guys 18-34. Huge in prisons. But the little kids didn't tune in too much. ('Animaniacs' and 'Pinky and the Brain' had a similar problem -- older kids liked us. But the WB was selling commercials to advertisers promising that they'd deliver an audience of kids ages 2-11. I suggested they might promise to deliver the older kids, but the WB wasn't interested.) So the marketing/ratings people at the WB were very down on 'Freakazoid.' And Jamie Kellner, network prez, hated it, because of the demographics, I guess. He thought we were writing it too smart. We wound up making [24] episodes over the course of [two] seasons before they pulled the plug on us.

Kellner became one of the most-hated network execs on the internet for his cancellations of various cartoon shows, but in all fairness, he was in a tough spot: as I mentioned in another post, the WB had sold its kids' lineup to advertisers as being perfect for young children, and instead it was skewing to older children and teenagers, who had no interest in the products those advertisers were selling. The WB briefly considered moving Freakazoid! to prime time -- that's why most of the second-season episodes were full-length half-hour episodes, rather than collections of shorter segments -- but the idea was abandoned when Pinky and the Brain was removed from prime-time, and I doubt if it would have worked anyway (WB's cartoon shows weren't really for little kids, but they didn't appeal much to non-geeky adults either).

Ted Turner liked the show and brought the 24 extant episodes for Cartoon Network; there was talk of creating new episodes directly for Cartoon Network, but the high budget of the show made that impossible. Hopefully a DVD will come out someday -- as of yet, none of the Warner TV cartoons are available on DVD.

I leave you with some quotes from this show:

ANNOUNCER: But as Freakazoid bounds off to battle, certain questions remain unanswered. For instance: What part will this strange fellow play in our story? And what of the object he clutches so carefully? An ordinary watch, you say? Hardly. For it has a secret power. A bizarre power. The power to turn beavers into gold! Where did he come from? What did he want? And why was there a mint scene? Did it reveal character? How was the story advanced? We may never know.

(From the "Godfather" takeoff, "The Freakazoid"):
MR. FIZZIZZI: I believe in superheroes. I believe they are kind, righteous people who keep their word. I admire and I respect them. All except the Hulk fella, him I no like. He's got a bad smell. Anyway, a few weeks ago, my daughter, she started dating a boy... not a Shriner. When he come to da house for the first time, I take him to da garage, to show him my little putt-a-putt. That's what I call my little Shriner car, my little putt-a-putt. When we get to da garage, this boy, his name is "Snortz" or something, he takes one look at my little car, and he starts laughing and saying: "What a stupid little car! Hey mister, why you have such a stupid little dumb little stupid-car? This boy! He make fun of my little putt-a-putt in front of-a my daughter! I felt the fool!

FREAKAZOID: Cosgrove, how come you never got married?
COSGROVE: 'Cause I like meat too much.
FREAKAZOID: You could be married and still eat a lot of meat.
COSGROVE: I didn't know that.