In honour of the release of Across the Universe -- or as it will soon be known, Sgt. Pepper The Movie Without The Bee Gees -- The Associated Press asked various Film Festival attendees what their favorite Beatles song is.
Jimmy Carter gives by far the dumbest answer -- "Imagine" is not a Beatles song, it's not profound, and its popularity in Cuba doesn't mean what he seems to think it means -- which is good, because sometimes I think I'm getting too politically one-sided and it helps to be reminded that I find Jimmy Carter annoying.
Runner-up for dumbest answer, only because he at least named an actual Beatles album beforehand, is Michael Douglas, who also names "Imagine" and pretends that he wants a world without possessions. He doesn't.
Jude Law's comment is more apropos: "No, it wouldn't be 'Hey Jude.' I've got so many memories of that song being played. Thank God, it's a good song. It would be terrible to be named after an awful song."
The good thing about the Beatles is that in spite of the air of '60s Boomer nostalgia that surrounds a lot of discussion of their work -- hence movies like Across the Universe and various Boomers who think "Imagine" is profound -- the actual songs really do transcend the period in a way that a lot of iconic '60s music and entertainment doesn't. I attribute this to the songwriting of Lennon/McCartney and Harrison, who always seemed to go for fairly timeless themes and influences, whether it's the traditional AABA pop-song structures they used, or McCartney's various pastiches of every style of popular song, or Lennon's Lewis Carroll nonsense lyrics. (The Lewis Carroll influence means that whereas most '60s "psychedelic" songs sound horribly dated, something like "I Am the Walrus" feels sort of timeless because it actually has its roots in 19th century nonsense verse.) That may be why movies and revues don't usually succeed when they try to put these songs in the context of the '60s mythology -- these songs aren't really '60s songs any more.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Silver's Good Enough For Me, Mr. T
Reading about the upcoming Sweeney Todd movie, I remembered that I always derived a lot of silly, juvenile amusement from the fact that Mrs. Lovett calls the title character "Mr. T" a couple of times. Of course this was 1979, long before Rocky III made "Mr. T" mean something else, so the creators of the show can't be blamed for that. But what's their excuse for calling characters "Buddy and Sally" in Follies? or Stephen Sondheim's excuse for using the expression "Sorry, Charlie" (in Merrily We Roll Along) without apparently realizing that it's a Star-Kist reference? Or for that matter the creators of Kiss Me Kate for calling a character "Lois Lane?" Sometimes it seems like people who write musicals should be a little more aware of what's going on in popular culture, just so they can avoid stuff like that.
However, if Mr. T were cast in Sweeney Todd, it would be way better than with Johnny Depp. Think of how much better his big number, "My Friends," would become:
MR. T
This is my van,
No car can catch it.
Why should I fly
When it beats any plane,
My van,
My big black van.
Don't touch my van,
Maybe you'd scratch it,
And if you did,
I'd be bringing you pain
Very soon,
Respect my van.
It gave the slip
To Colonel Decker,
Plus those other Colonels
And also General Fullbright.
My van is cool,
Wish it was private.
Those other guys
Need a van of their own.
This van
Is not their van.
Murdock, that fool,
Once asked to drive it.
Asking me that,
He deserved to be thrown
To the moon.
Lay off my van.
We can outrace
The Dukes of Hazzard,
Then we'll beat the Bandit,
And maybe Buford Justice.
MRS. LOVETT (countermelody)
It is indeed, Mr. T,
If your teammates need, Mr. T,
Speed, Mr. T,
A van of their own
Ain't as good.
Hannibal would wilt in a Pontiac.
Murdock's wacked out, Mr. T,
You were right to shout, Mr. T,
That he deserved to be thrown
To the moon.
Wish you would.
And them Dukes
Haven't a chance with you
And your custom GMC,
Mr. T.
(Mr. T finishes his repairs.)
MR. T: At last I can drive to the youth center again!
However, if Mr. T were cast in Sweeney Todd, it would be way better than with Johnny Depp. Think of how much better his big number, "My Friends," would become:
MR. T
This is my van,
No car can catch it.
Why should I fly
When it beats any plane,
My van,
My big black van.
Don't touch my van,
Maybe you'd scratch it,
And if you did,
I'd be bringing you pain
Very soon,
Respect my van.
It gave the slip
To Colonel Decker,
Plus those other Colonels
And also General Fullbright.
My van is cool,
Wish it was private.
Those other guys
Need a van of their own.
This van
Is not their van.
Murdock, that fool,
Once asked to drive it.
Asking me that,
He deserved to be thrown
To the moon.
Lay off my van.
We can outrace
The Dukes of Hazzard,
Then we'll beat the Bandit,
And maybe Buford Justice.
MRS. LOVETT (countermelody)
It is indeed, Mr. T,
If your teammates need, Mr. T,
Speed, Mr. T,
A van of their own
Ain't as good.
Hannibal would wilt in a Pontiac.
Murdock's wacked out, Mr. T,
You were right to shout, Mr. T,
That he deserved to be thrown
To the moon.
Wish you would.
And them Dukes
Haven't a chance with you
And your custom GMC,
Mr. T.
(Mr. T finishes his repairs.)
MR. T: At last I can drive to the youth center again!
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Compare and Contrast
In the comments to my Miller-Boyett post, asks about how Full House was re-tooled before it aired. I don't know much about it, but Wikipedia says that the original idea was for the three guys to be comedians. And there was an unaired pilot with a different actor whom Bob Saget was brought in to replace. And I recall reading that there was an even earlier version of the pilot script by different writers (MTM refugees and Who's the Boss? creators Blake Hunter and Martin Cohan) that didn't get used.
Anyway, one thing I forgot to mention about Miller-Boyett shows was that they all had insanely long opening sequences with uplifting theme songs. Once the Laverne and Shirley theme became a hit, no matter how farcical the show was, the song always had to be some huge inspirational thing about standing tall on the wings of the family everywhere you look, because out of the blue the sweet insanity will come to you. But when they re-tooled the show, they'd always go back and shoot new footage for the title sequence and re-tool that as well. Observe:
Angie, season 1:
In season 2, the setting is different and a character has been dropped, so most of the characters are brought back to the location in Philadelphia to shoot outdoor footage -- I guess the theory being that if they change the setting again, they won't have to re-shoot footage of people eating hot dogs outdoors. Also, the first season executive producer is already gone. And the song has been remixed.
Perfect Strangers season 1, when they were working at a crummy job, focuses mostly on how two guys both came to Chicago pursuing a dream and nothing's gonna stand in their way, even if they have to work a crummy job, yada yada.
And then the opening credits everybody remembers, which are almost entirely about how awesome these guys lives are and how successful they are (they get to go to ball games, run around in revolving doors, and just generally live in Chicago the way Ferris Bueller lived for only one day).
Anyway, one thing I forgot to mention about Miller-Boyett shows was that they all had insanely long opening sequences with uplifting theme songs. Once the Laverne and Shirley theme became a hit, no matter how farcical the show was, the song always had to be some huge inspirational thing about standing tall on the wings of the family everywhere you look, because out of the blue the sweet insanity will come to you. But when they re-tooled the show, they'd always go back and shoot new footage for the title sequence and re-tool that as well. Observe:
Angie, season 1:
In season 2, the setting is different and a character has been dropped, so most of the characters are brought back to the location in Philadelphia to shoot outdoor footage -- I guess the theory being that if they change the setting again, they won't have to re-shoot footage of people eating hot dogs outdoors. Also, the first season executive producer is already gone. And the song has been remixed.
Perfect Strangers season 1, when they were working at a crummy job, focuses mostly on how two guys both came to Chicago pursuing a dream and nothing's gonna stand in their way, even if they have to work a crummy job, yada yada.
And then the opening credits everybody remembers, which are almost entirely about how awesome these guys lives are and how successful they are (they get to go to ball games, run around in revolving doors, and just generally live in Chicago the way Ferris Bueller lived for only one day).
Licensees
DVD releases of older TV shows and movies are slowly winding down; with DVDs not selling as much as they used to, there are a lot of shows and movies that aren't going to get out of the vaults. One hopes that some studios will take the obvious step of licensing out the titles they don't want to release. That's what Universal seems to be doing. Criterion will be releasing Ernst Lubitsch's early '30s musicals with Maurice Chevalier -- made for Paramount but owned by Universal -- in its low-budget Eclipse line. And Universal has slowly started letting Hart Sharp Video have some old TV titles for its "TV Guide Presents" line, first Banacek and now, glory of glories, the syndicated seasons of Charles in Charge. I hope this becomes a trend; we're not going to see big-studio releases of obscure old movies and cheesy '80s TV shows, so why not let small companies have them?
Monday, September 10, 2007
Jane Wyman
The Yahoo headline for her obituary calls her "Ronald Reagan's first wife," which makes me wince a little, because she deserves to be remembered for much more than that. She was a fine actress in every genre, an Oscar winner for Johnny Belinda, a fine singer who didn't do nearly enough musicals. Her movies with director Douglas Sirk, star Rock Hudson and producer Ross Hunter, Magnficent Obsession and All That Heaven Allows, almost single-handedly re-invented the "woman's picture" and re-defined an entire studio (Universal would spend the next decade and a half making movies like this). And she introduced herself to a new generation on a prime-time '80s soap, Falcon Crest.
Here she is with Bing Crosby introducing the Oscar-winning "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening":
And here's her solo number from her second movie with Crosby, Just For You:
Here she is with Bing Crosby introducing the Oscar-winning "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening":
And here's her solo number from her second movie with Crosby, Just For You:
Sunday, September 09, 2007
The Retoolers
I happened upon this 199 Time Magazine article about the Urkel phenomenon, and what caught my eye was this passage about the producers of the show, Miller-Boyett productions (originally Miller-Milkis-Boyett), the producers of some of the cheesiest and most popular "family" sitcoms ever. Explaining their method, the author writes:
That reminds me that these guys -- whose shows were usually evil but phenomenally successful -- could write a book on how to re-tool a sitcom: almost every show they were ever involved with was substantially re-tooled in the middle of its run, sometimes several times. Like their mentor Garry Marshall, they didn't do the whole artistic-integrity thing and would basically do anything to keep a show on the air, whether it was bowing to network demands, playing up any character who became popular, or changing the setting. Let's look at some of the shows produced by Miller-Boyett or some variant thereof (Miller-Milkis, Miller-Milkis-Boyett -- basically, Miller, a former assistant to Billy Wilder, was the constant factor in all this):
- Happy Days: one of the most famous and successful (commercially anyway) re-toolings ever. Then it was re-tooled several times to adjust for the departure of Ron Howard and the departure/return of Joanie and Chachi.
- Laverne and Shirley: they moved the whole show from Milwaukee (Miller was from Milwaukee and it was presumably his idea to set these shows there) to Hollywood, then did it for a year without Shirley (or Lenny).
- Mork and Mindy: Completely overhauled in its second season.
- Angie: this was one of the few older-demographic comedies this team did (Bosom Buddies, which underwent a mild second-season re-tool, was another). Since all their shows were attempts to cash in on the success of something else, I suspect that this was done in response to the launch of ABC/Paramount's Taxi, which briefly made it OK for the network to do smart adult comedies. Then Taxi's ratings tanked and they abandoned that pretty quickly. Anyway, despite a successful first season, Angie had a new setting and had dropped some characters by the time the second season started.
- Perfect Strangers: early on, Larry and Balki were working for a mean shop owner played by Ernie Sabella. In the third season, they were working a big glamorous Chicago paper. Apparently the producers had decided that people didn't want to see the characters working a depressing dead-end job like Laverne and Shirley; this was the '80s and audiences wanted successful people.
- The Hogan Family: one of the most notorious and publicized re-toolings of the '80s, started as a show with Valerie Harper and wound up as a show about Sandy Duncan.
- Going Places: a show I never saw, but which according to the linked article had the characters change jobs/settings in the middle of its short run.
- Family Matters: the focus of the Time article that started this post; it starts off as a Perfect Strangers spinoff and suddenly it's a show about Urkel, whom the producers embraced just as they once embraced the Fonz.
Just about the only show on that list that didn't get heavily re-tooled was Full House, and even that got changed a lot before it first aired (change of premise, and an unused pilot with a different actor).
I don't have much to say to sum up, except that Tom Miller and co. are a test case for what producers can accomplish if they don't really care what their shows were originally supposed to be about. If they throw the whole integrity and plausibility notion aside and just rejigger every show to emphasize whatever the public likes at a given point, they can actually be pretty darn successful. Frightening, but successful.
But they have gained a reputation in TV circles as expert fix-it men, skilled at tinkering with shows and playing up the elements that work. Their legendary success was boosting the role of Fonzie, the greaser with a heart of gold, in Happy Days. "Basically, the concept of a show is merely a vehicle to get it launched," says Boyett. "What keeps it going is the ability to present characters people want to follow."
That reminds me that these guys -- whose shows were usually evil but phenomenally successful -- could write a book on how to re-tool a sitcom: almost every show they were ever involved with was substantially re-tooled in the middle of its run, sometimes several times. Like their mentor Garry Marshall, they didn't do the whole artistic-integrity thing and would basically do anything to keep a show on the air, whether it was bowing to network demands, playing up any character who became popular, or changing the setting. Let's look at some of the shows produced by Miller-Boyett or some variant thereof (Miller-Milkis, Miller-Milkis-Boyett -- basically, Miller, a former assistant to Billy Wilder, was the constant factor in all this):
- Happy Days: one of the most famous and successful (commercially anyway) re-toolings ever. Then it was re-tooled several times to adjust for the departure of Ron Howard and the departure/return of Joanie and Chachi.
- Laverne and Shirley: they moved the whole show from Milwaukee (Miller was from Milwaukee and it was presumably his idea to set these shows there) to Hollywood, then did it for a year without Shirley (or Lenny).
- Mork and Mindy: Completely overhauled in its second season.
- Angie: this was one of the few older-demographic comedies this team did (Bosom Buddies, which underwent a mild second-season re-tool, was another). Since all their shows were attempts to cash in on the success of something else, I suspect that this was done in response to the launch of ABC/Paramount's Taxi, which briefly made it OK for the network to do smart adult comedies. Then Taxi's ratings tanked and they abandoned that pretty quickly. Anyway, despite a successful first season, Angie had a new setting and had dropped some characters by the time the second season started.
- Perfect Strangers: early on, Larry and Balki were working for a mean shop owner played by Ernie Sabella. In the third season, they were working a big glamorous Chicago paper. Apparently the producers had decided that people didn't want to see the characters working a depressing dead-end job like Laverne and Shirley; this was the '80s and audiences wanted successful people.
- The Hogan Family: one of the most notorious and publicized re-toolings of the '80s, started as a show with Valerie Harper and wound up as a show about Sandy Duncan.
- Going Places: a show I never saw, but which according to the linked article had the characters change jobs/settings in the middle of its short run.
- Family Matters: the focus of the Time article that started this post; it starts off as a Perfect Strangers spinoff and suddenly it's a show about Urkel, whom the producers embraced just as they once embraced the Fonz.
Just about the only show on that list that didn't get heavily re-tooled was Full House, and even that got changed a lot before it first aired (change of premise, and an unused pilot with a different actor).
I don't have much to say to sum up, except that Tom Miller and co. are a test case for what producers can accomplish if they don't really care what their shows were originally supposed to be about. If they throw the whole integrity and plausibility notion aside and just rejigger every show to emphasize whatever the public likes at a given point, they can actually be pretty darn successful. Frightening, but successful.
Friday, September 07, 2007
Choose Your "A-Ford" Pun
Dave Kehr, who first broke the news about Fox's upcoming Ford At Fox box, now has all the information about the set, contents and special features. It doesn't have all of Ford's Fox movies -- some of the surviving silents are missing -- but it does have 24 movies, some of Ford's wartime documentary work, and a new feature-length documentary. The official studio release is here.
Everybody will have an oddball favorite among the movies that haven't been previously released on DVD. Mine is Tobacco Road. Yes, it's a sanitized version of the book and play, but it's like a satire of The Grapes of Wrath by the same people who made that film (Ford, producer Darryl Zanuck and writer Nunnally Johnson) -- the dark side of the people that they were sentimentalizing the year before.
Now, given the price of the set, how many reviews will include some variant of: "Get it if you can a-Ford it?"
Everybody will have an oddball favorite among the movies that haven't been previously released on DVD. Mine is Tobacco Road. Yes, it's a sanitized version of the book and play, but it's like a satire of The Grapes of Wrath by the same people who made that film (Ford, producer Darryl Zanuck and writer Nunnally Johnson) -- the dark side of the people that they were sentimentalizing the year before.
Now, given the price of the set, how many reviews will include some variant of: "Get it if you can a-Ford it?"
Little Rich
After all the Richie Rich bashing, I should give equal time to Jerry Beck, who has compiled some stories from the early, "cool" Richie Rich.
I don't know, though. Those early stories were certainly better drawn than the ones I grew up with, but they still have the problem of pretending that Richie, a privileged little snot, is some kind of hero. I mean look at that sample Jerry posts. Richie's beating up some poor underprivileged schmuck. I know that guy is probably a "crook" (in Richie-speak), but maybe he wouldn't have to steal if Richie would give him some money and a decent meal instead of breaking his bones.
Update: Commenter Andrew asks: "Out of curiosity, Jaime, do you feel the same way whenever Uncle Scrooge thwarts the Beagle Boys et al?" First of all, I didn't mean the above with absolute seriousness, or indeed any seriousness at all. In other words, no, I don't think that the "crooks" in the Richieverse are in fact tragic victims of society.
But I should probably clarify that I don't actually have a Marxist attitude toward fictional millionaires. I do not begrudge Scrooge McDuck, nor Bruce Wayne their tremendous wealth. I'm not even all that bothered when Daddy Warbucks does The Full Benito and has his goons take criminals out back to be executed. But Bruce Wayne has other qualities to offer besides wealth, Daddy Warbucks isn't the star of the strip, and Scrooge is a funny miser. Richie's like Scrooge if we were supposed to admire him for no other reason than being an insane miser who likes to keep piles of cash in his house. So, no, he's not an evil capitalist exploiter of the martyred proletariat. But he is annoying.
If you want to know what makes Richie so annoying, I can't sum it up better than this one-page gag recalled at Man vs. Clown:
Leslie Cabarga and I spent the summer mining the Harvey Comics vaults and cherry-picked the best of the original Richie Rich comics of the 50s and 60s for a new trade paperback volume due out next month. This is the second of several high quality Harvey Comics reprint books we are compiling for Dark Horse.
I don't know, though. Those early stories were certainly better drawn than the ones I grew up with, but they still have the problem of pretending that Richie, a privileged little snot, is some kind of hero. I mean look at that sample Jerry posts. Richie's beating up some poor underprivileged schmuck. I know that guy is probably a "crook" (in Richie-speak), but maybe he wouldn't have to steal if Richie would give him some money and a decent meal instead of breaking his bones.
Update: Commenter Andrew asks: "Out of curiosity, Jaime, do you feel the same way whenever Uncle Scrooge thwarts the Beagle Boys et al?" First of all, I didn't mean the above with absolute seriousness, or indeed any seriousness at all. In other words, no, I don't think that the "crooks" in the Richieverse are in fact tragic victims of society.
But I should probably clarify that I don't actually have a Marxist attitude toward fictional millionaires. I do not begrudge Scrooge McDuck, nor Bruce Wayne their tremendous wealth. I'm not even all that bothered when Daddy Warbucks does The Full Benito and has his goons take criminals out back to be executed. But Bruce Wayne has other qualities to offer besides wealth, Daddy Warbucks isn't the star of the strip, and Scrooge is a funny miser. Richie's like Scrooge if we were supposed to admire him for no other reason than being an insane miser who likes to keep piles of cash in his house. So, no, he's not an evil capitalist exploiter of the martyred proletariat. But he is annoying.
If you want to know what makes Richie so annoying, I can't sum it up better than this one-page gag recalled at Man vs. Clown:
PANEL 1So, yeah. The joke is that Richie Rich kicked a homeless man off his property.
[Richie is walking on his estate with his asshole cousin, Reggie Van Dough. Richie's chauffeur Bascomb is working on one of the Rich family's luxury automobiles.]
Richie: Bascomb is the greatest mechanic in the world! He can make anything run!
PANEL 2
Reggie [pointing at pile of rags]: Oh yeah?! Let's see him make that pile of rags run! Haw, haw!
PANEL 3
Richie [whispering; pointing to pile of rags]: Uh, Bascomb...
Bascomb [wiping hands on rag (not from pile); steely look of determination]: I'll take care of it, Master Rich.
PANEL 4
Bascomb [sternly; hands on hips]: Excuse me, sir, but I think it's time you moved along!
Vagrant [fleeing; very tattered and filthy]: Chee! Can't a guy find a place to sleep around here?!
Reggie [flabbergasted; sweat drops flying]: A TRAMP!!!
Richie [doubled over with merriment]: Yep! And Bascomb made him run! Ha! Ha!
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Pavarotti
Update Ken Furie, music editor for the now-defunct High Fidelity, has a post up about Conrad L. Osborne's great article "Diary of a Cavpag Madman," the definitive piece about how Pavarotti the brilliant young singer became Pavarotti the media star. He also talks about how the piece came to be published intact:
Oddly enough, he was most prominently associated with an aria that wasn't really right for his type of voice: "Nessun Dorma" really needs a bigger, more heroic voice. But Pavarotti made that aria work for him anyway, because he used his voice very intelligently and could always figure out how to make an aria display his voice to best advantage, even if he really shouldn't have been singing it.
One piece that was perfect for his voice was the "Ingemisco" from the Verdi Requiem. One of the things that helped make him a star was his appearance in Herbert Von Karajan's La Scala film of the Requiem, with Leontyne Price, Fiorenza Cossotto, Nicolai Ghiaurov, and Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear) directing the cameras. Pavarotti was a last-minute replacement for Carlo Bergonzi, and this film -- along with the commercial recording of the Requiem he made in Vienna that year with Georg Solti -- was a huge boost for his reputation.
About all the credit I can claim for the "CavPag Madman" piece is giving C.L.O. the records to review--unless you count getting the thing into print, and getting it into print intact. (In fact, this was no small feat, but that's another story. Okay, if you must know, I had to threaten to quit. I knew it was a weak bargaining chip--the next time I used it, or at the latest the time after that, it was taken not as a threat but as an offer, and accepted--but this time, at least, it worked, more or less.)
I do recall talking to Conrad while he was working on the, er, "review," and being told that it was taking a strange form, which he projected would represent "either a breakthrough in criticism or the final flipping out of C.L.O." (I suggested there was no reason why it couldn't be both.)
Oddly enough, he was most prominently associated with an aria that wasn't really right for his type of voice: "Nessun Dorma" really needs a bigger, more heroic voice. But Pavarotti made that aria work for him anyway, because he used his voice very intelligently and could always figure out how to make an aria display his voice to best advantage, even if he really shouldn't have been singing it.
One piece that was perfect for his voice was the "Ingemisco" from the Verdi Requiem. One of the things that helped make him a star was his appearance in Herbert Von Karajan's La Scala film of the Requiem, with Leontyne Price, Fiorenza Cossotto, Nicolai Ghiaurov, and Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear) directing the cameras. Pavarotti was a last-minute replacement for Carlo Bergonzi, and this film -- along with the commercial recording of the Requiem he made in Vienna that year with Georg Solti -- was a huge boost for his reputation.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
"I gaze upon the glory of THE PRICE IS RIGHT and I see the face of America, and it is divine. Plus, you know, hot chicks on sports cars." -- Barney
I'm glad there's going to be a DVD set for The Price Is Right, but how do you pick "the 20 best episodes?" What makes a good episode of TPIR? Is it one where somebody manages to win an unusual number of fabulous prizes, like winning both showcases? Or is it a show where something silly happens, like that one where the yodeling "Cliffhanger" guy gets stuck?
Monday, September 03, 2007
Unkind Cuts
One thing I like about the DVD reviews at Sitcoms Online is that they provide timings for the episodes. (TV Shows on DVD does this too, but they don't review as many shows.) This is useful because it helps identify which episodes have had musical sequences cut, or had syndication versions included by mistake.
CBS/Paramount is the most notorious studio these days when it comes to edited releases. The Sitcoms Online reviews of some recent releases indicate that The Odd Couple Season 2 probably hasn't had any major edits (all the episodes run over 25 minutes), Sabrina the Teenage Witch Season 2 has probably had a few episodes hacked up (there are a few episodes that run 30-60 seconds shorter than the rest, which usually means that they cut a scene with someone singing a song), and Bosom Buddies Season 2, apart from the expected absence of "My Life", has a couple of musical sequences missing -- people on the message board have identified one of the missing sequences as the cast singing "Yakkity Yak." (Paramount also cut Yakkity Yak" from a couple of Happy Days episodes.)
The upshot is, if you see any favorite old show in syndication, record any episode with any musical content. You can't be sure that your favorite scene will make it onto DVD.
Also, Paul Mavis at DVD Talk shares my affection for Bosom Buddies season 2, pointing out that it was one of the first mainstream sitcoms "to incorporate the whole ironic, self-reflexive, pop-culture referencing humor then found only on Saturday Night Live or at comedy groups like Second City or The Groundlings, or in movies like Animal House and Caddyshack."
CBS/Paramount is the most notorious studio these days when it comes to edited releases. The Sitcoms Online reviews of some recent releases indicate that The Odd Couple Season 2 probably hasn't had any major edits (all the episodes run over 25 minutes), Sabrina the Teenage Witch Season 2 has probably had a few episodes hacked up (there are a few episodes that run 30-60 seconds shorter than the rest, which usually means that they cut a scene with someone singing a song), and Bosom Buddies Season 2, apart from the expected absence of "My Life", has a couple of musical sequences missing -- people on the message board have identified one of the missing sequences as the cast singing "Yakkity Yak." (Paramount also cut Yakkity Yak" from a couple of Happy Days episodes.)
The upshot is, if you see any favorite old show in syndication, record any episode with any musical content. You can't be sure that your favorite scene will make it onto DVD.
Also, Paul Mavis at DVD Talk shares my affection for Bosom Buddies season 2, pointing out that it was one of the first mainstream sitcoms "to incorporate the whole ironic, self-reflexive, pop-culture referencing humor then found only on Saturday Night Live or at comedy groups like Second City or The Groundlings, or in movies like Animal House and Caddyshack."
Very Uplifting
Nothing much to post today, and I hope you're out doing something instead of sitting in front of the computer. So here's the all-time greatest "signing off the air" promo, from Joe Dante's masterpiece Gremlins II.
Friday, August 31, 2007
More From the '70s
I've mentioned earlier that by the '70s, the Broadway musical was basically a director's medium: from that point on, musicals would be largely about the way they were staged and the conceptual gimmicks that the director came up with. Another part of this was that songs were increasingly written around the staging, whereas in the past, the director would build the staging around the song that was written for a particular spot.
So in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, R&H (the producers as well as the writers) would come up with a song, and leave it to the director to figure out how to execute it. Joshua Logan, the director and co-writer of South Pacific, had to come up with physical gimmicks to maintain interest during a song -- like having Liat act out the lyrics of "Happy Talk" while her mother sings the song -- but what he didn't do was come up with a stage picture and ask the songwriters for something to fill it.
By the late '60s and '70s, you have more and more songs whose music and lyrics are shaped by the staging, rather than vice-versa. A lot of the songs in Bob Fosse musicals are like that, with the melody shaped to fit the typical Fosse moves instead of Fosse coming up with dance moves based on the music. And Stephen Sondheim became Hal Prince's favorite songwriter, in part, because he was willing to write long numbers around Prince's stage pictures. (It's said that Sondheim didn't come up with the Act 1 finale of A Little Night Music, "A Weekend In the Country," until Prince had already blocked the whole scene.)
Here's a good example of what I mean, Sondheim's personal favorite of his songs, "Someone In a Tree" from Pacific Overtures. This is a song entirely based on a stage picture: instead of seeing the signing of the treaty of Kanagawa, we get it from the perspective of onlookers: someone who saw the whole thing from a distance when he was a ten year-old boy (but couldn't hear what they were saying), and a samurai hiding below the treaty house (who is listening in case he's summoned for backup, but can't see what's going on). We have the narrator (Mako) and the old man in the present, and the young boy and the samurai in the past, and the lighting picks out little fragments instead of showing a big scenic picture all at once. That's all built into the song, and so although the song does work on a recording, it really isn't designed to work separately from the staging. And instead of the director coming up with stage business to sell the song, the song incorporates stage business that is necessary for the scene, like the tree climbing. It is, in part, a song that expresses the director's vision.
Here's the original Broadway cast:
Speaking of Pacific Overtures, the same uploader also has the original cast doing the first number from the second act, "Please Hello" (where various Western countries come in and force Japan to trade with them). It's one of the weaker numbers because the music consists of lame parodies of Sousa, Gilbert and Sullivan, etc., but the lyrics may be the most intricately-rhymed of all time.
So in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, R&H (the producers as well as the writers) would come up with a song, and leave it to the director to figure out how to execute it. Joshua Logan, the director and co-writer of South Pacific, had to come up with physical gimmicks to maintain interest during a song -- like having Liat act out the lyrics of "Happy Talk" while her mother sings the song -- but what he didn't do was come up with a stage picture and ask the songwriters for something to fill it.
By the late '60s and '70s, you have more and more songs whose music and lyrics are shaped by the staging, rather than vice-versa. A lot of the songs in Bob Fosse musicals are like that, with the melody shaped to fit the typical Fosse moves instead of Fosse coming up with dance moves based on the music. And Stephen Sondheim became Hal Prince's favorite songwriter, in part, because he was willing to write long numbers around Prince's stage pictures. (It's said that Sondheim didn't come up with the Act 1 finale of A Little Night Music, "A Weekend In the Country," until Prince had already blocked the whole scene.)
Here's a good example of what I mean, Sondheim's personal favorite of his songs, "Someone In a Tree" from Pacific Overtures. This is a song entirely based on a stage picture: instead of seeing the signing of the treaty of Kanagawa, we get it from the perspective of onlookers: someone who saw the whole thing from a distance when he was a ten year-old boy (but couldn't hear what they were saying), and a samurai hiding below the treaty house (who is listening in case he's summoned for backup, but can't see what's going on). We have the narrator (Mako) and the old man in the present, and the young boy and the samurai in the past, and the lighting picks out little fragments instead of showing a big scenic picture all at once. That's all built into the song, and so although the song does work on a recording, it really isn't designed to work separately from the staging. And instead of the director coming up with stage business to sell the song, the song incorporates stage business that is necessary for the scene, like the tree climbing. It is, in part, a song that expresses the director's vision.
Here's the original Broadway cast:
Speaking of Pacific Overtures, the same uploader also has the original cast doing the first number from the second act, "Please Hello" (where various Western countries come in and force Japan to trade with them). It's one of the weaker numbers because the music consists of lame parodies of Sousa, Gilbert and Sullivan, etc., but the lyrics may be the most intricately-rhymed of all time.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Little Octagon
Brian Hughes at "Again With Comics" has posted "Playful Obsession," Dan Clowes' vicious parody of Harvey Comics. (this link comes via a comment by Anthony Strand.)
It's all there, with the characters changed enough so he doesn't get sued. The main target, of course, is the way all the Harvey Comics kids have unhealthy obsessions, and the way these comics portrayed money-fixation, dot-mania and compulsive overeating as positive things. (If you read "Little Lotta" you'd swear that overeating gives you superhuman strength.)
And I particularly appreciate the fact that Clowes makes a reference the way Richie flaunted his wealth in front of his pauper friends Freckles and Peewee, and did nothing to help them out of their crippling poverty.
It's all there, with the characters changed enough so he doesn't get sued. The main target, of course, is the way all the Harvey Comics kids have unhealthy obsessions, and the way these comics portrayed money-fixation, dot-mania and compulsive overeating as positive things. (If you read "Little Lotta" you'd swear that overeating gives you superhuman strength.)
And I particularly appreciate the fact that Clowes makes a reference the way Richie flaunted his wealth in front of his pauper friends Freckles and Peewee, and did nothing to help them out of their crippling poverty.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
What the '70s Called a Hit Musical
I noticed that someone has uploaded excerpts from the biggest hit musical of 1970, Applause, a musical version of All About Eve starring Lauren Bacall. This is probably my least favorite hit musical, certainly my least favorite from before the '80s. (And even Cats doesn't annoy me as much.) The Broadway musical was on life support by 1970, with the collapse of Broadway-style music in the pop market -- which meant that most musicals, even successful ones, didn't have hit songs to help market them. And so a lot of shows were increasingly coming to rely on production gimmicks. Some directors, like Hal Prince, went for big conceptual ideas, and others, like Applause director-choreographer Ron Field, just tried to throw everything at the audience to keep them entertained.
When this worked, it worked fine; it had worked in Cabaret -- a Prince production that Field had choreographed -- where Field's imaginative, movement-filled musical numbers were a highlight. (Everyone who saw the original version of Cabaret -- which is, by the way, far superior to the movie or any of the revised versions -- recalls that Field's "The Telephone Number" was the hit of the whole show.) But it was an approach that could make a show more about the staging than about the songs or performances. And what bugs me about Applause is that Field seems to have so busy coming up with gimmicks that he let the show fall apart creatively.
The talent was there: Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (Bye Bye Birdie) wrote the songs, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green were brought in to write the book (after an earlier script was thrown out). But Comden and Green's book doesn't have a funny line in it. (They were not able to use the All About Eve lines, because they didn't initially have the rights to the movie script, but their dialogue is shockingly witless for the people who wrote Singin' in the Rain.) And many of Strouse and Adams' songs are mediocre -- like a really stupid song called "Fasten Your Seat Belts" -- and the ones that are good are wrecked by the bad pseudo-hip orchestrations of the veteran Philip J. Lang.
So it was a good idea for a musical that was turned into a really poorly written musical, and nobody seemed to care because of a) Lauren Bacall, who overplayed entertainingly, and b) Field's relentless staging, which sort of beat the audience into submission. But the performances were basically terrible; everybody was encouraged to overact and oversell every single line or bit of business. It's the kind of loud, annoying, cartoonish faux-entertainment that gives Broadway musicals a bad name.
Here's an example of how Applause wrecked what is actually a pretty good song -- the title song, which could have been a rather sweet tribute to the joy of performing and instead becomes a monstrous thing led by a vocally-overstretched Bonnie Franklin (One Day at a Time).
Making a slightly better case for the show, from a TV version (there never was a movie), is Bacall's number "But Alive." The staging is kind of wearying too, and the arrangement is early-'70s crass, but at least it's entertaining. Bacall didn't have much of a voice, but she did know how to make the most of a number.
When this worked, it worked fine; it had worked in Cabaret -- a Prince production that Field had choreographed -- where Field's imaginative, movement-filled musical numbers were a highlight. (Everyone who saw the original version of Cabaret -- which is, by the way, far superior to the movie or any of the revised versions -- recalls that Field's "The Telephone Number" was the hit of the whole show.) But it was an approach that could make a show more about the staging than about the songs or performances. And what bugs me about Applause is that Field seems to have so busy coming up with gimmicks that he let the show fall apart creatively.
The talent was there: Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (Bye Bye Birdie) wrote the songs, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green were brought in to write the book (after an earlier script was thrown out). But Comden and Green's book doesn't have a funny line in it. (They were not able to use the All About Eve lines, because they didn't initially have the rights to the movie script, but their dialogue is shockingly witless for the people who wrote Singin' in the Rain.) And many of Strouse and Adams' songs are mediocre -- like a really stupid song called "Fasten Your Seat Belts" -- and the ones that are good are wrecked by the bad pseudo-hip orchestrations of the veteran Philip J. Lang.
So it was a good idea for a musical that was turned into a really poorly written musical, and nobody seemed to care because of a) Lauren Bacall, who overplayed entertainingly, and b) Field's relentless staging, which sort of beat the audience into submission. But the performances were basically terrible; everybody was encouraged to overact and oversell every single line or bit of business. It's the kind of loud, annoying, cartoonish faux-entertainment that gives Broadway musicals a bad name.
Here's an example of how Applause wrecked what is actually a pretty good song -- the title song, which could have been a rather sweet tribute to the joy of performing and instead becomes a monstrous thing led by a vocally-overstretched Bonnie Franklin (One Day at a Time).
Making a slightly better case for the show, from a TV version (there never was a movie), is Bacall's number "But Alive." The staging is kind of wearying too, and the arrangement is early-'70s crass, but at least it's entertaining. Bacall didn't have much of a voice, but she did know how to make the most of a number.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Haw, Haw! Or, Things That Suck: Jackie Jokers
I already touched on this a bit in my anti-Richie Rich screed, but Mister Kitty's "Stupid Comics" has has a great overview of Richie Rich's most annoying friend, Jackie Jokers.
Actually, he started out with his own comic, something I wasn't aware of as a kid (because I encountered him in the Richie Rich digests); his solo title failed, so it became "Richie Rich and Jackie Jokers." I agree with everyone that there's something deeply weird about a little kid working as a Borscht Belt comedian, especially when his look-alike father seems to have pushed him into it -- don't they have child labor laws?
And yet as a child, I kind of liked the Jackie Jokers stuff, even though I knew even then that the writing wasn't any good and that Jackie's jokes were terrible. (It really was an indication of how little respect Harvey Comics had for kids that they thought we'd believe Jackie was a great comedian, even though he never had a funny joke.) I probably liked them because they were the only stories in those digests that took the focus off a) Richie's disgusting wealth and b) Richie preventing desperate, hungry people from stealing anything from his vast wealth.
So in addition to the stories mentioned on that page, I remember Richie and Jackie writing a script for a sci-fi comedy (Reggie Van Dough tried to steal it, but they fixed him), which consisted entirely of bad puns:
Okay, that doesn't even rise to the level of a bad pun.
There was also this story that featured a second show-biz kid, "Kool Katz" the musician with an overbearing Jewish mother. In this story, Kool's "Mama" had written a play called "Boy in the Big House," which she thought was a drama but everyone mistook it for a comedy. Richie produced it on Broadway with Jackie as the star, and it became a huge hit as a comedy, and Mama accepted it when she realized it was a hit.
At least the dialogue was better than in Richie and Jackie's frickin' script.
And yes, I remember those movie and TV parodies with Jackie. I remember "Carry" (Jackie is forced by everyone to "carry" their books, until he uses his telekinetic powers to get even). I remember "Shirley and Laverne," a parody of "Laverne and Shirley." (Worst title parody ever.) And I remember "Sez-a-Who Street," featuring the Comic Book Monster, who ended the story by eating the whole comic book.
Yes, I screwed up my childhood, and all because I had nothing better to read on bus rides and boring assemblies.
If you can stand more of this, Scott Shaw! reviews a Jackie Jokers issue where Jackie meets Nixon and Kissinger.
Actually, he started out with his own comic, something I wasn't aware of as a kid (because I encountered him in the Richie Rich digests); his solo title failed, so it became "Richie Rich and Jackie Jokers." I agree with everyone that there's something deeply weird about a little kid working as a Borscht Belt comedian, especially when his look-alike father seems to have pushed him into it -- don't they have child labor laws?
And yet as a child, I kind of liked the Jackie Jokers stuff, even though I knew even then that the writing wasn't any good and that Jackie's jokes were terrible. (It really was an indication of how little respect Harvey Comics had for kids that they thought we'd believe Jackie was a great comedian, even though he never had a funny joke.) I probably liked them because they were the only stories in those digests that took the focus off a) Richie's disgusting wealth and b) Richie preventing desperate, hungry people from stealing anything from his vast wealth.
So in addition to the stories mentioned on that page, I remember Richie and Jackie writing a script for a sci-fi comedy (Reggie Van Dough tried to steal it, but they fixed him), which consisted entirely of bad puns:
FUTURE JACKIE: Can I borrow your spaceship, Richie? I want to be a star on some star!
FUTURE RICHIE: How star-tling!
Okay, that doesn't even rise to the level of a bad pun.
There was also this story that featured a second show-biz kid, "Kool Katz" the musician with an overbearing Jewish mother. In this story, Kool's "Mama" had written a play called "Boy in the Big House," which she thought was a drama but everyone mistook it for a comedy. Richie produced it on Broadway with Jackie as the star, and it became a huge hit as a comedy, and Mama accepted it when she realized it was a hit.
BOY IN THE BIG HOUSE: Oh, what a fate, to be the Boy in the Big House! If only I had listened to my Mama and worn a sweater on windy days, this wouldn't have happened to me!
At least the dialogue was better than in Richie and Jackie's frickin' script.
And yes, I remember those movie and TV parodies with Jackie. I remember "Carry" (Jackie is forced by everyone to "carry" their books, until he uses his telekinetic powers to get even). I remember "Shirley and Laverne," a parody of "Laverne and Shirley." (Worst title parody ever.) And I remember "Sez-a-Who Street," featuring the Comic Book Monster, who ended the story by eating the whole comic book.
Yes, I screwed up my childhood, and all because I had nothing better to read on bus rides and boring assemblies.
If you can stand more of this, Scott Shaw! reviews a Jackie Jokers issue where Jackie meets Nixon and Kissinger.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Obscure Musicals: The Grass Harp
One of those flop musicals that is sacred to hard-core Broadway fanatics is The Grass Harp. This is a 1971 musical based on the novel by Truman Capote, about a dotty spinster who runs away from her sister's house and goes to live in a treehouse rather than allow her sister to market her miracle dropsy cure. That's an over-simplified summary, of course, but it gives you an idea of what the story is like: a very delicate, whimsical fable about eccentric people. The musical adaptation, which ran only a week, was further proof that whimsy and delicacy rarely succeed on Broadway.
The book and lyrics were by playwright and poet Kenward Elmslie, who was the significant other of the late, great John LaTouche. His theatre work is similar to LaTouche's in that he tries to create a fusion of high and low -- to bring poetry and highbrow experimentation to Broadway while still keeping that Broadway pizazz. He's not nearly as good a lyricist as LaTouche was, though, and while some of the lyrics for Grass Harp are very beautiful, others are a little clumsy or drab. The music was by Claibe Richardson, who died in 2003.
This 2002 interview with Elmslie gives some background on The Grass Harp, as does this online chat from 2003. It was originally produced in Providence, Rhode Island, with a cast that included Barbara Baxley from She Loves Me and Elaine Stritch as the evangelist Baby Love. For the Broadway production, the show managed to pull together an even better cast including Barbara Cook, Max Showalter (the creepy father from the movie Lord Love a Duck), and the great contralto Carol Brice, who was equally comfortable on Broadway and in the opera house. Celeste Holm, who was originally supposed to play Cook's part, was then cast as Baby Love, but she quit the show out of town because her part was too small, and was replaced with Karen Morrow -- a good thing too, because while Holm was an excellent actress she didn't have enough of a voice for the very difficult music that had been written for the character (more on that later).
With the high-powered singing voices of Cook, Brice and Morrow in the production, it was decided to do the show without amplification; it was the last Broadway musical that didn't use microphones. (Not that everyone agreed with this. Capote's last word of advice to Elmslie after he looked at the show was "Mike it.") Several of the best numbers have the kind of sound you only hear in un-miked musicals: starting soft, building to a big vocal climax, orchestration deliberately thinned out during the vocal portions so the singer can always be heard. Even though some of the music has a contemporary sound -- some of the weaker songs are reminiscent of Burt Bacharach or the music for Company (a show from the previous year) -- much of it is in a very old-school style that feels like Rodgers and Hammerstein. Brice's first song, "If There's Love Enough," is a song of homespun wisdom that's sort of like a Capote-ized version of "Climb Every Mountain," and it's a great song. (Note: to include audio clips in this post I've uploaded the audio files to Daily Motion; click on the embedded video to hear the song, but there's no actual video except a caption identifying the song.)
There were many other superb songs in the piece, including almost all of Cook's numbers; there were also some pretty good comedy songs, like Brice's "Marry With Me (Love, Bill)." Although the show flopped, Elmslie and Richardson arranged with their mutual friend Ben Bagley to record it: to save money, orchestrator Jonathan Tunick went to Europe and recorded the orchestral tracks there (the union rates were lower) and the cast added their vocal tracks back in New York; Bagley released the album on his label Painted Smiles, and it became a cult classic. It was Cook's last Broadway musical; tired of appearing in one cult flop after another, she concentrated on concert performances after that.
Like all flop shows with great songs, the problems were blamed on the book. And it's hard to deny that the story is maybe just too whimsical to be a musical; several other Capote musicals have had the same trouble, finding themselves unable to work up the kind of raw energy that a story needs to sustain a bunch of musical numbers. (Capote's own House of Flowers was one of the great cult flops of the '50s, and a musical version of Breakfast At Tiffany's starring Mary Tyler Moore was such a disaster that it got rewritten by Edward Albee and then closed out of town.) But there was another problem apart from all the whimsy, which is that the audience didn't have a very clear rooting interest. The focus of the musical is on Dolly (Cook), a slightly nutty old maid; her behavior is supposed to be saintly, but it can come off as annoying. And so while "Chain of Love" -- whose opening lines are taken directly from Capote -- is a beautiful song, perfect for Cook's voice, it's one of the few moments in the score or the show that makes us feel any real emotional attachment to the character, and it comes too late in the first act to make us really care about her.
And then there's the problem that often comes up in adaptations of novels: what to do with the narrator? The narrator, and sort of the main character, of The Grass Harp is Collin, the orphaned teenage boy who's been sent to live with the two sisters (the good Dolly and the greedy Verena). But take him out of the novel and he doesn't really do a whole lot. So Collin (Russ Thacker) is a weak presence in the musical and his songs are the worst in the whole show; his first number, "Floozies," is proof of why it's a bad idea to write a peurile number to reflect a character's peurile sentiments. And coming so early in the show -- it's the second number -- "Floozies" may have helped turn people off the whole evening:
Elmslie and Richardson worked on some other projects, including a musical about Lola Montez, but I don't think any of them got to Broadway. (Bagley recorded some songs from Lola on Painted Smiles, and released a few of them as bonus tracks on a CD of The Grass Harp.) Elmslie has concentrated mostly on his poetry, but to many people he'll always be best known for that handful of great songs from The Grass Harp, and for creating one of the last showcases for great old-school un-amplified Broadway singing. Including one of the longest "belt" numbers in musical theatre history, "Baby Love's Miracle Show" -- a number that lasts a full twelve minutes and where Karen Morrow hardly ever gets a break from singing. It's also, of course, a number in the great Broadway tradition of fake gospel numbers, starting with "Blow Gabriel Blow" and going through "The Lord Done Fixed Up My Soul" and "Brotherhood of Man" and many others.
The book and lyrics were by playwright and poet Kenward Elmslie, who was the significant other of the late, great John LaTouche. His theatre work is similar to LaTouche's in that he tries to create a fusion of high and low -- to bring poetry and highbrow experimentation to Broadway while still keeping that Broadway pizazz. He's not nearly as good a lyricist as LaTouche was, though, and while some of the lyrics for Grass Harp are very beautiful, others are a little clumsy or drab. The music was by Claibe Richardson, who died in 2003.
This 2002 interview with Elmslie gives some background on The Grass Harp, as does this online chat from 2003. It was originally produced in Providence, Rhode Island, with a cast that included Barbara Baxley from She Loves Me and Elaine Stritch as the evangelist Baby Love. For the Broadway production, the show managed to pull together an even better cast including Barbara Cook, Max Showalter (the creepy father from the movie Lord Love a Duck), and the great contralto Carol Brice, who was equally comfortable on Broadway and in the opera house. Celeste Holm, who was originally supposed to play Cook's part, was then cast as Baby Love, but she quit the show out of town because her part was too small, and was replaced with Karen Morrow -- a good thing too, because while Holm was an excellent actress she didn't have enough of a voice for the very difficult music that had been written for the character (more on that later).
With the high-powered singing voices of Cook, Brice and Morrow in the production, it was decided to do the show without amplification; it was the last Broadway musical that didn't use microphones. (Not that everyone agreed with this. Capote's last word of advice to Elmslie after he looked at the show was "Mike it.") Several of the best numbers have the kind of sound you only hear in un-miked musicals: starting soft, building to a big vocal climax, orchestration deliberately thinned out during the vocal portions so the singer can always be heard. Even though some of the music has a contemporary sound -- some of the weaker songs are reminiscent of Burt Bacharach or the music for Company (a show from the previous year) -- much of it is in a very old-school style that feels like Rodgers and Hammerstein. Brice's first song, "If There's Love Enough," is a song of homespun wisdom that's sort of like a Capote-ized version of "Climb Every Mountain," and it's a great song. (Note: to include audio clips in this post I've uploaded the audio files to Daily Motion; click on the embedded video to hear the song, but there's no actual video except a caption identifying the song.)
There were many other superb songs in the piece, including almost all of Cook's numbers; there were also some pretty good comedy songs, like Brice's "Marry With Me (Love, Bill)." Although the show flopped, Elmslie and Richardson arranged with their mutual friend Ben Bagley to record it: to save money, orchestrator Jonathan Tunick went to Europe and recorded the orchestral tracks there (the union rates were lower) and the cast added their vocal tracks back in New York; Bagley released the album on his label Painted Smiles, and it became a cult classic. It was Cook's last Broadway musical; tired of appearing in one cult flop after another, she concentrated on concert performances after that.
Like all flop shows with great songs, the problems were blamed on the book. And it's hard to deny that the story is maybe just too whimsical to be a musical; several other Capote musicals have had the same trouble, finding themselves unable to work up the kind of raw energy that a story needs to sustain a bunch of musical numbers. (Capote's own House of Flowers was one of the great cult flops of the '50s, and a musical version of Breakfast At Tiffany's starring Mary Tyler Moore was such a disaster that it got rewritten by Edward Albee and then closed out of town.) But there was another problem apart from all the whimsy, which is that the audience didn't have a very clear rooting interest. The focus of the musical is on Dolly (Cook), a slightly nutty old maid; her behavior is supposed to be saintly, but it can come off as annoying. And so while "Chain of Love" -- whose opening lines are taken directly from Capote -- is a beautiful song, perfect for Cook's voice, it's one of the few moments in the score or the show that makes us feel any real emotional attachment to the character, and it comes too late in the first act to make us really care about her.
And then there's the problem that often comes up in adaptations of novels: what to do with the narrator? The narrator, and sort of the main character, of The Grass Harp is Collin, the orphaned teenage boy who's been sent to live with the two sisters (the good Dolly and the greedy Verena). But take him out of the novel and he doesn't really do a whole lot. So Collin (Russ Thacker) is a weak presence in the musical and his songs are the worst in the whole show; his first number, "Floozies," is proof of why it's a bad idea to write a peurile number to reflect a character's peurile sentiments. And coming so early in the show -- it's the second number -- "Floozies" may have helped turn people off the whole evening:
Elmslie and Richardson worked on some other projects, including a musical about Lola Montez, but I don't think any of them got to Broadway. (Bagley recorded some songs from Lola on Painted Smiles, and released a few of them as bonus tracks on a CD of The Grass Harp.) Elmslie has concentrated mostly on his poetry, but to many people he'll always be best known for that handful of great songs from The Grass Harp, and for creating one of the last showcases for great old-school un-amplified Broadway singing. Including one of the longest "belt" numbers in musical theatre history, "Baby Love's Miracle Show" -- a number that lasts a full twelve minutes and where Karen Morrow hardly ever gets a break from singing. It's also, of course, a number in the great Broadway tradition of fake gospel numbers, starting with "Blow Gabriel Blow" and going through "The Lord Done Fixed Up My Soul" and "Brotherhood of Man" and many others.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
My Intercostal Clavicle
I'm sure a lot of you have already seen the panels from this famous 1951 Batman comic story (also reproduced at Superdickery and many other places). The thing I wonder after reading it, though, is whether Bill Finger could really have been using "boner" over and over again without any double meaning, even in 1951.
I think that when this story is discussed it's usually assumed that "boner" just means a particularly stupid mistake, and that nobody could have known what it would eventually mean. But the use of "boner" or "bone" as a double entendre wasn't exactly unheard of before that. Think of Bringing Up Baby a movie from 1938, that gets a huge amount of mileage from obviously very deliberate double entendres around the word "bone." (Cary Grant is first seen holding a dinosaur bone and saying "I think this must belong in the tail." That's not accidentally funny; that's deliberate.) So while I may be totally wrong on this, I don't think it's far-fetched to imagine that "boner" already had a sort of secret meaning by 1951, even if it wasn't generally known. It's sort of like -- and again, you can see this in Bringing Up Baby -- the way the secret meaning of "gay" was hinted at in song lyrics and movies for decades before it went into general public use.
Another one I've always wondered about is from Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial By Jury:
This is a huge problem for anyone producing Trial By Jury now, but at the time it was a reference to the old saying "keep your pecker up," with "pecker" meaning "heart." On the other hand, this was W.S. Gilbert, a writer who once had a female character say (in the play Engaged) "what have I in common with tarts?" (She is referring, or thinks she's referring, to the pastries.) So I've never been quite convinced that there wasn't some kind of early, dirty meaning of "pecker" that he might have been aware of.
I think that when this story is discussed it's usually assumed that "boner" just means a particularly stupid mistake, and that nobody could have known what it would eventually mean. But the use of "boner" or "bone" as a double entendre wasn't exactly unheard of before that. Think of Bringing Up Baby a movie from 1938, that gets a huge amount of mileage from obviously very deliberate double entendres around the word "bone." (Cary Grant is first seen holding a dinosaur bone and saying "I think this must belong in the tail." That's not accidentally funny; that's deliberate.) So while I may be totally wrong on this, I don't think it's far-fetched to imagine that "boner" already had a sort of secret meaning by 1951, even if it wasn't generally known. It's sort of like -- and again, you can see this in Bringing Up Baby -- the way the secret meaning of "gay" was hinted at in song lyrics and movies for decades before it went into general public use.
Another one I've always wondered about is from Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial By Jury:
DEFENDANT: Is this the Court of the Exchequer?
CHORUS: It is!
DEFENDANT (aside): Be firm, be firm, my pecker.
This is a huge problem for anyone producing Trial By Jury now, but at the time it was a reference to the old saying "keep your pecker up," with "pecker" meaning "heart." On the other hand, this was W.S. Gilbert, a writer who once had a female character say (in the play Engaged) "what have I in common with tarts?" (She is referring, or thinks she's referring, to the pastries.) So I've never been quite convinced that there wasn't some kind of early, dirty meaning of "pecker" that he might have been aware of.
Alternate TV Universe: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Sort of like a "grudge match I'd like to see," except instead of imagining a fight, we ask what would happen if a TV show were done with a few minor tweaks:
Scenario: The show Buffy the Vampire Slayer has the same setup we're familiar with: an ordinary girl named Buffy discovers that she is the Chosen One with the power to fight vampires and other monsters. She protects the town from evil under the guidance of her British Watcher. The only difference is that Buffy is Buffy Patterson from Family Affair, and her Watcher is Mr. French, who was placed with Uncle Bill by the Watcher's Council for the express purpose of guiding Buffy to her destiny.
Can Buffy protect New York from vampires? How will Jody, Uncle Bill and Cissy deal with being the new Scooby Gang? Speculation welcome.
Scenario: The show Buffy the Vampire Slayer has the same setup we're familiar with: an ordinary girl named Buffy discovers that she is the Chosen One with the power to fight vampires and other monsters. She protects the town from evil under the guidance of her British Watcher. The only difference is that Buffy is Buffy Patterson from Family Affair, and her Watcher is Mr. French, who was placed with Uncle Bill by the Watcher's Council for the express purpose of guiding Buffy to her destiny.
Can Buffy protect New York from vampires? How will Jody, Uncle Bill and Cissy deal with being the new Scooby Gang? Speculation welcome.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
First Looney Tunes Reference
Earlier I wrote that a scene from Kitten With a Whip (1964) was "one of the first references to Warner Brothers cartoons in a non-WB movie." I'd forgotten about the ending of the 1958 Paramount production The Geisha Boy:
Of course since Frank Tashlin wrote and directed this movie, you could argue that this is more of a Looney Tunes insider reference than anything else. But still, it might be the first time that Looney Tunes cartoons were referred to as a general cultural reference instead of Warner Brothers plugging itself (e.g. My Dream is Yours).
Jerry Lewis's delivery of the Porky Pig line isn't all that good, by the way. He doesn't seem to realize that he's not supposed to stutter on "folks."
Of course since Frank Tashlin wrote and directed this movie, you could argue that this is more of a Looney Tunes insider reference than anything else. But still, it might be the first time that Looney Tunes cartoons were referred to as a general cultural reference instead of Warner Brothers plugging itself (e.g. My Dream is Yours).
Jerry Lewis's delivery of the Porky Pig line isn't all that good, by the way. He doesn't seem to realize that he's not supposed to stutter on "folks."
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