Long after I stopped acting in school productions (which was November 1981 at the University of Pennsylvania, to be precise), my mother would periodically say how much she wished that my shows had been preserved on video, so she could see them again. It’s important to understand that my performances were in the pre-home video era, before every parent had a video camera to capture every precious moment, let alone a pocket-sized phone with a digital video camera within it. The idea of YouTube was unimaginable.
I always said to my mom that I was grateful that there’s no video of me as Will Parker, as Colonel Pickering, as Juror Number 3. Why? Because it allowed me, my friends and indeed my mom to recall the performances, and the productions, as the magical experiences they were at the time. With a recording, my performances might have been revealed as subpar and amateurish, especially as my own highly self-critical faculties developed.
But as I’ve told people about this over the years, I have omitted a key piece of information – though I’ve never lied. For the past nine years, hidden in the dark recesses of YouTube, there has been footage of teen-aged me in performance, during my senior year of high school, if I recall correctly. It is not, however, of me in a school show, or community theatre, but rather as the top-billed “star” of a short film made by my friend Dan Karlok, the one true moviemaking buff I recall encountering as a teen. It should be noted that when I say moviemaking, I mean on film, that forgotten material that had to be sent off and processed, edited by hand, and so on.
To further set the scene, I must explain that in 1980 when the short film below was made, today’s zombie obsession among horror buffs was still very much a cult, built largely upon just two movies: George A. Romero’sNight of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. There was no The Walking Dead regularly serving up horror on basic cable (there was barely basic cable for most people), let alone the final installment of Romero’s trilogy, Day of the Dead, which came out in 1985, the same year as The Return of the Living Dead, Dan O’Bannon’s riff on Romero’s universe.
So coming way out ahead of the trend, Dan Karlok rallied a significant number of my high school cohorts (mostly drama and band kids), as well as the distinctive figure of his burly and bearded older brother Andy, for the mini-epic which he wrote, scored, edited, shot, and pretty much everything else too: Dawn of the Night of the Dead: The Musical, almost 25% of which is credits. If you don’t recognize me, I’m the guy in the Boy Scout shirt and top hat.
Now I should mention that for people perhaps aged 45 and up, this film may prompt some distant memory. That’s because through circumstances entirely unknown to me, Dan sold the film to the USA Network in its very early days, to use as interstitial material on its “Up All Night” and “Night Flight” schlock movie fests that ran on the weekends in the very wee hours back in the latter half of the 1980s. It also appeared a few times on Connecticut Public Television. Yes, you may have seen me once upon a time, but I forgive you for not remembering the face or name.
Dan has gone on to a career in film and television, having spent several years in the lighting department in the early days of Law & Order; he most recently directed and executive produced the documentary Joan Rivers: Exit Laughing. I don’t see him much, but outside of his film work, he can be spotted around the northeast fronting The Eugene Chrysler Band, a rockabilly combo.
Some may wonder why I haven’t revealed this bit of my performing past until now, since it has been hiding in plain sight since 2007 according to YouTube. Well, I just never thought it the right time. But after shamelessly launching myself back on stage for the first time in 35 years earlier this month, and having a blast doing so, I thought I might as well show all. While I suspect you may get a chuckle out of how ridiculous I am in this, keep in mind that it’s also a time capsule for me of many friends from my youth, some with whom I’m still in touch, and at least one who passed away a number of years ago.
I shall now be adding this to my “reel,” along with my appearances on Cupcake Wars and Law & Order: Special Vctims Unit. Agents, casting directors, producers and directors: I await your call. In the meantime, happy Throwback Thursday and Happy Halloween!
P.S. True zombie buffs may note that in Romero’s Day of the Dead, the zombie named Bub is played by a very fine actor named…Howard Sherman. That is his real name, but he now uses Sherman Howard professionally. No relation. And I got to the zombie game first!
P.P.S. I did one other film with Dan, a stop-motion animated film, the name of which I simply can’t recall. I voiced two characters: a James Bond-esque villain and one head of a particularly dimwitted two-headed dragon.The plot was so convoluted, that Dan typically had to explain the premise, in detail, before showing the film. Only Dan would know whether it has been lost to time, is in the filmic equivalent of witness protection, or lurks somewhere in YouTube, just beyond my reach.
Protesters at Me Before You screening in Manhattan
Before you start shouting about spoiler alerts, let me point out that the headline of this piece does not indicate in what context this suicide occurs. Could be real life. Could be a play, a movie, a TV, or a book. In fact, it’s several movies and at least one book; I’m sure there are many more. Because when it comes to representations of disability, the cliché of the person in the wheelchair who can’t accept life after becoming disabled is a fairly standard device, sad to say.
I am not, however, writing in the abstract, so let me now make clear: the headline refers, in this case, to the film Me Before You, which opens nationally this weekend. Marketed as if it were from the word factory of Nicholas Sparks, Me Before You is the work of romance novelist Jojo Moyes. It has reportedly sold some six million copies, which means that the target audience for the movie, namely fans of the book, already know the outcome. So I haven’t really spoiled anything. The spoiler, had the movie diverged from the book, would be, “The Guy In The Wheelchair Decides To Live And Love Like Countless People With Quadriplegia Do Even Without Having Bags Of Money Like The Dude In This Story.”
Protest leaflet handed out at Me Before You screening
Having seen the film, I would even argue that my headline serves as a useful translation of what takes place. Why? Because when it comes time for Will, the dashing wheelchair user, to end his life after being brought out of his shell by kooky Louise, who has been hired to be his companion, he merely asks her to bring his parents into his oh-so-charming bedroom at the assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland. Then we watch a single digitally rendered leaf fall from a tree, changing colors and turning brown before it reaches the ground. Yup, his suicide is equated with nature’s inevitability and we don’t see any of it, lest it trouble the sensitive viewer with anything nasty.
I want to be clear about this: whatever your position on assisted suicide, it is not part of the circle of life. Rather, it is a choice to alter life’s path drastically, and for god’s sake it’s not a metaphor. It is death. But the gauzy view of disability and dying on display in Me For You has no use for such truths, because that would mar the Cinderella/Pretty Woman paradigm it struggles to project. The film is so rigged in favor of Will’s choice that his parents barely appear on screen with him and both his pre-accident friends and Louisa’s athletic fiancée are insensitive dolts. There’s also a gender paradigm at play, with the film’s women arguing against Will’s decision, while the men position his choice as being somehow the manly thing to do.
Sam Claflin and Emilia Clarke in Me Before You
Both Jojo Moyes and Emilia Clarke, who plays Louisa, in interviews, have tried to convey that Me Before You is meant simply to be one story, complete unto itself, rather than a tract about disability and assisted suicide. While that may well be true, and they ultimately have the right to tell any story they choose, the fact that the end result plays more like a lengthy public service announcement for the assisted suicide organization Dignitas than an actual drama does undermine their argument.
If Me Before You existed in a vacuum their defenses might help them get by, but the fact is that when major films choose to display disability narratives, they tend to be inspiration porn (look how Christy Brown overcame his disability in My Left Foot and how brilliant Daniel Day Lewis is in contorting himself to pretend to disability), legal debates (Brian Clark’s Whose Life Is It Anyway?, from which Me Before You filches some repartee about the proximity of breasts to a man with paraplegia) or stories of spirits set free from their broken, damaged bodies (if Hilary Swank can no longer box, she has nothing left in her life and it’s only right that Clint Eastwood help kill his Million Dollar Baby).
Me Before You is really about how knowing Will has transformed Louisa’s life, since hers is the story that will go on and puts the selfless suicidal guy in a wheelchair up there with such other overplayed tropes as the magical black man and the wise Asian. Louisa is in fact a manic pixie dream girl. So the film is about two tired stereotypes and their stereotypical families. One family represents the coolly removed British aristocracy, who are so generous as to convert their stables as a private home for Will, rather than actually renovating their stately manor; part of their estate which also includes a castle, reinforcing the fairy tale elements of the story. The other family is salt of the earth working class. But make no mistake – Louisa is the heroine and Will is a device.
While we’re told Will experiences bouts of pain that causes him to scream in anguish, he faces nothing so agonizing on screen. Yes, we do see him fighting off pneumonia, but his other “challenges” in the film amount to: 1) having to have his chair lifted out of the mud by three passing burlymen because Louisa is an idiot, 2) grappling with the discomfort of a clothing sales tag that remains in his collar, and 3) having Louisa ladle hot soup into his lap. These are all played for laughs, and the last glosses over the possibility that while Will may not feel it, he may have sustained a burn. All of this is representative of the film’s effort to use disability as a plot device, without ever doing more than skimming the surface, oh so politely, of life with disability.
Look, I’m a middle aged guy who has no disability. So I’m not the target audience for this film. But I still want to speak out, among many other voices. At a Wednesday night screening in New York, the theatre was filled overwhelmingly with young women, and if this film manages to succeed, I worry that it will fetishize romantic supermodels in wheelchairs who serve to empower and enlighten young women before taking themselves out of the equation so those women can realize their true potential in life and love. Think I’m being harsh? Moyes wrote a sequel, providing further adventures for our Louisa, confirming that the story is indeed hers and not even hers and Will’s.
I also can’t presume to speak for people with disabilities, but they’re working hard to make their feelings about this film known, and you can look to places like The Chicago Tribune and Salon for more personal accounts. But as someone who advocates for artists with disabilities, and for truer portrayals of disability on stage, screen and television, I find Me Before You to be simultaneously dull and dangerous, because it both sugarcoats and homogenizes every element of its story to the point that both the disability and mortality at its core are rendered as negligible, beyond the extent to which they have an effect upon the emotions of the non-disabled protagonist.
As a film, Me Before You is pedestrian. As a story that deals in significant issues, it is at best clueless and at worst callously indifferent. As a statement about disability and assisted suicide, it is a Hallmark ad in favor of the latter. See it if you must, but try to pay attention to what it leaves out, namely the reality of life for countless people with disabilities. If anyone deserves to brandish the film’s marketing slogan (and hashtag campaign) “Live Boldly,” it’s them, not anyone in this bland contraption.
P.S. One small side note: Me Before You asks us, in its opening scenes, to believe that a Londoner walks out into a downpour in a bespoke suit without an umbrella. If nothing else I’ve written convinces you of the film’s lack of truthfulness, that certainly should.
For more information about the disability community’s perspective on Me Before You, visit Disbeat.
Howard Sherman is interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.
It’s a tad too early to announce the emergence of a new trend, but two recent announcements suggest that there’s something brewing in the theatrical zeitgeist.
The announcements to which I refer are Quentin Tarantino’s repeated references to adapting his newest film The Hateful Eight for the stage, and Warner Bros Theatre Ventures’ announcement that Stephen Adly Guirgis will adapt the 1974 film Dog Day Afternoon for Broadway. I’m more sanguine about the latter than the former, because Guirgis is a proven theatrical talent who is likely to assert his own unique take on the true-life story that fuelled the Sidney Lumet film. While some have noted that The Hateful Eight is, if you strip away the profanity and slurs, the widescreen, and the protracted running time, really a western equivalent of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery.
The potential wave of which I speak is the movie-into-play adaptation, which seems poised to supplant the movie-into-musical and jukebox musical trends of recent years. This isn’t a brand new idea, and has actually been more common on British stages than American ones, with Chariots of Fire, The Shawshank Redemption, Cool Hand Luke and The Ladykillers among the examples. But when British exemplars have crossed the Atlantic, they haven’t set Broadway afire, with Festen and Elling being blink-and-you-missed-them failures. The Graduate ran for a year, but it closed more than 12 years ago.
Misery, now on Broadway in a different version than the UK one in the early 1990s, has held its own in the face of negative notices, buoyed no doubt by the Broadway debut of Bruce Willis, but its fortunes have been declining. Breakfast at Tiffany’s and A Time To Kill both closed particularly fast.
Experts will be quick to note that in many cases, the movie-to-play adaptations are often based on an original book from which the film and play have been adapted separately. But it’s usually the movie’s success and familiarity that prompts the theatrical version. The same impulse that has driven the trend for musical adaptations of movies seems to be behind these play efforts, with movie companies eager to exploit even properties that perhaps don’t lend themselves to musicalisation.
The problem is that drama into drama efforts often aren’t transformative enough to make the new stage versions compelling. When assembling songs into a story (like Mamma Mia!) or adding songs to one (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), there is inevitably a change in the source material. But the play into play paradigm doesn’t necessarily undergo the same kind of revision and rethinking – even though it’s essential to making great theatre. And of course without fundamental change, the inevitable comparisons are easier to make.
The best film into stage adaptations (The Lion King, Once) create something that is an altogether new way of looking at the preceding work. If film companies’ only goal is to generate more income from existing material, and to trade on our affection for it, then this incipient genre may well prove an unsatisfying one, as so many jukebox musicals and movie-to-musical adaptations have been before.
Having also produced Misery, Warner Bros’ choice of Guirgis is a heartening one, particularly if they give him room to let his own imagination and language truly create a new work for the stage, rather than a photocopy. While I never want to see them lured away for long from original work, I can only imagine what artists like Annie Baker, Anne Washburn, Stephen Karam, Suzan-Lori Parks, Mike Lew, and Tarrell Alvin McCraney could do with some classic and – better still – not-so-classic films. But only if it interests them creatively – not just for the money.
This essay originally appeared in The Stage, under a slightly different title.
In case you haven’t heard, Caucasian actors are being victimized by casting practices at the television networks. They, after holding primacy on screen since the earliest days of television, may – horrors! – have a few less opportunities to secure roles in new television series this year because of an effort by the networks to produce stories about characters who may not be Caucasian and to seek more actors of color for television series for roles that may not have been written with actors of color in mind.
The article – or is it an essay, or perhaps an op-ed – attempts to tread a careful line. Launching with that equivocating headline, it’s quick to bring out a positive view of the casting practices it asserts are underway:
“The change is welcomed by talent agents who no longer have to call casting directors and ask them if they would possibly consider an ethnic actor for a part, knowing they would most likely be rejected. “I feel that the tide has turned,” one agent said. “I can pitch any actor for any role, and I think that’s good.”
But Andreeva immediately undercuts that view with an opposing perspective, in this case not attributed to anyone, even anonymously, so presumably the view of Andreeva herself:
“But, as is the case with any sea change, the pendulum might have swung a bit too far in the opposite direction. Instead of opening the field for actors of any race to compete for any role in a color-blind manner, there has been a significant number of parts designated as ethnic this year, making them off-limits for Caucasian actors, some agents signal.”
Andreeva follows up her opinion by citing two more unnamed talent agents (or is it a single person quoted twice) invoking stories about how white actors are being marginalized by the new practice.
“Basically 50% of the roles in a pilot have to be ethnic, and the mandate goes all the way down to guest parts,” one talent representative said.
“In one instance, after a number of actors of different ethnicities tested for two roles in a pilot this year, two Caucasian actors ended up being the top choices for the two remaining regular parts. However, because of a mandate from the studio and network, one of the roles had to diverse, so the pilot could only cast one of the top choices and pass on the other to fulfill the ethnic quota. “They need to say the best man or woman wins,” one rep suggested.”
Andreeva goes on to note both multiple shows where the original Caucasian protagonists have been changed to black, as well as true-life stories about Caucasians which have been adapted to star or include actors of color. Indeed, in the case of Broad Squad, a show about the first women to graduate from Boston’s police academy in 1972, Andreeva helpfully shows us a photo of that all-Caucasian class alongside her observation that the show’s pilot features a racial mix that more closely matches Boston’s current racial makeup today. In doing so, she’s invoking the historical inequality of the races 40+ years ago in order to question the portrayal of racial diversification today. The show isn’t a documentary.
In the false balance that runs through the article, in her 14th paragraph of 19, Andreeva gives with one hand, only to snatch away a positive view of the situation immediately thereafter:
“A lot of what is happening right now is long overdue. The TV and film superhero ranks have been overly white for too long, workplace shows should be diverse to reflect workplace in real America, and ethnic actors should get a chance to play more than the proverbial best friend or boss.
“But replacing one set of rigid rules with another by imposing a quota of ethnic talent on each show might not be the answer.”
By invoking “quotas” when talking about Caucasian job losses (which she has in no way demonstrated to actually be the case beyond the statements of two anonymous figures), Andreeva is employing the sort of language that in ugly political races is referred to as a “dog whistle,” not necessarily perceptible to the average reader, but red meat to those who secretly – or not so secretly – harbor reactionary, questionable racial attitudes and bemoan the loss of absolute Caucasian primacy in America.
Through my role at the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts, I can attest to the fact that television networks are absolutely seeking to diversify the stories they tell. In our nearly 30 year history of advocating for diversity in race, culture and ethnicity in film, television and theatre, we’re often consulted on these issues, and have been continuously by the networks and other entertainment sources. They haven’t advised us of any quotas they’re trying to fill, but they’re also not solely focused on race; the number of calls seeking to tap our database of artists with disabilities has also seen a marked increase.
Andreeva treats efforts at diversity as a trend, a response to successful shows with actors of color in lead roles (How To Get Away With Murder), and shows that focus on stories about non-Caucasian principals (Empire, Black-ish, Fresh Off The Boat). To be sure, no one can accuse the entertainment industry of not seeking to recreate success through imitation, but their commitment to diversity seems to go deeper than that. Yet Andreeva doesn’t fully address to economic imperative of doing so: the fact that America is on a rapidly accelerating pace towards seeing Caucasians as only 50% of the population within the next 30 years. The networks are, for once, ahead of the curve, rather than following it.
Andreeva also fails to note that, with the expansion of scripted series on cable and on streaming services, there are more television series now than ever before, presumably resulting in more acting jobs than we would have seen only 30 years ago when the networks still retained their dominance. So it’s not hard to extrapolate – and I freely admit I’m guessing here – that on a net basis, Caucasian actors aren’t losing work, but that in an expanded marketplace, actors of color are now afforded more opportunities than before because there’s increased “capacity.” Additionally, is she unaware of the ingrained inequality of the entertainment industry, so recently on display through the Academy Award nominations?
Those of us who believe that diversity, that normalization, in the entertainment industry is essential and overdue may hear “dog whistle” language just as loudly as those it’s designed to reach. That’s why Andreeva’s article, with its false balance, can’t be given a pass in the daily avalanche of Internet content. We’re still a long way from seeing the reality of America’s multiculturalism fairly represented on TV, or on film or in theatre. So when we hear a whistle, we have to sound the alarm.
Howard Sherman is Senior Strategy Consultant at the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.
Perhaps you’re unaware of it, but there’s an arts education film up for an Oscar this year. And no, I’m not referring to something in the documentary short subject category, but rather a Best Picture nominee.
But what of Whiplash the arts education film? After all, we don’t get all that many, and when we do, they tend to be syrupy uplift pictures like Mr. Holland’s Opus or Music of the Heart. Since Whiplash can’t possibly be accused of being saccharine, why isn’t its musical didacticism being discussed in arts circles?
For anyone working in or teaching the arts, the answer is probably simple: it’s a harsh film in which we see the ugly side of musical monomania, a depiction of college level arts education that would probably send any prospective student running in the opposite direction from a conservatory program. But I’d like to suggest that while music is the movie’s métier, it’s really not about the arts at all, insofar as it mirrors or exists in relation to any cinematic antecedent. Whiplash is, first and foremost, a sports movie-military movie hybrid.
Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons in Whiplash
Made for only $3 million, Whiplash has stripped its story to the bare essentials, perhaps for budget reasons, or perhaps solely to focus our attention on a handful of bravura scenes. While it establishes our hero’s passion for music, it spends the majority of its first two acts showing us how he beats his way into an elite music ensemble – and then proceeds to have his hands and emotions beaten to a pulp by a teacher who is music educator as drill sergeant, a hard-ass, perhaps heartless, taskmaster whose idea of teaching seems based in ridicule and torment rather than actual training. While it’s likely that Teller’s character has other teachers and classes, they’re all relegated to the level of incidental or absent in favor of scenes of solo practice or ensemble totalitarianism under the baton of Simmons.
Richard Gere and Louis Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman
We’ve seen the drill sergeant in countless films – Burt Lancaster in From Here To Eternity, Louis Gossett Jr. in An Officer and A Gentleman, and R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket to name three (with only the last suggesting that the drill sergeant methods might not be all they’re cracked up to be). You could also add Robert Duvall’s The Great Santini into this mix, especially for the scene where he bounces a basketball off of his son’s forehead. We’re meant to wonder whether these men are psychotic or uniquely skilled “builders of character” and that’s the same model that’s in place in Whiplash. They have their equivalents in the average sports movie – think of Gene Hackman in Hoosiers, trying to reclaim his stature after punching a kid at a prior job – and the link between sports movie, military movie and Whiplash becomes fairly obvious. They all share the idea of growth through humiliation.
Now to be clear, I really liked Whiplash as a film, and I’m not inclined to think that it’s representative of arts, or specifically music, education in any way, nor do I think it should be. It’s just one story, probably no more accurate about jazz than Smash was about the theatre, and I liked it for the two lead performances, the steadily rising tension between those characters, and because it was, at least, a film that sought to take the arts with a degree of seriousness – although I bridled quite a bit at the cruelty in the name of something meant to be emotionally resonant and I was troubled by its abject failure of the Bechdel Test or any meaningful depiction of diversity. Without giving away anything, I did think its third act, while thrilling, was ultimately preposterous in its plotting.
I happen to have a deep antipathy for stories with heroic but brutal coaches or brutal but tough-loving drill sergeants; often as not, I find myself deeply angry after watching stories in those genres, since I would never have been able to function in the face of such dehumanizing treatment, and always question whether it’s necessary or even morally right. Despite using that same template, I was able to stay with Whiplash because, while I have seen my share of angry directors and conductors in my day, I’ve never encountered such relentless ugliness in the arts.
The film did force me to review my own musical training, because while I did act in high school and college, I had absolutely no theatre education, but I did dabble with musical instruments. Disregarding compulsory class-wide forays into the recorder and its more simplistic forerunner the flutophone, I took cello lessons in elementary school for what now seems like all of three weeks and took private guitar lessons for perhaps a year and a half in junior high. Much as I loved music, I demonstrated no particular skill on any of these instruments but revealed my inability to submit to anything resembling regular practice. I continued to play the guitar, badly, for fun, for many years, but I haven’t picked one up in any meaningful way in about a decade.
Would I have benefited from a J.K. Simmons in my life? Might I have mastered the guitar – or the piano, as my mother dearly wished – if there had been someone to really push me? I tend to think not, because the drill sergeant as music teacher might have not only turned me away from the instrument, but from music itself, and that would have been a shame, since (recorded) music remains a balm for me in times of stress or sadness. But might I have developed a skill had I been under the guidance of someone who wasn’t content to let me practice lackadaisically or walk away after a brief attempt? That we’ll never know.
As for Whiplash? Good movie, but a work of fiction, more spare than Mr. Holland’s Opus, but equally manipulative. And for god’s sake, if you are thinking of taking up music, or any arts training, or you have a child who shows aptitude and interest, I strong suggest you approach it not as an arts movie, a sports movie or a military movie. At that point, consider it a horror film – as you watch it, keep repeating: it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie. At least I hope it is.
Almost as quickly as the Into The Woods trailer appeared, my social media feeds were filled with an anguished refrain: where are the songs? Yes, the core audience felt betrayed, even though I suspect every person who was moved to write already knows the score by heart.
What those of us who love theatre in general, musicals in particular, and Sondheim most of all have to remember is that, sadly, we are not representative of the majority of moviegoers, and movie marketers have to throw a wide net. Those of us who flock to watch the trailer of Into The Woods are already committed to seeing it, no matter how much we may want to grouse about it. The film studios are trying to reach a much wider crowd, for whom the sight of stars singing may be off-putting, strange as such a thought may be to those of us who are ready to belt out a show tune at the slighted prompting. It’s also possible that we’ll get a more representative trailer as the film draws closer.
Minimizing the musical theatre connection has certainly been true for movie musicals for some time. It’s almost as though marketers are trying to slip the fact that people sing past potential audiences. Unlike Into The Woods, which does seem more like a moody tour of the film’s production design than anything, music is prominently featured in countless trailers, even for non-musical films, and sometimes with music that isn’t ever heard in the film. But when it comes to seeing people sing, let’s keep that quiet, shall we? We can hear singing in trailers, and see people moving their lips, but not in sync. Take a look at the trailer for Hairspray as an example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ53mRO80c0
Dancing, apparently, isn’t so problematic. The Dancing with the Stars effect has probably only increased its appeal. Another example is Mamma Mia! which looked as if it was a romantic comedy with a bunch of Abba songs on the soundtrack, rather than a story told using Abba songs. One can understand why they wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see and hear Pierce Brosnan warbling, but the sight of master thespian Meryl Streep going to town on some Swedish pop might have added some appeal in its very incongruity.
Maybe Paramount knew the theatre purists were already on edge when they cut the trailer for Sweeney Todd, given the relative musical inexperience of the main cast (which many feel lived down to their expectations), which keeps vocals to a minimum. Despite that, more than most musical trailers, Sweeney actually gave us a real look at a bit of a song, “Epiphany,” spoke-sung by Johnny Depp (although we were halfway through the trailer before it was deployed). However that could easily be recognized as a fantasy sequence and seemingly not the style of the whole film. Overall the trailer hewed closer to the Hammer Films homage that director Tim Burton had appropriated for the Grand Guignol tale, and maybe a few Fangoria devotees were lured into a musical they’d have avoided otherwise.
It’s not that we don’t get a few glimpses of people singing in some trailers, but in the quick-cut style that brings them flash and energy, there is a certain “blink or you’ll miss it” quality, even when the making of music is central to the plot, as in the Dreamgirls trailer, where one would think performance footage of a superstar like Beyoncé would actually be a plus.
The incongruity of Eddie Murphy singing may be why we saw a bit of exactly that in Dreamgirls, and the same rationale may have applied to Depp in Sweeney, as well as Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellwger as the merry murderesses in the trailer of Chicago. For Zellweger, the singing was new; for Zeta-Jones it was part of her professional background, but before she became a star. Perhaps singing from people we least expect to sing has marketing value.
Mind you, this fear extends to movies that aren’t musicals but tell musical stories and in which the main characters are known to us precisely because they’re singers. The flash of the trailer for the just-released Get On Up, about James Brown, gives us glimpses of his energetic performances and we hear his music along with narration and dialogue, but lips actually moving along with the songs go largely unseen. Of course, given the subterfuge with which actual musicals are being marketed, I can’t help but wonder whether some audiences see this and think, “Uh, I dunno. I think they’re trying to slip one of those durned musicals by us.”
As much as we purists might be desperate to see musical scenes as quickly as possible, we can be fairly sure that the film itself will be a musical, even if it has been adapted and altered from its stage version. The example of Irma la Douce, one of the very few musicals to be adapted for the screen without the songs, is unlikely to recur.
So what about original musicals for the screen? To be fair, original live action film tuners are scarce, except for animation, where, since Disney’s The Little Mermaid, a mini-song score seems de rigeur. But is that a selling point? On the basis of the trailer for Frozen, which ultimately drilled Idinia Menzel’s “Let It Go” into the brains of millions of kids and their parents worldwide, even Disney wasn’t sure that the massively successful score was going to bring in the crowd. The film seemed to be the story of one girl, one boy and one talking snowman. However, to be fair, even though they hid it, the word got out about the exceptional songs.
The trailer for Les Miserables did show us Anne Hathaway as the doomed Fantine singing “I Dreamed A Dream,” in fact it’s all we hear as we watch that trailer – all of the other visuals that are laid over it could easily come from a non-musical. No warbling Wolverine here. Perhaps, to the handful of people in the world who have managed to escape any knowledge of the stage musical, this one song could be an isolated case. But this trailer more than any demonstrates the marketing tactic that prevails: don’t make it look too much like a musical in the hope of capturing some people who may not like musicals, and as for the core audience, we’ll throw ‘em a bone.
I wish I could recall which Twitter wit I read who compared movie trailers without songs to foreign film trailers without dialogue, since I would like to credit them for that very astute observation. But it’s worth noting that foreign films are financed and produced abroad, then picked up for distribution over here; the Hollywood studios shoulder vastly greater risk when they release musicals. While I’m fairly grouchy about the studios these days, with the endless remakes, sequels and films from dystopian young adult novels (thanks Mark Harris for that), I really am willing to give them a lot of leeway on musicals, to a degree on how they adapt them, but certainly on how they sell them. For perspective: if a musical sells 600,000 tickets in a year, it’s a smash; if a movie musical sells 600,000 tickets in its first week, it’s a disappointment. And after all, if a trailer whets our appetite for a movie musical, we can always fire up the iPod, or our Sondheim channel, and listen and sing along to our heart’s content until the movie comes out. After all, haven’t we been doing that already?
Incidentally, we’re getting two musicals this Christmas. In addition to Into The Woods, everybody’s favorite orphan is back, and on the basis of the trailer, while it’s hard to know what’s been done with the story and most of the score, at least we know it will still be a hard knock life tomorrow, though we may not be entirely sure of who’s singing.
Perhaps you knew it as a place to cool off, use the bathroom or grab some free wi-fi. You may have passed through it on your way to an office in the building known variously as 1560 Broadway, 165 West 46th Street, or the Equity Building, for which it has been a lobby while construction shut down the regular side street entrance. I’m referring to the Times Square Visitors Center, which closed its doors suddenly three weeks ago.
In recent years, it has hosted meetings and events, allowed tourists a close up look at one of the Waterford crystal New Year’s Eve balls, and had a small exhibition of Broadway memorabilia. But if you looked beyond that, you could see the vestiges of the intimate Embassy Theatre, a movie house which opened in the pre-sound era of 1925, a bit ahead of many of the grand movie palaces that were about to proliferate. Landmarked in 1987, it was the smallest of the more than 300 theatres designed by Arthur Lamb. Of particular note is that it was built as a high-end theatre for women, with an all-female staff.
Throughout its days as the Visitors Center, from 1998 to 2014, its exquisite details remained intact, if you looked beyond the tourism information booth, the endlessly replayed newsreel highlights clips, the faux peep show and the glowing ball in the center of the space. Given its landmark status, these features should remain preserved, even as the space is converted, reportedly, into a retail opportunity of some kind. Just in case some of the features are protected but obscured in the space’s newest incarnation, here’s a small selection of photos from this lovely gem, taken just after it was closed to the general public and sat in semi-darkness, while those of us who worked above passed through it for a few more days.
When I saw it for the first time last week, I was really struck by the poster for the West End debut of the musical Urinetown. Why? Because it didn’t look like a theatre poster. It looked like a movie poster.
In point of fact, it looked to a certain degree like the poster for Star Trek: Into Darkness, which owed a debt to the poster for The Dark Knight Rises. Many movie posters are endlessly iterative and imitative, as they want to subtly remind you of other successful films in the same genre. I give points to Urinetown UK for evoking dark futures with humanity under threat – completely consistent with the world conjured in the show. Equally apt, it counters the darkness by placing a young attractive couple, reaching for a drop of water, at the center of a spaghetti-tangle of (empty) pipes, and they added a tagline: “A drop of hope can change the world.”
It has taken almost a decade since Urinetown’s Broadway closing for it to reach England, so the opportunity to capitalize on Broadway buzz has long since faded, That certainly suggests one reason why the graphic bears no relationship to the Broadway marketing material, unlike The Producers, The Book of Mormon, Jersey Boys and so many other US to UK transfers. That works in two directions as well, since Mamma Mia! and Matilda ads look the same in both countries, having started in London.
As I pondered the Urinetown UK art, it struck me that one reason the vast majority of theatre ad design looks so different from movie ad design is that while a movie is trying to simply drive sales and pique interest, theatre designs, more often than not, are trying to build a brand. If theatre images emphasize a star, they could be undermining a long run, since eventually stars leave; movies have no such problem. Think of the image of Les Mis’ Cosette: as the show ran and ran, the image became so ubiquitous that they could run ads without the show’s title and you would know what the ad was for. Producer Cameron Mackintosh’s team even could play with the image, running variations on Cosette that honored holidays or welcomed other shows to Broadway. And it was hardly the only show to do that: think of the Phantom’s mask, the eyes of Cats, the Chagall-esque Fiddler on the Roof, Larry Kert running after Carol Lawrence for West Side Story (though that would eventually be supplanted by Saul Bass’ fire escape logo for the film). Colleges, high schools and community theatres use knock-offs of these designs for years and years.
As I’ve said, it’s the lapse in time that has afforded Urinetown UK the chance to go in another direction, since given the relative age of the show, it doesn’t undermine a worldwide branding effort. The other reason they have that opportunity: in my opinion, the original Urinetown graphic never became iconic. Do you remember it? Perhaps only vaguely, and I suggest that’s because it was only a type treatment, as opposed to an image, a true logo, a brand.
To digress for a moment: when I worked at Hartford Stage, one of my responsibilities was to work with a range of local designers to secure pro bono graphic designs for each of our shows. In addition to keeping expenses down, it insured that each show would have its own feel and look, with the ads held together by a very solid, strong and consistently utilized company logo. In this process, the artistic director had only one edict – there must be some representation of the human in every graphic. He believed that people are at the center of theatre, that audiences come to watch people on stage, and so the human element – sometimes nothing more than an eye or a hand – was a reminder of the unique nature of live theatre. In hindsight, thinking back over 50 shows, I believe he was right and I’ve advocated for this approach ever since. To be fair, not every design was perfect, and some worked better as art than as marketing, but the best remain those that followed the artistic director’s dictum. If you think of great theatre graphics, I’d be willing to bet that you’ll find the majority do so as well. That’s why, at least in my estimation, there’s not a graphic image from the Broadway Urinetown that lingers in memory.
But turning back to Urinetown UK, as I have often this week, I continue to applaud the complexity and sophistication of its imagery, which come to think of it also recalls that used for Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. I was so intrigued, that I took the time to watch a three-minute promo video for the show and, to be honest, it ended up showing me what I think is missing from the Urinetown campaign. A barrage of words flew at me from a variety of speakers, all describing the experience of the show: epic, wackadoo, eco-friendly, apocalyptic, daring, exciting, entertainment, political, adventurous and satirical wit. Director Jamie Lloyd said he hoped it would advance “conversations about climate change, environmental disaster, the moral responsibility of big business.”
But looking at the poster and watching this video, I realized that something has been, if not forgotten, downplayed for this Urinetown, at least as I know the show.
It’s very, very funny. I laughed a lot.
Not only that, it is especially funny to those who know and love musicals, since it’s “satirical wit” is focused, in part, on previous, iconic musicals.
Now if it is Lloyd’s intention to lean heavily on the show’s Brechtian overtones and downplay the humor, then you can probably ignore everything from here on in. But if Urinetown UK– with all of its topical, political and social overtones – is to retain its irreverent take on both a world without water and its stance as a love letter to musical comedy, then I’d urge the powers that be to tweak the tone of their rhetoric and their imagery, lest they mislead their potential audience – and those who buy. Remember, you’re fighting a title that, for some, carries a whiff of something distasteful, even while it becomes a memorable point of distinction from most other musical theatre.
I’ve heard it said many times that if a show is a hit, its logo – whatever it is – looks brilliant. And perhaps in the long run, if there is in the long run, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But when you’re trying to set expectations and lure audiences, every communication is freighted with meaning (it can even effect the advance perception of critics who were previously unfamiliar with the material), and what I remember most of Urinetown was having a darned good time.
Oh, please. The headline is not a spoiler. More than 400 years after the play was written, “young doomed love” is the Romeo and Juliet brand, and I suspect that most anyone coming to see something with that title on it would actually be disappointed with a happy ending. True, they did such things in the 1800s, but it proved a passing phase.
Odds are that those kooky kids from Verona are dying somewhere in the world every night. However, movies about them, while not infrequent, only come along every so often. The newest appeared this past weekend and made a spectacular belly flop at the box office, averaging just over $1,100 per theatre, meaning that based on the average U.S. movie ticket price from 2012, about 136 people saw it per theatre between Friday and Sunday. A dud by any other name would smell as bad.
Some will say the film died due to lack of stars: Hallie Steinfeld was impeccable in True Grit but she didn’t become a teen queen as a result; Douglas Booth was entirely unknown to me, as were his prior film and TV credits. Ed Westwick brought some Gossip Girl capital as Tybalt, but apparently not enough; fine actors such as Damian Lewis, Stellan Skarsgard, Natascha McElhone and Paul Giamatti have been in some great movies, but no one buys tickets for R & J to see the adults, do they?
The fact is, while staying true to the R & J brand in storyline, period design and almost all things, the film’s producer and creator failed to attend to one of the world’s most powerful brands: William Shakespeare. That’s why their film seemed a folly as soon as we started hearing snippets of airy language that sounded old-timey but not Shakespearean in the trailers, and accelerated when screenwriter Julian Fellowes, ostensibly promoting the film, pompously informed us mere mortals that most people can’t understand Shakespeare and that thanks to his own highly expensive education, he was well suited to dumb down old Will for the rest of us. Yes, this new R & J offered up the sure-fire marketing lure of simplified language for all the dolts who like their Shakespeare de-caf.
A Klingon Shakespeare buff
To be fair, only a handful of countries of the world actually hear Shakespeare in its original language; he is a foreign playwright on most continents and so we don’t know what is actually being spoken in countless productions. His stories take priority, not the precise words. This gives weight to a brilliant joke in Star Trek VI when an alien character urges that Shakespeare is best heard “in the original Klingon.” But it is an act of perversity to translate Shakespeare from English to English, one even odder than English language operas in North America that still feel compelled to provide supertitles.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the Shakespeare brand carries a mixed message. On the one hand: greatest playwright in history, profound insights, timeless plots, stunning language. On the other: the language does in fact stun some people into incomprehension, and years of bad English teachers and ill-advised productions have made Shakespeare seem a daunting experience for so many who might enjoy his work if they weren’t so afraid of it.
I am not Shakespeare, nor was meant to be.
Even though this new R & J film wasn’t a studio production, it summons visions of pitch meetings out of What Makes Sammy Run: “I’m giving you the straight dope. Shakespeare – great story man, little wordy though, language a little dusty. Here’s what we do: we keep absolutely everything that makes his stuff sell year after century, but we put it in language everyone can understand. But let’s keep it British. Maybe we can get that Downton Abbey guy to do a rewrite.”
The result was a product which tried to exploit the Shakespeare brand at the same time as it was draining it of its appeal. For people who find the word Shakespeare daunting, just the mention of his name can be a a turn-off; for those whose hearts flutter when they hear it, bowdlerizing the language eliminates any interest in seeing it. That’s not to suggest that reinventions of Shakespeare aren’t fair game: it’s been done in everything from Joe Macbeth to West Side Story to 10 Things I Hate About You. Even Sons of Anarchy is rooted in Hamlet. Heck, in Washington DC, there’s the Synetic Theatre, which is acclaimed for wordless Shakespeare. But Synetic isn’t foolish enough to sell their work as the same old Will and just get by with a program insert saying,” At this evening’s performance, the actors will be mute.”
I’m no Shakespeare scholar any more than I am a movie box office prognosticator, but having seen two stage Romeo and Juliets in the past two weeks, I admit to schadenfreude at the film’s failure, since it was such a foolish business move from the moment Fellowes’ agent got the call (surely after Tom Stoppard fell over laughing) and because I could have called it the moment that first trailer came to light. Our lovers will live to die another day on stage and screen; the IBDB alerts me to a Romeo and Juliet in Harlem due out next year. Using the original language. As for this version, its failure is no tragedy – and certainly not a Shakespearean one.
Yes, I’m serious about the headline. I feel your scorn, but before your jerking knee sends you to the orthopedist, let me get right to the point.
There are any number of things one can object to in the Fast & Furious movies: the crudely drawn characters, the wooden acting, the endless (albeit largely bloodless) violence, the reckless driving, the disregard for the rule of law, the recurrent crashing cars, the nonsensical plots, the impossible (digitally created) stunts. I could go on.
But there’s one major aspect of this popular series that’s being increasingly looked at as a reason for its success, and it’s one to be admired: the thoroughly integrated, multinational cast.
We can say that it’s Hollywood’s crass way of appealing to every possible demographic and market, both domestic and foreign, and I suspect that’s true. But the net result is a series of films in which race isn’t a major issue – and loyalty, camaraderie and self-made families are, regardless of skin color.
Sure, the nominal stars of the films are the bland white Paul Walker alongside burly Vin Diesel, who lays claim to “ambiguous ethnicity” and whose character is identified as Italian American. But look at the group surrounding them: Michelle Rodriguez (Latina, from Texas by way of the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico), Tyrese Gibson (African American from LA), Chris “Ludacris” Bridges (African American and Native American from Illinois), Elsa Pataky (Spanish), Sung Kang (Korean American originally from Georgia), Gal Gadot (Israeli) and Dwayne Johnson (from California, of Canadian and Samoan heritage). It’s not the U.N. (the villains are predominantly British, with one hulking Dane thrown in for good measure), but it is a melting pot. The director of the most recent films in the series is, not so incidentally, Taiwanese.
How many stage events can lay claim to this kind of diversity? Do we see this in our orchestras, our dance troupes, our stage productions? If we have to provide models in order to promote acceptance, and indeed our ongoing health as a field, are the Fast & Furious flicks leading the way in racial equality, under the cover of a mass entertainment that we might prefer to disdain?
And even though almost every character is strikingly attractive, both male and female, the usual gender barriers don’t apply. We might well be troubled by the gunplay and the hand-to-hand combat, but no one can say that the films are particularly sexist, since the women are equal (and often victorious) combatants, while the men take time out in the most recent film to express deep caring for a newborn child, to the extent their acting chops permit.
Don’t read too deeply into these movies – they’re all surface. But since there will always be potboilers and popcorn flicks, isn’t it remarkable to find ones that are ahead of the curve on race relations in a way that many arts groups can’t consistently demonstrate. Might not this approach ultimately serve our own bottom lines, as well as our loftier ambitions? I’m not advocating a Fast & Furious musical (dear god, no), but rather the reinforcement our own commitment to multiracial stories, colorblind casting and other initiatives, because we’ve still got a long way to go and our futures depend on a true embrace of multi-culturalism.
As Fast & Furious 7 is already in production, I can only hope that by the time number 8 roars in our direction, it will feature gay and lesbian characters as well among our band of heroes, as the series’ popularity enables it to integrate ever more inclusivity into its midst, among the explosions and wrecks. Even market-driven ensemble shoot ‘em ups need to grow up in that respect as well.
Oh, and by the way, I’ve seen four of the six films: the first was OK, the second was dull, I skipped 3 and 4, but the last two were absolute hoots. If you like that sort of thing.
While we’re told Will experiences bouts of pain that causes him to scream in anguish, he faces nothing so agonizing on screen. Yes, we do see him fighting off pneumonia, but his other “challenges” in the film amount to: 1) having to have his chair lifted out of the mud by three passing burlymen because Louisa is an idiot, 2) grappling with the discomfort of a clothing sales tag that remains in his collar, and 3) having Louisa ladle hot soup into his lap. These are all played for laughs, and the last glosses over the possibility that while Will may not feel it, he may have sustained a burn. All of this is representative of the film’s effort to use disability as a plot device, without ever doing more than skimming the surface, oh so politely, of life with disability.
