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With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for July, 2012

‘Follies’: sprucing up Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 masterpiece

Tuesday, July 31, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

The big news in Broadway musical fan circles this week is the release of a new limited edition CD of the original cast album of “Follies,” the 1971 show that Stephen Sondheim did with co-directors Harold Prince and Michael Bennett and book writer James Goldman.

The original production has become legendary, and with good reason. It was the peak effort of the decade-long collaboration between Sondheim and Prince that resulted in “Company,” “A Little Night Music” and “Sweeney Todd” (they also came up with “Pacific Overtures” and “Merrilly We Roll Along” in the years between 1970 and 1981).

I was lucky enough to be on a college break in Manhattan during the winter of 1971 and scored a ticket to a preview of “Follies.” I had seen “Company” and loved it the previous fall, but the ambition and the scale of “Follies” blew me away. It was the only show I show during that period that had the same excitement as the ground-breaking movies that came out in the 1960s.

Prince and Sondheim seemed to be as much inspired by Fellini and other film directors as they were by their Broadway predecessors. With ghosts wandering through otherwise “realistic” contemporary scenes and spectacular vaudeville flashbacks “Follies” played a bit like a stage version of “Juliet of the Spirits.”

It was the most expensive musical ever produced on Broadway up to that time — an $800,000 budget — and the attempt to chart the decline of American show business and the “American dream” in the years between World War II and 1970 was electrifying as staged by Prince (and co-director Bennett) and as presented in music by Sondheim.

There have been two Broadway revivals of “Follies” in recent years, but neither of them came close to the 1971 original, which in addition to the score and the direction had spectacular set design by Boris Aronson and extraordinary costumes by Florence Klotz. The designers had to present two different eras on stage — the 1940s and the early 1970s — and they succeeded brilliantly.

“Follies” ran for a year but lost money because it was so expensive to run. Harold Prince made so many right choices on the show that his decision to have the album recorded by Capitol Records rather than Columbia (which had done “Company” the previous year and always did the best cast albums) turned out to be disastrous.

The record label refused to record the two-album set that was necessary to capture all of the music in the show, so songs were cut entirely and others trimmed to fit on one LP. Adding insult to injury was a rushed production of the album that resulted in an inferior sound mix that has pained fans of Sondheim for the past 40 years.

Bruce Kimmel of the Kritzerland limited edition show and movie label saw the original production and like most other fans bemoaned the inferior sound of the LP and its subsequent CD reissues. But after doing successful remixes and remasterings of two other flawed cast albums from the same era — “Promises, Promises” and “Sugar” — the producer decided to see if the original master recordings of “Follies” were still available.

The tapes were in the Capitol archives, Kimmel did a test remix of one number, was pleased with the improved quality, and moved forward with a full restoration of “Follies.”

The CDs shipped last week and I am happy to report that the results are wonderful. The cuts made in the score are still unfortunate, but the sound quality has been vastly improved, giving the vocal work of stars Dorothy Collins and Alexis Smith a whole new dimension.

The downside of Kimmel’s business is that the major recording companies only allow him to produce limited editions of his restorations and the more popular titles tend to sell out quickly. Kimmel reported on his Facebook page last week that only about 100 copies of the 1,500 copy release are still available.

(For more information on the new “Follies” CD and Bruce Kimmel’s terrific backlist go to www.kritzerland.com)

‘Bond Girl’: low aspirations in Wall Street chick lit novel

Monday, July 30, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

When Erin Duffy’s debut novel “Bond Girl” (William Morrow) was published last winter, it got high marks from the Entertainment Weekly reviewer and a strong blurb from one of my favorite novelists, Adriana Trigiani.

A romantic comedy set on Wall Street around the time of the 2008 crash — written by an insider — sounded irresistible, so when the paperback came out recently I grabbed it.

Beyond the great title, and a few details of life on “the Street,” however, I found the book to be terribly disappointing.

“Bond Girl” is never boring, but the heroine Alex Garrett is hard to care about because her workplace is presented so unappetizingly and the “romantic” subplot makes Alex look stupid.

One of the quotes from a positive review of “Bond Girl” on the paperback edition cites the unusual setting for a “chick lit” novel and the fact that all of the titles in this genre need not be about the publishing industry and other “glamor” professions.

I agree that many of the Manhattan career women books work the same narrow turf, but you can’t discount the “aspirational” qualities in this genre. A lot of young women (and men) read these stories and dream about becoming a writer or an editor or a TV producer the same way that lots of baby boomer moviegoers in the 1970s wished they would one day live in the sophisticated worlds of “Manhattan” or “An Unmarried Woman.”

An almost deal-breaking problem I had with “Bond Girl” is that Alex’s job in a brokerage firm sounds horrendous and as one of the lone women on the bond-trading floor she is the object of unrelenting sexism that makes her seem to be crazy to want to work with (and for) these neanderthals (most of whom call her “Girlie”).

I kept waiting for Alex to get to a better place at Cromwell Pierce — to justify all of the crap she has to put up with from the men — but it never happens. The narrative stalls out and our heroine starts to look like a dope who has joined a fraternity where her hazing will never end.

(The illustration that Jimmy Geigerich did for a Bloomberg Business review of a non-fiction book about women battling men on Wall Street — below — might have been a more accurate piece of art for the dustjacket than the standard shoe fetish shot.)

The work place unpleasantness is made even worse by the pitiful relationship Alex forms with handsome co-worker Will. Yes, she is right to be cautious and secretive about an office sexual affair, but when Will refuses to see her on weekends and Alex doesn’t question him about this, she looks willfully idiotic.

They’re going out on dates after work and having sex — for the better part of a year — and she doesn’t confront Will about never seeing her on a Saturday night or returning any weekend phone calls.

When the true nature of Will’s relationship with Alex is revealed — late in the novel — I can’t believe any reader will share her shock.

“Bond Girl” is a real puzzler — a beach book that I would have been tempted to toss in the ocean if I had read it at the shore.

‘Skidoo’: when the Hollywood old guard tried to get hip

Sunday, July 29, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

The Otto Preminger film “Skidoo” flopped upon opening in late 1968 and then became a minor cult film after it vanished in a way that few big budget Hollywood films ever do.

For more than 40 years, the picture was much sought after by bad movie cultists who had a hell of a time tracking it down.

“Skidoo” rarely turned up on television and it stayed off the video market even at the height of the VCR boom.

Everyone interested in movie lore heard about “Skidoo”s combination of LSD and Jackie Gleason and musical numbers by Harry Nilsson — along with a nightmarish ensemble that included Carol Channing, Groucho Marx, George Raft and Peter Lawford — but few had seen it.

Well, thanks to Olive Films “Skidoo” debuted on DVD last year and the bad news is that this is one of those famously terrible films that is more fun to talk about than to watch. It’s not so-bad-that-it’s-good in the vein of “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”; it’s just so bad as to be nearly unwatchable (like “Myra Breckinridge,” another film from the same period that didn’t get a legitimate video release for more than 30 years).

The director of “Skidoo,” Otto Preminger, was a member of the old guard who scored major hits from the 1940s through the mid-1960s but like such fellow pillars of the establishment as Stanley Kramer and Billy Wilder, Preminger’s clout began to drift away in the late 1960s as a result of such New Hollywood landmarks as “The Graduate” and “Bonnie & Clyde.”

Desperate to appear with-it, these dinosaurs made “topical” pictures that were hooted off the screen by the very small audiences who saw them. Stanley Kramer’s “R.P.M.” is perhaps the worst of the bunch — a 1970 college protest drama starring Ann-Margret as a campus radical (!)

“Skidoo” is bizarre enough to hold a viewer until the end — you don’t want to miss Carol Channing performing the title number in Sgt. Pepper-style duds with a chorus of Hollywood hippies — but the mixture of gangster comedy and LSD trip farce is painful to watch.

According to the Foster Hirsch biography of Preminger, Gleason loathed his director and it’s no wonder that he did — the star looks embarrassed by the movie around him and is subjected to a “trip” sequence that seems designed to make him look like a fool.

The only semi-redeeming feature of “Skidoo” is the song score by then-unknown Nilsson (six months later he would have a top ten hit with “Everybody’s Talkin’” from “Midnight Cowboy”). The songwriter contributed several hummable tunes and then the best sequence in the picture — the merciful closing credits which are all sung by Nilsson (from top-billed actors to the copyright information).

The quintessential New York City feminist baby boomer

Saturday, July 28, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Julie Salamon gave us what is probably the best book ever written about the production of a movie — “The Devil’s Candy” — and you can now read the paperback edition of her terrific 20111 glimpse into the New York theater scene of the past 40 years, “Wendy and the Lost Boys” (The Penguin Press).

The book is a biography of Pulitzer Prize-winner Wendy Wasserstein — she was named after the character in “Peter Pan” — but the late playwright had connections to so many key New York stage figures that it has a much broader scope than you might think.

After fending off pressure from her upper middle class Brooklyn parents to become a lawyer, Wasserstein came into her own when she decided to attend the Yale School of Drama in the early 1970s.

Wasserstein arrived in one of the starriest groups of students ever to attend that institution — her peers included Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, and Christopher Durang.

The writer was frustrated at Yale because Dean Robert Brustein didn’t really like her work — she was too funny and warm and slick — but Wasserstein got a big boost when “Uncommon Women and Others” was chosen by the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford.

The play was the hit of the O’Neill summer of 1977 — with a cast of semi-unknowns on the way up that included Swoosie Kurtz — and it quickly moved into New York for an acclaimed off-Broadway run and then was taped for the PBS “Theater in America” series. Meryl Streep appeared in the TV special, along with Jill Eikenberry and Kurtz.

Wasserstein’s tale of a group of baby boomer Mount Holyoke grads looking back at their college days five years earlier struck a chord with audiences in their late 20s and the writer would spend the rest of career charting her generation’s foibles in plays like “The Heidi Chronicles” and “The Sisters Rosensweig.”

Salamon shows how the writer was able to deftly fictionalize her own life, but in a way that large audiences could identify with. She knew which aspects of her existence would strike universal chords.

The writer became affiliated with Playwrights Horizons just as it was being started by Andre Bishop — she followed him as he moved up the ladder to Lincoln Center Theater. Wasserstein’s two biggest hits, “Heidi ” and “Rosensweig” were produced by Bishop.

Wasserstein befriended Frank Rich just before he became the most powerful critic in the city at The New York Times. As Salamon points out, Rich never reviewed his friend’s plays, but with his backing she became one of the most frequently written about theater figures in The Times.

The playwright had a gift for friendship, but she often got into trouble when her many friends and acquaintances thought they were her “best friend.” “Lost Boys” shows us that even rich and famous people hold on to high school ideas of interpersonal relationships well into middle-age.

Wasserstein was never able to find Mr. Right and entered into a series of disastrous quasi-romantic relationships with men she knew were gay, including Bishop, Durang, and the costume designer William Ivey Long.

Things got even more tense with Wendy’s “lost boys” when she decided she wanted to have a baby via artificial insemination and asked some of these gay men to be sperm donors.

Wasserstein wrote the charming 1998 romantic comedy “The Object of My Affection” (below), in which a straight woman played by Jennifer Aniston dreamed of raising a child with a gay friend (Paul Rudd). Salamon shows us that the movie, like Wasserstein’s plays, was more than a little bit autobiographical.

The writer died tragically young — at the age of 56 — but not before making an indelible impression on audiences all over the country. Wasserstein was one of the very few writers of her generation who had her plays produced with great success on Broadway — she picked up the baton that Neil Simon had held for the previous 30 years.

‘Targets’: Peter Bogdanovich classic about movies & murder

Friday, July 27, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Like many movie buffs, when news of the the murders in a theater in Colorado broke last week, I thought about the classic 1968 low-budget thriller “Targets” which followed a young man on a shooting spree that included a stop at a drive-in theater.

Peter Bogdanovich made his directing debut with “Targets” and it remains a deeply unsettling experience all these years later, especially the sequence in which people in their cars watching a horror movie are picked off by a sniper who has hidden himself behind the giant screen.

Bogdanovich went on to an illustrious career as the director of “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” among others, and he has continued to do important work as a historian and cultural commentator.

Bogdanovich was interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter earlier this week about his debut film and what happened in Colorado.

“People go to a movie to have a good time, and they get killed. … It makes me sick that I made a movie about it,” he said.

“We made ‘Targets’ 44 years ago. It was based on something that happened in Texas, when that guy Charles Whitman shot a bunch of people after killing his mother and his wife… It was meant to be a cautionary fable. It was a way of saying the Boris Karloff kind of violence, the Victorian violence of the past, wasn’t as scary as the kind of random violence that we associate with a sniper — or what happened last weekend. That’s modern horror. At first, some of the people (at ‘The Dark Knight Rises’) thought it was part of the movie. That’s very telling.”

“Nothing’s changed (since ‘Targets’). Things have gotten worse when it comes to the control of guns…. I’m not sure what the solution is. I just know that the violence in this country is out of control. And the fact that guns are so easy to get is chilling. But nobody wants to blame the movies. Nobody wants to blame guns. And yet, it’s so easy to buy them and there are more murders in this country than anywhere else. I’m not too eloquent on the subject. I’m just too angry about it.”

Bogdanovich was a highly regarded New York critic in the early 1960s who became determined to crossover to filmmaking just as the French critics Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard did.

Bogdanovich moved west and hooked up with the B-moviemaker Roger Corman — who was famous for employing and exploiting ambitious young men such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

Corman put Bogdanovich to work as an assistant on several pictures and then came up with a unique challenge for the aspiring filmmaker. If Peter could figure out how to use some leftover footage from a Corman turkey called “The Terror” along with a few days’ work Corman was owed by veteran actor Boris Karloff, the B-movie producer would underwrite any picture that Bogdanovich could construct within those limitations.

The would-be director and his production designer wife Polly Platt pondered the challenge for a few days and came up with a brilliant solution — they would combine a story about an aging and increasingly irrelevant horror movie actor in Hollywood with a tale of a mentally unbalanced young man who goes on a killing spree with his collection of high-powered rifles.

The 1966 massacre at the University of Texas inspired Bogdanovich’s character, Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), who has a dead-end job and an aggressively bland family life.

One day, he flips, kills his family and then climbs onto a gas storage tank near an L.A. freeway and begins shooting people as they drive by.

Eventually, the two plot strands merge when the Karloff character goes to the premiere of his latest B-movie at the drive-in where Bobby has taken refuge in the screen tower. As the picture is projected, Bobby pokes a hole in the giant screen and begins to shoot moviegoers in their cars.

“Targets” managed to bring together Bogdanovich’s fascination with old movies and his unanswered questions about why “good boy” Whitman went on his Texas spree two years earlier.

Paramount thought “Targets” to be such an accomplished thriller that they bought the movie from Corman for national release. Unfortunately, right after they purchased the rights, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, and the timing could not have been more wrong for an emotionally cool examination of a mass gun killer.

The picture never received a wide release, but after Bogdanovich scored a huge success with “The Last Picture Show” three years later, revival houses started booking “Targets” and it built a sizeable cult audience.

Sadly, the taut little thriller has retained its relevance through five decades of random, unexplainable massacres just like the one it dramatizes in such harrowing detail.

‘Mandingo’: they don’t make them like this anymore (or do they?)

Thursday, July 26, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Because I was living not that far above the Mason-Dixon line in 1975, I never had a chance to see the widely panned but hugely successful Southern plantation sex-and-violence drama, “Mandingo.”

I remember reading horrible reviews — from Roger Ebert, among many others — that said Paramount Pictures and producer Dino DeLaurentiis were deeply irresponsible to put out such a lurid, borderline racist film about American history.

The movie was released in the middle of the “blaxploitation” boom of the 1970s when both independent filmmakers and the major studios started making films designed for the black audiences that patronized the huge urban center theaters that were being abandoned by the white moviegoers who were moving out to suburban areas.

When I would go home to Philadelphia for visits in the 1970s I saw how the gigantic theaters of my childhood, like the Fox and the Goldman in Center City, had switched over from mainstream fare to pictures such as “Slaughter” with Jim Brown and “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” starring Melvin Van Peebles. As urban redevelopment claimed the downtown movie places in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the blaxploitation cycle came to an end in favor of the multiplex mass release of pictures designed for everyone.

The black film boom was due to a combination of demographic changes in the big cities and urban real estate in flux, as well as a long-delayed acknowledgement by production companies that the African American audience had been ignored by Hollywood for decades.

“Mandingo” was probably not designed as a blaxploitation film — most of the films in that genre were low-budget quickies — but the way the film looked at slavery from the slaves’ point of view and the presentation of the truly vile white slave owner characters made the picture an enormous hit with black audiences two years before “Roots” aired on ABC.

I caught up with the movie recently due to reports that the forthcoming Quentin Tarantino picture “Django Unchained” (below) — set for release on Dec. 25 — was partially inspired by the director’s love of “Mandingo.”

Tarantino has always celebrated exploitation filmmaking and “Mandingo” certainly falls into that category. 37 years after its original release, the movie still has the power to shock and titillate with its sexually tinged view of the slave-master relationship in the South before the Civil War.

It is still rather bracing to watch a Hollywood picture in which the black characters are the oppressed heroes (and heroines) and the whites are — without exception — racist exploiters. I can only imagine the charged atmosphere in a packed urban theater during a 1975 screening of “Mandingo.”

I doubt that there has ever been a more repellant female leading role in a studio picture than the one that was assigned to Susan George in “Mandingo.” She is the debauched young woman who marries the heir (Perry King) to the plantation after she has been carrying on an incestuous relationship with her brother since their early teen years.

The new husband suspects there is something wrong with the woman, she begins drinking herself into a nightly stupor, and he finds comfort with one of his slaves (Brenda Sykes). The Susan George character gets her revenge by forcing the title character — the “fighting slave” played by former boxer Ken Norton — into bed with her. When she gets pregnant, all hell breaks loose.

“Mandingo” is packed with sex and violence that remains explicit even by 2012 standards. The melodramatic style often seems totally at odds with the serious historical matters that are being dramatized, but I could not stop watching the movie.

The historical material is too important and painful for “Mandingo” to be viewed as camp, but the presentation is so lurid that you keep wondering what everyone involved with the production was thinking as it was being shot.

Expect a lot of “Mandingo” reassessment pieces between now and the opening of “Django Unchained.”

‘Where We Belong’: two sides of an adoption story

Wednesday, July 25, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Emily Giffin displays impressive empathetic gifts in her latest novel, “Where We Belong” (St. Martin’s Press), which digs into the highly charged issue of adoption, from both sides of the equation.

The book’s opening section gives a reader the impression that we will be following the story of a successful 36-year-old television producer named Marian Caldwell, who is living in the Manhattan fast lane.

We are tipped to the fact that Marian has been keeping a secret from her friends and the older co-worker she wants to marry, but the woman is so likeable and her job is so interesting that a reader might figure Marian will get to that secret sooner or later and that it won’t be such a big deal after all.

The first ten pages of “Where We Belong” have all of the glamour of one of those aspirational “chick lit” novels that exert such a powerful hold on young women who dream of being in the same position as the protagonist.

But then another first person narrator, Kirby Rose, enters the story, and we learn that 18 years earlier Marian gave her up for adoption when she was just about to graduate from high school in Chicago.

Kirby was adopted by a St. Louis couple thrilled to have a child. The girl loves her parents but has always wondered about her birth parents.

Giffin gives us two totally convincing protagonists, so we get to see a very complex human drama from both of the players. The novelist is so good at the split view that I found myself being pulled back and forth in terms of sympathy — just when we think Marian is dominating the situation (and the novel), Kirby moves in to convince us that she is the one we should care most about.

Giffin has a written a domestic story with a strong element of suspense — as both Marian and Kirby ponder a reunion with the long gone birth father. Although these characters and their dilemma are far removed from my own situation in life, the writer made me care so deeply about the women — and what was going to happen to them — that I raced through the book as if it was the latest Jack Reacher story by Lee Child.

(Emily Giffin will be talking about “Where We Belong” tonight at 7 p.m. at the Greenwich Library. A feature on the novelist will appear in our Sunday Pulse section on July 29.)

Is there a link between movie violence and ‘real’ violence?

Tuesday, July 24, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

The possible link between violent movies and “real” violence seems to be discussed every time we have a mass shooting incident like the one in Colorado last week.

What makes the most recent massacre even more troubling is the fact that it happened in a movie theater that was showing a violent, comic-book derived film of the sort that is especially popular among boys and young men.

The alleged perp — 24-year-old James Holmes — dyed his hair red before he went to the theater, in an apparent attempt to look like a character from the “Batman” series (he was reported to have referred to himself as “The Joker”).

It doesn’t appear to be a coincidence that the shooting spree took place at a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” the most heavily promoted and most widely anticipated comic book film of the year.

Like everyone else who loves movies, I get nervous when pundits try to draw a connection between on-screen violence and violence in real life.

A couple of days after the Aurora shooting I got a note from one of my favorite movie bloggers, Ken Anderson, who raised some very provocative points about the way film might influence us:

“When I watch the Academy Awards and some socially uplifting film wins big, all night long you get speeches about film’s power to influence, affect change,and inspire action. However, when word gets out that some negative or violent act was inspired by a film, all you get are Hollywood people saying that entertainment is entertainment…that it has no power to MAKE anyone do anything and film can’t incite or influence action. ?!?!?

I don’t get it.

Sometimes I think we’re all just a little afraid to admit/accept that film is as influential and powerful as I suspect it to be.”

Ken also pointed out that Stanley Kubrick withdrew “A Clockwork Orange” in England for many years because he was so disturbed by copycat violence there that followed the original 1971 release of his movie.

It is interesting that Hollywood will pat itself on the back for aiding in social change through such landmark movies as “Gentleman’s Agreement” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “Philadelphia” but tries to pull the covers up over its head when it is suggested that rampant violence in movies might have a negative social impact.

Liberals and conservatives alike have pushed for less smoking in films under the assumption that when young people see Julia Roberts or Sarah Jessica Parker puffing on a cig in a romantic comedy they will go and do likewise.

I doubt that there is much that can be done to reverse the tide of violence in nearly every form of entertainment, but the questions raised by Ken Anderson should be discussed.

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