Joe's View

Someone could make a great documentary about the struggles of New York stage actors — the endless auditions, the “day” jobs that slowly turn into alternate careers, the indignity of seeing TV and film personalities landing starring roles on Broadway that they cannot sustain.
“Every Little Step” only scratches the surface of this potent subject — as it follows the casting process for the 2006 Broadway revival of “A Chorus Line” — but the movie seems to work for general audiences. It was a hit at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, was picked up for national release by Sony Pictures Classics and debuted last month in New York and Los Angeles (the film opens at the Avon Theatre in Stamford on Friday).
On Sunday, I hosted a private screening of the movie at the Madison Art Cinemas as part of that theater’s incredible Sunday morning film club.
The theater sells subscriptions to a series of new films that are shown on Sunday mornings before they go into general release. The subscribers don’t know what movies they are seeing until just before the 10:30 a.m. screening begins. The screenings sell out almost immediately and there is an eager waiting list of people who would like to subscribe.
These people are real movie buffs and most of them enjoyed “Every Little Step,” despite the way it plays with the truth.
In two cases where we see actors receiving phone calls telling them they landed jobs in “A Chorus Line” what we are really seeing is re-stagings set up specifically for the cameras of co-directors Adam Del Deo and James D. Stern. (In an unintended irony we get to see what good actors the two performers in question are!)
“Every Little Step” has been sold as a documentary with two elements — the history of the original landmark production in 1975 and the audition process for the 2006 revival. But the material on choreographer-director Michael Bennett and the first production is so sketchy that I spent much of my talk after the Madison screening answering questions about the gaps in the film’s account of how the show originally came together.
Del Deo and Stern barely mention lyric writer Ed Kleban or the two book writers (James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante) who shaped the real stories of Broadway chorus line dancers into a coherent script. Kleban, Kirkwood and Dante shared the Pulitzer Prize with Bennett and composer Marvin Hamlisch (the latter gets lots of screen time in the documentary).
One of the saddest elements of “Every Little Step” is observing the stress-filled months of callback auditions the would-be cast members had to endure for a mediocre revival that really didn’t do much for anyone involved with it.
And then after the show was up and running — and not doing so well at the box-office — Bennett’s original premise of an equally-billed ensemble was violated when TV personality Mario Lopez was brought in and given “star” billing in ads designed to sell tickets to tourists.

I missed “Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio” when it appeared in hard cover last year, but I’m very glad I caught up with the book this week in the new Faber and Faber paperback edition.
Connecticut journalist Alec Foege does a masterful job of laying out the whole tragic story of the forces that have practically killed radio as a vibrant medium in this country.
Foege shows us how the Telecommunications Act of 1992 and the rise of one especially aggressive Texas company led to the current barren U.S. radio landscape where “local” broadcasting has virtually disappeared and the music stations have become so bland that you would think there was a conspiracy afoot to drive us all to iPods and other downloadable music.
The bottom line, of course, is the incredible profits that can be made from owning thousands of commercial radio stations manned by skeletal staffs. Other businesses would be happy with a 20 or 25 percent profit margin. Once the 1992 federal act became law and single companies faced virtually no limits on the number of stations they could own, profit margins went up to more than 50 percent.
“Radio’s the only business in which you can sell widgets without having to produce widgets!,” a Clear Channel general manager — with profit margins of 50 to 55 percent — exclaims at one point.
The sad part of the Clear Channel story is that it all began with a bunch of radio pioneers in the San Antonio area who were running wonderful stations geared to their community. But as the company grew bigger and became more interested in profits than in programming it had catastrophic effects on the medium nationally.
Instead of local talk radio, we began to get national “personalities” like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage who were heard in hundred of markets not so much for the quality of their shows but for the cost effectiveness of replacing hundreds of local announcers with syndicated programming.
On the music front, local radio stations that used to gear their playlists to regional taste started carrying the same music as their sister stations all over the country.
Foege writes about the technological innovations that made it possible for disc jockeys in Texas to record and transmit a few local references to be inserted as between-songs banter, sustaining an illusion that the whole broadcast was being done locally. A single dj can service hundreds of markets this way
“This book is an attempt to explain how two undeniable American traditions — capitalism and creativity — battled to coexist within the confines of one uniquely American media conglomerate,” Foege writes in his preface.
Sadly, the fight was rigged with the help of our own federal government, and creativity didn’t stand a chance.

Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” doesn’t seem quite as sturdy an American theater classic as “A Streetcar Named Desire” or “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” — the overt statement of the play’s themes by supporting characters becomes more grating with each viewing of the three-hour tragedy.
Miller gets preachy about capitalism and marriage and fathers and sons. Too often, he tells us what we should be thinking about the various members of the Loman family in a blunt manner that Eugene O’Neill avoided in his masterpiece about the Tyrone clan.
That said, the central role of Willy Loman remains a spectacular vehicle for a stage actor who is up to its tremendous physical and emotional demands. When we meet him, Willy is spiraling downward into madness and suicidal depression but he covers the pain with bursts of energy and anger meant to show us that he was a master salesman for more than 30 years.
At the moment, Charles S. Dutton is shaking the rafters at Yale Rep with his awesome portrayal of the Brooklyn salesman in the final days of his life. The mix of rage and fear in the performance is sometimes almost too much to bear because if a man with this much “life force” is defeated by his circumstances how much hope is there for the rest of us?
After training for the stage at the Yale School of Drama and becoming a Broadway star in the plays of August Wilson, Dutton went off to Hollywood and a long and fruitful career in film and television. The actor said he was done with the stage.
A few years ago, however, Dutton promised his Yale mentor Lloyd Richards (who directed him in his Wilson hits) that he would return to the theater. Richards told Dutton he was wasting his best stage years in Hollywood.
The great Yale artistic director and drama school dean died shortly after the conversation with his former pupil, but Dutton has honored his pledge with a performance that demonstrates the star has lost none of the power and range he displayed on Broadway in “The Piano Lesson” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” It is a thrill to see Dutton back on the Rep stage, tearing his way through a role worthy of his talent.
(“Death of a Salesman” is running through May 23 at Yale Rep. For ticket information go to yalerep.org)

The “summer” movie season started with a thud today — “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” — a picture as clunky as its title.
The movie may prove to be a financial success — although Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke reported yesterday that Fox had cut $5 million from its original $80 million opening weekend estimate — but it’s an example of sequel-making at its worst.
No story to speak of, repetitious action scenes, and a complete waste of star (and co-producer) Hugh Jackman’s considerable talent.
It’s one of the terrible ironies of Hollywood that someone as gifted as Jackman would have to return to this diminishing franchise role to maintain his clout in the industry. Here’s a guy who took London and Broadway by storm with his singing and dancing skills, but who is reduced to growling and flexing his muscles in a fourth outing as Wolverine.
The current summer movie preview issue of Enterainment Weekly reports that the sequel is Jackman’s “first shot at producing a major summer tentpole, a film that centers on a character that made him a star and is still the only way he’s proved himself as a box office draw for U.S. audiences.”
In the story, Jackman talks about trying to achieve a new depth of character in Wolverine and the grueling workout regimen that pumped him back up for the role (the latter effort seems largely wasted since the non-stop CGI action scenes reduce him and the character to a doll-like figure in what looks like a live-action cartoon).
“Wolverine’s fun and cool but I wouldn’t be down for my fourth time doing it if there wasn’t something more interesting to it than just slicing and dicing and smoking a cigar and saying a few cool lines,” the star tells Christine Spines.
But whatever that “something more interesting” might be, it never made it to the screen. And I’m not sure what “cool lines” the star is referring to.

One of the first big media tests of this New Austerity era we’re in will come Monday night at the Metropolitan Museum gala for the Costume Institute tied in with the opening of the new exhibit “Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion.”
Always one of the major celebrity/society happenings, the evening is put together by Vogue magazine and produces a blizzard of publicity shots showing movie, TV and fashion world stars looking their best in the most expensive clothes on earth.
In recent years, the shows have been preserved in book form by Yale University Press in gorgeous over-sized volumes that are as much fun to read as they are to look at.
“Model as Muse” is one of the best books in the series because it is so personality-driven and features a wide array of pictures by some of the most important photographers of the modern era — from Irving Penn to Richard Avedon to Steven Meisel.
There is a deeply nostalgic appeal to the book, too, in the shots of such great models of yesteryear as Suzy Parker, who went on to appear in several notable films of the 1950s (she’s a riot as a bad stage actress in the 1959 camp classic “The Best of Everything”).
A good portion of the book is devoted to the pop cultural revolution of the 1960s in which the formal dress of earlier eras was discarded as even the mature folks in fashion tried to keep up with the “Youthquake.”
Art historian and fashion writer Kohle Yohannon shows how key models such as Parker and Kate Moss have influenced fashion as well as worn it.
Moss has been able to parlay her status as a trendsetter into big bucks by signing on with the British Topshop chain for an affordable line of clothes in limited editions that fly off the shelves whenever they are made available (the first American outpost of Topshop in lower Manhattan has been doing sensational business since it opened earlier this month with an appearance by Moss that had crowds lining up around the block).
Yohannon traces the history of models from the anonymity of the pre-World War II era through the current “supermodel” era with figures like Moss and Gisele Bundchen generating almost as much press attention as movie stars.
Moss is co-chairing Monday night’s gala with Vogue editor Anna Wintour and pop star and fashion entrepreneur Justin Timberlake.
In the book, Moss provides an amusingly down-to-earth job description for the women in her line of work:
“If you can make a really bad dress look good, then you’re a good model.”

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released a two-disc “Director’s Choice” DVD last week that contains two Peter Bogdanovich films — the classic “Last Picture Show” that put the 32-year-old neophyte director at the top of the Hollywood heap in 1971 and “Nickelodeon,” the 1976 flop that capped a period of shocking decline from which Bogdanovich’s career has never fully recovered.
Few filmmakers have fallen so far so fast as Bogdanovich did in the mid-1970s, after three smash hits in a row had established him as one of the brightest talents of that era of exciting young American directors.
The critic-turned-director received an Oscar nomination for “Picture Show” and followed the film with two hugely successful comedies in just two years’ time — “What’s Up Doc?” (1972) and “Paper Moon” (1973).
In 1973, Bogdanovich’s name was right beside those of Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola and William Friedkin on the list of young outsiders who were redefining Hollywood moviemaking.
But, the director quickly lost his way after “Paper Moon.” He divorced his wife (and brilliant production designer) Polly Platt after a flagrant affair with “Picture Show” ingenue Cybill Shepherd. Bogdanovich went on to make two of the most misbegotten films in the history of Hollywood — the 1974 “Daisy Miller” in which Shepherd was hopelessly inadequate as the Henry James heroine and then the 1975 Cole Porter musical “At Long Last Love” that co-starred Shepherd and Burt Reynolds (neither of whom could sing or dance).
During this period Bogdanovich turned down the chance to direct “Chinatown” (1974) — that decision combined with his earlier rejection of “The Godfather” (1972) made Hollywood question his sanity.
Desperate for a comeback, Bogdanovich instead had another major box-office failure with “Nickelodeon” despite the presence of two major male stars of that decade, Reynolds and Ryan O’Neal.
Bogdanovich has long believed that the studio decision not to allow him to film “Nickelodeon” in black-and-white — as he did with “Last Picture Show” — was a fatal error on the part of the Columbia Pictures management.
All these years later, Bogdanovich has used computer technology to strip the color from “Nickelodeon” and come up with a crisp new black-and-white version of the 33-year-old movie (this was much more complicated than simply turning a knob and removing the color — the film was reworked shot by shot and you would never guess that it was not filmed in B&W).
The movie does look better and feel truer to the silent movie era in B&W than it does in the rather garish original color print (the DVD contains both versions).
Sadly, the movie itself is still a labored dud, with painfully broad acting by Reynolds and O’Neal (and a rare bum performance by the wonderful character actor Brian Keith).
Bogdanovich intended to use Shepherd in the female lead, but reportedly the studio nixed that notion due to the couple’s bad publicity and two high profile flops. In an act of perverse self-sabotage Bogdanovich used a model named Jane Hitchcock in the part. She received special “and introducing…” billing in the credits but delivered a performance of shocking flatness that killed much of the intended romance and comedy in the a of struggling filmmakers and performers at the dawn of Hollywood moviemaking. (Hitchcock made one more film before returning to modeling).
The new DVD is a fascinating but failed attempt to salvage a famous flop — by re-packaging it with “The Last Picture Show,” Bogdanovich has heightened the sad deficiencies of “Nickelodeon.”

It’s tough to think of a more entertaining or more recession-proof way to spend a Saturday afternoon in New York City than strolling through the gallery district of Chelsea.
The Manhattan art world might be in tumult due to the Wall Street collapse — and the fact that even rich people are finding themselves with much less disposable income — but there are still dozens of interesting galleries to cruise through on the far west side between 14th St. and the high 20s.
Last week, on one of the wonderful summer-like spring days we’ve been having recently, I went with a group of friends on a tour of about 10 galleries, including the fantastic Picasso show (above) at the huge Gagosian gallery — with almost 100 pieces of art it’s more like a small museum show than a gallery exhibit — and the fascinating collection of Polaroids by Patti Smith at the Robert Miller gallery.
It’s so much fun to people watch in Chelsea — where the folks looking at the art can be almost as interesting as what’s hanging on the walls — and the diversity of work that you can see free of charge in a few hours is quite dizzying.
The only money I spent that afternoon was for a few drinks and a snack at the very reasonable and very cozy Half King bar (co-owned by journalist Sebastian Junger) smack in the middle of the action at 23rd St. and Tenth Ave.
While we were walking through a gallery one of my journalist friends started asking me about the mechanics of the gallery business — how do they make money, how do you get your work shown there, who are all those pretty young things manning the front desk — and I was very happy to be able to refer him to a terrific book that had landed on my desk a few days earlier, “Art/Work” (Free Press) by Heather Darcy Bhandari and Jonathan Melber.
The savvy duo — she’s director and curator at Mixed Greens Gallery in New York, he’s a lawyer who does volunteer work for artists — take us through the business of art from how galleries operate to the nuts-and-bolts of setting up art Web sites and landing residencies and grants.
The book is designed to help artists make sense of the business end of their work, but it’s also a fascinating read for anyone who would like to be taken behind the scenes to read the comments and advice from the dozens of professionals the authors interviewed.
The book is artfully laid out with each page mixing practical information along with boldface advice quotes from artists, curators, gallery owners and tax preparers.
The book’s bottom line is that a real career in art involves the constant juggling of creativity and practicality.
It’s a self-help book that never loses sight of the real objective of any artist. Right near the beginning, the authors devote a full page to just five sentences from New York artist Stephanie Diamond: “Make your work. Make your work constantly. Love it. And hate it. But make it.”
(The Gagosian gallery is at 522 West 21st St. The Picasso show will be there through June 6.)

Beatrice Arthur had a long and incredibly productive life, but it was still sad to hear the news of her death Saturday at the age of 87.
Most of the obituary writers focused on her television work — Arthur had the good fortune to star in not one but two long-running situation comedies (“Maude” — right — and “The Golden Girls”).
I enjoyed the TV work, but always thought of Arthur as a stage actress, maybe because I was lucky enough to see her play Vera Charles in the original Broadway production of “Mame” (opposite another stage veteran who would find TV fame, Angela Lansbury).
“Mame” was the first Broadway musical I saw as a child — during its out of town try-out in Philadelphia in 1966 — and I can still remember how dazzled I was by the show and its two stars.
Lansbury and Arthur played larger-than-life “frenemies” who laid their cards on the table in one of the show’s best Jerry Herman tunes, “Bosom Buddies.”
Arthur also scored in Vera’s big show-within-the-show number, “The Man in the Moon (is a lady).”
The two stars went on to win Tonys for best actress and best featured actress.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that Arthur had already been honing her stage chops for almost 20 years when “Mame” opened in Philly.
12 years before, she performed in the legendary Lotte Lenya production of “The 3 Penny Opera” that played a key role in off-Broadway becoming a viable commercial entity (the cast also included a very young and very unknown Jerry Orbach).
Between “3 Penny” and “Mame,” Arthur played the matchmaker in the original production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” but was bitterly disappointed when her juicy part was cut down during the try-out period.
In 2000, I had the privilege of interviewing Arthur when she worked in Westport on the one-woman show that would return the star to Broadway two years later.
The actress said one of the unique things about “Mame” was how little work needed to be done to get it in shape for Broadway.
“When we were in Philadelphia,” she told me, “Angela and I used to go to the movies in the afternoons. That was unheard of (during a try-out run). The audiences loved it right from the first performance.”
Arthur was a blast to interview. We talked about “Mame,” Lenya (a personal idol of Arthur’s) and the terrible 1974 movie version of “Mame” in which Arthur played Vera, but the title role went to Lucille Ball (a “disaster” in Arthur’s view — “the role belonged to Angela”).