Across the Universe (2007)
Screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, story by Julie Taymor & Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais
Directed by Julie Taymor
Produced by Gross Entertainment/ Team Todd/ Revolution Studios
Running time: 133 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Expressing themselves through the songs of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, two lovers are introduced on opposite shores of the Atlantic. Jude (Jim Sturgess) works in a Liverpool shipyard, while in the Midwest, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) lives an idyllic suburban life. Jude leaves his girlfriend in 1963 and travels to America, while Lucy says goodbye to her high school beau when he joins the army. Jude makes his way to Princeton University, where he locates his biological father working as a janitor. He then meets an irascible Ivy Leaguer named Max (Joe Anderson) who brings the British sketch artist home for Thanksgiving, introducing Jude to his sister Lucy.

Max drops out of school and heads to New York’s Lower East Side with Jude in tow. The young bohemians find room and board with a blues singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and are soon joined by a guitar player from Detroit named Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) and an outcast from Ohio, Prudence (T.V. Carpio). Arriving in the Big Apple to deliver a draft notice to her brother, Lucy falls in love with Jude. When Max is shipped to Vietnam, she becomes active in the antiwar movement, which Jude — an illegal alien — remains largely ambivalent about. The gang encounters a West Coast beatnik named Dr. Robert (Bono) who expands their minds, but social forces begin to tear the group apart.

Who Made It?
Producer Matthew Gross and his associate Ben Haber were discussing the music of The Beatles and wondered why nobody had mined the riches of the greatest pop music library of all time for a movie. Working out a deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing — rights holders of the Beatles catalog owned jointly by Sony and Michael Jackson — Gross planned to option the rights for 18 Beatles tunes to the tune of $5 million. To script an original musical utilizing those songs and a 1960s love story as a backdrop, the producer turned to the British writing duo of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, who drafted a short treatment.

After several rejections of what was then titled All You Need Is Love, Gross found a partner in Joe Roth of Revolution Studios. To direct, Roth suggested Julie Taymor, the multi-talented director of stage (The Lion King) and screen (Frida). Eager to explore a cultural landscape she had actually grown up in, Taymor turned to partner and frequent collaborator Elliot Goldenthal to compose the music. She arrived on the title Across the Universe and won the backing for a visionary rock opera utilizing music and lyrics from 33 Beatles tunes. Delivering a cut deemed too long and unwieldy by Sony Pictures, Roth would recut the film himself, leading to Taymor threatening to remove her name from the ambitious project.

How’d They Do It?
Apple Corps — the multimedia company founded by The Beatles in 1968 — controls the band’s recordings, but the more lucrative publishing rights to most of that library was owned jointly by Michael Jackson, who bought the Beatles catalogue from ATV Music in 1985, and Sony Music, which the pop icon merged his publishing interests with ten years later. With a licensing fee of $250,000 per song, Beatles compositions had popped up in movies only sparingly over the years. Producer Matthew Gross learned that licensing 18 Beatles songs would cost $5 million, which he thought was a good investment to build a movie around. “The idea was reverse engineering. Instead of trying to string together a story from the songs, create a story and find the songs that suited the story.”

Formerly president of Kopelson Entertainment, Gross hooked the British screenwriting tandem of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais — whose credits included The Commitments (1991), as well as the Michael Caine comedy Water (1985), which George Harrison’s HandMade Films had produced — to write a treatment. After five rejections, Gross found a buyer in Joe Roth, former chairman of Fox who founded Revolution Studios in 2000. Roth recalled, “The Beatles catalogue is owned by two parties equally, Sony and Michael Jackson. We distribute our films through Sony and I went to them with the idea, so they were okay and we worked long and hard at a time when Michael Jackson was somewhat vulnerable and we got the rights.”

To direct, Joe Roth wooed Julie Taymor, who he’d met while chairman of Walt Disney Pictures and Taymor was directing and designing costumes for the Broadway production of The Lion King. Taymor grew up in Boston in the 1960s. Her love of theater and travel led to creating a dance company while living in Indonesia in the mid 1970s on a Watson Fellowship. In 1991, Taymor received a MacArthur Fellowship and the following year, directed her first opera, in Japan. Following the massive stage success of The Lion King, Taymor made her feature film debut in 1999 with an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Her sophomore film — Frida (2002) — notched Salma Hayek an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

In February 2005, it was announced that Julie Taymor had agreed to direct what was then being called All You Need Is Love for Revolution Studios and a planned release of September 2006. Six months prior, Taymor had approached the head of Sony Classical about the possibility of launching a Broadway musical utilizing tunes by the Fab Four. The idea dissolved, but with The Beatles on her brain and the opportunity to recreate an era she had actually lived through, Taymor worked with Clement & La Frenais to expand their less than novel love story set during the social upheaval of the 1960s. She would suggest the title Across the Universe and add three supporting characters: Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence.

Taymor revealed, “The picking of the names was a bit of a debate — the Jude, Lucy, Max, Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence — but I felt that, you know, you can like it or dislike it but it allowed us to use some of those songs with the names, obviously, like ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Hey Jude’, and later you have ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ but it connected the people to the songs, otherwise, who were those people? If you used those names and those songs, who are they singing about? So no, we don’t have a song about Jo-Jo or Sadie, we are familiar with the words ‘sexy Sadie’ and what do we have, ‘Maxwell’s silver hammer comes down, crashing down’ in the later song, so people who know those songs understand where the references come from.”

Jennifer and Suzanne Todd — who rose from assistants of Joel Silver in the early ‘90s to producing the Austin Powers comedies, Boiler Room and Memento — were brought in to get the movie made. Jennifer Todd recalled, “We got the script from Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais and we just loved it. Once the permission came through to use the songs from The Beatles’ back catalog, it was incredibly exciting. We got to take these tracks that have become so much a part of everyone’s lives and reinterpret them — to have them lead a narrative and really breathe new life into them. To be able to work with a director of Julie Taymor’s talent, to really experiment and try to create a totally new experience, I mean, what could be more thrilling?”

To collaborate on Across the Universe, Taymor turned to her partner Elliot Goldenthal, who in addition to writing a film score, was tasked with rearranging the 33 Beatles compositions Taymor had selected. “Though Elliot is a composer and there are no songs to be composed, his arrangements and his understanding of drama and character are so great. I’ve worked with him for 20 years and have total trust and admiration for his work. I knew that he would find a new way to interpret the songs; by placing them with new arrangements, the music would be fresh again — not a better version, but different.” Music producers T-Bone Burnett and Teese Gohl would work with Goldenthal on the music.

Bruno Delbonnel was hired as director of photography. Taymor recalled, “Bruno, in our first interview said, ‘I hate musicals.’ I thought, ‘Now what do I think about that? That’s interesting.’ And I thought, he’s done Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, these incredibly theatrical movies. He has an incredible sense of light and photography. I knew that tough, European sense with him: he would want it to be a serious movie, not fluff; that the darkness would be there when I wanted it to be there, but it would also have that whimsy and theatricality that was very important.” Choreographer Daniel Ezralow came aboard to create routines that broke with the dance musical norm when possible and drew inspiration from more realistic movements.

Aside from Evan Rachel Wood — who was offered the role of Lucy — the cast was filled with relative unknowns. During an open casting call in England, Taymor and Goldenthal were sent a tape featuring Jim Sturgess. Taymor mused, “We did not want musical theater voices, and we didn’t want pop-y voices. Jim just fit in right away. Jim’s been in a rock band and he’s an actor. He just sings with such an incredible ease that you feel that the character is talking just to you. He has a beautiful voice – and there’s no disconnect between when his speaking voice and his singing voice. Jim can go right from talking to singing.”

English actor Joe Anderson had came to an open casting call for the role of Jude, but felt better suited for Max and employing an American accent, won the part. Taymor had created the part of Sadie specifically for Dana Fuchs, a singer/songwriter who’d recorded a demo for the director on a previous project. Martin Luther was a New York based vocalist and guitar player with little acting experience. The same went for T.V. Carpio, whose background included singing, dancing and ice skating, but not much acting. Revolution Studios announced a $45 million budget and Across the Universe commenced filming September 2005 in New York.

Once Across the Universe began the test screening process, its troubles began. In an article for L.A. Weekly in April 2007, gossip columnist Nikki Finke named various “insiders” who claimed that most everyone with an opinion agreed that the movie was too long, everyone except for Julie Taymor. The director unveiled a shorter cut of 135 minutes, but when it received similar complaints, Taymor blanched at any more trims, even after Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal was said to have taken Taymor to dinner and extolled the virtues of a shorter running time. One of Finke’s “sources” was quoted as saying, “That’s the refrain of everyone: There’s a great movie in there, somewhere. But as it stands now, it’s so complicated it’s just a bad movie.”

Joe Roth hired an editor and whittled Taymor’s cut to 105 minutes. Screening his abridged version to a test audience in Phoenix, the scores reportedly shot way up. Roth — who in addition to running studios, directed Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987) and Christmas with the Cranks (2004) — left it up to Taymor to decide whether she would endorse the new audience friendly version. When Taymor floated maybe taking her name off the film, Sony backed down. Recounting the experience on The Charlie Rose Show, Taymor offered, “Look, I went through what many directors go through, which is: You get to the end, you think it’s done and some people think that it should be, slightly different.” She added, “And I did some cuts for pacing and everything stayed — you’re seeing my cut — and there’s support behind it. So, end of story.”

Running 133 minutes, Across the Universe premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2007. Sony timidly released it on 24 U.S. screens in 12 cities, followed by a slow expansion to 400 screens in 24 cities. Critics scattered in every direction. Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Across the Universe will have ardent defenders, but in the long run, it will do nothing to infuse life into the current mini-revival of movie musicals and is as soft-headed as the wishful refrain ‘All You Need Is Love.’ Maybe that works in real life but not in the movies, sister.”

Despite striking a chord with many who discovered the film — and The Beatles — on their own, Across the Universe failed to take off at the box office, bringing in $24.3 million in the U.S. and only $5 million overseas. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 2007, Taymor was asked to comment on her film’s wildly diverse reception. “I think anything that’s really different, that really takes chances, that breaks the rules, also plays with sacred cows — like the Beatles music — is going to, it’s going to engender that debate. And I welcome that; better than bland, better than, ‘Wow, that’s nice.’”

Should I Care?
Across the Universe is that weird kid taking a seat at the back of the class. She’ll discover Brazil, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fight Club and other like-minded kids to smoke with behind the school during lunch, inspiring walkouts and love-ins among moviegoers over the years while giving film studios and their shareholders anxiety attacks. Shooting straight from the heart, this love letter to the songs of The Beatles — like the boldest love letters — is ill-advised, occasionally tedious and monumentally dazzling. Its closest point of comparison is Moulin Rouge!, but with much better taste and less cornball reverence for song and dance routine than Baz Luhrmann, Julie Taymor crafts a poetic and sumptuous rock opera destined to become a classic.

Whatever you think about Across the Universe, chances are, you’ll end up thinking about it. Rather than a recyclable consumer entertainment product, almost every frame of the movie is designed with TLC. The framing, lighting and camera movement are beautiful, the musical arrangements eclectic, vocal work by the cast excellent, animation mesmerizing and its staging innovative. The film flies off the rails during its psychedelic, “I Am the Walrus” and “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” numbers, while its star crossed lovers start resembling chess pieces being moved across history rather than people we really care about. But if Luhrmann was heralded for raising the bar on movie musicals, Taymor elevates it even higher with the singular drive to try something different.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Movie Mogul Joe Roth Speaks” By Wilson Morales. BlackFilm.com, February 2006

“Film Has Two Versions; Only One Is Julie Taymor’s” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 20 March 2007

“Across an Alternate Universe” By Nikki Finke. L.A. Weekly, 12 April 2007

“Sony exploits its Beatles catalog” By Martin Lewis. Variety, 6 September 2007

“Julie Taymor Soars Across the Universe” By Edward Douglas. ComingSoon.net, 18 September 2007

“Beatles mania strikes again” By Chris Lee. The Los Angeles Times, 12 October 2007

“Jennifer and Suzanne Todd’s Sister Act” By Jessica Hundley. MovieMaker Magazine, 18 November 2007

“The Art of Musicals: Across the Universe” The Writing Studio

Across the Universe. DVD commentary by Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal. Sony Home Entertainment (2008)

Talk to Me (2007)
Screenplay by Michael Genet and Rick Famuyiwa and Kasi Lemmons (uncredited), story by Michael Genet
Directed by Kasi Lemmons
Produced by Pelagius Films/ Mark Gordon Company/ Sidney Kimmel Entertainment
Running time: 118 minutes

So, What’s This About?
At Lorton Reformatory in 1966, Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor) grudgingly puts in a visit to his convict brother (Mike Epps), fulfilling a promise he made to their mother. Dewey — the enterprising station manager of WOL-AM in Washington D.C. — is intercepted in the waiting room by the loquacious Petey Greene (Don Cheadle). Immensely popular as the prison disc jockey, Petey is serving a 10 year sentence for armed robbery, but doesn’t let this stop him from asking Dewey for a job, while he waits for a conjugal visit from his sassy girlfriend Vernell (Taraji Henson). Dewey dismisses Petey as a “miscreant” and brushes the con off by telling Petey to look him up when he gets out.

Petey wins an early release by talking a prisoner off a water tower, and with Vernell at his side, storms WOL, where his rap doesn’t go over well with Dewey or his boss (Martin Sheen). After being kicked out, Petey organizes a community protest against WOL. Recognizing the potential to tap into the prevailing anti-establishment mood, Dewey gives Petey a shot as a morning deejay. Off-the-cuff remarks about Berry Gordy get him yanked off the air, but Dewey refuses to give up on Petey. Through a successful radio program, a TV talk show and comedy albums, Petey becomes the voice of D.C.’s black community. Dewey gets him booked on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where stardom appears inevitable for Petey Greene.

Who Made It?
Lurma Rackley met Petey Greene in 1981 when she was hired to write an article on the broadcast legend for the Washington North Star. Greene looking for someone to pen his autobiography and was pleased enough with Rackley’s piece to offer her the job. Greene would pass away a year later, long before any book could be finished. Rackley was friends with Dewey Hughes, who by 1991 was a successful TV producer in Los Angeles. Hughes offered to take the material she’d finished and see if he could interest anyone in Hollywood on a Petey Greene biopic. He ultimately hooked producer Joe Fries with the idea. Producer Mark Gordon came on board as well and in June 2000, it was announced that Martin Lawrence had agreed to play Petey Greene.

Unable to reach a deal with Rackley, Joe Fries ignored her research and chose to center the film on Petey Greene’s relationship with Dewey Hughes. Titled Petey Greene’s Washington, a spec script by Hughes’ son Michael Genet was written and set up at Fox. Rick Famuyiwa was brought in for revisions, then Kasi Lemmons, who became more enamored with the project over time and aspired to direct it herself. After several directors in front of her passed, Lemmons — who’d made a big splash in 1997 writing and directing Eve’s Bayou — won the job, suggesting Don Cheadle for the lead. Talk to Me was put into turnaround by Fox and after several starts and stops, was financed by Sidney Kimmel Entertainment.

How’d They Do It?
Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene Jr. was an ex-con, a disc jockey, a two-time Emmy Award winning host of Petey Greene’s Washington on WDCA, a Washington D.C. community organizer, guest of the White House and in 1981, the subject of an article that freelance writer Lurma Rackley was assigned. When the interview was over, Greene asked Rackley if she’d ever written a book. Greene was looking to pen his autobiography, but collaborations with two or three other writers hadn’t worked out. Rackley had never attempted a book, but Greene was sufficiently impressed with her article and gave Rackley the job. A year into their interviews, Greene would be stricken with liver cancer and pass away at the age of 52.

Rackley recalled, “When he was in the hospital on his final days, he really couldn’t talk anymore — he could just listen; a relative put the phone to his ear so he could hear. I told him I promised I would get the story out.” According to Rackley, Greene’s attorney lost interest in a book, leaving the writer with 60 hours of taped interviews. By 1991, Rackley was press secretary for Mayor Marion Barry and working on the book part-time when she received a call from her friend Dewey Hughes. The conversation got around to Rackley’s work-in-progress. Hughes offered to take what she had so far — an outline, prologue, five chapters — and shop it around Hollywood.

Seven years later, Hughes hooked producer Joe Fries, who’d grown up in Bethesda watching Petey Greene’s Washington. Fries — who helped launch The Learning Channel — recalled, “I was completely the cultural opposite of Petey. Yet I was drawn to this character on television.” Fries offered to buy Rackley’s unfinished manuscript and her taped interviews, but concerned about how her candid interviews with Greene would be used, Rackley held out for the opportunity to join the movie as a consultant. “Joe and his people didn’t want to negotiate. They wanted me to sign that contract or they didn’t want to work with me at all … It was one of those all-or-nothing things.”

With Lurma Rackley no longer involved — she would self-publish her book, Laugh If You Like, Ain’t A Damn Thing Funny, in 2004 — and without Petey Greene’s life story, Joe Fries backed into the idea of a movie about the friendship between Greene and Dewey Hughes. He compelled Hughes’ son — screenwriter Michael Genet — to write a spec script. Genet recalled, “Joe Fries and executive producer Joey Rappa called and told me they wanted to do a movie about Petey and Dewey. As Joe started talking through the story with me, it all came rushing back like a raging river because I had lived it; my father and his best friend were two powerful brothers and the talk of our town, D.C.”

In writing a script about Petey Greene, Michael Genet turned not only to his father’s memories, but his own personal remembrances of Greene. “Whenever he opened his mouth and spoke, I would jump. As funny as he was, even as a boy I could hear the pain in his voice. Listening to him on the radio, I didn’t always understand what he was speaking about. But I couldn’t change that dial; he had me and an entire city mesmerized and hypnotized.” Genet added, “What I found in telling their story was that there is a love shared between black men that we almost never hear tell of. You wont find it defined in any textbooks or dictionaries, yet it exists.”

The script found a fan in Josh McLaughlin at The Mark Gordon Company, who’d also grown up in D.C. McLaughlin recalled, “Hearing Petey’s name, I remembered that there was a community center office dedicated to him. I found it was very difficult, though, to remember a non-blaxploitation movie about an urban city in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. The three Sidney Poitier/Bill Cosby movies, beginning with Uptown Saturday Night, did depict that period, and of course there was that great documentary concert film Wattstax. There were also several civil rights pictures, but those were Southern-oriented. Those are all good films, but the Black Is Beautiful era in a world of change has largely gone unexplored. Petey’s story, about speaking your mind, was a window into there.”

Writer-director phenom Rick Famuyiwa (The Wood, Brown Sugar) took a crack at the script next. He stated, “What drew me in first was Petey. He was an iconoclast, and a torchbearer of the oral tradition that is an integral part of African-American culture. To me, he represented a bridge between the orators of the civil rights movement and the orators of today, hip-hop musicians. Like a rapper, he was the voice of people who didn’t have a say. What he had to say wasn’t always what people wanted to hear both inside the community and out but it represented a truth he felt had to be expressed. I felt he could be contemporary and relatable to today’s hip-hop-reared generation.”

Kasi Lemmons began her career as an actress — appearing in Candyman and Fear of a Black Hat most memorably — but seeking a challenge beyond just paying the bills, went back to school, enrolling in the film program at the New School for Social Research. She also started writing. Lemmons followed her critically acclaimed gem Eve’s Bayou in 1997 with a disquieting adaptation of George Dawes Green’s novel The Caveman’s Valentine starring Samuel L. Jackson in 2001. She then labored for four years trying to get an adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s Napoleonic romance The Passion made, but even with Miramax poster girl Gwyneth Paltrow committed, tumultuous times at the studio ultimately squashed the project.

Petey Greene’s Washington came to Lemmons from The Mark Gordon Company as a rewrite. “I read the script years ago, and I respected it, but it didn’t speak my language.” Over time, the material begin speaking to Lemmons. ”I started to hear Petey’s voice in my ear. He was saying: ‘You better direct this thing. Don’t let this out of the house.’ I suddenly fell passionately in love, head over heels. One of the things that happened was the Iraq War. We were invading. People had strong opinions, and they were afraid to say anything. There was fear, you could feel it. People were afraid. I was. So I was attracted to a character who spoke loudly, without censoring, who let the chips fall where they would. There was something about a loud, uncensored, brave voice that attracted me.”

To get the directing job, Lemmons had to wait in line until Fox exhausted the names of the directors in front of her, prestige-wise. She recalled, “Finally I got a meeting. I went in über-prepared. I was very clear in how I wanted it to feel — very alive, very dynamic, immediate. Which is, I believe, how it feels. Instead of looking at the past, have it feel that you could enter it. It would have a movement, a beat. And to put Don Cheadle in it. I knew what people were afraid of — that it might be pretty. I said, ‘I want it to be gorgeous, without being pretty.’ I had to say without saying that I wouldn’t make it feminine. Once I had the movie I never thought about it again.”

Flush from the success of Hustle & Flow, Terrence Howard was briefly attached to play Petey Greene before agreeing to switch parts with Don Cheadle and take on Dewey Hughes instead. Fox ultimately put Talk to Me into turnaround, but Focus Features picked it up and tentatively agreed to provide financing. Lemmons flew to Toronto in September 2005 and with producer J. Miles Dale, started scouting locations. Lemmons recalled, “When I got to Toronto to shoot the movie we worked for 12 to 14 days, but we started getting a bad feeling around Day 10. We kept it together a few more days, but then things unraveled. There were legal issues in transferring the film from Fox to Focus. It was not a pretty feeling.”

With filming pushed back at least until April 2006, Don Cheadle remained on board, but Terrence Howard had to drop out. Chiwetel Ejiofor read for the role of Dewey Hughes and clicked with Cheadle so well that Lemmons used a rehearsal tape between the actors to secure a new financier. Lemmons recalled, “It’s extremely difficult to get money for films with a predominantly black cast. We were independently financed by Sidney Kimmel Entertainment because a producer there, Bill Horberg, felt passionately about the story but we were extremely lucky.” On a budget of $12.5 million, Talk to Me commenced shooting July 2006 in Hamilton, Canada, which was not only less expensive and less restrictive than D.C., but featured architecture locked in the 1960s.

After being screened at Cannes in May and the Los Angeles Film Festival in June, Talk to Me opened in limited release July 2007 in the United States. Critics were mostly supportive. Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “With its R&B soundtrack and footage of civil unrest, Talk to Me might seem to cover familiar ground. But as an intimate portrait of the complex, fruitful and extremely volatile friendship between trailblazing African American men whose daring came to redefine an industry, it’s fresh and revelatory.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “Talk to Me has a great subject and a great actor working in tandem, reminding audiences that once upon a time media personalities used to fight The Man, not be The Man.”

Distributed by Focus Features, Talk to Me never expanded beyond 193 U.S. theaters, where it was held to $4.5 million at home and $245,115 overseas. Disappointed with the box office, Lemmons was energized by her Petey Greene experience. “At the beginning of the Iraq War, people felt scared to say anything because you were going to be labeled ‘unpatriotic.’ People were very, very cautious and I felt like saying, ‘Wake up, goddamitt!’ I felt like screaming at people all the time. Talk to Me is this perfect anti-censorship film in a way. You’ve got this character that is going to tell it. Whether or not that’s a mistake, he’s going to have to judge later — but at the moment that he is speaking it, nothing is censoring him. I thought that was kind of exciting.”

Should I Care?
Talk to Me is at least five different movies and four of them range in quality from “really good” to “great”. There’s a 15-year friendship between two men from different worlds who become hugely successful by trusting each other. There’s a fantastic social document of an urban community in the late ‘60s. There’s a hugely entertaining story about a community radio station — with Cedric the Entertainer (as “Nighthawk” Bob Terry), Vondie Curtis-Hall (as Sunny Jim Kelsey) and Martin Sheen as progressive owner E.G. Sonderling — that rivals anything on WKRP in Cincinnati. There’s also a good story in here about events that overtake an R&B station on the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination.

By living so many lives in 52 years, the story of Petey Greene was probably never going to gel as a movie, taking creative license with history and losing focus in the last half hour, when Petey’s rise to celebrity isn’t very compelling. That said, Don Cheadle & Chiwetel Ejiofor — two of our best actors — have remarkable chemistry together. The sensational Taraji Henson figures somewhat less into their story, but Cheadle and Taraji can star in every movie as far as I’m concerned. Amid the clashing tones here, one Kasi Lemmons rings truest is how endangered we’ve allowed our speech to become in an effort not to offend anyone. Talk to Me is a testament to a time when even the people who had a lot to lose didn’t back down from challenging the status quo.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Remembering Petey” By Kathryn Sinzinger. The Common Denominator, 8 March 2004

“City core subs for Washington D.C.” By Doug Foley. The Hamilton Spectator, 6 July 2006

“The Ready Return of a True Believer” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 8 July 2007

“Talk to Her” By Amanda S. Miller. The Washington City Paper, 1 August 2007

“Talk to Me Kasi Lemmons” By Emanuel Levy

“Kasi Lemmons Finds the Voice to Speak Out in Talk to Me” By Lily Percy. MovieMaker Magazine, 15 October 2007

What the *&#! Is This About?
In New York City of the 1870s, Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is among the well heeled who attend a performance of the opera Faust at the Academy of Music. Newland is taken aback by the entrance of the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), who’s left her husband in Europe and become an object of great scandal by returning to her family. Newland is engaged to Ellen’s innocent, pampered cousin May (Winona Ryder). To discourage gossip against the family, he announces his engagement to May at an opera ball that night. When Ellen fails to appear, Newland seems disappointed. He goes out of his way to ingratiate her back into the favor of New York society, with the help of May’s reclusive grandmother Manson Mingott (Miriam Margolyes).

Sensing she might feel lonely, Newland wants to help the free spirited and exotic Ellen. “Is New York such a labyrinth? I thought it was all straight up and down, like 5th Avenue, all the cross streets numbered and big honest labels on everything.” “Everything is labeled,” he tells her, “but everybody is not.” Behind closed doors, Newland questions conformity. In public, he upholds family and tradition. “This was a world balanced so precariously that its harmony could be shattered by a whisper,” says our narrator (Joanne Woodward). The Mingotts enlist Newland to dissuade Ellen from seeking a divorce, but he finds himself falling in love with her. He tries to speed up his engagement to May, who correctly guesses he’s in love with someone else. Newland denies this.

For Newland, responsibility to his mother and sister, who rely on him for every security, comes before his own desires. A year and a half later, Ellen returns to New York when Mrs. Mingott suffers a stroke. Newland goes to meet her at the train station. They share a carriage ride, where a simple touch of Ellen’s wrist qualifies as a consummation of their affair. Ellen refuses to take it any further for fear it will hurt May. Meeting each other at the Metropolitan Museum, Ellen changes her mind about the prospect of an affair. Newland finally decides to confess his feelings to his wife, but she interrupts to tell him that Ellen is returning to her husband. Newland realizes that his family and all of New York society have conspired to send her back to Europe to preserve decorum.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Edith Wharton wrote most of The Age of Innocence from September 1919 to March 1920 while living in the Rue de Varenne of Paris. Her sister-in-law Minnie Jones helped research 1870s New York society by combing through back issues of the New York Tribune at Yale University Library. Published in 1920 in serial format, then as a novel, The Age of Innocence became a phenomenal bestseller. Columbia University awarded it the Pulitzer Prize for Literature – making Wharton the first woman to receive the honor – and within two years, the author had reaped $50,000 in royalties, including $15,000 from Warner Bros. for the film rights. The studio produced a seven-reel feature in 1924, while RKO mounted a talkie version in 1931 starring Irene Dunne as Countess Ellen Olenska. Neither was a box office success.

60 years after its publication, Jay Cocks – former film critic for Time Magazine – handed a copy of The Age of Innocence to his friend, director Martin Scorsese. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 1993, Scorsese recalled, “We had known each other since ‘68 and over the years we saw so many different films and over the years we really tried to write scripts together and do all kinds of projects and really got involved with wanting to do many different genres: westerns, costume pieces – you could call them costume pieces – romantic films, musicals, etcetera. And so around 1980 he gave me the book and said, ‘When you decide to do that romance piece,’ he said, ‘this one is you.’ Meaning this has the qualities that you would like.’”

Scorsese continued, “When I finally did read the book – because when he gave me the book I was finishing Raging Bull and I was going into King of Comedy – and in a sense, Raging Bull is a picture that is spinning. It’s like a vortex of emotion. I was very much into that state of mind. So it took me a while to sit down and read the book. But when I did, I reacted immediately to the passion of the love story between Archer and Ellen and especially the fact that it’s unconsummated … maybe because I read it and it was 1987, January and I had gotten older, but I reacted immediately to that. I must tell you that I’ve read other books – I’ve loved the books of Thomas Hardy and other types of classical literature and 19th century English literature – but this one, I said I can make into a film.”

Adapting a screenplay in 1987, Cocks & Scorsese had a first draft in three weeks. The Age of Innocence was set up at Fox, with Scorsese planning to direct as soon as he completed GoodFellas. But when studio chairman Joe Roth weighed the commercial risk of an Edith Wharton novel against Scorsese’s $32 million budget – as well as the director’s unwillingness to reduce his fee – the project was put into turnaround. Scorsese accepted an offer to direct Cape Fear for Steven Spielberg, but even after that movie became a blockbuster, Universal Pictures considered The Age of Innocence too rich for its taste as well. Mark Canton, chairman of Columbia/TriStar, was eager to forge a relationship with Scorsese, who by that time had been crowned “the greatest living American director” by critics. Columbia agreed to finance the film.

Speaking with the New York Times in 2007, Daniel Day-Lewis recalled The Age of Innocence and Martin Scorsese. “He is a mighty man, and when he asks you to do something, you want to do it. I was struggling to escape from English drawing rooms, but because of Martin, I accepted the role in The Age of Innocence.” Michelle Pfeiffer had already worked in drawing rooms as well, but Scorsese was more impressed by the versatility she’d shown in Married to the Mob, as well as Scarface, offering her the role of Ellen Olenska. The actress recalled, “What’s most universal and timeless about the novel and the film is what they have to say about the charades people play, the masks people wear for the sake of what’s socially acceptable. That’s still going strong. And when you see someone’s whole life guided by those standards, it touches a chord. You ask yourself: Will I wind up like Newland Archer? Could I make those sacrifices without becoming bitter?”

Many of those involved with the production of The Age of Innocence seemed enamored with the timelessness of Edith Wharton’s story. Jay Cocks remarked at the time, “The themes – which are love, passion, conscience, commitment – they’re pertinent and immediate and compelling at any time, whether it’s 1993 or 2010. We have the same problems of wanting things we can’t have and having things we don’t want, and that’s what this story is about.” As filming was just getting underway, Martin Scorsese addressed his suitability to portray those themes successfully. “I guess you try to make films about what you know. Merchant and Ivory are maybe more attuned to this kind of society. It is second nature to them, whereas Mean Streets, GoodFellas, Raging Bull are more second nature to me. But a love between two people, whether successful or unsuccessful, is common to everybody.”

By the time The Age of Innocence went before the cameras in March 1992, Scorsese’s visual research consultant – Robin Standefer – had spent two and a half years studying New York society of the 1870s. Her work with the New York Historical Society, the Library of Congress and Edith Wharton scholars was so meticulous that Standefer discovered Wharton had misnamed a Bougeureau painting in her novel. A dozen other consultants were devoted to food, to decorative arts, to etiquette. With its three-story brownstones, the Victorian city of Troy, New York – located on the east bank of the Hudson River across from Albany – stood in for 19th century Manhattan. The opera sequence was filmed over a five-day period inside the Philadelphia Academy of Music, while outside, the streets were covered with soil, as New York had no paved streets in the 1870s.

Accustomed to having a year to cut his films, when The Age of Innocence wrapped in June 1992, Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker were initially given only five months to have the film ready for Christmas. Then Scorsese’s 79-year-old father Charles – who had played bit roles in many of his son’s films – fell seriously ill. The studio decided against hurrying the greatest living American director. Producer Barbara De Fina recalled, “All the fine cutting and shaping would have suffered, the down-to-the-frame timing that makes it a Scorsese movie. Marty also likes to cut his scenes to the music, not lay in the score afterward.” Adding $2 million to its production costs, Columbia was confident that they were positioning the film for Academy Awards consideration in ‘93, with industry observers predicting a Best Actress win for Michelle Pfeiffer.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival August 1993, The Age of Innocence opened in the United States and Canada in limited release the following month. The critical praise was faint. Rita Kempley, the Washington Post: “Though lovely to behold, this film isn’t meant to send you home with a song in your heart.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “An extraordinarily sumptuous piece of filmmaking, The Age of Innocence represents an impeccably faithful adaptation of Edith Wharton’s classic novel, which is both a blessing and a bit of a curse.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: “As beautifully mounted as this production is, Scorsese has a way of letting the decor take over, so that Wharton’s tale of societal constraints comes through only in fits and starts. But it’s a noble failure.”

After test screenings had not gone well, Mark Canton successfully lobbied Scorsese to cut the film from 165 minutes down to 139 minutes. Audiences ignored the film anyway, which grossed $32.2 million in the U.S. The New York Times cited an unnamed prominent theater exhibitor as saying, “It’s a coast picture, a specialized picture that does best on the East Coast and the West Coast but doesn’t hit in the heartland. The women seemed to like it, but it didn’t grab the men at all. A good picture, but not mainstream.” Nominated for five Academy Awards – including Winona Ryder for Best Supporting Actress – only Gabriella Pescucci (Best Costume Design) ended up being honored. Michelle Pfeiffer wasn’t even nominated.

Should I Care?
Stanley Kubrick bent the heads of critics and moviegoers into a question mark in the mid 1970s when the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange announced he was adapting an 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray titled Barry Lyndon. If the choice of material wasn’t visionary in itself, the costume piece starring Ryan O’Neal was rendered to film with nothing less than the artistry of an 18th century impressionist painting. Martin Scorsese routinely cites Barry Lyndon as his favorite Kubrick film and The Age of Innocence is not only the director’s valentine to it, but surpasses it in style, exquisitely interpreting the language and descriptive flow of a Victorian Era novel, while boasting actors and production techniques that make Kubrick’s 1975 film look on many levels like hobby moviemaking.

Dante Ferretti lavishes the period in pictorial detail, with director of photography Michael Ballhaus bathing those scenes in vibrant color (the floral shop scenes alone are worth the price of a rental). Editor Thelma Schoonmaker, title designers Elaine & Saul Bass and composer Elmer Bernstein make The Age on Innocence a Thanksgiving banquet where each guest unwraps a spectacular dish. Like Thanksgiving, all this food – not to mention the many characters, their social positions and veiled agendas – are prone to give the first time viewer indigestion. On repeated viewings, the passion between Wharton’s exiled lovers and the tenacity of those seeking to keep them apart is much easier to distill and be moved by. Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer are as emotionally compelling here as any other roles I can remember.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Scorsese, From the Mean Streets to Charm School” By Alessandra Stanley. The New York Times, 28 June 1992

“The Fine Aging of Innocence” By Steve Daly. Entertainment Weekly, 21 May 1993

“In Age of Innocence, Eternal Questions” By Francine Prose. The New York Times, 12 September 1993

“Recreating The Age of Innocence In Brick and Paint” By Christopher Gray. The New York Times, 24 October 1993

“Innocence & Experience: The Making of The Age of Innocence” (1993)

Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood. By Nancy Griffin, Kim Masters. Simon and Schuster (1997)

Synopsis
Sunday, August 20, 1972. Memphis-based Stax Records descended on the L.A. Coliseum with most of their recording roster – Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, The Bar-Kays, Rufus Thomas and many more – for an eight hour concert to benefit the annual Watts Summer Festival, the observation of the “rebellion” that burned through the community only seven years previous, claiming 34 lives. Passing through the turnstiles were 112,000 people, the largest assembly of African Americans at a non-civil rights event up to that point in history. To record the day, Stax contracted award winning documentary producer David Wolper, and under the direction of Mel Stuart, supplemented the groundbreaking concert with “man on the street” interviews with the people of South Central L.A. and staged performances in the community. Narrating the film and providing his own commentary was a rising comedian named Richard Pryor.

Production history
In the early 1970s, a record company in Tennessee was looking to expand. Cinematographer Larry Clark recalled, “Stax Records – you know – they came out of Memphis and they were kind of like this underground company. They didn’t have the same kind of promotional machine that other record companies had like Motown. But people did identify with the type of music that Stax was putting out there. They could identify with it culturally. Motown was more crossover, whereas Stax was really that down home kind of sound. The mindset of the African American community across the country had changed and we were at that place where Stax Records was. People were lookin’ more towards the African roots, more towards our musical roots. That’s just where we were politically, culturally.”

Concert promoter Forest Hamilton was in Los Angeles to establish a film division – Stax West – when he met writer Richard Dedeaux. Hamilton’s collaboration with Dedeaux on a movie script produced the idea of a benefit concert. Stax president Al Bell seized on donating the proceeds to the Watts Summer Festival, observing the anniversary of the “rebellion” – as it was known in the community – that ignited in the summer of 1965. Most of Stax’s recording roster signed on to perform for free and Bell booked the Los Angeles Coliseum. Stax underwrote most of the expenses and Schlitz Brewing Company stepped up as sponsor. With tickets going for $1, the 90,000-seat arena – home field of the Los Angeles Rams – completely sold out. Wattstax was on its way to becoming the biggest assembly of African Americans ever in one place for a non-civil rights event.

Al Bell recalled, “As it evolved though, the idea emerged, well, you know, when we pull this off, we’ll have pulled something off that hasn’t been done before, but we really ought to consider doing a documentary. Well, then if we do a documentary, what kind of documentary should it be? Well, it should be about something that demonstrates to the world that the music that we sing is a reflection of what goes on in our lives and in our lifestyle. We gotta pull that off. I told Forest, ‘I want to go and find out who the finest documentary producer is in Hollywood.’ We want the very best. And he came back and said: ‘David Wolper.’” The contract between Stax and Wolper gave the producer creative control, with one major exception: Stax retained the right of approval on content relating to Black relationships or feeling, as well as the narration and music contained in the picture.

A budget of $480,000 was set. To direct, New Yorker Mel Stuart was brought into the project. “I got involved with Wattstax because I had done many films for Dave Wolper. I had just finished directing Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and was at liberty. I had some mixed feelings, because I felt I wasn’t that familiar with the Black experience, so this was the condition. I met the staff of Stax: Larry Shaw (who became co-producer of the picture with me), Forest Hamilton and others and said, this is the way I want to do it. I am the only White person on the creative staff. Everything will be siphoned through your feelings, ‘cause I don’t know enough about the Black experience. I can interpret it, but I don’t know it.”

Isaac Hayes recalled, “I thought about the commemoration of what happened, with the Watts riots. We were not celebrating the devastation that went on there. We were commemorating lives that were lost and the coming together of a people that had been suppressed. That’s why all the violence broke out. We were suppressed. You know, police brutality, all those things added up. All that pent up frustration from a people, it just came out. So, somebody struck a match. I don’t know how it started. But I think the society we were livin’ in bred that, gave rise to it. You know, you can suppress a person for so long and they will rise up.” To keep tensions cool, Al Bell lobbied the city to keep the LAPD out of the stadium. Security was all Black and was not permitted to carry firearms. With an estimated 112,000 turning out for the eight-hour concert, no violent incidents were reported.

Reviewing the concert footage, Stuart was disappointed with what he found. “It was like a newsreel, a performance. And I knew we needed more. I knew for the film to be important, it just couldn’t be a record of a concert. And I came to the realization that it’s not the music, it’s how the people feel about the music that’s important, how the people feel about their lives that’s important, if this film is going to have any substance.” Stuart, Larry Shaw and Forest Hamilton turned to the Stax acts unable to make the concert and staged them performing throughout Watts. The Emotions did a gospel song at a small church. Johnnie Taylor tore the roof off The Summit Club singing “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone”. Little Milton was filmed in the shadow of the Watts Towers lip synching “Walking the Back Streets and Crying”.

The filmmakers still didn’t feel they had a movie. Larry Clark recalled, “So then we had this assignment: go out into the community and ask people about the blues. So we went out and we found people on the stoop, we found people sitting in front of grocery stores, wherever we could, and we started asking about the blues. Part of it was we would start talkin’ to people, all right, and, just talkin’. Camera’s not even rollin’. Eventually, you kind of get a sense – when people are gettin’ relaxed – and then very quietly you turn on the camera, so that the person talking is not actually aware that you’re shooting.” In search of a narrator – someone to serve as the voice of the community – Forest Hamilton took Mel Stuart to a club to a see a comedian named Richard Pryor. The next night, Stuart returned with a camera crew and sat down at the bar for two hours with Pryor, who gave an improvisational tour-de-force on racial relations, the police or whatever else flew through his mind.

Columbia Pictures agreed to distribute Wattstax and held a world premiere February 1973 in Los Angeles. The film climaxed with Isaac Hayes performing his monumental hit “Theme From Shaft”, and “Soulsville”, songs from the movie Shaft. MGM immediately filed a lawsuit. In order for Hayes to appear in the movie at all, he was called back to pen a new song – “Rolling Down the Mountainside” – and lip synch it on a soundstage, as if it had been performed at Wattstax. The original ending was buried for 30 years. Hayes recalled, “I was angry. I was angry at MGM. Why would they do that? Makin’ money’s one thing, monetarily speaking, but it would have been a contribution to allow that to go just like it was, ‘cause it meant so much to so many people. It was insensitive of them to do that. But – you know – they had control of it. So I don’t know who made that decision, I don’t know if attorneys or what. Again, they were representing that same kind of suppression that caused them riots in the first place. It’s always a struggle.”

Wattstax was generally dismissed in the mainstream press. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “I don’t mean that the film is in any way fake; it just has the air of something too carefully laid out in advance. It’s so busy being glossy and optimistic that it doesn’t even allow its performers time to create on screen a measure of the excitement they might have created in person.” Though Wattstax was invited to open the Cannes Film Festival in May 1973 and according to Stuart “did very well in Black neighborhoods”, within a year, the film was a memory. An arcane financing deal dividing the film’s rights between Columbia and Fantasy Inc. – the record label that purchased much of the Stax library in 1977 – prevented Wattstax from being broadcast on TV or released on VHS. For decades, Wattstax practically disappeared.

In 2001, film restoration expert Tom Christopher was on the Warner Bros. lot working on a director’s cut of Amadeus. He stumbled into a palette of boxes that hadn’t even been checked into the film storage facility and discovered the original 16mm negative of Wattstax. After some investigating, Christopher also tracked down the missing ending. Fantasy Inc. joined with Columbia and Warner Bros. to restore Wattstax to its original theatrical condition, cleaning the negative and remastering the soundtrack. A 35mm print of Wattstax: The Special Edition screened at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and was re-released in 12 theaters that June. A long overdue DVD emerged later that year. Fantasy facility manager Scott Roberts commented, “We realized that the performances were really brilliant and quite a cultural find. So we coordinated with Warner Brothers and Columbia to get the film seen by the public as it was originally intended. The feedback we get is that it’s an important cultural document for African-Americans. It was a major event.”

Opinion
To get an idea of how epic the lineup of performers assembled at the L.A. Coliseum in August 1972 was, Isaac Hayes is nearly blown off the stage twice; first by cosmic bad assedness of The Bar-Kays laying down “Son of Shaft” and later in the afternoon, Rufus Thomas – the world’s oldest teenager – busting out “The Breakdown” and “Funky Chicken” and having enough energy left to coax hundreds of festival goers off the football field and back into the stands. It’s one hell of a show, but what makes Wattstax one of the top five concert films of all time is how poetically it weaves the music into the real world of the community surrounding the venue. Interspersed between the delicious drum beats and funky rhythm guitars, the filmmakers give the people a voice. Opening up about their experiences – hopes, fears, relationships – is more even more powerful than what takes place on the stage.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
Official Site Wattstax – The Special Edition Restoration

DGA Interview with Wattstax Director Mel Stuart

“Loud and proud” By James Maycock. The Guardian, July 20, 2002

“Wattstax back: Forgotten film revived with slot in Sundance” By Tommy Perkins. Memphis Business Journal, January 17, 2003

“Sound For Wattstax Concert Film” By Blair Jackson. Mix, June 2003

Wattstax (30th Anniversary Special Edition). Warner Home Video (2003)

Synopsis
Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) – a peddler of bootleg tapes who lives with his family in the housing projects on the north side of Dublin – is approached by his friends Outspan (Glen Hansard, guitar) and Derek (Kenneth McCluskey, bass) to take over management of their band. “You had the Frankie Goes to Hollywood album before anyone had ever heard of ‘em. And you were the first to realise they were shite,” Outspan tells him. Jimmy accepts and announces they’re going to be playing “Dublin soul.” His musical aspirations are ribbed by Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. (Colm Meaney), but Jimmy’s newspaper ad brings every musical wanna-be in the neighborhood to the Rabbitte home for auditions. Dean (Félim Gormley, sax), Billy (Dick Massey, drums), Steven (Michael Aherne, piano) and a bus conductor Jimmy heard belting out drunken tunes at a wedding named Declan Cuffe (Andrew Strong) join the band.

Imelda Quirke (Angeline Ball), the most beautiful girl in town, and her friends (Bronagh Gallagher, Maria Doyle Kennedy) are enlisted as backup singers. The final piece becomes a trumpet player named Joey “The Lips” Fagan (Johnny Murphy). Old enough to be their dad, Joey wins over the kids by claiming to have jammed with everyone from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Otis Redding to The Beatles. Joey christens their band The Commitments. Tensions arise when Declan develops a star sized ego, the girls seduce Joey the Lips one at a time, and Billy quits before he kills their lead singer. Jimmy replaces the drummer with a skinhead named Mickah Wallace (Dave Finnegan), a psycho who earns a promotion from the band’s doorman. As The Commitments build a local following, Joey promises he can deliver Wilson Pickett – in town performing – to jam with them at their next gig. Stardom appears inevitable.

Production history
In the mid-1980s Roddy Doyle was teaching secondary school (high school) in the Kilbarrack neighborhood of north Dublin, where he’d grown up. He’d written a satiric novel called Your Granny’s A Hunger Striker that publishers he’d submitted it to didn’t even bother opening. Kicking around ideas for a better book, Doyle recalled, “I decided I wanted to write about the type of kids I taught and had become charmed by, really, and whose company I enjoyed, who are typical of the type of place I came from. I didn’t want it to be a school story. I wanted to see them a few years after they would leave school, still young, but adult. Forming a band just struck me as being a good excuse to bring them together. It could have been a football team because I’m also very fond of football, but I can’t see football being funny – or amusing on paper. Also, it would have been restricted to one sex.”

Launching what he dubbed King Farouk Press in 1987, Doyle printed 3,000 copies of The Commitments, dispersed them to local bookstores and built a cult following in Dublin. London publishing firm Heinemann picked up the rights and published the novel to critical and commercial success. It was so well received that interest in a movie began to filter in. Doyle recalls, “They said they loved the book and the first thing they do before your arse is warm on the seat is to tell you how to pull it apart and give it a happy ending. I was kind of frightened by this. I’d two questions I put to would-be producers and Lynda Myles was the only one to answer them correctly. Would the film have stars, because it didn’t seem to make sense to have stars in a film about unknown people? She agreed. I asked then would the language remain intact; not necessarily the expletives but the rhythm of the language, would it be Dublin? And she said yeah, of course.”

London based producer Lynda Myles recalls, “One of the things that was very important to him was he would be allowed to write the script. He wasn’t interested in signing away the rights. And what we agreed was we would start working with him and take it as far as we could go – given that he had never written a screenplay before.” While Doyle kept his day job teaching in Kilbarrack, Myles and her partner Roger Randall Cutler coached the novelist through the finer art of screenplay adaptation, instructing Doyle how to condense scenes. Their patience produced a completed draft, but Cutler admitted, “It somehow was just a wee bit short of the experience of reading the novel. One wanted to have a screenplay that did that and more, if you like.” The producers passed the book to British screenwriters Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais for help.

Dick Clement recalls, “Roger had shown it to us in London. We came back to Los Angeles. We thought we had money to develop movies, had lunch with Alan Parker just to sort of talk about what we were all doing, which we did fairly often. He said, ‘I’d like to do it.’ We called Roger Randall Cutler and said, ‘Now, this will make it more expensive, and it will probably become Alan’s movie, not yours, but at the end of it you’ll have an Alan Parker movie, which is pretty tempting. It took some convincing that this was actually for real. I mean, you can’t blame him, because these things don’t normally happen that way.” In terms of their rewrite, Ian La Frenias added, “It wasn’t a punch-up job. It needed to be rethought to just as a film. And I think Roddy – there was all that wonderful dialogue and characters – but it just had to be retold in a form that made a more dramatic and that more actually happened and there were bigger beats and the growth and the development of the band and their characters.”

Alan Parker – director of Fame, Pink Floyd: The Wall and Mississippi Burning – remembers, “The first time I heard about Roddy Doyle’s book was Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais – who are old friends of mine and are quite wonderful writers – they gave me the book. And I loved the book, for a number of reasons. First of all, it was a very slim volume. And I found myself laughing out loud. It’s a wonderful book because it’s mostly dialogue and all of the descriptions really are in the beauty of language, and if you’re laughing out loud at a book then you think to yourself, ‘Well, maybe the movie’d be all right.’” With the principals of Beacon Communications – Armyan Bernstein and Tom Rosenberg – locking down financing, Parker worked with Clement & La Frenais on the screenplay adaptation. Once a script was ready, casting convened in Dublin.

Andrew Strong (Deco) was discovered after his father – vocalist Rob Strong – was hired to give Parker an idea of what Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett were going to sound like interpreted by an Irish soul band. Strong was 16 when he was offered the part. Robert Arkins was an accomplished trumpet player and frontman of his own band, but was ultimately was offered the part of Jimmy Rabbitte. Of the ten leads, only Bronagh Gallagher (Bernie) and Johnny Murphy (Joey the Lips) had acted before. After five weeks of rehearsals, a 53-day shooting schedule commenced in Dublin. Parker recalls, “Barrytown – which is the mythical place where Roddy has set his book – obviously was based on Kilbarrack, where Roddy was a schoolteacher. And I just found it cinematically a little dull, Kilbarrack, I have to admit.” Parker ended up shooting the film in 44 different locations spread throughout Dublin.

Opening August 1991, critics in the U.S. did anything but applaud The Commitments. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “As in his earlier Fame, Mr. Parker immerses his audience in a world in which popular art amounts to a communal high, a means of achieving identity and a great escape from the abundant problems of everyday life. As in Fame, he does this with a mixture of annoying glibness and undeniable high-voltage style.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “Parker never promises us a profound human drama here, and the band is so good that maybe music was the best way to go. But I was left with sort of an empty feeling, as if after the characters were developed into believable people, Parker couldn’t find anywhere to go with them.” Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: “Parker gives Dublin’s poverty the same misplaced gloss he brought to the Japanese refugee camps in Come See the Paradise. And the predictable way in which the band’s nine men and three women argue about music, sex and fame robs the story of urgency.”

The Commitments only managed $14.9 million at the box office in the U.S., and while the film swept the British Academy Awards in 1992, it notched only one Oscar nomination, for Best Editing (Gerry Hambling). A decade after its release, Parker mused, “This film really was quite inexpensive to make for its time. I think it cost $12 million and bear in mind that all the music was done within that budget, and recorded and everything. And it’s the kind of film, I suppose it’s the music which gives it its chance of success as a movie, particularly in the United States, which is, you know, audiences in the States are not really very tolerant of films that are not filmed in the American language. The Irish accent could have been difficult; I don’t think it’s that difficult to follow.” In addition to winning many fans on home video, The Commitments did become a sensation as a two-volume soundtrack album. By 2008, the CDs had sold 12 million copies worldwide.

The popularity of the soundtrack has enabled Kenneth McCluskey and Dick Massey to tour the world with a band calling themselves The Stars of The Commitments. Glen Hansard – who performs and records with his band The Frames – returned to acting in Once (2007) and won an Academy Award for Best Original Song with Markéta Irglová. Soundtrack sales remained brisk enough to get the attention of Miramax Films. In 2000, the studio flew playwright Warren Leight to Dublin to sound out a sequel. But according to McCluskey, “Miramax bought the rights to make a sequel, they commissioned a script writer and he came to Dublin. We got him very drunk and sent him back to New York with a hangover, but nothing ever happened.” Roddy Doyle has maintained that he has no interest whatsoever in a Commitments reunion. “It’s a better story if they break up. I don’t think it would be as enjoyable if they went on became the biggest band in the world.”

Opinion
The Commitments is one of those special movies that just hit at the right place and right time. Within a few short years, construction cranes and venture capital would have made a film about a working class band on the skids in Dublin laughable. But in either a stroke of genius, case of first timer’s luck, or both, the movie caught everyone involved at the peak of their creativity. The audience gets to experience lighting in a bottle in what is probably the most entertaining movie I’ve ever seen featuring actors I’d never heard of. Roddy Doyle’s source material has a sharp ear for the vernacular of the north side of Dublin, but more importantly, contains a self-depreciating wit that slashes through the cheesy melodrama of the musical genre. Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. – an absentee character in the novel – acts as a partial observer in the movie, bringing even greater doses of humor and vitality to the story.

Alan Parker belongs to a class of British directors whose commercials won lots of citations in the 1970s, but unlike most of his films, The Commitments is focused on its characters, its dialogue and its ideals as opposed to lighting effects or trick editing. And unlike a lot of shitty musicals (or worse, American Idol) the emphasis here isn’t on how music can transform you into a superstar, but on what music can do for your dignity. Music supervisor G. Marq Roswell is one of many who deserve credit along with Parker for the four-star soundtrack. The Commitments’ versions of “Mustang Sally”, “Slip Away” and “Try A Little Tenderness” have stood up against the original recordings by Wilson Pickett, Clarence Carter and Otis Redding. The amateur cast is equal parts energetic and natural, particularly Robert Arkins, whose self-conducted interviews in the tub should resonate with anyone who ever dreamed of rising above their surroundings.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Something of a Hero: An Interview with Roddy Doyle” By Karen Sbrockey. Interview Literary Review, Summer 1999

“When Roddy Met Trudy” By Ciaran Carty. Sunday Tribune, February 25, 2001

The Commitments. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (2004)

Synopsis
Upon his release from Joliet Correctional Center, “Joliet” Jake Blues (John Belushi) is met by his brother Elwood Blues (Dan Aykroyd) in an old Mt. Prospect police car. Elwood takes Jake directly to St. Helen Blessed Shroud Orphanage to visit The Penguin (Kathleen Freeman), the nun who raised them. She reveals that the Cook County assessor has asked for $5,000 and is threatening to close the orphanage. Jake offers to have the cash for her in the morning, but The Penguin refuses to accept stolen money, and when the brothers curse up a storm, she kicks them out in disgrace. An old bluesman named Curtis (Cab Calloway) who raised the boys and also lives in the orphanage advises them to get churched up.

Standing at the back of the Triple Rock Cathedral to hear a sermon from the Reverend Cleophus James (James Brown), Jake is struck by the holy spirit. It occurs to him they can save the orphanage by reuniting their old band. Elwood reveals that might not be so easy; they all took straight jobs. Pulled over by a pair of Illinois State troopers for running a red light and driving on a suspended license, Elwood notifies Jake “We’re on a mission from God,” and leads the law on a wild car chase through a shopping mall. Laying low from the authorities, the Blues Brothers also dodge assassination attempts by a mousy brunette (Carrie Fisher) who has it in for Jake.

Steve Cropper (rhythm guitar), Donald Dunn (bass), Willie Hall (drums), Tom Malone (trombone) and Murphy Dunne (piano) are found playing a Holiday Inn. Trumpeter Mr. Fabulous (Alan Rubin) is lured away from his job as a maître’d when the Blues Brothers make a scene in his restaurant. Lead guitarist Matt Murphy and saxophonist Blue Lou (Lou Marini) are recovered in Calumet City working for Matt’s wife (Aretha Franklin) at a soul food diner. She doesn’t let her husband go without breaking into “Think”. In addition to state police and the Mystery Woman, the Blues Brothers are pursed through Chicago by a redneck band, Illinois Nazis and the state National Guard as they try to make it from their big gig to the county assessor’s office.

Production history
According to interviews given at the time, John Belushi pinned the birth of The Blues Brothers to the autumn of 1977 while he was stuck in Eugene, Oregon shooting Animal House. Belushi recalled, “There were a lot of rainy nights with nothing to do and this guy I met there, Curtis Salgado, began playing me all this music. It was fucking unbelievable. I was starving for it and Curtis kept asking me if I was really interested. Interested. I couldn’t stop playing the stuff! Magic Sam, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Junior Wells – I walked around playing that shit all the time. I bought hundreds of records and singles. And then I knew Danny had played the harp in Canada, and I always could sing, so we created The Blues Brothers.”

Dan Aykroyd traced the origin of The Blues Brothers to New York, where Belushi would warm up audiences for Saturday Night Live. Aykroyd recalled, “He used to sing rock stuff, and he introduced me to The Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin. I introduced him to James Cotton and some of the white blues bands that were working up North, like The Lamont Cranston Band.” Aykroyd quickly got in on the act. “We just decided we’d go out and sing a couple of old blues numbers – and why don’t we wear the suits that you wore when you were doing Roy Orbison? That was the discussion. John did Roy Orbison once. He wore the thin tie and white shirt and black suit. And then the shades, you know? And we just added the hat to it and the digital watches and the locked briefcase.”

If TV audiences couldn’t decide whether The Blues Brothers were mocking someone or paying tribute, they weren’t alone. Aykroyd added, “Well, we thought it was a parody at first, but then we started to get in with these heavyweight musicians and we realized, ‘Hey, we’ve got to be pros here.’” Belushi – who played drums growing up in the suburbs of Chicago – was living out a dream. Aykroyd remained dubious about taking their act on the road. Then Steve Martin asked The Blues Brothers to open nine shows for him September 1978 at the Universal Amphitheatre in L.A. Under the guidance of Paul Shaffer, Aykroyd & Belushi assembled a band. The response was so overwhelming that when Atlantic Records put out a concert album – A Briefcase Full of Blues – it sold three million copies.

Pitching an idea for a movie over the phone, Aykroyd & Belushi found a buyer in Universal Pictures, which rushed The Blues Brothers into development. Belushi convinced Aykroyd to get to work on a script and summoned director John Landis to New York. Aykroyd recalls, “Then Landis came in and talked to me at Saturday Night one night, and said, ‘I want this, this and this in the movie.’ I took some notes, and said, ‘Fine, you’ll have it.’ And I sort of cut the script to what he wanted – including of course, the thought and myth that we knew. So from the beginning, it was like Landis and I putting it together. Landis saying, ‘I want the biggest car chase ever at the end of the movie,’ and I went, ‘Okay!’ And I said, ‘Well, I want to jump a swing bridge.’ And he said, ‘Fine.’ And you know, I turned in a three-hundred-plus-page script.”

When he sent the script for The Blues Brothers to producer Robert Weiss, Aykroyd wrapped it in the pages of the San Fernando Yellow Pages to blunt the effect. As written, each member of the band had been given their own story. Aykroyd recalls, “I didn’t even know how to write movies. I don’t think I’d even seen a screenplay. I was told most screenplays were 120 to 150 pages long, but when I sat down to write The Blues Brothers, there were so many descriptive passages in there, just paragraphs and paragraphs of shots, of concepts, of ideas, of descriptions and eventually it just kind of ballooned up.” The script ran 324 pages. Landis recalls, “When I read it and I got these calls from Bob Weiss and Sean Daniel and Ned Tanen, you know, hysterical, ‘What the fuck is this?’”

Landis adds, “So I basically distilled it, rewrote it, and then gave it back to Danny and then we worked together. But basically it was – don’t want to say streamlining because this movie’s anything but streamlined – but it was trying to make it as economic in the story as possible. I really wanted to simplify it to the point, I mean, it really is like Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, ‘Let’s put on a show and save the orphanage,’ just really make it a straight forward story on which we can hang all this craziness.” Shooting commenced July 1979 in Los Angeles. The musical numbers were largely shot on the Universal lot, while the climactic concert was filmed at the Hollywood Palladium. By the time the production moved to Harvey, Illinois to shoot a car chase in the shuttered Dixie Square Mall, the $27 million budget was climbing. It would end up at $36 million.

Released June 1980, The Blues Brothers was praised in its hometown; Gene Siskel ranked it #8 on his list of the year’s 10 best films, while Roger Ebert recommended the movie as well. Many critics outside of Chicago did not. Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker: “The film’s big joke is how overscaled everything in it is; this has an unfortunate result – Landis is working with such a lavish hand that his miscalculations in timing are experienced by the audience as a form of waste.” Richard Corliss, Time Magazine: “Alas, more is less, and The Blues Brothers ends up totaling itself.” Variety: “If Universal had made it 35 years earlier, The Blues Brothers might have been called Abbott & Costello in Soul Town. Level of inspiration is about the same now as then, the humor as basic, the enjoyment as fleeting. But at $30 million, this is a whole new ball-game.”

Speaking 25 years later, Landis commented that The Blues Brothers, “got the most hateful reviews. People wrote that it was Hollywood out of control. We had a bunch of films that were way over budget about that same time: Apocalypse Now, Star Trek: The Movie, 1941, Heaven’s Gate and The Blues Brothers. All of those films – with the exception of Heaven’s Gate – eventually showed a profit. But the press kept saying Hollywood had gone crazy, and The Blues Brothers took a lot of that rap.” The film grossed $57.2 million in the U.S. and another $58 million overseas, but due to its costs – and the fact that Animal House earned twice as much – was considered a wash commercially.

Asked in 2005 about the film’s impact, Landis stated, “When we made The Blues Brothers, it was all Bee Gees and ABBA. Now, I get questions like, ‘How did you get Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin and James Brown to be in the movie?’ And I have to tell them, ‘It’s because they were thrilled to get the job.’ To give you an idea of how different it is now, when we did The Blues Brothers, MCA/Universal refused the soundtrack album, because they said no one but old black people would buy it. Then we went to what was called a ‘black label’ – Atlantic – and they refused to put John Lee Hooker on the album! Fifteen years later, John had a platinum album. So The Blues Brothers was successful in its attempt to call attention to these guys.”

Opinion
If you hate musical numbers, car crashes, R&B, soul, gospel music or profanity, you’ll probably find a lot to dislike about The Blues Brothers, which brazenly – though a bit raggedly – serves up epic quantities of each. For its fans, time appears to have been very good to this film, which isn’t seamless, but stands as one of most enduring musicals or comedies ever made. Of the six or seven movies he appeared in, it’s probably the best testament to the immense talent and likability of John Belushi. Also documented are show stopping performances by James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Cab Calloway that if nothing else, make the film a marvel in musical anthropology.

What’s truly awesome about The Blues Brothers is the vision of Aykroyd & Landis’ script, which is filled with enough music, characters and ingenuity for two movies (Landis intended the picture to have a retro, road show release, with an intermission and a running time of two and a half hours.) The difference between this flick and 1941 – which was bloated with zany ideas and cast members – is that unlike Steven Spielberg, John Landis knew his musical and comedy genres. Elwood’s closet sized apartment, the chicken wire in front of the stage at Bob’s Country Bunker, and Carrie Fisher popping up like Wile E. Coyote throughout the film are all terrific concepts, and Landis demonstrates the panache to get honest to goodness laughs from that stuff. Along with Aykroyd & Belushi, he should also be acknowledged for employing so many great R&B musicians who were on the verge of being forgotten.

D.J. Nock at DVD Times writes, “25 years later, it’s easy to see that The Blues Brothers is little more than the sum of its parts. Like a lot of popular films, its reputation seems to precede it; never possessing the quality that its status reflects. But don’t get me wrong – I find the film to be a very entertaining brew, but its ‘perfect’ reputation is probably unjustified. Director John Landis has certainly made better films (especially his masterpiece, Trading Places), and his skills as a filmmaker have been put to more efficient use elsewhere.”

Scott Weinberg at DVD Talk writes, “Easily of the most ebullient and smoothly enjoyable musical comedies ever made, The Blues Brothers boasts a roster of musical talent that must be heard to be believed: Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, and John Lee Hooker, all legends of the music industry, had their careers earn a well-deserved shot in the arm from their appearances in The Blues Brothers. And the musicians hired to play Jake & Elwood’s band? Top-notch artists across the board. The flick’s basically one-third blues music, one-third character-based comedy, and one-third car chase — and all of it’s grade-A prime American Comedy, brewed in the vintage year of 1980.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In December 1983, acclaimed art rockers Talking Heads concluded their “Stop Making Sense” tour, documenting the event by filming three shows at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. Ambling onto a completely empty stage in a pair of white tennis shoes and carrying an acoustic guitar, singer/ songwriter David Byrne performs “Psycho Killer.” As the show progresses, Byrne’s band mates – bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz, keyboardist Jerry Harrison – join him on stage one at a time, one song at a time, while roadies assemble amps, instruments and an entire stage around them.

By the performance of “Burning Down The House,” the band has been joined by guitarist Alex Reid of The Brothers Johnson, Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell, percussionist Steve Scales, and backup singers Edna Holt and Lynn Mabry. For the entirety of the film, focus is kept squarely on the performances taking place on stage. Highlights include Byrne doing jogging laps during “Life During Wartime,” and appearing in an oversized gray suit for the song “Girlfriend Is Better.” Only near the end of the show is the packed audience finally revealed, most of them up out of their seats and dancing.

Production history
After turning in his cut of the film Swing Shift in the summer of 1983, director Jonathan Demme was notified by Warner Bros. that they were bringing in Robert Towne to rewrite several scenes, steering the film away from the quirky period drama that had been scripted and turning it into a light romance, playing off the chemistry Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell had developed. “We had this hard-nosed feminist, all women together thing, and Kurt Russell was supposed to be a bastard, and suddenly all these scenes were being rewritten, and I found myself in a very awkward position because I had to cooperate with these new scenes.”

Demme and producer Gary Goetzman had seen Talking Heads perform at the Greek Theatre that summer as part of the “Stop Making Sense” tour the band had launched to promote their latest album. The way David Byrne had staged the show and sequenced the songs – evolving his demeanor as the evening progressed – floored the director. He felt that it was a movie waiting to be filmed. Equally enthused for any opportunity to hang out with Byrne, a mutual friend introduced Demme to the musician “to see if he’d be interested in putting a film together of the concert.”

The prospect of a movie intrigued Byrne in part because of technical challenges he’d encountered on the tour. Demme recalls, “He designed the lighting for the live show with a lighting director and found it very frustrating that he could never get the right lighting. He realized that on film he would finally get the chance to get the lighting right.” Demme had collaborated with Jordan Cronenweth on Handle With Care and suggested the master cinematographer – who had recently shot Blade Runner – to light the concert. A week later, Byrne got back to Demme with $1.2 million the band had agreed to put up themselves to bankroll a film.

While Robert Towne labored over rewrites for Swing Shift, Demme sought refuge on the road with Talking Heads. Byrne kept after him about how Stop Making Sense would be different from other concert films. The director approached each member of the band for input. Tina Weymouth recalls, “So, we said ‘We’re not crazy about split screen images and flashing images.’ There was always one camera straight on. The format was very flat. It was always like a painting – sort of like a Robert Wilson design in two dimensions, but also with four moving cameras. And even though there were cranes that would be observing things, a lot of the time we weren’t even aware we were being filmed. It comes across as being real.”

A great deal of what separated Stop Making Sense from other concert films was already in place on the tour. Chris Frantz recalls, “The whole staging of the show seemed to be the most obvious idea in the world: to construct a show where you saw what it took to construct a show, in the show. And you start with an empty stage with absolutely nothing on it, and you put the stuff on the stage during the show that it takes to make a show: the lights, the amps, the instruments, the players, everything, and then you proceed to use that stuff. So everybody sees what it takes to make a show when they see that stuff put into action.”

At the time, Demme stated, “There’s been a kind of curse on concert movies. They almost never do well commercially, and I’m very rarely excited by them. I wanted to eliminate two things that I don’t like about them: shots of the audience and backstage interviews with the singers.” Filmed over three nights in December 1983 on the tour’s last stop – the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood – the set ran two hours and fifteen minutes. Acknowledging the movie should play nowhere near that length, Demme left four songs on the cutting room floor. Editing the picture in six weeks, mixing the sound in another two, Stop Making Sense was completed only ninety days after Demme wrapped photography.

The movie was put before an audience for the first time in April 1984 at the San Francisco International Film Festival. The response was overwhelming. Demme recalls, “Very quickly, people started leaving their seats and moving up closer to the screen and also standing up in their seats. By the end of ‘Burning Down the House’ the building was literally shaking and the manager of the theater was truly sincerely freaked out. He thought something terrible structurally might be about to happen, and it was a big struggle with him to not stop the show.” Screening the picture outdoors for the Venice Film Festival produced the same result of audiences dancing in the aisle.

Twenty-five years after opening in the U.S. in October 1984, Stop Making Sense routinely lands atop lists of the best concert movies ever made. For its reissue on DVD in 1999, David Byrne stated, “Another thing I noticed was my character – if I could call myself a character – he takes a kind of journey in this thing. He starts off as Mister Stiff White Guy and does his very, very, very best to get down and get loose by the end of the show, to kind of shed his inhibitions and get loose … And so he’s kind of changed as a person, just like would happen in a regular movie with a regular story with three acts or whatever, which I think helps make this movie work in a way that some other concert movies don’t.”

Opinion
Unlike concert movies out to celebrate the pageantry of a musical event, or offer some glimpse into the mind of a musician, this is the first democratic concert film. Stop Making Sense is made expressly for the concertgoers who came to see a concert, producing a seamless, exhilarating document of a performance. The only reactions or insights to be taken away here are ones Jonathan Demme empowers the viewer to take away on our own.

Demme’s work seems almost effortless against David Byrne’s gloriously geeky staging, as well as the chemistry of Talking Heads themselves; enigmatic, witty and unpredictable. Instead of a band trying to blast you out of the arena, here we’re compelled to get as close to the stage as possible. Jordan Cronenweth strips the theatre of color and bathes it in gorgeous shadow – memorably during Byrne’s dance with a lamp in “This Must Be The Place” – while Pablo Ferro, whose hand drawn titles were scrawled over the credits of Dr. Strangelove, designed the opening titles here too.

Colin Jacobson at DVD Movie Guide writes, “No matter how hard I tried, I never could develop much of an affinity for Talking Heads. They are one of those acts that I always felt I should like but just never really did … I think SMS might finally have done it. Is it the greatest concert film of all-time? I don’t feel that way – I doubt anything will ever surpass Prince’s brilliant Sign O the Times – but this piece, directed by Jonathan Demme, makes a strong argument for the Heads’ case; the film presents the band cleanly, effectively and evocatively. It does what every good concert movie should do: it makes me really wish I could see the show live.”

“First let me say that the Talking Heads had a huge influence on me as a teenager. They were among my favorite bands and one of the reasons that I wound up learning the bass and spending the next fifteen years playing in bands of my own … Though considered an avant-garde art band the Heads put on a surprisingly energetic presentation that shows them to be both consummate performers and accomplished musicians. Stop Making Sense comes closer to capturing the feel of a live show than any concert film made before or since. If you let your self get swept up in the performance you may well be tempted to get up off the couch and dance around in front of your screen,” writes Chris Hughes at DVD Talk.

Dean Roddey at DVD Verdict writes, “There are a few times and places where the Universe or God or the Muse is caught on film talking to us through human conduits. On my short list of such religious musical experiences are Hendrix at Monterey Pop, The Band’s The Last Waltz, Sting’s Bring on the Night, and U2’s Rattle and Hum, and, last but not least, The Talking Head’s Stop Making Sense. These films, for those of us who appreciate such things, contain transcendent moments that definitely peg the Chill Bump Meter.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In Seattle, Jack Baker (Jeff Bridges) leaves his latest one-night stand in her bed. “You’ve got great hands,” she tells him on his way out. Jack dusts off his tux and shuffles to a gig at the Starfire Lounge. Performing a dual piano act with his partner of 31 years – his older brother Frank (Beau Bridges) – Jack can barely mask his contempt for his job, his surroundings and his employer. His only happiness seems to come from his dog, the 10-year-old neighbor (Ellie Raab) who’s adopted him as a surrogate dad and performing his own brand of sophisticated jazz piano at an after hours joint.

With audiences drying up, Frank holds auditions for a singer. Thirty-seven “singers” later, Susie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer) enters. While her entertainment experience is limited to being on call for the Triple A Escort Service, Susie’s voice is elegant and powerful. After a rocky start, the Fabulous Baker Boys and the Sensational Susie Diamond start drawing crowds. But the more intimately Jack and Susie get to know each other, the more nervous Frank becomes. “This isn’t some hat check girl you can leave behind at the Sheraton. You’ve got two shows a night with her!” Jack ignores the advice. Both he and Susie come to regret it.

Production history
A love for movies brought Steve Kloves from Sunnyvale, California to UCLA, where he worked at a campus deli and found little time for class. He dropped out his sophomore year and took an unpaid internship with an agent. Barely old enough to drink, he wrote a script called Swings, an “’80s version of Diary of a Mad Housewife” about women in the suburbs. The script brought Kloves to the attention of Paramount, which put his third screenplay – a coming of age tale set against World War II titled Racing With The Moon – into production in 1983 with Richard Benjamin directing and Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage starring.

Kloves started work on his next script. “I had spent a lot of time in bad hotels and I would occasionally go down to the bar and hear some guy play the piano, and some of them were pretty good. The way my mind tripped off on it was that this guy’s parents gave him piano lessons to improve his life and give him an opening into culture and there he was, twenty years later, at a Holiday Inn playing ‘Feelings.’ ” Kloves finished writing The Fabulous Baker Boys in 1985 and sold it to producer Paula Weinstein. She took the project to Mark Rosenberg, president of production at Warner Brothers.

Chevy Chase and Bill Murray were proposed to star. Kloves wanted Jeff and Beau Bridges and spent the next three years holding out for the opportunity to direct the film himself. Mark Rosenberg left Warner Brothers, partnering with producer/director Sydney Pollack to form Mirage Productions. Pollack read The Fabulous Baker Boys and recalled, “The first thing that struck me was its sense of atmosphere, mood and leanness. Steve is a minimalist, and there is something extremely evocative in the understated way he writes.” But even with the Bridges, Mirage was unable to interest a studio. Finally, in 1988, Fox agreed to finance the film at $11.5 million.

For the role of Susie Diamond, Kloves hadn’t considered anyone except Michelle Pfeiffer. It was hoped she would be able to do her own singing, but it had been seven years – for Grease 2 – since Pfeiffer had sang or had a voice lesson. Composer Dave Grusin suggested a singer/songwriter named Sally Stevens coach Pfeiffer’s vocal performance. After taking the actress to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel to hear a nightclub singer and get the ambiance down, they spent six weeks rehearsing for two hours a day at Pfeiffer’s Santa Monica home. Stevens recalls, “I can swear that every single note in that movie was hers.”

Shooting commenced in December 1988. Though set in Seattle, much of the film was shot in L.A., with the production utilizing the Biltmore Hotel, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and the Ambassador Hotel for key musical sequences. Nominated for four Academy Awards – including a Best Actress nomination for Pfeiffer – and a darling of nearly every critic that reviewed it, audiences stayed away. Kloves recalls, “Baker Boys was considered a difficult, quirky movie. Dark. Anything in the present state of Hollywood where people have real arguments is considered dark.” It wasn’t until the film was released on home video that moviegoers warmed up to it.

Opinion
Jazz music, a conflict that stays mostly internalized in the main character, and a dry sense of humor are only a few of the challenges Kloves imposes on the audience here, the number one being that his screenplay doesn’t tell us much more about these characters or their music than we’d soak up tending bar at one of their gigs. The reason that The Fabulous Baker Boys endures as a classic is precisely because it refuses to impose any artificial plot devices, jokes or dialogue on the audience, transporting us right into those dingy lounges with their blue collar musical acts.

Using the success metric coined by Howard Hawks, this movie has three great scenes and no bad ones. Pfeiffer’s audition to “More Than You Know” is magic, as is her show stopping performance of “Makin’ Whoopee” atop a piano. And any screenwriter should envy the way Kloves bookends his story. While Susie Diamond is still the best role of Michelle Pfeiffer’s career, Jeff Bridges walks away with the movie, playing a worn out rake who’s heard the same lines and played the same tunes one time too many. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus brings an Edward Hopper/“Nighthawks” vibe to the film, aided immeasurably by Dave Grusin’s mellow musical score.

Nathan Rabin at The Onion A.V. Club writes, “American studios turned out plot-light, atmosphere-heavy observational gems like this throughout the ’70s, but when Baker Boys hit screens in the late ’80s, its understated, world-weary sophistication stood out like a Cole Porter ballad sandwiched between generic Top 40 R&B hits … Though it lacks momentum as it ambles to a close, Baker Boys is nevertheless a touching, sly, resonant look at the joy and pain of collaboration, and the way jaded souls cut themselves off from their emotions to keep heartache at bay, but ultimately end up hurting each other all the same.”

“Even by the standards of leisurely paced films, The Fabulous Baker Boys takes its sweet time to kick its dramatic arc into gear. The movie, especially its final act, could’ve used tighter editing. But those are minor complaints. Both Bridges are excellent; it might be the pinnacle of Beau Bridges’ filmic career. Pfeiffer initially overplays the brassy broad routine (perhaps still channeling her performance from 1988’s Married to the Mob) … but her performance transcends vocal prowess. Heterosexual males might have trouble watching Pfeiffer’s rendition of “Makin’ Whoopee” without drooling on themselves,” writes Phil Bacharach at DVD Talk.

Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews writes, “This is the film that contains the classic scene of Michelle Pfeiffer in a red dress laying on top of the piano, belting out the standard, ‘Makin’ Whoopee’, and there are several other moments that make this a worthwhile watch for those who enjoy thoughtful fare with lots of good music. It’s an efficiently made film made by consummate professionals, and for a night of quality sights, sounds, and good performances, the price of the rental should be well worth it.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Bearded, overweight and sipping whiskey, Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer) huddles in a studio in Paris, laying down a track of his poetry, alone. Moving back in time to Venice Beach, California in 1965, Morrison follows a woman who catches his eye back to her bungalow. He climbs in her window. “You got a problem with doors?” asks Pamela Courson (Meg Ryan). “Waste of time.” The sensitive, somewhat pretentious Morrison drops out of UCLA film school and spends his time with Pam, living on a roof and writing. He runs into a classmate, Ray Manzarek (Kyle MacLachlan) and samples some of the lyrics he’s been scribbling.

Arriving on the name Doors, guitarist Robby Krieger (Frank Whaley) and drummer John Densmore (Kevin Dillon) join keyboardist Mazarek and the charismatic Morrison in the band, which builds a following in L.A. performing songs like “Light My Fire” at clubs on the Sunset Strip. A trip to Death Valley to drop peyote culminates in The Doors performing “The End” to an entranced crowd at the Whisky à Go-Go. A recording deal with Elektra Records under the supervision of producer Paul Rothschild (Michael Wincott) follows, as does notoriety when Morrison gets the band banned from The Ed Sullivan Show for growling the word “higher” on live TV.

Morrison insulates himself from the pressures of fame with booze, and also occupies himself sexually with wicca obsessed journalist Patricia Kennealy (Kathleen Quinlan). Violating state obscenity laws at a show in New Haven, increasingly erratic behavior on stage and showing up drunk for recording sessions alienates Morrison from his band mates until they ultimately part company following the release of their last studio album, L.A. Woman in 1970. Morrison and his wife Pam head to Paris, where the enigmatic rocker has an encounter with destiny.

Production history
Oliver Stone was introduced to the music of The Doors in April 1967, “hooched down in a base camp in Vietnam.” He returned from the war and the first screenplay he ever attempted – Break – was so inspired by the band’s surreal imagery that Stone sent a copy to Jim Morrison, hoping he would star. Over the next twenty years, William Friedkin, Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Brian DePalma, Paul Schrader, Walter Hill, Barry Levinson, and Ron Howard all tried to develop a feature film on Morrison. DePalma planned a fictionalized account along the lines of The Rose, with John Travolta agreeing to play a rock icon styled after Morrison.

After a series of protracted negotiations with Morrison’s estate and the members of The Doors, producer Sasha Harari, rock promoter Bill Graham and Columbia Pictures ended up with the film rights to The Doors in 1985. Harari’s first choice to write a script was Oliver Stone, who was departing for the Philippines to direct Platoon and never responded. Following two drafts – one by Ralph Thomas, another by J. Randall Jahnson – Columbia put the project into turnaround, where Brian Grazer and Imagine Entertainment picked it up.

Harari wasn’t happy with the scripts he was reading and persisted in getting Stone to come on board. But when the screenwriter met with The Doors, he failed to win the band over. Bob Dolman turned in the next draft and the project stalled. Eventually, Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna agreed to bankroll The Doors through their studio Carolco Pictures. Vajna felt he had the perfect director to take over: Oliver Stone. Two Academy Awards later – for directing Platoon and Born On The Fourth of July – the band was much more receptive to the ideas Stone presented.

Stone agreed to helm The Doors after he finished his next picture, Evita. Meryl Streep was set to play Eva Peron in an adaptation of the stage musical, but was holding out for more money than the production could afford. When Streep dropped out, Stone moved immediately into The Doors, completing a first draft in the summer of 1989. “The script was written more as a tone poem. The concept was that the movie was all in Jim’s lyrics. I picked the songs I wanted and wrote each piece of the movie as a mood to fit that song … I tried not to put my rationalizations about motivations between us and the songs.”

Stone was thinking about Val Kilmer for Jim Morrison as early as 1987. “In Willow, he was not at all the classic Errol Flynn type, he’s more in the anti-hero mold. I liked his implied arrogance.” Kilmer wasn’t a fan of The Doors, at least not yet. He spent several thousand dollars to shoot a demo of himself performing four of the band’s songs in his home. Stone sent Kilmer to work with Paul Rothschild and had the actor lay down his own vocal tracks against The Doors’ master tapes. When the band heard the demo, they weren’t sure whether they were listening to Morrison or Kilmer.

With Carolco raising $38 million in financing, shooting commenced in April 1990. Stone refused to film Kilmer lip synching his way through the club or concert scenes and instead recorded the actor singing live, with The Doors master tapes playing behind him. Stone’s insistence to make a movie about the music culminated with 30,000 extras showing up for the concert sequences. Stone recalls, “There was a lotta acid going around, a lotta marijuana. They were stripping clothes off, unasked, just to participate. They loved the music and wanted to get back to that time. The concert scenes probably looked better than the real ‘60s concerts did.”

Arriving in theaters March 1991, moviegoers and critics either loved The Doors or hated it. Ray Manzarek assailed Stone’s vision, which he referred to as “the evil side of sex and drugs.” Rolling Stone called the film “the King Kong of rock movies.” The Washington Post headline read, “Doors: The Time To Hesitate Is Now,” but Gene Siskel called it a “vibrant tribute to rock cult figure Jim Morrison and the decade in which he flourished.” The film grossed a modest $37 million in the U.S. and $25 million overseas. Most people found it on home video instead of seeing it on the big screen with a crowd.

Opinion
The film does increase in power the larger canvas it plays on -and the higher volume it’s jacked up to – but whatever sized screen you’re watching it on, The Doors holds up as one of the greatest rock ‘n roll movies of all time. Stone doesn’t provide much insight into the enigma of Jim Morrison, and the movie tells us even less about his music. Character study is not what it’s going for. Instead, the film endures as an experience, a triumph of sight and sound featuring twenty-seven of The Doors’ songs married to some of the most astounding camerawork and mind blowing optical effects ever put to film.

Even the most tight collared Stone hater would have to admit that the movie looks and sounds like platinum, a credit to cinematographer Robert Richardson and music producer Paul Rothschild. The scope that went into recreating the ‘60s – from the Sunset Strip to the concert scenes – is awesome, even as the film staggers around for a story, or Meg Ryan is cast completely out of her element. By bringing in Crispin Glover to appear as Andy Warhol, Mimi Rogers as photographer Gloria Stavers and Michael Madsen as Tom Baker, not to mention Val Kilmer putting on the show of his career, there’s not a dull moment to be found here.

Eamonn McCusker at DVD Times writes, “Overall, it’s a good film but not quite the biopic it could have been. Most fans of Morrison and The Doors will admit that the legend of the Lizard King is something that has overshadowed the music for over thirty-one years but in revisiting this film and rereading the Jerry Hopkins/Danny Sugerman biography, maybe Stone is right, maybe Morrison actually was really dislikeable and maybe it’s necessary to separate the Morrison from his music – great albums, awful man.”

“It doesn’t take much experience in the way of mind-altering substances to know a bad trip when you see one, and Oliver Stone’s The Doors plays out like an epic hangover one expects to never recover from. The film is overwhelming in all the wrong ways, and while, theoretically, such an assaulting effect would seem the correct one for a film detailing the perpetually overindulgent life of rock god Jim Morrison … the effect remains one of unrestrained, unpleasant bombast, attacking the mind as opposed to tingling the subconscious,” writes Rob Humanick at The Projection Booth.

Preston Jones at DVD Talk writes, “Much has been made of Stone’s synthesis of fact and fiction, a blend that fused the myths and the men who made them, resulting in an intoxicating cinematic experience, one charged with the mind-expanding possibilities of psychotropics and poetry, smashed together in splendid fashion. Val Kilmer doesn’t perform so much as inhabit the soul of Jim Morrison … It’s a searing performance that’s justly been celebrated as perhaps the crowning achievement of Kilmer’s erratic career.”

© Joe Valdez

31 days of October. 31 articles devoted to the screen’s maestro of suspense and the macabre, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980). I’ll be jumping back and forth through five decades in this series. More than half of the films I’ve never seen before, but even the ones I have seen were viewed, researched and written about this month.

By Joe Valdez

On vacation in Griesalp, Switzerland with her parents, the adolescent Betty Lawrence (Nova Pilbeam) chases a dog onto a ski lane and almost kills a gregarious French skier named Louis Bernard, much to the amusement of her father Bob (Leslie Banks). Later, she distracts her mother Jill (Edna Best), causing her to lose a skeet shooting competition versus a German sharpshooter (Frank Vosper).

While Jill cuts a rug with Bernard, a sniper shoots him. His dying words direct her to retrieve a hairbrush in his room and to take it to the British Consulate. Bob retrieves a note from the hairbrush, but before he can turn it over to the Consulate, he and his wife receive another note, advising them to say nothing, or else they’ll never see their child again. The couple returns to London.

Instead of cooperating with British authorities and endangering his daughter, Bob follows clues on the note to the “Tabernacle of the Sun” church, where the nefarious Abbott (Peter Lorre) detains him. Abbott is ringleader of a den of assassins who plan to kill a foreign diplomat at the Royal Albert Hall. Bob manages to get word of this to Jill, who races to the symphony to avert the assassination and rescue her daughter.

While working for British International Pictures in the late 1920s, director Alfred Hitchcock collaborated with screenwriter Charles Bennett on an adaptation of the “Bulldog” Drummond novels by Herman Cyril McNeile. Taking his cue from John Buchan, McNeile’s hero was a dashing World War I veteran turned private eye. B.I.P. owned the rights to the character, so when Hitchcock moved to Gaumont in 1933 and set about reviving the “Bulldog” Drummond project, it was without “Bulldog” Drummond.

Now titled The Man Who Knew Too Much, Bennett’s script was an action thriller about a father forced into duty as a spy when he’s warned of an assassination, and his daughter is kidnapped to keep him quiet. In world events, Adolf Hitler had just been appointed chancellor of Germany, while in America, Franklin Roosevelt had escaped an assassin in Miami. The script tapped into tension sweeping the globe, chiefly, paranoia in England over the threat of a resurgent Germany.

British humorist D.B. Wyndham-Lewis doctored Bennett’s script, while actor-writer Edwin Greenwood and playwright A.R. Rawlinson were hired to contribute dialogue. Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams also punched up a few scenes. Leslie Banks and Edna Best were cast as the protagonists, while Peter Lorre was chosen to play the criminal mastermind. Hitchcock was so enamored with Lorre that his role grew as filming commenced in June 1934.

Many in Hitchcock’s crew – like Lorre – had fled Nazi Germany. Czech-born cameraman Curt Courant served as cinematographer. The art director was Alfred Junge, a German emigre. When Gaumont got a look at the movie, they found it more unsettling than entertaining, and booked it as a B-picture. But The Man Who Knew Too Much proved enormously popular with critics and audiences in England, and crossed over in the U.S. Hitchcock would later say that the film was the real start of his career.

The difference between the two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much comes down to whether you prefer your Hitchcock bare bones with European moodiness, or glamorous with Hollywood stars. Both films climax at the Royal Albert Hall and both have fatal flaws. As rough as it is, I prefer the original in a head to head taste test, but not enough to really recommend it.

Hitchcock arranges evocative transitions; cutting to a speeding train when Jill reads the ransom, or cutting away from the symphony so we aren’t sure whether the assassination succeeded. Leslie Banks and Edna Best are hapless, but Peter Lorre does fine work as “the most cold blooded murderer in all the history of crime.” The Man Who Knew Too Much is almost entirely action at 75 minutes, and while it desperately needed character work, the surprise is how lacking in momentum the suspense is.

Jonathan Coe at Sight & Sound writes, “The original version feels much more of a piece because it is quirky and surreal almost from the start. After a perfunctory prologue in Switzerland … we are plunged into a deliriously quickfire sequence of events, each one more dreamlike than the last.”

“With a brief, seventy-five minute running time, The Man Who Knew Too Much will likely leave contemporary audiences unsatisfied. Besides the stiff performances, occasionally awkward staging, and functional dialogue, Hitchcock and his battery of writers … barely tap into the potential inherent in the material,” writes Mel Valentin at Movie-Vault.

J.D. Dunn at 411mania writes, “Yes, the film does suffer from flaws, but they’re hardly fatal flaws. The Man Who Knew Too Much still stands as a must-see for any fan of Hitchcock or the spy genre.”