BEST WORST THING THAT EVER COULD HAVE HAPPENED (2016)

The Best Movies You (Probably) Never Heard Of

I am, always have been and always will be, a musical theater buff. Or maybe musical theater fanatic is more like it. I’m sure that anyone who knows me would second that motion. Many is the time when someone would say something that would prompt me to sing a well known, and sometimes not so well known, impromptu show tune. Invariably they’d ask me to stop.

I remember someone said they were from Iowa and I started singing “Iowa Stubborn” from The Music Man. If I pass by a steam grate I’ll almost certainly start singing “Steam Heat” from The Pajama Game. If I don’t want someone to feel sorry for me I might say “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” Sometimes I reference something more obscure. Once when someone mentioned Radio City Music Hall I found myself singing “I Wanna Be A Rockette.” You’re probably not familiar with…

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BEST WORST THING THAT EVER COULD HAVE HAPPENED (2016)

Source: BEST WORST THING THAT EVER COULD HAVE HAPPENED (2016)

BEST WORST THING THAT EVER COULD HAVE HAPPENED (2016)

 

I am, always have been and always will be, a musical theater buff. Or maybe musical theater fanatic is more like it. I’m sure that anyone who knows me would second that motion. Many is the time when someone would say something that would prompt me to sing a well known, and sometimes not so well known, impromptu show tune. Invariably they’d ask me to stop.

I remember someone said they were from Iowa and I started singing “Iowa Stubborn” from The Music Man. If I pass by a steam grate I’ll almost certainly start singing “Steam Heat” from The Pajama Game. If I don’t want someone to feel sorry for me I might say “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” Sometimes I reference something more obscure. Once when someone mentioned Radio City Music Hall I found myself singing “I Wanna Be A Rockette.” You’re probably not familiar with that song because it’s from a show that was never produced called Kicks.

Of course, not everyone likes musicals. Some people down right hate them. I don’t know what to do about those poor unfortunate souls. Most people enjoy a night out at the theater and have a cast album or two in their record collection or on their playlist. And then there are those fanatics like myself who will try to see as many shows as possible, even when his funds are low. Who tries to track down every cast album in existence and has read just about every book ever written on the subject (and there are quite a few!). The problem is that we never really seem to accept the fact that other people on this planet don’t quite share the same passion for musical theater that we do.

Being a theater buff has its drawbacks mind you. There aren’t many cities like New York and London where there’s a constant selection of plays, musicals and other entertainment to choose from every night of the week. It cost a lot to see a show on Broadway or even Off-Broadway. No, you don’t have to pay $600.00 to see a show, that’s just for premium day-of-the-performance tickets. There are websites like Stub Hub that let you buy discount tickets to shows and many have rush ticket policies and lotteries. For several years I worked as an usher for two of the biggest theater chains on Broadway. I got to see shows and get paid for it! It wasn’t great pay but most of the shows were great (Some weren’t. Some were bad. But hey, variety is the spice of life).

Yet in many ways the very thing that makes theater so wonderful is also it’s greatest liability, and that’s its ephemeral quality. Paintings, books, sculpture; movies, television shows and architecture are crystalized mediums, meant to exist as they are through time immortal. Music could be considered a bit of a gray area. Until Thomas Edison invented the phonograph the only way you could hear music was for someone to play or sing the tune, which was preserved on paper with notes. Certainly most music is best when heard live but there are instances like with Sgt. Pepper and The White Album that the record itself is the work of art.

Theater, on the other hand, is always performed live and in the flesh. All art is about communication and the observer is always the final collaborator, but theater is the one art form that only exists now. Each performance of a play is like a snowflake; no two will ever be exactly the same. Sometimes actors are indisposed for one reason or another but as the old saying goes “the show must go on” and so an understudy will cover the roll. If a show is successful and runs a long time then other actors will inevitably take over. When a show closes the scenery ends up in a dumpster, the costumes are either packed into the mothballs or sent to the Goodwill and the actors, stage hands, musicians, etc. will go on to do other things. But if the play or musical has an afterlife then not only will new actors get to re-interpret the rolls but new directors will come up with new ideas and new ways of bringing the work to life, new scenery will be designed, sometimes new material will be written. Other shows will just vanish into the ether.

When a play closes then the DNA sample that will allow it to be revived is the written text of the playwright. Thousands of plays stretching all the way back to Euripides have been commercially published over the years. Even shows with painfully short runs might get their text printed and the rights to the show optioned in the hopes that another theater company or scholastic theater department will give it another chance. The same goes for musicals. Both Musical Theater International and the Samuel French Company have a whole catalogue of musicals that can be licensed and indeed some very popular titles make a fortune in fees. I knew somebody who shared an agent with Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, the creators of Grease. Their mutual agent sent them a check every month for a million dollars, each!

A printed text is not a great delivery system for a musical mind you. If you’re unfamiliar with the music then reading the lyrics on the page can be a bore. The main lifeline for a musical has pretty much always been the cast recording. Here you can listen to the original actors singing and give you the gist of what their performances were like on stage. While just about every show since World War II that’s been a commercial success has had a cast album issued there are quite a few flops, and even a few shows that never even made it to the stage, that have recordings. Goddard Lieberson was the president of Columbia Records, which specialized in cast recordings in the fifties and sixties. He had a great ear and a good sense of what shows were unusual quality. He once convinced Columbia’s parent company, CBS, to finance My Fair Lady in exchange for the recording rights. My Fair Lady became a monster hit and its cast album was at one time the best selling LP of all time.

Lieberson also believed that there were shows that weren’t successful that warranted a cast album. Among the flops he had recorded were The Golden Apple, Candide, Drat the Cat and Flora the Red Menace. All of these shows developed a cult following amongst theater enthusiasts and in many cases went on to have a second life in regional or amateur theaters.

A term that is well known among theater buffs is “flop collector”.  Millions of people have seen The Lion King, Wicked and The Phantom of the Opera. Sure, it’s hard to get tickets to Hamilton right now but it’s success guarantees that it’s gonna be around for a while. Be patient, you’ll get to see it. But seeing a show that only ran in the single or double digits, now that’s something to brag about.

The infamous Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark had a pretty robust run even though it’s losses probably equaled the GDP of Luxemburg. But how many people got to see Legs Diamond, an utterly horrific catastrophe starring Peter Allen as a gangster? Or how about Rockabeye Hamlet starring a young Beverly DeAngelo and Meatloaf. This show had such unforgettable (in the wrong way) songs like “He Got It In The Ear”, “The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Boogie” and had Ophelia strangle herself with the chord from her microphone?  In 1965 Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlin appeared in a musical version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The show had a terrible out-of-town tryout and David Merrick, the shows producer, closed the New York production while still in previews. He told the press that he was saving the public the indignity of having to see such a bad show. He also quipped that the eponymous Manhattan jewelry store offered to compensate the losses but that Cartier wanted him to keep it open. Probably no show has more cache then Carrie, a 1988 fiasco based on the Stephen King novel. If everyone who claimed to have seen it actually bought tickets the show would still be running.

Then there are shows that didn’t really work the first time around but, thanks in no small part to their cast album, the show went on to be rediscovered and revived by it’s admirers. There are quite a few of these. I already mentioned Candide, a musical based on the Voltaire novel written by Leonard Bernstein. It was given a Broadway revival that ran for two years! Jerry Herman, the composer-lyricist behind Hello Dolly! and La Cage Aux Folles had a major flop in 1974 with Mack and Mabel. Thankfully it produced a wonderful cast album and has had a number of other productions, including a very successful, full scale revival in London. The Seussical was a musical hodgepodge of various Dr. Seuss stories that was given a cut-rate production on Broadway but has thrived in youth theaters. Side Show told the story of Daisy and Violet Hilton, conjoined twins who achieved fame in vaudeville. It developed a devoted following but couldn’t meet expenses when it opened on Broadway and it closed after just a few weeks. Yet it immediately found a home in regional theaters and has even received a Broadway revival, albeit an unsuccessful one.

Few musicals that failed on Broadway had more of an afterlife, are more treasured or were more of heartbreak for those involved with it then Merrily We Roll Along.  This 1981 musical ran for just sixteen performances after a long and troubled preview period. It got a lot of (negative) attention because the show was brought to the stage by two of the giants of the Great White Way: Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim and Producer-Director Harold Prince. Many along Broadway were baffled (and a small group of haters delighted) that two of the most talented and astute theater professionals could ever be responsible for such a theatrical miscalculation.

First, a bit of background information: Stephen Sondheim is considered by many to be the greatest songwriter in Broadway history. Still alive and working today, he is a protégé of Oscar Hammerstein II of Rogers and Hammerstein fame. Though he’s always considered himself a composer first and lyricist second, he made his debut on Broadway writing the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein’s music on a little something called West Side Story. The show wasn’t a massive hit when it opened. Many were either baffled by the shows perceived esoterica or were turned off by the violence and ugly subject matter. But more then enough people liked the show and it had a successful two-year run. Four years later the film version came out, which was a massive hit. West Side Story has been a staple of the American Stage ever since.

He hoped to write both music and lyrics with his next show, Gypsy (1959). Alas the shows star, the great Ethel Merman, demanded an experienced composer, so Sondheim ended up again writing only the lyrics. Gypsy once again was a modest hit that has since become one of the most frequently performed and revered musicals of all time. The problem was that Sondheim was now typecast solely as a lyricist. He finally got to hear his music and words played together in the uproariously humorous A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). The show was a major hit and even won the Tony Award for Best Musical. Yet in a slight that seems downright ludicrous in retrospect, Sondheim wasn’t even nominated for best musical score. Fortunately, he would compensate for that and then some in the not-too-distant future.

Whereas Stephen Sondheim was protégé of Oscar Hammerstein, Hal Prince was a protégé of George Abbott. Broadways top musical theater director from the thirties into the sixties, Prince went to work for Abbott as an office assistant and quickly worked his way up to working as a stage manager. At just twenty-six years old he managed to co-produce his first musical, The Pajama Game. It turned out to be the biggest hit of the season (it didn’t hurt that mentor Abbott directed it). He then went on an amazing winning streak, producing such hits as Damn Yankees, Fiorello!, and the monster hit Fiddler on the Roof. Prince also produced both West Side Story and A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum. Yet just as Sondheim yearn to write music as well as lyrics, Prince hoped to direct as well as produce. He cut his teeth directing shows like She Love’s Me, Baker Street and It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman. All of these shows were well directed but for one reason or another they didn’t click. Then came Cabaret, a challenging musical about Wiemar Germany and it’s surrender to fascism. It was both a landmark and a hit. There was no turning back.

Then in the seventies the two men teamed up to create five of the most remarkable musicals the American Theater has ever seen. They weren’t the eras biggest hits. They didn’t click with the public the way that shows like Pippin, A Chorus Line and Annie did, but they certainly found an audience and each and every one of them propelled the art of the musical forward.

First came Company, a landmark show that explored the complications of marriage through the eyes of a confirmed bachelor. What made it remarkable was that while it had a story and characters there was no plot and it wasn’t structured like a traditional three act play. The show was sort of a mid-point between a book musical and a revue. Next came Follies, another plot-less musical that used a reunion middle-aged and elderly performers who had appeared in a faux Ziegfeld Follies as a metaphor for the disillusionment that comes with age and disappointment in the decisions that one makes. A Little Night Music was an intricately plotted, sophisticated modern operetta about love, sex and infidelity. Pacific Overtures dealt with the United States forcing Japan into trade agreements by way of gunboat diplomacy. The evening was presented as if it were a kabuki theater piece, one that slowly morphs into a Broadway musical the more westernized Japan becomes.

Their fifth and in the long run most famous collaboration was Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. This show took a Victorian melodrama about a barber who slits the throats of his patrons and grinds them up into meat pies.  Under Prince’s capable direction it became a parable about the dehumanizing effects of the industrial revolution and the viscous cycle that can come about when one is consumed with a need for revenge and violence. Again, these shows were not huge hits and not all of them made money. But they showed the world that a musical could challenge an audience without sacrificing showmanship.

After Sweeny Todd Prince’s wife suggested to him that he should do a show about kids, particularly since he had two smart teenage children whom he was very close to. He ran with that suggestion and remembered a 1934 play by George S. Kauffman and Moss Hart called Merrily We Roll Along. The play dealt with a successful but bitter playwright who has made a mess of his life and explores how he created the abyss he’s fallen into. What was unique about the play is that much as Harold Pinter would do many years later in Betrayal, the action moves backwards in time, opening and 1934 and ending in the halcyon days of 1916 when he and his friends were all young and full of promise. Prince suggested that it to Stephen Sondheim as the basis for a musical. George Furth, who had already done wonders with unconventional dramatic structure in his book for Company was hired to write the libretto. The show was a go.

As Sondheim and Furth wrote the show, Prince, never at a loss for unique ideas, came up with the unprecedented notion that since this was a show about the follies of youth, why not cast the show with teenagers? It was an unorthadox idea but one that his collaborators liked. And so a casting call went out for young performers age sixteen through twenty. By now Sondheim and Prince were Gods to young musical theater enthusiasts and nearly every kid with a headshot showed up for the cattle call audition.

One of the youngsters who auditioned was Lonny Price. A nebbish from New Jersey, Price was like a lot of shy, introverted kid who found acceptance on the stage, appearing in school and youth theater productions. When he was still in high school he wrote Stephen Sondheim a fan letter. To his amazement, Sondheim wrote back! A year later he wrote Harold Prince asking him for a job. Prince hired him as an office boy.  Price even invested in Pacific Overtures by cashing in his bar mitzvah bonds.

You might not know the name Lonny Price but there’s a good chance you have seen him before. He appeared in a couple of memorable movies. In The Muppets Take Manhattan he was the young kid who produces Kermit the Frog’s show. In Dirty Dancing he played one of the Jewish kids who befriends Jennifer Gray.  Eventually Price segued into directing.  Most recently he had a major success on Broadway directing Glenn Close in an acclaimed revival of Sunset Boulevard.

At one point Price had the idea of making a documentary based on Merrily We Roll Along; the only problem was where could he get footage of the show that could be used in a documentary? For many years any filmed documentation of a stage show was nonexistent. When television came in then variety shows, most notably The Ed Sullivan Show invited the casts of current shows to perform. It was great advertising but rarely more then one or two numbers were performed and only a few shows were given the chance. In 1966 the Tony Awards went from only being broadcast locally in New York to the entire country.  Still, only the shows nominated for the top prizes got to perform and in those pre-VCR days you really only had one chance to see them.

Beginning in the early seventies the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts founded the Theater on Film and Tape Archive.  Deals were struck with the Actors Equity and other trade unions to record a certain performance of the show archive.  Over the years they have assembled a treasure-trove of theatrical records, not just from Broadway but Off-Broadway, regional theaters, all kinds of stuff.  I can’t begin to tell you how many shows I’ve been privileged to see, at least in it’s archived form. Like seeing a painting in a art book, it’s not the same as seeing the real thing in person, but it’s at least a second best and at least you can get a good idea as to how it worked on stage. Yet the reason that the unions have allowed these productions to be recorded is because none of the tapes can leave the library. The public can view them, but only at a viewing station. Records are kept of everyone who views these tapes and each guest can only view each recorded performance once.

In more recent years social media has suddenly made the theater more accessible to the public well beyond the tri-state area. Tony Award performances are now instantly available on YouTube. Electronic Press Kits are put together and shown on promotional web sites, giving people an up close look at how these shows were made. On the downside, many a theater patron has recorded an entire show on their phone and posted it on-line. A shows legal department has to keep an eye out and delete any of these usually unwatchable pirated videos. Still, the advantages outweigh the drawbacks in the digital age.

None of this existed in 1981 when Merrily We Roll Along opened. The show wasn’t asked to perform at the Tony’s because the show had long since closed by the time the awards were given out. Price could interview the actors and other people involved with the show but other then production stills there wasn’t much of the actual production that one could see.

Alas, there was sufficient interest in Merrily We Roll Along that ABC-TV approached Hal Prince about filming a TV special about the shows journey to the stage. After the show flopped the project was scrapped and the footage was locked away in storage. Price tried to locate the raw material but it seemed to have been lost. Then all of the sudden an ABC archivist found the footage. Now he could make his movie.

We see footage from the audition with lines of fresh-faced kids lining up, belting out songs like “Poor Johnny One Note” and learning a few dance steps to see how well they move. We get to see that magical moment when only a handful of them remain and Hal Prince tells them “the good news is, your all in the show,” followed by sheer joy and euphoria as these young people who don’t even know each other yet embrace. There’s the read through, the first time the actors get to play their roles, at least verbally, while Sondheim plays and sings the songs. By all accounts it looked like they were on to something.

There’s the rehearsal process, which of course can be grueling but for young kids with lots of stamina and who are eager to please the exhaustion is exhilarating. Friendships form during rehearsal, as do romances. Cast member Jim Walton started dating a young lady in the cast named Janie Gleason. Shortly after they opened (and shortly before they closed), Gleason told Walton that she was pregnant. They were married right on the stage in between performances. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the marriage didn’t last.

Price and James Weissenbach, both of whom were cast in the two lead roles, had birthdays very close together. They decided to have a dual birthday party and also decided to invite the entire cast. Weissenbach suggested that they invite Hal and Steve. He did, not expecting them to accept the invitation. Amazingly they did. After arriving Sondheim asked Price if he had a piano? He led Sondheim into his bedroom – lined with posters from his shows – and the maestro began to play “Good Thing Going”, one of the loveliest tunes he would ever write and one that both Price and Weissenbach would perform in the show. Luckily, Price hit record on his Sony boom box.

Everything seemed like a dream. The rehearsal process was like something out of a Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland “let’s put on a show” movie. It’s been said that you should never meet your hero’s but here were two of Broadway’s living legends and they were as generous and kind as can be. And yet at the end of the rainbow there wasn’t a pot of gold.

First preview. The cast is on stage behind the curtain. The overture starts up. It’s one of the most scintillating musical prologues they ever heard coming out of a Broadway pit. The show curtain goes up on a cast of performers, almost none of whom have reached legal drinking age. Yet they’re supposed to be playing jaded, melancholy showbiz phonies in their forties! Their wardrobe consists of T-shirts identifying their characters as “Best Friend”, “Producer”, “Ex-Wife”, etc. The whole thing looks like a high school production of Bye Bye Birdie, not a professional Broadway show. Its crystal clear to everyone that they’re in trouble.

Drastic cuts are made. New songs written and taken out. One thing that makes performing on stage so much more rewarding then on camera is that you get to actually here the laughter, gasps and applause of the audience. Unfortunately you can also hear dead silence where there should be a reaction and if people get up and leave you have to stay in character and try not to acknowledge them (I’ve heard stories about audiences booing but thankfully I’ve never seen it). Then a big bombshell was dropped when James Weissenbach, playing the lead role of Franklin Shepard was dismissed and replaced by fellow cast member Jim Walton. One can only guess what that did for morale, which was already sinking. Alas, there’s quite a bit of analogue footage of the show being performed and it’s pretty clear that at least when it came to movement James Weissenbach couldn’t cut it. We then see Jim Walton and frankly he does seem to be more in synch with the rest of the cast.

All of this was happening during the shows New York previews. Traditionally a preview was just that, a sneak peak for the public and a chance for the cast to get comfortable before the audience. It used to be a show would only get a couple of previews before they opened. That’s all they needed because just about every single show that ever opened on Broadway tried out in one or more city before coming into town. This way if the show was in trouble the necessary changes could be made away from prying eyes. The show could be fixed before they faced the firing squad of New York critics or, if it looked like it was irreparable, producers could cut their losses and close the show on the road.

By the 1970’s, things had changed. The escalating cost of producing a show meant that many shows didn’t get a tryout at all, so a show would instead play an extended preview period without going out of town. This made sense from an economic standpoint because you didn’t have to pay for hotel accommodations, transportation, loading scenery, and other expenses (preview periods are now longer then ever because shows have become so technical that just working out the kinks in the computer system can take forever). But trying to fix the problems while the show was previewing in New York meant that it was being worked on right there in Manhattan where any number of looky-loos could come and see what was going on. There was no social media in 1981. No Facebook, no Twitter, no message boards. But gossip is nothing new and it always knew how to travel. There was Page Six of The New York Post, Liz Smith and other cogs in the noise machine that started to spread bad word of mouth up and down Manhattan. Even back then haters be hate, hate, hating.

Finally, the show had to open. Everyone agreed that the actual opening night was euphoric. Opening nights usually are. The theater is full of family, friends, colleagues and well wishers of all kinds. The next day though, the jury would hand down their verdict.

Alas, the show was almost universally panned. Frank Rich, who now writes political commentary for New York magazine was just beginning his thirteen-year tenure as the chief drama critic for the New York Times. He was every bit in awe of Sondheim and Prince as the kids in the show. While a journalism student at Harvard he wrote a rave review of Follies in the Harvard Crimson. In years to come he would continue to be one of Stephen Sondheim’s biggest champions, sometimes to the point of exasperation among readers. Yet here it was, his first chance to review as Sondheim show for the Times. He had to be honest. A critic who isn’t forthright in his or her opinions is worthless. He gave the show a negative review. “It was a painful piece to write quite honestly,” reflects Rich in the documentary.

Merrily ran for only sixteen performances. The day after it closed the young cast assembled in a recording studio to preserve the show on vinyl. The record would allow the show to, well, roll along, and quite merrily at that. Almost immediately after the show closed colleges began to request the chance to put the show on. In 1985 the show got its first major re-staging at the La Jolla Playhouse just outside of San Diego. With a revised script, some new songs, new sets and costumes and, most importantly, a cast of actors closer in age to their roles, it was clear that the show wasn’t as stillborn as so many Broadway wags thought. Since then the show has been revived, constantly. Just recently Playbill reported that the show had just received its five thousandth performance!

While Sondheim and Prince remained close friends, their careers went in separate directions. Sondheim continued to write strikingly original shows such as Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins and Passion. He’s won more Tony Awards then any other songwriter in musical theater history, plus a Grammy, Oscar and Pulitzer Prize. In 2010 he even had a theater named for him. Currently he and playwright David Ives are working on a musical based on two different Luis Bunuel movies. Lord knows I’m excited to see it.

Shortly before Merrily opened Hal Prince had enjoyed a great success with Evita. He later went on to direct The Phantom of the Opera, Kiss of the Spider Woman and a hugely successful revival of Show Boat in 1994. Just recently a retrospective of his long career called The Prince of Broadway had it’s U.S. premiere.

And what about the kids in the cast…..?

Well, needless to say they aren’t kids anymore. Among those who participated in the documentary are Anne Morrison, who played the female lead role of Mary Flynn. She has performed in regional theaters all over the country, appearing in such shows as The Fantasticks, Forbidden Broadway, Guys and Dolls, Little Shop of Horrors, many others. She has settled in Sarasota, Florida where she has a rewarding career teaching acting to the mentally challenged. Abigail Pogrebin continued to audition for roles but then got a job working at CBS news. She went on to produce segments for Bill Moyers, Charlie Rose, Ed Bradley and Mike Wallace. She then switched to print journalism and had a best seller with her book Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish that is being adapted into an Off-Broadway musical.

Some of the cast members did go on to have careers on Broadway. Jim Walton, the man who ultimately played the lead in Merrily never achieved stardom but he has been a working actor ever since. He’s appeared on Broadway in 42^nd Street, Crazy for You and revivals of The Music Man and Sweeny Todd. He still lives in the same Hell’s Kitchen apartment that he moved into back in 1979 when he worked as the buildings super. The intercom still has the nametags that he made with a label maker low those many years ago. Tonya Pinkins has gone on to play many starring roles on Broadway. In 1991 she won a Tony Award for the musical Jelly’s Last Jam and in 2004 gave an electrifying performance in the Tony Kushner/Janine Tessori musical Caroline or Change. She’s also appeared in numerous TV shows including All My Children, 24, Gotham and (natch) Law & Order.

One actor who most certainly did go on to achieve stardom was Jason Alexander. Yes, that Jason Alexander, aka: George Costanza, aka Art Vandele, aka Master of His Own Domain. After Merrily he went on to appear on stage with Chita Rivera and Liza Minnelli in The Rink, received his first major recognition in Neil Simon’s play Broadway Bound and won a Tony Award for Jerome Robbins Broadway. Then came a little show about nothing that gave him the financial security that most actors can only dream about. One actor who didn’t participate in the documentary is Giancarlo Esposito, who went on to appear in movies like Do the Right Thing and The Usual Suspects. Recently he’s made his mark on TV history playing drug lord Gustavo Fring on the shows Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. I guess he was too busy to participate in the doc though I find it odd that they don’t mention him even though he can clearly be seen in the documentary footage.

It’s quite amazing that so much footage could be unearthed from a show that just barely made it out of the starting gate. It’s strange that the calculations of two Broadway masters could be so off, yet it also says something about how incredible theater is because instead of having to be stuck with an unsuccessful work of art you can start afresh and maybe get it right. And finally it says quite a bit that a project that only lasted for a few months could have such a profound, lasting, heartbreaking yet enriching impact on the lives of a bunch of star struck kids who, despite such a bitter disappointment managed to avoid turning out like the characters that they played.

 

Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened is streaming on Netflix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCwqEdQykJU

JOHNNY DANGEROUSLY (1984)

The Best Movies You (Probably) Never Heard Of

It doesn’t matter how successful an actor is, at some point they’re bound to have a slump. It may seem as if Tom Hanks has been on an upward trajectory ever since he made a big splash in Splash way back in 1984. It’s easy to forget that he suffered a brief dry spell with The Burbs, The Bonfire of the Vanities and Joe Versus the Volcano before he got back on track with A League of Their Own. It seems as if Julia Roberts has been “Americas Sweetheart” for as long as some people can remember, but she hit a rough patch between The Pelican Brief and My Best Friends Wedding with films like I Love Trouble and Mary Reilly. Denzel Washington hit a snag in between Training Day and Inside Man and even Harrison Ford had a lukewarm period between Air Force One and Indiana Jones and the…

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JOHNNY DANGEROUSLY (1984)

Source: JOHNNY DANGEROUSLY (1984)

JOHNNY DANGEROUSLY (1984)

 

It doesn’t matter how successful an actor is, at some point they’re bound to have a slump. It may seem as if Tom Hanks has been on an upward trajectory ever since he made a big splash in Splash way back in 1984. It’s easy to forget that he suffered a brief dry spell with The Burbs, The Bonfire of the Vanities and Joe Versus the Volcano before he got back on track with A League of Their Own. It seems as if Julia Roberts has been “Americas Sweetheart” for as long as some people can remember, but she hit a rough patch between The Pelican Brief and My Best Friends Wedding with films like I Love Trouble and Mary Reilly. Denzel Washington hit a snag in between Training Day and Inside Man and even Harrison Ford had a lukewarm period between Air Force One and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

These actors were blessed to have relatively brief lulls in their otherwise sterling careers and never wanted for employment. Some actors have gone through long stretches of lousy roles mixed with inactivity. Following a disastrous 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty Marlon Brando suffered a ten-year slump before landing his career-defining role as Vito Corleone in The Godfather. All through the eighties and into the early nineties John Travolta was thought to be as obsolete as an 8-track player (an occasional Look Who’s Talking gig not withstanding) until Quentin Tarintino cast him as Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction. Robert Downy, Jr. looked like he was finished by the mid-nineties due as much for his substance abuse and police blotter as his lack of good roles. Alas, he seems to have gotten clean and between Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes his prospects look just fine, at least for the immediate future.

One actor who is currently basking in the glow of a major career comeback is Michael Keaton. Born Michael Douglas and raised in the greater Pittsburg area, he got his start working behind the scenes (and occasionally on camera) at Mister Rogers Neighborhood, which was filmed in Pittsburg.  He later headed out west to Hollywood. By the time he arrived in Tensile Town that other Michael Douglas (Kirks son) was already appearing on Streets of San Francisco and the eponymous host of The Mike Douglas Show already taken the name “Mike”. And so he chose Keaton as his new surname. After appearing on episodes of Maud and The Mary Tyler Moore Hour (a variety show, not the sitcom), he landed his first starring gig a sitcom called Working Stiffs. Co-starring James Belushi, the show only ran for nine episodes.

Keaton’s big break came when Ron Howard cast him opposite Henry Winkler in the movie Night Shift. Keaton then got his first big break in the film Mr. Mom, before reuniting with Howard in the comedy Gung Ho. He then received rave reviews for his role as a recovering drug addict in Clean and Sober and enjoyed success as a mental patient in the underappreciated comedy The Dream Team.

In 1988 Tim Burton had cast Keaton as the title character in the offbeat supernatural comedy Beetlejuice. Warner Brothers executives waited until that film was in the can before offering Mr. Burton the big budget event movie Batman. Burton accepted, then raised quite a few eyebrows when he cast Keaton as the title character. While his co-star Jack Nicholson seemed born to play the Joker, Keaton, a man of average height and build and who’s sex appeal was more of the Mick Jagger variety then Robert Redford, hardly seemed like the ideal choice to play Bruce Wayne/Batman. The Internet might have only been in its gestation period at the time but there were no shortage of batfans writing in to Warner Bros. and various fan magazines to voice their displeasure at Keaton’s casting. Yet as Burton saw it, this unconventional casting choice made sense. Why, Burton reasoned, would a guy like Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford (both of whom were considered for the role) have to dress up like a bat? They could just kick someone’s ass. John Peters, the films co-producer, pointed out that after seeing Keaton in Clean and Sober he knew that he was not the kind of guy you want to face in a street fight. Like James Cagney or Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, he was a guy with  enough pent-up rage to take on ten men twice his size.

In the end, people liked Keaton’s Batman. The film was a colossal box office hit. He and Burton reunited three years later for Batman Returns. The studio inevitably wanted a third installment but Burton decided he had enough of the Dark Knight. Without his director Keaton also decided to pass, even when Warner’s offered him a staggering $15 million to star in Batman III. It takes a lot of will power to turn down that kind of dough, but Keaton did. One has to wonder if he didn’t come to regret passing up that paycheck since the next two decades were not exactly fruitful. He made a few good films like Kenneth Branaugh’s version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Quentin Tarintio’s Jackie Brown, and he pretty much ran away with Toy Story 3, providing the voice of a metro sexual Ken doll. He also had to make some absolute dreck to pay the bills, including Multiplicity, Herbie: Fully Loaded and Jack Frost. In the latter film he plays a man who dies and comes back to life as a CGI snowman to help comfort his grieving son. That’s the price of fame in Hollywood.

Some might blame Keaton’s drought on the notion that people who play superheroes are somehow “cursed” to always be identified with them. George Reeves who played Superman on television never got another roll. He later was found dead from a shotgun wound in his Los Angeles home. The death was ruled to be a suicide though many unanswered questions remain (see the movie Hollywoodland with the franchises current Bruce Wayne, Ben Affleck). Christopher Reeve was unforgettable in the Superman movie series. As Richard Donner who directed the first film said, “All we did was give (Reeves) the suit.” Alas, he never was able to shake the image of him as the man of steel, even when he became a real life superhero following his spinal injury after being thrown from a horse. Lynda Carter will always be Wonder Woman and Lou Farigno will always be the Hulk and we’re still waiting for Toby McGuire to find a plum role that doesn’t require a Spider-Man costume. Then again, Hugh Jackman has found roles beyond Wolverine, Christian Bale has done plenty beyond the Dark Knight and we’ve already mentioned that Robert Downy, Jr. has another franchise going.

Typecasting is something that all successful actors have to contend with and frankly there are hundreds of thousands of other out-of-work actors who would kill to be so “cursed”. Another reason for Keaton’s dry spell might have been the very reason why he became so famous in the first place and why he made an effective Batman, his uniqueness. Like it or not, it’s usually the more handsome leading men, like Tom Cruise, or the everyman, like Bruce Willis, that get the most work. A fireball of energy like Keaton can at times seem like a square peg to the guys at Central Casting. Woody Allen originally cast Keaton in The Purple Rose of Cairo as the matinée idol who becomes Mia Farrow’s love interest. Alas, Allen realized early on that Keaton could never pass for a romantic leading man in the 1930’s. He was let go and replaced by Jeff Daniels.

And then in 2012 his twenty-years of typecasting worked to his advantage when he landed the lead role in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), playing an actor who has never been able to find a role that could equal his turn as the eponymous superhero. The film was a hit, won the Oscar for Best Picture and many people think that Keaton should have gotten an Oscar as well. Either way, he immediately landed another plum role in the following years Best Picture winner, Spotlight. Last year Keaton gave one of the best performances of his career playing Ray Kroc in The Founder. Just this week Keaton has been getting high marks for playing the villain in Spider-Man: Homecoming. He’s also slated to play the ringmaster in Disney’s umpteenth live-action re-embalming of one of their animated classics, Dumbo, which will also re-unite him with Tim Burton.

I mentioned that Keaton gave one of his best performances in The Founder. Prior to that a friend of mine asked me what I thought Keaton’s best performance was? Batman obviously came to mind and he was really good in Clean and Sober. I must confess that I was never a big fan of Beetlejuice, though he was quite amusing. I also always found Mr. Mom to be icky. But one early Michael Keaton film that wasn’t a big hit but has a real big place in my heart is the 1984 cult favorite Johnny Dangerously, a spoof on the gangster films of the 1930’s and 40’s.

The film begins in 1935. Well, sort of. The whole film is one big living cartoon filled with anachronistic jokes. When we first meet Keaton as the title character he’s working as the proprietor of a pet shop. A typical 1930’s street urchin comes in and tries to steal a puppy. Alas, an alarm goes off. Turns out Johnny attached an anti-theft tag to the dog’s tail, which set off the alarm. Such things were relatively new in 1984 and they sure as hell didn’t exist in 1935. “Go ahead, call the cops,” the kid yells in a typical Brooklyn accent of the period. “You think you’re pretty tough, eh kid?” Soon Johnny begins to tell the kid where a life of crime will get him. When the screen starts to get blurry and some harp music plays the kid asks what’s going on. “Eh, don’t worry, it’ll end in a couple of minutes,” Johnny assures the boy. “It always does this when I talk about the past.” Yup, it’s that kind of movie.

“Immigrants poured into America from all over the world, looking for a better life for their children,” says Johnny. “And over 97% of them settled in a two block area of New York City.” We meet young Johnny (Byron Thames), who was then called Johnny Kelly, a resourceful youngster making a living by selling papers on the street. Unfortunately he has a rival named Danny Vermin (Greg Olden), a nasty fellow who cuts the leash of a seeing-eye-dog, causing his blind owner to walk right out into traffic. He and Johnny get into a scuffle. It catches the eye of a gangster named Jocko Dundee (the late, great Peter Boyle). Seeing that Johnny has plenty of moxie, he tells him that if he’d like to make a fifty he should stop by the Club Maronie that evening. The offer suddenly seems enticing when he goes home and catches the doctor paying his mother a house call. She’s gonna need an operation, $49.95 (this week only).

We meet his mother (Maureen Stapleton, who just a couple of years earlier won an Oscar for the film Reds), a stereotypically loving Irish mother. It happens to be her birthday. “How does it feel to be twenty-nine?” he asks. “It’ll be a miracle if I see thirty,” she answers. We also see his younger brother Tommy, a wide-eyed little scamp who reads law books and colors in pictures of Oliver Wendell Holmes. “You’re father always did want you to be a lawyer,” Ma says, looking at a picture of her late husband dressed in prison stripes and strapped into an electric chair. “God knows he could have used one.” With a sick mom and a kid brother with a future. Johnny has no other choice. He decides to take Mr. Dundee up on his offer.

Jocko Dundee arrives at the nightclub/casino, run by Dundee’s archrival, Roman Maronie (Richard Dimitri), a hot-tempered Italian immigrant with a horrendous grasp on the English language (“You fugging iceholes!” “You cork suckars!”) Johnny arrives soon after, smuggling a pistol in a newspaper for Dundee. What ensues is a crazy slapstick fight where Johnny manages to take on Maronie’s henchmen and save Dundee’s life. “From now on you’re my boy.” When Dundee asks his name he answers “Johnny. Johnny Dangerously.” Flashing back to the present, the adult Johnny tells his young friend “Boy, I should never have picked that name.”

The story progresses and Johnny grows up “you’re typical poverty-stricken teenager.” We then see Johnny entertaining a young girl by doing the Charleston. But this being a mid-1980’s comedy, Johnny starts to breakdance, culminating in a wicked windmill. Another great Reagan era gag has a black guy walking down the street carrying a cathedral radio on his shoulder like a boom box.

Alas, Ma Kelly continues to need pricey medical care, and so Johnny joins the Dundee gang full-time. Back in the old neighborhood Johnny becomes a hero. Everyone in the neighborhood knows him as a gangster. Everyone that is except for Ma and Tommy.

And things aren’t great between them either. Tommy announces that he’s going to drop out of law school to get married. Why can’t Tommy wait until after he graduates?

Tommy: I can’t say it in front of Ma. 

Ma: I know why. You want to get laid.

 

Oh yes, it’s that type of movie.

Later Tommy shows up at Johnny’s penthouse where he has a bevy of scantily clad molls hanging around him. Ah, but Johnny’s here to set Tommy straight. He takes him into the bedroom and shows him…a film. Not a stag film but rather a medical film appropriately titled Your Testicles and You. If you ever wondered what it would have been like if Max Fleischer made an animated sex-ed film then here’s your chance.

Things continue to hurdle forward. Johnny meets a singer named Lil Sheridan, played by the radiant redhead Merilu Henner from Taxi (much as I loved that show I must say that if a woman that beautiful were driving a taxi cab overnight in New York in the seventies she’s de a statistic before the end of her first shift). At first they engage in a bit of Howard Hawksian banter, with Lil pretending she doesn’t like Johnny. Needless to say, they become an item.

Johnny also find himself with a rival when a Danny Vermin, the kid he used to knock heads with in the old neighborhood.

 

Danny: I’ve fulfilled a lot of people’s predictions about me. I’ve become a real scumbag.

Johnny: Good for you Danny. A lot of people go their whole lives without finding out what they want to be.

 

The grown up Danny is played by Joe Piscopo, the New Jersey native who joined the cast of Saturday Night Live during the 1980-1981 season, generally considered to be the franchises nadir. He was one of only two cast members to return the following fall. The other was Eddie Murphy. Essentially, from 1981 to 1984 SNL was The Eddie Murphy Show, yet Piscopo gained a fair amount of attention for his impersonations of Andy Rooney, Ted Koppel and especially Frank Sinatra. As one writer put it, “Eddie’s success went to Joe’s head.” Sadly he would never cross the Rubicon that many SNL alumni have and achieve movie stardom. Still, he’s damned funny in this film. One of the films best running gags involves Danny’s fairly idle threats. When Johnny hangs him on a hook Danny tells him “you shouldn’t hang me on a hook. My father hung me on a hook once. Once!”

When Tommy finally graduates from law school he informs his big brother that instead of starting up a law practice he’s decided to join the D.A.’s office and fight crime. Fortunately the D.A. (Danny DeVito, another Taxi alum) is on the payroll. One of the cleverest scenes has Tommy showing up at the D.A.’s mansion with evidence to put Johnny Dangerously (who he doesn’t suspect is actually his brother) behind bars. That’s when the D.A. makes a proposition to Tommy. His dinning room suddenly becomes the set of a game show with tons of fabulous prizes! “And all of this can be yours if you’re willing to Play Ball!”

I guess by now you know that Johnny Dangerously is basically one big Helzapoppin’ style gagfest. Indeed, it could earn the title of being the best movie Mel Brooks never made. Director Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, Clueless) must have studied every gangster film that Warner Brothers ever put out. Michael Keaton’s model for the title character was clearly James Cagney, one of my personal favorite actors of all time. Lots of people have done impressions of Cagney over the years. Before playing The Riddler on the Batman TV series Frank Gorshin was best known as a Rich Little-like impressionist, Cagney being his specialty. Yet Keaton doesn’t imitate Cagney. He instead captures the actors swagger while creating a personality all his own.

Two people who must get a special shout-out are the film’s production designer, Joseph R. Jenning’s. He creates a sort of exaggerated art deco that seems like it would be right at home in a film of the era but at the same time is just funny to look at. Another is “Weird Al” Yankovick. Best known for his parodies of Top 40 hits, Yankovick has written his share of original songs and for this film he wrote a delightful gem called “This is the Life” (see the music video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1n5XqwUkYw). For legal reasons it was not available on the original VHS release but thankfully it’s been re-instated for the DVD.

Once when I described Johnny Dangerously to someone they said that they didn’t think this movie would fly today (it barely took off in 1984, commercially speaking) because while people know The Godfather, Goodfellas and The Sopranos no one under a certain age has ever seen a gangster film with Cagney or Edward G. Robinson. Perhaps though when I first saw the movie I was not yet all that familiar with the depression era cops and robbers films. I was also unfamiliar with the “disaster” epics of the seventies (which I’m still not that big a fan of) yet I thought Airplane! was a riot. And of course what makes some people laugh isn’t going to work on everyone. I thought The Hangover was just okay, I hated Bridesmaids and Bad Moms and I think both the British and American versions of The Office are unwatchable, even though I like many of the actors from both versions (also, Amy Heckerling has directed some episodes of the American version). Still, Johnny Dangerously is my kind of comedy and if you like your jokes to be post modern and flying at you like bullets from a tommy gun then it’s probably yours too.

 

SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS (1927)

The Best Movies You (Probably) Never Heard Of

Mary Pickford, arguably the biggest female star of the silent screen, was once quoted as saying that “It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of talkies instead of the other way around.” Part of this statement might have been stimulated by sour grapes. Though Croquette, her first “talkie” was a hit, even winning her an Academy Award, Pcickford’s career faltered soon after.  It’s a tantalizing hypothesis. The idea of synchronizing sound and moving images had been around for nearly as long as their have been movies. Shortly before the Lumier brothers exhibited the world’s first projected motion pictures in 1895, Thomas Edison had patented the Kinetephone. This was a peep show device with synchronized a Kinetescope – a motion picture device where rolls of film were shown to one viewer at a time through a peephole – with a cylindrical phonograph record. People would…

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SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS (1927)

Source: SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS (1927)

SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS (1927)

 

Mary Pickford, arguably the biggest female star of the silent screen, was once quoted as saying that “It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of talkies instead of the other way around.” Part of this statement might have been stimulated by sour grapes. Though Croquette, her first “talkie” was a hit, even winning her an Academy Award, Pcickford’s career faltered soon after.  It’s a tantalizing hypothesis. The idea of synchronizing sound and moving images had been around for nearly as long as their have been movies. Shortly before the Lumier brothers exhibited the world’s first projected motion pictures in 1895, Thomas Edison had patented the Kinetephone. This was a peep show device with synchronized a Kinetescope – a motion picture device where rolls of film were shown to one viewer at a time through a peephole – with a cylindrical phonograph record. People would listen to a sound recording through a pair of earphones that resembled a stethoscope while viewing the movie.

 

Numerous experiments were made before Western Electric and Warner Brothers patented the Vitaphone, a sound synchronization system that was used in The Jazz Singer, the first talking feature. It wasn’t the first “sound” picture. Movies have always played with some kind of musical accompaniment, whether a piano in the nickelodeons, a Wurlitzer organ that was connected to various other instruments to create sound effects (drums, whistles, bells, etc.) or a full orchestra which was often utilized for grand premieres in L.A. and New York. By 1927 studios were already supplying theaters with pre-recorded soundtracks made up of music and sound effects to play along with their respected films. After all, it was a lot cheaper than hiring an organist, let alone a full orchestra. Even singing had been seen in the movies by this point, but synchronizing lip movement with pre-recorded dialog was a major challenge. Alas, Warner Brothers made it work and when Al Jolson turned to the audience and said, “you ain’t heard nothing yet”, audiences gasped with amazement. A motion picture actually TALKED!

 

As we’ve seen time and time again, once someone takes a risk and strikes gold Hollywood’s knee jerk reaction is to try and do the same thing. Dorothy Parker, one of many east coast scribes who traveled out west to add some much needed verbal wit to the screenplays then being written was asked what was Hollywood’s favorite “ism”, as in modernism, realism, impressionism, etc. Her response? “Plagiarism.”

 

We can all remember about a decade ago when Avatar came out and the studio bigwigs were saying that within a few years almost every movie would be made in 3-D. Well, 3-D cinematography has certainly enhanced movies like Hugo, The Life of Pi and Gravity but after a while moviegoers became more cautious about which stereoscopic movies they were willing to pay a surcharge to see (and don’t kid yourselves. That’s the real reason why Hollywood has been pushing 3-D). And so after The Jazz Singer came out “talkies” were all the rage.

 

And that’s pretty much all they were, talking. Cameras had to be housed in a sound proof booth and couldn’t be moved. Microphones had to be hidden in some sort of prop – a table centerpiece, a statue, and a houseplant – and the sound quality was rarely very good. Many of the great silent stars couldn’t make the transition to sound. Clara Bow was marred by her thick Brooklyn accent. Emil Jannings, the German actor who won the first Oscar for Best Actor, was virtually incomprehensible in English. Other actors had so refined their silent screen personas that adding dialog was nothing but an intrusion. There was nothing wrong with Buster Keaton’s voice but it completely ruined his deadpan reactions to the most death-defying stunts. Lon Cheney only made one talking picture, a remake of one of his earlier triumphs, The Unholy Three. He was slatted to play the title role in Dracula but died before he had the chance. Would this “man of a thousand faces”, one of the most expressive and purely cinematic thespians ever to step before a camera, be able to scare audiences as much with the addition of his voice? We’ll never know for sure.

 

In the end their was only one person who had both the foresight to know that adding a voice would destroy his signature character and also had the financial power to prevent that from happening. That was Charlie Chaplin. He recorded a soundtrack for City Lights (1931), which included sound effects and a beautiful musical score that he himself composed. He gleefully came close to crossing the line with Modern Times (1936) in which he sang a bunch of gibberish but never actually articulating. He finally did give in when he made The Great Dictator (1941) where he played both a Hitler-like despot and a Jewish barber who somewhat resembled the Tramp but didn’t wear the trademark bowler hat, tails, etc., thus sparing fans of having to hear their beloved Tramp speak. The success of City Lights and Modern Times seems to indicate that an audience for silent pictures still existed.

 

One can’t really say that movies never “needed” sound. After all, if there were no need for dialog then there wouldn’t be any need for title cards. Alfred Hitchcock, who’s 1929 feature Blackmail became the first British talkie, said that “the problem with silent films is that people’s lips would move and no sound came out. The problem with talking pictures is that once sound came in people started photographing plays.” Eventually audiences got tired of static talking films and filmmakers demanded that they be allowed to move their cameras. In time sound would indeed open up new doors and become a welcome part of the film medium. Without synchronized sound we could never have the musicals of Busby Berkley, Astaire and Rogers or the Arthur Freed musicals at MGM. Film noir is all but inconceivable without the dialog and voiceover. Orson Welles put his radio background to full use in Citizen Kane and the visual effects in Star Wars would never have been as effective without Ben Burtt’s revolutionary sound design.

 

Still, there was something magical about silent films. Directors who learned how to tell a story entirely through movement, close-ups, etc. made the best of them. While the melodramas of D.W. Griffith might seem a little dated today there were some films that continue to pack a wallop. The silent comedies are as evergreen as anything caught on film. Erich Von Stroheim’s monumental epic Greed is as powerful today as it was in the twenties and would only be ruined if the human voice were added.

 

And then there are the German expressionist films. These eerie, beautiful films set in a nightmare world where everything seems to be in turmoil. They would influence the horror films of the thirties and continue to see their influence on more contemporary films, most notably the films of David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club) and Tim Burton (his version of Batman and Sweeny Todd especially). But the films that were made in Weimar Germany and later in Hollywood are among the most well crafted and visually stunning films ever made. They remain technically dazzling and don’t have any need for spoken words.

 

German Expressionism began as a movement in painting. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner organized a group of artists who called themselves Die Brucke or “The Bridge”. Their members included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Auguste Macke and George Grosz. These men filled their canvases with harsh, foreign colors, grotesque figures and asymmetrical architecture in order to comment on a world that was becoming more and more industrial, mechanized and un-human. Then came the dramatic works of Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Arnold Bronnen and Bertold Brecht.

 

It was after World War I that expressionism reached the cinema. Economically, the Treaty of Versailles left Germany for dead and the country plunged into a Great Depression far worse than the one the U.S. would face in the thirties. The German mark was literally not worth the paper it was printed on. This anger and disillusion that would tragically lead to the rise of the NAZI party and the Third Reich. But for the time being it helped spark one of the most exciting movements in cinema history.

 

The first German Expressionist film was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, Caligari told the story of a mad scientist who hypnotizes a sleepwalker to kill on his behalf. The film was meant to be a statement on how international governments manipulated others into fighting in the Great War. A framing device that opened and closed the picture in an asylum muted this commentary. From a cinematic standpoint Caligari does seem kind of stagey. Its sets are rather two-dimensional and the camera mostly stays stationary. Yet the film creates a great, creepy atmosphere and the surreal sets are a wonder to behold. Soon the German film industry was thriving with some of the most unusual and visually arresting films ever made.

 

There were two main directors of the movement. First there was the Austrian born Fritz Lang. He first achieved fame with his two-part film Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler. His most famous film was the expressionist science fiction film Metropolis. The grandfather of such movies as Things to Come, Blade Runner, Brazil, City of the Lost Children, Batman, The Matrix and countless others, Metropolis is an amazing film that is as dazzling today as it was back then. His first sound film was M (1931), the story of a child killer (Peter Lorre) who is hunted down by other despicable members of an urban underworld. M could very well be the first great sound film. Rather then simply using the soundtrack to record dialog, Lang utilized sound to create mood, tension and to work with, rather than against, the images on the screen.

 

Released in the same year the NAZI’s came to power, M was meant to be an attack on fascism and the paranoia and scapegoating that it stirred up, a fact that was lost on the party officials. Shortly after the films release Joseph Goebbels contacted Lang about making propaganda films. That night he boarded a train for Paris, then booked passage to America. The day he arrived in New York he applied for American citizenship. He found work in Hollywood where his expressionistic sensibilities were put to use pioneering the film noir movement with pictures such as Fury, You Only Live Twice and Scarlet Street.

 

The other giant was Friedrich Wilhelm, or F.W, Murnau. A contemporary of Germany’s famed director Max Reinhardt, Murnau began making movies after World War I. Most of his earliest films are lost, depriving us the chance to see his progression as an artist. The movie that made him famous was Nosferatu (1922). A plagiarized version of Bram Stokers novel Dracula and subtitled A Symphony of Horror, Nosferatu is still one of the creepiest vampire films ever made. Unlike most German Expressionist films it was filmed on location but was lit so beautifully by cinematographers Fritz Arno Wagner and Gunther Krampf that it created an eerie, otherworldly quality that still creates a chilling atmosphere today.

 

He later also directed The Last Laugh (1924), which chronicled the mental breakdown suffered by a hotel doorman (Emil Jannings) when he’s demoted to a washroom attendant for no other reason then the fact that he’s getting on in years. As visually stunning as it is heartbreaking, The Last Laugh is noteworthy because it relies almost completely on visuals, utilizing only one title card in the whole film. In 1926 he created another feast for the eyes with his version of Goeth’s Faust legend. This was the last film he would ever make in Germany.

 

By 1926 many filmmakers from Central Europe were heading across the Atlantic to the promise land of Hollywood. The lure was unmistakable. The U.S. economy was booming in the 1920’s and Hollywood studios could offer superior production faculties and lots more money. Directors such as Ernst Lubitsch, William Wyler, Joseph Von Sternberg and Michael Curtiz would thrive in California, as would actors like Emil Jannings, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Soon Murnau would join them when William Fox, the head of the Fox Film Corp. (the precursor to 20^th Century Fox) offered him the chance to work in Hollywood.

 

His first film for Fox was Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. To describe the plot is almost laughable. It takes place in a small, lakeside community. There’s a Man (George O’Brien) and his Wife (Janet Gaynor). Their names are never given. Nor are any of the other characters in the film. They live in a small cottage that doesn’t appear to have any electricity. Like the films he and others made in Germany, the contours of the cottage are very asymmetrical and askew. They appear to be poor, yet they live with an older woman who’s identified in the credits as “The Maid” (Bodi Rosing), so they apparently aren’t that bad off. They also have an infant.

 

The cottage looks like it could be in the 19^th century, but then we meet “The Woman From the City” (Margaret Livingston). She looks every bit the modern-day flapper. She whistles for the Man and he comes and joins her. They seem to have been carrying on an affair for some time. The Maid knows about it and probably the woman does too, judging from the forlorn look in her eyes.

 

The Flapper then suggests that the two of them should run off to the city together. As for his wife, the Mistress asks, “Couldn’t she get drowned?” This question is asked in the form of a title card. Murnau didn’t like title cards. Indeed, he all but abandons them half way through the film. Given that we quickly dissolve to a shot of the woman in a boat that capsizes it’s safe to say that the title card is superfluous. And yet Murnau had the cards graphic designer animated the word “drowned” so that it looks like it’s sinking to the bottom of the screen.

The mistress then takes him to the lake and into the bull rushes, makes two bundles of reeds for him, then hides them in his sailboat. He is to take his wife out on the lake, capsize the small vessel and use the bundles of reeds as a floatation device for himself while she drowns.

 

Though clearly conflicted, he takes his wife out on the lake the next day. All is still and silent until they get out into the middle of the lake, then he begins to approach her. The Woman is terrified. She doesn’t put up a fight. Instead she clasps her hands and begs for forgiveness. Admittedly, the acting is performed in a sort of larger-then-life pantomime that by 1927 was growing stale as more subtle, naturalistic acting became the order of the day. Indeed, for some modern audiences it may be hard to take seriously, at least at first. But if you’re willing to surrender to it then you’ll almost certainly become enthralled.

 

Ultimately, the man can’t kill his wife. He rows the boat ashore, his shame written all over his face. As soon as they dock she runs away. Though they appear to be in the middle of nowhere a streetcar line appears to run through their lakeside community. She boards the car. The Man catches up and pays their fair. He kneels down and begs for forgiveness.

 

They arrive in “The City”, a metropolis that was clearly created on a backlot. They go and eat at a modern, art deco restaurant. Next they go into a church and witness a wedding. Then they get their portraits taken at a photography studio. At one point they walk across the street. The urban landscape dissolves and is replaced with the bucolic countryside where they live. But it’s only a brief respite. Soon they’re in the middle of a busy intersection with honking cars and carriage drivers yelling at them.

 

This effect of moving from the country to the city while the Man and Woman are in the foreground is one of the many optical effects that Murnau helped pioneer. At the time there were no optical printers, let alone CGI. The effect was achieved through double exposure. In other words the exposed film had to be rolled back in the camera while the second element was photographed. When printed the two images appear together as one. In order to achieve this effect the cameraman had to measure EXACTLY where the original exposure began. Parts of the camera lens would have to be matted off and so as only to expose part of the frame, then matted off again to photograph the reverse. Even more amazing is that many of the double exposure shots that Murnau achieved in this and earlier films also had the camera move! It would be fifty years before George Lucas and his special effects team on Star Wars would perfect the motion control camera system, allowing them to shoot multiple elements of spaceships, planets, etc. and seamlessly blend them together. Murnau and his cinematographers, Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, had to meticulously keep track of their exact camera angles in order to achieve these effects.

 

The two of them go to an amusement district, clearly modeled on Coney Island. Later, Man and Wife are back on the lake, riding on that same sailboat back to their cottage. That’s when a storm hit. The boat capsizes and the man swims ashore. A search party boards their row boats and armed with lanterns go out and try to find the woman. The grief-stricken husband is sure that he’s lost her forever. But alas, she survived thanks to those bundles of reeds that were still strategically hid in the boat.

 

Again, a plot synopsis hardly does the film justice. Sunrise, as its slightly pretentious subtitle suggests, is a visual tone poem. It’s a film about emotions, not ideas. It’s told purely through beautiful imagery and close-ups. If at any point one of the characters uttered a single word it would completely kill the illusion.

 

Sunrise wasn’t exactly a “silent” film mind you. In fact, it’s in some ways one of the first films to truly integrated music, sound effects and image. While Warner Brothers was developing the Vitaphone, Fox was working on a sound-on-film system called the Movietone Sound System. Vitaphone was a sound-on-disc system that recorded the sound on a record, which was subsequently synchronized with the projected image. The obvious problem was that if was easy for the sound and picture to get out of synch. Whereas Movietone, on the other hand, recorded a soundtrack that was optically printed on the edge of the film print, thus guaranteeing proper synchronization. Warners may have been the first studio to produce a talking feature with The Jazz Singer, but the Vitaphone soon proved too unreliable to become the industry standard. Movietone and other sound-on-film systems were much more reliable.

 

Sunrise boasts a beautifully evocative score by Hugo Riesenfeld and Emo Rapee. The film also does a fine job utilizing sound effects, particularly in the urban scenes.   A year later Fox launched Movietone News. The longest running newsreel series, Fox continued producing them until 1963, long after television became the main source for electronically delivered public affairs info.

 

Sunrise also had the distinction of being released in the year that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences began giving out their annual Academy Awards. For this year and this year only, the winning actors took home Oscars not for individual performances but for their entire body of work for the year. Janet Gaynor won not only for Sunrise but also the films Seventh Heaven and Street Angel. The films two cinematographers, Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, won the Oscar for Best Cinematography. The film also won the award for “Best Unique and Artistic Picture”. This was one of two prizes that were awarded to what the Academy voters felt was the finest cinematic work of the year. The other was “Outstanding Picture”, which went to the airplane film Wings. Quickly realizing the futility of having two different top prizes, the latter award became today’s “Best Picture” category. The other was dropped all together.

 

Both O’Brien and Gaynor were lucky. They both possessed good speaking voices and continued to work well into the sound era. O’Brien went on to star in numerous Westerns and became part of John Ford’s unofficial stock company. Gaynor also did well in the thirties, appearing in the original versions of both State Fair and A Star is Born. Her popularity began to wane by the end of the thirties but she continued to work well into her seventies, frequently appearing on television series ranging from General Electric Theater to Love Boat.

 

Murnau made two more films, 4 Devils and City Girl, neither were very successful. He left for the South Pacific where he began to shoot a documentary about Tahiti. Originally it had some sound interviews but were later edited out. The film was censored because it contained shots of bare breasted native women.

 

Murnau didn’t seem to be interested in making the transition to sound, although it was starting to look like he might not have a choice. Alas, we’ll never know if he could have made the transition. He died in 1931 at the age of forty-two when his chauffeur, a fourteen year old Filipino boy, crashed his Rolls Royce. Avant-Garde film maker and author Kenneth Anger claimed in his celebrated book Hollywood Babylon that Murnau was actually performing fellatio on the young man, a rumor that may be just that. In 2000 John Malkovich played the director in Shadow of the Vampire, an odd film that suggests that Max Schrek, played in the film by Willem Dafoe, was actually a vampire. Less than two years ago it was reported that his skull was stolen from his family plot in Germany.

 

Today, the only kinds of silent films, that is movies without any synchronized dialog, are either relegated to such avant-garde films like Godfrey Reggio’s Koyoniskatsi or used as a gimmick as in Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie and Michael Hazanavicius The Artist, 2011’s Best Picture winner. To make a film entirely visually would be an awesome challenge for a filmmaker today. Would the public go for it? It would be a hard sell for sure. But maybe if we lived in a more film-literate society and more people were exposed to silent films at an early age then perhaps they’d be willing to watch a picture where no single person makes a sound.