Friday, August 03, 2012
Edward Copeland's Top 100 of 2012 (80-61)
People like to mock Frank Capra as simple-minded at times and this film especially, but it remains a rousing indictment of corruption in Washington that echoes to this very day. It's too bad that a filibuster doesn't still mean that a senator has to do what Jefferson Smith did and hold the floor for as long as he can instead of the procedural gimmick it's turned into today that prevents legislation from moving out of the Senate. Still, whenever I catch Mr. Smith, no matter how long it has been on, I have to watch until the end. It's the curse of being both a movie buff and a political junkie. In a way, with recent events, it seems to have a bit of timeliness beneath the treacle and idealistic love of how this country should work.
When people think Ingmar Bergman, they think heavy, but here flows one of his lightest and most enjoyable concoctions. In an introduction made for the Criterion edition of the film, Bergman remarks how Smiles changed everything for him. At the time, he was broke and living off the actress Bibi Andersson when his studio entered the film at Cannes and it won a prize (best poetic humor) and became an international success. Bergman says it was a turning point for both him and his studio, earning him free rein to go on and make even more of the greatest films of all time. The film contains obvious echoes of The Rules of the Game, though Smiles more than stands on its own with its tale of love and adultery, male vanity and female cunning, aging and youth. It's not only a delight as a film but inspired the great Stephen Sondheim to write one of his earliest great scores as composer and lyricist in A Little Night Music. Isn't it rich?
The Weinstein P.R. machine spun so much press off this film's twist that I think it takes away from how great a movie had developed before that plot turn even happens. I was fortunate enough to see it early, before the hype went into overdrive, so I thought another story turn was the "twist" and relaxed and the real twist took me by complete, wonderful surprise. I hope someday new viewers will be able to see the film without knowing what lies ahead. Even if they don’t though, they will see a great study in human nature as well as great performances from Stephen Rea, Forest Whitaker, Miranda Richardson and Jaye Davidson.
While Spike Lee still has talent to spare, he has yet to come close to equaling the power of his third film and its study of one hot day in Bedford Stuy. His strongest work has flourished in his documentaries, especially his pair of post-Katrina films When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise and the feature Inside Man. Something tells me he’ll come back eventually. More than 20 years later, Do the Right Thing retains the power it unleashed in 1989 as that breed of film that has become rarer and rarer: the conversation starter.
The film marketed as Bergman's "last feature" truly is one of his best, painting a vast semiautobiographical canvas of two children from a large theatrical family who find their lives upended when their mother weds an authoritarian monster of a minister. Beyond the narrative, Sven Nykvist's photography, Anna Asp’s art direction, Susanne Lingheim’s sets and Marik Vos’ costumes present a sumptuous feast for the eyes. Its three-hour running time flies by and watching the 312-minute cut Bergman originally made for Swedish television proves even more rewarding.
Bogie got one of his best roles, John Huston made one of his greatest films (winning his only two Oscars for writing and directing) and his old man got a supporting actor Oscar in the deal as well. When you see Walter Huston do his mocking, triumphant little dance, you want to join in. Sierra Madre wasn’t John Huston’s only classic starring Humphrey Bogart released in 1948 either. The two also collaborated on Key Largo, While it’s good, it’s this film with its prospecting south of the border that’s the real keeper.
Here comes Howard Hawks again and Cary Grant (playing a nerd, believe it or not) as well. (I haven't added it up, but I suspect Grant appears in more movies on this list than any other actor). Katharine Hepburn's most inspired performance powers this screwiest of screwball comedies as her flighty socialite wreaks havoc on the world of Grant’s mild-mannered paleontologist. All of this and a leopard or two, too.
Salieri may consider himself the "patron saint of mediocrity," but little can be called mediocre about Forman's adaptation of Peter Shaffer's play. F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce were both brilliant and you can't really argue against its musical score. The unitiated might suspect slowgoing in a period costume drama such as this, but they haven't seen enough and certainly not Amadeus which overflows with humor and light as well as its darker elements.
There wouldn't be a Breakfast Club without a Virginia Woolf, but I don't hold that against Edward Albee or his great play turned into a superb movie by Mike Nichols. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were never better and while the truth games and verbal battles make you cringe, you can't avert your eyes from their power. Albee's play marks its 50th anniversary this year and it still packs a punch a half-century later.
To me, one of the crimes of both versions of the AFI list is that Psycho is the only representation of black-and-white Hitchcock, as if no one noticed him until he started working in color, but nothing is further from the truth and Notorious is one of the best examples of that. The kiss between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant remains one of the most sensual images ever put on celluloid and Claude Rains is superb as the conflicted heavy of the piece.
This film shouldn't work and it probably wouldn't if its stellar cast hadn't saved it. Kazan and Budd Schulberg's attempt to justify their actions during the McCarthy hearings doesn't quite work as an allegory, but the film itself works as a powerful story thanks to the indelible performances it contains. Brando earns the big kudos but the solid work of Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden and especially Lee J. Cobb shouldn't be forgotten.
As digital projection sounds the death knell for celluloid, I feel even more grateful that when I saw Lawrence of Arabia for the first time, I saw the restored, 70mm print in a theater released for its 25th anniversary. I never could watch the cropped, pan-and-scan versions on TV. It’s a shame that more classics fail to get re-released outside major markets, but with the digital future, it’s almost moot. As for the film itself, if it weren't for the weaker second half, this movie that almost defines epic would have landed higher on this list. Still, with its stunning cinematography, gorgeous score and great Peter O'Toole performance, it belongs on the list nonetheless.
When I made my 2007 list, I admitted being torn between including 8½ or Nights of Cabiria to represent Fellini and I ended up opting for 8½. In the intervening five years, I’ve watched both films again and my preference clearly leans to Cabiria. While Giulietta Masina's remarkable performance as the title character might break your heart at times, more often than not, she'll leave you smiling, even if it's a sad smile. While Masina initially wins you over when seeing the film the first few times, on later viewings I've found the movie itself richer. It's constructed almost as a perfect circle, a ring of hell if you will, from which Cabiria would like to escape. "Everyone has a secret agony," a character tells her at one point and as much as Cabiria might try to avoid it, she hopes to abandon her life. First, she sees fun in a brief sojourn with a celebrated movie star (Amedeo Narrazi) that in a way predicts Pretty Woman some 30 years down the road, though without the manufactured happy ending. Fellini grounds Nights of Cabiria in reality, a world where the poor are forced to live in caves and anyone can be a victim. In another incident, when Cabiria realizes that once again she's been gypped, it leads to an ending that manages to be touching, magical and inspiring, all at the same time, ending with one of film's greatest close-ups.
Kirk Douglas probably was miscast, but this early Kubrick doesn't get the kudos it deserves and it certainly bears up better over the years than some of his later works such as A Clockwork Orange. Paths of Glory centers on one particular battle between the French and the German, where the poor French troops are outmanned and outgunned, but that's no excuse for disobeying orders in the eyes of one general. Kubrick often tackled the futility of war and its inherent contradictions, but he really knocked it out of the park with this one.
Of the many collaborations between Zhang Yimou and Gong Li, this one remains my favorite, even though it's less heralded than many of his others. Gong and Ge You portray a married couple and we follow their lives in a kaleidoscopic tour of Chinese history, beginning with the civil war in the 1940s and passing through The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and a few years beyond. Epic while staying focused and personal in the telling, if you haven't seen To Live, you should. This might end up being Zhang’s masterpiece.
Another instance of the all-too-rare occurrence of a sequel that's better the film that spawned it. Whale's funny follow-up to his own Frankenstein contains most of the classic moments you probably associate with the story: the blind hermit, "She's alive!" and much more. It also adds some pure wackiness such as Ernest Thesiger’s Dr. Pretorius, with madder plans than Colin Clive’s original Dr. Frankenstein himself. We also get to hear Boris Karloff speak his first words as the monster and Elsa Lanchester play a dual role: Mary Shelley in a funny prologue setting up the sequel and as the bride herself. It’s a hoot from start to finish — and even manages to toss in a scare or two amidst the laughs.
Just as McCabe & Mrs. Miller isn't exactly a Western, it's not strictly a character study either. First and foremost, it's a Robert Altman film, one of those times when the late director got a hold of financing, cameras, actors, a crew and the things he needed for what intrigued him at that moment and did his cinematic dance, part strictly thought out, much improvised and lots that came about by happy accident. That style didn't always work throughout his long career, but when it did, magic resulted. As Pauline Kael wrote in her July 3, 1971, review of the film in The New Yorker, "Though Altman's method is a step toward a new kind of movie naturalism, the technique may seem mannered to those who are put off by the violation of custom — as if he simply didn't want to be straightforward about his storytelling.…He can't be straightforward in the old way, because he's improvising meanings and connections, trying to find his movie in the course of making it…" It took me about three viewings to warm to McCabe. Now, it stands as one of my very favorite Altman films and I can see it climbing higher in the future the more I watch it.
Even with a distance of more than a decade, I find it difficult deciding where to place newer films amid the established classics, but Memento continues to excite me more than any other new movie I saw between 1998 and 2002. The film surpasses the accusations of detractors who see it as merely a gimmick. It also manages to be both funny and heartbreaking as it spins the tale of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a man suffering from short-term memory loss that prevents him from remembering anything after a single day. Not helpful when you’re trying to solve your wife’s murder. The film that put Nolan on the map remains my favorite of his works. Pearce gives a great performance as do Joe Pantoliano and Carrie-Anne Moss. It feels as if in the wake of Nolan’s Batman films and Inception, Memento has slipped from many long-term memories. It shouldn’t be forgotten.
When I first saw de Sica's masterpiece, English speakers knew it as The Bicycle Thief. It's only been recently that we've learned the more correct English translation. I guess his film still has things to teach us today. De Sica mastered the art of making films that plucked on a viewer’s heart strings without being so sentimental that it bred resentment. Shoeshine plays like a rough draft for Bicycle Thieves and he later made the great Umberto D., but I have to opt for the simple heartbreaking beauty of Bicycle Thieves and that unforgettable final shot.
A meditation on life, the universe and everything and, for a film whose story begins with a chess game between a knight back from the Crusades and Death for the knight's life as the Black Plague spreads chaos around them, it has a bit more humor than you'd expect. The film also marked the first teaming of Bergman with Max von Sydow, who portrays the knight. It sets the stage for many of the themes Bergman would return again and again throughout his career dealing with God, faith and so much more.
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Labels: Albee, Altman, Capra, Christopher Nolan, De Sica, Fellini, Hawks, Hitchcock, Huston, Ingmar Bergman, Kazan, Kubrick, Lean, Lists, Nichols, Sondheim, Spike Lee, Whale, Zhang Yimou
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Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Bring on the lovers, liars and clowns!
By Edward Copeland
Without a doubt, one song stands heads and shoulders above all others written by Stephen Sondheim for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and "Comedy Tonight" holds that perch. Even people unaware of the movie or the stage show of Forum probably know that infectious number that opens and closes both versions. No more proof need be delivered to back this claim than the sheer number of performances, spoofs and use of the song as background music for clips and slideshows that I stumbled upon on the World Wide Web. Who knows how many more are out there? One used the song to back scenes from The West Wing, but the quality of the video was so poor, I wasn't going to use it until I stumbled upon a better version. Another person did three separate Bewitched montages, two of which employed identical moments only one used Zero Mostel's 1962 original cast recording version while the other took Nathan Lane's 1996 revival recording. I chose not to toss those in this collection because each montage only lasts 42 seconds, cutting off the song early. Never fear though, that still left me with plenty of options. Before I "open up the curtain," I thought I'd start with a clip of "Invocation and Instructions to the Audience" from The Frogs, a 1974 musical staged and "freely adapted" by Burt Shevelove (co-author of Forum) from the play by Aristophanes (written in 405 B.C.) and staged in the Yale University Swimming Pool with a cast of Ivy League students whose ranks included one Meryl Streep. Sondheim originally composed "Invocation" as the opening number for Forum when his first attempt ("Love Is in the Air") wasn't working during out-of-town tryouts. The show's legendary director George Abbott, according to Sondheim's Finishing the Hat, didn't find "Invocation" "hummable enough" — no doubt inspiring the producer's complaint in Merrily We Roll Along. Thankfully, that led to the blessing of "Comedy Tonight" and "Invocation" returned with the addition of the hysterical "Instructions to the Audience" when Sondheim and Shevelove collaborated on The Frogs. The clip below comes from the BBC Proms program given July 31, 2010, to celebrate Sondheim's 80th birthday. With the backing of The BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by David Charles Abell, Daniel Evans, a Tony nominee for best actor in the 2008 revival of Sunday in the Park with George, and Simon Russell Beale, a Tony nominee for best actor in the 2004 revival of Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, perform the number.
As I mentioned, people love to use "Comedy Tonight" as a backdrop to scenes from their favorite television shows or, in one instance, a series' cast actually performed the song themselves. I thought I'd start with TV and go chronologically from the oldest to the newest. First, this variety show's ensemble performed the number in the show's third episode ever on Oct. 18, 1976. Honestly, it's pure coincidence that I led into this with the number from The Frogs.
Anyone recall the last time they saw a rerun of this hit 1980s detective series with romantic banter between the leads? No, not Moonlighting. I refer to Remington Steele, the series that made Pierce Brosnan a star during its run from 1982-1987. What did happen to Stephanie Zimbalist?
The English certainly aren't immune to the charms of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Five major productions of the musical have played London since 1963 (with its original Pseudolus, Frankie Howerd, reprising the role in a 1986 revival) and a company that toured throughout the United Kingdom. Some enterprising fan of the musical combined the song with the long-running British spy series MI-5 (originally titled Spooks) that ran 10 seasons beginning in 2002.
This West Wing fan not only sets scenes to a version of "Comedy Tonight" but tosses in some of "Love Is in the Air," the first opening song that Sondheim wrote for Forum as well.
Finally, since in some ways the farcical elements of Forum almost make it a cartoon, its final television salute should, most appropriately, pair it with an animated work, namely Avatar: The Last Airbender, which ran from 2005-2008.
The song brings out the fun in everyday folk as well as we see here where "Comedy Tonight" underscores a year-end slideshow presentation for players, coaches and fans of the Long Beach State track and field team.
What happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas if you post it on YouTube as with this parody of "Comedy Tonight" performed by the master of ceremonies (officially named MC Vegas) for an annual Edwardian Ball.
Now, I haven't heard much of them lately but the concept of flash mobs shouldn't be an unfamiliar one to most reading this. Apparently, at University of Western Ontario, you might be able to get course credits for participating in them since they appear to do them so often. The campus' improv broke out once into Handel's "Messiah." They interrupted this lecture with — you guessed it — "Comedy Tonight" Impressively, they choreographed some moves as well as learning the words.
I'm not sure what's funnier: That this boy named Ben (I believe his last name is Lerner) would perform this spoof of "Comedy Tonight" at his bar mitzvah (interrupted by his younger sister Nina) or that the explanatory note by his father informs us that when dad posted it years ago, the video and audio had problems, so we're watching a corrected version that he has labeled Take 2. I didn't try to track down the promised one that Nina later sang at her bat mitzvah.
Also on YouTube sits, as you'd expect, the song playing against photos of various Republican presidential contenders. I almost included it, but that's really like shooting water in a barrel, isn't it? Why waste the space? They make the point so much more brilliantly when they open their mouths than when we just look at them, even if we do see Rick Santorum chowing down on a very phallic-looking food item. Instead, we'll skip to the movies. As with television, I'm going to do this chronologically, starting with the oldest and we're going way back to 1928 and one of the last gasps of silent German Expressionism, Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs starring Conrad Veidt as the creepy villain Gwynplaine, 14 years before Veidt became best known as Major Strasser in Casablanca.
For pure ambition, you have to give it to the students at The College of New Jersey Musical Theatre staged at the Ewing, N.J., campus a full-fledged musical based on the original Star Wars trilogy spoofing songs from a wide variety of musicals. The show opens with "Trilogy Tonight."
The title for the single best-edited video that I found involving a single subject probably deserves to go to the true identity of puddleglum128 for mating Zero Mostel's version to scenes from Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs. I'd call it perfect if it didn't contain the strange audio splice in the middle, but the right moments of Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster and the rest get used.
Christopher Nolan's second take on Batman, The Dark Knight, earns two takes of "Comedy Tonight!" The first, staged by The Pauper Players of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of the group's annual Broadway Melodies in 2009 where they parody different works. (The other two that year were Lost and Super Mario Bros.) The second video features photos from Nolan's film set to Nathan Lane singing the finale version of the song and also includes stills of Gerard Way.
For the last montage, which must have required a tremendous amount of time and effort by CRAIGSWORLD1427, he asked people about what movies throughout film history tickled their funny bones the most and then assembled various bits and pieces (including dialogue) with the song for this nearly 10-minute long package. It's worth it though. Chuck Workman, be damned.
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Labels: Animation, Books, Christopher Nolan, Demme, Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Lost, Music, Musicals, Sondheim, Star Wars, Stoppard, Streep, Television, Theater
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Wednesday, November 16, 2011
It started out like a song… (An appreciation in two acts)
By Edward Copeland
…when Merrily We Roll Along opened on Broadway 30 years ago tonight at The Alvin Theatre — or at least it should have. Unfortunately, despite having one of Stephen Sondheim's most gorgeous scores, the musical closed 16 performances later on Nov. 28. The musical tallied 52 previews beginning Oct. 1, 1981, before its official opening at The Alvin (which would lose the name the theater had held since 1927 two years later when rechristened The Neil Simon Theatre). Merrily wasn't the shortest Broadway run of any Sondheim show (that title belongs to 1964's Anyone Can Whistle, which closed after 12 previews and nine performances) but Merrily marked the last collaboration
on a new musical between the legendary composer with the revered director/producer Harold Prince serving as director, a teaming that began with 1970's Company and continued through Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd. The union won Prince five of his Tony Awards, gave Tonys to Sondheim for four of those scores (including an amazing three wins in a four-year span) and three best musical winners. However, Merrily contained too great a score to let it go gentle into that good night and the show (and its composer) raged against the dying of that musical's light and its label as a disaster. As soon as four years later, a key revision of Merrily, directed by James Lapine at The La Jolla Playhouse in La Jolla, Calif., began the show's rehabilitation and it has had frequent tinkering, revisions and revivals in the decades since (and I'm relying on reports and reviews), fixing many of its underlying structural problems and raising its stature in the Sondheim canon. Encores! at City Center in New York will present a two-week concert performance of Merrily in February (again directed by Lapine), but the musical remains one of only three Sondheim shows yet to receive a Broadway revival — the other two being his last original Broadway work, 1994's Passion (but it won best musical, so that'll happen eventually), and Anyone Can Whistle (but no one has spent much time trying to salvage that one). If you aren't familiar with the story in Merrily We Roll Along, it is told backwards, which tends to get a big chunk of the blame for its problem. All I know is that every work I've seen that tells its tale in reverse — be it Harold Pinter's Betrayal, Christopher Nolan's Memento or even the backward episode of Seinfeld (titled "The Betrayal") — turns out well. I've never been fortunate enough to see a production of Merrily live to judge for myself, but damn I love that score so while this day marks the anniversary of a short Broadway run, I'm still taking the opportunity to use it to celebrate Merrily We Roll Along anyway, its initial reception be damned. (Pictured at top, the original Charley Kringas, Mary Flynn and Franklin Shepherd. From left, Lonny Price, Ann Morrison and Jim Walton) In Sondheim's great book Finishing the Hat (which is essential reading for both Sondheim fans and writers in general. I've never written a song in my life, but people who practice prose could learn just as much from Finishing the Hat as songwriters), the composer describes the "notion" of Merrily We Roll Along as follows:
Franklin Shepard, a successful songwriter and movie producer in his 40s, reviews his life, both professional and personal, especially his relationships with his best friends, Mary Flynn and Charley Kringas (his songwriting collaborator), and his two wives, Beth and Gussie. The action moves backward in time from 1981 to 1957.
Actually, for me to accurately tell the beginnings of Merrily We Roll Along, I have to go backward in time as well. Merrily's writing took place in 1980 when Sondheim and Prince conceived the idea of making a musical (with actor-writer
George Furth, who died in 2006, writing the book as he had done for the team's Company, for which he won a Tony) out of the 1934 play Merrily We Roll Along by George S. Kaufman (seen at typewriter in photo below) and Moss Hart (at right in same photo). It was the second effort from the famous playwriting team who had scored with their first collaboration, Once in a Lifetime, and would go on to write such classics as the Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can't Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Kaufman and Hart's version of Merrily, while not considered a flop on the level of the musical version, was deemed a disappointment when compared to Once in a Lifetime, which ran at The Music Box Theatre for
two years and 406 performances. Merrily followed it into The Music Box, but lasted only 155 performances, which would be labeled neither a flop nor a disaster except for how expensive the production was to stage: It had a cast of 55 actors. Among that ensemble were eventual recognizable movie and TV character performers such as Walter Abel, Kenneth MacKenna, Mary Philips and Jessie Royce Landis as well as Doris Eaton, who was the last surviving Ziegfeld girl until her death in May 2010 at 106. The main story differences in the play (other than character names) is that their lead character (MacKenna, at right in photo below) is a successful playwright of popular comedies instead of a composer and film producer and his friend is a painter (Abel in photo below) instead of a lyricist. His platonic female friend remains a writer, though she's patterned after Dorothy Parker here. Obviously, the time span, while still running backward, covers different years, starting in 1934 and ending in 1916. Reviews were mixed and sometimes funny, as the words of Herman J. Mankiewicz, who would go on to co-write Citizen Kane, wrote, "Here's this playwright who writes a play and it's a big success. Then he writes another play and it's a big hit too. All his plays are big successes. All the actresses in them are in love with him, and he has a yacht and a beautiful home in the country. He has a beautiful wife and two beautiful children and he makes a million dollars. Now the problem the play propounds is this: How did the poor son-of-a-bitch get in this jam?" 
Obviously, neither Hal Prince nor Stephen Sondheim saw a production of the Kaufman/Hart play, let alone the original. Unlike the playwriting duo's other works, Merrily never received a Broadway revival and wasn't that well known. Prince and Sondheim were considering projects after the astounding success of their last production, Sweeney Todd. According to the biography Sondheim: A Life by Meryle Secrest, Prince's wife Judy suggested that their next show be about young people. Her husband tried to think of appropriate
works such as Thornton Wilder's Our Town, but rejected them. "Then one morning as he was shaving," Secrest wrote, "he recalled Merrily, in which his former producing partner Robert Griffith, had once played a small part. It seemed like the perfect solution. Prince immediately called Sondheim. Prince said, 'It was the first time he ever said yes on the phone.'" Stephen Citron elaborates further on the appeal to Prince in his book Sondheim & Lloyd-Webber: The New Musical, repeating the story Secrest tells that he recalled the play while shaving particularly "that the play had ended with Polonius' advice to his son, 'This above all, to thine own self be true,' which was one of the messages he wanted the musical to deliver. He knew at once the framework of this play could be bent to serve his purpose — to cast young people in the major roles — and give him a platform to say what he wanted about the disillusioning events of the last 25 years." The Kaufman/Hart play had the similar idea except the defining event of their time was the Great Depression. "Kaufman and Hart had wanted to write about the deterioration of idealism and the rise of American greed in what they called the "heedless years" which followed World War I until the Depression," Sondheim wrote in Finishing the Hat. "In fact, their original title for the play was Wind Up an Era. In our transposition, we were writing about a generation's idealistic expectations for the future, symbolized by the launch of Sputnik, and their deterioration into compromise and deceit, exemplified by Nixon and Watergate, and culminating in The Me Decade, as the 1970s came to be called." Perhaps given that basic crux
of an idea, Merrily arrived 30 years too soon. Granted, I was a youngster during Watergate through Reagan's election (albeit an odd one who actually knew and paid attention to these events in grade school), but I'd pick the past decade as a time that truly captures disillusionment, the death of idealism and a rise in avarice that would make those labeled greedy in Kaufman and Hart's era drop their collective jaws at Wall Street's audacity and avarice as well as the partisan clashes for control that prioritize political power above the nation's economic welfare. As I write this, the evening news reports on more standoffs between the Occupy protests that have spread across the land and the police, including the suicide of a demonstrator. Merrily, we do not roll along. Sondheim also notes in his book that in the rehearsal script for Merrily We Roll Along, the "Transitions" included references to events that occurred in the years being covered, but those lyrics were cut prior to the opening. "As the show took shape, it became clear that the 'Transitions' should reflect Frank's history, not the country's," Sondheim wrote. The composer also found the reverse chronology intriguing, writing in the same book: "If the songs were conventional, telling the story backwards suggested something unconventional: the possibility of reversing the usual presentation of them.…The structure of Merrily We Roll Along suggested to me that the reprises could come first: the songs that were important to the characters when they were younger would have different resonances as they aged; thus, for example, "Not a Day Goes By," a love song sung by a hopeful young couple getting married, becomes a bitter tirade from the wife when they get a divorce, but the bitter version is sung first in the musical's topsy-turvy chronology." To illustrate what Sondheim means, the first link is to "Not a Day Goes By (Part I)" from the 1994 York Theatre Company production of the show. The character of Beth, Frank's first wife, (played by Anne Bobby) sings in Act I. The second link is "Not a Day Goes By (Part II)" from Act II of the same production. It's also sung by Bobby as Beth joined by Malcolm Gets as Frank and Amy Ryder as Mary.As I mentioned earlier, the writing of Merrily We Roll Along was mostly complete in 1980 — or so they thought. Things had moved along enough that the casting process took place and, keeping with Prince's idea, they cast talented newcomers with little experience. One of those lucky newcomers who made her Broadway debut in Merrily We Roll Along was Liz Callaway (seen at left in photo below at 2002 reunion of original cast with Tonya Pinkins, middle, and Donna Marie Elio). "It was incredible making my debut in a Sondheim/Prince show because the first Broadway show I ever saw was Company. I think I was 9 or 10 years old," she told me. In fact, of the 27 performers listed in the opening night cast on the Internet Broadway Database, all but seven were making Broadway debuts and
12 of those 27 never appeared on Broadway again. However, it was a long journey from casting to opening night. Callaway would later receive a Tony nomination for featured actress in a musical for Baby and appear in the original cast of Miss Saigon. In Merrily, she was cast as a nightclub waitress and was the understudy for Ann Morrison's role of Mary Flynn. "After we were cast, they announced we were postponing rehearsals for nine months," Callaway told me. Meryle Secrest wrote in her Sondheim biography that the delay in rehearsals were because Sondheim hadn't finished the score and that's what pushed them to September 1981. Also weighing on his composing, according to Secrest's book, was Hal Prince's insistence that Sondheim needed to write a popular score again. Secrest wrote: "Obviously, 'Send in the Clowns' was a very successful song, but the score was not that type of score. In this show, we've got the Sinatra record and the Carly Simon record, and my mother can sing the songs first time out, so that makes her happy." Prince was referring to the fact that, although the show had not yet opened, Sinatra had recorded one of its songs, "Good Thing Going," and Simon had recorded another, "Not a Day Goes By." Sondheim wrote in Finishing the Hat, "Of all the shows I worked on Merrily We Roll Along was, with the possible exception of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (and for similar reasons), the most difficult score to write. With Forum, however, I didn't have to worry about holding the score together — the piece didn't require cohesion, only variety." When rehearsals did start and they eventually got to the lengthy month of previews, even more changes ensued. "Yes, there were tons of changes, including replacing the leading man and choreographer. We postponed the show several times," Callaway said. Another original cast member, Tonya Pinkins, described the
constant changes during the rehearsal and preview process as a "trial by fire." Pinkins would next appear on Broadway in 1992 in Jelly's Last Jam with Gregory Hines and win the Tony for best featured actress in a musical. She also received Tony nominations for lead actress in a musical for Play On! and Caroline, or Change? In Merrily, she played Gwen Wilson, who Pinkins characterized as "a Hedda Hopper type" and was one of many characters that were changed or revised in later incarnations of the show. Of those seven actors with previous Broadway experience, one had been in four previous Broadway musicals dating back to 1968 — when he was 10. He hadn't been on Broadway since 1973 when he co-starred in the musical Seesaw with a score by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields. It was directed, choreographed and written by Michael Bennett and earned seven Tony nominations, and won two, one for Bennett's choreography and another for Tommy Tune's featured performance. After that show, Giancarlo Esposito didn't return to Broadway until Merrily We Roll Along at the ripe old age of 23 in the role of the valedictorian, another character that would vanish in revisions since the original Merrily started with Franklin Shepherd giving the commencement address at his former high school, prompting the look back at his life. Since Merrily had a short run, Callaway didn't get
to go on for Morrison in the role of Mary after it opened, something she remains grateful didn't occur. "No, thank God. I wouldn't have been good. I did get to sing for Annie Morrison at some of the rehearsals during previews when she got sick. I think in some ways that was my audition for future work I would do with Sondheim," Callaway told me. In Finishing the Hat, Sondheim wrote that the month of previews "was a painful month spent under the gimlet eyes of theatrical vultures…a month that saw George (Furth, seen at left) and I busily rewriting, Hal busily restaging, the leading actor and choreographer being replaced — in short, all the showbiz chaos I had seen and thought I'd envied in movies. Worse, we fell victim to the age-old illusion that blinds all rewriters: by the time opening night arrived, we thought we'd fixed the show. What we'd done was bettered it, not fixed it." By stroke of luck, a future lyricist and musical book-writer happened to be working at Studio Duplicating at the time and got to type the original Merrily script, once they settled on one. Bill Russell, who received Tony nominations for his book and lyrics for the 1998 musical Side Show, recalls, "I called my boyfriend and said, 'This is going to be such a hit.' Then we saw the show in previews. What had jumped off the page did not jump off the stage. Reading that someone is 'pushed into the swimming pool' was much more exciting in my imagination than the sad effect of someone falling through paper 'water.' Still, the score really stood out." That was before the theater critics weighed in — and, more importantly, its resurrection began.The reviews tended not to be favorable. Some were downright harsh. Arguably the most powerful theater critic at the time, Frank Rich of The New York Times, had the perception of being an unabashed Sondheim admirer, but the lead of his review read, "As we all should probably have learned by now, to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one's heart broken at regular intervals. Usually the heartbreak
comes from Mr. Sondheim's songs — for his music can tear through us with an emotional force as moving as Gershwin's. And sometimes the pain is compounded by another factor — for some of Mr. Sondheim's most powerful work turns up in shows (Anyone Can Whistle, Pacific Overtures) that fail. Suffice it to say that both kinds of pain are abundant in Merrily We Roll Along, the new Sondheim-Harold Prince-George Furth musical that opened at the Alvin last night. Mr. Sondheim has given this evening a half-dozen songs that are crushing and beautiful — that soar and linger and hurt. But the show that contains them is a shambles." He also picked up on what he saw as the major problem that many saw — asking younger performers to play older, though his take was its contrast to Follies. Rich wrote, (Follies) also used the effective trick of assigning each major character to two actors, one middle-aged and one young, so that past and present could interweave at will to potent effect. With one passing exception, the roles in Merrily are always played by young actors, no matter what the characters' ages or how high the toll in cuteness." However, Rich would re-examine the show himself as its road to redemption took place. Unbelievably, Douglas Watt reviewing at New York Daily News actually bashed the score. He wrote, "…it would be unthinkable for Sondheim not to come up with at least one sound ballad, as in 'Good Thing Going (Going Gone),' but the score is for the most part pallid…" Watt couldn't even get the song title correct. Later, he disappeared and reportedly changed his name to Frank Wildhorn. (Just kidding.) Many of the reviews beat up on Kaufman and Hart almost as much as Furth, Prince and Sondheim. One notable exception among theater critics was the late Clive Barnes at The New York Post. "Whatever you may have heard about it — go and see it for yourselves. It is far too good a musical to be
judged by those twin kangaroo courts of word of mouth and critical consensus. It is the story of success, the complexities of compromise, and life lived amid quicksands. It also has that surging Sondheim sound that is New York set to music," Barnes wrote. Even within Barnes' praise though, he saw casting inexperienced newcomers as a flaw. "One difficulty the production did not solve to my entire satisfaction was that of the cast and its aging. From beginning to end, through this entire backward gauntlet race of a Silver Jubilee, the age of the cast scarcely varied," Barnes wrote. In Finishing the Hat, even Sondheim admits that their concept of casting young performers — which included Prince's 16-year-old daughter Daisy as Meg, Shepherd's impending third wife — and expecting them to be able to play the characters' older selves was the biggest flaw. "Whatever the flaws the show may have had to begin with, the original production compounded the felonies. Hal and I had conceived our treatment of the Kaufman-Hart play as a vehicle for young performers. In 1934, the play had been cast with actors in their 20s and 30s who played slightly older than themselves at the start and slightly younger at the finish," Sondheim wrote. "What we envisioned was a cautionary tale in which actors in their late teens and early 20s would begin disguised as middle-age sophisticates and gradually become their innocent young selves as the evening progressed. Unfortunately, we got caught in a paradox we should have foreseen: actors that young, no matter how talented, rarely have the experience or skills to play anyone but themselves, and in this case even that caused them difficulties. (The singular exception was a remarkable performer named Jason Alexander, who at 21 seemed like an old pro: It was as if he'd been born middle-aged.)" Alexander, who played a George Abbott-like producer named Joe Josephson received positive mention in almost every review, no matter how negative overall.So after the nine-month delay before starting rehearsals, the 52 previews with all those changes and 16 performances, Merrily We Roll Along closed. "It was very depressing to have the show close after we had worked so hard and waited so long to do the show," Liz Callaway
told me. Callaway and Tonya Pinkins both agreed that while working so hard on a show that closed so quickly was disappointing, it was the perfect introduction to their chosen profession. "I will say I think it some ways it was the ideal first Broadway show experience," Callaway said. "To work with the best and have it not be successful prepared me for what a career in the theater would be." Pinkins said, "It was an amazing experience…to work with the gods of theater." Callaway added that the morning after the show closed, "we recorded the cast album. You can imagine how bittersweet that was." The curtain didn't just fall for good on the first production of Merrily in November 1981: The partnership of Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince came to an end as well, though neither has ever discussed particulars. However, the story of the musical doesn't end here. It has many stops to make and new passengers to pick up during the next three decades. I've never written a play, but I've seen enough to know you should end Act I with the audience wanting to come back to see how it wraps up. I'll spoil some of my own piece — its ending could be called a happy (or at least hopeful) one and there will be more notable cameos from people associated with the show. Remember — don't take your drinks back to your seat.Tweet
Labels: 80s, Awards, Books, Christopher Nolan, H. Prince, Harold Pinter, Music, Musicals, Neil Simon, Seinfeld, Shakespeare, Sinatra, Sondheim, Theater Tribute
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Monday, November 07, 2011
A fabulous disaster
By Edward Copeland
For people around my age, one of the biggest laughs in (500) Days of Summer comes when Zooey Deschanel's Summer tells Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tom that lately they've been acting like Sid and Nancy. Tom takes offense, thinking she's comparing him to the late Sex Pistols bass guitarist who stabbed girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death, but Summer corrects him, "No, I'm Sid Vicious." For anyone such as myself for whom Alex Cox's Sid & Nancy served as a seminal film during high school years, it is a hysterical moment. Today marks the 25th anniversary of the U.S. release of Cox's film. There's always a danger when revisiting treasured films of your youth, that the experience won't be the same decades down the road but I'm pleased to report that a quarter-century later, Sid & Nancy works better as a movie than I remember it doing when I originally saw it.
When the movie begins, we gaze upon a young Gary Oldman's version of Sid Vicious staring blankly, without expression, at a TV in a dark hotel room as detectives ask if he is the one who called 911. He says nothing, but we glimpse his bloody hand for a moment. What struck me isn't the context of the scene — no matter how long it's been since you've seen Sid & Nancy, you know that she's dead — no, what struck me is how amazingly young Gary Oldman looks. The actor in this 1986 film bears so little resemblance to the actor working under that name today. Can this possibly be the same man? This remarkably talented actor, still a couple of years shy of his 30th birthday then, who transformed himself so memorably into the drugged-out punk rock legend couldn't possibly be the same man now is in his early 50s and seen most often as Commissioner Gordon in Christopher Nolan's Batman movies or Sirius Black in Harry Potter films? It just seems impossible, doesn't it? It's great to hear the buzz that Oldman is receiving for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy because embarrassments dominate his credits more than winners since at least 1995. Some examples: Lots of voice work for video games, The Scarlet Letter, Lost in Space, Hannibal, the TV show Friends and voices in Disney's 3-D Christmas Carol and Kung Fu Panda 2. Thankfully, we still have his Sid Vicious to be amazed by.
An even larger, more existential query loomed over me while I watched Sid & Nancy again, for the first time in I don't know how many years and began to think about what I would write in this tribute. First, came relief that I didn't find myself disappointed as has happened before when returning to a sacred relic from an earlier archaeological phase of my life. Then, I was struck by a question that had never occurred to me before about the movie — what appeal did it hold for me and many of my friends back in high school? We weren't punk rock enthusiasts — that day had largely passed though many of us owned the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols (and I mean album — on wax), but we tended to be eclectic musically. We weren't lurking around shooting heroin in our veins (though I can't make that statement with 100% certainty concerning one of our informal group). Why did Sid & Nancy speak to us in such a profound way that we not only fell for the film but went multiple times? The theater which showed this movie (and we often went to midnight showings — it wasn't always The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Pink Floyd — The Wall) would be the site for both the beginnings and ends of teen hookups. I guess watching a love story about two drug-addicted people, one of whom stabs the other to death, just brings out the romance
in people. As I pondered the possibilities of why this cinematic portrait of punk had such pull over us, I looked over my notes and discovered one word that seemed to recur from different characters in the movie: Bored. There lies the link between the punk rockers in the movie and the suburban teens in a Bible Belt multiplex watching them: Both groups felt stifled to the point of losing their minds. Sid Vicious found his escape in drugs and his music; we had to make do with watching movies about him until we were old enough to get the hell out of town. In one scene in the movie, someone says, (you can't really tell who because there's a jumble of bodies crowded in sleeping bags and blankets on an apartment floor) "You know I was so bored once I fucked a dog passionately." Thankfully, it never got that bad here (that I know about). Sid & Nancy shows that even the punk fans grew tired of punk, as in a scene at a club where several sit behind a wall, not even paying attention to the Pistols. One has even brought her baby adorned with a green Mohawk haircut. One of the group, Clive (Mark Monero) announces, "Ain't gonna be a punk no more. Gonna be a rude boy just like my dad." When you consume so many drugs that you can't tell what day or country you're in, a state of ennui comes easy as later when Nancy (Chloe Webb, who's as great as Oldman) lies in bed with Sid and complains that she's so bored that she hates her life. "This is just a rough patch. Things'll be much better when we get to America, I promise," Sid reassures her. "We're in America. We've been here a week. New York is in America, you fuck," she yells at him, prompting him to look out the balcony at the Hotel Chelsea sign.
Watching Sid & Nancy now makes it easier to appreciate what Alex Cox accomplishes on a filmmaking level. He tosses out the idea of a conventional narrative (and shouldn't that be required when telling the story of punk pioneers?) while at the same time employing many standard cinematic techniques to great effect. When they get to the infamous concert on the ship on the Thames and the London police make them pull ashore, Cox throws in a short but effective tracking shot of Sid and Nancy, arm in arm and in love, oblivious to the chaos around them, as they simply walk away from the ship and the melee on the docks just to be with one another. Cox also frequently likes suddenly to distance us from characters, usually
the title ones, but not always, so they appear as specks against a background that gives the scene a different connotation such as a message about abortion. He's not above some wacky film use either. When Sid, Nancy and her friend Gretchen (played by none other than Courtney Love) cross a vacant lot and see some kids picking on another one, Sid tells them to stop. The bullies ask him who he thinks he is. "I'm Sid Vicious," he answers and then the kids run away in fast-motion speed like something out of an Our Gang short. A moment such as that reminds me of what really goes unappreciated about Sid & Nancy — its nearly continuous strain of humor, albeit mostly dark humor. Truth be told, that aspect led to my friends and I returning to the film as much as any empathy for the bored. If you just lay out the basic plot of the film — The true story of heroin-addicted musician and his heroin-addicted girlfriend who he stabs to death but doesn't face justice for his crime because he overdoses first — well, it doesn't exactly sound like a rollicking night out. The first response to that description probably would be something like, "Sounds bleak." The word that begins the IMDb plot summary is "morbid." I'm not trying to convince you that Sid & Nancy produces a laugh riot, but I've sat through many bleak films in my time (Wendy and Lucy leaps to mind) and Sid & Nancy isn't one of them because Cox and his collaborators approached the subject matter with such verve, creativity and vitality.Speaking of the painful Wendy and Lucy, two scenes in Sid & Nancy reminded me of that pretentious piece of misery (but in a good way). One emphasizes the careful balancing act Alex Cox and Abbe Wool's screenplay took with scenes that show these characters' desperation (and that one gets hit out of the park by Chloe Webb's superb work. She and Oldman both were robbed in not receiving Oscar
recognition). The second one plays as sort of a twisted homage to another filmmakers' work. Both keep humor behind the anger and tears. In the first, the infamous telephone booth scene, anxious for drugs and out of cash, Nancy calls her mom in America in the middle of the night London time telling her that she and Sid just got married. She assures her mother that Vicious isn't at all as they describe him in the newspapers and no, she's not pregnant either. Not known for her subtlety, Nancy suggests that her mom would want to send them a wedding gift for their honeymoon. Nancy explains that they don't have a place yet, so money would be better and since it's a different time there, why doesn't she head over to Western Union and wire some to them and they can pick it up in the morning. We never hear the mother's side, but it's very reminiscent of that call Wendy (Michelle Williams) makes to her sister) who has heard all her crap before and doesn't want to deal with it. (Lucky her — I immediately wanted to watch a movie called Wendy's Sister and Lucy.) Nancy loses it. "I am so married!" Nancy yells into the phone. "YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT ME! IF YOU DON'T SEND US MONEY, WE'RE BOTH GONNA DIE! FUCK YOU!" Nancy screams before she hangs up and throws such a fit she breaks the glass in the phone booth. Sid gets her to rest down on the curb. "I fucking hate them! I fucking hate them! Fucking motherfuckers! They wouldn't send us any money! They said we'd spend it on DRUGS!" she tells Sid. Then Oldman gets the scene's deadpan punchline: "We would."
The other sequence proves truly hysterical (unless you were living it I imagine). While in America, Nancy takes Sid to visit her grandparents in a dinner scene that plays as if it's a twisted homage to Alvy's visit to Annie's parents in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. There are other scenes
that obviously influenced later films or seem to predict other filmmakers' recurring trademarks. Recognizable character actors Gloria LeRoy (who still works today, which is her 80th birthday) and Milton Seltzer (who passed in 2006) play Granma and Granpa whose table gets filled out by many other men and women, mostly younger, whose relationship never is explained. What's so funny about the scene is that Nancy doesn't change herself in the presence of her grandparents and the young people, sprinkling her speech with F-bombs as always even though her demeanor is generally friendly. Sid comes off as downright polite — except for not wearing a shirt to the dinner table. The highlight comes when Granpa starts questioning Sid as he would any suitor. "So are you gonna make an honest woman of our Nancy, Sid?" he asks Vicious, who obviously misses the gist of the
question. "She's always been an honest woman to me, grandpa, sir. She never lied to me," Sid tells him. Granpa tries again, "What are your intentions?" Nancy steps in to outline the couple's plans for this: Monday they'd go to the methadone clinic, then she'd get Sid a few gigs (this takes place after The Pistols have broken up, but I'll get back to that), then they'd move to Paris "and go out in a blaze of glory," Nancy says. "Don't worry, you'll be proud of us," Sid reassures the grandparents who look anything but reassured. As the family retires to the living room, Sid promptly passing out in a chair from a bit too much
vodka, Nancy in his lap. Nancy assumes that they'll be staying there but Granma comes in and, being as polite as she can, tells her she thought it would be better if they stayed at a motel so they booked them a room there. Nancy admits she was hoping they'd drive them to the methadone clinic, but Granma says it's impossible because they are going on a trip the next day. One of the never-define teenage boys blurts, "Since when?" Granpa also gives Nancy money for transportation. She's wise enough to know what's up and storms out, but Vicious remains in the chair like a statue. The grandparents argue about how they can get him out. Eventually they do, and we see Sid and Nancy in the hotel lying in the dark watching TV. While much of the sequence has been played for laughs, it might be the film's most touching moment. "These people. Really lovely. Best fuckin' food I ever ate," Sid tells Nancy about her grandparents with a wisp of sadness in his voice. "Why'd they throw us out?" Just as he didn't understand what the meaning of Granpa's questions were, Vicious can't fathom how these people that seemed to be friendly and treating him like a human being would suddenly throw him out for some unknown reason. Nancy knows, and she gives the scene its clincher. "Because they know me." Oldman and Webb created such a magnificent acting partnership in Sid & Nancy that I wonder why no one has devised a project in 25 years that paired these two again.
Granted, the movie focuses on the couple, but it also looks at The Sex Pistols and the music industry in England at the time as well and that's where we find a lot of the humor as well. Though Sid & Nancy really only takes time to develop John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon (well played by Andrew Schofield unless you are John Lydon or are friends with John Lydon) with the other band members being more or less ciphers. While the movie portrays him as a prick at times, it also shows him as someone who aspires to some degree of professionalism, something difficult to reach when your bass guitarist tends to be wasted or not there at all. They'll be on stage at a club, ready to go and Sid will be roughhousing elsewhere in the crowd. "Sid, we'll go on when you're ready," John ("He hates being called Johnny") will shout. The movie also has much fun
with its take on the band's manipulative manager Malcolm McLaren (acted with a perpetually bemused grin by David Hayman), who at times seems less concerned that Sid might be destroying himself as long as he gets press out of it. The first time we see Malcolm, he's standing outside a club trying to lure people into a performance. "Is it fucking worth it? Yes it is," he tells anyone who passes by. When Lydon and the other members come to him to complain, explaining that sometimes they have to turn off Vicious' amp because he isn't even playing the same song that the rest of the band is and they need a new bass guitarist, Malcolm doesn't seem upset. Instead, he replies, "Sidney's more than a mere bass player. He's a fabulous disaster. He's a symbol, a metaphor. He embodies the dementia of a
nihilistic generation." Eventually, even McLaren sees the need for intervention. At first, he tries to talk his assistant Phoebe (Debby Bishop) to be Sid's handler for a couple of months, but she wants no part of it. He asks why. "Infectious hepatitis, loony girlfriend, drugs?" she lists off. "Boys will be boys," Malcolm counters. Everyone agrees when the discussion of an American tour comes up, that it's a good chance to separate Sid from Nancy for awhile, since both band and management see her as the bad influence. At a meeting at a small restaurant, they make it clear: no wives or girlfriends can go. When Nancy puts up a fit — Sid appears catatonic the whole time — Phoebe makes it clear that if they can't separate for a few weeks, Sid will be replaced. So Sid goes alone and that tour ends up being the band's end as they get booked in inappropriate venues by people not even clear who they are. (As in Atlanta, as you can see in the sign below.) The final straw comes when Sid heads to a party and walks through a hotel's glass door. When he reunites with Nancy and she decides to manage him, things go from bad to worse and everyone pretty much knows where this story ends.
As I mentioned before, the influences — intentional and otherwise — on other films and filmmakers become more apparent 25 years later. For example, it's even more obvious why Martin Scorsese thought of using Sid Vicious' take on "My Way" as the ending song for Goodfellas when you see the re-creation of the video for it in Sid & Nancy (and that is Gary Oldman doing the singing by the way), especially following the quick take of Joe Pesci as Tommy aping the famous shot from Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery. (Pardon the Portuguese subtitles.) Embedding is disabled for the Goodfellas ending, but click here.
While they stay at the Hotel Chelsea, Sid and Nancy manage to start a fire in their room and they just stare at it, fire fighters eventually coming in around them to extinguish the flames. The hotel manager (Sandy Baron), always bragging to potential tenants about the high-class clientele that have lived there, does berate them slightly but moves them to a room on the first floor accompanied by a slow-moving man who appears to be a decrepit bellhop, but doesn't appear to be that old. The only item he carries is Sid's guitar, which he hands back to him as he says something slow and cryptic along the lines of "Bob Dylan was born here" and
then extends his hand for a trip. It's the type of character we'd see frequent many a work by David Lynch, but I don't recall one making an appearance yet. They didn't really kick in until Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart a few years later. It could be pure coincidence, but when I saw him again, Lynch came to my mind immediately. Musicians and fires aren't that unusual, but it did in a way remind me of Oliver Stone's awful movie The Doors, which also only bothered to define two members of the band. As for the fire, I'm still waiting to find out how the hell Meg Ryan got out of that closet. Imagery may be what I took away most from this return visit because I'd forgotten, if I'd ever known, that the director of photography for Sid & Nancy was the ultra-talented and, of late, Coen brothers' favorite Roger Deakins. For those of you keeping score at home, Deakins has received nine Oscar nominations for cinematography and won zero. His nominations have come for The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, Kundun, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn't There, The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men, The Reader (shared with Chris Menges) and True Grit. Look at it this way: Deakins has received more nominations for best cinematography without winning than Peter O'Toole went winless for best actor — and they at least gave O'Toole an honorary Oscar.What boggled my mind then and still does now are people who think that somehow Sid & Nancy comes off as an endorsement for heroin use. Being broke, unaware of your surroundings, killing a loved one and accidentally yourself — tell me where I sign up. As the methadone case worker (Sy Richardson) tells the duo, who dismiss it as "political bullshit" when he paints it as a government conspiracy he claims to have seen first-hand in Vietnam, "(S)mack is the great controller. Keeps people stupid when they could be smart." Yes, the fantastical ending paints the idea that perhaps Sid and Nancy reunite on another plane, but that doesn't mean it's endorsing smack addiction as the path. Still, those closing sequences seem more spellbinding today than before, Of course, no knew in 1986, the symbolic power of including this image of Sid Vicious' path to a pizza joint after making bail in Nancy's slaying.
I almost could have created a 25th anniversary tribute to Sid & Nancy composed entirely of photos. As it is, I've left out many line and anecdotes that I wanted to write about, but I keep cutting them to squeeze in more art — and I'm not even getting all the art in that I wanted. I didn't begin to get into discussing what the hell has happened to Alex Cox or Chloe Webb. Still, there are so many shots I didn't get in — Sid and Nancy having a mock shoot-out on the roof of a hotel, Nancy hanging upside down from a hotel window, Malcolm scaring off men beating up Sid simply by pointing his finger like a gun, Sid spontaneously dancing with some kids after the pizza, Nancy's friend Brenda and her S&M business — but I do want to use one shot from the closing reunion sequence because I think it's the most beautiful.
Finally, just in case anyone might still believe that the movie serves as an ad for heroin, the final card that appears on the screen.
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Labels: 80s, Animation, Christopher Nolan, Coens, Disney, Dylan, Gordon-Levitt, Lynch, Michelle Williams, Movie Tributes, Music, O'Toole, Oldman, Oliver Stone, Oscars, Pesci, Scorsese, Twin Peaks, Woody, Zemeckis
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