Sunday, June 03, 2012
"My standards of fun are not the norm."
I thought I'd drop a few final thoughts that I failed to fit in the main tribute post before I actually listed my 10 favorite episodes, which turned out to be a bear of an assignment — first narrowing the list to 10, then trying to determine rankings. Even in the later, weaker
seasons, the show still managed to come up with some winners or — if nothing else — moments and lines that made you feel that your time wasn't completely wasted. I almost could do a list of favorite lines. When I attempted to prune the list, some episodes stayed in the running longer than they otherwise would have simply by virtue of priceless moments. For example, I toyed with including the Season 2 episode "Safe," a good episode about a teen (Michelle Trachtenberg) who had a heart transplant six months earlier, but has been driven nuts by her overprotective mom (Mel Harris) who keeps her in a clean room at home. When her boyfriend sneaks in for some sex, before they even kiss he notices something on he arm and she appears to go into
anaphylactic shock. Eventually, she gets worse and gets sent to Princeton-Plainsboro where one theory after another fails and she begins to become paralyzed. House becomes convinced that the boyfriend brought a tick in with him and the bug caused the infection that's paralyzing her, but no one can find it, so Cuddy hslts the search. Wilson says they must get her to ICU. Foreman wheels her into an elevator, though House blocks Cuddy's entrance with his cane. Foreman gives her an injection to buy House three more minutes of tick searching and he locates the nasty bug in her pubic hair — leading to the priceless moment where the elevator doors open and her parents and Cuddy witness House's head rising from between the girl's legs. They obviously think the worst until he shows them the tick. One of my favorite moments, but just not enough for the favorite list. It helps explain why I think Season 2 easily wins the title as the best overall season. The show's most memorable moments could break your heart as well. It didn't make my list either but as far as touching installments go, Season 4's "97 Seconds" about the paraplegic man (Brian Klugman) and his extremely faithful service dog, an English shepherd named Hoover, gets me every time. 
House nearly hit a home run with each of the 24 episodes produced for its second season. I easily could have filled all 10 spots on my favorite list from this season alone, but in an attempt to spread the wealth I succeeded in limiting Season 2 episodes on the list to a total of three. That means, in addition to "Safe," I couldn't make room for other great ones such as "The Mistake," where House and Chase face a disciplinary board hearing over a patient's death because Chase got distracted by news of his
father's death; "Deception" with guest star Cynthia Nixon as a mentally unstable woman with a difficult-to diagnose ailment that, with Foreman temporarily in charge of the diagnostics department, leads both House and Cameron to play sneaky games to try to prove their diagnoses; "Sex Kills" (another one that came very close to making the final list) with guest star Howard Hesseman as a man in desperate need of a heart transplant but deemed "too old" by the transplant committee to be approved for the procedure, prompting House to go on a scavenger hunt for a freshly dead body that wouldn't be deemed suitable for transplant. When they find a somewhat overweight
woman declared brain dead after a car wreck but suffers from another ailment, House vows to cure her so her heart would be safe for transplant. "We're going to cure death?" Cameron asks incredulously. House cackles like a mad scientist before answering normally, "Doubt it." The storyline perfectly blends the pathos of the man who just lost his wife and a daughter worried that her father will die with humorous elements stemming from both storylines that end up running on parallel tracks. On top of that, the episode tosses in one of the funniest clinic episodes with a young man (Adam Busch) who seeks help because he claims he's fallen in love with a cow, though that isn't his whole story. "So I have to wonder what could be more humiliating then someone calling your girlfriend a cow and not being metaphorical?" House asks him. "Sex Kills" would have made a Top 20; Season 2 also includes "Clueless," which I referred to in the first half of the tribute, about the husband with the devoted wife who grows sicker and sicker and that House figures out she's been poisoning him with gold; "All In," where a sick boy shows all the signs of a case that has haunted House for years because of his inability to solve it while he's simultaneously coaching Wilson by phone in a hospital Texas Hold 'Em benefit; "Forever," the tragic tale of a sick woman and her young baby; and "No Reason" where guest star Elias Koteas, the husband of one of House's former patient's, walks into the conference room and shoots him prompting an episode that mixes dreams and reality as they work to save House.
Another aspect of House that worked incredibly well lay in its ability to attract talented and well-known performers to play all levels of parts, whether it be recurring roles such as Sela Ward as Stacy, House's ex-girlfriend and Princeton-Plainsboro's main lawyer
whose arc lasted throughout Season 1 and most of Season 2; Chi McBride as Edward Vogler, the billionaire pharmaceutical magnste who becomes chairman of the board of the teaching hospital with promises of a blank check for research only to spend most of his time trying to get rid of House instead; Michael Weston as Lucas Douglas, who starts out as House's goofy private eye and pseudo-friend before he becomes Cuddy's unlikely boyfriend; and David Morse as Michael Tritter, the wrong guy for House to treat the way he usually treats clinic patients as he turns out to be a cop. That incident launches the third season storyline of Tritter pursuing House on drug charges — Tritter acting as Javert to House's Jean Valjean. Tritter even puts the financial and professional squeeze on Wilson and others in an attempt to force them to cooperate and turn against House. In other cases, Oscar nominees (past and future) and even a couple
of winners popped up as patients of the week including Shohreh Aghdashloo, Candice Bergen (though as Cuddy's mom she appeared twice when she wasn't a patient), Joel Grey, Taraji P. Henson, Amy Irving, James Earl Jones, Michael O'Keefe, Kathleen Quinlan, Jeremy Renner, Mira Sorvino and David Strathairn. Sometimes, familiar
faces would turn up as mere clinic patients such as Peter Graves, Shirley Knight and Carl Reiner. Those names just scratch the surface because — let's be honest — unless you were a super medical diagnostician yourself, most of the terms that House and his team bandied about came off as gobbledy gook. In actuality, each week's case merely served as the episode's MacGuffin and that's why that part of the show grew tiresome the fastest. The same thing that made the regulars stand out and brought us back each week happened to be the trait in the most interesting cases: Less the illness than the characters who suffered from them. If the patient bored us, so did the case. However, even a late episode such as Season 5's "The Social Contract" can score on that level when Jay Karnes (Dutch from The Shield) played Nick Greenwald, a book editor who suddenly loses the ability to prevent himself from saying whatever comes into his mind. 
Perhaps I've conditioned my memory to remember it this way, but I believe "House Vs. God" was the first House episode I watched while stuck in the hospital. It proved to be a damn good way to start. Pitting the doctor, whom I would soon discover, served as the most
outspoken atheist on primetime television against an ill teenage faith healer named Boyd (Thomas Dekker) made for a natural clash in the teleplay by Doris Egan. To its credit, the show didn't take the easy way out and make Boyd and his father Walter (William Katt) obvious frauds. It also threw in a subplot involving Wilson trying desperately to get in on one of House's home poker games, which leads to the revelation that the good oncologist has been dating one of his cancer patients (Tamara Braun), who becomes involved with Boyd's story. The episode offers a bounty of memorable House lines. I can't recall if the YouTube clip includes either of these two: "You talk to God, you're religious. God talks to you, you're psychotic" or "Isn't it interesting…religious behavior is so close to being crazy that we can't tell them apart." Then, comes the inevitable first meeting between House and Boyd. "So, you're a faith healer. Or is that a pejorative? Do you prefer something like 'divine health management'?" House asks. Of course, it inevitably leads to dialogue between House and his colleagues (Chase, not a murderer at this point, briefly attended seminary, so it's his idea to keep score on case developments on the board).CHASE: You're gonna talk to a patient?
HOUSE: God talks to him. It'd be arrogant of me to assume that I'm better than God.
WILSON: And that's why religious belief annoys you. Because if the universe operates by abstract rules you can learn them, you can protect yourself. If a Supreme Being exists, he can squash you any time he wants.
HOUSE: He knows where I am.
Robert Sean Leonard gets to wrap the show with a great delivery of Wilson's final line, sighing, "House, you are…as God made you."
If I had to present a legal case proving my assertion that the actors who portrayed the patients of the week were more important to the strength of House than the medical mysteries were, I'd submit John Larroquette and this episode as Exhibit A. Actually, Larroquette's character, Gabe Wozniak, wasn't the patient of the week. The real case involves his son Kyle (Zeb Newman). The episode plays off the running gag that House, to hide out from everyone, tends to have lunch in rooms with coma patients. This time, he throws Wilson —
hunting for him after being upset by a visit from Tritter (David Morse) — a curve because he's eating in Gabe's room — and technically he's in a vegetative state, one he's resided in for 10 years. When the team gets stumped for answers about what's causing Kyle's seizures and other problems and Kyle can't provide much in the way of family history, House defies Cuddy's orders and pulls the Awakenings trick of a shot of L-dopa and wakes Gabe up, who sits straight up in bed, longing for a steak. The problem is that Gabe doesn't seem terribly interested in his son's plight, so House makes a deal that takes Gabe, himself and Wilson to Atlantic City in search of a sandwich that Gabe loved and the elder Wozniak agrees to answer one question in exchange for every question that House answers to him. Occasionally, we get cuts back to Princeton-Plainsboro for updates on Kyle, but the trio of Larroquette, Laurie and Leonard make this episode, written by Doris Egan, a true standout. As you'd expect, lots of jokes stem from 10 years of unconsciousness such as when Gabe picks up an iPod and asks, "What's this? It says 'ip od.'" It even manages to wrap up with touching moments that involve not only the episode's storyline, but House and Wilson's relationship as well. The episode also contains many movie references, not just to Awakenings but to The Silence of the Lambs and Sleeper as well. 
The most recent episode to make the top 10 lands here simply for giving Robert Sean Leonard an episode that truly focuses on Wilson in a way that no other installment had done before. (For the same reason, the similarly Cuddy-centric "5 to 9" from Season 6 almost made the cut as well.) Written by David Foster and directed by the great Lesli Linka Glatter whose résumé includes standout episodes of other great
shows such as Mad Men ("Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency"), Freaks and Geeks ("Kim Kelly Is My Friend," "Boyfriends and Girlfriends") and several episodes of Twin Peaks. "Wilson" tells the story of a former patient, Tucker (Joshua Malina), who developed a friendship with Wilson and takes his former oncologist on an outing each year on the anniversary of being cancer-free. House declares Tucker "a self-important jerk." Wilson insists he's his friend and House forcefully reiterates his description. "Seems to be what I'm attracted to," Wilson replies. While Tucker and Wilson (whom Tucker calls "Jimmy") try hunting, Tucker mysteriously collapses and ends up in Princeton-Plainsboro again. Wilson learns that Tucker left his wife for a younger woman when he mistakes the girlfriend for Tucker's daughter. Wilson experiences what he believes to be a "House" moment when he notices that the girlfriend has a cold sore and diagnoses transverse myelitis. House, barely passing by, tells Wilson it's cancer. Meanwhile, Cuddy asks Wilson if it's OK to call his ex-wife Bonnie about a condo that she and
Lucas want to move into together. Wilson calls her on it, saying she's Bonnie's friend and only asked him to test House's reaction. As for Tucker, Wilson's diagnosis wasn't right and, indeed, it was cancer, causing him to try to act more like House, doing a double shot of chemo. House warns him that he can't handle it if it goes wrong the way he could, but Wilson tries anyway and it ends up degrading Tucker's liver to the point he needs an immediate transplant. Tucker, already confirming House's original diagnosis that he's a self-important jerk by bringing his wife and daughter back in his time of need because the young girlfriend can't deal with it, starts blaming Wilson and suggests he donate part of his liver. Even Cuddy tells Wilson he's crazy when he informs her that he plans to do it. "You're a doctor, not a donor," she reminds him. The most touching moment comes when Wilson asks House to be present at the operation and House says no. "What? Why?" Wilson asks. "Because if you die, I'm alone," House replies. In the end, when Tucker turns out OK, he again dumps his wife and brings back the young girlfriend. Wilson finally corrects him when he again calls him Jimmy. "It's James." Then, in the best payoff, Wilson steals the condo out from under Cuddy as a new place for he and House to live. "She hurt my friend. She should be punished," Wilson tells him. "You got mad? I'm proud of you," House says. As the finale showed, the real love story of House occurred between those two men, even if it wasn't sexual.
The most distinctive episode of House in the show's history. They attempted to replicate it with Season 8's "Twenty Vicodin" set entirely with House in prison, but that didn't come close to approaching what the writers, actors and director accomplished here. After House
agreed that his hallucinations of Amber might signal a need for a serious time out, he agreed to check himself to the Mayfield Mental Hospital to attempt to free himself of his addiction and his demons. The two-hour season premiere written by Russel Friend, Garret Lerner, David Foster and David Shore, truly allowed Hugh Laurie to shine. While House went willingly, once admitted, his usual desire to be pulling the strings couldn't be stopped right away as he sought to leave almost as soon as he arrived. It wasn't quite that easy if he ever wanted to practice medicine again, explained the hospital's chief psychiatrist, Dr. Darryl Nolan, our first introduction to the character played by
the always welcome Andre Braugher. If he didn't sign off, House wouldn't get his license back. The episode, directed by Katie Jacobs, not only placed House in a different setting, but with an entirely different cast of characters, save for one brief phone conversation with Wilson. In addition to Dr. Nolan, he formed a begrudging and unlikely kinship with his hyperactive roommate Alvie, played by Tony Award-winner Lin-Manuel Miranda (as House tells Alvie, "You're my only friend. And I hate you.") and an attraction to a secretive woman named Lydia (Franka Potente, who first caught attention as the title character in Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run.) The episode really comes alive when it's Laurie and Braugher going at it one-on-one. "Seriously, is that your strategy? Give everybody what they want, except me?" House asks the psychiatrist. "You're a natural leader. You could something useful down here…for them…definitely for you. Or you could keep fighting. If you think you could break me. If you think I'm not every bit as stubborn as you," Nolan responds. It made for quite an interesting start to the sixth season where House made a true attempt at changing his ways, but somewhere it just sort of got lost, which is a shame.
The best of the episodes dealing with House's hallucinations in that the teleplay by Matthew V. Lewis & Liz Friedman manages to blend deftly the humor and seriousness of the situation as House realizes that his imaginary Amber (Anne Dudek, wonderful again) has a side
that's more malevolent than the real Amber. Running concurrently, the patient of the week, a deaf high school wrestler, makes a good candidate for a cochlear implant but he'd prefer to stay deaf. "My Patient is opting into a handicap; he's an insult to every other gimp out there," House complains. "I'll blind him too, if he wants to experience that culture." Meanwhile, Chase and Cameron's wedding approaches and Wilson tries to warn Chase not to let House throw him a bachelor party. "The main reason my third wife and I eloped was to avoid House's bachelor party… Have you seen Caligula?" Wilson asks Chase as House approaches, inquiring if Wilson is trying to scare him away from the party. "I took an oath to do no harm," Wilson declares, adding that he won't be attending. "Uh, I'm not going to the bachelor party. Every time I go to one of your parties, I end up embarrassing myself in some new and unexpected way," Wilson insists. House begs to differ. "The thing with the duck was hardly unexpected." After he gives Chase a long speech about how his marriage won't truly mean something without wanton depravity the night before, Chase agrees to go, though he doesn't know that Cameron will be
crazy about the idea — so he asks House to make it look as if he's been kidnapped. Imaginary Amber keeps toying with House, trying to get him to remember the name of a stripper from Wilson's party. "Why go back to that well? In the nine years since Wilson's party, a whole new generation of hot girls have been abused by their stepfathers," House tells his hallucination, who also gets him to implant the cochlear implant in the high school wrestler without his permission. He expects Wilson to chastise him, but he sees it as a kind act. However, when Wilson arrives home to finds all his furniture in the yard and the bachelor party being held in his apartment, that doesn't please him as much. Imaginary Amber finally got the name of the stripper dislodged from House's mind, so he hired her for the party and Chase opted to taste her body butter, only she uses strawberry to which Chase is allergic, sending him into anaphylactic shock. They rush Chase to the hospital where they've received word that the wrestler has taken a turn for the worse as well. "I knew about her body butter, and his strawberry allergy. I tried to kill Chase. Why would I do that? I don't want Cameron," House says to Amber. "You're not a big fan of other people's happiness," Amber replies. After he ignores whatever she says to him, he manages to save the wrestler. He then admits to Cuddy that he hasn't slept since Kutner's suicide. That night, he goes home and actually sleeps the whole night. When he wakes the next morning, he thinks he's conquered the hallucinations but when he rolls over, Amber lies next to him grinning. Labels: Braugher, C. Reiner, Cynthia Nixon, D. Morse, House, J.E. Jones, Lists, Mad Men, TV Tribute, Twin Peaks
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Thursday, January 27, 2011
Not so good grief
By Edward Copeland
No two people grieve exactly the same way. No book contains rules for proper mourning. When someone loses a spouse, a sibling or, most tragically, a child, outsiders can't judge if their behavior is normal or appropriate. That's not the case with movies on the subject such as Rabbit Hole or performers in them like Nicole Kidman. They're fair game, especially when everything about them rings false compared to countless cinematic examples that depicted grief well.
David Lindsay-Abaire adapted Rabbit Hole from his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which I have neither read nor seen but which won one of my favorite actresses, Cynthia Nixon, a Tony Award. Our faithful Broadway correspondent Josh R selected Nixon as one of his 10 best experiences in the 2006 New York theater season. Josh wrote:
As a mother grieving over the loss of a child, the luminous Ms. Nixon brought emotional credibility to a play that might otherwise have gotten bogged down in maudlin, movie-of-the-week style dramaturgy...the actress delivered an eloquent, astutely measured account of the manner in which emotional forbearance serves as a buffer against the unbearable sense of bewilderment that comes in trying to make sense of tragedy. Rather than resorting to histrionics, Nixon registered all the pain of her character’s acknowledgement of her suffering with delicate, nuanced strokes — in a performance that was all the more powerful for what remained unsaid.
Seeing how great Nixon can be in so many different roles, I almost can visualize her performance based on Josh's prose. Needless to say, the character of Becca which won Nixon her Tony probably bore little resemblance to the Becca that Nicole Kidman brings to the screen. Kidman's Becca comes off as an uptight control freak with a superiority complex who treats almost everyone who crosses her path cruelly and as if they are imposing on her time — and none of it has to do with sadness over the death of her son. She makes Mary Tyler Moore's character in Ordinary People look warm, open-hearted and loving by comparison.
Every choice Kidman makes as Becca turns out to be wrongheaded and misguided. You never get a sense that this is a woman devastated by the loss of her young son in an accident. She plays Becca more as if the death and its repercussions were more of an inconvenience for her and she treats everyone else in similar fashion with one exception. She starts stalking and then befriends Jason (Miles Teller), the teen who drove the car that struck and killed her son. At times, the scenes between Becca and Jason made me feel as if I were watching Birth 2. Her encounters with Jason are the only moments when she displays anything resembling humanity.
As a result, where a viewer should feel sympathy for Becca, instead you just want someone to slap her. Kidman doesn't play her as someone scarred by a tragedy, she plays Becca as someone you would walk across the street to avoid because she's such a stuck-up jerk. I went back and looked at some of the reviews of the original play in 2006 and nearly all the theater critics had high praise for its entire cast (which also included John Slattery and Tyne Daly) and the production itself, though The New York Times' Ben Brantley admitted that the play itself, "As beautifully observed as Rabbit Hole is, it never rises to the shock of greatness." The reviews also noted the tears the production evoked. In the film version with Kidman, let's just say there's not a wet eye in the house.
As I said, I've neither seen nor read Lindsay-Abaire's play but I have to believe that he changed it a lot for the screenplay because there are too many scenes in the movie that I can't imagine how they would have been depicted in a stage production. There's also the fact that the play had five characters where the movie adds significant new roles played by Sandra Oh, Giancarlo Esposito and Jon Tenney.
The remainder of the film's cast can be great in other works. Dianne Wiest as Becca's mom and Tammy Blanchard as her sister come off best, but Aaron Eckhart feels nearly as false as Kidman does. Some of the blame may rest on the shoulders of director John Cameron Mitchell, who keeps everything and everyone at an icy, removed distance and may have instructed his cast to follow his lead, yet Wiest, Blanchard and Oh find ways to breathe life into their characters, so I don't think that's the case.
Eckhart's role as Howie, Becca's deeply wounded husband, may be hampered since most of his scenes pair him with Kidman's ice queen. He does better when separated from her as in some scenes opposite Oh, but when he has to respond to Kidman's offputting performance, he seems flustered. It's particularly embarrassing when the teen driver Jason comes over to give Becca a comic (which gives the play and the film its title, though without any sort of deeper explanation) and he blows up at him being there and I was again reminded of Birth where Danny Huston goes after the boy. I suppose I should be grateful for small favors — at least it's Eckhart here and not Danny Huston.
Mitchell seems an unusual choice to direct the film, following his helming the adaptation of his fun, one-of-a-kind stage musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch and his attempt at making a mainstream porn film, Shortbus. Visually, he doesn't add much to Rabbit Hole and I'm not sure if he should be blamed for giving his cast bad direction or none at all.
As I wrote yesterday, when I reviewed another overrated film, Blue Valentine, one of the biggest headscratchers of this year's Oscar nominations is that the actors branch wasted two of its best actress slots on Michelle Williams and Kidman when there were so many worthier candidates out there. I truly have to believe members just filled in names based on what they heard or read and didn't watch Blue Valentine or Rabbit Hole.
As for Rabbit Hole in general, it's truly a shame because the list of great films about grieving stretches from the beginning of the medium to now. In 2009, you had a beautiful example with Colin Firth in A Single Man. Last year, I celebrated the 20th anniversary of another great example, Men Don't Leave. If you look specifically for a good example of a film about a couple affected by the loss of a child, take another look at 1988's The Accidental Tourist.
I could keep going on with examples of films that tackle the subject of grief better than Rabbit Hole does, but instead I'm just gonna mourn the talent wasted on this film and the time I lost watching it.
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Labels: 10s, Awards, Colin Firth, Cynthia Nixon, John Slattery, Michelle Williams, Nicole Kidman, Oscars, Theater, Wiest
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Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Thank you for being my friends
By Edward Copeland
The Golden Girls is a classic sitcom (seven seasons, 180 episodes) that everyone seems to enjoy, yet few want to admit it. Created by Susan Harris, who also created one of my all-time favorite sitcoms, Soap, it's one of the rare series where each member of the cast was rewarded with an Emmy during the show's run, which began 25 years ago today.
We've lost a member of the original of the original foursome each year for the past three years: Estelle Getty in 2008, Beatrice Arthur in 2009 and Rue McClanahan earlier this year. (Just Saturday, we also lost Harold Gould, who had a recurring role as Rose's boyfriend Miles.) Meanwhile, the sole survivor, Betty White, has become an unexplained phenomenon and busier than ever at the age of 88.
My faithful contributor Josh R saw the characters as a template for younger counterparts later on HBO's Sex and the City. Arthur's Dorothy is like Cynthia Nixon's pragmatic, cynical Miranda; McClanahan's slutty Blanche lines up with Kim Cattrall's Samantha; White's naive Rose equals Kristin Davis' Charlotte; and the parallel gets weak between Getty's Sophia and Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie other than they are both short, though we could go for a reach and say both are the matriarchs of the groups.
As a comedy, the show was fairly predictable: You could almost guess the laugh lines, but it did have a couple of moments that always stuck with me. One time, when Rose was hiding a dog that always brought back hidden objects she said he could find anything to which Sophia responded, "Quick! Find us a viable Democratic presidential candidate."
The other one means more to me all the time. When Dorothy faced a mysterious illness and got no help from doctors who either blew her off, told her she was getting old or should see a psychiatrist, she finally found a doctor who diagnosed her with chronic fatigue syndrome. Later, she ran into one of the other doctors who was particularly dismissive of her in a restaurant and gave him a dressing down that made me applaud. Of course, I was in a hospital at the time.
It was my extended time in hospitals when The Golden Girls really came to mean a lot to me. One hospital had lousy TV choices (its only cable news channel was Fox, which to me would threaten its religiously-affiliated nonprofit status. Have no fear. I reported them. :-) ) so the frequent reruns of The Golden Girls were a lifeline to me. I'd see the same episodes multiple times, but it didn't matter. The girls gave me some comfort through a particularly hard time. In fact, I miss their reruns now since Lifetime doesn't air the show anymore.
Happy anniversary, Golden Girls.
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Labels: 80s, Awards, Cynthia Nixon, HBO, Television
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Saturday, May 22, 2010
From the Vault: Baby's Day Out
Like a mutant variation of Dave Bowman's transformation in 2001: A Space Odyssey, John Hughes continues his backward evolution in filmmaking, reaching a new career nadir with Baby's Day Out.
Think Home Alone with a baby instead of Macaulay Culkin and you've got the general high concept of this piece of Hughes-written drivel.
This isn't just a filmmaker going to the well once too often, it's Hughes diving into an empty one, cracking his skull on the bottom and repeating the dive because he keeps blacking out and forgetting there's no more water.
The story, such that it is, concerns a young, snooty rich couple (Lara Flynn Boyle, Matthew Glave) who face the abduction of their toddler Bink.
As is the usual Hughes course of action, he paints the family as gross caricatures then, without any developing scenes, expects the audience to care about them as they fret over their missing child.
This raises one of the many good points about what's wrong with this material. Whereas it's one thing in Home Alone to have a grade-school student stuck in a comically perilous situation, is there something really funny about having a child who isn't even a year old wandering around construction sites and across busy intersections while his parents worry about whether he's alive or dead?
Of course, the answer is not really. When baby Bink crawls on a girder hoisted high above the ground, what should the audience feel? Is it suspense about whether he'll fall? If he does, it's tragic and not a comedy. If he doesn't, it's just a pointless special effect in an absurd movie.
Despite its questionable taste, much could be forgiven if Baby's Day Out managed to induce laughs, but nary a giggle is provoked as Hughes resorts to his usual silly musical cues and plentiful hits to the groin. It's not that a funny, cartoonish film about kidnapping a baby can't be made -- it has been and it's called Raising Arizona.
Because the script has little interest in creating characters, the actors, many of whom have been good elsewhere, seem in visible pain. Joe Mantegna suffers as the lead kidnapper as he tries to express what it would be like if an infant set fire to your crotch with a butane lighter and your idiot friend proceeded to stamp it out. I don't think Stanislavsky, Lee Strasberg or Stella Adler could help Mantegna on that one.
Meanwhile, Joe Pantoliano fails to overcome the same problem as Mantegna's cohort and Cynthia Nixon struggles to maintain the English accent they feel a nanny is required to have. Director Patrick Read Johnson desperately tries to keep the pace moving, but most of the gags, such as one involving a gorilla at the zoo, get stretched beyond the point of humor or reason to pad out the film's running time.
Even the solitary, slightly amusing gag involving the baby and a revolving door gets repeated to the point that it loses what little charm it had. With a premise like this, it's as absurd as the movie itself to try to pick on plausibility problems, but even this film overreaches by trying to justify the baby's path through the city as being based on Bink's favorite book.
Admittedly, the kid (actually twins) is cute but, in the end, do you really want to pay to look at someone else's baby's pictures, especially when they are shots of humorless near tragedies?
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Labels: 90s, Cynthia Nixon, John Hughes
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Monday, November 09, 2009
Is research that hard?
By Edward Copeland
Whenever I complain about anachronisms or factual inaccuracies in a movie, some people think I shouldn't be taking the film in question so seriously. However, I can't help it. If a feature really has me under its spell, that kind of goof breaks it immediately and it's hard to recapture that spirit in the middle of the movie. Granted, Lymelife wasn't really wowing me anyway, but as the inaccuracies added up, it just added to my distaste for the film, despite its talented ensemble cast.
Before I start ranting about the anachronisms and inaccuracies, I feel it's best to talk about Lymelife itself. There's the oft-repeated Tolstoy quote about all happy families being the same but all unhappy families are different, but I swear movies, particularly indies, try their damnedest to put that author's truism to the test.
Lymelife is the directing debut of Derick Martini, who co-wrote the film with his brother Steven. Based loosely on his own experience, it stars Rory Culkin as 15-year-old Scott Bartlett, facing an array of growing pains in 1979 Long Island. His parents Mickey and Brenda (Alec Baldwin, Jill Hennessy) have a tense relationship, especially, as far as Scott knows, over Mickey's grand plan for a large housing community while Brenda yearns for their life back in Queens. Scott's older brother Jimmy (Kieran Culkin) is in the Army and about to be activated for an overseas engagement. At school, Scott is the victim of bullies and longs for Adrianna Bragg (Emma Roberts), who views him as nothing more than a friend (and who hasn't been there).
Adrianna's life isn't going much rosier. Her mom Melissa (Cynthia Nixon) is unhappy and the breadwinner of the home, secretly sleeping with Mickey since Adrianna's dad Charlie (Timothy Hutton) is unemployed because he's been diagnosed with Lyme disease. (On a personal note that rang true, he mentions that at one point in the diagnosis process, doctors thought he might have multiple sclerosis. Before I was diagnosed with M.S., they ruled out Lyme disease as a cause of my problems.) As a result, he spends much of his free time in the woods with a rifle stalking deers he blames for his fate, though he's got more problems than just his illness. If a gun is introduced in the first act...
The cast all performs more than ably, though at times Hennessy lays her New York accent on a bit too thick. Once again, it's truly amazing what good actors the younger members of the Culkin brood, particularly Kieran, have turned out to be given what a mugging ham their older brother Macaulay was in his heyday.
Now, back to the rant. According to the IMDb, Derick Martini was born in 1975 and Steven Martini was born in 1978, meaning the brothers were 4 and 1 in the year the film was set, made clear that it's 1979 by a brief TV shot of the taking of the U.S. hostages in Iran and in a collection of train tickets. Since the press notes say the story is semiautobiographical, why did Martini choose to make it a period piece and, more importantly, why not make certain he got the facts of the period right.
There are little things. Scott has a collection of Star Wars figures and at one point in a hybrid of Travis Bickle and Han Solo, is shooting a laser pistol at his mirror at "Lando." I played this back twice to make sure I wasn't mishearing Greedo, but no, he's calling out Lando, the character played by Billy Dee Williams in The Empire Strikes Back who wouldn't be introduced until May 1980.
Other anachronisms could be nitpicked, but it's a huge inaccuracy that just pulled me out of the picture. Scott's brother is being activated as part of the U.S. effort in the Falkland Islands war. Now, maybe many of you have forgotten that war, but it was between the British and Argentina, it took place in 1982 and the U.S. was not involved in it whatsoever.
Maybe the Martini brothers were too young to get the facts straight, but the movie had two executive producers, including Martin Scorsese, and six producers, including Alec Baldwin, who helped get Lymelife made. Why did none of these people, who could mentor these young filmmakers, step up and say, "This is a giant goof about the Falkland Islands war." I know a lot of them are old enough and smart enough to know the real story and since this was a low-budget indie, they weren't just there for a paycheck. So why shirk their responsibility to help these young men?
Having just finished watching the first two seasons of Mad Men, which is meticulous in its details of real events, down to the day, it comes off as laziness when you see such blatant indifference to the facts in a film such as Lymelife.
Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is ignorance and though many advise you to check your brains at the door for movies, that applies more to crap such as Transformers. When you're trying to be real, why be so careless as to allow things to break that reality?
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Labels: 00s, Alec Baldwin, Cynthia Nixon, Mad Men, Scorsese, Star Wars
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Monday, April 20, 2009
NY theater flashbacks: 1994
By Edward Copeland
I'd thought of doing something like this for a long time and since I have long-term projects and other complications preventing me from seeing new things to write about, it seemed as good as time a time as any. Of course, I'm relying on memory, so forgive any mistakes I may make along the way. My theater obsession was primarily New York and primarily Broadway. I had been to the city before on movie junkets, but never had enough free time to see a show. So, in March 1994, I planned my first trip to the Big Apple to specifically see a show. In this case, it actually was two shows or one show in two parts. In other words, it was both halves of Tony Kushner's Angels in America on consecutive nights.
Since this was the
second season in which Kushner's play had run, though the first for the second half, two members of the original cast already had left. F. Murray Abraham had succeeded Ron Leibman in Leibman's Tony-winning role of Roy Cohn (in addition to some other roles). I'd seen bits of Leibman, but I felt Abraham was more than a worthy substitution. Marcia Gay Harden had departed from her Tony-nominated role as Harper Pitt (among others). Cynthia Nixon had yet to assume the role, so I got to see Harden's understudy, Susan Bruce, who was fine. One other interesting casting note that few get to experience is the chance to see both the understudy for a role and the actor who was cast in the part. When I saw Millennium Approaches on Friday night, Jeffrey Wright was off, so his understudy played Belize and his other roles. The actor was Darnell Williams, known to All My Children fans as Jesse Hubbard. He was quite good. Saturday, Wright returned for Perestroika. As good as I thought Williams was, Wright was a revelation. I wanted to leap to the stage and give him a Tony right then and, sure enough, months later Wright would win the Tony for featured actor in a play for Angels in America: Perestroika. Seeing this two-part play was a wonder; it makes perfect sense why I developed an addiction to New York theater, specifically Broadway. An expensive habit. I should have taken up heroin. The power and magic of Angels in America still resonates. What a work of imagination, blending fantasy, history, current events, real people, fictional characters and churning them all into a glorious theatrical fest. Now, 15 years and more than 100 productions later, Angels in America remains the best show I ever saw on Broadway. I was such a theater neophyte when I ordered the tickets for the show over the phone, I didn't know the difference between orchestra and mezzanine, so first row mezzanine center sounded better than ninth row orchestra center. Actually though, I think my lack of knowledge served me well. When Ellen McLaughlin's angel came crashing through the ceiling of the bedroom of Prior Walter (the magnificent Stephen Spinella who won Tonys for both halves), I was more or less even with her. Since the play was split into two
halves, it won the Tony for best play in two consecutive seasons but it only won the Pulitzer Prize for part 1, Millennium Approaches. I really don't know how you can separate it like that because for me both parts make a whole and you can't have one without the other without it seeming incomplete. I fell in love with the play so much (and I'm a straight man) that I bought book copies of both halves of the play and performed them in the living room of my friend Wagstaff, playing all the parts, so he could get a sense of the play that I thought just reading the play wouldn't do. (The only other time I did this was to perform The Seagull, which I was reading for the first time when I performed it.) As Angels in America became a cultural phenomenon, there was immediate talk of a film version. I still would love to have seen what Robert Altman would have done if his plan to make it as two films had come to fruition. As much as I loved Altman, Angels in America seemed to be a uniquely theatrical experience to me and a lot of its magic and spectacle would be lost on the big screen. Now though, most people probably know Angels in America based on Mike Nichols' HBO miniseries version of it. It is very good but I was right: While it's a good thing that it doesn't seem like a filmed play, a lot of the spirit is lost. You also inevitably get into the performance comparison game since Jeffrey Wright was the only member of the Broadway cast to reprise his role in the TV version (and he got an Emmy to go with his Tony). Al Pacino put a handle on some of his worst late-career traits and was great as Roy Cohn. I can't compare him to Leibman and, of course, it's difficult sizing up performances trying to reach the balcony with the toned-down ones of film or television. Most of the miniseries and stage counterparts seem fairly evenly matched, though I actually preferred the underrated Kathleen Chalfant in all her many roles to Meryl Streep. While Justin Kirk was fine as Prior on TV, he had a helluva act to follow in Spinella (Kirk would shone for me in a later theater season on stage). Ben Shenkman's Louis on TV actually was better than Joe Mantello's on stage. (Mantello turned primarily to directing after Angels, winning several Tonys and having mixed results, in my opinion.) The biggest mistake of the miniseries though was the casting of the ultrabland Patrick Wilson as Joe Pitt. Sure, the character was supposed to be a closeted, Mormon Republican, but David Marshall Grant had no problem bringing him to life on stage. On the whole, the TV miniseries was good, but I'll probably never watch it again because my memories of the Broadway incarnation are too precious to me.
PASSION
Before I ever saw a show on Broadway, I was a fan of Broadway musicals and I had a collection of original cast recordings that might seem suspiciously too large for a heterosexual, especially since the collection was dominated by my adoration of Stephen Sondheim. A planned junket for a couple of movies (I can't even remember which ones) happened to coincide with the opening of a new Sondheim musical on Broadway. Hallelujah. I booked my flight for a day early and spent the night with a friend so I could see the 2 p.m. Saturday matinee (7th row, right orchestra) of Passion before having to show up at the junket hotel for my job. The show was still in previews, which had been extended, so I wasn't seeing the finished project but I didn't care. It's evolution was interesting. It began life as an idea of two one-act musicals, the other half being something called Muscle about bodybuilders. That would have been strange. Instead, Passion grew to a 2-hour, intermission-free show
based on an Italian film from the 1970s I actually had seen accidentally late one night on Showtime or Cinemax when I was in junior high. So I had a vague idea of the plot, but I didn't care: I was going to hear a Sondheim score I'd never heard before. Passion divided its audiences in half. Many hated it, others loved it, but for me, especially upon many times listening to the score, it's the same case as with many Sondheim shows: The score is better than the show itself and Passion is one of Sondheim lushest, most beautiful scores of love and longing. The critics of the show whom I found ridiculous were the ones who mocked Donna Murphy's performance as Fosca, the sickly soldier's sister whose face and demeanor leaves a lot to be desired but whose obsession with another soldier manipulates him into loving him despite his love for a married woman. Murphy won a well-deserved Tony because she is amazing. She practically overpowers everyone else on stage with her. Some pros such as Tom Aldredge and Gregg Edelman hold their own, but Jere Shea as Giorgio, was the show's weak link and he was supposed to be the lead and every other performer got the better of him, be it Marin Mazzie as the married woman he's having an affair with to the various soldiers to Murphy. Passion is a problematic show with a great score and I'm grateful I saw it because it seems highly unlikely at this point that Sondheim will ever premiere another new score on Broadway, even if he ever solves the problem of Wise Guys/Bounce/Road Show; it's played so many different places and I doubt the entire score would go in the trash can even if it did somehow ever make it to Broadway.
GREASE
This was the point when someone should have staged an intervention, but alas I was in New York for a junket and the only people I knew were fellow entertainment journalists, and none too well. They scheduled interviews extremely late on a Sunday afternoon for some reason, so I scanned the Broadway listings. As usual, most Sunday matinees didn't start until 3 p.m., too late for me. However, one show had a 1 p.m. starting time and to get my fix, I bought tickets to the Grease revival with Rosie O'Donnell. I assure you, Rosie was not the attraction. As a kid, and even today, I love the movie version. I'd only seen one production of the stage version, a summer stock version starring Eddie Mekka of Laverne & Shirley fame and it sucked.
Still, I could not be deterred. The pre-show actually got me in a good mood. The guy playing Vince Fontaine already was on stage acting as a disc jockey, bantering with the audience and playing classic 1950s songs. Unfortunately, that eventually stopped and the curtains opened. My seat was on the very front row, so much so that part of the stage extended out past my seat. This proved to be particularly odd seating when they staged Danny and Sandy's trip to the drive-in and his car literally drove over me where I had to crook my head to see some of the number, but mainly I saw a tire and the undercarriage of the fake car. Despite the fact that the show generally sucked, especially because they kept trying to insert Rosie's Rizzo into numbers in which she didn't belong, including a reprise of "Greased Lightning." What the fuck? Though since Rosie was in it, it would have made sense if she'd sang the line, "You know that I ain't braggin'/she's a real pussy wagon." Still, there were some good performances. It was a minor performance, but Megan Mullally got to play Marty. Marcia Lewis, the show's sole Tony nominee for acting, was fun as Miss Lynch, the Rydell teacher. Sam Harris showed real promise as Doody, especially in his big number "Those Magic Changes." Without a doubt though, the performance the brought the house down was the great Billy Porter as the Teen Angel really bringing "Beauty School Dropout." The original Grease at one time was the longest-running show in Broadway history. I never saw it, but it's a bit of a head-scratcher to me since the movie seemed to improve so much. This revival, which opened in May 1994, lasted until January 1998. This was largely due to its producers, the infamous Weisslers, who kept it alive and have kept Chicago alive by inserting one bit of stunt casting after another. A short list of names who went into Grease for a time following Rosie: Linda Blair (Rizzo vomits pea soup! No, but that would have been fun), Debby Boone, Chubby Checker, Mickey Dolenz, Sheena Easton, Joely Fisher, Debbie Gibson, Dody Goodman, Jasmine Guy, Jennifer Holliday, Al Jarreau, Lucy Lawless, Maureen McCormick, Mackenzie Phillips, Joe Piscopo, Jon Secada, Brooke Shields, Sally Struthers, Jody Watley, Jo Anne Worley and Adrian Zmed. Obviously, they didn't all play Rizzo. There were some Dannys, Teen Angels, Miss Lynches and Vince Fontaines thrown in as well. Of course, this revival had nothing on stunt casting compared to the Grease revival that ran from August 1997 through January of this year that picked its leads from a TV reality show.
TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES, 1992
My job at work had switched to an interesting schedule of 10 hour days where every third week we would have three-day weekends and every third week we'd get four-day weekends. It certainly proved
to be a nice schedule, but not so much for my credit card and my Broadway obsession, which you think that Grease would have slowed. So I planned my first three-play trip in June and I lucked out that they were all winners. One thing I found: I was disappointed far fewer times by Broadway plays than by Broadway musicals. The first play of the weekend amazed me and was the closest to casting the spell on me that Angels in America did. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 was a one-woman show performed by Anna Deavere Smith. Now, this wasn't the type of one-person show most people think of where an actor assumes one persona for an evening. No, Smith portrays dozens of people, people she interviewed as a journalist would to get their take on what happened to them during and after the Los Angeles riots. Very few of the people are well known, but it doesn't make Smith's performance any less riveting as she assumes every gender, ethnicity, etc., to paint a portrait of a staggering event in this nation's history as well as an intimate look at a major city that still has characteristics of a small town. It's brilliant. I only saw two of the four nominated lead actresses in a play (the other was the winner that same weekend), but I still believe that Smith deserved the prize, especially since there was no way Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 was going to (or should have) beat Perestroika for play.
AN INSPECTOR CALLS
You don't often come out of a play feeling cool and wet, but if you were close enough to the awesome set by Ian MacNeil working in tandem with Rick Fisher's lighting and Gregory Meeh's special effects, you were likely to exit the theater with tangible evidence of a night's entertainment with Stephen Daldry's revival of J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls. Now, if you go to the theater as often as I did, you are going to run into celebrities eventually. This show marked my first experience as the late Madeline Kahn and her husband sat in the row behind me. They seemed to enjoy the play as well, an old-style mystery as a mysterious inspector (Kenneth Cranham) upends family secrets while investigating a death. The family, a rich industrial clan led by Philip Bosco and Rosemary Harris, has many members and are far from functional. The entire cast excelled, the pros such as Bosco, Cranham and Harris, as well as newer finds such as Marcus D'Amico and especially Jane Adams as the clan's daughter and she won a Tony for the role, one of 5 Tonys it won, though it amazingly lost scenic design which still boggles my mind. Granted, I didn't see the show that won (Carousel), but it had to be stunning to top McNiece's set.
MEDEA
Emma Peel, meet Euripides. Diana Rigg brought her London stage triumph to the states for a limited engagement in a new translation by Alistair Elliott that seemed to draw Tonys to actresses like a magnet and
it did so with Rigg in director Jonathan Kent's production. This time, I was back in the mezzanine, not by choice, but because the play was a limited engagement, it was the best I could get. Medea was the third and final play in my three-play weekend and since it was a quick 90 minutes, I had my carryon duffle bag (I travel light) under my seat so when the show ended I could grab a cab to the airport and catch my plane home. That is one advantage of going from the Eastern time zone back to the Central: Time is on your side. Back to the play. Don't get me wrong. Rigg was superb, even though Anna Deavere Smith's achievement impressed me more. Medea has to be placed in the hands of a really lousy actress to fail and Rigg doesn't fit that definition. This is a wronged woman whose idea of revenge on her husband is to kill her own children, yet somehow you still manage not to hate her or view her as a complete monster. Rigg pulls this off magnificently, making her Medea a woman of intelligence as well as sadness. She hates what she is doing yet she's certain it's the course she must follow. The play itself was set on a very sparse set of loud, clanging metal doors, ringing through the audience with appropriately echoing dins that must have driven theatergoers with assisted listening devices crazy at times. Peter J. Davidson's set along with the revival itself were the only Tony nominations besides Rigg the show received and I think that was what sort of made the production feel lopsided. Except for some occasional nice moments from the women of Corinth who serve as a chorus, everything is designed as a showcase for Medea/Rigg. Any other characters or actors seem to be an afterthought. As a result, I think that's why Rigg's performance loomed so large. Everyone else was designed to be minimized.
DAMN YANKEES
The shows I saw in 1994 (with the exception of Millennium Approaches, which was really a holdover from the 1992-93 season) were really all from the 1993-94 season in terms of the Tony Awards. The final Broadway
show that I saw from that season was the revival of Damn Yankees. Bebe Neuwirth took on Gwen Verdon's famous role of Lola, the Devil's temptress trying to keep a man's soul for the Devil's collection. Victor Garber played the Devil who offered a middle-age man (Dennis Kelly) a chance for a sprint at youth and baseball glory in the form of a gifted player (Tony winner Jarrod Emick, by far the show's highlight). The cast also had some other soon-to-be familiar faces in Vicki Lewis (of NewsRadio fame), Dick LaTessa (who would win a Tony as the dad in Hairspray) and Gregory Jbara (currently playing Billy's father in the musical version of Billy Elliott.) As I said earlier, I was disappointed much more often by musicals than by plays and that was the case here. The cast certainly had talent to spare, but the production never seemed to come together for me. Emick truly shone, but Neuwirth seemed as if she were in a different show and Garber projected himself as too much of a pushover to be much of a formidable devil. It also launched what I called the "Marquis curse." The Marquis Theatre is located within the Marriott Marquis hotel and I didn't have much of a good track record with the shows I saw there. The theater itself was odd. It didn't feel like a Broadway house in the way every other theater I'd go to did. It look and felt more like a high school auditorium, more suitable for a commencement ceremony than a multimillion musical production. Now, I didn't go on this trip to New York for one show, but the other two shows I saw were my first ventures to that state of mind known as "off-Broadway," where better things often play but they are forbidden from Tony recognition because their theaters fail to have enough seats or fall between certain streets.
THREE TALL WOMEN
Edward Albee received the third of his three Pulitzer Prizes for Three Tall Women (and who knows if he's done. He turned 80 last year, but he's still working). Two of his plays have won Tonys for best plays (surprisingly, neither one was one of the Pulitzer winners) and last year he got a special Tony for lifetime
achievement. Three Tall Women was my first off-Broadway visit, venturing further up the upper west side of Manhattan to see the play at the Promenade Theatre. Usually, I'm a big Albee fan, but what I think hurt this production was that it revolved around three actresses, two of whom were magnificent and one who was fairly bad. The actresses play characters named simply A, B and C. Carter was quite wonderful as the nonagenarian A, in faltering health and fuzzier memory and Seldes is nearly as good as B, her caretaker. Baker, however, fumbles as C, a young lawyer sent to try to get A's estate in order. Part of the problem could be attributed to her role, but to me it seemed to emanate from Baker. In the second act, the three actresses, all become A at different ages while a mannequin in a bed beneath an oxygen mask comes to represent the real woman. The problem with the play is that, unlike the very best Albee plays, Three Tall Women is too on the nose, missing Albee's famous obliqueness with an unfortunate tendency to spell everything out. Still, Carter and Seldes and long stretches of the dialogue made the trek worthwhile.
SUBURBIA
I began my 1994 theater journey with the greatest theatrical experiences I've ever had and I ended that season with another of the best theatrical experiences, only this one took place in Lincoln Center's off-Broadway house, the Mitzi E. Newhouse, located below its Broadway showcase, the Vivian Beaumont. No
curtain hid the set from the audience before the show began. My seat was on the front row of the pseudo-in-the-round theater. The play was Eric Bogosian's Suburbia, which Richard Linklater made a fairly good film version of later. The only member of the stage cast to repeat in the movie was the hysterical Steve Zahn as the stoned, skateboarding, Buff. The play cross-breeds your usual look at aimless youth in a small town with Waiting for Godot as several of the young adult await a reunion with a former member of their pack who has found that first taste of fame and fortune as a rock musician outside of their world. Sitting so close to the action, at times it felt as if the actors were in my lap and it was a great cast that included, in addition to Zahn, Josh Hamilton, Martha Plimpton, Tim Guinee and Zak Orth. Most of the action takes place in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven and that miniature 7-Eleven was a wonder to behold. Large enough for the actors to walk through its aisles, it was fully stocked with the products you'd expect to find in a convenience store. Before the play started, it was tempting to hop the bar and walk on in and buy a cold Coke from the fridge (if they were really cold) and have a nice refreshment. Bogosian's style, as seen in his one-man shows, is often an in-your-face, electric sort of dialogue that brings its truths in stings and that was the case with Suburbia as well but, like most Bogosian works, it's also very funny. There is something about great works of art, be they plays, musicals or movies, when they are really good, afterward, you feel energized, as if you should be dancing a dance of joy as you exit, no matter what the subject matter was. That's what I discovered in the best of New York theater, a love affair that was no longer unrequited beginning in 1994.
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I'd thought of doing something like this for a long time and since I have long-term projects and other complications preventing me from seeing new things to write about, it seemed as good as time a time as any. Of course, I'm relying on memory, so forgive any mistakes I may make along the way. My theater obsession was primarily New York and primarily Broadway. I had been to the city before on movie junkets, but never had enough free time to see a show. So, in March 1994, I planned my first trip to the Big Apple to specifically see a show. In this case, it actually was two shows or one show in two parts. In other words, it was both halves of Tony Kushner's Angels in America on consecutive nights.
Since this was the
second season in which Kushner's play had run, though the first for the second half, two members of the original cast already had left. F. Murray Abraham had succeeded Ron Leibman in Leibman's Tony-winning role of Roy Cohn (in addition to some other roles). I'd seen bits of Leibman, but I felt Abraham was more than a worthy substitution. Marcia Gay Harden had departed from her Tony-nominated role as Harper Pitt (among others). Cynthia Nixon had yet to assume the role, so I got to see Harden's understudy, Susan Bruce, who was fine. One other interesting casting note that few get to experience is the chance to see both the understudy for a role and the actor who was cast in the part. When I saw Millennium Approaches on Friday night, Jeffrey Wright was off, so his understudy played Belize and his other roles. The actor was Darnell Williams, known to All My Children fans as Jesse Hubbard. He was quite good. Saturday, Wright returned for Perestroika. As good as I thought Williams was, Wright was a revelation. I wanted to leap to the stage and give him a Tony right then and, sure enough, months later Wright would win the Tony for featured actor in a play for Angels in America: Perestroika. Seeing this two-part play was a wonder; it makes perfect sense why I developed an addiction to New York theater, specifically Broadway. An expensive habit. I should have taken up heroin. The power and magic of Angels in America still resonates. What a work of imagination, blending fantasy, history, current events, real people, fictional characters and churning them all into a glorious theatrical fest. Now, 15 years and more than 100 productions later, Angels in America remains the best show I ever saw on Broadway. I was such a theater neophyte when I ordered the tickets for the show over the phone, I didn't know the difference between orchestra and mezzanine, so first row mezzanine center sounded better than ninth row orchestra center. Actually though, I think my lack of knowledge served me well. When Ellen McLaughlin's angel came crashing through the ceiling of the bedroom of Prior Walter (the magnificent Stephen Spinella who won Tonys for both halves), I was more or less even with her. Since the play was split into two
halves, it won the Tony for best play in two consecutive seasons but it only won the Pulitzer Prize for part 1, Millennium Approaches. I really don't know how you can separate it like that because for me both parts make a whole and you can't have one without the other without it seeming incomplete. I fell in love with the play so much (and I'm a straight man) that I bought book copies of both halves of the play and performed them in the living room of my friend Wagstaff, playing all the parts, so he could get a sense of the play that I thought just reading the play wouldn't do. (The only other time I did this was to perform The Seagull, which I was reading for the first time when I performed it.) As Angels in America became a cultural phenomenon, there was immediate talk of a film version. I still would love to have seen what Robert Altman would have done if his plan to make it as two films had come to fruition. As much as I loved Altman, Angels in America seemed to be a uniquely theatrical experience to me and a lot of its magic and spectacle would be lost on the big screen. Now though, most people probably know Angels in America based on Mike Nichols' HBO miniseries version of it. It is very good but I was right: While it's a good thing that it doesn't seem like a filmed play, a lot of the spirit is lost. You also inevitably get into the performance comparison game since Jeffrey Wright was the only member of the Broadway cast to reprise his role in the TV version (and he got an Emmy to go with his Tony). Al Pacino put a handle on some of his worst late-career traits and was great as Roy Cohn. I can't compare him to Leibman and, of course, it's difficult sizing up performances trying to reach the balcony with the toned-down ones of film or television. Most of the miniseries and stage counterparts seem fairly evenly matched, though I actually preferred the underrated Kathleen Chalfant in all her many roles to Meryl Streep. While Justin Kirk was fine as Prior on TV, he had a helluva act to follow in Spinella (Kirk would shone for me in a later theater season on stage). Ben Shenkman's Louis on TV actually was better than Joe Mantello's on stage. (Mantello turned primarily to directing after Angels, winning several Tonys and having mixed results, in my opinion.) The biggest mistake of the miniseries though was the casting of the ultrabland Patrick Wilson as Joe Pitt. Sure, the character was supposed to be a closeted, Mormon Republican, but David Marshall Grant had no problem bringing him to life on stage. On the whole, the TV miniseries was good, but I'll probably never watch it again because my memories of the Broadway incarnation are too precious to me.
Before I ever saw a show on Broadway, I was a fan of Broadway musicals and I had a collection of original cast recordings that might seem suspiciously too large for a heterosexual, especially since the collection was dominated by my adoration of Stephen Sondheim. A planned junket for a couple of movies (I can't even remember which ones) happened to coincide with the opening of a new Sondheim musical on Broadway. Hallelujah. I booked my flight for a day early and spent the night with a friend so I could see the 2 p.m. Saturday matinee (7th row, right orchestra) of Passion before having to show up at the junket hotel for my job. The show was still in previews, which had been extended, so I wasn't seeing the finished project but I didn't care. It's evolution was interesting. It began life as an idea of two one-act musicals, the other half being something called Muscle about bodybuilders. That would have been strange. Instead, Passion grew to a 2-hour, intermission-free show
based on an Italian film from the 1970s I actually had seen accidentally late one night on Showtime or Cinemax when I was in junior high. So I had a vague idea of the plot, but I didn't care: I was going to hear a Sondheim score I'd never heard before. Passion divided its audiences in half. Many hated it, others loved it, but for me, especially upon many times listening to the score, it's the same case as with many Sondheim shows: The score is better than the show itself and Passion is one of Sondheim lushest, most beautiful scores of love and longing. The critics of the show whom I found ridiculous were the ones who mocked Donna Murphy's performance as Fosca, the sickly soldier's sister whose face and demeanor leaves a lot to be desired but whose obsession with another soldier manipulates him into loving him despite his love for a married woman. Murphy won a well-deserved Tony because she is amazing. She practically overpowers everyone else on stage with her. Some pros such as Tom Aldredge and Gregg Edelman hold their own, but Jere Shea as Giorgio, was the show's weak link and he was supposed to be the lead and every other performer got the better of him, be it Marin Mazzie as the married woman he's having an affair with to the various soldiers to Murphy. Passion is a problematic show with a great score and I'm grateful I saw it because it seems highly unlikely at this point that Sondheim will ever premiere another new score on Broadway, even if he ever solves the problem of Wise Guys/Bounce/Road Show; it's played so many different places and I doubt the entire score would go in the trash can even if it did somehow ever make it to Broadway.
This was the point when someone should have staged an intervention, but alas I was in New York for a junket and the only people I knew were fellow entertainment journalists, and none too well. They scheduled interviews extremely late on a Sunday afternoon for some reason, so I scanned the Broadway listings. As usual, most Sunday matinees didn't start until 3 p.m., too late for me. However, one show had a 1 p.m. starting time and to get my fix, I bought tickets to the Grease revival with Rosie O'Donnell. I assure you, Rosie was not the attraction. As a kid, and even today, I love the movie version. I'd only seen one production of the stage version, a summer stock version starring Eddie Mekka of Laverne & Shirley fame and it sucked.
Still, I could not be deterred. The pre-show actually got me in a good mood. The guy playing Vince Fontaine already was on stage acting as a disc jockey, bantering with the audience and playing classic 1950s songs. Unfortunately, that eventually stopped and the curtains opened. My seat was on the very front row, so much so that part of the stage extended out past my seat. This proved to be particularly odd seating when they staged Danny and Sandy's trip to the drive-in and his car literally drove over me where I had to crook my head to see some of the number, but mainly I saw a tire and the undercarriage of the fake car. Despite the fact that the show generally sucked, especially because they kept trying to insert Rosie's Rizzo into numbers in which she didn't belong, including a reprise of "Greased Lightning." What the fuck? Though since Rosie was in it, it would have made sense if she'd sang the line, "You know that I ain't braggin'/she's a real pussy wagon." Still, there were some good performances. It was a minor performance, but Megan Mullally got to play Marty. Marcia Lewis, the show's sole Tony nominee for acting, was fun as Miss Lynch, the Rydell teacher. Sam Harris showed real promise as Doody, especially in his big number "Those Magic Changes." Without a doubt though, the performance the brought the house down was the great Billy Porter as the Teen Angel really bringing "Beauty School Dropout." The original Grease at one time was the longest-running show in Broadway history. I never saw it, but it's a bit of a head-scratcher to me since the movie seemed to improve so much. This revival, which opened in May 1994, lasted until January 1998. This was largely due to its producers, the infamous Weisslers, who kept it alive and have kept Chicago alive by inserting one bit of stunt casting after another. A short list of names who went into Grease for a time following Rosie: Linda Blair (Rizzo vomits pea soup! No, but that would have been fun), Debby Boone, Chubby Checker, Mickey Dolenz, Sheena Easton, Joely Fisher, Debbie Gibson, Dody Goodman, Jasmine Guy, Jennifer Holliday, Al Jarreau, Lucy Lawless, Maureen McCormick, Mackenzie Phillips, Joe Piscopo, Jon Secada, Brooke Shields, Sally Struthers, Jody Watley, Jo Anne Worley and Adrian Zmed. Obviously, they didn't all play Rizzo. There were some Dannys, Teen Angels, Miss Lynches and Vince Fontaines thrown in as well. Of course, this revival had nothing on stunt casting compared to the Grease revival that ran from August 1997 through January of this year that picked its leads from a TV reality show.
My job at work had switched to an interesting schedule of 10 hour days where every third week we would have three-day weekends and every third week we'd get four-day weekends. It certainly proved
to be a nice schedule, but not so much for my credit card and my Broadway obsession, which you think that Grease would have slowed. So I planned my first three-play trip in June and I lucked out that they were all winners. One thing I found: I was disappointed far fewer times by Broadway plays than by Broadway musicals. The first play of the weekend amazed me and was the closest to casting the spell on me that Angels in America did. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 was a one-woman show performed by Anna Deavere Smith. Now, this wasn't the type of one-person show most people think of where an actor assumes one persona for an evening. No, Smith portrays dozens of people, people she interviewed as a journalist would to get their take on what happened to them during and after the Los Angeles riots. Very few of the people are well known, but it doesn't make Smith's performance any less riveting as she assumes every gender, ethnicity, etc., to paint a portrait of a staggering event in this nation's history as well as an intimate look at a major city that still has characteristics of a small town. It's brilliant. I only saw two of the four nominated lead actresses in a play (the other was the winner that same weekend), but I still believe that Smith deserved the prize, especially since there was no way Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 was going to (or should have) beat Perestroika for play.
You don't often come out of a play feeling cool and wet, but if you were close enough to the awesome set by Ian MacNeil working in tandem with Rick Fisher's lighting and Gregory Meeh's special effects, you were likely to exit the theater with tangible evidence of a night's entertainment with Stephen Daldry's revival of J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls. Now, if you go to the theater as often as I did, you are going to run into celebrities eventually. This show marked my first experience as the late Madeline Kahn and her husband sat in the row behind me. They seemed to enjoy the play as well, an old-style mystery as a mysterious inspector (Kenneth Cranham) upends family secrets while investigating a death. The family, a rich industrial clan led by Philip Bosco and Rosemary Harris, has many members and are far from functional. The entire cast excelled, the pros such as Bosco, Cranham and Harris, as well as newer finds such as Marcus D'Amico and especially Jane Adams as the clan's daughter and she won a Tony for the role, one of 5 Tonys it won, though it amazingly lost scenic design which still boggles my mind. Granted, I didn't see the show that won (Carousel), but it had to be stunning to top McNiece's set.
Emma Peel, meet Euripides. Diana Rigg brought her London stage triumph to the states for a limited engagement in a new translation by Alistair Elliott that seemed to draw Tonys to actresses like a magnet and
it did so with Rigg in director Jonathan Kent's production. This time, I was back in the mezzanine, not by choice, but because the play was a limited engagement, it was the best I could get. Medea was the third and final play in my three-play weekend and since it was a quick 90 minutes, I had my carryon duffle bag (I travel light) under my seat so when the show ended I could grab a cab to the airport and catch my plane home. That is one advantage of going from the Eastern time zone back to the Central: Time is on your side. Back to the play. Don't get me wrong. Rigg was superb, even though Anna Deavere Smith's achievement impressed me more. Medea has to be placed in the hands of a really lousy actress to fail and Rigg doesn't fit that definition. This is a wronged woman whose idea of revenge on her husband is to kill her own children, yet somehow you still manage not to hate her or view her as a complete monster. Rigg pulls this off magnificently, making her Medea a woman of intelligence as well as sadness. She hates what she is doing yet she's certain it's the course she must follow. The play itself was set on a very sparse set of loud, clanging metal doors, ringing through the audience with appropriately echoing dins that must have driven theatergoers with assisted listening devices crazy at times. Peter J. Davidson's set along with the revival itself were the only Tony nominations besides Rigg the show received and I think that was what sort of made the production feel lopsided. Except for some occasional nice moments from the women of Corinth who serve as a chorus, everything is designed as a showcase for Medea/Rigg. Any other characters or actors seem to be an afterthought. As a result, I think that's why Rigg's performance loomed so large. Everyone else was designed to be minimized.The shows I saw in 1994 (with the exception of Millennium Approaches, which was really a holdover from the 1992-93 season) were really all from the 1993-94 season in terms of the Tony Awards. The final Broadway
show that I saw from that season was the revival of Damn Yankees. Bebe Neuwirth took on Gwen Verdon's famous role of Lola, the Devil's temptress trying to keep a man's soul for the Devil's collection. Victor Garber played the Devil who offered a middle-age man (Dennis Kelly) a chance for a sprint at youth and baseball glory in the form of a gifted player (Tony winner Jarrod Emick, by far the show's highlight). The cast also had some other soon-to-be familiar faces in Vicki Lewis (of NewsRadio fame), Dick LaTessa (who would win a Tony as the dad in Hairspray) and Gregory Jbara (currently playing Billy's father in the musical version of Billy Elliott.) As I said earlier, I was disappointed much more often by musicals than by plays and that was the case here. The cast certainly had talent to spare, but the production never seemed to come together for me. Emick truly shone, but Neuwirth seemed as if she were in a different show and Garber projected himself as too much of a pushover to be much of a formidable devil. It also launched what I called the "Marquis curse." The Marquis Theatre is located within the Marriott Marquis hotel and I didn't have much of a good track record with the shows I saw there. The theater itself was odd. It didn't feel like a Broadway house in the way every other theater I'd go to did. It look and felt more like a high school auditorium, more suitable for a commencement ceremony than a multimillion musical production. Now, I didn't go on this trip to New York for one show, but the other two shows I saw were my first ventures to that state of mind known as "off-Broadway," where better things often play but they are forbidden from Tony recognition because their theaters fail to have enough seats or fall between certain streets.Edward Albee received the third of his three Pulitzer Prizes for Three Tall Women (and who knows if he's done. He turned 80 last year, but he's still working). Two of his plays have won Tonys for best plays (surprisingly, neither one was one of the Pulitzer winners) and last year he got a special Tony for lifetime
achievement. Three Tall Women was my first off-Broadway visit, venturing further up the upper west side of Manhattan to see the play at the Promenade Theatre. Usually, I'm a big Albee fan, but what I think hurt this production was that it revolved around three actresses, two of whom were magnificent and one who was fairly bad. The actresses play characters named simply A, B and C. Carter was quite wonderful as the nonagenarian A, in faltering health and fuzzier memory and Seldes is nearly as good as B, her caretaker. Baker, however, fumbles as C, a young lawyer sent to try to get A's estate in order. Part of the problem could be attributed to her role, but to me it seemed to emanate from Baker. In the second act, the three actresses, all become A at different ages while a mannequin in a bed beneath an oxygen mask comes to represent the real woman. The problem with the play is that, unlike the very best Albee plays, Three Tall Women is too on the nose, missing Albee's famous obliqueness with an unfortunate tendency to spell everything out. Still, Carter and Seldes and long stretches of the dialogue made the trek worthwhile.I began my 1994 theater journey with the greatest theatrical experiences I've ever had and I ended that season with another of the best theatrical experiences, only this one took place in Lincoln Center's off-Broadway house, the Mitzi E. Newhouse, located below its Broadway showcase, the Vivian Beaumont. No
curtain hid the set from the audience before the show began. My seat was on the front row of the pseudo-in-the-round theater. The play was Eric Bogosian's Suburbia, which Richard Linklater made a fairly good film version of later. The only member of the stage cast to repeat in the movie was the hysterical Steve Zahn as the stoned, skateboarding, Buff. The play cross-breeds your usual look at aimless youth in a small town with Waiting for Godot as several of the young adult await a reunion with a former member of their pack who has found that first taste of fame and fortune as a rock musician outside of their world. Sitting so close to the action, at times it felt as if the actors were in my lap and it was a great cast that included, in addition to Zahn, Josh Hamilton, Martha Plimpton, Tim Guinee and Zak Orth. Most of the action takes place in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven and that miniature 7-Eleven was a wonder to behold. Large enough for the actors to walk through its aisles, it was fully stocked with the products you'd expect to find in a convenience store. Before the play started, it was tempting to hop the bar and walk on in and buy a cold Coke from the fridge (if they were really cold) and have a nice refreshment. Bogosian's style, as seen in his one-man shows, is often an in-your-face, electric sort of dialogue that brings its truths in stings and that was the case with Suburbia as well but, like most Bogosian works, it's also very funny. There is something about great works of art, be they plays, musicals or movies, when they are really good, afterward, you feel energized, as if you should be dancing a dance of joy as you exit, no matter what the subject matter was. That's what I discovered in the best of New York theater, a love affair that was no longer unrequited beginning in 1994.Tweet
Labels: Albee, Altman, Awards, Cynthia Nixon, Linklater, Musicals, Nichols, Pacino, Sondheim, Streep, Theater, Zahn
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Friday, February 15, 2008
Choosing roads, not paving them
By Edward Copeland
Twenty years ago today, the first great original HBO series premiered. Tanner '88, a collaboration between "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau and director Robert Altman, seems even more timely today than when the fictional Democratic presidential candidate Jack Tanner sought his party's nomination in 1988.
Re-watching the series 20 years later, it's amazing how many of the details still ring true, not only in regard to political campaigns but in the mark it left on other series as well. The short-lived HBO misfire K Street with James Carville and Mary Matalin playing themselves in a fictional lobbying office definitely bore the Tanner lineage in its attempts to capitalize on recent news events. What surprised me though is seeing the seeds of ideas explored in the great HBO series The Wire. Tanner '88 didn't stop to make clear introductions to its large cast of characters: It just jumped in and let the viewer figure it out, just as The Wire has.
The strongest similarity between the two series occurs in the episode "The Girlfriend Factor," where Tanner's tour of a rough inner-city Detroit neighborhood ends with his discovery of a slain child. Still, the most striking resemblance is its huge ensemble cast
(Altman loved them) of characters including the Tanner campaign team, his family and the press assigned to cover his candidacy as well as extended cameos by celebrities and real-life politicians. Since Altman and Trudeau filmed and wrote the series while the real-life 1988 campaign was going on, their paths crossed with the real race and real candidates such as Bruce Babbitt, Gary Hart, Bob Dole, and Pat Robertson. You even see many real-life pundits and media types such as a young Chris Matthews and Linda Ellerbee. Ellerbee serves as the moderator for a fictional debate between Tanner, Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis, a well-edited piece of filmmaking magic that interspersed real debate footage with the fake stuff. Ellerbee also makes some of the most cogent comments of the entire series when it comes to coverage of presidential campaigns, thoughts that still ring true today. Television can't cover change well, Ellerbee says, and that is what any election is ultimately about.Unfortunately, campaigns then and now turn out to be more about what makes great TV. It's a long, tedious process (and that was 20 years ago! Today's endless campaign makes past ones look like a commercial break). Ellerbee wonders if anyone willing to put themselves through that is someone you should really want as president. Given the task of embodying the former three-term U.S. representative from Michigan was longtime Altman collaborator Michael Murphy and he makes a very believable candidate. Murphy, who played the political operative in Altman's masterpiece Nashville, gets to be the candidate here. He even gets his own, smaller scale Nashville fundraiser which includes the late Waylon Jennings, offering advice on his campaign and jokingly telling a reporter that he will vote "as soon as I pay my poll taxes."
If Murphy is the solid center of the series' universe, Pamela Reed's great work as campaign manager T.J. Cavanaugh gives the show its forceful momentum. T.J. is an absolutely marvelous creation and it's a shame Reed didn't get any Emmy recognition for her work. Whether it's putting out fires or starting new ones, lashing out at underlings or listening to frantic late-night calls from former client then-U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy, Reed creates a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking wonder. When someone suggests she take a desk job as an assistant to an elected official, T.J. dismisses it out of hand: For her, it's all about the action of the campaign. For those out there who think that Sex and the City was Cynthia Nixon's first great HBO series, they need to check her out here playing Tanner's 19-year-old daughter Alex, whose enthusiasm for causes and desire to be a crucial part of her father's campaign often makes more problems than they solve. While many of the
issues discussed in Tanner '88 are still relevant today, it's interesting to see the ones that are gone now. In 1988, Alex Tanner was actively involved in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, which today is thankfully a bad memory. Other lines of dialogue do betray the series' age. When discussing an odd quote by then-President Reagan, T.J. observes that his lines haven't been as good since the Writers Guild strike that was taking place back then. Jack even gets to ape Reagan when a scandal erupts because he's dating the deputy campaign manager for the Dukakis campaign (Wendy Crewson), so he ducks reporters the way Reagan used to, heading to a helicopter and acting as if he can't hear their questions. It's also odd to see people communicating via walkie talkies with nary a cell phone in sight. When Tanner communications director Stringer Kincaid (Daniel Jenkins) is surprised to learn that the Dukakis campaign monitors all TV coverage of other candidates, it seems quaint in the age of YouTube.The period nature of the piece also shows up at a Hollywood fundraiser when enthusiastic Tanner volunteer Andrea Spinelli (Ilana Levine) informs her boss that Molly Ringwald starred in Pretty in Pink, which made an "amazing" $7 million in its opening weekend. Andrea's character really is the one who develops the most over the course of the Tanner episodes. She transforms from a dizzy, spoiled young woman paying her own way to join the campaign into a miniature tyrant. When a journalist starts to tell her that he's noticed a change, she replies that it's because she's "no longer a nice person."
Altman's direction perfectly suits the material with his fly-on-the-wall approach. There are some nice touches, such as the unsavory photographer Deke (Matt Malloy) capturing an inspired Tanner by filming him through the bottom of a glass coffee table and, with T.J.'s urging, turning the footage into a campaign commercial. Tanner 88 also gets into the nitty gritty of a campaign's mechanics, especially one as underfinanced as Jack Tanner's. After the campaign is over, they face FEC audits and unpaid bills. The same dependence on polls and focus groups that exist today, existed then. A question asked in one focus group ("If ideas are his currency, let's see the color of his money") seems to be asked often today. At the
same time, thoughts, usually voiced by the campaign's pollster Emile (Jim Fyfe), could be being said about the amazing rise of the candidacy of Barack Obama today. "More than ever," Emile says, "People want a leader they can believe in. A leader who can lift them up, who can cast a spell." Tanner '88 makes the case that the singer is more important than the song. "Leadership isn't about management," Emile says at another point. "It's about values." What's interesting is that the characters view non-political matters in much the same way. When Tanner's girlfriend meets with the real Kitty Dukakis following the scandal, Kitty tells her that she has to "poll her own heart" about whether her romance with Tanner was worth it. It's a question Tanner asks himself often, since he confides at one point that every day, he feels as if he gives up a little of his soul. Perhaps the most striking story strand in relationship to issues going on right now is when they get to the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta and
Tanner decides to challenge the apportionment of superdelegates on "principle." Assisting him in this task is a great guest spot by Harry Anderson as the supertracker who knows all the delegations inside and out. His episode is the magnificent "Boiler Room," one of the most viscerally exciting half-hours of TV ever filmed and one that won Robert Altman an Emmy for best directing in a drama series, one of the first Emmys HBO ever won and the first in a series category. The series ends on a cliffhanger of sorts with Tanner contemplating a run as an independent candidate, one that might have happened if the series had been renewed for more episodes. Altman and Trudeau did do a sequel of sorts years later for The Sundance Channel called Tanner on Tanner, focusing on a now-grown Alex making a documentary about her father's campaign. It was a mixed bag, but the original remains peerless and worth watching to this day. As someone who soured on The West Wing over the long haul, I can't help but fantasize what that series could have been like if Altman and Trudeau had helmed it. Their characters all were cast in shades of gray and had distinctive voices. I'd loved to have seen a drama series about a Jack Tanner presidency. 
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Labels: 80s, Altman, Cynthia Nixon, HBO, The Wire, TV Tribute
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