batman! the musical?
August 30, 2002
NYPOST.COM Entertainment: BAT-SONG! By MICHAEL RIEDEL: HOLY Broadway!"Batman: The Musical" has finally landed a director - Tim Burton.Warner Brothers, which is producing the multimillion-dollar musical, has been courting Burton, who directed the 1989 "Batman" movie as well as the 1992 sequel "Batman Returns," for over a year. The studio sealed the deal last week, theater sources say, after Burton had several long and productive meetings with bookwriter David Ives and composer Jim Steinman. Reached yesterday, Steinman said: "We're thrilled he's going to do it. David and I floundered around for a year trying to figure out how to musicalize Batman. Then we looked at Tim's original movie and thought, that's it." [.....] According to one theater source, he wants to direct "Batman: The Musical" because he is not pleased with the goofy, campy turn the franchise took with "Batman Forever" and "Batman and Robin," both of which were directed by Joel Schumacher. Burton's movies were haunting and much darker than the theme-park rides Schumacher cranked out. "He wants to re-establish his original vision," said the source. "His major impulse is to redeem the soul of the 'Batman' series."
You know ... Many words come to mind when I see Tim Burton's original "Batman" movie. Dark. Moody. Basically well-written. Interesting.
"Musical" is just not one of those terms that I associate with it, somehow. I just can't see looking at that movie and thinking, "Now here's where the Joker ought to break into a little softshoe number." I mean, I do understand how he could be upset with the way the series veered under Schumacher. Nipples on the batsuit were probably not quite what Burton had in mind when he helped Warner Brothers resurrect the franchise. Still ... musical?
To be sure, I do think that the set could be truly magnificent, as long as you had a stage large enough to accommodate it. All that straight-line deco-ish stuff could look nicely dark and looming -- although switching sets would be a nightmare of the first water. And you could certainly get some magnificently gloomy music out of Batman -- think "Phantom of the Opera", but without the cheery bits.
What interests me, though, is the selection of Jim Steinman as the lyricist. He's the person who wrote most of the lyrics on Meat Loaf's most successful releases, Bat out of Hell, and Back into Hell. Steinman's does what I like to think of as "big rock." Heavy, bombastic, complicated and complex, but great to listen to.
And ... long.
The uncut version of Meat Loaf's "I would do anything for love" single clocks in at something over 13 minutes long (The lyric sheet goes on and on and ON....) One of Celine Dion's biggest hits, "It's all coming back to me", was originally written for Back into Hell, but they decided that it had enough extremely long big ballads; "It's all coming back to me" clocks in somewhere near 7 minutes long. Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" lasts about the same length of time. [note 1]. I just envision rehearsals with actors going to Burton, grabbing him by the lapels, and screaming, "Make him STOP! I can't swing across the stage on the batrope, rescue a falling maiden, thwart the Joker over on one side, then thwart the Catwoman on the other side, all while singing a 15 minute power ballad at the top of my lungs! It just can't be done! I need to breathe somewhere!"
And then there's this nugget: Steinman, whose "Dance of the Vampires" opens this fall on Broadway, described his "Batman" score as a mixture of "Brecht, Weill, Rodgers & Hammerstein and rock 'n' roll." The overall design concept, as of right now, he said, is "Gotham City as Berlin in the 1930s."
Weimar Gotham. Well. Yes. Quite. (And if the political situation in the US is roughly the same by then as it is now, that will add some fascinating and probably unintended political overtones to the whole setting.)
And that combination of influences is ... unique, to say the least.
It will be interesting to see if this actually makes it through. Technically, there's no reason why it shouldn't. If Warner Brothers is right about what it would cost, it will be considerably less than, for example, filming a new Batman movie. They note that they'd like to open it out of town, and then take it to Broadway, but it sounds like the sort of musical that won't travel well physically; that may be quite the undertaking.
Complete Digression: The "Total Eclipse of the Heart" video was this wonderfully over the top thing, featuring demonically possessed choirboys in love with Bonnie, who was dressed in diaphanous white stuff as she ran through an abandoned mansion that was, I suppose, meant to be their boys school.
... And the video for "I would do anything for love" featured a woman floating into the scene of an apparently abandoned yet thoroughly overdecorated mantion, wearing diaphanous gauzy stuff.
... And the video for "It's all coming back to me" featured Celine Dion running through the mansion she once shared with her now-dead lover, dressed in diaphanous gauzy stuff.
Anyone want to bet that somewhere in "Batman The Musical", we'll see Vicki Vale running through stately Wayne Manor, dressed in diaphanous gauzy stuff, as she tries to belt out a 10-minute power ballad? [UP]
real beverly hillbillies
August 28, 2002
CNN.com - 'Beverly Hillbillies' to become reality show: CBS is resurrecting "The Beverly Hillbillies" as a reality series, Variety reports. The network will soon begin casting for a weekly half-hour series that will follow the adventures of a rural, lower-middle class family -- yes, there will be a granny -- as they are transplanted from their humble digs to a Beverly Hills mansion. The project is tentatively titled "Real Beverly Hillbillies." During their one-year stay in California, they'll be afforded a wide variety of luxuries they'd normally be unable to afford, from maid service to personal assistants. They'll also have a chance to earn a substantial income each week, either via a stipend or through some other means. ---CNN story
OK, I am impressed. And also aghast. Apparently, making people do stunts, live on an island, date and then be interviewed and dissected by the date's friends and parents, and live in a fishbowl ... apparently, all that is still not enough for us. Now we want to take a family, transplant them into luxurious digs, and laugh at them as they try to figure out the rules. Oh, I say, isn't that just ever so droll?
OK, Mr Maynard, CBS veep of alternative programming and corporate moron, here's a concept: the reason that the original Beverly Hillbillies series worked is because you were intended to laugh at them. They weren't real. Nobody's feelings or sensibilities were at issue. We knew they were actors and we were laughing at the characters, not the real people. And unlike the real world, they always came out on top of those city slickers. Do you really think there will be anything like that in this series?
"Oh, look! Lack of education and income produces ignorance of the ways of the rich and famous! It is to laugh!"
Well ... no, it really isn't. And you should be ashamed of yourself for even considering this.
But you're a corporate shill and a network vice president besides, so you know no shame. And so this show will be inflicted upon our airwaves.
And because the rest of us also know no shame, it will probably succeed wildly.
In the meantime, the Rainbow Tour ... er, that is, the casting junket is going on around the country, so just wait, and it will come to a very very small town near you sometime soon.
Posted by iain at 11:52 AM | Comments (26)
not returning to the pines after all
August 5, 2002
HBO cans new gay reality TV series: Cable channel HBO has stopped production on a planned reality TV series about five gay men sharing a summer house on Fire Island after complaints, according to New York Observer columnist Rebecca Traister. --PlanetOut, apparently via 365gay.com
HBO’S Gay Series Stops Shooting After A Letter: According to the subjects of the film, HBO executive vice president of original programming Sheila Nevins halted production on the project—which was being helmed by the Emmy-winning directors of The Celluloid Closet—because she felt that negative community reaction to the project had prevented the filmmakers from getting access to Fire Island’s "real" gay social scene. (Rebecca Traister, New York Observer, August 5, 2002)
So, so, so.
We won't get to see scantily clad young and middle aged men cavorting about the Pines, having public sex, partying like it's 1999 (or rather, 1979), and showing the nation just how hedonistic a few relatively wealthy white men can be.
Too bad. So sad.
Oh, wait ... I'm not.
Frankly, I suspect that the reason cited in the Observer article itself is more likely to be true than any spillover from the letter. HBO's parent company, AOL Time Warner, has shown itself to be supremely unconcerned about such trifling things as "unintentional outing" in its MTV subsidiary's "Real World" program. (Remember "Paul", Danny's military boyfriend from the New Orleans season? Now there would be concern over outing, if ever there was one, but they just sailed on.) They'd have just slapped pixellation over faces, and cut scenes if someone got really truculent and aimed lawyers at them, and that would be that.
Ms. Nevins has earned a reputation as an executive with a taste for the salacious (see Real Sex and Taxicab Confessions). as well as a nose for quality reality programming, and at a time when the envelope-pushing Queer as Folk continues to earn attention for rival Showtime and ABC’s "reality miniseries" The Hamptons seemed to prove only that Long Island’s East End is as vacuous as Christie Brinkley, some of the documentary subjects wonder whether it was actually a lack of sensational material that was at the root of HBO’s decision.
"There’s a question about whether they wanted something less wholesome than what we were giving them," said Robert Kushner, who was one of the aborted documentary’s subjects. "HBO is saying ‘not enough access,’ but that might be a thinly veiled way of saying that they didn’t get the red meat they wanted, that it wasn’t sensational enough to justify a million dollars. So much for the thinking man’s channel." The HBO spokeswoman denied that this was the case.
Well ... they would deny it, now wouldn't they? The organization that just received 93 nominations for excellence in television could not very well just say, "Frankly, we wanted more fucking in the sand, more drugs in the parties, more naked men everywhere, and we just weren't getting it. We decided to cut our losses and look for something sexier."
Along those lines, the most amusing part comes later in the article: "Four of the original eight housemates were apprehensive enough that they dropped out of the project before contracts were signed. Sources said that one, a senior official at AOL Time Warner, the company that owns HBO, refused to consider the project. An attorney, an investment banker and a developer at one of Manhattan’s largest real-estate firms also dropped out."
Now let me get this straight-ish: One of the company's own executives was so distrustful of how he would be portrayed that he refused to particpate, right off the bat. Yes, that just does argue for a program full of wholesomeness, doesn't it? It's especially noteworthy that HBO didn't really start getting grumpy until people started including "no erections" and "no sexual acts" clauses in their contracts. HBO was upset because they'd never had to negotiate clauses like that, but then look at HBO's previous "reality" series, such as they are: Taxicab Confessions. Real Sex. In "Taxicab Confessions", the people are usually drunk, usually NOT engaging in sexual acts, and in no position to state which things should and should not be included. (I still marvel that HBO hasn't been sued into the next century for having clearly drunken people signing contracts. Their lawyers must have ulcers the size of canyons.) In "Real Sex", the entire point is to show sexual explorations, so having a contract that said, "no erections" or "only these positions" would be totally ludicrous. The documentaries produced by various people and then brought under HBO's "America Undercover" series banner, for the most part, don't count precisely because they were conceived and primarily produced by independent people and organizations. It's startlingly apparent that HBO and the house's residents had quite different agendas; the residents wanted to show how normal they were (and all you radical types out there, do not EVEN start with me), and HBO wanted ... well, they wanted "The Pines: Even MORE Sexual Depravity and Drugs!" And they weren't getting it.
It's also not even vaguely surprising that most of the businesses shut out the cameras. Although a great many of them would deny it, part of their appeal is that you can do things in the dark that nobody outside gets to see. Being out of the closet is one thing; discovering that the camera caught you tucking money into a dancer's g-string or, heaven forfend, fondling the contents of said g-string ... well, that's something else again, isn't it?
Clearly, I can't say that I'm even vaguely sorry that the series won't be produced. It would be nice if it had come off the way the residents had intended, but then, it's not likely that would ever have happened, is it?
Posted by iain at 02:22 AM