Oh what a day! June
20 marks the release of Jersey Boys,
yet another attempt to bring a Broadway hit musical to the screen. There’ve
been other movie adaptations of Broadway musicals in recent years: Les Misérables, Sweeney Todd, Mamma Mia!,
and Dreamgirls immediately come to
mind. Some have had distinguished casts, and have picked up a few critics’
prizes. But with the exception of Chicago
in 2002, none has been an outstanding success. This time around, the
director is Clint Eastwood, who’s insisting that Jersey Boys is not a musical so much as a dramatic story that
happens to feature music. We’ll soon see how well that approach works, and
whether today’s moviegoers can be persuaded to overlook the dreaded “m” (as in “musical”)
word when they choose an evening’s entertainment.
There was a time when Hollywood was all about musicals. Once
The Jazz Singer introduced
synchronized sound, every studio rushed to make films that featured “all
talking -- all singing -- all dancing.” The marquees of 1930s movie palaces
touted Busby Berkeley’s backstage extravaganzas, with their oodles of beautiful
girls dancing in formation. Later that decade, audiences thrilled to Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers, who specialized in elegant dancefloor tête-à-têtes. The
1950s were the great years of Gene Kelly, the inventive genius behind such
classics as An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain.
By the late 1950s, moviegoers would just as soon stay home
and watch that newfangled wonder, television. That’s when Hollywood moguls—looking
to compete with the tiny black-and-white screens in America’s living rooms—turned
to Broadway. They shelled out big bucks for the film rights to stage musicals
that could be filmed in living color, then augmented by stereophonic
sound. It worked, sometimes very well. West Side Story (1961) was an enormous critical and popular
success. My Fair Lady (1964) was a
hit too, despite the casting of a leading lady (Audrey Hepburn) whose singing
voice needed to be dubbed. After Julie Andrews, the stage star of My Fair Lady, was snubbed in favor of
Hepburn, she was quickly snapped up by the Walt Disney Company, which cleverly
cast her in a charming original musical, Mary
Poppins.
By this time, every studio was vying to make the biggest,
splashiest, most lucrative musical of all. A fascinating book called Roadshow!, by my colleague Matthew
Kennedy, is subtitled “The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s.” Matt chronicles
how Hollywood’s determination to produce spectacular roadshow musicals (the
kind with reserved seats and intermissions) eventually killed off the genre.
His opening chapter, “The Musical that Ate Hollywood,” is devoted to a Broadway
adaptation that was so successful it saved Twentieth-Century Fox from ruin,
following Fox’s monstrously expensive 1963 production of Cleopatra.
Of course I’m talking about The Sound of Music. This nun-and-Nazi fest hardly had instant
appeal in Hollywood. Detractors called it The
Sound of Mucus, and actor Doug McClure sniped that “Watching The Sound of Music is like being beaten
to death by a Hallmark card.” But the film turned Julie Andrews into America’s
new sweetheart. And a brilliant mountaintop opening that made maximum use of
location shooting and a wide-screen format showed how cinema can breathe fresh
life into a stagebound play. The film’s original release was so successful it
lasted a full 4 ½ years. Only problem: all of Hollywood was now looking for the
next Sound of Music. Doctor Dolittle, Camelot,
Star!, Paint Your Wagon, Hello, Dolly! . . . . the costly flops just kept
on coming. Which goes to prove that extravagance has its price.
0 Comments