Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Know the Score

Speaking of the musical version of The Producers: Rumor has it that every song that was in the show was at least filmed for the movie, though I'm wondering if that includes the little ditty that the cast sings at the end following their bows. In any case, rumor further has it that all the songs will be on the CD (which is scheduled to hit stores November 22, a month before the film is released) but that a few of the preview screenings now being done have omitted one or another, just to see if shorter is better. One might assume that if any number is trimmed before release, it will be untrimmed for the DVD release.

It is also being reported that Will Ferrell, who plays Nazi playwright Frank Liebkind, has recorded a longer, more elaborate version of his big (but short in the film) number, "Der Guten Tag Hop-Clop."

There will also be a new song which Mr. Melvin Brooks has written to run under the closing credits. It's called "There's Nothing Like a Show on Broadway." As most of you may know, when a musical is transferred to the screen, there's usually a new song or two. Maybe once upon a time, this was done for creative reasons but the main idea since around the late forties has been to see if they can snag an Academy Award, or at least a nomination for Best Song. Pre-existing songs are not eligible; only ones written directly for the screen.

So that's why in the movie of Guys and Dolls, we got "Pet Me, Poppa" instead of "A Bushel and a Peck." It's why in the film of Music Man, we got "Being in Love" instead of "My White Knight." It's why we got "I Move On" in Chicago and "Let Me Dance For You" and "Surprise, Surprise" in A Chorus Line and about half the songs in "Grease" and "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" and did anyone ever write one of these that was as good as the rest of the score? The only one I can think of that might qualify is "Mean Green Mother from Outer Space" in the movie version of Little Shop of Horrors.

I am told that there is only one case where a Broadway musical was transferred to the screen with its score intact — no songs cut, no songs added. Anyone want to guess what it is? I'm asking because I want to see if it's happened more than once. I can only think of the one.

• Posted at 8:48 PM · LINK

Just Amazing

I tuned in MSNBC to see what was up with Hurricane Rita just as another story was breaking: The JetBlue airliner that had to make an emergency landing at LAX with its front landing gear wheels turned sideways. It all ended well but it was startling to be sitting here, watching it via a perfect helicopter shot, aware that we might be about to see a plane crash live on television. (JetBlue makes live DirecTV broadcasts available to its passengers. Apparently, the pilots turned it off for the landing but if they hadn't, those people could have been watching the shot of their own plane's landing gear burning up.) The video of the touchdown may still be available here on the MSNBC site, and don't be surprised if you have to sit through a commercial or two to get to it. It was more suspenseful when it was live, of course, but also when it was preceded by long minutes of the Airbus making its approach.

Nice to see some good news on TV for a change. Hope it isn't too bad for those in the path of Rita.

• Posted at 7:15 PM · LINK

The Times, They Are A'Changing...

A somewhat amusing game is currently being played around the blogosphere...and by the way, there's got to be a better name for it than that. "Online community?" "World of weblogs?" Anyway...

Monday, the New York Times put its op-ed columnists behind a subscription wall: Pay or you can't read Maureen Dowd. A lot of webloggers ordinarily wouldn't care about this but it seems to be an irresistible challenge. How do we get for free what the Times now wants to charge us for? They keep finding ways and someone (probably, many someones) at the Times keeps running around, closing off those routes.

Shortly after the wall went up, many bloggers discovered you could read the restricted columns by merely adjusting the wording of the URL. That's the webpage address. The new, subscription-only addresses have the word "select" in them and if a non-subscriber edited it out, it went to the page for free. This revelation spread across the Internet and the trick really did work...for about six hours. Web-watchers at the Times, I'm guessing, were monitoring websites, learned of the loophole and quickly had it closed.

Other webloggers noted that some other newspapers that carried Times columnists in their print editions were posting columns on their free websites. The Times seems to have stepped in and told at least some of those newspapers that they can't do that. This weblog is attempting to track where the columns appear for free but as you'll see if you try some of the links, some (not all) of the articles have disappeared before they were supposed to expire.

There's a place called The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive that has posted his first subscription-era column. We'll see how long that practice continues. The big test of the whole system may come this weekend when Frank Rich's column is posted. Will it quickly be available to non-subscribers?

I've gone ahead and subscribed to TimesSelect...or at least, I'm on their 2-week free trial, which will roll over to an annual subscription if I don't cancel in twelve days. A lot of people, I'm guessing, will opt out then and the Times will have a better idea of how successful this new idea will be. I'm not sure yet if I'll be among those sticking around. Access to the New York Times archives is nice, but in two weeks I'll have pulled up and saved a lot of articles. If some of the columnists (especially Rich) are still available for free, then I'm not sure why I'd want to pay the fifty bucks a year.

The Times recently announced massive layoffs. You get the feeling there'll be more after the first two weeks of this new plan?

• Posted at 10:15 AM · LINK

The Forum Forum

I couldn't resist running this message I received from Steve Winer. And by the way, the romantic leads in that production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum were John Hansen and Pamela Hall.

I'm one who also saw Phil Silvers in Forum, but I saw him on Broadway. It was truly as memorable an evening as you noted, and I had an interesting near miss after the show. I had seen the show with my father, and after the show we went to Gino's Restaurant for dinner. Gino's was and remains today a beloved Italian restaurant near Bloomingdale's.

Just as we were finishing our meal, a group of cast members from the show, including the young romantic lead whose name escapes me, came in to dine. My father had written extensively for television in the live anthology days of the fifties, and he was friendly with Larry Blyden from that time. We stopped by the table on our way out to compliment the cast and for my father to ask them to send his regards to Blyden. The romantic lead said "You should stay around a while. Phil is going to be coming over." My father, however, decided we should leave. As Charlie Brown would say, "Auggghhh!"

And last year, watching the What's My Line? reruns on the Game Show Network, I heard Phil Silvers mention his regular dining at Gino's — nearly twenty years prior to my experience.

One more note. Wasn't Larry Blyden brilliant in that production? If anybody remembers Blyden at all today, it is probably from the many game shows he hosted. Few know how fine an actor he was (I also saw him be equally great in a New York production of Absurd Person Singular and the original production of The Frogs at Yale).

Blyden was a fine actor. I first came to know his work on a short-lived 1963 TV series called Harry's Girls which has never been rerun to my knowledge, and which I wrote about here. I recently got to see a few episodes of it and it really was as good as I recalled...and Blyden was terrific. The guy could act, sing, tell jokes, dance, direct, do everything. His end was so tragic: He was about to start a new game show for Goodson-Todman so he went on a vacation to Morocco. While there, he went against the advice of some local friends and sped off alone in a jeep to explore nearby villages. As the story is told, he got into a car accident in some remote little town. The crash should not have been fatal but it occurred where there were no doctors and no telephones and by the time someone found him days later, he was dead...at the age of 49. The game show, which was called Showoffs, went on the air with Bobby Van as its host and disappeared quickly. Mark Goodson was later quoted as saying he thinks that if Blyden had hosted, it would have been a success.

I envy you getting to see him in those other plays. On the other hand, I got to have lunch with Phil Silvers.

• Posted at 1:53 AM · LINK

WGA Stuff

As I sorta predicted here, the "new WGA" slate won the Writers Guild election. Here are the details.

Patric Verrone will do a fine job as president. Then again, his opponent — Ted Elliott — would have done a fine job, too. We had some very fine candidates this time, and I don't see that they were disagreeing as much as they seemed to think they were disagreeing. In any event, Patric has an enormous task ahead, just to prep the Guild for the next negotiation, which probably means prepping it for a strike. The current contract expires November 1, 2007.

Patric's slate, all of which was elected, ran on the promise to "organize, organize, organize," meaning to spend record sums to try and get a lot of non-guild writers into the Guild and to get their work areas covered. It would be nice to see them succeed and I'm optimistic that they will.

• Posted at 1:53 AM · LINK