Airdate: March 11
Category: Entertainment (Page 5 of 5)
At Variety On the Air, I offered a largely positive take on new NBC musical drama Smash, but with a few scattered misgivings about some aspects of the show, including a couple of the musical set pieces in early episodes. Above is one of those numbers, the baseball (cough)-infused “The National Pastime.” Apologies for the spoiler for my West Coast readers.
Smash depicts the making of a Broadway show based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, and her relationship with Joe DiMaggio is apparently one key part of the fictional fiction. That explains the genesis of the above number, which despite the enthusiastic performances (and barely bridled sexuality) of Megan Hilty and friends, is kind of a nightmare. Corny doesn’t begin to describe it.
When I watched it a second time Sunday, months after seeing the screener last summer, to see if I had been too harsh in my initial assessment, I decided that I was – that it only ranked about an 8 on the nightmare scale, as opposed to a 10. But what still bothered me the most was how beside herself with joy Debra Messing’s character, the songwriter, was at the number. Her revelry at seeing “The National Pastime” wrapped in this kind of glory made me fear for the musical she was co-creating in the show.
I mean, in the world of this musical, you’ve got about two hours to tell the story of Marilyn in a meaningful way, and you’re going to spend three precious minutes with this? Surely there’s a better way that doesn’t involve making me wish baseball had never been born.
Some will enjoy “The National Pastime” just fine, and in any case, the rest of Smash is much better than this. But I can’t help it: “The National Pastime” is a big fat swing, leg-kick and a miss.
Never too early to shop for the holidays, especially for you Downton Abbey fans out there.
This one was a real labor of love for me — my Variety story on Diner looking back at the movie on its 30th anniversary and looking ahead to its reincarnation on Broadway this fall.
This film is one of my early inspirations: so funny and so poignant. Here’s how the story begins …
“Diner,” written and directed by Barry Levinson, is a wonderful movie.
That simple sentence began a lengthy, thoughtful review by Pauline Kael in the April 5, 1982, New Yorker, a review that saved a cinematic gem from quick extinction — and, as it turned out, helped pave the way for a Broadway musical decades later.
This spring will mark the 30th anniversary of “Diner,” Levinson’s inaugural effort as a helmer, which simultaneously celebrated and deconstructed the late-1950s Baltimore of his youth. Come the fall, Levinson’s “Diner” tuner adaptation, with music and lyrics by Sheryl Crow, and with Kathleen Marshall directing, will bow on the Rialto.
Set design has begun, with final casting to take place in the spring in advance of what will be an out-of-town test run in the summer.
The rebirth of “Diner” has stirred excitement about the musical (mixed with guarded curiosity) from those who remember the film for both its comedy, centered on the exploits of six Baltimore buddies, and its insightful commentary on communication bumps and bruises between the sexes.
In an age of four-quadrant blockbuster mindsets, the blossoming of what was such a personal project into a franchise is noteworthy. Though movies of such intimate scale often disappear, a few can pay off for decades.
Still, if the legit adaptation has any naysayers, that would only make sense. Ultimately nominated for an original screenplay Oscar, a Writers Guild award and a Golden Globe, “Diner” would have been relegated to an MGM dustbin if not for the power of Kael’s pen, say Levinson and his colleagues.
I watched this movie on a regular basis in my teens and 20s, but when I checked it out again last month in preparation for this story, it was heartening to how fresh and vibrant it was. It holds up remarkably well, something I would attribute to Levinson’s absolute precision with the material and the great work by the cast, which made a moment in time so timeless.
In a sense, this was Seinfeld before Seinfeld: light on plot but heavy on conversation and just trying to make it through the simple and the ridiculous parts of life. But it has a yearning that Seinfeld dropped pretty much by its second season. These guys (and Beth) want something better for themselves, but they don’t really know how to get it — in fact, most of them can’t even admit they want it.
Seinfeld would have the equivalent of the football quiz, the Carol Heathrow bet at the movie theater, “Are you gonna eat that?” But it wouldn’t have had Shrieve’s at once hilarious and harrowing verbal beatdown of Beth over his records. It didn’t, and wouldn’t, have had the ending that Diner had.
Not that I intended this to be a Diner vs. Seinfeld discussion. Both are classics. But while I loved Seinfeld, writing my own Diner would be my dream. There’s hardly a moment in the film that isn’t kinda quietly brilliant.
They made it look so easy, Levinson and his gang. They’re just stories, right? Just people talking. And yet it’s so rich. Most of the stuff I’ve ever written on my own has aspired to be like some combination of “Diner” and a few other movies like “The Misfits” mixed in. Someday …
So, I hope you enjoy the story. For me, it’s a smile.
This song, “Here Come the Geese,” is on a Barenaked Ladies album for kids, but I really dig it for some reason.
It’s from the album Snacktime
One of these days I might post a desert-island discs list for parents. For starters, They Might Be Giants would be on there as well.
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Just a reminder, because it’s been a while since I’ve said this in a post: Any Dodger Thoughts thread is an open chat thread. You can talk about old topics, new topics or out-of-the-blue topics …
Passing by a billboard for the upcoming movie “Safe House” Monday on Westwood Boulevard, my wife and I were having some fun with the slogan, which is just a little too obvious in its twistiness. We kept on thinking of different examples as we drove along …
THERE ARE NO VITAMINS
Vitamin Shoppe
NO UNDERGROUND TRAINS HERE
Subway
THESE CHICKENS DON’T COME HOME TO ROOST
California Chicken Cafe
It’s as if Linda Richman had taken over the studio marketing campaign. Discuss …
If I were to say the Dodgers are my life, I wouldn’t mean to say that the Dodgers are my only reason for existence.
If I were to say that the Dodgers are my life, I would mean that the Dodgers are so much like my life that it’s frightening.
I look at my life and I look at the Dodgers, and I see so much to celebrate. I see an existence much more positive than not. I see rewards that were earned and good fortune that sometimes might not be deserved. We catch a break now and then, the Dodgers and me.
But I see also frustration. Unrewarded effort. Misplaced effort. And sometimes, downright incompetence. I see a whole that might be less than than the sum of its parts, because the guy in charge doesn’t quite have his act together.
Frank and Jamie McCourt are the target of a lot of Dodger fans’ hate right now. The McCourts now, before them Fox, alongside them the Giants or the Yankees or Barry Bonds or Reggie Jackson in 1977 or Juan Marichal in 1965. Of course, hating the enemy is one thing; it’s worse when you hate your own. People find latent joy in hating their rivals, but it’s just painful to hate the ones that hold the keys to your castle.
But I don’t hate the McCourts. Hate is a word that I have almost no use for, except that hate is a word that regularly comes up inside my head. Because there is no one in this world I hate more than myself.
I don’t hate myself all the time. I don’t hate myself most of the time. But I hate myself some of the time, because I have goals for myself, for the way I want to be as a human being, for what I want to achieve and for the quality of life I want to bring myself and my family. Sometimes when I don’t achieve those goals, I understand, or I forgive. Other times, I just hate myself for it. I’ll hate myself for it.
For so long, I thought achievement, along with a certain kind of composure or even emotional grace, was my birthright, the way World Series titles once seemed to be for the Dodgers. But on the field, I’m so much less than I intended to be.
I was born to privilege that was hard-earned by my father, who had to save for weeks to buy a 25-cent yo-yo when he was a child and never took a dime from my grandfather in adulthood. I was educated at the finest schools, yet find myself in my 40s writing about inconsequential events in a profession that may well spit me out in 10 years, give or take, without any cushion whatsoever, if what’s happened to some friends in the business is any sort of evidence at all.
The Los Angeles Dodgers were born to privilege that was hard-earned from their parents in Brooklyn. And they had a cushy childhood in this city, abundant with success. But now they find themselves in middle-age, not without their virtues, but all too often caught in moments in which they seem turned around, spread too thin, where they can’t rise to the most critical challenges or sometimes execute the simplest tasks.
Sustained greatness for us is chronically, almost pathologically elusive. We are only intermittently transcendent and never when it counts, never supreme. Some of that is bad luck, and some of that is the result of a brain or soul or body that is just inadequate.
I don’t hate the McCourts. Oh, I’ve been angry at them, but I’ve never hated them. I don’t think I can because without even thinking about it, I see in them what I see in myself – a mix of good intentions and egotistical selfishness, competence and incompetence, ostensible foresight undermined by confusion. Why should they be any better than me? If I owned the Dodgers, I’d get some things right that they get wrong, but I’d surely screw up something else.
If there’s anything I hate outside of myself, it’s stupidity and hypocrisy and injustice. I do hate the occasional hypocrisy and stupidity that I think the McCourts have shown over the past five years, from the moment they took ownership of the team and, to my mind at least, proclaimed themselves to be something more saintly than they actually were. But hate the people themselves? I have to get over my own issues and failings, first – otherwise I think maybe I’d be a hypocrite, too. And I don’t want to be a hypocrite – or more of a hypocrite than I already am.
I do so crave to be better, and of course, I crave for the Dodgers to be better. Is this really the best we can be? Good but not great? Slowly sliding backward no matter how much we want to climb forward?
The world is a strange place, such a strange place. It would be pedantic or condescending or even hypocritical for me to point out the level of angst wasted by our culture on Tiger Woods relative to the angst spent on problems of real significance, especially when I’m closer to being part of the problem than the solution. I’d be better off keeping it in my own element.
Today, I saw a film that will get wide consideration early next year to be honored as the best piece of filmed art of 2009, yet it didn’t hold a candle to the small, almost completely ignored TV show that I came home to see afterward. “Friday Night Lights” has persevered against all odds, producing dozens of hours of greatness while the big guns of the entertainment world pat themselves on the back for doing a decent job for 120 minutes – and yet continues to find ways to be even greater. My god, you should have seen this show tonight. “Friday Night Lights” made me cry. It is who I want to be. And I might never get there – probably won’t ever get there.
I want to make someone cry – know what I mean? Instead, I’ll continue to write dispensable stories about the entertainment industry or blog posts about the Dodgers, here today, gone tomorrow. How can you not hate yourself just a little for that? How can you direct anger elsewhere when you bear that kind of dissatisfaction?
And of course, there is the one all-encompassing difference between my life and the Dodgers, the one difference I’d like to ignore. There’s the grand prize that can be lost. The Dodgers haven’t won the World Series since 1988, but no one can take 1988 away from them. I have a grand prize, but a cruel world can and will decide to hack away at it at any moment. It has happened to some of you, and honestly I don’t know how you bear it. I don’t know how I will ever bear it.
This is my life. I’m happy until I get angry. I get angry often and profoundly, but the anger goes away. It goes away on its own, and it goes away quickly. It must do so because it has to. If I keep it, I’m done for. Amid the stupidity, hypocrisy and injustice – amid the impending agony – I have to keep pressing forward as if I’ll keep my peace in this world.
The Dodgers are my life.
