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| re: A Chorus Line - the Movie | |
| Posted by: JereNYC (JereNYC@aol.com) 09:35 am EST 01/08/19 | |
| In reply to: re: A Chorus Line - the Movie - PlayWiz 12:10 am EST 01/08/19 | |
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| Not in the mid-1980's, of course, but I can't imagine a better person to make a film of A CHORUS LINE now than Rob Marshall. He comes from Broadway and likely knows the material backward and forward, he clearly has experienced Broadway auditions on both sides of the table and he has experience taking a stage-bound show biz story and making movie magic with it. The problem would be that, I think, the material in A CHORUS LINE is resistant to being pulled apart and rewritten and changed...every word, note, and lyric is so interconnected that, once you start pulling it all apart to make changes, you risk all the dominos falling. And that IS a problem with the film. Marshall wouldn't be able to make the kind of changes to the material that he made to make CHICAGO work on film without risking another debacle like the 1985 version. He'd have to commit to working with the material as it is, and that might feel too constraining to a director who wants to interpret material in his own way. |
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| re: A Chorus Line - the Movie | |
| Posted by: PlayWiz 12:10 pm EST 01/08/19 | |
| In reply to: re: A Chorus Line - the Movie - JereNYC 09:35 am EST 01/08/19 | |
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| I remember seeing these terrific commercials in the movie theater for the show "Dreamgirls" when it was playing on Broadway, and on a big screen, filmed as it was playing on Broadway, in a 1-2 minute ad, it looked tremendous. It's possible Bennett or someone else could have just filmed the play pretty much as it was presented on Broadway, with some shots around the theater, perhaps to show Zach before he comes on stage, and it would have worked. There have been successful films that for the most part take place in one room or locale. ACL didn't need to be opened up really -- when you're an actor waiting for hours to be seen at an audition, it's part of the experience to be in that vicinity and world for a while. | |
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| re: A Chorus Line - the Movie | |
| Posted by: JereNYC (JereNYC@aol.com) 12:55 pm EST 01/08/19 | |
| In reply to: re: A Chorus Line - the Movie - PlayWiz 12:10 pm EST 01/08/19 | |
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| Absolutely agreed that the best possible person to have made that movie in the mid-80's was Bennett himself. He clearly was experimenting with ideas for just such a film with his staging of the show's opening that opened the Tonys that season. I just wish that he hadn't been so stuck on his own concept, written about above, that was anything but a movie adaptation of ACL. As I wrote elsewhere in this thread, he could have made a fairly straightforward adaptation of ACL and THEN made an original movie musical about dancers auditioning for a film adaptation of a Broadway hit that would have only benefited from whatever his experience would have been making ACL. It would have been win/win...we all would've gotten a better ACL film that probably would have done better at the box office and we would have gotten an interesting film experiment from Bennett. |
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