Movies Til Dawn

Above is a 'featurette' made for God knows what reason about the making of the 1977 movie version of the musical 'The Wiz'. Directed by Sidney Lumet, the film was an enormous and enormously expensive undertaking--the most expensive movie ever made in New York at that time (according to this mini-doc)--and was an enormous failure, both critically and commercially, ending the cycle of 'blaxploitation' films that had begun earlier in the 1970s and dooming the Hollywood musical for quite a long time. Lumet is interviewed as is Rob Cohen, the producer. That it took two New York Jews to end the resurgence of black cinema is a fact one can't comfortably look away from (or comfortably look at, for that matter). Lumet blathers platitudes about how fabulous Diana Ross is, how 'truthful' young Michael Jackson is ("you have to work very honestly around him...' etc.). He also performs a very interesting dance step at 4: 40--did he choreograph as well...

Last weekend I went to the TCM Film Festival in Hollywood and saw (among a couple of other films) 'Bye Bye Birdie', starring Ann-Margrock--er Margret--Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, Paul Lynde etc. The film, shot in 1962/63, holds up only reasonably well with Margrock--er Margret--being the best reason to revisit it. Part of the problem is that it's poised uncertainly between the disappearing oldish Hollywood and the emerging newish Hollywood--even though 'A Hard Day's Night' hadn't yet appeared it's clear that Hollywood knew that something new was coming on 'the scene' and that musicals needed to be more inventive, filled with a different energy than they'd had in the already forgotten 1950s. The old-school MGM musical was dead, courtesy of the dissolution of the Arthur Freed unit at the end of the decade and MGM's failure to ever get its much touted biopic of Irving Berlin, 'Say It With Music', off the ground. Musicals were still ...