Ripped from the Headlines

Remake, remodel: "Mad Max: Fury Road" and the delicious taste of a reboot done right

When I go to the grocery story for ice cream, I know exactly what flavor I want. Maybe I'm flexible on who's making the flavor but in general, give me what I know I already like.

Ice cream makers aren't the only ones in on this truism; advertisers are well aware that once consumers find something to our liking, we keep going back to it. Then movie executives got on the bandwagon a few decades back and boom – we're awash in remakes, reboots and sequels.

Of course, when you're pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a two-hour entertainment venture in an industry that's slowly leaking customers, original vision and story is not high on priority list.

Last week, the latest edition in how this tale plays out hit the press. On Thursday, Sony Pictures announced it would remake the 1996 supernatural cult favorite The Craft to much wailing and moaning among people who feel it's a touchstone. (Confession: I have not seen, and I have no opinion on the remake.) Then on Friday, Mad Max: Fury Road premiered after a three-decade hibernation of the franchise.

Remakes and reboots and sequels, oh my! It's easy to see why they get the studio executives excited; they're a proven favorite flavor. It's also easy to see the dismay in potential consumers, who're left bewailing "why?" And while it's less easy to see, I imagine there's a significant disappointment in the creative screenwriters whose fresh stories are buried once again under the same stuff we've already seen. Hiring writers for remakes and reboots must appeal to those who like the strictures of fan fiction: Here are your borders, your canon, and a beloved lead character. Go!

The moaned "why" is not important here. Why is easy, why was decided by the accountants who saw that Craft made $55.6 million in worldwide box office with a budget of $15 million, and that the last entry in the Mad Max franchise, Beyond Thunderdome (1985) earned $36.2 million with a budget of $10 million. (And that one had Tina Turner in a skimpy mesh dress!)

The "why" that comes next, however, does interest me. Clever writers who avoid aping the same movie again can make or break the good do-over film. And while I can't speak for Craft (though there's hope in the indie horror director Leigh Janiak and screenwriter Phil Graziadel, who worked together on her film Honeymoon), I can address why Fury Road is the best kind of do-over film possible.

There are a number of reasons to ignore Fury Road, including:

1. No Mel Gibson, perfect as the haunted title survivor. (Pretend the last decade of his behavior never happened.)

2. The Fast and Furious franchise already has a lock on two hours of racing cars.

3. Dystopic sci-fi largely has gone beyond shoot-em-ups.

4. Ain't nothin' wrong with the first three Max films (aside from the absurd replacing of Australian voices with American ones in the 1979 original).

But having seen Fury Road, there are even more reasons to go see it. Fury Road, is exactly what you want from a big, loud (very loud), dumb (not entirely dumb) summer action picture. The movement is nonstop, the dialogue is minimal but effective, and the visuals are jaw-dropping and original. It succeeds because:

1. Original director and screenwriter George Miller has remained fully in the driver's seat.

2. He's not cashing in on his creation; he's re-crafting it for a new age.

3. He understands that women watch action films – and has weighted not just his cast but his story in their direction

Was there a screenplay for Fury Road? Ostensibly yes; writers (including Miller) were deployed at some point to craft at least a skeleton of a story. But what they did best was not in the line-by-line readings, it was in the world-building of a post-apocalyptic landscape of little water, acres of sand, plenty of grinding metallic engines, and an abundance of shell-shocked, possibly insane survivors. The film is predicated on a brilliantly realized, layered world of intertwining backstories – white-faced creatures exist to serve with religious fervor underground; women are sequestered as breeders for the leader (or used as milk-producing cows); there's a determined, take-no-shit female leader (Charlize Theron) who makes a bold break for freedom that propels the plot; and there are multiple factions of differently-motorized tribes scattered around the blasted landscape. Each calls out for its own film, or at the very least more explanations and explorations, but none of those are forthcoming. You are in this story, and the story owns the viewer from the first startling moments.

And the payoff works, for the most part. Angst, loss, determination, conversion, reunion, loss, survival. Max (played ably if not electrically by Tom Hardy) is almost beside the point. Instead, for this go-around Miller has used his Mad Max creation as a Trojan horse to tell a story today's audiences will lap up like ice cream – a brilliant packaging switch that more than justifies the need for whatever this film is: reboot or sequel.

"We don't need another hero," Tina Turner sang in the theme song to Beyond Thunderdome. And she has a point – most remakes feel like a chance to capitalize off of an established franchise and ring that cash register again. Fury pulls off a magic trick with this new edition, expanding its universe and providing several new, unexpected heroes. That it will more than make its budget back should comfort the accountants, but it's unimportant to those who care about story. Fury Road gives us the heroes we didn't know we needed.

This story originally appeared at Curiosity Quills.

10 scripts, 2 Oscars: Which writers will take home the best screenplay awards?

The writer on a movie set is a second-class citizen, a vestigial remnant that might once have served a purpose but who, once filming has begun, can only get in the way. Once a script leaves the hands of its screenwriter, unless said screenwriter is also directing, they’re less useful than an appendix. Nobody wants to know or hear about the “writing” any more.

But that hasn’t stopped the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from creating two Oscars for the writing that even makes the story possible. Sharp acting, studied design and clever writing aside, all movies have to start in the same place – with a story – and so the writing of that story deserves at least a nod. Even though, on Oscar night, writers tend to be shoved all the way in the back of the theater. (They’re the ones most likely to have loosened hair pins and bow ties by the time they’re called; bless them, they’re so grateful.)

With that in mind, my hubris and expertise has surged to the fore again (as it did in August when I prognosticated which TV scripts were most likely to take home Emmys). Here, a brief look at the two important Oscar writing categories and which male scriptwriters (because there are no women nominated) will bring home a new lil’ buddy (and a whole new lease on his career) after Sunday night.

Take notes!

Writing, Adapted Screenplay
For reference: An adapted screenplay may be an original work, but it derived its inspiration (at the very least) from something else (like a memoir) that has already been written.

American Sniper (Jason Hall)
Based on the late Chris Kyle’s memoir, Sniper has been a source of contention since it was first released. Is it anti- or pro-war? That foot-on-either-side-of-the-minefield approach is likely director Clint Eastwood’s, but clearly Hall’s script wasn’t interested in seeing things in black-or-white at all times. Nominated by the Writers Guild of America.

The Imitation Game (Graham Moore)
Being nominated by the WGA is one thing; winning it gives your script a huge boost: Moore comes to the Oscars knowing the guild is on his side, and this is likely to tip the balance in his favor on Sunday. That said Imitation is a weird artefact of a script, divided in what story it wants to tell and dropping a major moral quandary three-quarters of the way through telling it. The likely winner, but not the most deserving one.

Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)
As the heir to the Robert Altman school of intertwined, loopy and often surreal storylines, Anderson wrote and directed his own script and probably deserves a special prize for being able to successfully adapt a Thomas Pynchon novel. Alas, Vice has a very low profile and didn’t even receive a WGA nomination.

The Theory of Everything (Anthony McCarten)
Or, the biopic about a Cambridge-educated scientific genius who changes the world that isn’t Imitation Game. Theory is a more coherently-told, if rambling, story about the great Stephen Hawking (based on his ex-wife Jane Wilde Hawking’s memoir) that is conventional in nearly every way. Still, McCarten’s take on the love triangle between Jane, Stephen and a family friend was done with a light hand and a firm expertise. Not WGA-nominated.

Whiplash (Damien Chazelle)
Here’s your dark horse outsider. A relative newcomer to directing/scriptwriting, Chazelle occupies a unique niche: storyteller/director for dark musical tales. Whiplash is roundly considered to be original and extremely well made, but is probably in the wrong category. It’s only considered “adapted” because Chazelle adapted his own 2013 short film by the same name for this longer take. The WGA recognized this and nominated it as an original; being in the wrong category for the Oscars could sink Chazelle’s chances.

Writing, Original Screenplay

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. and Armando Bo)
Those who haven’t yet seen Birdman may sneer, and sneer rightly: At its twee, weirdly-punctuated title; at the fact that it took four people (including the director) to write it. Yet Birdman soars above those criticisms by being a kinetic bit of magical realism that was like nothing on the screen we’ve seen in years. Not nominated by the WGA, though; this may hurt its chances.

Boyhood (Richard Linklater)
The screenplay that took 12 years to complete should win for something. But it’s hard not to feel that Linklater let his actors form the script every time they met for a week each summer over that long span of time. It’s the Mike Leigh way to tell a story, and while it’s not wrong … it’s not exactly scriptwriting. Linklater is owed, big time. But based on the script – there’s not enough there, there. WGA-nominated.

Foxcatcher (E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman)
A big misfire. Slow-moving and dreary, starring Steve Carell’s prosthetic nose. Director Bennett Miller really thought he was on to the next Capote (in which he was also directing an Oscar-nominated script by Futterman) and then found whatever gems his script kept hidden buried under turgid directing and performances (save for Mark Ruffalo). Nominated for reasons unknown by the WGA.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (screenplay by Wes Anderson; story by Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness)
You want your quirk? Wes Anderson delivers your quirk. He may be pushing his limits in terms of just how sweetly off-the-wall he can be, but no question that director/writer Anderson knows how to move things along on charm and style. As the WGA winner this year, Budapest is largely considered to have this in the bag.

Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy)
There’s a good chance you missed this film, but it’s never too late to seek it out. Darker than the inside of a goth’s closet during a blackout, Nightcrawler was also pointedly satirical about the way the greed for ratings has turned the newsgathering game into a blood sport. Gilroy wrote and directed his own script with a firm, clear hand but this one tended to fly under most peoples’ radar. Worthy, and WGA-nominated, but hasn’t really a solid chance.

This article was originally published at Curiosity Quills.

Imitation of Life: Why Hollywood doesn't tell stories of female pioneers

At some point while watching the “Imitation Game,” probably when Benedict Cumberbatch was not actually on the screen, it occurred to me: Joan Clarke deserves a movie of her own.

 

 

For those who haven’t seen “Imitation Game,” which is good but more serviceable than great - Joan Clarke (played by Keira Knightley) is the sole woman on the team of cryptologists who are assigned to break the Nazi code, which changes every night and can only be interpreted via the Enigma machine.

As we see in the movie, Clarke (who was a real woman with a fascinating history), not only has to be as smart as her colleagues, she also has to outsmart her parents - who in the 1940s still believe in a woman’s reputation. As in so many other instances, the woman’s story is just as powerful as the man’s, only she has to do it while hobbled; if not by heels then circumstance.

I want to see Joan Clarke’s story. She lived until she was 79. She befriended a closeted gay man (Cumberbatch’s Turing) and believed they could make a marriage of the minds work - it would free her to pursue her love of mathematics, and it would give him the beard he needed not to face the fate he ultimately did - in England at the time, homosexuality was a crime. She was a numismatist. She was paid less than the men. She was, by all accounts, a pretty awesome lady.

And yet, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see her story. Not just because Turing’s tale trumps it (and was so recently told) but because she was a woman. Most women who get big flashy nomination-ready roles play the supports in the story - even when they’re lead actresses, even when they’re up front as protagonists. This year’s Oscar nominees are props for others - as wives, as heads of households holding it together; or they’re damaged by loss or mental issues. They are rarely creators of action, of plot, of story.

Even the woman who played Clarke despairs about the incredible paucity of female stories out there. “There are very, very few stories told,” Knightley told me when I spoke to her for the LA Times’ Envelope (full article here). “Thank God, they’re finally doing a movie about the Suffragettes - some of the most seminal female figures of the 20th Century. It’s amazing there hasn’t been a film covering that whole political movement.”

Well, one film comes to mind right away: “Mary Poppins.” Where the mother of the family is in fact a Suffragette, and is roundly considered a figure of fun because of it.

“It’s still female voices that are very often missed out on, completely,” she continued, and pointed out a new exhibit at London’s Tate Museum specifically devoted to female artists. “It’s not that there weren’t many famous female artists,” she said. “We just haven’t heard of them. Very often in every section of culture women are lost; every actress will say the exact same thing to you. We’re all looking for these interesting, inspiring, complex creatures … but they’re very difficult to find.”

Part of this is the box, of course. What box? The box of expectations. Part of the attempt to understand why the most powerful movie of the season, “Selma,” failed to score more than two Oscars (yes, it did get a berth in the Best Picture slot, but it had a distasteful tokenistic feel in light of the director, Ava DuVernay, being overlooked). Films featuring black characters and actors tend to only do well at the Oscars when those black characters and actors are victims: “12 Years a Slave,” for example.

That box transfers to women as well: Take a woman out of what’s considered her expected, traditional roles - wife, mother, daughter, victim - and give her a story to propel, well, then there’d better be a man standing right behind her or, better yet, let’s just tell the men’s story. It’s what people what to see anyway, right?

Poor Joan Clarke. A name almost lost to the ages, overshadowed by the genius of Alan Turing. He didn’t ask to overshadow her. History did that. Storytellers did that. The movies did that. All is not lost; of course, there are women out there doing good female stories - Reese Witherspoon, Drew Barrymore, DuVernay - but it is a very small drop in a very large pond.

But here’s one larger rock worth considering: “Suffragette,” starring Meryl Streep, Helena Bonham Carter and Carey Mulligan is written by a woman: Abi Morgan. And it is directed by a woman: Sarah Gavron. (Due out: later this year.) So, we start. And hope. And watch for the hobbling heels they’re still undoubtedly wearing - visible or no.

What’s your favorite female-centric film? Let us know here.

This article was originally published at Curiosity Quills.

Ho-ho-hold the treacle: Most holiday movies stink. Demand better!

After much delay, at last I saw “Maleficent” the other night. And yes, while it is full of exactly what one expects from a Disney film – for (spoiler alert), example, a villain given grace by his vanquisher tries one last time for the win and ends up falling to his death – it took a remarkable number of turns away from expectations and more than once I prickled up with a tear.

I don’t cry much in the movies, and I wonder how many regular moviegoers do any more. Certainly, I know how the man behind the curtain works too well – the little manipulations of script, color, costume and music are all tip-offs to me. When a script does successfully vault my hurdles and makes me teary, I love it like no other. But there are so few instances when a movie goes where it did not seem to be heading, and evokes an emotion that I was unprepared to have. I can’t be alone in this – we’re all ingesting so much visual entertainment these days, I think it’s getting harder to really push our buttons.

Or is it? As we head into the holiday season, there’s a distinct change in the air. All at once, it’s time for the holiday movie – more specifically, Christmas movie – onslaught, and almost without exception it is seriously sweet stuff: Norman Rockwell households, problems best enclosed in quotation marks, wholesome (and usually very white) protagonists whose only real problems in the world now are how they can make one day at the end of the year feel real and precious. The other 364 days? Who cares.

Tune into the Hallmark Channel, and it’s almost wall-to-wall Christmas movies this time of year. From “Mr. Miracle” to “One Christmas Eve” to “Christmas Under Wraps,” these are films that are not written to surprise or challenge viewers – they’re meant as the equivalent of a holiday sweater: red and green-colored expressions of goodwill toward people. There’s nothing inherently wrong with them. They’re perfectly nice. And also like that holiday sweater, meant to be worn once and never thought of again.

Into all of this niceness has pawed one of the odder internet memes in recent years, Grumpy Cat. Lifetime – not traditionally the source of original, meaty stories – has embraced the cat with the permanent frown (a real animal) and turned her into the star of “Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever.” This is enough to make me sit up and take notice: Comedian Aubrey Plaza is providing the voice of the cat and one of the scriptwriters is a longtime contributor to “SpongeBob SquarePants,” which automatically makes it a more interesting story.

Will it all pan out? Or will it end with Grumpy Cat coming to some kind of un-grumpy realization about the joy and wonder of the holiday season? Civilization will not fall either way, but it would be nice to know that things might turn out a little differently than the paint-by-numbers structure most of these holiday movies are made of.

We’re gluttons for stories these days, with more outlets than ever to tell them to us – online, in the movies, on TV. Expectations are higher than they once were – it’s up to us to demand better from our mythmakers. We want movies that will send their arrows through our protective walls, into our hearts, and release the emotion within. The storytelling equivalent of “nice” makes us sleepy. The other kind makes us alive.

If all goes well, “Grumpy Cat” will have a long life. Think of the Christmas movies that stick with us these days – “Elf,” “A Christmas Story.” Think of “It’s a Wonderful Life” as a horror movie (stay tuned for that next time). The films that are more than the sum of their parts, which get around all of the treacle and usual expectations … those are the ones we’ll want to watch again and again.

So for this Christmas, here’s what I want: A better story, well told. Think Santa’s got that on his sleigh?

This column originally appeared in Curiosity Quills/Between the Lines.

No paper, no pen: On the loss of Robin Williams, a great American writer

“What will your verse be?”

— Robin Williams as John Keating, “Dead Poets Society” (1989)

Just hours after the news that Robin Williams had killed himself broke on August 11, Bostonians opted to continue their dialogue with the late comedian. They went out to a bench in the city’s Public Garden, where Williams had filmed a scene from 1997’s “Good Will Hunting,” and began to chalk quotations from his movies in the pavement.

“O Captain! My Captain!”

“Your move, chief.”

“Bangarang!”

Williams had his share of personal demons and, as came out late last week, was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s. But he hid those demons (and that diagnosis) so well that his final desperate act in this life came as a gut-punch to everyone who ever watched one of his live-wire performances. So the need those Boston fans (and the hundreds who used social media in a similar way over the ensuing days) had, to offer things he said back into the universe, had a natural quality to it - he had spoken so much to us for so long, it made sense that we were not ready to end the dialogue.

But Williams was not the author of those quotations; he delivered those lines memorably and brilliantly in movies like “Dead Poets Society,” “Hunting” and “Hook” - but they are not his words.

What hasn’t been discussed much amid all the public mourning for Williams’ loss is this: While he was a genius at improvisation and impersonation, the talent that went bone-deep for him and underscored everything else he did was that he was a writer. Not on paper; Williams wasn’t much of a pen-to-paper guy. That would take too much time, and he had so much to say, and in the end not enough time to say it all. Williams did not author books or screeds; he managed likely just one Top 10 list in his lifetime.

But words on the page aren’t the only way to be a writer. Words are building blocks, constructing the story a person wants to tell and in his case, that story was told in one torrential chapter at a time, in real time, in front of huge crowds.

“Robin Williams would be the first to say that his writing would have happened on the stage,” says Mark Malkoff, a comedian and filmmaker who hosts “The Carson Podcast.” “You go up on the stage and see what comes out of your mouth. He wasn’t methodical like some comedians - like George Carlin - who wrote out every single word before going on stage. But very few people can get on stage and wing it for an hour.”

Talent, yes, but it also takes a serious amount of bravery to get up on stage with just the sketches of ideas and voices rattling around in your head. But that’s what Williams did. A legendary improvisor, he used his body and the room around him to frame what he wanted to say on any given night - just watch the first third of his 1982 stand up “An Evening With Robin Williams,” in which he wanders around the crowd, picking up personal objects, plays with audience members’ hair, tries on their clothing. They become characters in the story he’s writing in those moments, as he constructs worlds and people and thoughts with the strength of his energy and creativity. It’s far from effortless - sweat builds on his face as he progresses - but this free-flowing gush of words is funny, topical and spontaneous all at once. Whether you find his brand of humor hilarious or not hardly matters: This is the creative whirlwind in motion, this is what writing looks like, and Williams is exposing every draft as it pours out of him.

This isn’t a perfect way to work: Williams’ style meant he used almost no filters or obstacles to let what was in his head pour out. That meant if he’d heard a great joke somewhere he might just spit it out later on, with a different flair. Comics who pointed this out to him did note that when confronted he would pull out his wallet and pay them for the joke, as if he knew it could happen and couldn’t prevent it. The crime of joke theft is one of the more egregious comic-on-comic offenses, but it didn’t seem to taint Williams in the long term. It’s almost certain that if he lifted someone else’s idea and gave it out later, it was just part of his inability to stop the words from coming. His mind had picked up the shiniest object it could and handed it to the crowd as if to say See? Isn’t this wondrous?

And it was. 

In the end, Williams got to do what most writers only dream of: He bypassed the editing process and took his work directly to the ear of the audience. The genius of what he was able to do was not just in making that happen, but to prove to everyone else that it was the best way for him to ply his trade. So they let him - Williams had the rare privilege of appearing on talk shows without the usual pre-interview; he would riff those minutes away without a care, while hosts sat back and laughed along with him. On sets, directors often let him improvise dialogue, as if knowing the nuggets he offered were more valuable than whatever the script had down in ink.

Before he was doing, Williams’ story ran the gamut. He was an alien. He was President Eisenhower. He battled and discussed his addictions. He made dick jokes and crazy voices. He played everyone from an earnest, poetry-loving teacher to the scariest photo developer you ever did see. He was a philanthropist and altruist, sports fan and - from most accounts I’ve heard - a genuine mensch of a man.

He considered Jonathan Winters, another great stream-of-conscious comedian, a mentor and once said, “Jonathan taught me that the world is open for play, that everything and everybody is mockable, in a wonderful way.” That makes sense. Robin Williams played with his words in a unique, unparalleled manner, and even if he wasn’t always playing games, he seemed more at home with the world while was composing. Those words arent ones that will likely ever get compiled on a page, but they were all part of the epic tale he was telling, one whose volumes have now, prematurely, ceased to be writ.

This post originally appeared in the Between the Lines column at Curiosity Quills.

'Boyhood' is full of storytelling magic, minus the story and any wizardry

Modern movie stories generally goes a little something like this:

1. Hero.
2. Hero travels to a different world (you can go metaphorical or literal on this one).
3. Hero meets companion. (In Western society, this companion is almost always of a minority race, or disabled, or female. Look, this is what they taught me. I don’t make this stuff up. Discussion on this topic in another column.) This person usually dies.
4. Hero meets shadow self: The nemesis, the “other” who they will battle who in many ways is just like the hero.
5. Only hero or nemesis survives; success of the hero is dependent on whether he gets home.

This is all from a college course I took once about film and Jungian archetypes, and it’s been a while so I might be a little fuzzy on the edges. But in general, you can map virtually every movie Hollywood has spat out at us in this way. (TV series as well, to some extent.)

But it’s boring after a while. Once you know the outline and start seeing it again and again, it gets tiresome fast. Soon, it’s as if you’ve been listening to the same song for years and never realized how repetitive the tune actually is.

Stumbling across a movie that subverts that paradigm, then, is something worth talking about. I saw “Boyhood” a few weeks ago and really had no idea what to expect. I knew the premise: Director/writer Richard Linklater filmed a boy over about a dozen years, a few scenes every summer, capturing the growth process of a child becoming a man in real time. Simultaneously his stars Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke as mom and dad also aged, but the spurt between single digits to voting age is far more pronounced and dramatic – and “Boyhood” is, as its title indicates, about the boy.

Read the rest of my latest "Between the Lines" column here, at Curiosity Quills!

A twist in the tale: Why too many 'Twilight Zone' endings can ruin the surprise

One summer, I spent my days lounging around the pool, reading “The Twilight Zone.”

Not watching. For one thing, “The Twilight Zone” reruns were on way late at night. I wasn’t quite a teenager, VCRs were in other peoples’ homes, and the Internet was still a good decade or so away. So I’d only seen a handful.

And those shows, when I could catch them, were potentially very scary. It was safer to read the summaries of every one of the 156 episodes, all neatly collected in Marc Scott Zicree’s “Twilight Zone Companion.” Little did I know how much his book, and that series, would define a style of storytelling I would prefer above all others.

Call it what you like: Twist in the tale, surprise ending, gotchas. “Zone” sent me to the works of Richard Matheson (a “Zone” writer but also well-known for his fiction, including the novel “I Am Legend”) and Roald Dahl (his grown-up, nasty stuff); I watched lesser series like “The Outer Limits” and “The Darkroom.” I loved “The Sixth Sense” (and no, I did not see it coming, thank you).

But on the road to becoming an expert in the “Twilight Zone” style of story, something unexpected happened: My antennae got a little too finely honed to be surprised any more. Getting a “Sixth Sense” surprise is so rare these days. And I’m not alone – in general, TV and movie audiences have watched enough of these twists in one form or the other that it takes a truly different shift to catch us unawares. The ones that fail feel like they ought to have the “sad trombone” music playing as credits roll. Bad twists undercut storytelling and cheapen the whole story.

To read the entire Between the Lines post, check it out here at Curiosity Quills!

Not seeing the forest for the trees: 'Into the Woods' and other ways Hollywood gaffes in retelling classic fairy tales

“Into the Woods” fans, brace yourself: The Disney adaptation of the award-winning, long-running, grown-up thinking fairy tale musical by Stephen Sondheim – one of the stage’s pre-eminent writers – is getting neutered.

As the New Yorker reported recently, during a master class in New York City Sondheim told the audience of high school drama teachers that characters that are killed in the musical are not in fact dead and that sexual liaisons that occur are either not happening or probably not happening. C’mon folks, it’s Disney, right? What do you expect?

Somewhere along the line – and it was probably starting as far back as 1937, when Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was released – Disney became the de facto, go-to home for anything that even whiffed of childhood. In the ensuing years, the company has refashioned, retold and co-opted just about every fairy tale known to Western civilization, and some (hello, “Aladdin”) from other cultures entirely. The stories are their stories, the way they want to tell them, and that means the way the most adults and children want to consume them. And if that means smoothing out the rough parts and neutering anything that whiffs of controversy, supplanting all of it with sentimentality and tired moralistic and gender tropes, then so be it. The people don’t know better, do they?

The thing is they could. Fairy tales have been having a good run on TV and in the movies in recent years, even with Disney backing. From ABC’s “Once Upon a Time” series to NBC’s “Grimm” and even Fox’s “Sleepy Hollow” (a blend of folk and fairy tale), these stories are not just for children any more – not that they ever really were in the first place. Original, undiluted fairy tales are dark, scary beasts big on retribution and less big on telling a big moral story or dispensing justice. They were warnings, not advisories.

Check out the rest of my new "Between the Lines" column over at Curiosity Quills!