Read Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz Online

Authors: Greg Lawrence,John Kander,Fred Ebb

Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz (26 page)

BOOK: Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz
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KANDER: We should have stage directions:
Fred sticks finger down throat.
EBB: [
laughing
]
John bangs on table and screams
.
KANDER: Actually,
Steel Pier
and
The Rink
were connected
in that both of those shows were terribly emotional experiences for us.
EBB: I remember having the highest hopes for them and then being unfulfilled emotionally. I don’t remember going into any of the others with the kind of high expectation that we had for them. They were our two biggest disappointments, weren’t they?
KANDER: Yes, no question.
EBB: Not because they failed, but because of how much I loved them.
KANDER: That’s exactly the way I feel. I could watch them over and over. We both used to go back to see them again. Both of the shows deal with personal emotions; they were not political statements.
EBB: They were not dark or tough.
KANDER: They were more about people than any two shows we have ever done.
EBB: They were crushing because we had such high hopes dashed. You know the line “They had it coming” from
Chicago
. But I never saw it coming with
The Rink
or
Steel Pier
.
KANDER: My memory is that even though I liked the scores of both shows, it was those characters and the actors we had playing them that made them such special experiences. I thought our work on both of those shows was really good, but for me it wasn’t about the recognition of skill so much as it was rejecting the big emotional investment that we both had. The
Steel Pier
cast was much larger than that of
The Rink
, but in both shows the companies were terribly caring, terribly committed. At the end of
Steel Pier
, there was a moment that Karen Ziemba and Daniel McDonald had, where they just hold each other and the music swells and he goes away. That’s another one of those moments that even to this day if I think of it, I start to tear up. There was just no way not to be moved by that moment. More than just the
love story, the
Steel Pier
is about a lot of people who are living in a difficult time, the Depression, and who are trying to survive by any means that they can. Some of them do and some of them don’t, and many of them are trying to survive in the wrong way. They’ve been sold a kind of show-business dream with the marathon. Oh, God, I remember how moved I was when I saw Deb Monk sitting there and singing the song “Somebody Older” when she’s trying to talk this young man into taking her away with him.
EBB:
Steel Pier
was also very emotional for me. I cared about the people in it enormously. Deb Monk, Karen Ziemba, Danny McDonald. They were very dear and the rehearsal period was very special. I was sorry when we opened—I wish we could have just rehearsed.
KANDER: I felt the same.
EBB: I thought the dancing in
Steel Pier
was about as good as any dancing I had seen. Oddly enough, with the Tonys that year we lost to ourselves, because
Steel Pier
lost to the revival of
Chicago.
Ann Reinking won over Susan Stroman. I thought that was unfortunate, as much as I love Ann and loved seeing
Chicago
get yet another award. I was sorry Susan wasn’t recognized for that extraordinary work she did.
KANDER:
Steel Pier
was about dancing. There wasn’t a moment in it when there wasn’t movement.
EBB: Gregory Harrison was wonderful. That may have been the first time he did a musical, but he was terrific.
KANDER: Both shows, I think, broke our hearts.
EBB: You might think that anything that fails breaks your heart, but that’s not true.
KANDER: No, not true.
EBB: It has to be beyond that.
Flora, the Red Menace
didn’t break my heart in the same way.
KANDER: In both of those shows we had big emotional
investments, and if somebody asked if you could go back and relive an experience in one of your shows, it would be
Steel Pier
or
The Rink.
I would want to go back and live through the whole thing just as it was, not go back and do something different.
Chicago,
the Movie
T
he screen version of
Chicago
waited more than twenty-five years to be made. Directed by Rob Marshall and written by Bill Condon, the movie was released on December 27, 2002, with a cast that featured Catherine Zeta-Jones (Velma), Renee Zellweger (Roxie), Richard Gere (Billy Flynn), Queen Latifah (Mama Morton), and John C. Reilly (Amos “Mr. Cellophane” Hart). The movie won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress for Catherine Zeta-Jones. Thanks to the movie’s enormous popularity, the soundtrack became a surprise hit for Sony’s Epic label.
 
 
EBB: Nobody wanted to make the movie of
Chicago
for a long time.
KANDER: I remember the subject of the movie came up the last time I saw Fosse. You were in California, and Bobby and I went to Hugh Wheeler’s funeral here. Bobby had not been able to figure out how to do the film. But after the funeral reception, he told me, “I think I finally figured out how to do the movie, and when Fred gets back, we’ll talk about it.” It was the first time he ever said that, and that was the last that I ever saw of him. He died shortly after that. What his version of the movie would have been like we will never know, because he never told anyone.
EBB: I didn’t have a clue how to do the movie.
KANDER: It also took a long time before anybody wanted to do the movie of
Cabaret
, and it sold for very little, as I recall.
EBB: So did
Chicago.
KANDER: The cast is really wonderful, and you know I’m kind of a snob about people who are primarily movie stars. When I saw how talented they are—Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renée Zellweger, and Richard Gere—I was ashamed of myself because they are all extremely gifted. They could step right into the show. Richard Gere could play Billy Flynn like that! [
snapping fingers
]
EBB: And he would have an affection for it. They all have special feelings for the piece, and that is gratifying. We had the opportunity to meet the whole company when they were filming in Toronto last year. They are a terrific group of people and they treated us like royalty. We heard Renée Zellweger sing “Funny Honey” and “Nowadays.” John C. Reilly sang “Mr. Cellophane,” and Richard Gere sang “All I Care About Is Love” and “Razzle Dazzle.” Catherine Zeta-Jones sang “All That Jazz.” I added a line to “Class” for the movie. It was actually the first line that I ever wrote for the song, but Bobby Fosse thought it was too much, so we cut it. The line in the show eventually became “Everybody you watch / S’got his brain in his crotch.” But I put back in the original line, which was “Every guy is a snot, every girl is a twat.” By the way, we scarcely have any money participation in the movie.
KANDER: They have to pay us for a new song, though practically nothing.
EBB: I think we were lucky to get
Chicago
done at all. Nobody wanted it. I tell you, Marty Richards persevered. He produced the show and hung on to it and believed in it. He kept trying to get it done as a movie.
KANDER: At one point when we were working on the movie of
New York, New York
, you and I and Liza together went
to Scorsese and asked him to do it. I don’t know if he ever seriously considered it or not. I’m glad the movie has turned out the way it has, and we are both grateful that Rob Marshall directed it.
EBB: I can name quite a few people who have come and gone on that project. Fosse and Madonna. Rob Iscove. Then there were people like Nicholas Hytner and Wendy Wasserstein. They had written a script for it. Nick Hytner had shopped it around Hollywood with him directing and Charlize Theron to star in it. But nobody picked it up. At one point, Liza and Goldie Hawn wanted to do the movie. Liza was going to be Roxie, and Goldie was going to be Velma. They even sang “All That Jazz” at the end of the TV special that I did with them,
Goldie and Liza Together
. They had a wonderful friendship for a while.
KANDER: Larry Gelbart also wrote a screenplay for
Chicago.
He was paid a lot of money for that.
EBB: They kept sending him back to rewrite it until eventually he said, “Enough.” Apparently at Miramax there are a lot of young people out of college and they read scripts for Harvey Weinstein and the producers. They have meetings, one of which I went to with Larry. A young guy who looked like a Harvard undergraduate came in and started to attack Larry’s screenplay, but he did so for ridiculous reasons. He suggested that Roxie has to have a love affair. “You cannot do a major musical without a love affair,” he insisted. He referred to the movie of
Roxie Hart
and pointed out how well that was handled, that Ginger Rogers had a love affair with a reporter. Then he said to Larry, “So why don’t you write in a reporter who’s covering the case and have him get involved with Roxie.” That kind of advice is insulting for somebody as gifted and important as Larry, though he took it very well. I kept kicking him under the table.
KANDER: I think he’s been through that kind of shit many times. In the theater you own your own material, and nobody can tell you that you have to change something. They can try to
pressure you, but with movies you are just for hire. That’s why Larry is so expensive. He gets the money up front, writes the script, and if they give him too much of a hassle, he can just say, “The hell with it.”
EBB: The idea of seeing the story through Roxie’s eyes is a wonderful idea.
KANDER: That was Rob Marshall’s idea. Suggesting that concept was how he got the job.
EBB: Yes, he pitched it to Miramax.
KANDER: As I understand it, they were talking to him about doing
Rent
, and basically he said, “Before we talk about that, I’d like to talk about
Chicago.”
He had this idea, and whatever he said got him the job.
EBB: It’s extraordinary with a $45 million movie for someone to get the job based on saying, “We’re going to see the story through Roxie’s eyes.” Rob had so little experience with movies.
KANDER: He did that TV movie of
Annie.
EBB: The movie of
Chicago
is a wildly improbable success story. Good for him! Good for us!
KANDER: The most amazing thing in this whole experience is Rob, particularly when somebody you know as long and as well as we have known him. To see somebody that we’re that close to go off and do something so wildly different.
EBB: It’s so improbable that it could be the basis for another movie.
KANDER: This sort of thing happened to me once before. Years ago I knew an actor-singer named Kenneth Nelson, who was known for doing musicals. He had a beautiful voice. He had been a very close friend for a number of years and then I went to see
Boys in the Band
. Suddenly there was somebody who I thought I knew vomiting his guts out on the stage giving such a performance that when I went back to see him afterwards, I felt really shy. I realized I didn’t know that person as well as I thought
I did, and I think we did not know Rob as well as we thought. His contribution codirecting
Cabaret
was enormous and he also saved us with
Kiss of the Spider Woman,
where he was choreographer. But film is a different medium. Where do you learn to say “Cut” or “Action”? That’s what I’m talking about.
EBB: It’s a whole different ball of wax, not just dancing. How did Rob get those performances in
Chicago?
How does he know so much?
KANDER: The most amazing thing is that he sat down and worked out on paper every one of those scenes. So that was no accident—
EBB: I can’t begin to imagine how difficult that must be, and he choreographed it. He did everything. He coordinated all of that with what it looks like and how it’s lit.
KANDER: With the movie of
Cabaret
, Fosse went way far afield from the original stage production in order to make a movie. He really changed the dramatic focus. It was wonderful, though the first time we saw it, we didn’t think so.
EBB: I thought he messed it up.
KANDER: But the second time we saw it, we both thought it was a masterpiece. I think the first time we were simply not prepared for how different it was from the original.
EBB: Cy Feuer showed
Cabaret
to us in California. He said, “Don’t pay any attention to it. It’s rough. The sound is off.” When it was over, I complained about everything that I was told to ignore. I thought her speech at the end about not going to London was ridiculous. I was just really petulant and argumentative. I thought they had ruined it, but then I saw it again with Liza at the Ziegfeld and with an audience that was loving it. That helped.
KANDER:
Chicago
, the movie, is much closer to the original intention of the piece than the movie of
Cabaret
was.
Cabaret
is a marvelous piece of moviemaking, you could almost say
suggested
by the stage piece. The
Chicago
movie is much closer to the stage piece. That doesn’t make one better than the other. They are just different. I think the opening of the movie from Roxie’s point of view is fantastic and makes the whole movie work. I’m so glad they did it. That makes me so happy. It’s not intended to be a realistic piece. That opening is the core of the story. Moment by moment, it’s not literal in the stage piece and it’s not literal in the film. If it had been literal or realistic that way, I think the story would have been boring. The thing that I like about the film, the thing that is more personally satisfying to me than
Cabaret
, is that in order to do
Cabaret
Fosse had to go all over the place and change the story radically, and the focus of the piece. He took out a great deal of the music. It was like starting all over with the same raw material.
What was brilliant about what Rob did, I thought, was that he came up with a very clear and simple solution which allowed him to do the stage piece, and yet it was a movie, very much a movie movie. It was as if he were doing both a stage piece and a movie at the same time. I thought that was most ingenious, capturing the feeling of a stage piece in a movie. Rob’s choreography accomplished the same thing that Fosse’s did in the show but Rob was very careful not to ape Bobby’s style. I think he succeeded very well. There is so much editing in the film to keep it as a film that you don’t get long stretches of uninterrupted dance. If a dance goes on all the way through a number, there is a lot of cutting away, which is what makes it a movie. Even though there is a lot of dancing going on, you never feel that you’re an audience member in a theater watching a stage number, except toward the end, when he does “Hot Honey Rag.” Even then there are little touches that keep it from falling into that trap. The biggest thing about it is that he manages to capture the feeling of the stage piece in a movie.
EBB: The whole reaction to the movie of
Chicago
and the
soundtrack has been overwhelming. We’ve never experienced anything like this before, and we never expected it.
KANDER: I don’t think it was anticipated by Miramax either, or by Sony.
EBB: Miramax kept hedging their bets. They put a song we didn’t write called “Love Is a Crime” on the soundtrack to attract a younger audience with an artist named Anastacia. They didn’t feel our music would attract enough young people to buy the album.
KANDER: That song is on the soundtrack only because we legally could not stop it. We were able to stop them from putting the song in the film. They wanted to have it play with the credits of the film. Our lawyers were able to prevent that. Harvey Weinstein, who runs Miramax, apparently wanted music that would appeal to sixteen-year-olds.
EBB: He must have thought the project’s appeal with our score was to middle-age and older-age audiences. He also hired Janet Jackson to write another song, thinking that she would attract a younger audience.
KANDER: She was paid $300,000 to write a song. Clearly, Sony and Harvey Weinstein have no confidence in our score, or very little. I think we should tell this story. Apparently, Janet Jackson actually did write something and apparently it was terrible, though we have never heard it. I found out about her being hired to write a song only because my friend Albert was online and he saw this story about Janet Jackson being contracted to write a song.
EBB: We would never have known if he hadn’t ran across the story.
KANDER: I came home from a concert one night, and there on my pillow was a printout of the story. You know how certain things happen, and at the time you’re really frustrated because you can’t do anything about it. It was late at night when I found
out so there was nobody I could call. I knew, or at least I was fairly sure, that we had an ironclad clause in our contract, which indeed we did, protecting the integrity of the piece. So the next morning I got ahold of our agents, Sam Cohn and Maarten Kooij, and they went to Miramax. The first response was that Harvey wanted to talk to us about this. We both said no. Neither of us wanted to meet with Harvey. They came back to us a number of times, and then I got a call at my house in the country from Marty Richards saying that Harvey wanted him to ask us if we would consider collaborating on a song with Janet Jackson.
BOOK: Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz
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