Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (6 page)

Martin never raises his voice. And his British accent was wrapped in his trademark cottony diplomacy as he expressed to his composers the
urgent
and
sincere
need to get this thing accomplished in a timely fashion, as this staged reading in July—“well, it’s going to be
a major outlay of funds
.”

I put down my fork and watched, full of empathy for both composer and producer, because Bono was doin’ the ol’ tap dance. He was fudging numbers, giving assurances, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Boy, did I recognize that dance—I had been doing it my whole professional life. Bono was arguing they’d get it done in a couple of weeks, and the producers were saying that was impossible.

I had seen plenty of artists—musicians in particular—generate everything required in a couple of intense spurts of productivity, so I wasn’t concerned. Martin, on the other hand, left a lot of his lunch on the plate.

For our final night in Ireland, we all drove into Dublin and dined at the Clarence Hotel, which Edge and Bono had bought and converted into a five-star lodging in 1992. There in the tea room Bono delivered a heartfelt toast to the future of our little project, adding a nod to Tony Adams surely in a cloud above us. And when the bill came, Edge and Bono graciously offered
to cover it. Which was great, because I was broke. Julie protested—we should all split the bill evenly. The producers chimed in, agreeing with Julie.

I nodded with a smile, but I was sweating. I was skint. Completely. And that Pinot was off the charts. This was serious—my wife and I made our mortgage by the skin of our teeth every damn month. I looked around the table. I was surrounded by millionaires, multimillionaires—if they saw my bank statements, they’d be stunned. They’d wonder what sort of writer I actually was. They wouldn’t understand that public television had limited funds to pay writers, especially now with the Republicans in charge and—no—I couldn’t let a single doubt creep into their brains. I would pay the bill, and it was going to sting. I pulled out my wallet, ready to fling one hundred dollars onto the table—or, in other words, all the money I had saved for my children’s college fund. But Edge put his foot down—it was
their
hotel after all, he and Bono
insisted
on paying. I wanted to tearfully clutch his hands in gratitude, like I was some Russian peasant woman. I was exhausted from the stress. That was almost a catastrophe.
Christ, how pathetic.

The next morning, huddling alone over a free scrap of bread in the Delta Business Lounge, waiting for my flight home, I felt—what the . . . !—a pair of hands sliding down my chest from behind, and now something was on the back of my neck! It was nuzzling, it was . . .
it was Julie.

She held my head in her hands. “I’ve been looking for someone like you for a long time.”

“You have no idea how I’ve begged the world for a partner like you,” I said, trembling.

“We’ll be working on a lot of things together,” she promised in a whisper. My flight was called. I walked to my gate with cotton
fluff for a brain and two pieces of artificially flavored licorice for legs. The rest of the journey passed in a fog.

•     •     •

“We were dealing with a woman who has absolutely no sense of commercial potential.”

“You try to help her, but it’s only ever a one-way street. She has a narcissistic disorder.”

It was still six months before
Across the Universe
opened in theatres, but toxic gossip about Julie’s film was being reported with relish on the
Deadline Hollywood
blog by dirt-dishing Nikki Finke, who larded her article with quotes about the “impossibly artsy-fartsy cut of this $45 million pic which audiences dislike” and about how difficult it was to collaborate with Julie:

At one point, Amy Pascal [cochairman of Sony Pictures] took [Julie] to dinner and diplomatically told her ‘how good it could be’ if only she’d cut the movie. But Julie still refused. . . . Five months had gone by and she didn’t listen and she didn’t care.

I saw an early screening of the film. I thought it was a gas. It was a love story, it was the Beatles, it was eye candy and high spirits, what’s not to like? Would it sell $100 million worth of tickets? Who the hell knew?

The suits didn’t understand that the film wasn’t about the 1960s. It was about what it meant to be in your twenties, no matter what era. And most of all it was about music. For humans, music has the same purpose it has for birds, whales, and other musical animals—
mood synchronization,
as the scientists would say. Why did Julie gravitate in her work toward musicals and opera?
Because singing was a mode of communication more emotional, more immediate (and more ancient) than “talking.” In
Across the Universe,
where thirty-five Beatles songs were crammed into a 125-minute film, it wasn’t the plot
per se
that kept us on the edge of our seats so much as wondering how we were going to be made to
feel
next. When Max sang “Hey Jude”—as earnest and optimistic a song as ever’s been written—the formerly bleak world seemed transformed.

This was an incredibly hopeful and persuasive artistic statement. And those Hollywood philistines weren’t getting it. I wanted to punch them out, they were distressing my cowriter so. But it looked like the chances of
Across the Universe
opening in the fall with
her
cut of the film were very slim.

Meanwhile, the Telsey + Company casting agency had been hired to find the actors for our workshop reading, now only three months away. However, with the project cloaked in secrecy, the agency had no idea who they should be looking for. So Julie and I worked up descriptions of the main characters and sent them off to the agency, hoping it would provide some guidance.

Only, it turned out they weren’t seeking guidance so much as
the actual descriptions
that they would then send
verbatim
to every talent representative in New York. On April 16, our unedited breakdown went out in an e-mail blast announcing the Actors’ Equity Association–approved staged reading of
Spider-Man the Musical.

Within the hour, the announcement was picked up by every single blog that specialized in either comic books or Broadway shows, or Civil War memorabilia, potato salad recipes—I mean it was everywhere. The show was now public knowledge. And Arachne? The one novel narrative element in the show? The element we had been hoping to keep under wraps till the first preview, which was at least two years away? She was out of the bag.

Arachne: Female, 20–35 years old. A beautiful, boastful young woman turned into a spider for her hubris. She subsequently appears to Peter Parker and the audience as—in turn—someone to inspire Peter; a lover; a bride; a terrifying (and sexy) dark goddess of vengeance; and, finally, a lonely, fragile young woman. Strong Celtic, Balkan style. Outside the box ideas are welcome.

Arachne’s entire story arc, just sitting there naked for everyone to pass judgment on. And pass judgment they did. In our naïveté, Julie, David Garfinkle, and I had imagined that word of a Spider-Man musical directed by Julie Taymor with music by Bono and Edge would be greeted pretty unanimously by the fanboys with “Wow!” and also “Cool!” But they didn’t express excitement. Or even cautious optimism. They didn’t even bother with dubiousness. The news sent them straight into brain-melt. They could barely believe the news was true. And they hoped—God, how they hoped—that it
wasn’t
true. Why? Because they were Spider-Man’s self-appointed guardians, and they feared the show would be an embarrassment for everyone involved, for everyone who had ever been associated with Spider-Man for the last forty-five years—real people, fictional people,
everyone
.

So at the end of the day, having trawled through the snark and speculation and cris de coeur of commenters like Mr. Bong, laserbrain, Calico Pete, and Jabba the Griffin, I got past my own fear and bafflement and began to think,
How edifying
. Here was an opportunity to study the comic-book geek in his natural habitat. These blog posts were the raw responses of true Spider-Man devotees. I made a note that the Geek Chorus in our show had to be
these
geeks—they had to be protective, unfair, dubious, melodramatic defenders of the pure.

But these posts were also a warning shot across our bow. We had to be extra-smart about this. We had to be respectful; we couldn’t stray too far afield, or we would suffer a world of wrath. The fanboy’s imagination was deep. But I was beginning to learn it wasn’t very
wide
.

•     •     •

Bono and Edge were ridiculously behind in their writing chores. We were three months away from a massive workshop and how many songs were completed, as in “actually ready to be performed”? Five? How about three? Any?

David Garfinkle, looking distressed, confirmed to me that a whole lot of nothing had shown up from the boys to date. Most of his distress at the moment, however, was from his having just deposited his precious cell phone into a paper lunch sack. Meanwhile, an old man in a homemade Spider-Man outfit was walking by. More spider-men were wandering about. We were in Queens, at the Kaufman Theater, for the premiere of
Spider-Man 3
. Sony and Marvel were desperate to keep pirated footage off the Internet, so into the lunch bag your cell phone went. The sack in turn was placed on an enormous table containing a sea of completely identical-looking lunch sacks. David was never seeing that BlackBerry again.

Julie had just walked the red carpet, and was now cheerfully bringing up the cost of this new Spider-Man movie.

“Two hundred fifty-eight million! That’s a new record—most expensive movie of all time . . .”

She knew this factoid was especially pertinent in light of the article that appeared in the
New York Post
just two days before.

$pider-Man. Could the upcoming stage version of “Spider-Man” be the most expensive musical of all time?

The May 2, 2007, edition of the
Post
was notable for running the first-ever newspaper article written about the Spider-Man musical. The article was penned by notorious Broadway muck-meister Michael Riedel.

Word is that the show, which is getting a staged reading this summer, could cost almost $30 million to bring to Broadway. “The numbers are going to be astronomical,” says a producer, who is familiar with the show’s finances.

“Thirty million is ‘astronomical,’ ” snorted Julie, “and meanwhile the Spider-Man movie costs a quarter-BILLION
.
And David, it’s not really going to be thirty million anyway, is it.”

“Uh, no no . . . it’s more like twenty-three . . . twenty-four—”

“And who wants a ten-million-dollar Spider-Man musical anyway!? That’s just stupid. And you know,
The Lion King,
in 2007 dollars, cost easily thirty million—it’s just that nobody cares, cause it’s taken in over a billion in grosses . . .”

We were eager to check out
Spider-Man 3
because the teasers suggested that Peter Parker would be drifting toward the “darker” side of superherodom. Julie was hoping Marvel’s exploration of darker themes would give her license to touch on some grittier material herself.

But we and the rest of the audience were disenchanted by the results on-screen. Peter’s “darkness” was mostly a new, emo-style haircut, a surly attitude, and an out-of-left-field dance number. That number, along with a song Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane performed, prompted Spider-Man junkies online to predict that Taymor’s Broadway musical was going to be nothing more than two and a half hours’ worth of the very worst parts of
Spider-Man 3
.

We clearly needed to inoculate this show against potential embarrassment.
Julie and I went back to Dublin in June 2007 for three more days of work with the boys, with all of us making sure we didn’t lose sight of the storm clouds inside every adolescent.

“I’m not the crack of the pavement . . . I’m not the trash can overflowing,” suggested Julie, trying to pin down Mary Jane’s frame of mind. “That’s such a teenage sentiment. I’m not going to let the place define me.”

Edge and Bono nodded in agreement.
They’d been there.
Bono grew up in Ballymun, five miles from Dublin’s center, near a dodgy tower block called Seven Towers. Barely out of their teenaged years, the two lads would become—like Peter Parker—as close to mythic figures as the real world allowed. Walking down the street with Edge or Bono, I would see on the faces of pedestrians the same reaction as the cabbie or child in a Marvel comic book whenever Spider-Man swooped by: Eyes would widen, mouths would gape, and they’d point, as if they’d just seen a giraffe.

So now Edge and Bono were making the case that Peter Parker was “an indie kid, like Kurt Cobain before Nirvana”—back when Kurt was considered the geekiest kid in his high school. After Peter is beat up at school, what he sang had to feel
real
.

Bono closed his eyes to concentrate. “I hear it as bummed-out garage rock.”

Bono then sang the verse while demonstrating how to “walk home dejectedly.” He started at the back of the room and slinked toward us, moving with the feline yet masculine strides only rock stars can get away with.

Edge grimaced. “Could you try and be more like the geeks?”

“Edge is giving me geek lessons,” explained Bono, apologetically.

“He’s having a hard time,” said Edge, shaking his head with a grin.

Moments later, however, the room was shot through with tension as Julie insisted with an unnerving fervor how “Think Again” (Arachne’s song of vengeance) needed to get to “an unearthly, terror-rising, terrifying moment.” She explained how Arachne was so enraged by Peter Parker’s betrayal, she was now “pulling the vaults of heaven and hell into her presence
.
”

Like Arachne, Julie herself seemed to possess this frightening capacity to rain down retribution. The day after I landed the
Spider-Man
job, a former assistant director for
The Lion King
told me how he witnessed Julie dressing down an assistant designer for wasting her time. He said he had never seen anything like it: “It was like one of those sixteenth-century disembowelments.”