Driving Mr. Baby: The Paul Simon Connection

Midsummer seems the right time for a good old-fashioned car chase movie, and Edgar Wright’s gorgeously gas-guzzling Baby Driver more than fills the bill. With its driving scenes scored to the tunes throbbing out of the leading man’s iPod, Baby Driver can even be considered a musical, La La Land for the behind-the-wheel set. (It’s fascinating to contemplate what would happen if La La Land’s “Another Day of Sun” opening scene were transported to Baby Driver’s Atlanta. Ansel Elgort as Baby would never let a little thing like freeway gridlock stop him from getting--very quickly--where he needs to go.)

Baby is the getaway driver for an exceedingly rotten egg (Kevin Spacey), who rules with iron fist over a squad of ruthless criminals. Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm (as a very different kind of Mad Man) play thugs with varying degrees of smarts but lots of anger issues in common. Needless to say, Baby has a backstory that explains what he’s doing in such loathsome company. Though he loves to drive, loves the thrill of being in motion, he’s by no means a hardened criminal type. He also loves his deaf foster father, and he’s starting to love the pretty little waitress (Lily James) who believes in him, and who wants nothing more than to drive into the sunset with her tunes blasting from the car stereo.

This is a movie that’s much dependent on its soundtrack. I didn’t recognize most of Baby’s music, though it’s fun to hear him crank up a golden oldie, “Tequila.” The use of familiar pop songs to score a film is not the newest of ideas. But it was very new in 1967 when director Mike Nichols decreed that The Graduate should be cut to such existing Simon and Garfunkel tunes as “The Sound of Silence” and “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme.” The original idea was for Paul Simon to devise some brand-new musical cuts for the film. Simon tried, but nothing seemed particularly promising, although Nichols thought there was something to be said for a scrap of a Simon ditty about Mrs. Roosevelt. (A simple shift to Mrs. Robinson, and music history was made.)

The financial backer of The Graduate, Joseph E. Levine, was irked in 1967 that Nichols wanted to score his film with songs written all the way back in 1964. Referring to the singing duo as “Simon and Schuster,” he bellowed at Nichols, “Every kid in America knows these old songs. You’ll be laughed off the screen.” Somehow that’s not what happened. The nostalgia built into “The Sound of Silence” and “Parsley, Sage” made them all the more poignant to the young audience. And this new approach to film scoring—using existing tunes to evoke the feeling of an era—would persist. Cut to 1973 when George Lucas chose  classic fifties oldies like Fats Domino’s  “Ain’t That a Shame,” Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day,” and the Clovers’ “Love Potion Number Nine” to establish the 1962 mood in American Graffiti.

Paul Simon also helped inspire Edgar Wright (a lover of genre films and the late George Romero) to write and direct Baby Driver. The film’s title is a steal from a bouncy Simon and Garfunkel track released back in 1970 on the duo’s Bridge Over Troubled Waters LP. Happily, it’s used over the movie’s end credits, certainly a jaunty way to wrap up the story. There was a time, following The Graduate, when Simon tried writing and starring in his own movie, One-Trick Pony. It didn’t work. Simon may be a musical genius, but a filmmaker he is not.  

A Little Danish in La La Land

In the City of the Angels (now newly known as City of Stars), April 25, 2017 has been officially proclaimed “La La Land Day.”  To celebrate this momentous event, dancers wearing bright primary colors will be dangled from bungee cords down the side of the L.A. City Hall tower. That seems a fitting salute to this award-winning film, on what is sure to be another day of sun. 

L.A. is clearly besotted by a movie that pays tribute to its own wacked-out glory. I know people who’ve already bought their tickets to a big event scheduled in late May for the Hollywood Bowl:  a La La Land Concert, with the movie accompanied by a hundred-piece live orchestra and (presumably) by anyone who cares to sing along. 

Personally, these events aren’t for me, even though I thrill to the excitement of musical theatre. I grew up with a strong appreciation for musicals performed live, on stage, and it’s rare for me to see a movie musical that outshines its stage version. I’ll make an exception for West Side Story (great film!), but I firmly believe that a true stage metamusical, like A Chorus Line, shouldn’t even try to work as cinema. 

Which makes it curious that today’s Broadway producers keep looking to Hollywood for new material. Check out how many of the current long-running Broadway musicals originated as films: Aladdin, Kinky Boots, School of Rock, Waitress, The Lion King. And this season’s new hopefuls include musicalized stage versions of Anastasia, Amélie, and Groundhog Day.  

I’m particularly obsessed with stage musicals right now because a young writer who’s near and dear to me, Jeff Bienstock, is just back from Denmark, where his original musical (with composer Andrea Daly) had its world premiere. Their Legendale moves in and out of the videogame universe, and its cast includes a Wild Warrior, a Cow Maiden, a creepy Alchemist, and several Zombie Robots, along with more everyday folk. The head of Denmark’s Fredericia Theater, Søren Møller, snapped up Legendale when he saw a workshop production in New York City. As he told the opening night Danish crowd, the show made him feel he was watching beloved films of his childhood: ET, Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark . He emphasized that he fell in love with the Legendale script partly because of its cinematic possibilities. 

The rear of the Fredericia Theater stage is spanned by huge curved panels encrusted with thousands of LED lights. Through the magic of technology, Legendale’s audiences could see behind the actors such glowingly realistic effects as a gushing waterfall, a fiery explosion, soaring birds, and trees swaying gently in the wind.  In Søren’s words, Legendale is “changing the perspective of what theatre can be.” Other musicals included on the Fredericia Theater’s roster of late are direct stage adaptations of big Hollywood animated musicals: Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and DreamWorks’ The Prince of Egypt. These too take advantage of the Danish theater’s spectacular electronic wizardry. So little Denmark, where per capita funding for cultural activities far exceeds anything we’ve ever had (or are likely to have) in the U.S., is expanding the horizons of theatre production by way of the inspiration of the cinema.

For the youngest generation of playgoers it may occasionally be hard to tell the difference. Somewhere on  Facebook’s Fredericia Theater site, I spotted mention of an overheard comment in praise of Legendale – “En pige på omkring syv år sagde: ‘Det var en god film’” Which of course is Danish for “A seven-year-old girl said, ‘That was a good movie.’”  

Lights Out for “La La Land”

Well, I’ve just finished watching the most screwed-up Oscar broadcast in history. I’m frustrated and baffled . . . and how else is a viewer supposed to feel when a Best Picture winner is announced and then (mid-acceptance speech) the Oscar is rescinded?  Not that the eventual winner, Moonlight, is unworthy. Frankly, I’d like to watch this film again, because -- though I recognized some fine performances -- I wasn’t among those who fell in love with the total package. But in any case I was rooting for La La Land, for the honor of my hometown, and for the revival of musicals on the silver screen.

I’ve been thinking about musicals a lot since I finished reading a highly touted new novel by the British author Zadie Smith. Swing Time begins with two little mixed-race London girls who are wild about dance. Their passion is fueled by the hours they’ve spent in front of the telly, watching the great old musicals. One that figures prominently in the narrator’s recollection is Swing Time, in which (in a number called “Bojangles of Harlem”) Fred Astaire dances elegantly with three shadow-images of himself, all of them done up in blackface in tribute to Bill Robinson and the great black tap dancers of the era. And when watching something called Ali Baba Goes to Town the narrator is surprised to spot an actual African-American featured dancer, Jeni Le Gon (1916-2012), whose unusual legacy becomes part of the plot. As a more recent inspiration, Michael Jackson appears too, via his Thriller music video. 

In the course of the story, the two little girls grow up. One becomes a professional dancer, with some chorus-line successes on the London stage (she’s Hot Box cutie #1 in a revival of Guys and Dolls) until life takes its toll. The narrator, smarter and less agile, goes the university route. Unexpectedly, she becomes the personal assistant to a world-famous Australian singer-dancer whose character and blonde beauty obviously borrow from such gifted self-promoters as Madonna and Lady Gaga. The celebrity becomes temporarily infatuated with Africa, swooping down from her heights to play at philanthropy while taking on some new dance styles, a new lover, and an adopted baby girl. It’s cultural appropriation to the nth degree, and the playing out of this story is set against those of the narrator’s social activist mother and her childhood friend.  There’s much in this novel that’s grim and sad, but the joy of dance remains, both in the rituals of an African village and in a final image of a struggling little family group dancing on the balcony of a London tenement flat.

It was joy I wanted on Oscar night, and (despite some overly silly stuff from host Jimmy Kimmel) I was happy to see dance held in a place of honor. Justin Timberlake and his crew can dance down my aisles any day. There was lovely, magical dancing in the Moana number for which Lin-Manuel Miranda did not become an EGOT. And of course “City of Stars” from La La Land got the Astaire-Rogers treatment it deserved. But I’d like to dance some flamenco on the heads of Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, or those important-looking guys with the suits and briefcases from Pricewaterhouse-Coopers . . . whoever was responsible for the wrong name being read at what should have been the evening’s high point. But, come to think of it, La La Land is about melancholy as well as joy, and so maybe its fate is appropriate. I guess we should shrug our shoulders, face the music, and dance.

Postscript: The latest word is that there are two identical sets of Price-Waterhouse envelopes, one on each side of the stage. In the confusion of a complicated set change, Beatty was handed the wrong envelope, was confused by what he read (Emma Stone, La La Land) but passed the buck to Dunaway. So lots of blame to go around. 

Fred Astaire as "Bojangles of Harlem," Swing Time