My Year of Flops (21 page)

Their dreams of living, in the immortal words of the opening song, “L to the A-R-G-E large!” are suddenly shattered, as nothing can compete with the godlike power of a geek with a pad and pen doling out a negative review on television.

A young, disconcertingly hunky Nolte (he didn't yet embody terms like “grizzled,” “hard-living,” “zombie-like,” or “dead-looking”), wearing what appears to be a Tarzan wig, tries to cheer up a fellow actor by unconvincingly arguing, “Listen, no matter what this review says, the play was a great experience for me. I mean, it is about process, right?”

At the opening-night party, Hobbs hooks up with Beth, a hideous shrew played with the world's worst Southern accent by Tracey Ullman. Beth flatters Hobbs' creative ego by gushing, “Your feelings about your work are one of the things I love most about you.”

We then cut to a shrieking baby and Beth screeching at her overwhelmed husband, “Don't pretend to be asleep just because you got the baby the last four times. What's the matter, is the artist tired?” At least she didn't speak ill of process. Never denigrate the process. This is one marriage that cannot and should not be saved, a doomed union with the words “Do Not Resuscitate” tattooed on its forehead. We then skip ahead six years. Beth and her daughter are long gone, and Hobbs' career is floundering.

That all changes when Hobbs blows an audition but picks up an unlikely pal/temporary employer in superproducer Burke and a love
interest in Cathy Breslow (Joely Richardson), Hollywood's last idealist and one of Adler's employees. After the unsuccessful audition, Hobbs spies Adler lurching down the sidewalk and sobbing softly to himself while filled with the soul-shaking despair most folks reserve for the death of a child. It takes only his driver being 20 minutes late to reduce Adler's Master of the Universe to a state of childlike helplessness. “Look at me. You'd think I was a writer,” he moans to Hobbs before hiring him as a chauffeur.

Brooks plays a man so at ease with his own superficiality that I almost didn't want him to evolve. His Silver surrogate loves the Hollywood machine. He's the kind of wheeler-dealer who lights up like a Christmas tree when Julie Kavner's character offers to show him where the tracking is done for upcoming movies. For Brooks' big shot, that is the real heart of Hollywood, a wonderland of pure commerce. Brooks invites sympathy for this showbiz devil; the emotional transparency and simplicity of his character is beguiling.

Brooks is so good that he throws off the balance of the film, as
I'll Do Anything
isn't really about Adler. It's about what happens when Hobbs' ex-wife reenters his life just long enough to inform him that she's going to jail for a long time and that their six-year-old daughter Jeanne (Whittni Wright) will now be his sole responsibility.

Jeanne is very much Beth's child. But
I'll Do Anything
posits Jeanne as such a blindingly cute moppet that she snaps up a major role in a sitcom pilot without even consciously pursuing an acting career. She simply accompanies her dad to an audition where the gods of television decide it would be a crime for her not to be grinning her way into America's collective heart every week as an adorably racist girl who learns life lessons at a multiracial orphanage.

I'll Do Anything
's neurotic show-business types stop talking about their feelings just long enough to warble about their emotions in maudlin ballads and dance their feelings in splashy production numbers shot in long, involved takes that the director desperately hopes will hide his film's lack of visual style.

Good musicals make the inherently artificial act of people breaking
spontaneously into song and dance seem natural. But there's a fatal disconnect between
I'll Do Anything
's talky, touchy-feely chatfests and its strangely impersonal musical numbers. They seem to inhabit different universes. Even subpar Prince songs that sashay into the middle of the road with big plastic grins and jazz fingers a-flying can't give the film soul. The musical
I'll Do Anything
is the single whitest film ever made, with the possible exception of
Nights In Rodanthe
(which, ironically, was directed by a black man).

A musical that sends audiences home without a song in their hearts is in serious trouble. A musical that sends audiences home with only vague memories of being inundated with a mélange of interchangeable mid-period Prince quasi-funk is fucked. True,
I'll Do Anything
offers the odd spectacle of Nolte croaking a duet with Wright in a barroom rasp, but “Nolte Sings!” was an offer test audiences found easy to refuse.
I'll Do Anything
ended up being a victim of the very test-screening process it limply critiques. But the process—well, that had to be heartbreaking as well.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

It Ain't Over 'Til The Old Lady Sings Book-Exclusive Case File: Mame

Keenen Ivory Wayans is not known as a Confucius-like purveyor of profundities. But when
The A.V. Club
interviewed Anna Faris, she quoted him as saying something borderline wise: “There's no vanity in comedy.”

Lucille Ball embodied that maxim on
I Love Lucy
. Ball began her career as a glamorous starlet, but in
I Love Lucy,
she was often a screeching, braying, flailing, desperate, lying, off-key mess. She was gloriously unencumbered by vanity. In her signature role, Ball played a big ball of misplaced ambition; she embraced looking awful and acting a fool. America loved her for it.

By the time 1974's
Mame
rolled around, Ball's philosophy had changed to, “Comedy is all vanity.” Her involvement in the project began with the kind of pride that goeth before the fall. Ball became convinced that Rosalind Russell's portrayal of the title character on Broadway and in 1958's
Auntie Mame
owed a debt to her portrayal of Lucy Ricardo, and she was intent on collecting.

So Ball lobbied hard for the lead role in
Mame,
the film version of Jerry Herman's hit Broadway musical adaptation of
Auntie Mame
. Snagging that plum role proved her professional undoing. Why was Ball so surreally miscast? For starters, just about everyone other than Ball felt the role should have gone to Angela Lansbury, a musical-comedy vet who picked up a Tony Award for the part in 1966. Herman begged Warner Bros. to let the sexy, vivacious Lansbury reprise her role for the big screen. He failed.

Lansbury was a frisky 41 when she picked up the Tony for
Mame
. When Ball bulldozed her way into the lead, she was 61 and recovering from a broken leg. Casting Ball in the lead role dramatically altered the show's dynamic. With Lansbury on Broadway,
Mame
was about a dynamic middle-aged bohemian whose life changes course when she becomes the guardian of a towheaded moppet. With Ball in the lead, it became the story of a sexagenarian enjoying a few laughs before the sweet embrace of the grave. The proto-beatniks and freethinkers in 1958's
Auntie Mame
embrace Rosalind Russell's title character because she's the sexy, swinging life of the party. The eccentrics of
Mame
gravitate toward Ball because they miss their grandmas and suspect she's got a big silver bowl of butterscotch candies squirreled away somewhere.

Beyond the fact that she was at least 15 years too old for the role, there was the minor concern that Ball couldn't sing or dance. At all. In
I Love Lucy,
Ball's ghastly singing was a running joke; in
Mame,
it was a cause for alarm. She wasn't much better at hoofing, either. It's never an encouraging sign when a choreographer's main concern is his leading lady throwing out a hip.

Mame
was supposed to open in late 1973, in time for Oscar consideration,
until executives took a look at the film and realized that even in a world where 1967's
Dr. Dolittle
got nominated for nine Academy Awards,
Mame
's Oscar chances fell somewhere between nonexistent and “are you fucking kidding me?”

The hyperbolic trailers for
Mame
try to transform the film's screaming faults into secret virtues, crowing that it's a “multimillion-dollar production that took two years to capture on film,” as if going overbudget and overschedule were suddenly points of pride. The trailers also alternately hail Ball as “the most unique and talented actress of our time” and “the most versatile actress of all time,” in a bone-dry monotone. Then again, Ball is beloved for her portrayals of everything from a kooky housewife to a slightly older kooky housewife.

Mame
opens with Patrick (Kirby Furlong) being dispatched to live with his eccentric Auntie Mame after his parents die. The kid arrives at Mame's palace of decadence in the midst of a wild party. The soiree finds Mame sporting a hair helmet with sideburns and wearing a lipstick-red pantsuit that looks like it was stitched together from one of Santa Claus' discarded uniforms. Nevertheless, she's in her element, presiding as a mother hen over a crazy coterie of artists and oddballs.

There's no point aiming for subtlety when you're playing a character this flamboyant, but it's hard to watch Ball vamp, quip, and pose, pose, pose while outfitted in a sea of head wraps, sequins, and gowns, and not see an aging transvestite.
Mame
caused Pauline Kael to wonder of Ball, “After 40 years in movies and TV, did she discover in herself an unfulfilled ambition to be a flaming drag queen?”

The stock-market crash of 1929 wipes out Mame's fortune, but her money troubles end when she's wooed by the colorfully named Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, a wealthy, kind Southern granny chaser with a crumb-catcher mustache and Foghorn Leghorn drawl. Beauregard (played by Robert Preston) takes Mame and Patrick home to meet his mama. He tells his mother, who resembles William H. Taft in a dress, that she'll love Mame the second they meet, perhaps because they're the same age.

After Mame finds happiness and security as the pampered wife
of an American aristocrat, all that's left is for Patrick to grow up to be stuffy old Bruce Davison over the course of a single song. Having grown up the pet of a fearless feminist iconoclast, Patrick rebels by becoming a reactionary bore and getting engaged to an insufferable debutante (Doria Cook-Nelson). In
Auntie Mame
—which I watched solely as preparation for this Case File, and not, as I worried at the time, as a way of purging the last remaining vestiges of my heterosexuality—the sequences with the adult Patrick feel stiff and theatrical. Yet the film built up such goodwill that I didn't particularly mind.

But in the Lucille Ball
Mame,
there's a cognitive dissonance to the third act. How did a happy little boy who flourished in the incandescent warmth of his aunt's love grow up to be a small-minded jerk? Why are we supposed to care about a drip who wears the polka-dot tie, red carnation, and blue-and-yellow checkered suit of a sad clown?

Patrick's deplorable adult personality can be read as a reaction to his aunt's wildness. After a childhood spent playing second fiddle to a cyclone of progressive ideas, Patrick gravitates to the security and safety of living and loving among bigots. If life is a banquet, as Mame's motto contends, then Patrick has chosen to spend it consuming weak tea and watercress sandwiches. Mame's joie de vivre has infected and inspired everyone around her but the little man who matters most.

But mainly, these scenes exist so kooky old Auntie Mame can stick it to Patrick's snobby would-be in-laws (Don Porter and Audrey Christie) with badly dated sass. When Mame meets the in-laws-to-be, they propose buying their children the property next door so they can simultaneously keep their loved ones close and undesirables away. This causes Mame to dip into a nearby phone booth and transform into her alter ego, Superbohemian. Putting her theatrical flair to good use, she invites the snobs to her extravagant home, where she dramatically announces that she's purchased the estate next to theirs so she can start a home for single women.