May 24–31, 2001

movies

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Moon Over Broadway/Original Cast Album: Company/Don’t Look Back

($24.95-$29.95 DVD)

In the past half-century, 75-year-old filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker has helped to revolutionize non-fiction film, doing away with narrators and staged interviews and simply catching people in the act. Characters in Pennebaker’s films don’t address the camera; as much as possible, they ignore it, which is, of course, exactly what he wants. He played a small role in the filming of Startup.com, a Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema hit which opens theatrically this week and was directed by his wife and frequent collaborator Chris Hegedus, along with newcomer Jehane Noujaim. But he’s best-known for music-themed films like Don’t Look Back or Monterey Pop, and for covering politics as far back as 1960 (Primary ) and as recently as the early ’90s (The War Room ).

What links his subjects, if anything, seems to be a fascination with the creative process, whether it’s molding a candidate’s image or the text of a Broadway show. The latter is the subject of Moon Over Broadway, Pennebaker’s most recently completed film. (He’s currently at work on a documentary on Southern music which will serve as a sort of companion to Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?. ) Set during the rehearsal (and rewriting) process for Ken Ludwig’s Moon Over Buffalo, the film reveals in rather startling detail the pressures which come to bear on a $2 million-plus Broadway show. Between a star (Carol Burnett) who hasn’t done theater in decades and a nail-biting playwright who by his own admission can’t write one-liners to save his life, the production is in trouble from the start. (At one point, the producers consider bringing in a dentist from Long Island to punch up the jokes.) While the playwright and director reference Feydeau and Stoppard, Burnett is busy remaking the play in her image, developing bits with costar Philip Bosco and generally behaving like a trouper, not a diva. In fact, Burnett comes off as the sanest character in the film (or second-sanest, after producer Rocco Landesman). At least she’s not praising Woody Allen one minute and writing hearing-aid jokes the next.

Original Cast Album, dating back to 1970, hasn’t got nearly as compelling a story. It’s a straightforward account of the marathon recording session for the album of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, a pressure-cooker environment in which the tension mounts as the hours grow later. True drama emerges only in the last ten minutes, as an exhausted Elaine Stritch struggles to nail her solo version of "The Ladies Who Lunch," trying to make up in brassiness what she’s lost in voice. Seeing Sondheim and (briefly) legendary director Harold Prince at work is priceless, but the film doesn’t have the scope to become truly engaging.

Don’t Look Back hardly needs another recommendation, at least for the film itself. Pennebaker’s record of Bob Dylan’s 1965 English tour has become synonymous with music documentary, and the images in the film — like the proto-video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues" — are among those most strongly associated with him. Dylan is at his most perversely charismatic, and if the film provides no answers, it certainly raises some fascinating questions. More importantly, the film, like the other two above, has been reissued by Docurama in exemplary fashion, in a beautiful print and with enlightening commentary. Pennebaker and Dylan’s tour manager Bob Neuwirth grace the Don’t Look Back disc, while Pennebaker, Stritch and Prince reminisce on Original Cast Album. Most fascinating, though, is Moon Over Broadway, which features recollections from Pennebaker and Hegedus, Burnett (via an NPR interview), Bosco, all three of the play’s producers, its writer and director. Not surprisingly, they’re frequently humbled by what they see in the film, but it’s a tribute to Pennebaker’s technique that none feels too sandbagged to revisit the experience via his film.

Far East

(Mon., May 28, 9 p.m., WHYY TV-12)

PBS’ "Stage on Screen" has showcased some fantastic adaptations of theatrical works. This is not one of them. The screen version of A.R. Gurney’s play keeps the cast and the director, but dispenses with the theatrical narrator in favor of a conventional presentation, one which never fails to avoid imagination at every turn. As a naval officer stationed south of Tokyo in the years approaching the Vietnam War, Michael Hayden (Murder One) conveys a too-emphatic dedication appropriate to his wayward beer-fortune heir. But the play gets so caught up in his WASPy anxieties — namely, will his superior officer’s wife tell his family back home about his romance with a Japanese girl? — that all sense of perspective is lost. If the filming weren’t so blandly objective, you might take the lack of exterior viewpoints for some kind of statement, but as it is, the omission seems merely sloppy.