By MCN Editor editor@moviecitynews.com

Young Frankenstein In Seattle – Spoiler Free

Posted Monday, October 29th, 2007 - Comments Off on Young Frankenstein In Seattle – Spoiler Free
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August 27, 2007
The thrill and the horror of Young Frankenstein is that it, unlike The Producers, has the feel of the giant machine shows that have been hitting Broadway in recent years. For instance, the current Grease revival – generated not by the need for a revival, but as a guaranteed pre-sale based on a television contest that theoretically made intimate celebrities of the new Danny & Sandy. (I can’t wait for the all-Real World/Road Rules revival of Spring Awakening in a few years.) Or the insultingly bad, but terribly energetic turn of Legally Blonde from a teen girl cult movie into a teen girl cult Broadway show. Once we learned that Disney knew how to make a Broadway show as special as its family films, we can now expect hits when they make the transfer (even if Tarzan, their first non-musical movie turned musical theater show, flopped.)
Some of these shows, including the jukebox musicals, reach well beyond their roots. The Lion King does. So does Jersey Boys. And of course, The Producers. For me, Spamalot is the example of where the line is clearest. The show is at its best when it uses the Python movie as a starting point for its wonderful musical hall style humor, way off the narrative. The show is at its worst when pandering to the audience that is expecting to see “It’s just a flesh wound” or “Pink… no blue… agghhhhh!” Some moments just don’t transfer. And I am pleased to report that Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan had the good sense to realize that the little girl on the see-saw flying back into her bed was just not going to make it as anything but a laugh of recognition in their show and left it out.
In point of fact, Young Frankenstein does a pretty damned good job of walking that line. Reading the reviews in Seattle after first seeing the show on Friday, I was surprised how unilaterally they all seemed to argue that the show suffered from the “already know the lines” syndrome, especially in kicking at some of the performances. Not I. I was actually quite pleased to find that six of the seven major performers really did find their own space in creating these legendary characters for the stage, even when uttering the same lines.
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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon