The Screengrab : annette funicello

Screengrab Review: "The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

A new documentary, The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story, makes a pretty convincing case for its heroes as major cultural figures of the latter half of the twentieth century, especially in terms of their inescapable, pervasive influence: as the only songwriters Walt Disney ever put on staff at his studio, Richard and Robert Sherman were responsible for many a tune that, in the words of John Landis, "drilled" its way into the skulls of millions. The sons of a Tin Pan Alley songwriter named Al Sherman, Robert--the older, more serious one, who now looks like Robert Morse on Mad Men--and Richard--the younger, more effusive, giddier one, who in old photos looks like Oscar Levant--began dabbling in the business in the 1950s, a period when Robert, who describes himself as a frustrated novelist, did a lot of writing with other people. The brothers cemented their partnership, and found themselves on their true career path, when they scored a hit for Annette Funicello, then a teen idol as the Mouseketeer with the rack. That got them an audience with Disney, who set them to work on a movie version of the Mary Poppins books by P. L. Travers, and who was confirmed in his suspicions that they were his boys when the Shermans got ahold of a copy of one of Travers's books and unwittingly built an outline based on the same six chapters that Disney had underlined in his own copy.

The Mary Poppins project turned out to be more of an obstacle course than the brothers expected; ever the dreamer, Disney had put a lot of thought into sweat into it before he'd made any headway in persuading Travers--who Robert Sherman describes as "a witch", his jowls trembling faintly, as if afraid that she still might be able to hear him--to sell him the rights to the material. The Shermans were just two of many Disney employees called upon to soft soap the lady, until she relented and permitted Julie Andrews to descend from the skies with an umbrella in her mitts. (At the premiere, Travers sat through the movie with gritted teeth and, at the end, turned to Disney to sweetly tell him that now she'd have to get to work reclaiming her vision. Even more sweetly, he replied, "That ship has sailed." I'd hate to think what he'd have said to Lewis Carroll or Rudyard Kipling.) By the time the Shermans picked up their Oscars for Mary Poppins, they were practically old Disney hands, having already written songs for The Parent Trap a number of less-remembered Disney features (In Search of the Castaways, The Sword in the Stone, Big Red, etc.) The morning after, they marched into Uncle Walt's office, brandishing their prizes. "Well, boys," he greeted them, "you hit a home run. Just remember the bases were loaded." It's funny how many stories about Walt Disney seem to be about how lucky he was that more of the people he engaged in conversation weren't packing heat.

The documentary is full of interview subjects who point out that the Shermans, who for Disney also scored The Jungle Book, The Happiest Millionaire, The Aristocats, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks and also wrote "It's a Small World After All", brought a musical-theater approach to his films. Another way of putting it is that they helped establish the notion that feature films for children, including if not especially animated features, had to be designed as musicals. Whatever you think of this, it turned out that when the Shermans had helped ensure a market for their work after they left Disney Studios at the end of the '60s, depressed over Walt's death and the feeling that the place was becoming less like a family and more like a factory. They found that they were much in demand by filmmakers who were looking to get a bite of Disney's market niche, starting with James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli, who hired them for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and including the makers of Snoopy, Come Home, The Magic of Lassie, The Slipper and the Rose, the Reader's Digest films based on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and the Steven Spielberg production An American Tail. Richard even slips in the surprising information that his favorite of all their scores is the one they did for Hanna-Barbera's 1973 cartoon version of Charlotte's Web.

The Boys was directed by the Sherman cousins: Gregory V. Sherman, who's Richard's son, and Jeffrey C. Sherman, Robert's eldest boy. They appear briefly in the movie themselves, mostly to stress the unusual nature of their collaboration, which is that it's apparently unusual for members of their different clans to see each other in public and not cross the street to avoid saying hello. For as long as any of the younger Shermans can remember, when they got dragged along to public events where both brothers were likely to appear, the rule was to politely say hello and then decamp to the corner of the room farthest from whichever end the other Shermans were seated. It doesn't appear that this was the result of some calamitous break; the brothers just don't socialize, which sort of makes sense when you consider how much time they had to spend trapped in a room together when they were working. (Alan Menken, part of the team that would displace the brothers at Disney around the time of The Little Mermaid, says that he tries to choose his collaborators based on who he wouldn't mind spending a lot of time with, and marvels that anybody could do it at all with a member of their family.)

It's just that, at some point, the arrangement seems to have gotten a little nuts, to the point that Robert didn't think of informing his brother when, after the death of his wife and a lifetime spent in California, he decided to move to London. A number of people invoke Robert's war service, which included a tour of the Nazi death camps, to explain what they see as his darker nature, and there's a prickly moment when Angela Lansbury, the star of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, admits to wondering what could have been going through Robert's head when he saw the action climax to that film, in which a bunch of animated suits of armor and Ang on a flying broomstick fend off a Nazi invasion of Britain. In the end, though, some things can't be explained, just marveled at. The most telling contrast in the movie may be in the interview footage in which the cousins try to get their fathers to discuss their relationship and the nature of their estrangement. Richard tries to, tears up, and begs off, complaining that it's all too "personal." Robert can't seem to understand what there is to talk about. Family snapshots don't have to bore in to reveal a great deal.

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

HEAD (1968)

I think just about anyone who’s familiar with the Monkees’ sweet, goofy Peter Tork was bummed by the actor/musician’s recent diagnosis with head and neck cancer (although, apparently, the prognosis is currently good). And I think no matter how silly or cynically conceived hippies found the Pre-Fab Four back in the sixties, the songs the TV band had written for them (“I’m a Believer,” “Daydream Believer,” “Steppin’ Stone,” etc.) are a helluva lot better than most of the songs being written for today’s prefabricated music industry shills, most of whom don’t even have the self-awareness to be self-deprecating and more than a little embarrassed by their place in the pop culture firmament. To their credit, Tork and his bandmates Mickey Dolenz (the funny one), Davy Jones (the cute one) and Michael Nesmith (the smart one) tried their best to rebel against their corporate overlords with Head, a big-screen attempt at image-smashing phantasmagoria that plays like an LSD-inspired episode of the group’s small-screen show, i.e. a brainy, mostly well-behaved mind-fuck that’s actually a lot more entertaining and thought-provoking than some of the more “authentic” freak-outs of the era, what with the underwater imagery accompanying the haunting “Porpoise Song,” the burlesque meditations on fame and the peculiar cameos by the likes of Victor Mature, Annette Funicello and Frank Zappa with a cow.

HIGH FIDELITY (2000)

That High Fidelity is playfully self-conscious and yet not overly precious is a testament to both director Stephen Frears, here smoothly segueing between goofy comedy and sobering drama, as well as star (and co-writer) John Cusack, whose turn as romantically challenged record store owner Rob stands as one of his finest performances. Retaining the ragamuffin spirit of Nick Hornby’s source novel, Frears’ funny and incisive adaptation boasts two superb supporting players in Jack Black and Todd Louiso as Rob’s employees, as well as a script that refuses to sentimentalize the stunted-maturity failings of its protagonist. Rob is a man-child whose compulsive habit of concocting lists – about favorite songs and past break-ups – speaks to the vital role music plays in his romantic life, while also serving as his means of engaging in self-analysis through a safe, detached filter. A bit too much of Cusack’s narration and dialogue (taken verbatim from Hornby’s novel) lands with a writerly thud on screen, but the actor’s warts-and-all performance – unafraid to posit his protagonist as a navel-gazing prick, and still capable of making him endearing – is so energized that it overshadows any occasional missteps.

LAST DAYS (2005)

The high point of Gus Van Sant’s Béla Tarr-inspired “death trilogy” (following 2002’s Gerry and 2003’s Elephant), Last Days charts the final, pedestrian events in the life of a Kurt Cobain surrogate (Michael Pitt) in and around his Pacific Northwest estate. A ruminative, melancholy work with little interest in traditional narrative, Van Sant’s evocative gem aims mainly to situate viewers in a particular physical environment and headspace. In this case, that’s the remote residence and fuzzy mind of a shuffling, head-downturned, shaggy-haired rock star who wanders about his property like a ghost burdened by some ill-defined psychological and emotional misery. Rife with ambiguous religious overtones that contribute to an atmosphere of spiritual malaise, obliquely addressing the relationship between image and reality, and depicting its protagonist – constricted by claustrophobic full-frame compositions – as beset by hangers-on and record studio execs who take but don’t give, Last Days operates as a richly textured, arrestingly evocative avant-garde hypothesis about the forces that might have contributed to Cobain’s suicidal demise.

SINGLES (1992)

No one will mistake Singles for a great rom-com, but viewed as a snapshot of a very particular musical era, Cameron Crowe’s 1992 film holds up surprisingly well. The story has to do with two on-again, off-again couples (Campbell Scott and Kyra Sedgwick, Matt Dillon and Bridget Fonda) attempting to navigate choppy romantic waters. However, despite Crowe’s reasonably sturdy dramatization of twentysomethings in search of love and their post-collegiate identities – as well as his inconsistent (but far-from-disastrous) decision to have characters break the fourth wall to deliver commentary – the film’s lasting appeal has as much to do with timing as with storytelling. By setting the action in a Seattle grunge scene on the brink of exploding, Crowe hopelessly dated his film. Yet that turns out to be a good thing, since Singles, bolstered by cameos and performances by various members of the bands (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains) that would temporarily make Seattle the epicenter of rock, while comfortably rooted in the damp, sleepy, basketball-loving atmosphere of his Pacific Northwest milieu, proves an engaging, enduring time capsule.

GRACE OF MY HEART (1996)

This movie is character actress Illeana Douglas's best role to date. As in Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine and I'm Not There, Grace of My Heart attempts to create a transcendent reality for the stories about Carole King, who some readers may need to be reminded was one of the Brill Building songwriters of the early '60s who later went on to have commercial success as a singer-songwriter with her album Tapestry. Perhaps you saw her on Stephen Colbert's show. In this movie, she is known as Denise Waverly. Denise comes to work in the Brill Building for a Phil Spector-alike played by John Turturro, writing songs for girl groups. She takes up with her co-songwriter, a Gerry Goffin-alike played by Eric Stolz (among the real-life Goffin-King compositions: "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "The Loco-Motion," "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"), but their marraige falls apart. Later, she moves to California and takes up with a Brian Wilson-alike played by Matt Dillon. Even though it's not as smart as the Haynes rock fictions, it's quite a lovely little movie with lots of nice touches to people familiar with the characters portrayed. I especially enjoy the faux-Wilson's mental breakdown while working on the movie's version of Smile, the real-life album that broke Brian Wilson's spirit for a time.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Meatheads at the Mike: The Scarlett Johansson-Leonard Nimoy Connection

Phil Nugent — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

On the occasion of the release of Scarlett Johansson's debut album, Matthew Oshinsky has assembled a handy wrap-ups of actors, or at least professional camera subjects, turned vocalists. It comes divided into categories: "the teenyboppers" (Annette Funicello, David Cassidy, Hillary Duff); "former child stars" (a category that, perhaps surprisingly, seems to be the likeliest to yield an actual recording career, along the lines of those enjoyed by Janet Jackson, Phil Collins, and Alanis Morissette); and my personal favorite, "former soap stars" (including Rick Springfield, who Oshinsky notes "was already a popular singer in his native Australia when he suddenly found himself on millions of afternoon TV screens in 1981 [on General Hospital] and learned that he didn’t know what popularity meant"). For those fully fledged adult mainstream celebrities who decide that this is their big chance to show that they've still got what they had at the high school talent show, Oshinsky favors the label "Meatheads." Here we find your Russell Crowes, your Eddie Murphys, your Steven Seagals (no shit, really!?), and Bruce Willis, whose 1987 Motown release The Return of Bruno (with backup work by Booker T. Jones and members of the Temptations) tried to hedge its bets by presenting itself as a "soundtrack" to an HBO special in which Willis pretended that he was pretending to be a legendary white soul singer on the comeback trail. He thus hedged his bets in a way that, in this specialized field, passed for clever, inviting people who noticed that his music sucked to treat the whole thing as a joke. His hideous, malformed cover of the Staples Singers' "Respect Yourself" made it to number five on the charts anyway. If I live to be a thousand, I will never understand how anyone could miss the 1980s.

Oshinsky names Jennifer Lopez and David Hasselhoff the queen and king of this niche of pop cross-pollination, noting that Hasselhoff's second album, the 1989 Looking for Freedom,” "shot to No.1 in Deutschland on the strength of the title track, which was embraced by thousands of Germans looking for something American and easy to understand." (This may be closest that anyone has ever come to describing David Hasselhoff's career as being easy to understand.) But he also knows that anything touched by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy just has a special magic to it. "It is unknown if Mr. Shatner intended for his 1968 recording of poetry and pop covers, The Transformed Man, to be the galaxy’s funniest album, even 40 years later, but it’s a serious contender. Mr. Nimoy’s 1969 record, The Touch of Leonard Nimoy, was his fourth and last until 1995’s wistfully titled You Are Not Alone, which presumably referred to someone other than him being with us." I have no idea just what to make of the fact that the author seems to have gone out of his way to snub every crossover pin-up who earned my sister's devotion when we were living under the same roof: namely, David Cassidy's brother Shaun; John Schneider, of The Dukes of Hazzard; and David Soul, who before attaining stardom on Starsky and Hutch used to appear on talk shows singing in a ski mask so that his devastating good looks wouldn't distract viewers from admiring the beauty of his music, and whose big hit, the tender ballad "Don't Give Up on Us Baby", would be rediscovered by disk jockeys with sick senses of humor every time he was arrested again for beating up a woman. Unless I hallucinated all that, but I don't think I did. Drugs of that quality never made it into the Walthall County school system back in the day.

The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part II

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE FUGITIVE (1993)

The Fugitive might not have been the first TV series remade for the big screen, but it was almost certainly the one that proved how bankable- and even respectable- such adaptations could be. The film took as its inspiration one of the most influential series of its day, a four-season cat-and-mouse story of an escaped, convicted killer out to clear his name. While The Fugitive remains true to the spirit of the series, director Andrew Davis and his screenwriters do so in a way that reconfigures the formula for the big screen, beginning with a famous, still-impressive bus crash. The film also benefits from placing nearly equal emphasis on the pursued Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) as it does on pursuer, U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerrard (Tommy Lee Jones, who in a rare display of Academy affection for a genre performance won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar). The Fugitive also has a sense of place that’s rare for a big-budget thriller, utilizing Chicago so perfectly that the story becomes unimaginable in any other setting. But the best scenes in the film are the ones that remain truest to their television inspirations, specifically the near-miss suspense sequences in which Kimble barely manages to evade capture through a combination of luck and formidable intelligence. Of all the TV adaptations up to that time, it was The Fugitive that showed that films of this kind, when done right, could be much more than a simple grab for nostalgia-driven box office, and in doing so became more or less the standard by which big-budget TV-to-film translations are judged.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)

Yes, really. A huge hit on its original release, Mission: Impossible was mostly dismissed by critics as a dopey Tom Cruise action movie, while being criticized by many viewers for having too much plot, not enough stuff blowing up. But a second look at the film reveals what a gripping suspense movie it really is, translating the formula of the TV series- gadgets, undercover missions, realistic masks, and the like- into the form of a summer tentpole release. Mission: Impossible contains at least three or four wonderfully tense scenes- the opening operation gone fatally wrong, the tête-à-tête at Prague’s Akvarium, that awesome Rififi-esque break-in at Langley- more than most Hollywood thrillers can claim. In addition, the film represents the most successful attempt by director Brian DePalma to fuse the silky-smooth cinema-saturated style of his most characteristic work with a big-budget blockbuster, and in the process becomes a surprisingly lean and satisfying thriller. If nothing else, Mission: Impossible deserves respect as the only film in the series to date that’s remained true to the team-centric nature of the show, with subsequent efforts becoming increasingly focused on Tom Cruise saving the world. Supporting players like Jon Voight, Vanessa Redgrave and Henry Czerny make such a strong impression here that it’s a shame that Cruise has become so intent on hogging the spotlight in later films in the franchise.

THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)

Netflix, video stores and pay cable movie channels are littered with the toxic waste spew of that very special category of cinematic detritus: the SNL movie. Sure, the never-as-funny-as-it-should-be/ never-as-bad-as-its-rep Saturday Night Live has produced more than its share of legitimate comedy stars and second bananas over the years, from Chevy Chase and Bill Murray to Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. But one-dimensional SNL characters, barely tolerable in five minute doses, can be downright unbearable in full-length features (i.e., It’s Pat, A Night At the Roxbury, Coneheads, etc.). Wayne’s World is one notable exception, but to my way of thinking, The Blues Brothers is far and away the best of the SNL films (and, for the purposes of this list, one of my favorite TV-to-movie adaptations), transforming a recurring, ego-driven musical duo (whose routine and appeal I never really understood) into iconic figures in a John Landis/John Belushi/Dan Akroyd phantasmagoria that bends over backwards in its efforts to entertain: car crashes! cast-of-thousands musical numbers! more car crashes! Illinois Nazis! country and western! rhythm and blues! John Candy! Aretha Franklin! Carrie Fisher with a machine gun! (And did I mention the car crashes?) I mean, fuck! The endless, mind-boggling demolition-derby pile-up of police cars in the climactic car chase alone is worth the price of admission (take that, CGI!), but the musical numbers (by Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, John Lee Hooker, et. al.) are even better, and introduced me and countless other white people to a whole bunch of talented black people we’d never fully appreciated before. And if all that weren’t enough, The Blues Brothers is endlessly quotable (“We’re on a mission from God,” “Three orange whips,” etc.) and spawned a pretty damn tasty jambalaya at the late-lamented Cambridge House of Blues...and how many movies can you say that about? True, The Blues Brothers also spawned the execrable Blues Brothers 2000...but the original, indispensable 1980 version will forever stand as the Cadillac Ranch of movies, a bizarre, fascinating, coke-fueled white elephant at the crossroads of cracked genius and howling oblivion.

HEAD (1968)

It was 1968 and the studio chiefs were very confused. There was something called “youth culture” or “the counterculture” or whatever – you know, dirty smelly hippies who wanted to see weird shit at the movies! Hopelessly out of touch, these suits had to turn to the scruffy people for help. The kids seemed to like that TV show The Monkees, so Columbia Pictures hired the show’s producer Bob Rafelson, and he teamed with that really weird Jack Nicholson dude from the Corman pictures, and they smoked a bunch of weed and they came up with Head. Surreal, satirical, self-referential, psychedelic and pretty much plotless, the movie bore little resemblance to the kiddie show that spawned it and failed at the box office. In retrospect, it never had a chance; the heads wouldn’t be caught dead seeing a Monkees movie and the young fans of the show wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. But there’s enough inspired weirdness, bizarre cameos (Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Victor Mature and Sonny Liston) and good music (notably the Michael Nesmith-composed “Circle Sky”) to make it a worthy cult object, if not a great movie.

THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD! (1988)

The Naked Gun has very little competition as the least likely TV-to-movie transition of all time. It’s derived from a series that only yours truly and four other people watched, one that lasted six episodes and went off the air six years before the movie reached theaters. But Police Squad! had a pedigree; the Airplane! team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker created it, star Leslie Nielsen was nominated for an Emmy for his deadpan turn as Lt. Frank Drebin, and the show became a cult favorite through reruns and home video. Even so, The Naked Gun was an unexpected smash hit, spawning two lousy sequels and an entire craptacular genre of Leslie Nielsen parodies. Don’t hold those sins against it, though. The Naked Gun is a well-oiled laugh machine – from the slapstick stylings of the always hilarious O.J. Simpson to the climactic baseball game honored in an earlier Screengrab list, it’s like a MAD magazine come to life, complete with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it marginalia crammed into every corner of the screen. It’s really the last time Nielsen was ever funny, and that goes triple for the ZAZ triumvirate, who have separately and together foisted the likes of Brain Donors, Rat Race and Scary Movie 4 on their once loyal fans.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

The second and final season of Twin Peaks ended in a flurry of bizarre cliffhangers, so when rumors of a movie began to circulate, those few of us who were still watching shared a brief moment of hope that at least some resolution would be forthcoming. Then we heard that Fire Walk with Me would be a prequel covering the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life and, well, so much for that idea. Presumably the reasoning was that a reboot of the story would draw in a larger audience than a continuation, or at least that’s how we imagine David Lynch explained it to the suits at New Line. It’s a safe bet that 99% of any potential new audience fled the theater within the movie’s first 30 minutes, set in a deliberately alienating bizarro Twin Peaks called Deer Meadow, where the cops are unfriendly, the waitresses are hags and the FBI is represented by Chris Isaak as a pale echo of Kyle MacLachlan’s Special Agent Dale Cooper. (MacLachlan makes only fleeting appearances in the movie, unaware that his career is Showgirls-bound.) But those who left early missed out on one of Lynch’s most intense and emotionally charged fever dreams. Stripped of the quirky humor that had soured into tiresome shtick long before the series ended, Fire Walk with Me unwraps Laura Palmer from her plastic for a one-of-a-kind descent into hell. Sheryl Lee burns through the screen in a shoulda-been star-making performance and Lynch cooks up some of his most indelible set pieces, most notably the subtitled “Pink Room” sequence set in what appears to be Satan’s roadhouse. Just don’t ask us about the David Bowie cameo.

- Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak

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