Hey folks, Harry here... As a lifelong afficionado of the Musical genre it often times dismays me to think about the current sad state of affairs. In fact, earlier this evening I was watching a print of YELLOW SUBMARINE and was talking with various friends afterwards about the magic of musicals. Traditional narrative constraints can be applied, but also... it's a medium where you can simply break all the rules. You're allowed to look directly into the camera.. you can dance OFF THE SET... the set can continue for a completely unrealistic length of time. Inanimate objects can suddenly come to life, water can flow backwards, the clouds can become staircases that you can dance up and down. In a musical... everything and anything can and should happen. What has happened is to much of reality has squeezed this fanciful form. CABARET, EVITA, A CHORUS LINE... Practical, stuck in reality.... not magical. With PTA... At least with the fanciful aspects of MAGNOLIA... he completely demonstrates that... point of completely leaving behind reality and things that just HAPPEN... and let loose with the thoughts and fanciful notions that we trivialize in our everyday lives. Whatever he chooses to do next... I can't wait to see or hear about.
Hey,
Longtime reader, first time writer blah blah blah, I'm sure you hear all that a lot. You may have already heard about this, but I'm a die-hard PT Anderson fan, so I thought I'd just make sure...
This is from The National Post:
Anderson has four or five musicals in his head that he'd like to make, with Mann and Apple as possible collaborators. First, he wants to make something small, a shift from the three-hour-plus long Magnolia.
"I have a couple of thoughts," he says, of this unwritten film. "But I actually haven't been triggered to write it because I haven't found exactly the right music."
Could be interesting....as many Anderson fans know there was a scene in his first film, Hard Eight where Sam the Man Jackson is talking to Phillip Baker Hall and tells him he knows some guys, Floyd Gondolli, Jimmy Gator and Mumbles O'Mally. As you may remember, Phillip Baker Hall went on to play Floyd Gondolli in Boogie Nights and Jimmy Gator in Magnolia. "I would like to think that this is only a matter of coincidence." One could assume that Hall would play someone called Mumbles O'Mally in this possible musical....I also recall PT saying in an interview somewhere that he'd like to a musical someday and he loved Singin' in the Rain (which chronicled Hollywood's change from silent to talkies, a similarity to the way Boogie Nights chronicled Porno's change from film to video). Anyway, I'm babbling, but one last thing...John C. Reilly was asked in an interview about the "Wise Up" sequence in Magnolia, and the interviewer asked if PT was ever going to do an all out musical, and he said something to the effect of "I don't know, I'm always telling him he should do one."
Anyway, just wanted to give ya a heads up so you can look out for any info for us. Oh, and here's the link to the full article that Anderson was quoted from above.
Hopefully some of this might come in handy.
Crusher Creel
