Wednesday 31 July 2019

I'll Do Anything and A Dilly of a Pickle


Last time, when I covered Jackson Browne's role in attempting to bolster James L. Brooks' would-be musical I'll Do Anything, I said something that, with hindsight, might have come across as incredibly naive: "If, like me, you're into I'll Do Anything and yearn for the vaporised musical that never was, then any window you can get into what might have been is a precious thing." That last part is certainly true, but make no mistake - I'm not deluded enough to believe there's another soul on this planet who's anywhere near as invested in this blanked and blanked-out picture as I. Most people, if they're aware of the film at all, see only an unfortunate blip in Brooks' career, sandwiched in between the heavy-hitters Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets. I'm all alone in this idiosyncratic fixation of mine. The rest of the world will never know the joy of waiting for a VHS copy of Paul Mazursky's (equally effaced) 1993 feature The Pickle to arrive in the mail, just so as to view a two-minute trailer at the start hinting at the film as it was once meant to be, with all its Prince, King and O'Connor-written numbers intact. It was a unique experience that cost me $24. I leapt the chance to by The Pickle, following a tip-off as just what kinds of hidden treasures lay tucked away at the start of that tape. So when the VHS arrived, it was almost like I was uncovering this tiny pocket of oasis that had somehow survived an all-out apocalypse. I came away feeling truly giddy at the rare and wonderful world into which I had just glimpsed. I'll Do Anything, with Prince tunes and dancing studio hands, just as God (James L. Brooks) intended. It was only two minutes' worth of meagre, fleeting pieces, but it was as close to the actual thing as I was ever likely to get, and I was going to be happy with that, dammit. $24 well-spent. Only then I discovered that somebody had uploaded the entire opening to VHS release of The Pickle to YouTube a few months prior, meaning that I could have just gone online and watched the damned thing for free all along. Bum bum bum bum bum.

Do I have any regrets? Nah. I've previously been very upfront about how staunch an advocate I am for physical media. YouTube uploads come and ago, but I like having something solid, that I can hold in my hands, which stands as an artifact of Brooks' original vision. Tangible evidence that this buried musical was indeed once here. On top of which, the anticipation was a huge part of the thrill. And besides, I've now got a copy of this movie, The Pickle, which I likely wouldn't have happened across otherwise. It too has been buried by the sands of time. For good reason, you might say? I'm aware that, as Mazursky movies go, The Pickle doesn't exactly have the best of reputations, but the premise (high-minded director makes movie about giant space pickle) does at least sound intriguingly offbeat enough for me to give it 103 minutes of my time.



So how is the trailer? Obviously it's a very different beast with that vibrant, characteristically Prince backing track running throughout. In fact, it's startling just how immeasurably more alive this promo feels compared to the trailer that eventually surfaced for the final theatrical cut (which honed in more on the sentimental aspects of the film, at the expense of its sardonic love-hate missives to Hollywood). While the theatrical release seems narratively complete (more or less), I think you can tell that it was forced to expend a huge amount of its own blood upon the cutting room floor, leaving it in a functional but peculiarly languid state; here, it's borderline surreal just how much energy and freshness the trailer zips along with. This is a privileged look at a star-crossed picture that still believes in itself, shortly before the weight of the world swoops in and crushes its zestful spirit.

In addition to the film's infamously relinquished choreography, we also get a number of non-musical moments that weren't featured in the theatrical cut. These include:

  • A scene where Burke grabs hold of a tree trunk and shakes leaves onto himself and Matt (the characters' attire indicates that this would have happened during the sequence where Burke first talks Matt into becoming his chauffeur).
  • A scene with the younger (longer-haired) Matt and Beth kissing, at a more optimistic time in their relationship.
  • A scene where Jeannie embraces Matt while exclaiming, "I love you so much".
  • A moment with Matt prepping for his Mr Deeds screen test that isn't in the final montage.

The film rounds off with the unfulfilled promise that it would be "coming this Christmas". Sadly, no. The film missed the slated December 1993 release date and instead limped out into theatres, in its severely mutilated state, the following February, where it had its hide handed to it by a certain crass-com featuring a pet detective. But that's all spilled milk now. As things currently stand, a director's cut ever seeing the light of day seems like a futile pipe dream and, as such, this two-minute montage is probably the closest that most of us will ever get to experiencing the film pre-dismemberment. So get yourself a copy of The Pickle on VHS and cherish it dearly. Or, if you're not as bothered as me (and let's face it, you aren't) then click on that YouTube video while it lasts. But you'll never know the sheer thrill of having to wait fourteen days for a wad of magnetic tape to drop through your door just for a tantalising glimpse into an alternate universe where a forgotten ex-musical was allowed to be itself. That experience was purely mine.

Monday 29 July 2019

I'll Do Anything (Jackson Browne Edition)


So, we've already gone into I'll Do Anything and the tantalising case history of the hip and modern musical about life in Hollywood in the 1990s that was forced to jettison its array of songs by Prince, Carole King and Sinead O'Conner when the world decided that it wasn't ready for that kind of thing. There are further twists to the tale, however, ever more fingers in this supremely sticky pie and, happily, even more outlets in which the ghost of the film, as originally envisioned, is able to live on in its transmuted afterlife. If you're a fan of singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, then odds are good that you own a copy of his 1993 album I'm Alive, tucked away on which is a rather stirring track with the title of none other than "I'll Do Anything". The shared moniker is no coincidence, for at one time this was apparently slated to be the title track to James L. Brooks' ill-fated ex-musical. Browne brought this up in an interview he gave to host Sam Jones in a 2014 installment of the DirecTV series Off Camera, and he certainly does talk the talk. I was able to get hold of the interview in podcast form, and transcribed below are Browne's words on the matter. Note that in the actual interview Browne has a tendency to wander off into semi-comprehensible waffling, which I've done my best to scale down on here:

Browne: Since you brought up "I'll Do Anything", that was written for a musical, for a movie, called I'll Do Anything...

Jones: You're kidding me.

Browne: ...which before it was over, before it was released, they took...yeah, James Brooks movie, starring, uh, Albert Brooks, Nick Nolte, and uh, they had a lot of great music in that movie, and they didn't have the title song. They didn't feel they had the title song. And I never, never sign up for this kind of thing 'cos I'm all about reducing expectations and I can't, like, get on...but um, actually [David] Geffin called me and said look, you might as well take a crack at this, because other people have done it but they don't have the song, and if you write it...they need the song, give it a shot, and it's a good movie...But the song was about...it was gonna be sung by Albert Brooks, and it was funny...

Jones: No kidding.

Browne: It was about Albert Brooks singing to a test audience. I'm...I'm gonna ruin this song for you, right now...

Jones: It's ruined already!

Browne: Okay. Because in the movie he's a record producer. "I don't make art films, I make popcorn films!" And he's singing to a test audience that's about to view his latest film. He's pleading with them for a good report. He's singing to them, "Think of all we've meant to each other." And I knew this would be funny if it was really like, this is person who was basically [an] amoral person, pleading to be considered somebody of, you know like, think of what we've meant to each other. He's already told you he...has the crassest of ideals, all he does is make money...But I mean, it didn't get used in the movie. For whatever reason they took all the music out and I was left with a song that I would not have written for myself.

Jones: No kidding.

Browne: I wouldn't have written that song, at that time. As a matter of fact, one of the reviewers of the album when it came out was like, this is a co-dependency anthem...like, I'll do anything, I'll make the place a place for you and me, it was very, as you say, desperate. And that's what was gonna be so funny...I kind of tricked myself. I never take that kind of assignment, I'm adverse to it. But in that case I wrote one of my favorite songs.

If, like me, you're into I'll Do Anything and yearn for the vaporised musical that never was, then any window you can get into what might have been is a precious thing. Browne's story offers an intriguing new twist, as the song in question seems slightly out of sync with everything we've heard about the title song from other sources. "Tommy" (not his real name), who claimed on Joe Baltake's blog The Passionate Moviegoer to have worked on the film as an extra, informs us that it was going to be a tap number, and Browne's contribution doesn't really sound like a song to which you could feasibly tap dance. It also doesn't match the refrains of "I'll Do Anything" heard throughout the trailer on the VHS release of The Pickle (more on that later), which doesn't credit Jackson Browne as a contributor. This suggests two possible scenarios - either the version of "I'll Do Anything" that appeared on Browne's I'm Alive was drastically rewritten from that created for use in the film, or Browne's offering was rejected in advance of the film's all-out musical purge (Browne is vague on the circumstances of the song's rejection, although he does make it sound as if it was part of the wider cull). Nevertheless, if this is an indication of how Burke's big number was at one point intended to sound, then it's an unexpectedly tender plea to envision coming out of such a graceless character. In that regard it plays the perfect trick on you. For context, the reason why Jones insists that the song has been "ruined" is that, before Browne explains to him the genesis of the track, he cites it as an example of a song to which he was able to relate differently at separate stages of his life - firstly, on a "desperate, romantic" level back in 1993 at the album's release, and later in terms of his parental devotion. But, by its inception, it's a song that harbours a fundamental insincerity; it's an ostensibly pretty tune that, on close scrutiny, reveals a tortured desperation lurking at its core (the protagonist is clearly insecure as to whether of the object of their devotions reciprocates their commitment - there's a lot of talk about another potentially taking their place), one that readily bleeds into the kind of wretched spinelessness exhibited by Burke's character. And since this is the title number, it also encapsulates the entire ethos of the picture - that is, the near-total degradation of what once were grand motives. Rob a bank, steal a tank - whatever it takes to secure our share of bones.

So the mystery deepens. And the film's assortment of ghostly runoffs gets ever more bountiful.

Saturday 20 July 2019

Night Gallery: Big Surprise (aka We dig the Furry Freak Brothers and the Twilight Zone)


Last time, I brought up this online article which I read about ten years ago, and which now looks to have vanished without a trace, decrying the 1980s Twilight Zone adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "The Burning Man" for being a pallid knock-off of the Night Gallery episode "Big Surprise". I consider "The Burning Man" to be pretty massively underrated, so naturally I couldn't let that pass without comment. Both stories certainly have a number of points in common - both are taut, tenses exercises in fairly minimalist horror, each roughly about eleven minutes long. Both involve deeply eccentric old men whose intentions, we suspect, are none too savoury for the gullible preteen children unfortunate enough to have crossed paths with them. Both also involve some form of unspeakable underground menace that's been threatening to claw its way up to the surface. But then, "The Burning Man" is no more of a recycling of "Big Surprise" than it is of "The Elevator" (or vice versa, given that Bradbury's short story came first), with which it also shares a few similar plot points (chiefly, that both come from a distinctly entomophobic vein). What "The Burning Man" is, when you strip it right down, is a variation on the old phantom hitchhiker legend, one which taps into numerous primal fears about venturing into the vast unknown, combining wary observations about nature's curiosities with shades of Biblical catastrophe in order to pit its hapless protagonists up against a particularly monstrous personification of the natural world. It's weird, it's unsettling and there's a likeable kind of elegance to its unyielding oddness. "Big Surprise" plays like one of those interactive campfire stories that went just a little too far - it feels, for better of worse, like the sick product of a diseased mind. Whose diseased mind, you ask? None other than I Am Legend author Richard Matheson, whose shorter pieces provided food for a number of horror anthologies throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Matheson wrote "Big Surprise" first as a short story in 1959, and later adapted a screenplay for Night Gallery in 1971, which was directed by Jeannot Szwarc.

Both tales, I think, are enormously underappreciated, but whereas I love "The Burning Man" with all of my heart, with "Big Surprise" it's much more of a fraught love/hate relationship. On the one hand, it would be just plain churlish to ignore just how beautifully, wonderfully executed a short-form horror "Big Surprise" is, just how ferociously it crawls under your skin and screws with your nerves. On the other hand, "Big Surprise" might just be the the most sickeningly ghoulish piece of horror television ever devised - it's mean and it's malevolent, and whenever I watch it, I inevitably end up feeling as if  my personal and emotional space has been thoroughly violated. I certainly get my heebie jeebies' worth from this thing, and I do have to hate it for that.

Serling's opening narration:

"Our painting reminds us that there's a strange fascination at digging holes alongside ancient oaks. You give the average man a shovel and an "X" on a map and the fantasies come thick and fast. Pirate gold, hidden confederate treasure, and sometimes the unexpected...and sometimes the unwelcome. Hence the title: Big Surprise."

"Big Surprise" concerns a trio of schoolkids, Chris (Vincent Van Patten), Jason (Marc Vahanian) and Dan (Eric Chase) who get cajoled into digging a really deep hole by local kook Mr Hawkins (John Carradine) on the promise that if they walk ten paces and dig four feet, they'll unearth a "big surprise". Carradine is so skin-crawlingly repellent as Mr Hawkins that he makes Roberts Blossom from "The Burning Man" seem sweet and chummy, for all of his feverish rantings about human locusts and a genetic evil eating panting white dogs. He singles out one child, Chris, in particular, possibly because he recognises him as the most easily-led of the trio, or the most fearful and therefore the ripest prey for his malevolent capering. Szwarc's direction wastes no time in aligning Chris's fear and distrust of Mr Hawkins with our own; early on, there's a tracking shot revealing Chris's perspective as Mr Hawkins beckons him ever closer, followed by a number of queasy close-up shots in which you can practically feel the hot breath of this leering, whiskered creep as he bears down upon you. But what's queasier than Hawkins himself is the sensation that Chris is caught tight between two conflicting urges; the sensible urge from deep within his gut which tells him to keep his distance, and his fear of being exposed as a sissy before his peers; thus, the tracking shot plays like a particularly gut-wrenching game of chicken, testing just how close we're prepared to get to Hawkins before the tension becomes unbearable. This is something of which Hawkins is all-too aware; when Chris insists that he's not afraid of anything, Hawkins practically growls, "That's a lie!" He knows that Chris, more than anything, fears being made a fool. And this is something that he's only too eager to exploit.

Like Chris, we spend the segment caught between conflicting sensations - that is, our intuitive understanding that whatever's buried four feet below the specified location will certainly be nothing good, and our lethal curiosity to find out for sure. As we get deeper and deeper into the run-time, we know that we're marching closer toward inevitable doom and yet we keep on rolling with it. At first, Jason and Dan are reluctant to accompany Chris in his digging, particularly the yo-yo slinging Jason, who believes that Hawkins is playing a prank at their expense, but Chris convinces them that Hawkins might be sincere about sharing the location of hidden treasure. So they grab some shovels and start digging. After digging tirelessly for hours and boring out what they believe to be four feet, Jason and Dan grow weary of the endeavor and abandon Chris, taunting him for his gullibility. Chris feels humiliated, but remains too firmly committed to the task at hand to be capable of backing out now. He continues to dig, all by his lonesome, and eventually his shovel hits something. Chris considers recalling Jason and Dan, but decides that after their desertion he is not obligated to share any of the potential spoils with them. He uncovers a casket, and the lid opens up to reveal...actually, I'm not going to spell it out here. If you've read this far, then odds are that you already know the outcome or don't mind spoilers, but the fact is that mere words couldn't possibly do justice to the raw, visceral nastiness of that final twist (although the outcome is hinted at the start of the segment, when Chris insists that he wouldn't go near Mr Hawkins for a million dollars).

Back in my forum-lurking days, I came across multiple comments from viewers who were entirely unsympathetic toward Chris, with some even going to far as to express hope that he was dragged down into the casket and buried underground as comeuppance for his greediness. Good grief, people can be harsh. For one thing, Chris is only a child, and what he's doing has hurt nobody except himself (and surely if we're going to be casting morality stones we might lob them at the so-called friends who ditched Chris and left him all by himself in the woods?). Secondly, Chris is all of us. He's still caught up in that game of chicken he was pressured into at the start of the segment, and it's ultimately his determination and all-consuming inability to admit defeat and abandon an obviously self-destructive situation that drives him, not his avarice (although it's his decision not to call back his friends that proves his biggest mistake; he leaves himself alone, and therefore highly vulnerable). Chris's weaknesses are human weaknesses. Besides which, do we really want to see Chris shown up by the aloof, too-cool-for-school Jason? Naturally we don't. We're complicit in this obdurateness.

"Big Surprise" fails to impress reviewer David Juhl, who describes it as a "decent segment [with a] dumb ending", and poses the following questions of the final reveal: "Is Hawkins a ghost? An illusion? What is he? Also, Chris was the one of the three who most believed what Hawkins told him, so why punish him with such a fright?" I interpret the story differently, however. I don't believe the intention is to "punish" Chris so much as to bait him and prey on him. He goes after Chris because he sees him as the most likely to get caught up in this game of chicken. As for the actual nature of old Mr Hawkins, I don't think that's really important. He's simply an unspeakable terror that insists on getting up close and personal and staring us straight in the face, daring us to look away as his fiendish gaze transfixes us in horror. What does Mr Hawkins intend to do with Chris? Molest him? Cannibalise him? Or has this all just been some kind of elaborate, gruesomely-conceived prank? Whatever it is, we know that the final situation doesn't exactly spell benignity and that, whether literally or metaphorically, Chris has effectively been digging his own grave out there.

It's a short segment, and yet a good portion of the narrative consists of the three kids digging relentlessly and getting nowhere. Szwarc does an excellent job of sustaining tension throughout, however, with a succession of fast cuts showing the frantic shoveling and mounting dirt piles, but more hauntingly still, the subtle wind that appears to get increasingly prominent the deeper the young protagonists dig, as if the local landscape anticipates a disturbance of a cataclysmic nature. There's a strong sense that trouble is brewing, which gets especially pointed during the pivotal moment where Chris finds himself deserted and alone, and takes pause to reflect on the fruitfulness of his endeavors before returning to the task with renewed vigor. The overhead shots dwarf the solitary Chris, giving us a dizzying glimpse of just how little and vulnerable his is, as the branches of the decaying trees stretch across him like the talons of a predatory betroth waiting to swoop in for the kill.

The final image, after we're treated to our titular "big surprise", shows Chris's perspective blurring into an atmospheric shot of clouds sweeping over a sunset as the world fades into darkness. It's an intriguing case of pathetic fallacy, but it adds a doubly ominous dimension to a story that was already unbearably diabolical, as if time and space are unraveling while the entire world plunges into black. What the hell did you dig up out there, Chris? Have you doomed us all? I made a point last time about how I didn't perceive Roberts Blossom's character in "The Burning Man" as the Anti-Christ, despite his indirectly likening himself to the Devil. Mr Hawkins...well, I don't know. He's whatever the sickest and most twisted recesses of your warped imagination want him to be. Nothing good. And that's enough.

Saturday 13 July 2019

Twilight Zone '85: The Burning Man (aka The Day of The Cicada)


So a funny thing happened a couple of months ago, when I reviewed the 1980s Twilight Zone  episode, "The Elevator", and insisted that it's an installment that gets very little love from fans. I said that, but I had a hard time corroborating it, since most of the fansites and articles I'd found roasting the episode a decade or so ago appear to have vanished without trace. Meanwhile, the few truly positive reviews, such as that of Postcards From The Zone, have stuck around, giving you the impression that the episode perhaps isn't quite as strongly reviled as I made out. You'll just have to take my word for it. What's also been snuffed from existence is an old article purporting to have singled out the ten worst episodes of the 1985 revival that had "The Burning Man" down at the No. 2 spot, comparing it unfavourably to the Night Gallery episode "Big Surprise", which the author also didn't seem to care for very much (I actually don't remember what it ranked as the very worst episode, but it may well have been "The Elevator"). Unlucky, because "The Burning Man" happens to be one of my all-time favourite TZ tales, across any of the program's incarnations. Whereas my feelings on "The Elevator" have remained fairly ambivalent (I have a greater appreciation for that story's subtext than I did several years ago, but it's still not top-tier TZ for me), I've long considered "The Burning Man" to be an extremely underrated short-form horror, not least because it has the distinction of being one of the few episodes of the 1980s Twilight Zone revival to have genuinely scared me. As a story, it's too flat-out weird and discombobulating to be cast aside, and it's in need of someone who's willing to champion the hell out of it.

"The Burning Man" was adapted from the Ray Bradbury short story of the same name, which can be located in Bradbury's 1976 anthology Long After Midnight. The teleplay, written by J.D. Feigelson (who also directed the episode), is extremely faithful to Bradbury's story, with most of the dialogue being transcribed word-for-word. Bradbury, of course, wrote the script for "The Elevator", and while "The Burning Man" is a vastly different Twilight Zone installment, tonally and thematically, the two stories actually have a surprising number of plot points in common. At the very least, the same basic template is there. They each involve two unwary individuals, blood relations in both cases, who venture out into some unknown, where they are menaced and - it's implied - ultimately devoured by an unnaturally gifted creepy-crawly. In that regard, "The Burning Man" is a far freakier tale of an arthropod kingdom out of whack.  The giant spider from "The Elevator" was the stuff of nightmares but it was, at the very least, just a regular dumb spider who happened to get lucky and swell to gargantuan size after stumbling across a bounty of mega-proteins. The bug in "The Burning Man" comes from an altogether darker, more uncanny region of the Zone, in that there's a lot that's grotesquely odd about him. For one, he seems to be in the midst an identity crisis, in that he's not certain whether he's a locust or a cicada and exhibits traits of both. Through some unknown, possibly demonic means, he's also taken on a humanoid form and possesses the gift the gab.

Unlike "The Elevator", "The Burning Man" is not a cautionary tale about mankind's treatment of the natural world. Rather, it's a straightforward horror playing into a number of fundamental primal fears about the dangers of leaving the familiar and traversing the other, the unpredictability of the wilderness versus the safety of the city, the sense that you are an encroacher in a land that operates according to vastly different laws, and that the people you might run into out there are not quite what they appear. If there's a cautionary message to be gleaned from "The Burning Man", it's about not pissing off hitch-hikers. Be nice to the bedraggled stowaways you encounter on the open highway, even if they are incredibly strange and weird you out with their prophetic ramblings, because you never know when you might actually be dealing with the human manifestation of a plague of ravenous locusts. Then again, Albert Brooks didn't do anything which could have conceivably incurred the wrath of Dan Aykroyd's hitch-hiker in Twilight Zone: The Movie and it didn't work out much better for him. So perhaps the Twilight Zone's actual position on the matter is that we'd all do well to simply remain at home. Where Mr Death will come calling for you anyway, as per the classic Twilight Zone episode, "Nothing In The Dark". If there's a universal message to be garnered from The Twilight Zone, it's that we're all screwed no matter what we do.

Our two hapless protagonists are Neva (Piper Laurie, best known for playing Margaret White in Brian De Palma's 1976 adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie) and her young nephew Doug (Andre Gower), who are looking to escape an intense summer heatwave by driving to a remote lake for an afternoon's swimming. Along the way they get flagged down by a spooky and disheveled old man who seems awfully rattled about something and wants a ride as fast away from his present location as possible. He's played by Roberts Blossom, a pretty wonderful character actor who built a career specialising in roles as kooky and eccentric loners - where you've almost certainly seen him is as Marley the South Bend Shovel Slayer from Home Alone. There, he spent much of the film manifesting the protagonist's worst fears - having free reign of your household is a lot less fun when the local serial killer has their eye on you - but he turned out to be entirely benevolent when Kevin actually spoke to him. Don't expect the same outcome here. From the go, his character in "The Burning Man" is insufferably garrulous, talking a lot but ostensibly making little sense. First, he rambles on about the intense heat and how it makes people behave strangely. Then he talks about the locusts who come about once every seventeen years and whether or not there could be such a thing as people who follow a similar cycle. Then he talks about what he defines as "genetic evil" - that is, people who have malevolence weaved so finely into their DNA that they are incapable of being anything but malevolent from the day they're born until they die. Then he starts talking about a terrible genetic evil that could crawl from the earth like a locust on an abnormally hot day like today and devour everything in sight. As his ramblings become increasingly frenzied and nonsensical, Neva grows ever less thrilled about having him along for the ride, but the guileless Doug is soon hanging on his every unhinged word. It's not surprising; he's the kind of unwanted travel companion who would either bug you out of your wits or scare you witless with his doom-laden monologues:

"Eat me some summer boy, summer, ma'am. Just devour it whole. Look at them trees, ain't they a whole dinner? Look at them fields of wheat, ain't that a feast? Them sunflowers by the road, by golly, there's breakfast. Tarpaper on the top of that house, there's lunch. And the lake, way up ahead, Jehoshaphat, that's dinner wine, drink it all!

Finally, when the old man starts raving about how this genetically evil human-locust will turn his insatiable appetite to dogs, cats and people (all entrees enjoyed by the spider in "The Elevator", incidentally), Neva reaches the end of her tether and boots him out of her car, warning him that she has all manner of religious artifacts that will protect her from demonic forces (this is a bluff, as she later admits to Doug). She and Doug then drive off, leaving the old man by the wayside, and enjoy a blissful afternoon at the lake. When the time comes for them to head back, Doug has second thoughts about what they might encounter on the return journey, remembering the old man's prophecy, but Neva assures him that no harm will come to them. As they drive along the road in the evening sun, they are stopped by a small boy in an immaculately clean white suit (Danny Cooksey), who claims to have been deserted by his family, and agree to give him a ride back into town. Further down the road, after darkness has completely set in, the boy leans over and whispers something into Neva's ear (inaudible to Doug and the viewer) which causes Neva to lose her composure. The car then inexplicably breaks down, leaving the occupants stranded by the roadside in the dead of night. The story ends with the young boy grinning with undisguised malevolence, and asking Neva and Doug if they've ever considered the possibility that there might be genetic evil in the world. The final image shows the car headlights fading to black as the sounds of cicadas in the outside world become overpowering and drown out all other sounds.

To understand this macabre story, it helps if you know something about the life cycle of the cicada, which is referenced prominently throughout, although this also leads us into our very first nitpick. The old man explicitly identifies the creatures as locusts, not cicadas, but these are two very different insects and only the cicada has the unique periodical lifestyle that involves spending thirteen or seventeen years (depending on the specific species) underground as an immature nymph and emerging en masse for a significantly shorter shot at life in adult form. The cicada's curious love of prime numbers is thought to be an anti-predation mechanism, evolved to prevent their life cycle from syncing up with those of other animals and giving cicada-eaters regular nourishment and population boosts. By contrast, locusts have a shorter life cycle of only a few months. Bradbury has conflated the two creatures, although this is something of a necessary evil, given that the locust carries a weighty symbolism all of its own. Although they are solitary insects for much of the time, certain environmental conditions can cause locusts congregate into ravenous, crop-devouring swarms of Biblical proportions. Blossom's character has characteristics of both insects - he's spent seventeen years underground, like a cicada, yet when he turns his attentions to the surrounding vegetation and starts raving about eating everything around him, he's pure locust; it's that hunger that signifies the terrible disaster looming on the horizon. At the same time, he remains recognisably a cicada, notably in his tendency to drive everyone around him to distraction with his incessant buzzing.

The unearthly twist in the story's tail is that the old man played by Blossom and the young boy who appears at the end are one and the same - he's a cicada/locust in human form, so the implication is that he's shed his nymph exoskeleton and revealed the fresh body lurking underneath (an outcome he'd previously hinted at when he mentioned to Doug that the hot weather makes you "feel as if you're gonna split wide open", and later explicitly described in the midst of his deranged, "Eat me some summer" monologue). What's curious is that the cycle seems to have happened in reverse for him - unlike the nymph cicada who emerges after many years underground and acquires a new adult form, the old man sheds his skin in order to become a juvenile; hence, there's a sense that he's able to keep on perpetuating himself and this is part of a highly preternatural cycle. The aspect of the story that has long puzzled me, however, has to do with just how much self-awareness our buggy friend possesses, at least in his initial form. When he first encounters Neva and Doug, the implication is that he's just crawled his way up from the ground after being submerged for all that time (in one of the few modifications to Bradbury's original story, we hear Neva specify that "it's the hottest July in sixteen or seventeen years", providing our first hint that we're up against something cyclic) hence why his clothes are so ragged. In the Twilight Zone episode, we good as see him emerging from the ground (rather, we hear the sounds of the earth shifting as he looms into view and surveys his surroundings quizzically), while in Bradbury's original text it's hinted that this wayward stranger has not had far to travel:

"For you could see where the old man had come across a field high with yellow grass baked and burnt by eight weeks of no rain. There was a path where the man had broken the grass and cleaved a passage to the road. The path went as far as one could see down to a dry swamp and an empty creek bed with nothing but baked hot stones in it and fried rock and melting sand."

The old man is the seventeen year evil he keeps raving about, begging the question as to whether he's aware that he's describing himself this entire time and, if so, is he genuinely afraid of what he's destined to come? And what are his reasons for hitching a ride with the two human passers-by, other than getting a giddy little kick out of watching them squirm before all hell inevitably breaks loose? There is definitely a startling change in the old man's demeanor when he launches into his "Eat me some summer" bit; thanks to Blossom's performance, he sounds as if he's savouring each individual mouthful as he goes, to the point that you can practically feel the flecks of saliva dripping from his tongue. For the first part of the story, there's meant to be ambiguity as to whether Blossom's character is a legitimate harbinger of doom or if he's simply a crazy lunatic whose brains are slowly frying in the heat, and the reality, by the end, looks to be a mixture of both. His character starts out confused and disorientated - he is, after all, a human-shaped bug who's emerged from after seventeen years (or longer) underground and into a particularly stifling heatwave. He possesses an innate knowledge of his uncanny life cycle and what this means for the world around him, but it's only as he begins surveying the local landscape and anticipating the impending destruction that the pieces appear to click into place and he falls in line with his voracious nature. It's the depraved, feverish energy that Blossom brings to the roles that makes "The Burning Man" so authentically terrifying; you get a sense that he's less a man than a terrible malignance rattling away inside an increasingly rickety human shell, becoming ever more frenzied as it attempts to claw its way into being. What is frighteningly evident is that at the very end of the story, when he returns in his rejuvenated form, he remembers his previous encounter with Neva and Doug - his final utterance of, "Have you ever wondered if there's such a thing as genetic evil in the world?", coupled with that extremely unpleasant grin he flashes, is way too pointed for him not to - and looks to have been lying in wait for them this entire time. Not only is he about to turn his insatiable cravings on the world around him, the implication is that he's deliberately targeting Neva and Doug for their previous transgression. And whereas as an old man our human cicada/locust was completely out of his frazzled insect mind, as a young boy he seems frighteningly calm, calculating and in control. He may be the human manifestation of a swarm of locusts poised upon the brink of an all-out Biblical disaster, but he's chillingly adept at keeping his true nature concealed well beneath the surface.

One thing I would note is that both locusts and cicadas are vegetarian and do not eat people. So obviously there is something far more malefic going on with this uncanny being than his simply being a locust/cicada in human skin. In other words, what twisted kind of energy is lurking beneath the insect lurking beneath the man? Although the old man does say something about Lucifer being born on a day like this, and the small grinning boy at the end of the story seems eerily reminiscent of Damien from The Omen, I don't believe that he's an Anti-Christ figure or that he's come to bring about the full-scale Apocalypse. What he old man describes sounds like a truly cataclysmic natural disaster, but not actually The End. Neva and Doug are certainly goners and it doesn't look good for the surrounding landscape, but I think the implication is that this all part of a cycle, the genetic evil having previously emerged on a scalding hot summer much like this seventeen years ago, and once its gorged itself it will go back underground and wait another seventeen years, before reemerging and directing his renewed frenzy at some other unsuspecting passers-by. So what are we really up against here? I think the clue to that lies in the old man's initial warning to Neva and Doug when he first hops aboard their car and cries out, "It's after us!" Neva asks him to elaborate, and he responds, "The sun, what do you think?" The sun is of course what Neva and Doug were initially looking to flee when first they set out for the lake, but its repressive glare follows them everywhere. I think it's accurate to suppose that the old man is the embodiment of, if not actually the sun itself, then the punishing heat that's slowly baking away the Earth and its inhabitants. This much is hinted when he reveals his especially baleful lust for the different kinds of flavours of humans incinerating - "Fried, cooked, boiled and parpoiled people! Sunburnt beauties of people!" he exclaims, almost as if he were reading from the menu options at a truck-stop cafe. He is the "burning" alluded to within the title, a white-hot intensity that threatens to engulf the land around him in a hideous blaze. He's a combination of so many disagreeable natural elements - the delirium of the sweltering heatwave, the ruinous gluttony of a plague of locusts, the incessant droning of cicadas - that in the end he comes across as the embodiment of a nature out of balance and warped to its most monstrous extreme.

 

Our burning man (or bug) is the malevolent spirit of a cruel, cruel summer, although what ultimately makes him disturbing is the seemingly contradictory means by which he launches his hotly-anticipated attack. The young boy we meet at the finale is, after all, the polar opposite of his former self - clean and neatly presented, quiet, peaceful and, until the very end, entirely unimposing. What's more is that he strikes in the hours of darkness, when the overpowering sunlight that fueled his voracious energy has vanished from the sky. He is no longer "burning", and yet he's reached the peak of his malignance. To that end, he is a twisted inversion on Rod Serling's narration at the conclusion of the aforementioned "Nothing In The Dark", in which we are assured that "there was nothing in the darkness that wasn't there when the lights were on". However raw, freakish and exposed the dementia of the world appears in the broad daylight, in the darkness that dementia does not dissipate, it merely lingers out of sight. The cyclic nature of things means that we have never obtained permanent safety; rather, we are only ever between states, and that whatever undesirable forces stalked us in one stage of the cycle will sooner or later come calling for us again. This is something that Doug understands when, having reached the ostensible safety of the lake, he contemplates the return journey that will have to made and asks Neva if there is an alternative route back into town. The danger will still be lying dormant, even if it has to wait another seventeen years.

To end on another nitpick, Fiegelson's teleplay does, unfortunately, retain by far the most bothersome portion of Bradbury's original text - specifically, when the old man starts talking about the possibility of seventeen year people, and then poses, "how about twenty-four year people, or fifty-seven year people?" That's just crazy talk, and I'll tell you why. Those are not prime numbers! Then again, the man in both the original story and the TZ episode is inconsistent and repeatedly changes the total number of years he's been underground, so his numerical understanding may be open to question.

Sunday 7 July 2019

Krusty's Fun House (aka Cinnamon, Don't Make This Harder Than It Already Is)


Isn't it always terrible when the two greatest loves of your life go to war with one another?

Something I've tried long and hard to repress about The Simpsons is that they once put out a video game where the main objective was to kill rats. By that, I don't mean a game in which a couple of levels entailed mowing down a few enemy sprites in the shape of rats as part of a grander adventure. Killing rats was actually the be all and end all of the game. Your pest control services were required in Springfield because Krusty the Clown was having a few rodent troubles, so splat every last one of 'em and go out for frosty chocolate milkshakes. And if you know me, you know why a game of that premise isn't very likely to worm its way into my affections. (If not - long and short of it, I'm a rat fancier and have a great amount of affection for the Rattus Norvegicus, so it all cuts a little too close to home.)

The game was called Krusty's Fun House and was released in 1992 for the NES, Amiga, Sega Master System and various other platforms (note: when it was released in 16-bit form for the Super SNES it was retitled Krusty's Super Fun House). Like all Simpsons games from that era, it was a meticulously crafted experience that perfectly captured the tone, heart and humour that the viewers the world over so loved and admired about the series. You remember that Simpsons episode where Krusty acquires a "fun house" (whatever that is) and a swarm of rats move in, so he and Bart must unite to exterminate the rats as well as all the snakes, flying pigs and laser gun-wielding cats that have snuck in along with them. What a classic. Right up there with that episode where Bart saves Earth from alien invasion by spray painting everything red and Smithers kidnaps baby Maggie. No, like most Simpsons games, it was a case of a lot of random shit happening that had very little to do with the series itself, because why the hell not? At the time, the initial wave of Simpson-mania was still in full swing, and I presume we were supposed to get off on the meagre thrill of getting to control a sprite in the shape of Bart Simpson (or one of his associates) and to not ask questions.

Here is the game synopsis, according to the blurb on the back of the box:

"Hey kids! Give a hoot! Help out your old pal Krusty the Clown! My official Krusty's Fun House is infested with rats! There are over 60 levels in this game, and they're all crawling with the little varmints! I've got my loyal cadets, Bart and Homer Simpson, Sideshow Mel and Corporal Punishment to guard the rat traps, but I need you to lead the filthy rodents into those traps! Then we blow 'em up! We incinerate 'em! We laser-blast 'em! We electrocute 'em! We Krusterize the little stinkers!!! Hoo boy!

Did I mention the snakes, aliens and flying pigs? Well, watch out for those riffraff! If you can't Krusterize 'em, at least avoid 'em...they're worse than the #@!*%! rats! Making Krusty's house vermin-free is not a pretty task, kiddy cadets - but someone's gotta do it!"

My god, what a barbaric universe we live in.

I never played this game as a child, but I do have memories of being taunted about its existence by another kid in my class who was aware of my murine sympathies. Back then, I was nowhere near as well-versed in The Simpsons as I am now, but I'd seen enough that the synopsis, as he explained it, struck me as being somehow very un-Simpsonsesque, so I was quite comfortable in dismissing that kid as a filthy attention-seeker. I clean forgot about it for many years, and it was only much later, when I was leafing through Robert W Getz's Unauthorised Guide To The Simpsons Collectables, that I got confirmation that it was more than just the depraved fantasy of a pimply schoolkid looking to undermine a rat-loving peer. D'oh! I decided that the best that I could do was simply turn a blind eye and try to suppress all knowledge that The Simpsons had made a game that went so flagrantly against my personal sensibilities.

It was then that I noticed Sideshow Bob on the cover, and with that my perception of the game changed completely. For a game boasting Krusty as the hero, Bob would indeed be the logical character to have featured as the main antagonist. So, is he responsible for this rat infestation? In which case, how so? Is he Willard? Does he have some kind of uncanny knack for getting rats to obey him and tear his enemies to shreds? I suddenly went from wanting to bury all conscious thought of this game to wanting to know every last detail about it. Because a game that sees the character for whom I feel the greatest affinity join forces with the animal for which I feel the greatest affinity is a game that I can absolutely get behind. I wouldn't have thought there was anything Bob could do to make himself any more endearing to me than he already is (except possibly account for his baffling behaviour in "Black Widower"), but the revelation that he's a rat fancier (even in a non-canonical video game) would certainly score him a whole mass of additional bonus points. Did I say that the two greatest loves of my life had gone to war with one another? Apparently not - Robert Terwilliger and murid kind were Together At Last, teaming up to fight low culture and plebeianism wherever it manifested. Get into that clown's fun house and rip 'em up.

...or not, because I watched a longplay of this video game on YouTube and the crushing reality is that Bob's not even in it. Or rather, he appears very indirectly as a background detail in one of the later levels, on a poster advertising poetry reading sessions for the incarcerated. While it's nice that he's featured to some capacity, he is not the antagonist, nor does he have any discernible connection to the rat invasion. So why, then, is he featured so prominently on the cover, smiling and rubbing his hands together as if everything is going according to plan? Sod knows. Sideshow Mel does actually feature in the game as one of Krusty's allies, so I could hazard a very generous guess that there was a crossed wire as to which of the Sideshows to include on the box art. But I think it's more likely that the same "anything goes" approach that was applied to the game itself was also extended to the promotional art. Bob is on the cover because why the hell not?

Well, that was a huge letdown. I didn't get my Springfield rat invasion as directed by Sideshow Bob. So many wonderful possibilities flushed down the sewer. But what delights does the game actually have to offer?

I think the important thing to keep in mind about Krusty's Fun House is that it isn't really a Simpsons game. Rather, it's a largely unconnected game that just so happens to have a few Simpsons characters in it. The whole theme of rodent extermination obviously ties in very precariously with those featured characters, and it doesn't help that the rats themselves, while bearing the characteristic Groening trademarks of bug eyes and socking great overbites, blatantly don't belong in the same world as Bart and Krusty. They are purple, bipedal and all-round very anthropomorphic, which makes them distinctively out-of-place in the Simpsons universe, where Groening was always very insistent that animals behave like actual animals. They certainly don't look like any rats we've seen in the series proper. You could argue, of course, that the alien antagonists from Bart vs. the Space Mutants were every bit as fantastical and far-out and, yeah, you would be absolutely right. But they were at least based on something pertaining to the series itself, however loosely, in that the Space Mutants are the villains of a horror sci-fi movie franchise that appears to lend itself to perpetual sequelisation, and with which Bart remains unshakably fascinated (for the first few seasons, anyway - I think the mutants may have dropped off the map as the series went on; if such a game were made today they would probably use Kodos and Kang). Those purple bipedal rats, however - where the hell did they come from? What on earth is there about Krusty's character suggesting that murids would be his natural adversary? Is there any internal logic to be extracted from this befuddling mass of randomness?

As it turns out, yes. Kind of. Krusty's Fun House makes slightly more sense, as a concept, when you realise that it was actually just the repackaged version of an unrelated game, Rat-Trap, which was created for the Commodore Amiga by the British game developers Audiogenic. There, you were playing as a purple-haired kid looking to rid his house of unwanted rodents by guiding them to various extermination devices and avoiding other adversaries, like snakes. Not only where the rats there purple and bipedal, they wore big red shoes, had red, clown-like noses and were pretty wretchedly adorable. How anybody could have relished their inevitable swatting is beyond me. The game was subsequently licensed to the US-based Acclaim Entertaiment, who already had numerous Simpsons titles under their belt (including the aforementioned Bart vs. the Space Mutants) and decided to continue their Springfield streak by giving Rat-Trap a lavish Simpsons make-over. Hence why we got the rather incongruous theme of pest control within a game purporting to be about Bart and co.

The key objectives of Rat-Trap remained intact. You had to navigate your way through various levels, solving mini-puzzles and creating paths that would guide the unwitting rats toward extermination devices operated by one of four Simpsons characters (Bart, Homer, Sideshow Mel and Corporal Punishment). And it has to be said that most of their methods of killing the rats are really, really cruel. As in, there's something very Itchy & Scratchy about it all. Homer has the most humane approach, in that he simply zaps the rats with some kind of laser device, but Bart spaghettifies the rats with a modified sieve, Punishment eats them alive, Mel pumps them up with oxygen until they explode, and JESUS CHRIST, what kind of sick game is this? Putting aside my personal feelings toward the species in question for just a moment, I do think that there's something about a Simpsons game dedicated to witnessing the characters killing animals in a sadistic and over-the-top fashion that seems incredibly out of the spirit of the series. Now, I wholly appreciate that it's only a game and that no rats, snakes or gun-wielding cats (guess those are the aliens) were actually harmed in the process, but this entire concept strikes me as being not at all within the natures of the characters we know and love. I suppose that's the justification for making the rats so anthropomorphic and cartoony - the less they look and act like real animals, the more splapsticky and less barbaric it becomes, at least in theory. In the game's introduction, Krusty gloats that the rats are really dumb and will follow any path that's laid out for them, but doesn't their extreme gullibility merely increase your pity for them?

On the subject of how accurately Krusty's Fun House represents its titular character, Sega Retro has this to say:

"Krusty's Fun House was an early Simpsons game, debuting in 1992. As such, the characters had not been fully developed, so at this point Krusty was simply a happy smiling clown rather than a man haunted by addiction and a dark past."

I would dispute that, in that Krusty has never been characterised as a "happy smiling clown". Krusty was one of the very few supporting characters to be introduced during the Simpsons' crudely drawn filler era; he made his first appearance in a short on The Tracey Ullman Show, where it was evident from the get-go that there was this huge discrepancy between his onstage persona and the person lurking beneath all that clown make-up. In his first appearance, the joke was that he was basically a thinly-disguised Homer variation; Bart worshiped him from afar but was disappointed to finally meet Krusty in the flesh and discover that grown-ups are alike all over. "Krusty Gets Busted", the first episode in the series proper to focus extensively on Krusty, moved firmly away from the initial "Krusty is Homer" idea and instead painted Krusty as a self-indulgent sell-out with an assortment of vulgar appetites (in Bob's words), whose debauched personal life was ostensibly at odds with his wholesome, fun-loving TV image...which honestly wasn't that wholesome, given that the physical abuse he inflicted on Bob was entirely genuine. One reason why I think "Krusty Gets Busted" is such a great episode is because it sets up a complex dynamic in which the moral divide between the heroes and villain isn't quite as black and white as one might assume. Krusty may not be a Kwik-E-Mart bandit, but there is nevertheless an obvious disparity between the Krusty whom Bart idolises and the Krusty who actually exists, and who is less interested in inspiring young minds than in conditioning them to be unquestioning consumers and choking their brain cells with senseless violence. Meanwhile Bob, who actually did the dastardly deed, has a sincere interest in providing children with quality, non-pandering entertainment (the sad thing is that it's Bob's genuine compassion for Bart that ends up setting the stage for their long-term enmity - if he hadn't invited him down to that Choices thing...). In fact, for all of my grievances about Krusty's Fun House being very far-removed from the spirit of The Simpsons, there is something eerily on form about having a smiling Krusty front a colourful, ostensibly light-hearted game with such a disturbing premise. One of the game's few authentically Simpsons touches is the array of posters adorning the walls of Krusty's titular fun house, hawking everything from Krusty Brand pacifiers to Ned Flanders' Leftorium (here called the "Left-o-rama"). Here, Duff is identified as a brand of cola (presumably because the presence of alcoholic beverages in a children's game would be a huge no) and for some reason Dimoxinil (the hair growth formula used by Homer in "Simpson and Delilah") is simply "Hair in a Drum". These posters provide charming little Easter eggs for devoted viewers and give the game some semblance of connection to the wider Simpsons universe, but they also feed perfectly into the air of commercial crassness (mixed with horrifying violence) that permeates Krusty's brand of entertainment from head to foot. It merely convinces me all the more that this game missed a serious trick in not having Bob be in cahoots with the rats. As if Bob, who is no stranger to the Krusty's depravities, wouldn't be able to sympathise with the misunderstood vermin his "happy" chum is so ruthlessly pummeling just to prop up his mercenary hellhole.

As for Bart, though, I totally can't see him going for this. Bart may revel in mayhem and destruction, but for the most part the series has wisely shied away from making him actively cruel to animals (which is a major factor separating him from Billy, the sociopathic little shit from Family Dog). And besides, later in the series - in the Season 8 episode "Homer's Enemy", to be more precise - we get a subplot where Bart buys a derelict factory that's infested with rats, and he completely tolerates them. So there.

And that's Krusty's Fun House, a game that seems custom designed so that smart-mouthed schoolkids would have ammunition with which to taunt their rodent-loving classmates, and an all-round confounding and unsettling footnote in history of The Simpsons. Perhaps if you can get past the unapologetically barbaric premise then the game itself is a perfectly fun and addictive one to play, but it's certainly not my cup of tea, nor do I suspect it would be tea for any of the characters with whom I identify. Lisa would hate this game. Willard would really hate this game, and possibly head with Ben and Socrates to rip up Audiogenic. Bob would consider it hopelessly plebeian and go back to his poetry recitals. I'll leave you with this heart-tugging image of Clancy Wiggum and Cinnamon, as a reminder that Springfield as a whole has way more of a murid affinity than Krusty's Fun House lets on.

 

Wednesday 3 July 2019

I'll Do Anything (For Love, But I Won't Do That)


Test audiences, who needs 'em? Am I right?

Chicago Sun-Times critic and Benji The Hunted cheerleader Roger Ebert was once asked that very question by a Dan Schwartz from Paradise Valley, Arizona, who asked: "How can the creators of ostensibly artistic and creative films...justify the asking of Joe Six-Pack's opinion? I don't mean to sound insulting, but what the hell does the public know?" Schwartz's question and Ebert's full response are transcribed in Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2004; said Ebert: "Many directors find test screenings invaluable; Billy Wilder, for example, killed the first reel of Sunset Boulevard after a screening. If the screenings are used by the filmmakers themselves to get screenings on a rough cut, that's valid. Too often, however, studio executives use preview screenings as a weapon to enforce their views on directors, and countless movies have had stupid happy endings tacked on after such screenings." (p. 860) It's easy to see test audiences and focus groups as the enemy to creativity. Fact is, negative test screenings can and do cause filmmakers to make very questionable compromises. You only need to look to Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction (1987) for an example of a film that had its ending radically reworked to appease test audiences who drastically failed to understand the point of the picture they were watching. On the other hand, there have been occasions where, quite against my better judgement, I've found myself feeling a surprising empathy for test audiences whose feedback resulted in contentious or unpopular decisions. A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a screening of Little Shop of Horrors (1986) with the original ending intact and I found that version very hard to take, even knowing in advance what was coming. That ending may work great on the stage, but film has a very different energy and atmosphere to theatre, and I can see why test audiences weren't so taken with it back in the mid-1980s. Still, I think the most haunting examples of test audience obtrusion occur when a director's vision is rejected with so little clemency than the director is compelled to approach their beloved brainchild with a sacrificial knife and gut it into a million pieces, so that its innards can be rejigged and reconstructed in an entirely different form. Pictures that exist in a state of half-existence, or perhaps even double existence, in that as you're watching them, you're sort of consciously aware that you're seeing two different pictures at once - the salvaged film you've actually got, and the ghost of What Might Have Been, which hangs over it like a musty smell. Either way, what you've not got is a film that feels at peace with itself. Test audiences murdered Mike's Murder. And they called I'll Do Anything on its titular bluff.

I'll Do Anything was the third feature film by writer-director James L. Brooks, whose previous films, Terms of Endearment (1983) and Broadcast News (1987), were major Academy Awards contenders, the former managing to bag the top prize at the 56th Academy Awards in 1984. I'll Do Anything, by contrast, died a dog's death on its release in 1994 - specifically, a death akin to that of the dog from the Ray Bradbury short story "There Will Come Soft Rains". Once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered in sores, it ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour, its decay going largely unnoticed by a general public who were all too busy rushing off to catch the latest screening of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (fucking Philistines). One of the problems facing I'll Do Anything from the go was the negative press regarding its production history. Everybody knew its awkward little secret - that it was originally envisioned as a full-fledged Hollywood musical with a distinctively 90s twist, with songs written by Prince, Carole King and Sinead O'Connor and choreography by Twyla Tharp. It all sounded very good on paper. Only test audiences reacted with such vomit-spewing bile to the musical sequences that Brooks balked and put his editing knife to the film's singing vocal chords, rendering it forever tuneless (save for one song which survives in the closing credits). It's impossible to comment on this particular development without also noting that the plot of the film itself, which takes place in contemporary Hollywood, deals heavily with the pains of having to make movies by committee and cater to the whims of test audiences who wouldn't know artistic integrity if it bit them on the nose. And - get this - the title song was specifically about showcasing the raw desperation of a character imploring test audiences to like him and give his project a pass. It's a bitter irony that haunts I'll Do Anything to the finish.

Brooks is of course the creator of Gracie Films and a producer of The Simpsons, and a number of Simpsons alumni feature in the cast of I'll Do Anything, including none other than Marge Simpson herself, Julie Kavner. She plays Nan Mulhanney, a prescription drug addict and compulsive truth-teller who has the unenviable job of having to tally test audience reactions all while trying to shore up her pitiful non-relationship with her boyfriend Burke Alder, a spineless and self-absorbed movie producer. Burke is played by Albert Brooks, who had previously courted Marge as pro bowler Jacques in "Life on The Fast Lane". That's actually what got my curiosity in I'll Do Anything piqued in the first place; if Julie Kavner and Albert Brooks were playing a couple, then hells yes, I was watching. Here, Marge and Jacques they ain't (for the most part, Burke barely acknowledges Nan's existence), but I nevertheless maintain that the two actors have terrific chemistry, and the scenes focused on their interplay are among the high points of the movie. In addition to Kavner and Brooks (who is of no relation to that other Brooks who helmed the project), Tracey Ullman appears in a supporting role (it was her TV show in which The Simpsons first appeared as crudely-drawn filler, and she later guest starred as Emily Winthrop in the Season 2 episode, "Bart's Dog Gets An F"), and that's Harry Shearer you can see lingering the backdrop of some shots.

I'll Do Anything centres mostly on Matt Hobbs (Nick Nolte), an out of work actor who, despite getting off to a promising start when one of his early roles in a mini-series was nominated for an Emmy in 1980 (he lost to Powers Boothe, who really did win for his portrayal of Kool-Aid/Flavor-Aid poisoner Jim Jones at the 1980 Emmy Awards) has never had the lucky break he feels he's due -  the peak of his subsequent career has been playing an extra in Oliver Stone's Platoon. His marriage to Beth (Ullman) fell apart soon after the birth of their daughter, Jeannie (Whittni Wright); Beth and Jeannie now reside in Georgia while Matt continues to move around pursuing various acting gigs that inevitably fizzle. He's so committed to his non-existent acting career, in fact, that he hasn't seen Jeannie for years. Matt finally lands upon a steady source of income when he encounters Burke, who ropes him into becoming his personal chauffeur. He agrees to have Jeannie over for a three-week visit, only to later discover that Beth has other plans; she's facing a jail term for money laundering and needs him to take Jeannie for the duration - meaning that Matt suddenly has full-time custody of a girl who's effectively a stranger to him. Thanks to Beth's questionable parenting methods (the C word, compromise, gets thrown around a lot, which I guess ties in with the film's title), she's been raising quite the steely-eyed monster in Matt's absence (think Angelica from Rugrats if she'd been an octave screechier), and Matt, who's been shirking parental responsibility for Jeannie's whole life is now living under the same roof as the Kid from Hell. Matt and Jeannie's efforts to come to terms with their changed circumstances is the crux of the story, but there are also subplots involving Nan and Burke's relationship, and Matt's potential new relationship with Cathy Brelow (Joely Richardson), a development executive who gets little respect from her peers and is pushing to get her dream project realised, a remake of Mr Deeds Goes To Town. (Didn't they actually remake that movie in 2002 with Adam Sandler? I repeat what I said before - fucking Philistines.)


James Bridges, who was made to overhaul his initial rough cut of Mike's Murder when test audiences detested its intensely experimental approach, went to his grave insisting that he was happier with the project as it was theatrically released, and that audience feedback had enabled him to make a better picture. How does James L. Brooks feel about the changes he was forced to implement on I'll Do Anything? After making the call that the musical numbers needed to be culled, he was obligated to go back and create several new scenes to compensate for their absence, though he's long-maintained that he'd conceived the basic story and script independently to the musical numbers and as such saw them as fully capable of standing on their own. His interest in making the film as a musical was to explore that "heightened sense of reality" that you get through a musical, the idea that song and dance numbers, for all their artifice, bring you "closer to the truth", in what they reveal about the internal condition of your characters. 

The million dollar question, of course, is are we ever going to see a director's cut of the film with the musical numbers restored? The answer, for now, is a clear outlook not so good, although Brooks has indicated that he himself was perfectly willing at one time. Sadly, it seems that the original cut of I'll Do Anything is being held captive by an assortment of legal barriers that would make its release too much of an ownership nightmare. Hans Zimmer, who worked as composer on the film, confirmed this much in a 2013 interview, where he said: "there’s a really simple reason it will never be seen: The deal structure on those songs was so complicated and so expensive, and it would cost so much money in rights to put it out.” In the same interview, Zimmer also weighed in with his views on why test audiences rejected the musical version with such hot-blooded ferocity. He felt that the film took too long to establish that it was a musical; by the time the first song kicked in, the audience had already accepted the film as a down-to-earth family comedy, and were unwilling to make the leap into Brooks' heightened sense of reality.

Test audiences may have not have dug the picture back in the early 90s, but I think it'd be an awful shame if the original cut of I'll Do Anything stayed locked up forever because that initial response was so hostile. Now that the dust has long settled and the film has done all the damage to Brooks' reputation that it was ever likely to do, I believe that the wider public should be given the chance to re-evaluate the film from the perspective of what it was versus what it could have been. Although I didn't care for the original ending of Little Shop of Horrors, I do think it's a very good thing that it's out there, so that viewers have the opportunity to decide for themselves which version they prefer. The musical version of I'll Do Anything has been kept so stringently under lock and key since its merciless disemboweling that the details of what lies within remain vague and obscure. It's difficult to say, from the outset, whether or not Brooks made the right call in excising those numbers, in part because I've encountered two wildly divergent responses from different sources purporting to have seen the original cut. In his article "The Unmaking of I'll Do Anything", film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum had this to say:

“Having had the opportunity to see I’ll Do Anything as a musical, I can report that it was immeasurably better in that form — eccentric and adventurous, to be sure, but also dramatically and emotionally coherent...And even though not all of the experimental numbers “work” especially well (I could have done without the title tune, for instance), I would still argue that the best of these — all featuring Twyla Tharp’s twitchy choreography as well as songs — are irreplaceable because they come closer to the truth than the remainder of this film."

 Whereas Adam Groves of The Bedlam Files had this take:

"What the workprint version of I’LL DO ANYTHING isn’t is particularly interesting or even noteworthy.  I’ll confess I was expecting a cinematic outrage on the order of THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED, but in fact I’LL DO ANYTHING in its musical format plays like most all truly bad movies: dreary and dull...Worst of all, the whole thing feels half-hearted, with the Twyla Tharp choreographed musical numbers staged in shockingly pedestrian fashion.  It seems that Brooks, despite his high falutin’ proclamations about musical cinema (“Through song you can get closer to the truth”), just couldn’t bring himself to fully embrace the format–or perhaps he didn’t know how to do so.  As he once admitted, “my style when directing is that I really don’t know how to get people to suspend disbelief,” and the suspension of disbelief is a requirement in a movie musical."

Honestly, whatever sins the musical cut of I'll Do Anything might have committed, something deep within my gut tells me that it was never going to be comparable to a wacky comedy about a clown luring children into Nazi death camps. We would probably do well to leave The Day The Clown Cried out of this.

The most illuminating article I've found on I'll Do Anything was written by Joe Baltake of The Passionate Moviegoer. Baltake does not claim to have seen the original cut of the film and offers no comment on which version is better, but he does provide helpful pointers on where the musically- curious can get tantalising glimpses of the film as it was once intended. His hot tip is to check out the trailers on the VHS release of The Pickle, a 1993 film by Paul Mazursky. (The next question being, was I really reckless/fanatical enough to blow $24 on this dubious-looking title just for a negligible window into what might have been? It would be terribly out of character for me not to. The video is on its way as we speak). Baltake also notes that "the laser disc version of the movie includes a "making of" documentary which shows co-stars Albert Brooks and Julie Kavner performing in numbers." (I don't have a LaserDisc player; could someone please be a love and put this onto YouTube?). Really, though, what I found most intriguing came not from the article itself, but from a comment on Baltake's piece by a user identifying as "Tommy" (although he states that's not his real name):

"I also worked on the film - as a dancer. I was hired for the song "I'll Do Anything" which Albert Brooks sang to a line of people waiting to get into a screening his film. It was a tap number and took a week to film. I can't tell you how disappointed we dancers were to find out all the numbers had been cut and that we would NEVER see them. BIG bummer. Tommy (not my real name)."

I have to say, all of Groves' efforts to convince me that the world is losing nothing by keeping the musical version of I'll Do Anything sealed away in a vault for all eternity went down with a noisy thud when I read that statement by "Tommy". Assuming that what "Tommy" says is true, then all the Groves in the world are not going to convince me that I don't want to see a movie in which Albert Brooks tap dances before a crowd of painfully indifferent human guinea pigs, begging them to like him in exchange for his complete and utter pliability. I don't know why, but the knowledge that it was a tap number just sealed the deal. I formally need this film in my life, to the extent that it is now the unattainable Holy Grail. I find myself spectacularly in love with an ill-fated Hollywood musical that I have never seen and will very likely never have a chance to see. I don't know what I can do with all that dead-end energy other than to champion the ghost of that little lost film. The musical version of I'll Do Anything WAS here, and I'll do whatever I can to keep a fire burning for it.

Of course, Groves' article also implies that the cast themselves would be only too happy for the original cut to remain dead and buried, referring to a bootleg copy of the original soundtrack that was in circulation among some Hollywood cliques and, in Groves' words, "laughingly compared with Springtime For Hitler." If true, that does make my aforementioned mission statement to keep nursing enthusiasm for the musical cut into something of a double-edged sword. Fact is, I have way too much respect for the talent involved to want to rally for anything that would be likely to humiliate them. But then I'm highly suspicious of that tidbit Groves includes about Nolte and co-stars purposely attaining and destroying copies of the original musical cut, which seems like one of those anecdotal punchlines people tend to substitute where none exists. Baltake also makes reference to the bootleg soundtrack in his piece and includes a few contemporary comments from journalist Chris Willman, who didn't seem too enamored with the musical numbers and goes after Albert Brooks and Julive Kavner in particular, which I guess shouldn't surprise me. (Willman also refers to a "truncated drug subplot", implying that Nan's dangerous predilection for drugs cocktails was once intended to be more than just background detail to her involuntary tendency to speak her mind.) But here's the way I see it - right now, Hollywood has a real hard-on for awarding key roles in musical productions to big-name actors who couldn't sing if their life depended on it. Let's see, we got Russell Crowe in Les Miserables, Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia! and, most gruesomely of all, Emma Watson in Beauty and The Beast '17. I would sooner take a musical performance with a bit of purposeful character and eccentricity over an insipid performance from a Hollywood big shot who was blatantly chosen for their A-list credentials.

The lingering question is what of the I'll Do Anything that we got? Is James L. Brooks right about the story being capable of standing with or without the musical numbers that were at one time or another intended to be the heart of the movie? Is it at least an enjoyable film on its own terms? Obviously, I'm somewhat biased because I like the cast, but I would say that, yes, it's perfectly fine in its present state. It's also immeasurably better than that mean-spirited, homophobic Jim Carrey vehicle that devoured it at the box office back in '94 (a movie about an eccentric P.I. who locates missing animals frankly has no business being that repugnant). I suspect, however, that Rosenbaum is onto something when he says that the musical cut was more "dramatically and emotionally coherent" than the version Brooks put out. The non-musical cut more-or-less works from a story point of view (there aren't many obvious narrative blank spots caused by cutting the songs, although some individual scenes do fizzle out where it feels like more of a punchline should have been) overall it does feel very slight, and the constant interplay of intersecting story threads never really comes together in a cohesive or satisfying fashion. Obviously, the main focus of the narrative is on Matt's endeavors to tame the little red-toothed shrew he sired and has found himself unexpectedly saddled with, but how do the film's various subplots factor into that struggle, other than just entailing people whom Matt happens to have befriended in Hollywood? I think the loss of the songs hurts the picture, if not narratively, then certainly thematically; I'll Do Anything never gets to the issue that seems to be lurking at the core of its character dynamics, which I think has to do with what Kavner's character describes as "the near total degradation of what once were grand motives". She's talking about the corporate machinery of Hollywood and its strangulation of talent and creativity, but she also alludes to the means by which the characters' individual aspirations and preoccupations have caused them to blunder into their own private hells, cut off and stranded in what are effectively entirely separate universes to the people with whom they share a common physical space. It's here that I can see how the kind of inner monologue you get through musical sequences would have been a particularly valuable method of illustrating that disconnect. You know how it is in musicals. Characters get to have all that self-expression, and yet nobody hears them. They're belting out into a void.

Jeannie is, for a good part of the film, nothing more than the perfect manifestation of her estranged parents' mutual self-loathing and thwarted ambitions; totally uncommunicative, except to lash out at the world whenever it threatens to send her a jarring reminder that it does not revolve around her. Jeannie cannot read, which makes her all the more impervious to external influence. And yet her greatest wrath is directed inward, as demonstrated in a scene where she goes to pieces over not remembering the words to a song (the same song she performs for real during the closing credits). Her name is, of course, symbolic, since she's spent her whole life sealed away in a bottle, enforced by her father's abandonment and her mother's extremely warped overcompensation. I'd say the whole point is that the adult characters aren't really any different. Nan is the only one who sees things as they are and is prepared to speak the truth (which does make her pretty tactless at times, but she nevertheless remains the moral centre of the film), although she's largely ignored by Burke, a man so obsessed with what other people think of him that he doesn't think of other people. Burke has taken this self-immurement to its greatest extreme, clinging to it as if it were tantamount to self-preservation. As he says at one point, "I'm all alone. At least there's that." (Horrifyingly, he says this right after terminating a call from Nan in which she was attempting to profess her love for him.)

The third act sees Jeannie land a role in a sitcom, effectively surpassing her father on the success front, while Matt's big shot at scoring a lead role is blown when Cathy folds on him after being put on the spot by Burke in a particularly idiotic focus group. Jeannie's own breakthrough is at risk of turning sour when she discovers that he can't make herself cry on demand, which gives Matt the opportunity to connect with his daughter by sharing his acting wisdom. By the end of the film, there's nothing to suggest that Matt will be breaking out of his bit-part rut any time soon (he gets a role in another Oliver Stone picture, although it's not one of the leads), but he finds release from his own bottle in being able to put aside his own ego and ambitions aside and nurture Jeannie's talent, and she reciprocates by finally opening up to her father. It all ends a little abruptly. For one thing, I expected Ullman's character to have some form of input in the film's resolution, but she doesn't reappear at all once Matt has taken Jeannie, which seems slightly off to me (she's imprisoned, she's not dead; couldn't Jeannie at least have had a telephone conversation with her or something?). The subplots are wrapped up in an equally sketchy fashion. We are given indication that the relationship between Nan and Burke will endure and (hopefully) improve, since the two are shown getting physically intimate for the very first time, although the film's treatment of Cathy is kind of egregious; as a character she gets next to no closure, and her relationship with Matt goes out on such a bizarrely chilly note that I'm left puzzled as to what I was intended to make of it in the first place.

I'll Do Anything is an unsettled film that spins a lot of wheels and doesn't seem entirely clear about where it ultimately ends up, but the pleasures of the picture are in the assortment of smaller character moments leading up to it, which are engaging enough to hold your attention. I give props to the quietly contemplative scenes in which we see Matt taking the time to bridge a connection with Jeannie. Those scenes are so well-done, in fact, that I have wonder how well their unassuming realism would have sat with the heightened reality of the musical sequences, had those stayed in (assuming that Brooks didn't add in all of those moments in afterward). But then all of the evidence suggests that the musical cut would have been a very, deeply eccentric beast indeed, and for that much I think it's worth mourning.

In its current state, I'll Do Anything is a case of "I'll go with it, but I'll inevitably be thinking of that other version of itself and wondering how much more far out it was, for better or for worse". I yearn for that cut, and yet every last bite of this extremely bitter reality sandwich tells me that it's not coming. Oh, but my copy of The Pickle is, so silver linings.

Finally, what do we know about all those ill-fated musical numbers that had to be jettisoned along the way? The good news is that they haven't completely vanished without a trace - although the original cast recordings have stayed locked away in a heavily-guarded vault for the past quarter-century (save for those bootleg copies that slipped the net), a number of them were recycled in subsequent projects, giving us a further tantalising glimpse of what might have been. "Don't Talk 2 Strangers", a song originally intended to be sung by Beth as she bids farewell to Jeannie, later appeared on the soundtrack to Spike Lee's 1996 film Girl 6, and later still on Chaka Khan's 1998 album Come 2 My House, while Prince included his own renditions of three of those songs ("The Rest of My Life", "My Little Pill" and "There Is Lonely") on his 1999 studio album The Vault...Old Friends 4 Sale. This site has some useful information on the fates of various tunes. As I say, the musical version of I'll Do Anything WAS here. We need to hang onto whatever scant traces we have.