March 19, 2004

The Atomic Revolution: Now the Truth Can Be Told

Last year I was blown away by the beautiful artistry that went into the eerily slick corporate propagandotainment comic book, The Atomic Revolution. I'm using the cool, Golden Age comic style as a major visual reference point for my As Yet Unannounced Animated Musical, which has more than a little good, old-fashioned apocalyptic flavor to it. The cool animation artist Ethan Persoff rediscovered it, scanned it in, and hosted the entire book on his site (and now accepts donations to...
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Posted by greg allen at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

February 29, 2004

On How A Musical Revival Takes Longer Than One Year

Rebecca Traitser, oft of the NYO and some online zine called Salon, notes in the NYT that the studios haven't quite ironed out all the details of that post-Chicago musical revival we've all been waiting for. Ignoring that Miramax-spun history of contemporary musicals for a moment (Moulin Rouge? South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut? 8 Mile?), it seems musicals need a certain studios ne savent quoi to escape development hell. Some examples: Broadway films [Do we know that Joel Schumacher's...
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Posted by greg allen at 01:00 PM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2003

Oooooo-kla-ho, man! Is that Hugh Jackman??

I may have a new tagline for my As-Yet-Unannounced Animated Musical: it's not Terminator meets West Side Story; it's Swordfish meets Oklahoma! But I'm already too late. Starting Saturday, PBS will broadcast the Royal National Theater's 2002 revival of Oklahoma! starring hacker, mutant, and musical theater whore, Hugh Jackman. Related Links: Salon. For once, I didn't make it past the ad Oklahoma! on PBS, starring Hugh Jackman Hugh Jackman starring as Peter Allen, Liza Minnelli's gay husband (is there...
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Posted by greg allen at 01:28 PM | Comments (0)

August 21, 2003

Beyond Bruce Schneier's Beyond Fear

On BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow calls Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World "one of the most important texts of the decade." I'm pretty sure he means the decade starting in 2000, (or, say, September 11, 2001), not the last ten years. Schneier's a/the security expert, and Beyond Fear, Cory says, "utterly demystifies security" for a non-technical audience. My bet is, it guts every Ashcroftian rights-and-power grab in the name of security like a trout on a church...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:19 PM | Comments (0)

July 01, 2003

Making Musicals Film Series? Sign me up.

Film Forum is presenting a 3-week series, The Freed Unit and the Golden Age of MGM Musicals. Stuart Klawans gives a preview in yesterday's Times and recommends the dark, slightly weird, The Band Wagon.. [By the way, it was written by Comden and Greene, directed by Vincente Minelli, and starred, um, Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse.] The Band Wagon opens July 4, which means my PS1 museum tour is booked against the 3:15 Saturday screening. At least I don't have...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)

June 19, 2003

Bollywood Thursdays on TCM

Turner Classic Movies is showing a dozen Bollywood classics on Thursdays in June, introduced by Ismail Merchant. As might be expected whenever Merchant's involved, the movie menu reads somewhere between vegetarian and vegan: noble, needs some spice, and definitely not enough cheese. But that's just how it looks to a guy who discovered Bollywood through Diesel Jeans commercials and Namaste America, an Indian music video show on NYC's public access channel Saturday mornings. Merchant/Ivory's own meta-Bollywood film, Bombay Talkie is...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:07 PM | Comments (0)

April 30, 2003

Painless Prediction: A Wave of Raves for Jerry Springer: The Opera

Guardian's Michael Billington's got one that begins: "Reviewing an already acclaimed show is a bit like arriving sober at a party where everyone else is drunk." Here's a giddy Telegraph profile of Tom Morris, who put on the show at London's Battersea Arts Centre. Comedian/bookwriter/director Stewart Lee's site has dozens more. As one who is writing an Animated Musical on a counterintuitive, quite contemporary subject, I, for one, hail our new operatic overlords. JSTO opened tonight at the Lyttleton,...
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Posted by greg allen at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2003

He'll Be Back: A Terminator Weekend

Partly in preparation for the impending release of T3, partly because I've been describing my Animated Musical as "Terminator meets West Side Story," we watched T and T2 back-to-back last night. Pertinent findings: 1) That's a lot more Linda Hamilton than the average human constitution is prepared for, and 2) my worries about having taken too much inspiration from films I hadn't seen for 19 and 12 years, respectively, were unfounded. And besides, at the end of the Terminator...
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Posted by greg allen at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)

April 09, 2003

How to Finish An Animated Musical Script

You may have noticed I've been kind of quiet on the "about making films" front lately. Even if the number of Bloghdad.com posts seems to indicate otherwise, It's not because of the war. I've been writing, rewriting, actually, on the fourth draft of the Animated Musical script. Looking back to November, when I finished the second draft, I have to say I'm very pleased with the progress: Characters A couple of major characters needed to be more fully developed....
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Posted by greg allen at 07:01 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2003

On The Coming Wave Of Movie Musicals

Rick McGinnis writes about it on his Movieblog, jumping off from Renee Graham's Boston Globe article, article,"Casting aspersions on the future of movie musicals." Something's coming, but is it something good? Since Chicago, it's been Code Orange for movie musicals, I guess, and no one quite knows what the appropriate response is. The speculation (remake West Side Story with J-Lo and Ben) can barely keep up with reality (Vin Diesel's up for the "hard edge" remake of Guys and Dolls)...
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Posted by greg allen at 01:04 PM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2003

On Opera Adapted From Novel

I became familiar with Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale, through its horrible film adaptation, a numbingly unsubtle reproductive fascist farce. I guess in 1990, the only totalitarianism that director Volker Schlondorff could get people to accept is the East German kind. Anyway, on the occasion of its premiere at the English National Opera, Atwood writes in the Guardian about allowing the Danish composer Poul Ruders to make an opera of it in the first place. One challenge turned out...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2003

A Long NYT Article On The Road To Chicago

Rick Lyman writes about the decades-long battles to make a film version of Chicago, including a Chandler Auditorium-ful of cast, director, and writers who were attached to the project through the years. One star is conspicuously absent from the scrum, Bebe Neuwirth, whose Broadway Chicago won her a Tony and transformed the property from a "half-remembered musical from the 1970's [into] a fresh hit." Yet somehow, casting "Catherine Zeta-Jones was an easy choice, with her musical comedy experience." Lyman leaves...
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Posted by greg allen at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2003

The Oscars: A Musical Comedy

About the Oscar nominations: Chicago is to movies what painted cows are to art....
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Posted by greg allen at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2003

About Chicago: One Man's Sad Journey

Act I: Setup Chicago is being called "an attempt to revive the movie musical," a genre which has been woefully ignored by Hollywood since Moulin Rouge and South Park. It apparently won a bunch of awards at the Golden Globes last week, and now lemming journalists are herding it to the cliff of Oscar plausibility. Despite a general trepidation/disapproval of the genre (See exceptions here), I'm writing an Animated Musical. Act II: Action I went to see Chicago last night...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)

November 24, 2002

AYUAM second draft completed. Get me rewrite!

The last couple of days have been pretty productive, and I've managed to get out the second complete draft of the As-Yet Unannounced Animated Musical (AYUAM or AM for short) script. It's probably even less fun to read about an unannounced than it is to write cagily about it. Sorry. Here on the weblog, I've been trying to come up with thematically consistent and entertaining links and clues over the last few weeks, creating a scattershot mosaic of references that,...
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Posted by greg allen at 05:21 PM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2002

Writing Proceeds Apace; In the Mean Time, Follow These Links

"I can do things the traditional Hollywood route. I don't have to try the new, unproven Internet." - Screenwriter Pamela Kay, leaving the new crop of screenwriting communities behind in Matthew Mirapaul's NY Times article, "Aspiring Screenwriters Turn to Web for Encouragement" What I hate to see/hear in historical documentaries: the expert interviewee's super-affected use of the third person present tense. Listen to a twee example (about 2 minutes in) from NPR's story of the song, Dixie. Obviously, I enjoyed...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:36 PM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2002

"Alone, nothing, together, a household word, a legend"

Even though I'm on the record (ad nauseum) as hating musicals, it's probably more accurate to say I hate most musicals or bad musicals. The shows I've seen by Adolph Green, who collaborated for sixty+ years with Betty Comden, don't fall into either category. Unbenknownst to me, they were sitting right in front of me at The Public Theater's 1997 revival of On The Town; right before the show started, an announcement was made and they stood to accept...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:24 PM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2002

On flashbacks and the As-yet Unannounced Animated Musical Feature

Did a few walkthroughs this weekend on the story & structure of this project. It's a crime story (whether it's a "based on a true story" story or "any similarity to real persons is entirely coincidental" story depends on how we proceed with the rights. I'll discuss this subject in some detail later, as I did with music rights.), so I've been trying to find an ending that works; do they get away with it? Learn their lessons? Pay for...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:40 PM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2002

On giddy, embarassing glee derived from movie log lines

On the plane this week, I made myself laugh (and my wife nervous) by coming up with the pitch way too quickly and unabashedly for a half-rewritten script I'm...rewriting: It's like Monster's Ball meets Memento. It pales in comparison to "Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate" and "Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman," though. (Too many of these log lines, and I'll screw my movie/director index up.)...
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Posted by greg allen at 04:44 PM | Comments (0)

July 10, 2002

New Project: Did I mention

New Project: Did I mention it's animated? Actually, yeah, I did. Indirectly, anyway. Did I mention it's a musical? Umm, yeah. Well, I've been researching anime, animation production, CG, and techniques today. Here are some interesting links I've assembled so far: Animation through Virtual Studios, from Animation World Magazine. Forget posting an online production diary. These guys made an animated short entirely online, with 100+ collaborators worldwide using a production website and database. Robert Breer. I was wracking my brain...
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Posted by greg allen at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)

July 07, 2002

Unlike Schoolhouse Rock, this song has no impact on my desire to write a musical

When I posted on kottke.org about "Fifty Nifty United States," I gave a link with the lyrics and a Real Audio file. here is that link....
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Posted by greg allen at 09:25 PM | Comments (0)

July 04, 2002

On July Fourth, I watched a lot of movies and called it research. (But don't hate me; one was Flashdance)

For the new project (comments to follow): Everyone Says I Love You(Woody Allen) - An utterly joyless, excruciating experience. I just wanted his characters to shut up for even one second. Everyone seemed to be doing a frantic, bad Woody Allen impression; the most "successful," Poor Ed Norton was possessed. Just wrong in every way. This is one of the films he sued his longtime producer over; he's lucky I wasn't on the jury. Disney's Classics of the 50's...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)

July 03, 2002

On hating musicals while making plans to watch Buffy; On The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I don't hate

Last night was a rerun of Buffy: The Musical, Joss Whedon's annual stunt episode of the show (two seasons ago, there was the silent episode, then the "no background noise" episode. In 2001, it was the "background singer" episode, I guess.) Not a Buffy fan, but with the gushing reviews from last fall still fresh in my conscience, we sat down to watch it. [note: Stephanie Zacharek's Salon.com review is dripping with the vampire-inspired ecstasy that so scared the Victorians....
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Posted by greg allen at 01:59 PM | Comments (0)

February 07, 2002

My daily Baz Lurhman and

My daily Baz Lurhman and Martin Scorcese encounter: They're both in this NYTimes article about rampant botox injections "playing havoc with facial expressions." One of many priceless quotes, this one about the only-temporary effects of treatment: "You could marry a woman with a flawlessly even face," one doctor said, "and wind up with someone who four months later looked like a Shar-Pei." The writer, Alex Kuczynski, formerly of the Times' business beat and the NY Observer, which first broke the...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)