Tribute: Mary Rodgers

Posted on June 28, 2014 at 6:16 pm

Mary Rodgers, writer and composer, died on Thursday at age 83. She was co-creator of the wonderful musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” based on the Princess and the Pea fairy tale. It was a breakthrough role for Carol Burnett on Broadway. Here she is singing, “I’m Shy.”

It was remade with Tracy Ullman.

Burnett played the role of the evil Queen.

Rodgers also wrote books for kids that have become classics, especially Freaky Friday, filmed three times, most recently with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UShtvCen6So

She wrote a two-generation advice column with her mother for McCall’s Magazine and she worked with Leonard Bernstein on his famous series of Young People’s Concerts.

Rodgers was the daughter of one award-winning Broadway composer Richard Rodgers (“South Pacific,” “Pal Joey,” “The Sound of Music”) and the mother of another, Adam Guettel (“Floyd Collins” and “The Light in the Piazza”). The New York Times wrote:

“The Light in the Piazza,” Adam Guettel’s 2005 musical, for which he won a Tony for best score, was based on a 1950s novel by Elizabeth Spencer about an American woman traveling in Italy with her mentally disabled daughter, who falls in love with an Italian man. Years ago, Ms. Rodgers had suggested the story to her father as ripe for musicalizing, but he decided against it. Decades later she passed the idea on to her son.

Why, she was asked in 2003, did she not adapt the work herself?

“I had a pleasant talent but not an incredible talent,” she said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine. “I was not my father or my son. And you have to abandon all kinds of things.”

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John Green Profile by Margaret Talbot

Posted on June 20, 2014 at 8:00 am

My friend and Pre-Code movie series co-host Margaret Talbot has a thoughtful profile of The Fault in our Stars author John Green in The New Yorker. He told her

I love the intensity teen-agers bring not just to first love but also to the first time you’re grappling with grief, at least as a sovereign being—the first time you’re taking on why people suffer and whether there’s meaning in life, and whether meaning is constructed or derived. Teen-agers feel that what you conclude about those questions is going to matter. And they’re dead right. It matters for adults, too, but we’ve almost taken too much power away from ourselves. We don’t acknowledge on a daily basis how much it matters.

Talbot is insightful not just about why teen stories appeal to Green but about why Green is so important to teenagers, in part because he has made himself so accessible. She writes about his online chats with teens who have cancer and his responding to comments on his series of video posts about everything from public policy to geopolitical conflicts, classic literature to promoting his slogan: DFTBA — “Don’t forget to be awesome” (and evil corporations profiting from that slogan). The article is as significant for its portrayal of the millennial generation’s experience and expectation of fan-dom as it is for its biographical details about Green. It is reassuring to see that some analog aspects of fandom persist, even in the era of Tumblr, YouTube channels, and Twitter.

Many authors do pre-publication publicity, but Green did extra credit: he signed the entire first printing—a hundred and fifty thousand copies—which took ten weeks and necessitated physical therapy for his shoulder.

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M. Knight Shyamalan at the National Press Club

Posted on June 13, 2014 at 10:16 pm

Writer/director M. Knight Shyamalan (“The Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable,” “The Last Airbender,” “After Earth”), appeared at the National Press Club this week to talk about his side project, an intensive assessment of American schools and proposals for reform, as described in his book, I Got Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America’s Education Gap. He became interested in the issue after he visited two schools just four minutes apart. In one, the students were vitally engaged and excited about all possibilities. They gathered around him, asking if they could be in his next movie. In the other, they recognized him but assumed that it could not possibly be the same man who made Hollywood films. They had already internalized the idea that no opportunities would come to them.

Shyamalan is the son of doctors. He was raised to believe in evidence and data. He spent years trying to figure out the elements that separated effective schools from failing schools and found that there were a lot of passionate adults and a lot of “heated, accusatory” arguments but very little quantifiable, replicable data. He had his own studies done and he found five core elements that were necessary for schools that made students excited about learning so that they would achieve at or beyond grade level. All five were required.

First is: principals who spend 80 percent of their time teaching teachers (“the norm is 8 percent, like a coach not coaching the players”) and the creation of “an incredibly loud and consistent culture.” He spoke frankly about the racism that is still a toxic force in the lives of children today. “They’re getting a message shouted to them outside of the school and we’re going to shout one louder.” That’s what school culture can do, especially in communicating a sense of community and possibility.

He also emphasized the importance of teachers. A good one can sustain a student despite subsequent years of mediocre teachers. But a bad one will make students lag for as much as three more years. Data must be available for continuous assessment and feedback and to create a highest common denominator by making best practices replicable. More time with the students is essential. The school day and especially the school year do not provide enough time and kids who do not have access to resources at home fall too far behind over the summer to catch up. And schools must be smaller. By itself, keeping the school to 350 or fewer raises the graduation rate 17 percent.

Shyamalan was engaged and engaging, self-deprecatory (“celebrity advocates make my stomach cringe”) but passionate. It was good to see his willingness to take on this complicated problem and be a constructive part of the solution.

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Interview: Dean DeBlois of “How to Train Your Dragon 2”

Posted on June 13, 2014 at 7:00 am

Writer/director Dean DeBlois is one of my favorite people to interview and it was delightful to talk to him about the wonderful “How to Train Your Dragon 2.”

Just give me the basics just to set the stage. Tell me how much time has gone by since the first film and where we start off.

This is the second installment of a planned of trilogy. It has our characters now 20 years old instead of 15 year olds that were in our first movie. We wanted to introduce Hiccup and the gang at a different crossroads in their life where they are now stepping into adulthood with some uncertainty and a sense that Hiccup isn’t quite cut out to take over his father’s mantle as chief. So instead he is expressing his restlessness by being out there on the edge of the Viking map and charting new lands and finding new dragons. That’s where he comes across the conflict that actually threatens the peace back home. He discovers that there is a group of dragon trappers that are trapping dragons for an ambitious conqueror named Drago Bludvist who on plans on amassing a dragon army. And there is also a vigilante who is out there rescuing dragons and whisking them away to safety.

Now tell me a little bit about what has happened in the technology side since you made the first one and how that has affected making the movie. Were there things you were able to do this time that you couldn’t do last time?

Sure, absolutely! This film is actually the first to roll out a brand new generation of software that has been in development for over five years. And it just reinvents the way that we approach our work and makes it very intuitive and real time so that we don’t have to wait for renders which always impairs creativity. The big improvement is that the software is much faster so you can work with lots of characters on screen but the results are immediate and so animators now work with their hands again. They get to use the stylus and they can manipulate characters instead of using spreadsheets, numeric entries and pull-down menus.

It seems to me that there is a lot more capacity for many, many characters to interact with each other.

That’s exactly it! There are so many shots in this movie that increase the scope and scale which is perfect for our ambition for the film. There were shots that couldn’t have been done before, like where we have thousands of characters on screen rushing the beach and the epic battle of the second act or so many different characters riding their dragons even in the opening during the dragon races. It allows us to be really rich and complex and also allows for incredible subtlety with the animation as well because there is so much going on under the skin with every one of our character.

With every year it seems like technology makes our lives a little bit easier and makes things look a lot better. Five years ago it seems like clouds in particular were very difficult or water, or anything interacting with water was difficult, like ice for example. We have a lot of that in our movie and it was really difficult to light that but now they look spectacular and you can imagine actually what it going to be five years from now. I believe that what we’re doing now which feels very cutting edge five years from is going to look primitive in ten years.

There is a guy name Dave Walvoord who was our head of visual effects who spent a lot of time actually developing the look of that ice. And it really was incredible. They worked really hard, it was difficult but they figured out a formula that seems to allow just the right amount of light to reflect through it and it has just the right opacity and luminosity to it that just makes it jump off the screen. That’s hats off to our effects department, breathing so much life into what lurks beneath the waves has add a really great quality to it

I’m going to try to do this so that we avoid spoilers but we lose an important character in this movie, so what can you say about that?

It was painful but it was a rite of passage and I think that we all knew that Hiccup had a place to go narratively and so long as he had a crutch he wouldn’t step into the role that he needed to step into. So as somebody who suffered a very similar loss as a boy it has a great heroism to it and a nobility to it but also narratively in terms of tracking Hiccup’s coming of age it was a rite of passage that I thought we needed to go through in order to really commit to the person he needed to become.

That was sad but what totally got me was that beautiful song. I cried. So tell me about the choreography and where the song came from.

I’m really happy to hear that because that was the moment I was most afraid of in the movie and as a result I’m maybe most proud of. The risk for a cringe-worthy experience was high I knew I wanted to have this old Viking ballad that would have been passed down through the generations and something that would have been sung at her wedding to bring her back from this place of regret and remorse and feeling overwhelmed by the realization that people can change and she made the wrong decision and all this time her son who probably needed her feeling like a square peg back in Berk, left to feel like he was the only one that was sympathetic to dragons.

So she is carrying a lot of that burden at the beginning of the scene and Hiccup is so enthusiastic, he’s unaware that he is only overwhelming her more but Stoick realizes that there is another approach and so he uses this song that was a duet to remind her of the person she used to be and who they used to be together. So it was made to be carried out in a very clumsy kind of charming way that used music minimally in order to feel authentic and raw and not a burst into song musical moment. And it sounds like we pulled it off if it made you cry.

I should tell you the song was actually written by Jónsi who was the frontman of an Icelandic band call Sigur Rós and he did our incredible song at the end of our first film. He’s a good friend and I made a concert film for them a few years ago. He joined forces with John Powell to write two pieces for this movie and that’s Hiccup’s introduction song and this song. Lyrically I had something very specific in mind. Shane McGowan from the Pogues has always written these really heartfelt tender beautiful moments and beautiful lyrics and so we approached him about it. He jumped at the chance so the lyrics are lyrics are actually from Shane McGowan, John Powell and Jónsi. We even brought in a choreographer to help us with the movements.

The choreography was pretty intricate.

Yes, we used a choreographer from Once, the stage production and America Idiot. I asked him to make it feel like your parents, sort of bumbling parents dancing around the kitchen instead of Dancing with the Stars. And he incorporated a few fumbles as well in the middle of the choreography to make it feel really authentic and unrehearsed.

I thought that was great. Now I want to go back to the beginning for a minute because that dragon race was an incredible way to get you very immediately into the film and with the characters. How do you orchestrate that to keep us on top of so many different things that are happening?

Narratively we had a lot of ground to cover just in terms of recapping it for the audience and helping out the audience who had not seen the first film. So we decided to do it this very kinetic visceral way. Now that the Vikings and dragons are no longer at each other’s throats they needed something to do with all that energy. so they created this obstacle race of sorts that involves finding marked sheep that are all over the island and then returning them to these baskets that contain them. And you have the whole populous of Berk crammed into these stands cheering them on. This way we could see all of our auxiliary cast aged five years later but also reintroduce them in a fun kinetic way paired with their dragons and seeing how they have become symbiotic flyers in these five years that has passed.

And then another thing is we fly be a lot of the updates that have been installed since the first movie so in places of catapults, and battle stations we now have feeding stations, water reservoir, and aqueducts. You can really see the ways that the dragons have been integrated into the Vikings’ daily lives and how it’s become a dragon utopia, which also helps to set up the stakes for the movie. This is what could be lost if Drago Bludvist has his way and conquers their land as well.

Drago is played by Djimon Hounsou. Tell me about selecting him for the cast and what you saw for that character.

One of my favourite movies is Blood Diamond and I thought Djimon was so powerful in that movie, in particular the scene where he is talking to his son who has been brainwashed by the warlords and has a gun pointed at his father. It’s this beautiful scene where he is saying, “This is who you are and these are your sisters and this is your mother” and remind him of sort of the daily life of who he used to be and the tears were running down his face. I thought that was a great reference for the moment where Hiccup was trying to reconnect with Toothless in the third act of the movie. So he was high on my list and I also love the fact that Djimon was born in Africa but raised in France and he has a very non specific accent which is what I wanted for this character. He was from a distant land, a strange land of unknown origin and so it added to his mystique that he is journeyed this long way for this goal of amassing a dragon army. He’s got a great character to his voice that’s really powerful and intimidating but also textured to indicate that there’s more going on than just the arch villain. He has limited screen time in this movie but I think there is a sense of wanting to know more about what makes him tick.

And I also really enjoyed the new character that you added, Eret played by Kit Harington.

I started watching Game of Thrones as I was setting up the movie and John Snow quickly became one of my favorite characters. And I loved that sense of youth in his voice, and there’s a nobility there. Eret is from a completely different land but also in a way a contemporary of Hiccup’s, roughly in that age range. There was a youth and a charm but also playfulness to the voice that Kit brings. And I actually think he did a great job of rising to the occasion because we pushed the character to be much more of an arrogant, cocksure, cowboy of a dragon trapper who loves the sound of his own voice and Kit immediately took to that and packed more accent to it to make it seem even more amplified. I think he had a lot of fun with the role.

What’s next?

I’m about to start writing that script after I take a little break. I have an existing outline already that was part of mapping the trilogy was kind of knowing what threads we would be drawing out of the first film and playing out in the second installment but then also what are we setting up for the third? I love the idea that something that Cressida Cowell had mentioned when she was visiting the studio and she is the author of the books from which the first movie was based. She said, “I plan by the end to explain what happens to dragons and why they are no more.” That was so compelling and I thought “Wow, it is such a powerful idea.” Of course it’s bittersweet but I think it is so emotionally powerful and fitting to be able to close a chapter on this trilogy with history returning to somewhat as we know it and what happened to the dragons and where did they go and could they come back. These are all mysteries that will be unveiled. But I loved that Hiccup learned stand on his own and made the toughest decisions of all for the betterment of mankind and dragons.

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Interview: “Obvious Child’s” Jenny Slate and Gillian Robespierre

Posted on June 12, 2014 at 1:10 pm

Jenny Slate gives a star-making performance in “Obvious Child,” a romantic comedy about Donna, a young stand-up comic who becomes pregnant and has an abortion. Her decision is not presented in a comic or light-hearted way. What is revolutionary is that it is presented at all. As writer-director Gillian Robespierre points out, in movies women who become unexpectedly pregnant either choose to deliver the child (“Knocked Up,” “Juno”), or miscarry. In this movie, Donna does not question her decision, but that does not mean it is an easy one. She is supported by her best friend, Nellie (Gaby Hoffman), and her mother (Polly Draper). I spoke to Slate and Robespierre about the film.

In the movie you do basically three stand-up performances. I want to talk to you about what I thought the most compelling scene in the film which was the second one, where you are working through some very deep pain on-stage.

Jenny: That was my favorite really, I like them all but I love that one. You know Donna is very, very free on stage and at the beginning of the movie she’s very free, from 0 to 100 in a second and she just keeps it at 100. You’re enjoying it and you’re not really considering whether or not it’s an active job or a passive job that she is doing up there. And I kind of consider it to be kind of the most basic sort of passive that she’s just blasting it out. And the second time she really lets her nature take over. That need to share has just become the most animal that it can be. In my mind that type of stand-up is equivalent of her just kind of like squatting on the ground and just like sorting through the detritus. This is my stuff, just doing it for nobody but herself. There many different things that we can do to ourselves and for ourselves and that one is on the non-helpful side but I find to be hilarious and you know it’s not so painful and cringeworthy where you don’t want to watch, the audience laughs.

The audience in the theater laughs, but the audience in the movie is uncomfortable because it is so raw.

Gillian: That was our intention. All of the extras were wonderful that day so we have a couple of cutaways with reactions that are just great. I’ve seen the movie millions of times but there’s always one guy who just looks so lost and scared, and really perturbed. I really wanted to make sure that the people in the club in the movie were awkward but the audience in the movie theater or at home are laughing.

Jenny: I like that dual thing where the guy leaves and Donna is like, “oh this is not working for you?” It’s a bummer for them but I think I did a thrill ride for us.

Gillian: One of my favorite parts in the movie. I looked forward to that.

You cast two of my absolute favorite actors as Donna’s parents, Richard Kind and Polly Draper.

Gillian: Well when we were looking for the parents, Jenny was always part of the film, we wanted to find the perfect combination of sort of whimsical and arty and tough. And it could have been either way, the dad could have been tough and the mom could have been whimsical but really the script meant for a fun creative dad and the more uptight mother. And I can picture them in the 80s wheeling down and around in New York City and really being tickled by each other but obviously they could not make it last. And they’re perfect left side/right side and that’s sort of what Donna has. We know that she on one hand tells very sort of body jokes but on the other hand she has a very high IQ, which are mom reminds her of everyday. And on stage which is sort of relating to the audience, are smart moments in her life that people can relate to even though she does it in a kind of silly way. So we wanted both of those aspects of her brain and her personality to be portrayed in human parents. And I love Polly Draper from Thirtysomething. I watched it when I was little and I obsess about that show. She and Jenny have the same raspy voice. I think they look alike. I think Richard Kind and Jenny have these malleable comic faces. I’m so thrilled they said yes. They read the script, they loved it and they saw that it was a Jenny Slate movie and they said yes immediately.

This was originally made as a short film so tell me a little bit about expanding it to full-length.

Gillian: Donna didn’t have a career in the short. We had to get in and out pretty quickly. She was a lot younger, she was 25 and she gets dumped, has a one night stand, discovers she is pregnant and then she bumps into the one night stand on the way to the woman’s health center. And we sort of just shot it four days in New York City with no money. We wanted to really expand in her world, creating her parents. In the short her mom was a character but not anything but a phone call so it was a voiceover. And that voice was acted by my mom. We expanded on Donna’s world. It was fun to figure out what is Donna going to be, what’s her job. She’s not a career person but she’s been in this bookstore for five years, it’s very comfortable in there. Her boss is a sort of grandpa figure. They’re friends and she’s really somebody who has a hard time with change and expanding her world. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that kind of character. She’s a little meek in life and not a victim but she lets a lot of things happen to her. “My boyfriend broke up with me and he is cheating on me so I can’t do my comedy anymore.” That’s a very passive way of thinking about life and the easy way until it’s hard.

Jenny: She thinks, “I’m just chill, I’m just trying to make s**t work and everybody’s just messing with me,” until suddenly just like, “God that just can’t be true because I feel so mad I must have some power in there.”

The movie has a beautiful portrayal of girl friendship, with the character played by Gaby Hoffman.

Jenny : In the scene where she is trying to say like, “No do your own thing” and Joey has his own opinion, she says, “You guys stop with the crazy jokes” which I think adds a really nice texture. And it just reveals a little bit of what their relationship is, kind of a threesome of friends and you don’t need to know that story but it just adds a bit of realism to it. Gaby and I are both people that are very eager to share so that made it very easy to connect to each other and then Gillian’s script is so clear.

Gillian: I feel like that’s a very important relationship in a lot women’s life. I know that I’m a gal’s gal and I have a lot of great friends. I have great female friends and they mean so much to me in my relationship, it’s so important and for Donna I wanted her to have that complex female relationship with her best friend who is not really going to let her get away with everything but also very unconditionally supportive. They’re polar opposites. Nellie is a little grumpy and a lot more reserved and has a lot more rules while Donna is sort of a wildflower who can’t really control things but they meet up in the middle and have some wonderful balance. And then three of them together, that’s when I think Joey and Donna sort of regress a little but they’re fun, they like to tell jokes each other, make each other laugh and made her laugh. Nellie won’t have it sometimes and then sometimes she breaks down and she chuckles.

What has the reaction been to the portrayal of abortion in the film?

Gillian: People are really excited for this story, I think it’s exciting to see a woman in screen who they can relate to and who they can laugh with. Pushback hasn’t really come our way yet and we’re excited for conversation if and when it happens.

Donna has to learn to overcome her prejudices when she meets a guy who does not look like what she is used to.

Gillian: At first he seems like a dull kind of frat boy muscleman. But like for every other character we wanted to make them complex and dimensional and with him it was like not just peeling away his bro-ness but to show that he’s really excited about this funny woman. When she tells a joke he laughs really hard and then he tells her one back and he’s a funny guy too. And she doesn’t feel like she deserves to be looked at so that was like a nice subtle layer that in there but also that she would never ever go for a guy who wears boat shoes.

Jenny : And then she makes fun of him right away. And he’s like, “don’t judge me”, and she’s like, “oh….”

What’s next for you?

Jenny: I’m in a new series on FX called “Married” with Paul Reiser. I play a woman who has a lot of daddy issues and a tiny, tiny bit of a partying problem. And she has a three-year-old son. It’s about different couples trying to make their marriages work.

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