24 replies to this topic

[FauxPas]

Gypsy Rose Lee also shows up in a fascinating film called "Screaming Mimi" with Anita Ekberg.  It really resembles the kind of exploitation sex and horror trash Mario Bava and Jesus Franco put out in the 1960's but it is a fifties Hollywood thriller.  Ekberg plays a "nightclub dancer" who does an "artistic" dance number with chains!.  (Everything is as thinly disguised and covered over as Ms. Ekberg's astonishing physique - strippers were verboten).  There is all sorts of kink going on beneath a paper thin Hollywood veneer of respectability.  Anyway, the middle-aged Gypsy Rose Lee shows up as the nightclub owner and does a version of "Put the Blame on Mame" shaking her fringed dress.  She seems to have a very close relationship with the club's cigarette girl who she aggressively protects from male attention.

Gypsy Rose Lee displays a very idiosyncratic screen personality and delivery in this film - she combines the  heartiness of Lee Patrick with the sardonic humor of Eve Arden with an offbeat sexiness all her own.  Obviously she can only play a variation of herself but that personality is rather unique.  I think her dismissal of her talents was unjust.

No commentary on the Midler version?  It had a script that was more faithful to the stage original than the Russell movie.  I thought the direction wasn't bad.  Midler was game but there were major pieces missing in her characterization and singing.

[dirac]

Hi, FauxPas. Welcome to the discussion. I like Midler and so prefer not to bring up that version of Gypsy, which I saw only once and thought badly misjudged.

[dirac]

Arthur Laurents changes his mind.

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But now Laurents says the film version is not going to happen "for a really fascinating reason, much bigger than 'Gypsy.' "

He recently spoke with the musical's lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, who asked Laurents why he wanted to allow the film project to happen. "He said, 'What is the point of it?' And I said, 'They have this terrible version with Rosalind Russell wearing those black and white shoes.' And then Sondheim told me something that he got from the British -- and it's wonderful. He said, 'You want a record because the theater is ephemeral. But that's wrong. The theater's greatest essence is that it is ephemeral. You don't need a record. The fact that it's ephemeral means you can have different productions, different Roses on into infinity.'

I had mixed feelings about this project, but what a silly reason for not doing a remake – as if a better film of the show would somehow obviate future revivals. Laurents is either a)losing it; b) has another reason he doesn’t want to divulge publicly; c) has no particular reason and is just having a bit of fun with Streisand and the rest of us, especially since he was the one who told the press in the first place; or d) a bit of all three.

[dirac]

Quote

(Who would ever agree to direct her, I can't imagine!)

According to reports, Tom Hooper, for one...

[glebb]

According to BroadwayWorld.com, this project is off.

[dirac]

Hi, glebb, good to hear from you. That's what the article I posted yesterday says - Laurents changed his mind.

[richard53dog]

dirac, on 15 March 2011 - 09:28 AM, said:

Hi, glebb, good to hear from you. That's what the article I posted yesterday says - Laurents changed his mind.

Well perhaps the project isn't quite dead yet......

http://www.nytimes.c...-film.html?_r=1

[dirac]

Thanks for posting that, richard53dog. Guess Laurents changed his mind again.

Sounds like he was busy right to the end:

Quote

In the month before his death, on May 5, the Tony Award-winning writer and director Arthur Laurents gave his blessing to a plan for a new film version of “Gypsy,” starring Barbra Streisand, and also finished a full-length play as well as his third memoir, Laurents’s agent and several associates said this week.

[Anthony_NYC]

Apparently the project is still on. Playbill is reporting that Julian Fellowes will adapt the screenplay. Not an obvious choice, I'd say, but I admire some of his work.

[dirac]

Thanks for the update, Anthony_NYC. Well, they better do it soon, lest it be necessary to rename the protagonist Grandmama Rose.

Perhaps in the Fellowes version Rose and her daughters will be driven onto the vaudeville circuit because the family seat, Eggroll House, is entailed??