At a time when Big Tech is desperate to sell people on outsourcing the creation of art to slop-generating, plagiarism-fueled environmental disasters, we should all turn to D.A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: Company, a monument to the thrill of doing it right.
This is not a naïve film in the slightest. It opens with an explanation for its off-kilter existence: it was made as a would-be pilot for a whole documentary series of similar inside looks at Broadway processes, and then the interested party got promoted and moved on. C’est la vie, Pennebaker’s chatty text scroll seems to imply. You do what you do, and what happens, happens: “There was never a next one. This was it.”
It’s right there from the start: the idea that there’s no guaranteed reward for all this, no payout, so who the hell would get into this business for the money? Why would you do it, if you didn’t care about the work itself?
Pennebaker cares about keeping his cameras quiet so they don’t get booted out of the marathon recording session. Stephen Sondheim cares about developing his independent voice. Elaine Stritch cares about nailing “The Ladies Who Lunch.” Everyone here—the musicians who stay into the small hours of the morning, the actors running through take after take—cares about the process of collaboration, of polishing their own individual pieces of the puzzle and giving others time and space to do the same.
There’s an easy intimacy to the documentary, which is mostly, but not entirely, fly-on-the-wall (it’s loosey-goosey rather than formally strict, so sticking to one style wouldn’t make sense). It feels like Pennebaker nabs his occasional interviews during coffee breaks, like he’s talking to coworkers; he’s one person doing a job, in a room full of other people doing their jobs. It’s professional but casual, and that means that one of the things the piece captures is how interstitial a cast album recording is. It’s not the show, which comes with sets and costumes. It’s made in a studio, a space full of drab neutrals that has boxy sound equipment instead of an audience. Everyone comes in casual clothes (Elaine Stritch’s fisherman’s hat is iconic). But as behind-the-scenes, mundane, and unglamorous as it is, it’s clear that almost everyone finds it more stressful than the live shows they’re familiar with.
They’re making a permanent record, one people will be able to visit and revisit it over and over again without the forgiving, ceaseless forward momentum of a live performance to put any bloom on the rose. Everyone’s aware that what may pass on stage won’t always work through headphones.
It breeds perfectionism. Sondheim has to correct the pronunciation of “bubi.” He makes a catch in Pamela Myers’s performance of “Another Hundred People,” and says—rubbing his eyes—“You changed two notes, and I have a feeling that I haven’t noticed them and you’ve been doing it for weeks. … It used to be an F sharp and it’s gradually become an A.” Night after night, he didn’t hear the difference. Here, he does, and he has to catch it before someone else does too. Notes have to be given and received gracefully. Everyone has to agree this is a good use of their time.
It all culminates with Elaine Stritch singing “The Ladies Who Lunch” at the end of the long night—and, after all these hours, her voice is fraying. Sondheim, who insisted on the proper F sharp, is willing to have her adjust the song to her needs; that’s how tired everyone is. But Stritch, who has a heartbreaking line about how long she’s worked with bad material and how alive she feels now that she finally has something good, isn’t willing. She does take after take, and it—predictably—gets worse and worse, until she’s hoarsely crying out the words but not, everyone has to point out, actually singing them. She’s a human instrument, and she’s breaking down.
The solution, here and everywhere, isn’t to abandon the human element but to serve it. The technology here allows that (they lay down the orchestral track first), and it’s a good tool. But it’s a tool that exists so Elaine Stritch can rest and come back to an absolute, shimmying-with-joy triumph, so Stephen Sondheim can smile as he hears it.
The final grace note when each song is recorded is the invitation to come back and listen to it, to pass from performer to audience. Look what I made. I did something really cool. Other people will hear it too, eventually, as I’m hearing it now. But even when that’s not true, even when the pilot never gets picked up and the series never comes, there’s still Elaine Stritch dancing, radiating light as she knows that this time, she’s got this. She has it. God knows she wouldn’t farm that out to anyone else.
Original Cast Album: Company is streaming on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
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Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Justified, Season Four, Episode Two, “Where Waldo?
You guys must have been laughing when I brought up Art last week – we jump right into some great stuff with him pretty much immediately, opening up with a Tastes Like Piss speech about his marshalls (“The key to it is talk about it like you’re talking about the weather, don’t get all emotional and shit.”). Very funny to reveal a bunch of information we didn’t know about Rachel, even if it is a bit of a cheat. From there we get a bunch of great scenes of Art, Raylan, and Tim all talking shit, and it feels like both the kind of thing that naturally happens after four years of working together and, actually, kind of the point; these people are relaxed and revealing things about themselves to each other, comfortable talking shit.
Billy is a very fun character; Joseph Mazello plays him as relentlessly charming because he knows if he’s patient then people like Ellen May will draw themselves to him. Ellen May is one of those people who goes into religion to feel some kind of sense of control and a belief that things will be better, in the next world if not this one, and Billy can spot that from a mile off. He’s almost tapped into the energy of the show – the roundabout dialogue in general is something people are saying off-the-cuff and the plot turns come from impulse; Billy is closer to the mind of the writers, saying everything on purpose and making his decisions very purposefully. I’m also just assuming that at some point he’s gonna murder a bunch of dudes and it’s gonna own.
Biggest Laugh: Art saying he wants to get lunch first, in case Raylan shoots someone.
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: Boyd surrounded by children singing and giving him money.
Top Ownage: Gotta give it up for Raylan casually disarming an annoying kid.
A Muppet Christmas Carol
‘Tis the season. This time I was captivated by Michael Caine; the internet has made a big deal out of him taking the movie seriously (with the now-common refrain that he treats the Muppets as fellow actors whilst Tim Curry would go on to treat himself as a fellow Muppet), but this approach really does work to ground the movie – it uses the sentiment and story of the book as a jumping off point for jokes (favourite example: Kermit/Cratchett requests coal for the fire, Scrooge threatens to fire them, the rats immediately pretend they’re in Hawaii) and ironic observations, and such things fall back as things grow more serious (favourite example: Gonzo/Dickens and Rizzo getting the fuck out of Dodge when the Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come rocks up).
The most interesting part of the movie is how much of it is simply Scrooge reacting to things; people often stress the “scare the shit out of the rich” part of the story, but he’s also reminded that he had moments of joy, and he recognises how little people think of him, and he sees things that he thinks are beautiful (like Tiny Tim). There’s a few lines very late in the story of him now choosing to live ‘in the past, the present, and the future!’, with the suggestion being that up until now he was simply floating through the world, acting on abstract principle more than anything else. Caine backs this up with his performance; at the beginning, he embodies Scrooge’s contempt for the world, and as the story develops, you watch him take in what’s happening around him, absorbing the lessons he’s supposed to learn (favourite example: awkwardly imitating the dance of the Ghost Of Christmas Present, although his watching Tiny Tim comes close).
Obviously, there’s also the spectacle of the Muppets. This basically is the only essential form of the story (and I’m including the book); filtering Dickens’s vision through the Muppets brings it right out to full effect. Part of the reason of this is because the aesthetic itself brings out sentimentality that it wouldn’t with just people, no matter how well made.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “There Was an Old Woman” – That sure was something. More tomorrow.
MST3K, “Teenagers from Outer Space” – Alas, despite some really good sketches, this one was a snoozer. A dull slog of a movie and only a small number of good riffs, with more repetition of gags that usual.
The Practice, “Germ Warfare” – Seriously, what does that title mean? The firm has a bad day. Ellenor and Lindsey win their case against the EPA (and if any of this is true regarding the lack of regulation of arsenic-based pesticides in playground sets, the EPA deserved to be sued), only for the judge to call the jury idiots and toss the award. Bobby discovers both that his client’s wife was being treated for depression and could very well have been suicidal AND that Richard might have coached the key witness to lie. But that judge refuses to order a new trial. So this one is a bit of a downer, but reasonably well done. The high point is that Helen refuses to cover up for Richard and now faces pressure to quit. A thought, by the way: every time a jury comes back fast, someone asks what that means. On this show, it means nothing since the longest we’ve seen them wait is a day, and usually not more than a few hours. Four years and not a single prolonged wait for the jury, not a single sequestering in a high profile case. Weird.
A Bucket of Blood – A very good time as Corman’s own dark, kooky satire of the 50’s beatnik scene right near it’s end, where undercover cops lounge around with the stoners and poseur poets at California cafes. Dick Miller as a terrifically pathetic busboy internalizes Maxwell’s hilarious – and also frightening – blather about the artist’s superiority to others. (“Let them die, and by their miserable deaths become the clay within his hands that he might form an ashtray or an ark.”) When he accidentally kills a cat and turns it into a sculpture, he’s only encouraged to make more “art” with human bodies. Only 65 minutes and shot in five days, and while Miller was frustrated with the final result, there’s a lot on the brain here from exploiter/creator extraordinaire Corman about what makes someone an artist, and how much of that identity is based on external validation and egocentrism. Surely Roger never thought of this movie watching proteges like Peter Bogdonavich start their own careers.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “There Was An Old Woman” – another barely-there story but I liked the ending and it’s always fun to run into young Charles Bronson.
My wife and I saw this at the Museum of TV and Radio before it mutated into The Paley Center. It’s really a shock to see that Dean Jones did Broadway when he wasn’t Disney’s go to guy.
Such a great documentary and Stritch seems downright heroic here, giving this song everything she can muster (which is also what you need for “The Ladies Who Lunch”, the character’s venom turned inward). The Documentary Now parody “Co-Op” is also not optional, co-starring Mulaney as Sondheim.
Stritch powering through take after take, determined to get it, is so amazing, and while it initially feels like a defeat that she has to leave and let them lay the orchestral track down, she’s so transcendent when she comes back at full-force. (The true moral of so much of adult life: maybe you just need to take a break.)
Great, great, great stuff. Obviously hitting a lot of my buttons on the act of art/human element, but really sharp look at what’s at stake here. I really like this — “They’re making a permanent record, one people will be able to visit and revisit it over and over again without the forgiving, ceaseless forward momentum of a live performance to put any bloom on the rose. Everyone’s aware that what may pass on stage won’t always work through headphones” — as an acknowledgement of the gap at play. This is behind the dark secret (that is largely not a secret) of live albums, how they’ve been sweetened or overdubbed — this makes them no longer documents of a show but evocations of it, something that is designed to put you there in the audience even though you are hearing something the audience did not. “The forgiving, ceaseless forward momentum” is so powerful and sound-warping that an album almost has to cheat to hit it, but that cheating still is in service of the ideal. I wish I could find the piece I read that talks about this, but it’s about the connection the listener (at home) can forge with the performance (recorded and “recorded”), that is still a personal act and reach across boundaries that honors what a live artist and audience give to each other.
Thanks, and that distinction between document and evocation is so well-put. And if you do find that piece, let me know, because that sounds right up my alley.