Sunset Boulevard. Should we worry or rejoice?
Monday, March 4, 2019 at 10:52AM
NATHANIEL R in Adaptations, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Best Actress, Broadway and Stage, Glenn Close, Oscars (20), musicals, remakes

by Nathaniel R

As you have no doubt heard, the 1993 stage musical Sunset Blvd., Andrew Lloyd Webber's adaptation of the film noir classic Sunset Boulevard (1950) now has a green light for the movies. The stage musical premiered in London in '93 with Patti LuPone in the lead role before a legally-fraught switcheroo to Glenn Close for its Broadway debut in '94. The musical would go on to win 7 Tonys (including Best Musical and Best Actress) and roughly ever since then (we're talking 25 years now!) there's been talking of adapting it back to the screen, its original home and subject matter. This wouldn't be the first time that's happened of course. The most recent example is Hairspray which proved a hit in all three incarnations: 1988 / 2002 / 2007.

This project has been talked about for years and now a sudden green light with shooting scheduled for October. Was it Glenn Close's year long comeback of sorts as she undoubtedly came close to winning that elusive Oscar that finally did it...

Or was it the success of so many movie musical comedies since the genre's comeback in the early Aughts? Or was it the blockbuster smashes of two music-heavy performance dramas this past year (ASIB and Bohemian)? Our guess is it's a happy fusion of those three timelines since Sunset Blvd is a dramatic musical rather than a musical comedy (the latter being easier to sell) and The Wife proved, at least on a miniature-scale, that you can still market a movie on Glenn Close's name alone and end up with a profitable theatrical run.  

Directing the movie version will be the Tony-winning choreographer Rob Ashford and herein lies our typical worry. Why does Hollywood keep assuming that famous stage talent know how to direct movie musicals? There have been a lot of qualitative misses so far when going this route (The Producers, Nine, Mamma Mia!,) . Movie musicals are notoriously difficult to get right and they keep going to relative newbies to the cinema instead of people who've proven to have a firm grasp of what makes a movie, rather than a stage performance, electric. Ashford is hugely talented (he's won Tonys, Oliviers, Emmys, and Drama Desks among other prizes) but he's never directed a movie-movie and his live TV musicals (Peter Pan and The Sound of Music) dont scream "born to be directing cinema!"

That said he has directed musical performances within movies before, helping the main director with the musical sequences in Beyond the Sea, A Million Ways to Die, Ted 2, and Cinderella.  And yet this is quite a leap. What's stranger still is that he is known as a gifted choreographor (his Tony-winning work on Thoroughly Modern Millie is just delicious) but Sunset Blvd. is NOT a dance musical. 

We wish him all the luck because we sure would like this movie to be a grand success but there's a lot of reasons to worry; lack of film expertise when making a movie ABOUT movies, mediocre source material (like most of Webber's musicals there's only two-ish songs ("With One Look" "It's As If We Never Said Goodbye" and I'm also partial ), and the need to really direct Close. While she's one of the greatest screen actresses she has been known to overdo it on occasion and this purposefully larger than life role will have lots of opportunities to do too much in an effort to be too much. And there's one more bit of worrying: whether or not the movie is good, critics will likely sharpen their knives due to the typical anti-musicals critical stance and the reverence with which the original film is justly held. 

In short, we don't expect this to be the Glenn Close Oscar coronation so many hoped for this year but we're thrilled that she gets to take another one of her dream projects to the big screen. It's also a great relief that she's taken her Oscar loss so very well, still being endlessly gracious about the outpouring of love this season. She's resting up at the moment and getting back to work this October on what will surely be one of 2020's most talked about movies. 

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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