HOLLYWOOD SLUMP--IT'S THE TALENT, STUPID

If she fights when her clothes you are mussing
What are clothes? Much ado about nussing
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kow-tow
(Cole Porter---Kiss Me Kate--1948)

Arts: PBS screws up musical comedy--so does Hollywood and some proof that the Hollywood slump is caused by the second rate talent that dominates the business.

I am not a balls out fan of the American Musical. With exceptions---Singin' in the Rain---I have always found them hopelessly contrived, populated by idiotic characters, and most of the music is mainly mediocre---look at TNT movies for proof. But for proof that some of the stuff was great, look at Annie Get Your Gun. Annie had nine (yes, 9) hit songs and three number ones including the show biz anthem There's No Business Like Show Business. When you count the movie musicals---most were absolute shit---I admit that things with Fred Astaire, Mario Lanza, Gene Kelly, had their moments and those moments were when those stars were performing. We all agree that Rogers and Hammerstein and a bunch of others wrote lots of good stuff---if you could stand most of the plots. A lot of the music, taken song by song, has become American Standard. Beautiful stuff.

Which brings me to PBS and the special they ran about Richard Rogers. Rogers has produced a body of work that would stagger the normal team of writers. Literally a hundred HIT songs. For some reason PBS put on a Rogers tribute show and populated it with some of the least talented people in show business, people who proceeded to ruin almost every song. Why?

I'll get to that in a second. But first, talk about ruining every song.....

I rented It's De-Lovely, a supposed musical revolving around the life of Cole Porter. What is presented is a homosexual problem drama with some of Cole Porter's songs, all of them done badly. The main things that stick in my mind about this strictly homosexual psuedo-drama;
Porter's supposedly sympathetic wife wife is his procuror of male companionship.
Porter spends all his spare time pursuing other men;
he mates with all leading men in his shows.
Then we come to this sorry cast of (we assume) homosexual men who ruin song after song. Taking just one, Begin the Beguine, a great tune and song that the De-Lovely "talent" strangled. Beguine is a number showcased brilliantly by at least TWO sensational recordings, one of them an acknowledged classic by Artie Shaw, (start listening at the two minute mark) a guy who made his rep with a stomping soaring big band version of the Porter music that is still played, in fact it became such a hit that it superseded anything that any band had ever had; the other version was by Frank Sinatra who cut one of his classic super-swinging recordings, one that is also still played. All of us have heard both recordings.

Why not do a version that was popular? For all the music.

Because the purpose of the movie is an agenda using Porter music as a cover, not entertainment, there was never an attempt by the producers to purely entertain. It's a part of the AGENDA for "artists" to show things in the USA as gay. With that purpose in mind, the movie presents a Beguine version so awful and so depressing that one can't imagine the song ever being a hit for anybody. And so it goes throughout the entire movie, one that presents songs that Ella Fitzgerald---for one---has done so well that her versions are the standard.

I am not a Cole Porter fan. I think most of his songs stink (Go HERE for a list and tell me you know more than 15 of them). I acknowledge that tons of song writers think he was the best. As if being clever rather than being emotionally honest is "best."

"I would go to hell f'ya,
or even Philadel- f'ya"
or
"If she says your behavior is heinous,
Kick her right in the Coriolanus"

But aside from the cleverness in some of his song lyrics, I don't think Porter is more than a pimple on Richard Rogers' ass. Or Berlin's. Or Mercer's. Or Dorothy Field's. And so on.

De-Lovely was never meant to be anything other than a validation of homosexuality, both the lifestyle and the sex of it. Hollywood is gay and it is the art community agendas that are dominating all music and drama today. Their agenda is to present the past as degenerate and give us a contrived and hopeless today. The men are weak and swishy; the women masculine and sexless; the resulting product is not fun, not engaging, and not very good.

The PBS presentation of Rogers music was awful. Nobody in it would have ever been cast in the original Broadway productions. PBS gave us an empty Richard Rogers, one they had castrated. It was as if everything Rogers wrote was mediocre and PBS had to struggle to present it as if it was high art. Why? How did the Rogers estate let this happen? I don't know, but South Pacific was not a show for drag queens.

One more blast at De-Lovely, if that movie was a manufactured product the producers would be sued for Consumer Fraud for their advertising. Fluff, hot air, contrived personal relationships, and a living example of why Hollywood is in a slump, one they cannot pull out of because the slump is caused by the second rate talent that dominates the business.