Long Pauses

Tag: Director: Nichols

  • Minor Quibbles

    Well, crap. I’m thrilled so far with Angels. Mary-Louise Parker is stealing the show as Harper, and Justin Kirk is fantastic as Prior. The homage to Cocteau and the casting of the prior Priors were both brilliant. But why, in their trimming and reshaping, did Kushner and Nichols have to cut my two favorite lines from Millennium Approaches? When we first see Harper, she really should be saying:

    People who are lonely, people left alone, sit talking nonsense to the air, imagining…beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart…

    When you look at the ozone layer, from the outside, from a spaceship, it looks like a pale blue halo, a gentle, shimmering, aureole encircling the atmosphere encircling the earth. Thirty miles above our heads, a thin layer of three-atom oxygen molecules, product of photosynthesis, which explains the fussy vegetable preference for visible light, its rejection of darker rays and emanations. Danger from without. It’s a kind of gift, from God, the crowning touch to the creation of the world: guardian angels, hands linked, make a spherical net, a blue-green nesting orb, a shell of safety for life itself. But everywhere, things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving way…This is why, Joe, this is why I shouldn’t be left alone. [ellipses are Kushner’s]

    So much of the play is built from that imagery, established so early on. I imagine that Nichols thought it just too much for the opening moments of the film — too theatrical, too obvious, too wordy for a character we had just met. It’s Kushner at his best, though. “Systems of defense giving way” is, I think, the play’s richest metaphor.

    I was even more annoyed by the cutting of this brief exchange, which really should follow Belize’s description of the sky as “mauve.”

    Belize: All day long it’s felt like Thanksgiving. Soon, this…ruination will be blanketed white. You can smell it — can you smell it?
    Louis: Smell what?
    Belize: Softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace.

    Perestroika is about softness, compliance, forgiveness, and grace — grace, most of all. Can’t wait until next week.

  • Going Digital

    Mike, do you feel that these days you can actually do bolder things on television than you can in film?

    Nichols: I do, yes. It has to do with HBO, it’s as simple as that. We love HBO and we love the freedom that there is on HBO, and the power. And what is that power? It’s economic. You know, we’re run by market forces—the fact that an outfit can make a billion dollars a year just sitting there collecting its subscriptions. It’s an economic basis that affords us this freedom.

    HBO’s economic freedom is just one of the many topics of discussion over at Newsweek, where Mike Nichols, Tony Kushner, and their cast are talking up Angels in America. In preparation for the big premiere, I called my cable provider last week to find out how much it would cost to add just HBO to my basic service package. “You’re new monthly bill will be $61.50,” the surprisingly helpful saleswoman told me. “Or,” she paused, tying her carrot to the stick, “for just a few dollars more, we can upgrade you to digital cable and throw in the full compliment of HBO/Showtime channels, plus an additional tier of your choice.”

    So, of course, I now have digital cable.

  • Film and Stage

    In a recent interview with Cate Blanchett, Stuart Husband mentions that the actress has dropped out of an up-coming film adaptation of Patrick Marber’s play, Closer. I would be more disappointed — she’d be great in the role — but for the fact that I didn’t even realize that the film was in the works. It’s going to sport a fine cast, otherwise. Should be interesting. On a slight tangent, I looked up Marber at the IMDb and discovered that another of his plays, Asylum, is also being filmed, starring Ian McKellen.

    Closer will be directed by Mike Nichols, who apparently is going to finish out his career by filming great plays. Two months and counting until I fire up my one-month subscription to HBO in order to watch Nichols’s rendition of Angels in America. Quotes like this have certainly piqued my interest:

    In writing his first screenplay, Kushner shortened his work by roughly 90 minutes and made changes likely to be incorporated when the play is published again.

    “I don’t think that we changed very much in the first part,” Kushner said. ” `Perestroika,’ I knew when I was writing it, was going to be one of those plays that you can rewrite for the rest of your life.” Nichols helped him fix a scene that had never worked onstage. “I don’t think I want to say which one it was, because I don’t want everybody to sort of pay special attention to it,” Kushner said. But Nichols told him the scene violated the play’s inner logic.

    “Tony and Mike found a rapport so quickly,” executive producer Cary Brokaw added. “Mike wanted consciously to be true to the play, and found the more we examined the script, as a true adaptation of the play, that it was incredibly cinematic. It didn’t need fixing. It just worked.”

    This snippet from Meryl Streep ain’t bad either:

    “We’re all lucky to have been in this,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re living and writing and working,” she said to Kushner. “I don’t expect to get anything remotely as ambitious as this piece of work in my life again, so I’m grateful to you.”

    Damn. I’m giddy.