Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen SMALL PLEASURES HER HEART BELONGS TO DADDY One MORNING about a year ago, I stopped by Radio City Music Hall to watch the shooting of a scene for Annie. Nothing was happening. The entire...
...A couple of weeks later I heard that the color photography was even worse than the dance number itself, and shortly after that, Stark fired director of photography Kline...
...Albert Finney was in the lobby in his Daddy Warbucks costume regaling someone with stories of other times, other films...
...Whatever emotions the choreography might have aroused dance across his face instead...
...He was wandering aimlessly from his actors to his crew to his directors and back again...
...With each successive shot, Finney manages to look just slightly more distressed...
...As soon as Camille comes on, Grace begins to cry, and Warbucks begins to look uncomfortable...
...This is unusual, and I suspect that it, as much as any larger view Stark took, is what finally pulled Annie together...
...He couldn't have achieved it better if he had had all of Warbucks's war bucks to spend on production numbers...
...In fact, when I look back on what I saw there a year ago, I'm absolutely amazed that Annie has turned out to be the delightful movie it is...
...Stark was sure that their work would be too much in the saccharine spirit of the original...
...None of those enormously expensive production numbers at Radio City was to end up in the film...
...At this point in Annie, Warbucks is supposed to begin taking a .romantic interest in Grace...
...Edward Herrmann) and Eleanor (Lois De Banzie) at the White House...
...They were being directed separately by Joe Layton, a Tony-award winner for Barnurri, who was huddled somewhere else with director of photography Richard Kline...
...An equally appealing moment comes when Warbucks takes Annie to visit F.D.R...
...and Stark had also paid off Thomas Meehan, who wrote the original Broadway musical, without even reading his screen adaptation...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...And to do the dance numbers he hired Arlene Phillips, a choreographer with a reputation based on the punk avant-garde in Britain...
...Again Annie intercedes...
...The masterstroke in the last shot is that Grace is still crying, Warbucks still fidgeting, Sandy still watching the movie, and Annie has fallen asleep...
...The entire proscenium of the vast theater had been redecorated for the occasion so that the stage looked almost expectant, as if it were just waiting to-be filled with lights, cameras, and lots of action...
...The shot I watched the crew make, in which Reinking danced through mirror images of herself (i.e., other dancers wearing Ann Reinking masks), was hideous...
...wants Warbucks to head up the C.C.C., a prospect that makes Warbucks almost as uncomfortable as Grace did...
...That's right: "Tomorrow...
...Some place back in about the fiftieth row sat director John Huston, his mind seemingly as far from the stage as the rest of him...
...Making "Tomorrow" function as a camp parody of thirties politics is just the enrichment of the Annie material Stark was looking for...
...In addition to making all the big policy decisions, Stark functioned as the line producer, the guy in charge of the day-to-day ins and outs of making the film...
...The masks were a macabre touch, and as Reinking whirled past them being tracked by a Steadicam, the scene took on an expressionistic, almost nightmarish quality...
...His expression combines Warbucks's feelings with the bewilderment Warbucks is experiencing because he's never had such emotions before...
...Meanwhile, Annie is thoroughly enjoying herself for having brought Warbucks and Grace together...
...The result of this kind of thinking on Stark's part seemed to be the fiasco I witnessed from the wings at Radio City last spring...
...He inspired Huston, Finney and the others to give him the little touches that could make up for big failures...
...But now all of that has to be gotten across in a few reaction shots as he, Grace, and Annie watch Camille...
...But production seemed to be in a state of paralysis...
...When F.D.R...
...Stark needed a way to bring off "Tomorrow" - not something elaborate, just something fresh - because the song is too familiar...
...The great irony of this is that the film succeeds in little ways, by its endless small pleasures like the quartet that sings "Tomorrow," and the portrait of Washington on the wall...
...Another of Stark's efforts to cut against the whole-someness of Annie is casting Curry as the villain, Rooster, on the strength of Curry's performance in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and his consequent popularity with teenagers...
...I had other things to do, so I left and returned in the late afternoon...
...Rumor has it that with all his problems on Annie, Stark has exceeded his budget by $10 million, bringing the film's total costs to a record-breaking $50 million all told...
...Finney really rises to the occasion...
...She begins teaching it to him, and he makes Warbucks and Eleanor - "Oh, Franklin," the latter protests, "You know I can't sing...
...I thought that perhaps Huston just wasn't interested because musical numbers weren't his business...
...Annie had had a tremendous run on the stage, but it had attracted an audience comprised mainly of kids and their grandparents...
...By being on the set and poring over the daily rushes, Stark must have realized what was working when all else failed...
...The details are what have saved Ray Stark's bacon on Annie...
...The sumptuousness of the production number originally slated for this scene was to indicate the strength of his palpitations...
...join in...
...The first of two parts...
...It resulted from the whole approach Stark was taking, which was to try to expand the appeal of the Broadway musical by working a bit against the grain of it...
...Warbucks's secretary, Grace Farrell, played by Ann Reinking, was supposed to chase Sandy up on the stage and there become involved in dance numbers that were a finale to an elaborate "Let's Go to the Movies" sequence...
...God," someone once said, "is in the details...
...It wasn't as if the number were just an isolated mistake...
...In place of the "Let's Go to the Movies" production number, for instance, Stark has put a real thirties movie for Warbucks, Grace, and Annie to watch from their seats in the Music Hall...
...Even Annie's producer, the legendary Ray Stark, couldn't seem to get the day's schedule under way...
...Neither Annie (Aileen Quinn) nor her dog Sandy was anywhere in sight, though the latter was to have a key role in the scheduled scene...
...If you have no other awareness of Annie at all, you are still at least "vaguely aware of little girls with big voices singing 'Tomorrow,''' as Tim Curry put it...
...Whenever she and her friends got to feeling low, she tells him, they sang a certain song...
...F.D.R...
...Washington's expression next to Warbucks's, as if both were posing for the same group portrait, is the perfect touch of nuttiness this time...
...So Stark had gotten rid of Randall Kleiser, the director of Blue Lagoon whom Columbia Pictures had initially assigned to Annie...
...By then Reinking's number was actually being shot, and the malaise that had seemed to hover over the production in the morning had crystallized into a full-scale disaster...
...tries to explain the New Deal to her, she says she knows what he means...
...Everyone was milling about...
...Annie's editor, who is now in her eighties, happens to have been the editor on Camille (!), and she has re-cut that 1937 classic into a ninety-second mini-feature...
...Warbucks gets that unhappy look on his face again, and all four of them wind up trying to harmonize, like a barber shop quartet, as they gather under Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Washington on the Oval Office wall...
...To cut Reinking's number must have been a very hard decision for Ray Stark to make...
...To make a $40 million movie pay for itself, Stark knew, you have to attract everyone in between as well...
...Instead, he brought in Huston, who had done The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle, Fat City, and Wise Blood, but never a musical...
Vol. 109 • June 1982 • No. 11
