just sorta been re-watching the good parts of Smash (various clips on youtube) before it got really bad and I was wondering if anyone had actually read the original premise Smash by Garson Kanin.
I know he based it loosely on his brief experience directing Funny Girl but is it worth a read? Trashy? What?
Garson Kanin was a fantastic writer (and director, and generally fantastic at everything he did). It's an engaging book, if not his best work. Don't expect to find SMASH the television series on the page. The show was really only thematically inspired by the book, and I believe the novel was only optioned the rights as a legal maneuver to use the name and skeletal premise.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
Oh, hey--I love this novel. When I was at NYU, I used to find used copies of it at the Strand and give them to theater people for cheap birthday presents.
The only thing similar between the book and the TV show is the name "SMASH" and the premise of putting on a show. Nothing more, nothing less. Different characters, different plots and everything.
For those who have read it, do you think the show would have been better if it followed the book more closely? I guess it's hard to say really, that second season was such a train wreck.
Thanks for the input everyone, I will try and find a copy! :)