James Lapine and INTO THE WOODS — Page 2

Someone in a Tree2--I completely agree with "just your opinion" about the Sweeney film. Cutting the choral singing because "real people don't sing together like that" (says Tim Burton) ruined the movie for me. I hope he is kept far away from future musical projects.

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My theory? Burton cut it so he could be close to Johnny in the hospital, and then later they found an artistic reason to justify it.

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"Didn't they also HAVE to cut it because of Jonny Depp having to be with his daughter when she was in the hospital?"

This is a story I don't know, matt. Elaborate, please?

"Didn't they also HAVE to cut it because of Jonny Depp having to be with his daughter when she was in the hospital?"

That is true and I think Burton's later comments were made to justify those portions being cut, even if he thought of doing so earlier.

Production was shut down for a couple weeks when Johnny Depp's young daughter took very ill. To accommodate the shut-down, the chorale sections were cut. They were to be ghosts of Todd's victims. Christopher Lee was cast as one of the them and gave an interview around the time about it.

Or the chorus could have sung off-screen, as choruses do in hundreds of films. The movie would still have had a leading lady on quaaludes, but at least the choral singing would break up the tedium.

I like NINE a lot better than most people do (or did). I still had major problems with it, most notably Daniel Day-Lewis who nearly killed the film with his heavy-handed approach to Guido.

I've actually watched the movie at home, skipping that very first pretentious scene where he's talking about his films in a B&W interview. I start it right when he walks into the sound stage alone and the Overture starts.

The entire movie plays better if you take that first scene out, because it instantly sets a "weighty" tone that is SO wrong for that film and that story. If Guido takes himself that seriously, we're all doomed.

(A reminder that Fellini hung a sign on the camera while he was making "8 1/2" saying, "Remember, this is a comedy." I wish Rob Marshall had remembered that, too. And I wish anybody were playing that part other than Daniel Day-Lewis.)

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If it makes anyone feel better, there's apparently a version of the screenplay out there that was NOT written by James Lapine. It was written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel in the nineties.

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best12, I remember you posting your thoughts on Nine in another thread in the past and watched the movie that way after doing so. You are right that it does work a lot better without starting with that scene.

And really, for as much as people like to make fun of Marshall and his "musical in the mind" approach to both Chicago and Nine, I do think that neither would have worked cinematically without making the songs part of an entirely separate fantasy world. With Nine, even on stage a lot of the songs (especially the ones that did make it into the film) are often staged as fantasy sequences and internal monologues, so in retrospect Marshall really did not do anything new by doing them that way on screen.