Rob Marshall Directing Into the Woods Film For Disney — Page 8

I don't see them cutting No More if they want a big star in the Baker's role. That is sort of what makes his role interesting. It would be like cutting Sally's Losing My Mind from Follies or cutting Rose's Turn from Gypsy. I don't think that cut will happen. The rest are certainly fair game.

They'll have to re-work the prologue I'm sure. It's bound to be a feast of intercutting. Cinderella At the Grave will most likely stay, as it tells us about her relationship with her mother and also shows us how she gets her wardrobe for the festival in the first place.

Lament will probably be cut. I don't see Your Fault getting the boot. It's a fast, quick little song that leads into Last Midnight. I don't see Last Midnight working very well without Your Fault.

Merle Louise could realistically play Granny. She was 54-ish during the original Broadway production; she's in her late seventies now. This could be the only case of someone originating a role on Broadway and then going on to play it again 30+ years later.

Actually, even more than a cameo from one of its original stars, I think having one original cast member, like Merle Louise would be fantastic. She was so great in the stage show as Granny. Feisty and physically perfect. I'd love to see her in the film.

---

Well, Henrik, you realize that I didn't cut anywhere nearly enough?

I erred on the side of keeping things. In reality, they will probably cut a lot more than I did. With all your "disagreements," you're basically removing almost nothing at all (if anything). That would make the movie 2 hrs. 45 min. long, which they'll never do.

Assuming you have to cut even more than I did, what would you cut instead?

---

Updated On: 1/15/12 at 11:20 AM

Best12- I agree most of those cuts are realistic. Even though "Your Fault" is genius, it still could go on the chopping block.

If they are doing original cast cameos, and since they are likely to show Cinderella at the festival, how about Robert Westenburg and Kim Crosby as the King and Queen?

Also, Milky White better not be CGI. It's hard enough for bovine actors to get a job in this economy.

I don't know, best 12, generally things can be done much faster on film, allowing for cuts replacing changes and doing away with intermission, plus dialogue can be cut because images are more fluid and can convey much more than dialouge can on stage. This added to the song cuts you've outlined (and yes I might have some additional cuts or trims) may make a decent film. Dialogue can also be interpolated into song for condensing narrative. I agree there is no reason Into the Woods should be a very long film. But good film editing, employed throughout a good movie, has a way of supplanting song edits as damaging to Into the Woods as your three suggestions to which I've taken objection (some negotably).

Only three mind you, "On the Steps of the Palace" is the mosgt crucial, which I contend could be very filmic with the right creative use of flashback - and a good adaptation could have her telling this to the Bakers wife, for instance, who has already served as a sounding board for Cinderella's story.

The more I think about this, the more it reminds me of Sweeney Todd: a film adaptation sounds great until you realize that the show hinges upon purely theatrical moments that cannot be translated to film. For Sweeney, those moments were the Ballad of Sweeney Todd and the subsequent transitions, and the wonderful Epilogue. Those moments propelled and commented on the action in the show, and lifted the main character from barber-done-wrong to mythical everyman/semi-anti-hero, and I think the movie suffered from lack of them.

Into the Woods has an even bigger problem here: the Narrator. Since narration in film is always done via voice-over, there is no way to make his death scene, in which the characters of his stories physically accost him and feed him to the giant, "filmic." Without that death scene, there'd be no adequate explanation for why the narration stopped 75% of the way through the movie. They'd likely be forced to extend the narration through to the end of the movie, and thereby undermine the central message of bucking fatalism to create your own happy endings out of murky and morally ambiguous situations. I'm not interested in seeing an Into the Woods where the Narrator suddenly chimes in after Children Will Listen to remind us that these characters always had a happily ever after waiting for them at the end of the book -- you might as well only adapt the first act.

Another option is to cut the Narrator completely. If they did, then other numbers, most notably the Prologue and Ever After, will also have to be either gutted and redone or excised entirely. Also, since the Narrator's major purpose (at least in the first act) is to condense exposition, more time will be devoted to dialogue just to get through the exceptionally dense plot, and that will translate to still more music being cut.

Basically, their treatment of the Narrator will likely determine the film's success as an adaptation of the stage musical, at least for me. The good news is Lapine is on board; the bad news is that I'm not convinced that Lapine always knows what makes his own material tick. Also, the other bad news is Rob Marshall. And Disney. The movie is almost certainly going to be populated with High School Musical and Cheetah Girls cast-offs.

I think I lose ten IQ points every time I open this thread.

No more.

"The more I think about this, the more it reminds me of Sweeney Todd: a film adaptation sounds great until you realize that the show hinges upon purely theatrical moments that cannot be translated to film."

Hyperbole, I've said this before but very few shows in the history of musical theater are more essentially "theatrical" or seemingly impervious to cinematic adaptation than CHICAGO. That it turned out to be a superb and successful movie is a shocker. But it did.

Let's not confuse challenges with insurmountable obstacles/untranslatabilities quite yet.

Yes but then how do we kill him best12?

That would be quite tricky to do from a directorial stand point though, we mit be journeying closer into cartoon land than fantasy. I like the earlier idea of having him not be seen till he is captured, that way the characters have a conversation with their 'god', maybe he can just be hiding in a tree that way he can see everything that occurs around him, but be above it all, a kind of forest hermit. On another subject would Dick Van Dyke be up to narrator mysterious man?

Updated On: 1/15/12 at 04:06 PM