#1
Posted: 5/9/13 at 8:05pm
Baz Bamigboye who is usually reliable, reports. Also a blurb about Hugh Jackman and "Carousel":
>>Michelle Williams has been asked to wash that man right out of her hair in a new big-screen version of the landmark musical South Pacific.
The actress, who appeared in the recent Disney hit Oz The Great And Powerful, has been offered the role of U.S. navy ensign Nellie Forbush, the hick from Little Rock nursing injured sailors and soldiers in the New Hebrides Islands during World War II.
Michelle, 32, sang during a scene in the 2011 movie My Week With Marilyn. We met several times during that year’s awards season and she told me she was attracted by the idea of doing a full-blown film musical, saying the singing and dancing would be ‘liberating’.
Nominated for an Oscar three times for performances in Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine and director Simon Curtis’s Marilyn movie, Michelle has the quality and skill to play Nellie with aplomb.
It’s early days. The planned film’s director Michael Mayer and team of producers have not yet entered official pre-production.
But there’s already a screenplay. It’s by the author Lynn Grossman. Her husband, Bob Balaban, is one of the film’s producers with Ileen Maisel, Lawrence Elman and Denis Wigman.
Grossman’s script is richly developed and not sterile like the one used in Joshua Logan’s 1959 picture, which starred Mitzi Gaynor as Nellie and Rossano Brazzi as Emile De Becque, the French-born plantation owner who doesn’t want to let Nellie go after meeting her one enchanted evening.
Grossman, I’m told, has gone back to the source material used by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for their original stage show: Tales Of The South Pacific, the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by James Michener.
For instance, the stage and film let us assume that when Nellie sings I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair, she’s referring to De Becque.
Not so. Grossman has drawn on Michener’s prose and has set up the song in a more dramatic way.
Nellie has been out for a ride with an operations officer, Lieutenant Bill Harbinson, an arrogant All-American guy — who turns out to have a wife.
That’s the man Nellie wants to shampoo out of her hair.
Other numbers, including There Is Nothing Like A Dame, Some Enchanted Evening and Bali Hai, are set up in a similar dramatic way, emerging out of the narrative organically.
I’ve heard a rumour that the producers would like Les Miserables star Hugh Jackman to play De Becque, but he’s known to have his eye on another character from the Rodgers and Hammerstein catalogue: Carousel’s Billy Bigelow, though I don’t believe a new screen version of that will happen in the near future.
There’s also chatter about trying to cast someone like Justin Timberlake to play Lieutenant Cable, the young officer who becomes infatuated with Bloody Mary’s under-age daughter, Liat.
It’s certainly a mammoth undertaking, but if the producers can assemble a first-rate cast and an A-list crew, then I’ll be on the first navy boat to see this baby.<<
South Pacific Movie
>>Michelle Williams has been asked to wash that man right out of her hair in a new big-screen version of the landmark musical South Pacific.
The actress, who appeared in the recent Disney hit Oz The Great And Powerful, has been offered the role of U.S. navy ensign Nellie Forbush, the hick from Little Rock nursing injured sailors and soldiers in the New Hebrides Islands during World War II.
Michelle, 32, sang during a scene in the 2011 movie My Week With Marilyn. We met several times during that year’s awards season and she told me she was attracted by the idea of doing a full-blown film musical, saying the singing and dancing would be ‘liberating’.
Nominated for an Oscar three times for performances in Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine and director Simon Curtis’s Marilyn movie, Michelle has the quality and skill to play Nellie with aplomb.
It’s early days. The planned film’s director Michael Mayer and team of producers have not yet entered official pre-production.
But there’s already a screenplay. It’s by the author Lynn Grossman. Her husband, Bob Balaban, is one of the film’s producers with Ileen Maisel, Lawrence Elman and Denis Wigman.
Grossman’s script is richly developed and not sterile like the one used in Joshua Logan’s 1959 picture, which starred Mitzi Gaynor as Nellie and Rossano Brazzi as Emile De Becque, the French-born plantation owner who doesn’t want to let Nellie go after meeting her one enchanted evening.
Grossman, I’m told, has gone back to the source material used by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for their original stage show: Tales Of The South Pacific, the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by James Michener.
For instance, the stage and film let us assume that when Nellie sings I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair, she’s referring to De Becque.
Not so. Grossman has drawn on Michener’s prose and has set up the song in a more dramatic way.
Nellie has been out for a ride with an operations officer, Lieutenant Bill Harbinson, an arrogant All-American guy — who turns out to have a wife.
That’s the man Nellie wants to shampoo out of her hair.
Other numbers, including There Is Nothing Like A Dame, Some Enchanted Evening and Bali Hai, are set up in a similar dramatic way, emerging out of the narrative organically.
I’ve heard a rumour that the producers would like Les Miserables star Hugh Jackman to play De Becque, but he’s known to have his eye on another character from the Rodgers and Hammerstein catalogue: Carousel’s Billy Bigelow, though I don’t believe a new screen version of that will happen in the near future.
There’s also chatter about trying to cast someone like Justin Timberlake to play Lieutenant Cable, the young officer who becomes infatuated with Bloody Mary’s under-age daughter, Liat.
It’s certainly a mammoth undertaking, but if the producers can assemble a first-rate cast and an A-list crew, then I’ll be on the first navy boat to see this baby.<<
South Pacific Movie
