Arts Revisionists Won’t Stop at Colorization : Happy-ization of Films, Ballets and Plays Is Nothing to Smile About

For a while, I subscribed to the theory that colorization of black-and-white movie classics was the worst thing to hit the arts world since Andy Kaufman accused professional wrestlers of faking it.

But brace yourself: the ‘90s may be the decade of something even more insidious: “Happy-ization.”

Imagine, if you can, a new version of the Walt Disney tear-jerker “Old Yeller” where the faithful mutt doesn’t die, maybe just comes down with a stubborn case of mange.

How about a re-edited “Casablanca” in which a blushing (now that it’s available in color) Ingrid Bergman remains with handsomely tanned Humphrey Bogart in Morocco instead of leaving him pale and heartbroken at the monochromatic airport?

Or a restaging of “King Lear” where Lear’s scheming daughters Goneril and Regan, realizing that Father really Knows Best, reconcile their differences with the old man. Instead of being the major downer it is, the play could be a lot more uplifting as the Lears all wind up around the castle kitchen quaffing tea, munching scones and cracking one-liners. You know, sorta like a civilized “Family Ties.”

Like the idea?

It’s already happening. When Terry Gilliam’s dazzling 1985 movie “Brazil” turned up on television this week, the shocking ending--in which the hero’s apparent escape from an Orwellian torture chamber turns out to be only a fantasy, experienced moments before he is reduced to a mental vegetable--was cleaned up quite neatly: Our hero was left in the arms of the woman he loved in an idyllic pastoral setting where, presumably, they lived happily ever after.

Last fall when the Moscow Classical Ballet was in Orange County, the troupe put a new twist on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”: Instead of ending with the double suicide of the hero and heroine, the kindly artistic directors let them be reunited and ascend to heaven.

I’m sure it’s the kind of ending Shakespeare would have come up with himself if he hadn’t been such a Mr. Grumpus.

And in American Ballet Theatre’s re-thinking of “Swan Lake,” which played here in December, Mikhail Baryshnikov gave the tragic lovers an all-expense-paid trip to cloud nine at the end that made their deaths a little less tearful.

The Soviets seem to love tacking happy endings onto grim source material. The Kirov and Bolshoi companies do versions of “Swan Lake” in which the formerly star-crossed twosome actually outfight the evil Von Rotbart, rather than merely break his magic spell through their double suicide.

In that glasnost reigns o’er the land, why not follow the Soviets’ lead? Since we’re turning into a kinder, gentler nation, we might as well make it a happier one as well. I mean, hey, isn’t this stuff supposed to be entertainment? Why pay good money just to get depressed?

I suggest we dump “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with its images of bombs bursting in air, and adopt a new national anthem: Bobby McFerrin’s hit “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

Put on a happy face.

Not that any optimistic conclusion must automatically feel manipulative. Singer-songwriter John Hiatt works a credible happy ending into “Real Fine Love,” a new song about embracing the good. After recounting various impediments to happiness he had experienced since adolescence, he discovers while trundling his family off to bed: “Maybe it’s just a little thing/The way I feel tonight/A little joy, a little peace and a whole lot of life.”

In “William Brown,” a song about a man who sells his home in North Carolina and moves to Omaha, Randy Newman turned inside out the assumption that artists always focus on misfortune: Once in his new-found Nebraska, Brown “didn’t mind the dust/And he didn’t mind the wind/And he didn’t mind the cold/And he never missed home.”

In Henry Jaglom’s 1988 movie “Someone to Love” (which, as I recall, played in Orange County for about 30 minutes), the film maker set out to examine why the myths of childhood--about growing up, getting married and living happily ever after--didn’t work out for him and for so many of his friends.

But Orson Welles, interviewed on camera by Jaglom, reeled off some pithy observations on that topic. He cited the stereotypical story of a man and woman who meet, fall in love, then get married, saying something to the effect that “To get a happy ending, you have to stop the story before it is over.”

I wonder if that works for newspaper columns too?