Hollywood Strikes Up the Band : Film Studios Are Again Making Overtures to the Broadway Musical

There’s barely enough room for potential investors to squeeze into the auditions for the planned Broadway production of “The Secret Garden”: Hollywood has arrived.

Over the past two weeks, such film producers as Scott Rudin, Dawn Steel and Sherry Lansing, plus executives from Disney, Columbia/Tri-Star, 20th Century Fox, the Geffen Film Co. and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment have poured into Manhattan’s 890 Studios to view the show-in-the-rough, based on the children’s fantasy novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

“I was quite stunned by the hype,” says Marty Bauer, one of the talent agents involved in selling the film rights to the production. “We were hoping to keep this low-key until it went to Broadway.”

All that attention is peculiar enough for a show that won’t go to Broadway until April. But Hollywood’s surge of interest in “The Secret Garden”--adapted for the stage by Marsha Norman, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for her play “ ‘night, Mother”--is notable for another reason: It’s a musical.

Considered one of the riskiest genres in film today, the musical has suddenly become as popular in Hollywood as the car fax. “A lot of people are interested in this whole genre of movies that has disappeared,” says producer and former record mogul David Geffen, an investor in the upcoming Broadway production of “Miss Saigon” who is also developing “Dreamgirls” for the screen with director Frank Oz. Adds producer Rudin: “It’s something that you can’t turn on the TV and see. It’s still the domain of theaters and movies.”

David Hoberman, president of Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, says simply: “It’s time again.” His company is developing a number of musical projects and plans a production of “Newsies,” a musical about a newspaper strike to be directed by “Dirty Dancing” choreographer Kenny Ortega.

Disney’s other movie arm, Hollywood Pictures, also has a variety of musicals in the works. “We firmly believe that the musical genre is viable in today’s movie marketplace,” says company president Ricardo Mestres.

Hollywood Pictures is expected to secure the rights to “Evita”--once a bankruptcy court sorts through the legal tangles surrounding the current owner, Weintraub Entertainment Group--with Madonna starring as the ambitious wife of former Argentine leader Juan Peron. TV’s “Moonlighting” creator, Glen Gordon Caron, is rumored to be the leading candidate as director, and the production’s original producer, Robert Stigwood, is expected to produce the film version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical.

Hollywood Pictures is also developing a remake of “Gold Diggers of 1933,” the Busby Berkeley spectacle. And Steel, who has a production deal with Disney, is the lead bidder on “The Secret Garden,” which also was a 1989 CBS “Hallmark Hall of Fame” special.

But Disney isn’t the only movie company intent on re-creating the glory days of the Hollywood musical. Studio executives, producers and directors all over town are turning an eye to the genre. Their interest coincides with the mixed box-office results of last summer’s big-budget action pictures--combined with the surprise success of cheaper romantic comedies like Disney’s “Pretty Woman” and Paramount’s “Ghost.” Many industry observers believe that Hollywood’s interest in musicals is one outgrowth of a renewed determination to produce family fare that doesn’t involve car chases or heavy munitions.

Among the musicals now in the works:

* “Miss Saigon” producer Cameron Mackintosh is talking to Steven Spielberg about directing a film version of the musical about a love affair between a GI and a Vietnamese girl during the fall of Saigon. The Claude-Michel Schonberg/Alain Boubil musical opened in London last year to wide acclaim and is scheduled to open in New York on April 11. It already has accumulated $24 million in advance ticket sales, the largest pre-opening receipts in Broadway history.

* Nine years after the London opening of “Cats,” Spielberg and Lloyd Webber plan to adapt the show, which was based on the poems of T.S. Eliot, as an animated feature film for Universal Pictures. The deal was announced in June, but none of the parties are talking production details or timetables yet.

* Four years after “Phantom of the Opera” opened in London, Lloyd Webber is finalizing details for the movie version, to be directed by Joel Schumacher for Warner Bros., and starring original cast members Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman, Lloyd Webber’s estranged wife. Production of the film has been delayed from fall until next summer; that will prevent the movie from cutting into the business of four North American stage productions that continue to sell nearly $3 million worth of tickets each week.

* Tri-Star still plans to go forward with a film adaptation of “Les Miserables,” another international hit musical produced by Mackintosh and written by the same team responsible for “Miss Saigon.” “The hope is that we’d go forward in 1991,” said Mackintosh’s executive producer, Nick Allott. He added that a director has not been signed.

* Bette Midler and James Caan star in “For the Boys,” the story of two USO entertainers who travel overseas during World War II and the Korean War. Mark Rydell directs the 20th Century Fox film, which is to begin production in the coming weeks. Midler also plans to star in “Lenya,” a drama with music based on the life of singer Lotte Lenya. Tri-Star Pictures will distribute, but no timetable has been set.

* Producer-director Rob Reiner--together with screenwriter William Goldman and Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim--is working on an original musical for his Castle Rock Entertainment company that probably won’t go into production until 1992.

* Producer-director James L. Brooks is also penning an original musical. The only detail he will divulge is that it’s a comedy with singing and dancing.

For all of these filmmakers, bringing a musical to the screen in the 1990s is a daunting task. “It’s a humbling experience,” sighs Brooks, who is 30 pages into his screenplay. “It’s extraordinary how many more problems there are if you care about making the picture real.”

The screenwriter has to craft a story structure in which it is both natural and non-disruptive for the actors to break into song. “The question always is: Can you make it work?,” says Geffen. “It’s hard to integrate music into a story without stopping it.”

The music itself is also a stumbling block. Filmmakers note that popular music today is less concerned with telling a story than it once was. “Popular music and show music used to be close cousins,” Brooks said.

And Broadway--traditionally Hollywood’s main source of musical material and writing talent--isn’t generating as many hit shows as it once did. The result is that fewer writers and composers have an opportunity to develop the craft of writing songs for dramatic situations. The people who created many of Hollywood’s most memorable musicals--such as George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II--had their roots in musical theater, said screenwriter-producer Ernest Lehman, who adapted such stage shows as “West Side Story” and “The Sound of Music” to the screen.

In today’s arena, the arrival of Lloyd Webber continues that tradition. Similarly, composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman, who scored Disney’s animated hit “The Little Mermaid” directly for the screen, also have a theater background as the creators of the 1982 musical version of “Little Shop of Horrors,” which was filmed in 1986.

While there is a rich history of successful movie musicals, their recent record at the box office has been a checkered one: “Fame” in 1980, ‘Victoria” and “Annie” in 1982, “Flashdance” in 1983, “Footloose” in 1984, “Little Shop of Horrors” and last year’s “The Little Mermaid” all fared well at the box office. But such productions as the 1981 “Pennies From Heaven,” the 1985 “A Chorus Line” and last year’s “Sing” and “Bert Rigby, You’re a Fool” were outright bombs.

As with most genres, the popularity of musicals has been cyclical. In the mid-’60s, moviegoers flocked to such musicals as “My Fair Lady,” “Funny Girl,” “The Sound of Music,” and “Mary Poppins.” But what followed was a string of expensive flops, produced by and starring some of Hollywood’s biggest names. Among them: “Camelot,” with Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Harris; “Doctor Doolittle,” with Rex Harrison; “Star,” with Julie Andrews; “Paint Your Wagon,” starring Clint Eastwood; “Finian’s Rainbow,” which was Fred Astaire’s last musical; “Sweet Charity,” with Shirley MacLaine; “Mame,” with Lucille Ball; and “The Wiz,” with Diana Ross.

No musical has been nominated for a best-picture Oscar since “All That Jazz” in 1979. Before that, the last two musicals nominated for best picture were “Cabaret” in 1972 and “Fiddler on the Roof” in 1971. The last musical to win a best-picture Oscar was “Oliver!” in 1968.

“You can make comedies that flop and you can make action- adventure pictures that flop, and people will say that the public just didn’t want to see that particular comedy or adventure film,” said Craig Zadan, a co-producer of “Footloose” and the author of a biography on Broadway composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim. “But as far as I know, musicals are the only genre that, when they flop, people say that the audience doesn’t want to see those kinds of movies anymore.”

Hollywood Pictures’ Mestres doesn’t believe that musicals as a genre are cursed. Rather, he says, audiences haven’t been given quality productions. “I’m not sure that there have been recent musicals that embody the style and quality that characterizes the most successful ones. If ‘Grease’ were released today (it would be a hit).”

Zadan predicts that the crop of Lloyd Webber musicals will test the public’s appetite for more traditional musicals. “If they are successful, you’ll see a wildly aggressive rush to make musicals. But if they flop, it will be like what happened after ‘Hello, Dolly!’ and ‘Star.’ There won’t be any musicals for years.”

Zadan, who is a co-producer of the upcoming “Lenya,” said that the kinds of musicals in the works now generally are not written in the older style, “where people burst out into song.”

What passes for musicals now are actually dramas with music, he said.

“We’re not selling them as musicals,” Zadan said. “We’re sort of backing into them and saying, ‘This really isn’t a musical. It’s a drama that has songs.’ ”