Feelgood Factor Has its Ups, Downs

If a Feelgood Factor existed in show business, it would be symbolized by a thumbs up. It would be seen as a happy face, the brighter side of the classic theater mask.

As an invention, the Feelgood Factor would be a measure of pleasure. Like art for some people, you’d know it when you felt it. The Feelgood Factor would have no precise method of measurement. Its opposite is the Harry Cohn Factor, named after the Columbia Pictures chief who judged movies by how long he could sit through them.

The Feelgood Factor can leave you smiling, thoughtful, contented, elated, maybe even blissful. For some, it’s in movies like “Miracle on 34th Street” or the first “Rocky” or “Shane” or the more recently departed “Cinema Paradiso,” films that you want to return to.

Watch an audience leave a theater and you can almost imagine the Feelgood Factor at work, the slow departure, the quiet discussions, maybe the hummer who can’t give up the remembered songs.

But in recent days the Feelgood Factor has taken some strong hits:

* The longest-running movie this year in the United States, “Cinema Paradiso,” lost its theater date in Hollywood or, more exactly, West Los Angeles.

* Two Feelgood stage offerings, “Phantom of the Opera” and “Love Letters,” reported their first significant drops in ticket sales. The Phantom got well quick, though, after the announcement that Michael Crawford, its original star, was coming back to the Ahmanson.

* TV wiped out the last of its two experiments with supposedly Feelgood musical dramas when it gave notice to “Cop Rock” after earlier canceling “Hull High.”

* The movie “Child’s Play 2” killed them at the box office, earning in its first weekend $10-million plus--what almost a year of weekends has done for “Cinema Paradiso.”

But there was some scattered good news for the Feelgood Factor:

* Of all places, the Los Angeles Theatre Center opened two musicals almost simultaneously where few musicals rarely ever were seen. “Blues in the Night” and “The Joni Mitchell Project” sold out their first and second weekends and there’s talk both will get extended runs.

* One network television sitcom, “Cheers,” almost did the impossible for the ‘90s when it garnered 44% of the audience for its one-hour special.

* A number of Los Angeles-area theaters started sprouting with a heavy offering of Feelgood musicals.

* Paramount’s film fantasy, “Ghost,” after four months is in the top three of Hollywood’s best-sellers and still No. 1 in dollars earned, $186-plus million, and that’s apparently making a lot of ticket buyers and some people at Paramount feel good.

There’s no computer yet invented or conceived, no secret, patented formula, no guarded guru that can predict what will happen when an audience sits down. The Feelgood Factor has been like the Dow Jones averages: For every creeping step forward there have been three giant steps backward.

But sometimes a movie or a play or a television show can turn into a pleasurable surprise, confounding everyone. Consider the sleeper movie earlier remembered, “Cinema Paradiso.”

No one could have predicted a couple of years ago that this movie, at first cold pasta in its native Italy, would become in less than a year the second most popular foreign-language film in the United States. Tales of movies like “Paradiso” give success a good name. The story of an older man and a boy who shared a love of the cinema, “Paradiso” originally opened in a handful of Italian theaters in November of 1988. It closed in November of 1988, replaced immediately with an import that the Italians flocked to, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”

Its writer-director, Giuseppe Tornatore, took back “Paradiso,” only his second film, retooled it a bit and then sent it forth again. No cigar. So he shipped it to France, where audiences are known to surprise experts (the French find Jerry Lewis funny and Mickey Rourke heroic), and enough admirers were found to get it into the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the 1989 jury grand prize.

Earlier this year, “Cinema Paradiso” received a second Feelgood award of sorts, an Oscar, as the best foreign-language film of 1989. It has been running in the United States since its opening in New York and Los Angeles last February, this month passing the German film “Das Boot” as the second highest-earning foreign-language film. “Paradiso” has earned more than $12 million in North America.

“Paradiso” will have to be around much longer to top the first-place foreign-language film, the 1979 French film “La Cage aux Folles,” which has earned a reported $16 million. It may not lure any more ticket buyers in Los Angeles, however, for it was replaced Friday with “Vincent & Theo,” although one official of Landmark Theatres, which had been running the movie at the Westside Pavilion, said there’s a chance it might be brought back in two weeks, depending on how audiences feel about the movies there now.

Not everybody seems to be OK when it comes to possibly the most Feelgood of theatrical offerings, the musical, especially on television. Except for the BBC, which has given American TV viewers the offbeat musicals “The Singing Detective” and “Pennies From Heaven,” no one over here seems to have done it successfully.

Rather than making audiences feel good it has made them seem uncomfortable. Serenading sergeants in “Cop Rock” stretch the limits of real. Same for “Hull High’s” hall guards who rap and teachers who croon.

Ironically, the reverse usually works in flesh-and-blood, live musical theater, where reality gets suspended. You don’t see theater through a camera. You see it through your eyes and your mind and in the theater you are willing to stretch the limits of reality and accept fantasy as real. So you accept three women singing the blues and walking through walls in some simulated hotel room or the Phantom pleading for his impossible love. And somehow when the fantasy ends you feel good.

In this holiday season of congressional unrest, military build-up, tax laws, deficits, financial cheaters and apologists, Feelgood in the flesh may yet have a chance to ring up some happy faces. Theater producers know that despite their costs, musicals usually get the audiences in. That may help explain why there are musical dramas playing or scheduled to play all over the map: two at LATC, two continuing at the Ahmanson and the Shubert, and others scheduled at the Pasadena Playhouse, Pasadena Civic, Pantages, Orange County Performing Arts Center, the San Bernardino Civic Light Opera and the Westwood Theater. And next to the Santa Monica Pier, a musical cirque .

Despite cancellations and changes, Feelgood endures, even if you have to turn over a pile of rocks to find it at times.