‘The Fantasticks’ Takes a Long, Strange Trip to the Big Screen

Despite his affinity for show tunes, director Michael Ritchie felt more like singing the blues the night he flew into Portland, Ore., for a research screening of “The Fantasticks,” his big-screen adaptation of the world’s longest-running stage musical.

He’d asked the studio to enlist musical theatergoers. As Ritchie recalls: “Kind of confident that that had been done, I went up and, to my horror, discovered that they had recruited it just like every other preview, from shopping malls. We had an audience that certainly was not familiar with ‘The Fantasticks’ and many really just unfamiliar with the idea that people could stop talking and start singing.

“I know that seems incredible, between the animated films and number of times PBSreruns ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ But the audience was clearly uninterested in anything that happened once people started opening their mouths to sing. They’d talk, they’d go get popcorn--it was like a commercial break.”

How badly did the test screening go? Here’s a clue: It took place in the summer of 1995. The MGM/UA movie opens today.

Try to remember the kind of September when “The Fantasticks” was last on the release schedule, and you’ll be thinking back even a year before the 1996 release of “Evita,” the other significant stage-to-screen musical of the ‘90s. Its subsequent disappearance has been a great unsolved mystery, not least of all to its cast.

“The show has got so much place in the American sensibility, anyone who’s interested in the theater knows it,” says Joel Grey, one of the film’s stars. “People always asked me what happened to the movie, and I was in the dark as much as the rest of theater-loving Americans.”

The delay involves any number of factors that can come into play in prolonging a film’s shelf life: a standoff between a filmmaker with final cut and a studio that would just as soon release no cut; studio politics and ownership changes; a clause barring any direct-to-video release. And in this instance, of course, contemporary public indifference to critter-less live-action musicals.

Notes “Fantasticks” co-creator Tom Jones: “If you’ve got a really big star like Madonna in ‘Evita’ and it still bombs, well, you can see they’re really nervous about film musicals--and this is a lot more offbeat than ‘Evita.’ ”

What brought on the belated happy ending for “Fantasticks”--assuming you consider, as the filmmakers do, its four-city theatrical release a victory? In what producer Linne Radmin calls “a bit of serendipity,” MGM’s video division announced earlier this year that the film would have a VHS release. Yet one of the reasons it hadn’t shown up on tape years ago was a contractual clause forbidding any straight-to-video release. That got the lawyers, agents and guilds involved before the principals sat back down for a more fruitful discussion leading to the limited release.

But there’s also the deus ex machina involvement of Francis Ford Coppola as uncredited collaborator on a new--and, by most people’s estimation, improved--edit. The “Coppola cut” is 25 minutes shorter than the 110-minute version screened in 1995. Ritchie, in what may be a historic first, couldn’t be happier that another director took scissors to his work.

Eccentricities Abound in Musical

If “The Fantasticks” didn’t already have one strike against it being a movie musical, it’s based on a peculiar musical at that--sentimental and old-fashioned, yet dark and determinedly metaphorical. Also, Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s show is usually produced sans props, scenery or full orchestration.

Despite these eccentricities--or perhaps because of them, since the minimalism makes it inexpensive to stage--it’s had 10,000 productions. The first is still running in the same Greenwich Village playhouse where it opened in 1960.

After considerable interest in a film version in the ‘60s and ‘70s, musicals-shy Hollywood stopped calling. But Ritchie, 62, had been obsessed with the show since seeing it weeks after its opening 40 years ago. When the director of “The Candidate,” “Smile” and “Fletch” finally made his labor of love, the only thing minimalist about it was its $10-million budget, a quid pro quo for final cut. This was almost unimaginably low, given that he shot on location using the same Arizona vistas seen in “Oklahoma!” and had his cast do at least some live singing, to Tony winner Jonathan Tunick’s lush orchestrations.

The story remained intact: Two rural fathers conspire to bring a son and daughter together with the help of a mysterious man, resulting in grand romance in Act 1 and a loss of innocence in Act 2. But Ritchie added a carnival setting, hoping to combine the feel of an old MGM musical with a slightly surreal air: Rodgers & Fellinistein.

When Ritchie delivered his cut, “everybody was congratulatory,” he says, and old pal John Calley, then head of United Artists, seemed pleased. Trailers went out advertising a Thanksgiving release; early press screenings were held. Then came that research screening, which according to Radmin weren’t abysmal, just bad. “The numbers did not warrant the reaction,” he says.

Larry Gleason, the studio’s longtime vice president of distribution, disputes Ritchie’s and Radmin’s contention that theater buffs weren’t recruited. “Maybe half were ‘Fantasticks’ fans,” he insists. “The play’s history of success is that it’s done on an empty stage, using your imagination. People who were familiar with the show who ran to the first test screening felt it was overproduced. The film has a very interesting look, but the look is the problem for the ‘Fantasticks’ devotees.”

Shortly thereafter, Calley left MGM/UA, and the film “became an orphan,” says Radmin. Calley’s replacement, Lindsay Doran, “was fighting with Michael on cuts,” says a studio source, “to the point where she said, ‘Maybe we should have somebody else redo it from scratch.’ It was a very antagonistic relationship.”

But Ritchie says no cuts were ever proposed. “I had specifically said, ‘Tell me what changes are suggested, and tell me that if I make those changes the film will be released.’ And I never heard one single change suggested. But the bottom line is that I’m relieved, because they would have been the wrong changes.”

He says that, re-watching it over the years, he, Jones and Schmidt (the show’s creators also wrote the screenplay) “knew it was too long and reverential. But you can’t just say, ‘Well, let’s take a trim here. . . .’ That’s penny-ante stuff. We didn’t have a single creative vision that would take us by our throats and force us to see it in a new way. Four years later, that’s where Francis came in.”

Coppola Enters the Picture

In July 1999, Ritchie got a call from Coppola, an old friend, saying he might take over as head of MGM’s soon-to-be-revived United Artists division. Moreover, he’d dusted off a print of “The Fantasticks” and liked it. “He said, ‘But I think in a couple of ways you missed the boat, and I think it could be better,’ ” Ritchie recalls.

Coppola wondered if he could do some editing work to demonstrate. Intrigued, Ritchie said sure.

In the midst of grape-crushing season, Ritchie went up to Coppola’s winery-cum-studio and watched the rough reedit on an Avid machine. Changes were severe. Coppola had not only dropped a long prologue and epilogue in which the magician character, El Gallo, conversed with a suspicious cop, he’d even chopped off the opening number--and the show’s best-known song--”Try to Remember,” saving it for the end. El Gallo no longer narrated and didn’t even show up for a while.

“What he had done was make it real,” Ritchie says of Coppola’s edit. “He had taken out the narrator device--which had essentially removed the audience from the action--and created a real what’s-gonna-happen-next plot of young love in danger. Without adding anything, he transformed the whole nature of the thing.

“He was very nervous when he came back in, but I said, ‘I think it’s wonderful. There’s some minor things, but I think everything you’ve done is the right thing.’ Francis said, ‘Well, that’s a relief. Let’s go stomp some grapes!’ ”

Happy ending? Not yet. Coppola ended up just taking a seat on UA’s board of directors, not running things, and Ritchie learned the studio had no intention of releasing this version, either. “I thought, ‘How can it get any worse?’ ”

It did, in January, when leading lady Jean Louisa Kelley’s mom went on Reel.com and noticed orders being taken for an April VHS release. Screeners had even been sent to 30 video reviewers--of the original, pre-Coppola cut. Ritchie was enraged, but the studio, operating under a mostly new regime, argued that nothing in his contract forbade a straight-to-video release. The creative team’s attorneys pointed out that this prohibition was actually in the contract struck with Jones and Schmidt, so the spring video release was halted.

But Ritchie says he was warned by one studio exec that “if I was adamant about this not going straight to video, the film would never be seen by anybody. So a lot was at stake.” He held firm. At a spring Directors Guild of America dinner, he ran into current MGM head Chris McGurk, who proved friendlier than his predecessor and, according to Ritchie, said, “ ‘We’ve come to realize with “Yellow Submarine” and “Spinal Tap” that there’s great benefit to having a theatrical release in advance that you don’t get when you go straight to video.’ So I said, ‘That’s all I’ve ever been asking for--my day in court.’ ”

Come December, the original cut will have its day too, when DVD buyers see most of the deleted footage. A few who have seen the luxuriously paced original cut believe some nice touches got cut in the service of a streamlined story. But you won’t hear any such regrets from Ritchie, nor will he knock anyone who held up the release.

“I made a point in those years of never giving an interview that in any way trashed United Artists or any of the people involved,” Ritchie explains. “One reason is that I didn’t want to, when the film finally could be released, muddy the waters. Two, I’d felt that somehow I hadn’t done the film as well as I could have. I bear no hard feelings against any of the people involved. I thank them, because we now have the right version, and it’s the version the audience will see. I couldn’t have asked for more.”

MGM/UA’s Gleason admits he’s curious about who’ll turn up for the film’s limited engagement. “There is that group out there that may just surprise us and find it. There are strange people in love with ‘The Fantasticks.’ One great fan is Sumner Redstone. When he took over Paramount, he called up wanting to know what happened with the movie and would we be interested in selling him the rights, because he wanted to do ‘The Fantasticks.’ ”

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Fantasticks’ Review

* Transfer from stage to screen is imaginative. F14