'Fantasticks' co-writer Tom Jones, who died at 95 on Friday, told the tale of how much Hollywood wanted to make a film out of the musical, before it didn't.
there was a film adaptation, you are not alone in that. It was released into a handful of theaters almost as a closely held secret, five years after it was filmed by director Michael Ritchie. At a time when film musicals were at a historical low ebb, prior to “Chicago,” et al., It was taken off the shelf by United Artists only after Ritchie’s friend Francis Ford Coppola convinced the studio that he could do a re-edit that would make it more realistic and less stagey to young movie audiences.
When it came to a film adaptation, Jones told me, “There were several attempts in the ‘60s, and actually ‘70s, as well. It’s not that we were closed to the idea. The second thing Liza Minnelli ever did was when she and Elliott Gould did a tour of ‘The Fantasticks’ . And he had a vision and wanted desperately to do a film, when he was married to Barbra. At that time, they were with Ray Stark, because of the ‘Funny Girl’ movie. They had the money and everything.
Jones was recalling this unconsummated Hollywood courtship with a smile, not a grimace. “I have certainly no regrets,” he told me. “We had a wonderful time in Hollywood. We were invited to Adolph Zukor’s 100birthday party at Paramount at the time. Jesus, what more could you ask, really? Who needs to make the movie if you can go to Adolph Zukor’s 100“It was optioned once by an awful, awful man… just a terrible person,” Jones added, without naming names. “He actually paid $100,000 for the option.
Schmidt claimed the stage version “didn’t really catch on till the third year, when ‘Hallmark Hall of Fame’ did it on TV. A lot of people who had seen the show didn’t like it that much. It sold out for like the next eight years after that!… If you know the show, you don’t like very much. We weren’t crazy about it… But for people who didn’t know the show and had never heard the score, it was great… We started getting a lot of recordings then, too.
Grey was referring to 1972’s “Cabaret” when he referred to “maybe the last successful one,” and he was close, although that’s forgetting 1978’s “Grease.
“People have come to think of it as a tiny musical,” said Schmidt. “It’s written as big music with big endings. When I wrote it, I always heard the old MGM orchestra in my head. The piano and harp were intended to sound like we had 10 trumpets! It isn’t easy for everybody to play.
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Tom Jones, creator of the longest-running musical ‘The Fantasticks,' dies at 95Tom Jones, the lyricist, director and writer of “The Fantasticks,” the longest-running musical in history, has died. He was 95.
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