Well, dear readers, I am sitting here like so much tired fish, listening to Fred Karlin’s marvelously marvelous soundtrack to Up the Down Staircase. Completely unique and perfect for the film, a film I happened to have loved back when it came out. I went over and over again. I thought Sandy Dennis was superb and should have been nominated for an Oscar. The kids were all non-pros and excellent, and Patrick Bedford as a cynical and weary English teacher was brilliant and he should have received a supporting actor nomination. I wish I’d seen him as John Adams in the national tour of 1776, which played here at the Music Center – I’ll bet he was terrific. The music is just wonderful. Robert Mulligan, the director, who’d already made several of my favorite films, including The Great Imposter, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Love with the Proper Stranger, did great work on this, and the script by Tad Mosel is terrific – the book by Bel Kaufman, which was a favorite of mine, was all told through the use of letters and notes, so Mr. Mosel really had a task fashioning a screenplay out of all that. Never on Blu-ray – I’ll have to find the DVD and watch it again. And now, Mr. Karlin’s score to The Stalking Moon, another Mulligan film – not quite successful in the same way that Inside Daisy Clover isn’t, it’s still interesting and beautifully directed. I ultimately made two albums with Mr. Karlin, who was a fan of my albums. He came to the office, and we batted around some ideas and made two volumes of Jazz Goes to Hollywood movie themes, with his arrangements and him on flugel horn (he was a superb player). He was the nicest, most down-to-earth fellow.
Yesterday was a day in which I probably got a whopping two-and-a-half hours of sleep. Very irritating. Once she of the Evil Eye arrived, I went to Mel’s Drive-In and had a bacon and cheese omelet and home fries – the omelet was really good. After that, I went to the nearby mall and just roamed around, looking in lots of stores, a good way to pass the time. I came back home at noon, answered e-mails, and then sat on my couch like so much fish. I put on some movie and then just kept dozing off for most of it – that was kind of the entire afternoon, just dozing on and off and off and on, not necessarily in that order.
Then I showered and got ready to mosey on over to see a play at the Group Rep, entitled The Desperate Hours. I’d never seen it before, so I found it a very tricky play in terms of tone and keeping the beats of the play very clear for the audience. It was originally a three-act play, like most plays in the 1950s, but here it was consolidated into two. That meant that act one was shorter than act two – the first act ran about forty-five minutes and the second act ran about fifty-five. Anyway, I was glad to have finally seen the play and now I’d like to check out the film version directed by William Wyler.
I stopped at Gelson’s afterwards and got some more fruit pops, then popped over to Subway and got a spicy Eyetalian sandwich, then came home and ate it all up – it wasn’t great but hit the spot. And now, here I am, writing these here notes, which should have been up fifteen minutes ago and yet weren’t.
Today, you can bet your bottom dollar that I will be sleeping in and will be up when I’m up, I’ll do whatever needs doing, I’ll eat something light but fun, I’ll finish writing the Indiegogo patter and then I’ll probably film it tomorrow or Tuesday. Otherwise, I’m just relaxing and watching and listening.
Tomorrow, I’ll film the Indiegogo thing and choose clips for it, then I’ll put that on a thumb drive and get it to Marshall Harvey so he can edit. I’ll write all the copy they ask you to write, and then I’ll start looking for the perks, although I’m hoping to keep the perks to things I don’t care about donating to the cause. But there’s tons of stuff and I can certainly come up with fun perks – lots of B’way and LA window cards, some Follies material, all kinds of interesting bric-a-brac. I’m sure David Wechter will finish his notes and edits on our screenplay, so that we can then conform the script and see how many pages we’ve lost. Then we can go through it line by line and fix anything that doesn’t seem right. In the end, once we’re happy with the structure and the way it reads, I’ll do a final small dialogue polish.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, sleep in, be up when I’m up, do whatever needs doing, finish writing the patter, but mostly watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to have reacquainted myself with the marvelously marvelous score to Up the Down Staircase or, as we like to think of it, Up the Down Notes.