Word: allen
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...came up with the idea nearly 20 years ago, while working on Annie Hall. "I wanted to do a musical, but not for real singers and dancers," Allen explains. "I wanted people who could just act, and who would sing with all the emotion of people who are doing the best they can, but it's heartfelt. I went to my parents' 65th anniversary, and they danced. They can't dance. But it had more feeling to it than two people who go to dancing school for 50 years...
...luck of the draw, the cast included two actors, Goldie Hawn and Alan Alda, who had singing experience. Another, Drew Barrymore, pleaded that she was "beneath the human limit" of musical competence, so Allen hired a nonprofessional to dub her voice. But the rest of the cast was both untutored and game, and the result is one of the nerviest experiments yet for a filmmaker who has already tried everything from surrealist fantasy to Ingmar Bergman homage...
...film is the logical culmination of one of Allen's obsessions: the classic American popular song. After commissioning music for his first three movies, he decided that creating original scores was "such an ordeal" that it was easier to pop in recordings of Gershwin and Porter standards--the music he grew up with and, he admits, never grew out of: "My interest in music ended with the music...
...film is also the fullest expression of Allen's love affair with New York City. "I live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan," he says, "and I wanted to make a movie to share with other people the very warm and positive feelings I have for my neighborhood. I look around and I see rich kids going to these private schools and their chauffeurs take them, and I see husbands and wives come down at night, and he's got a tux on and she's got a gown, and they go out--it's a wonderful, romantic neighborhood...
...retro, romantic musical about the rich and pampered? Sounds like something most American moviegoers would scorn as passe. But Allen is still a believer in the traditional musical, however out of vogue. "It always depends on the quality of the work. If My Fair Lady came out tomorrow, people would love it." He'd eventually like to do a traditional musical with original songs, he says. But that, of course, means finding songs. Says Allen, sighing: "If only Lerner and Loewe were alive...