Sgt. Pepper's Tarnished Cornet

Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe,” a story of love and rebellion in the turbulent 1960s, utilizes characters, situations, words and music from the songs of the Beatles. You can forgive fans of the Fab Four if they’re skeptical; the last time someone attempted something similar, things got ugly.

Following 1968‘s “Yellow Submarine” animated film (with which the Beatles had very little involvement) and the bizarre “All This and World War II” (a 1976 documentary juxtaposing vintage newsreel footage with covers of Beatles songs), came an attempt at a big budget musical fantasy based on what many considered the Beatles’ greatest album: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

Partially based on a 1974 stage musical, the 1978 movie (which also included songs from “Abbey Road” and “Revolver”) was produced by Robert Stigwood, who had prior rock movie successes with “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1973), the Who’s “Tommy” (1975), “Saturday Night Fever” (1977) and the then-current smash, “Grease.” People trusted Stigwood’s instincts. Maybe the idea of putting ‘70s chart-toppers Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees in front of the camera to bring the Beatles songs to life wasn’t so horrible. What ended up onscreen proved otherwise.

During World War I, the town of Heartland USA sends Sgt Pepper and his Lonely Hearts Club (marching) Band into the European theater in order to bring inspiration to the fighting forces, helping to win the war. Upon his death in 1958, Pepper leaves the custody of his magical instruments (which guarantee the ongoing happiness of mankind) in the care of Heartland’s mayor, Mr. Kite (George Burns, wearing the first of the film’s many bad toupees).

Thirty years later, Pepper’s grandson, Billy Shears (Frampton) starts a new Lonely Hearts Club Band with his pals, Mark, Dave and Bob Henderson (The Bee Gees). Almost instantly, the band gets an offer from Big Deal Records’ head honcho B.D. Hoffler (“Halloween”’s Donald Pleasance in another bad wig). So off they jet to Hollywood, separating Billy for the first time from his true love, Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina in her first and last performance).

As soon as the band hits L.A., the debauchery of the music biz is in evidence: the booze, the drugs, the sex, the payola, the convertible limousines. After signing with B.D., the band quickly records and releases a record that becomes an overnight smash, putting them on a sellout tour and the cover of Time Magazine.

Meanwhile, Heartland has fallen prey to the mean Mr. Mustard (British character actor Frankie Howerd, in bad rug #3), an agent of the FVB (Future Villain Band), who instructs him to steal the original Sgt. Pepper’s magical instruments and distribute them to various evil accomplices. Without the instruments’ guarding force, Heartland falls into an iniquitous spiral not seen since Bedford Falls became Pottersville. Casinos, liquor stores and (horrors!) video arcades pop up on the streets, which are now frequented by hookers, pimps and punk rockers!

Desperate to save the town, the wide-eyed (literally) Strawberry boards a bus for Hollywood, only to find the salacious Lucy and the Diamonds trying to taint the purity of Billy and the LHCB. But when she explains about what’s happened to Heartland, they all go in search of the stolen instruments.

Their first stop is the lair of Dr. Maxwell, played by a wild-n-crazy Steve Martin (in his big screen debut). Maxwell, who uses his magical silver hammer to turn old people into young automatons in servitude to FVB, loses possession of Sgt. Pepper’s heart-shaped cornet in a tepid battle with our satin-clad heroes. After finding the drum left in Mustard’s van, the band retrieves the tuba from FVB’s brainwasher, Father Sun, played by an obviously bored Alice Cooper.

Finally, the LHCB attacks and somehow manages to defeat the corruptive FVB, played by the Bee Gees’ antithesis, Aerosmith. However, Strawberry is killed in the melee. After a funeral befitting Snow White (including glass coffin), a suicidal Billy leaps off the Fields home roof. But wait! A weather vane magically transforms into the reincarnated Sgt. Pepper (now mysteriously black in the form of Billy Preston) who shoots lasers from his fingers that in turn save Billy, transform the villains into Catholic clergy, return the town to its former wholesome self and resurrect the dead Strawberry! Talk about dues ex machina!

Abruptly, the film ends with a huge singalong of the title theme, as the cast is joined by a bizarre menagerie of ‘70s stars (some super, some not), including Robert Palmer, Jose Feliciano, Helen Reddy, Heart, Hank Williams Jr., Peter Allen and, uh, Sha Na Na?! Additionally (adding to the bad wig count), we have Carol Channing, Wolfman Jack, Tina Turner, Frankie Valli, Connie Stevens, and, again uh, Dame Edna!? It’s a perfectly strange cap to a perfectly strange film.

For one thing, aside from George Burns’ narration, there’s no dialogue at all in the movie other than sung lyrics. While this was partially done to avoid having the leads’ very British accents come out of the mouths of very American characters, the fact that the inexperienced “actors” were left stranded in the land of broad pantomime doesn’t help the film. On top of that, some of the more abstract lyrics (“He wear no shoeshine, he got toe jam football!”) don’t quite work in a film that’s using them as the literal screenplay.

So what’s left is the music, and with precious few exceptions, that’s a miss as well. Frampton’s presence and voice are both too slight to embody the weight of Lennon and McCartney and the Bee Gees’ lovely harmonizing has no place to go. Earth Wind and Fire pull of an entertaining, if funk-lite version of “Got to Get You Into My Life,” but Alice Cooper’s mere recitation of “Because” is as embarrassing as George Burns’ soft-shoe take on “Fixing a Hole.” Doing a down-n-dirty version of “Come Together,” Aerosmith is the only performer to emerge from the film with reputation unscathed, probably because they got to play the bad guys in this train wreck!

Frequent Beatles guest player Billy Preston’s “Get Back” sounds great (and he’s got moves that rival James Brown’s), but his involvement in this project feels almost like a betrayal. But not as much as the soundtrack’s producer and arranger, actual Beatles producer George Martin!

Ultimately, the movie feels like a ‘70s TV variety show ala “Donny and Marie,” comprised of awkward skits featuring non-acting musicians cut together with splashy musical numbers. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was a critical and box office dud, and spelled the beginning of the decline of the once mighty Robert Stigwood Organization (whose next musical film, a 1980 new wave movie called “Times Square” failed as well).

Over the years, the film has slowly built a minor cult of the “so bad it’s good” variety. The lack of dialogue makes shout-along viewings difficult, but there are still plenty of jaw-dropping elements (Billy’s white overalls! Completely off lip-synching! Female robot massage!) that make this a great DVD to toss in at a party.

The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” album remains a controversial touchstone. While many (including Rolling Stone Magazine) cite it as the greatest rock album of all time, there is a school of thought that its ambitious structure and inventive recording methods took rock into the more serious realm of Art, making it more pretentious and less vital (The New York Times compared the record to a spoiled child).

Certainly no one ever has or will argue that the movie version is anything close to “art,” but you can’t totally hate a movie that answers the question, “What would Ed Wood have done if he lived in the disco era?”
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ORIGINALLY POSTED in REWIND on MTV.COM, Sept., 2007

When actors sing!!

What’s the opposite of Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore singing pop in “Music and Lyrics?” Maybe it’s Sam Jackson belting the blues in “Black Snake Moan.” Traditionally, when characters in movies burst into song, you’re hearing a professional singer’s voice dubbed in. It takes guts for an actor to actually lay down some vocal tracks in a film, and the results have been mixed. While some have egos huge enough to delude themselves into thinking they’re the next Frank Sinatra, a lot of times they end up evoking Frank Stallone.

Marlon Brando’s off-key crooning in 1955’s “Guys and Dolls” was so bad that the performance you hear onscreen was carefully constructed from bits and pieces of numerous takes. Playing Sky Masterson was an especially gutsy move for the method actor, considering he had to hold his own against none other than Mr. Sinatra (who was furious that Brando got the bigger part).

But sometimes a distinctive, if less than Met-worthy voice can work in a film. Marilyn Monroe was an awful singer, but her breathy vocalizing fit her characters in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953) and “Some Like it Hot” (1959). Audrey Hepburn’s flat, wan voice perfectly suited Holly Golightly’s plaintive performance of “Moon River” in 1961’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” but she was overdubbed by Marni Nixon in 1964’s “My Fair Lady.”

In 1969, the musical western comedy “Paint Your Wagon” gave us tough guys Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin as singing gold prospectors. Eastwood had actually recorded a few singles prior to this film (and has subsequently sung in movies including 1982‘s “Honkytonk Man” in addition to composing the scores to many of his own films such as 2004’s “Million Dollar Baby”). Marvin, on the other hand, seemed unaware of his limited range, but his scratchy warbling still managed to score a #1 hit in England with “Wanderin’ Star.”

Robert Altman’s “Nashville” (1975), a satire on the politics of America and the music business, featured much improvisation and the realism-obsessed director actually demanded that his stars, including Henry Gibson, Lily Tomlin and Karen Black not only perform their own songs in the film, but WRITE them as well!

1977’s “Saturday Night Fever” proved that former sweathog John Travolta could dance, but his big screen follow-up showed that he had the pipes to match. As Danny Zuko in 1978’s “Grease” Travolta’s become an iconic part of one of the most successful musicals of all time (would it be the same if Henry “the Fonz” Winkler had accepted the part?).

Despite what “American Idol” would have you believe, sometimes technical ability isn’t as important as passion. What started as a self-indulgent gag on “Saturday Night Live” turned into a full side career for comedians John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as “The Blues Brothers” (1980) became a smash both onscreen and in the record stores. Following Belushi’s death in 1982, later attempts by Aykroyd to recapture the magic never quite felt as genuine (If there’s any heir apparent to John Belushi, it’s Jack Black, whose musical performances in films like 2003’s “School of Rock” and last year’s “Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny” succinctly capture the anarchic spirit of rock & roll).

Woody Allen’s 1996 musical experiment, “Everyone Says I Love You” intentionally cast non-singers such as Edward Norton, Drew Barrymore, Alan Alda, Goldie Hawn and Tim Roth in order to create a more realistic depiction of what it would like if people spontaneously burst into song in real life. In fact, Woody had to ask Hawn (who had recorded an album in 1972) to sing worse, while Drew’s singing was a bit TOO cacaphonous… she was the only cast member to be redubbed.

In a wonderfully surreal moment in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” (1999), much of the cast, including Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore, Jason Robards, John C. Reilly, and William H. Macy (but excluding the frogs) begins interacting with the soundtrack, singing along to Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up.”

2000’s “Duets” boasts somewhat less-than-mellifluous singing by Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Giamatti, and Maria Bello, but they are to be excused in that the film is based in the world of karaoke, an arena not known for musical prowess.

Gina Gershon’s narcissism takes the stage in 2003’s “Prey for Rock and Roll,” an embarrassingly cliché-ridden tale of an all-girl band trying to make it in L.A. Spewing lines about what is and isn’t “rock and roll” (what musicians TALK like this?), Gershon snarls and snaps like an exaggerated Courtney Love impersonation. Further evidence of how much the actress came to think that she was a real rock star came in a painful 2004 reality series, “Rocked With Gina Gershon,” in which she toured with a backing band (Girls vs. Boys) to promote the film.

When an actor plays an actual musician in a biopic, they have two options: Lip-synch or swim… uh, sing. For those thespians brave enough to tackle the musical part of the performance as well as the dramatic, the rewards can be great. In addition to winning a Best Actress Oscar for her role as Loretta Lynn in 1980’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Sissy Spacek’s singing earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Country Vocal Performance.

Not only did Gary Busey actually play guitar and sing as the star of “The Buddy Holly Story” (1978), the concert scenes were recorded live during filming to capture the energy of the shows. As part of his prep for the movie, Busey put together a band and went on tour with Holly’s songs, in order to feel comfortable performing in front of an audience.

Jamie Foxx won an Oscar for his channeling of Ray Charles in 2004’s “Ray,” but Foxx was actually a musician before he became an actor. Critics were more surprised by the deftness with which Joaquin Phoenix managed to evoke the seemingly-inimitable Johnny Cash in 2005’s “Walk the Line.” While Phoenix wouldn’t win his Oscar nod, his co-star, Reese Witherspoon did get Best Actress for her musical / dramatic interpretation of the love of Cash’s life, June Carter Cash.

Kevin Spacey (who crooned “That Old Black Magic” for the soundtrack to 1997’s “Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil”) is a decent singer, and tried valiantly to conjure Bobby Darin in the 2004 film “Beyond the Sea.” The movie was a passion project for the producer-director-star, but a combination of age (the 45 year old Spacey just can’t pass for a twenty-something Darin) and a permeable air of self-indulgence is distracting.

In recent years, musicals featuring big name stars have made a comeback. Audiences were surprised to hear Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor hold their own in Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 version of “Moulin Rouge!” The young Obi-Wan and the former Mrs. Cruise belt out songs by Elton John, Rodgers & Hammerstein, the Beatles, Kiss, Queen and more with an authority that caught many critics off guard. The following year, “Chicago” opened even more eyes (and ears) with respectable musical performances by Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Richard Gere. McGregor and Zellweger enjoyed their musical experiences enough to ask for a song and dance number in Peyton Reed’s 2003 homage to frothy ‘60s sex comedies, “Down With Love.”

But perhaps the strangest example of trilling thespians ever comes at the climax of “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” (1989), in which Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy sit around a campfire singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Still, it could have been worse. They could’ve tried to harmonize William Shatner’s version of “Mr. Tambourine Man!”
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ORIGINALLY POSTED in REWIND on MTV.COM, February 2007