deja vu: Mamma Mia and Across the Universe
I was recently asked why I opposed the spate of movies and Broadway plays that retrofitted new images and storylines to old pop hits. Phyllida Lloyd’s Mamma Mia to the music of Abba, and Julie Tamor’s “Across the Universe” to the music of the Beatles.
The most apparent reason is the aural experience of listening to music. Similar to reading, listening to music forces the participant to bridge abstract representation with mental images. Th act of mental bridge-building is a creative act in itself. Music videos were criticized for deciding what images to go with a piece of music from which we would have needed, otherwise, to form our personal vista. When developed to its logical extreme, image association turned into simulacra, and beautiful people were utilized to sell music.
George Michael’s “Freedom! 90″ video, enlisting Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington marked the height of the era: It combined beautiful people (who had nothing to do with the song) with a recycled song.
Where could we go from there?
The Retrofitted Music Movie was the next plateau.
Images superimposed on music frees us from the task of creating images alongside the abstraction of lyrics and sound. It makes us lazy, supplying us with prefabricated imagery when we should be constructing our own. I guess that’s why you often hear people dismiss a movie with “the book was better.”
The second reason I oppose Retrofitted Music Movies is this: musicians and songwriters publish their works under one publisher. After a long career, the publisher owns the catalog of their songs. Companies and buyers bid on purchasing and reselling the publishing rights to the entire catalog en-block. Once in possession of this catalog, they subtract a huge chunk of royalties that need to be paid out to the musicians and songwriters whenever the songs in the catalog are redistributed. If you look at the retrofitted music movies, you’ll realize that the birth of the concept probably had little to do with someone wanting to create a new work*. If anything, it looks suspiciously as if it had been motivated by a pure business decision to cut cost and maximize gain. How did I arrive at this conclusion? Well, I had a hunch, being in the music and music publishing business for five years.
Today I finally checked the credentials to see if it supported my theory. Here was what I came up with:
Mamma Mia is created by NBC/Universal Studios. If you Google the Abba Catalog, you will see that NBC and Universal also owns the entire catalog to all their works.
Across the Universe is distributed by Sony. According to Wikipedia, “Revolution was a strategic partner of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which distributed and marketed Revolution’s films. The company shut down in October 2007, coinciding with the end of the five year deal with Sony Pictures.” The company is called Revolution Pictures, and Revolution was one of the Beatles’ biggest songs. Someone must have planned the creation of this subsidiary company for the sole purpose of manufacturing Across the Universe, which was made in 2007. Upon it’s completion, the task was achieved, the company was no longer needed.
So why does all this bother me, you ask?
I realize it’s the entertainment world’s age-old strategy to cash in on the familiar. Up-and-coming bands and even nowadays with surgery, movie stars, need to look or sound like a proven commodity if they want to have a higher chance of signing a contract. Pushed to it’s logical conclusion, movies utilized soundtrack that have been proven hits, to reduce the investment risk factor by, if not more than half: even if the movie was horrible, at least audience members still walk away misty-eyed with the sentimentality of hearing their favorite hits when they were in their youthful prime.
In a larger picture, however, recycling and retrofitting old music is actually detrimental to pushing the continuum of the art form ahead. I will always remember the notorious quote bold explorer Miles Davis made about conservationist Wynton Marsalis, who championed preserving “traditional” jazz heritage by continuous reiteration versus forging ahead into new territory. It was something to the effect that if jazz musicians did what Marsalis wanted, “we’d all be back in the fields picking cotton.”
For every remake of an old hit, a new original artist/songwriter is deprived of exposure to the public. We stagnate in nostalgia to put money in the pockets of entertainment execs, but years from now, when people asks us about our fond memories (many of which are indelibly interwoven with music) of the great millennium, we can only say “it was…uh…kinda like the 70s?”
*I have to be fair here. Bach wrote parts of his greatest cantatas as variations on old hymns. A bust of George Washington is really nothing more than a reiteration of Caesar’s profile. The continuum of the arts have trudged forward with an ebb-and-flow progress, reiterating between the retelling of well-worn stories and entirely new creations.
