RENT

[stars in the sky]

Yeah. That was one of the problems my friend and I had-- Mark because the third (seventh?) wheel about whom they made the "dumped-for-a-woman" joke way too many times, even if it was hilarious every time they did it.

[I Will Be Popular]

I imagine it would be.

[imperfectly_green]

There were two wonderful, long articles about Rent and Rosario Dawson on the front page of the Washington Post Arts Section this morning--let's see if I--or someone else--can dig them up.

[imperfectly_green]

Here's the Rent one:

Hollywood's 'Rent' Check
The Broadway Hit Takes a Gamble by Bringing Its Cast, and Conventions, to Film

By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 20, 2005; Page N01

Of course they wanted the parts. Desperately. But in the laboriously drawn-out process of transferring "Rent" to the big screen, word had filtered to the original cast members of the Broadway musical that the filmmakers -- as often happens in stage-to-movie ventures -- were looking into celebrity power grids of higher voltage.

"We had heard we were going to be replaced with bigger names," says Idina Menzel, a Tony Award winner for her portrayal of the green-skinned witch in the hit musical "Wicked." Overtures were made to brand-name pop stars -- Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Usher among them -- and Chris Columbus, the latest major-league director to be attached to the project, went so far as to sit down with Timberlake.

Menzel braced herself. "I said to my agent: 'Just don't have them waste my time. Don't let them give me a pity meeting.' "

Pity, it turns out, was far from what the director had in mind. Long a fan of the show, Columbus -- director of blockbusters such as "Mrs. Doubtfire," the two "Home Alone" films and the first two "Harry Potter" movies -- ultimately decided that doing justice to "Rent" meant giving the roles back to Menzel and other actors present at the birth.

"It was the power of their relationships that I was taken with," Columbus says. "As I started to meet with the original cast members, I saw that they had created a bond and a kind of chemistry that I've never seen before."

Which is how it came to pass that six of the eight original lead performers of "Rent" -- among them heartthrob Taye Diggs and Jesse L. Martin of "Law & Order" -- made it into the roughly $40 million movie version of a brash, poignantly melodic rock opera. Based on Puccini's "La Boheme," "Rent" opened off-Broadway early in 1996, moved to Broadway a few months later, copped a Pulitzer Prize and became a touchstone for a younger generation eager for a show it could embrace as its own.

Now, the wisdom of Columbus's choices for the project -- indeed, the choice of Columbus himself -- is being put to the customary box-office plebiscite. With "Rent" opening Wednesday across the country, the musical question of the moment is: Will American moviegoers find room in their hearts for a Lower East Side story replete with HIV-positive lovers and singing junkies? (And with Rosario Dawson -- one of two actors not from the original -- playing an exotic dancer with a thing for handcuffs and heroin?)

"Rent" moves to a cineplex near you after years of false starts and delays, flirtatious interludes with such auteurs as Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, and endless debate over how a gritty musical with little dialogue might be brought to the screen. What seems to have stayed constant was faith in the material's potential.

Jeffrey Seller, one of the stage version's producers and an executive producer of the movie, can offer chapter and verse on how "Rent" got stuck in idle in Hollywood, and the difficulties directors encountered in the effort to reinvent it. "Scorsese admired the piece but didn't know what to do with it," notes Seller, most recently a producer of the Broadway musical "Avenue Q." "The hero here is Chris, because he had a burning desire to make the movie. And he had a vision of how to make it."

That vision will be hotly debated in the coming weeks, especially among the musical's legions of devotees -- "Rentheads" -- who over the years have helped to ensure the show's status as a Broadway phenomenon. "Rent" is the eighth-longest-running show in Broadway history, and since 1996 has grossed $460 million from its various North American productions. And Rentheads attending early film screenings are having a go at the movie online, parsing all 2 hours 10 minutes of it, song by song by song.

Anthony Rapp, who for the movie reprises his role as Mark Cohen, the Scarsdale kid turned downtown documentary filmmaker, says he has come across a lot of naysaying on the Web, "a similar kind of skepticism in the press and online communities," questioning the emotionalism of the film and the contemporary relevance of the story. "Rent" is about young people struggling with life-and-death issues -- but it's also about the need to stay true to a bohemian ideal, to one's artistic soul, to resist the temptation in a materialistic age to sell out.

Is there, perhaps, a perception among the cognoscenti that "Rent" -- under the stewardship of the guy who wrote "The Goonies" -- has gone a bit soft? "There is this thing about this show, that it has always worn its heart on its sleeve," Rapp insists, "and there are people who don't want that emotional content in their art."
Is there also in the portrait of suburban kids squatting in decaying New York lofts and dying of AIDS -- the film opens on Christmas Eve 1989 -- evidence of a piece that dates itself?

"I don't know," Rapp says. "Is losing your friend still relevant? Is HIV still relevant? Is 'La Boheme' still relevant?"

Columbus, too, is keenly aware he's in the hot seat. He got a baptism, he says, with the psychological pressure exerted by deeply proprietary fans during the making of the "Harry Potter" films. In a sense, he explains, "I had to go through the process of 'Harry Potter' to do 'Rent.' By the time of 'Rent,' I learned that I just have to think about the film."

And what that thinking has led to is a fairly straightforward adaptation.

Unlike, say, the Oscar-winning "Chicago," which reimagined the musical numbers of the Broadway version as figments of characters' dreams and delusions, "Rent" takes the view that characters simply go about their lives, open their mouths and music comes out. "People kept saying to me: 'How are you going to get into the songs? What's your device?' " Columbus recalls. His answer was that he wasn't going to have one. He reminded them that audiences have been suspending their disbelief with movie musicals for decades. Remember "West Side Story"? The unlikeliest people, street toughs, warbled and jetd. "It's a language," Columbus argues, "that we understand."

The director says he also understood the importance of remaining true to the blueprint of the show's composer-lyricist, Jonathan Larson, whose own story resonates with the pathos of the work. On Jan. 25, 1996, hours after the final dress rehearsal off-Broadway, Larson died of an aortic aneurysm. Months before, he had been waiting tables. He was only 35, and he never knew that he had written one of the most successful musicals in Broadway history.

"One song/before I go," Adam Pascal's Roger, a songwriter, sings at one point. In the musical's most famous number, "Seasons of Love," the ensemble asks, "How do you figure/A last year on Earth?"

Much of Larson's score, with its piercing harmonies, is intact: "Seasons of Love" -- now repositioned, as a prologue -- "La Vie Boheme," "I'll Cover You," "Out Tonight" and "Take Me or Leave Me" made it into the film. (The most prominent and, Columbus says, painful cut was a tender "Goodbye, Love" sung by Dawson's Mimi to Roger; Columbus reports that it will be on the DVD.) The director made other alterations, too, clarifying plot points. Once Larson died, the work was pretty much frozen, albeit still raw, unfinished. Columbus also has converted much of the opera-style recitative to spoken dialogue.

The characters, however, have undergone virtually no metamorphoses. All are instantly recognizable: Mark and Roger, friends who share a grimy loft whose rent -- ah! the title -- they cannot pay. Benny, played by Diggs, their yuppified landlord and ex-pal. Dawson's Mimi, the love interest for Roger who dances for her fixes at the Cat-Scratch Club. Outrageous, mouthy Maureen, portrayed by Menzel, who's loved by Mark but is in love with an uptight lawyer, Joanne (Tracie Thoms). And the big-hearted Tom Collins (Martin), who's hooked up with cross-dressing Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia, who won a Tony in the role).

All but Dawson and Thoms, a Baltimore native, have known each other since "Rent's" beginnings. "Rent" was in essence their show-business launching pad, and they remain devoted not only to Larson's memory but also to each other. (Diggs and Menzel especially; they're husband and wife.) When, for instance, Daphne Rubin-Vega, the original Mimi, was not cast in the movie, some of the other actors were upset. The original Joanne, Fredi Walker, also was not cast. Columbus says that Rubin-Vega was pregnant and that Walker took herself out of the running.

Still, Martin, who says he was granted a hiatus from "Law & Order" to be in the film, says he phoned Rubin-Vega to get her blessing, sort of. "I had to call Daphne and be sure she was okay with this," he explains. "Mimi belonged to Daphne. She was really upset. It can't be easy. I know she's happy for us, and I know it breaks her heart." (Efforts to reach Rubin-Vega, with the help of "Rent's" Broadway publicity office, were unsuccessful.)

The original cast members are a decade older than when they first inhabited their parts, and returning to those characters was a bit like revisiting a room moved out of long ago. Filming on the streets of New York and on soundstages in California, Rapp felt as if he were living in two eras of his life at once.

"It's sort of like going back in time, going back to where I was," he says of again playing Mark Cohen, a role he slipped into somewhere between 800 and 1,000 times. He has lost track. "I've grown up from that time and Mark hasn't. I didn't know what to expect exactly, but there was this plug and we just plugged ourselves into it. It's literally in our bones."

Sometimes, Rapp notes, going home can be disturbing. Not this time. Doing "Rent" again, surrounded by people he cared about, was "like going home to the warmest, most comfortable, most alive place you can be."

[imperfectly_green]

And here's the one about Rosario Dawson:

Rosario Dawson, Exercising Squatter's Rights to Mimi

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 20, 2005; Page N01

NEW YORK Rosario Dawson pined so hard for the film role of Mimi, the HIV-infected strip club vixen of "Rent," that she nearly skipped the audition. It just meant so much to her that the idea of vying for the part and not getting it seemed crushing.

"I got freaked out because what if my voice broke while I was dancing because I was out of breath or something," Dawson says, sitting cross-legged on a couch in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Battery Park.

Why the anxiety? Because Dawson, like Mimi, hails from the Lower East Side, and she, like Mimi, lived there in an apartment without heat or electricity. Nobody expects the cast of any musical production to have firsthand knowledge of the world they are pretending to inhabit, and it's no knock on anyone else in the film that he or she is guessing at what it would be like to dwell in poverty-stricken New York in the mid-'80s. But those are Dawson's roots.

"We had a big, gaping hole in the middle of the floor when we moved in," she remembers. "Sheets of plastic on the windows. At first there was no running water, no heat, no electricity. My mother learned to be a plumber and put in all the pipes in our place."

The way Dawson describes the experience, it all sounds kind of exciting. Then again, this woman could make a tax audit sound festive. Dawson, 26, is enthusiasm incarnate and speaks in gushers, bouncing from topic to topic, with barely a pause to inhale. She smiles, flips back her short black hair every few seconds and talks, a few paragraphs at a time.

Which is what she's been doing all day. The publicity operation for "Rent" has taken over a suite and a bunch of rooms in the Ritz-Carlton and the whole scene -- a combination of walkie-talkies, sofas and finger food -- looks mildly paramilitary, like a SWAT team from the Pottery Barn. A handful of women are carefully coordinating the arrival and departure of stars and journalists.

"Seth, you copy? Go to XM in two minutes," one barks.

"Take Adam back to 1233," says another.

At 3 p.m., Dawson is in Room 909 and looks likes she's just getting warmed up.

"I don't really ever lose my voice," she says. "I'm actually lucky about that."

Whatever that mysterious quality called "it" is, this woman has by the heaps.

"When I saw the first cut of the movie," recalls "Rent" director Chris Columbus, "I remember seeing this close-up of Rosario and thinking, 'This is the birth of a new movie star.' "

Well, not exactly new. Over the past 10 years, Dawson has appeared in more than a dozen movies, starting with "Kids" in 1995, a brutal and unforgettable indie about a group of skeevy Manhattan teens, released when Dawson was 16. Since then she's turned up in "Sin City," "25th Hour," "Men in Black II," and "Josie and the Pussycats." And she's made her share of stinkers, like Oliver Stone's "Alexander" and "The Adventures of Pluto Nash," an Eddie Murphy flop.

"I was like, 'Uh, I've only been acting a few years but, and not to be obnoxious or anything, but do you really want me to say the same line in every scene?' " she says, recalling the script for "Nash." "They were like, 'Don't worry, we'll fix it all later.' The story definitely needed work."

Her screen debut went a lot better. She was recruited for "Kids" right off the street, in an urban version of a Hollywood fairy tale. At the time she was living in that squat, and her dad noticed that a camera crew was working near the apartment.

"There was a Vibe commercial being filmed on my street that day and my dad said, 'Go down there and get discovered,' " Dawson says.

She wheedled her way into a couple shots as a dancer, and during a lull in shooting she noticed two men staring at her. One was 19-year-old Harmony Korine, who wrote the screenplay for "Kids." He and director Larry Clark happened to be passing by, scouting locations.

"Harmony was like, 'Oh my God, you're exactly what we've been looking for!' I'm looking at the two of these guys and thinking, 'Yeah, right.' "

Within days, Dawson was perched on the front of her father's bicycle ("That's how we traveled back then") and the two pedaled to Clark's office at Broadway and Houston. There they read the script, the account of a violent, druggy and sexually depraved day in the life of some New York teens. There's rape, AIDS and lots of nauseating amorality.

"My parents and I read the script and it was . . . heavy," says Dawson. "My mom and dad were like, 'You can do the movie as long as you don't smoke!' "

She didn't smoke. Once the movie was made -- it was shot in four days -- she assumed it would quietly sink into oblivion. (Everyone involved was new to the movie biz, after all.) With the funds from her part, Dawson and her family took a two-week vacation to Texas to visit her father's relatives. Her mother liked the town so much, she bought a house and moved the family.

Months later, the phone rang. "I got this random call saying 'Where have you been? We can't believe you're in Texas!' "

"Kids" had been shown at Sundance and was on its way to becoming a somewhat notorious hit. Harper's Bazaar flew Dawson to New York, first-class, for a group shoot with the rest of the cast. An acting career suddenly seemed possible, and eventually she moved back into her parents' apartment, this time with roommates, and enrolled in the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. Spike Lee cast her in his 1998 movie "He Got Game."

She lives these days in Los Angeles with her boyfriend, "Sex and the City" star Jason Lewis, and a pair of Rhodesian Ridgebacks. Relocating to the West Coast, she says, had a lot more to do with giving the dogs a back yard than it did with promoting her career.

But if she seems less than eager to call herself a Californian, she'll happily admit that Los Angeles was the scene of one of the most satisfying moments of her life. It was her second "Rent" audition for Mimi, this time in a dance studio with Chris Columbus watching. Dawson remembers being so terrified she forgot to sing and dance at the same time, pretty much required skills in a musical. When she was through, she thought she'd blown it. Columbus, though, was awed.

"We had a situation where we had six of the original cast members in the movie, so I needed to find someone who would fit into this group of people who'd done the show for 16 months," he says. "When I met her, I had no idea she could sing or dance, and at the audition she sang 'Out Tonight' and just the way she moved, and her voice, which has this fragile beauty about it."

When Dawson was finished, Columbus and his collaborators huddled briefly and then told her the good news.

"I walked out the door and I told her, 'It's yours.' "

Dawson later heard the details from her manager. Yes, she'd made some mistakes during that audition, but it didn't seem to matter.

"They told my manager, 'You know, even when she was screwing up she seemed perfect.' "

[imperfectly_green]

Three...more...days.

[I Will Be Popular]

Two...more...days.

[ElphieandFiyero]

One day people, got your movie tickets?

[I Will Be Popular]

What do you all think of the video clips from the blog? My fav's TMOLM... I love when they're looking across th pool table and when Maureen climbs on top of it...unadultarated hilarity.

[DefyingGravity12]

TODAY'S THE DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'M SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'M GOING WITH A BUNCH OF MY FRIENDS TONIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ;D

[stars in the sky]

God, the movie's just as good the second time 'round. I get such chills when the whole block is burning at the opening...

[ElphieandFiyero]

That was an excellent movie.
Spoiler
Did anyone else love how in Marks documentry at the end the last shot was of angel, because in the show he runs on at the end? I guess that was because they couldn't realy have him run on in the movie.
end of spoiler

[imperfectly_green]

I'm seeing it today with four other friends who know next-to-nothing about the show (though one of them is a fellow Broadway fan, she's more of a "Producers" fanatic--Producerhead?) so it'll be interesting to see their reactions.

Anyone know what the reviews are tending towards? The one in my paper was mixed--although I did like the title, something like: For Rent, Nice View, Needs Window.

[I Will Be Popular]

Ha! I like that title. My paper's was mixed, though mostly negative. But the negativity was directed towards Chris, not the actors.

[imperfectly_green]

Oh, my goodness.

I just got back from Rent. It was great, better than I thought it would be, at least. True, the direction could have used some work (*The camera panning to Mimi's hand as an example, which tipped people off as to the nature of the ending*), but I thought that over all it was quite well done.

Seeing the movie with a control group of non-Rentheads also enhanced my experience. A friend and I were sitting in front of the other four members of our party, and as the end neared they huddled over my shoulder, asking urgently "Omigod, does Mimi die? She can't die!" I swear, there was not a dry eye in the place (except for mine, I suppose, since I was expecting it) during "I'll Cover You (Reprise)."

After the opening number--"Rent"--my friend (the "Producerhead" I described before) turned to me and said, "Oh man," her way of saying "wow." And I was equally impressed. As my first time seeing Rent, I got a very good impression.

Perhaps now I can see it on Broadway.