The Yellow Brick Road to Profit

Hollywood's new formula is fantasy and rock

The Wizard of Oz lives 110 stories above the ground, on a bridge connecting the twin towers of Manhattan's World Trade Center. The Beatles--or pretty good substitutes--are alive, well and together in a corn-belt Shangri-la called Heartland, U.S.A. The Age of Aquarius has dawned again in Central Park, and the hippies are back selling their gospel of love and kindness. And down at the high school they are wearing pegged pants and leather jackets, as John Travolta, the heartthrob of the '70s, gives a belated tour of the '50s.

Translated, it all means that film makers have discovered that kids are the ones who fill the movie theater, and they love rock music and fantasy. That inescapable fact has led to an obvious conclusion, and the result is four blockbusting rock-fantasy musicals for 1978: The Wiz, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Hair and Grease. In fact, not since the '40s, the heyday of the movie musical, have so many horns been tooted or so many dollars been spent to put movies and music together. "The old musicals worked because they were contemporary in their time," says Producer Robert Stigwood, who is backing two of the new ones, Grease and Sgt. Pepper. "But the ones in between then and now, in the '50s and '60s, went wrong because they were half this and half that. Total fantasy works better today."

Or so Stigwood hopes. Grease, the film version of the long-running Broadway play, will be the first out, and is probably the safest bet. Set in a '50s high school, it stars Pop Singer Olivia Newton-John and Travolta, who has already scored a huge success as a '70s greaser in Saturday Night Fever. "It's going to be a '70s look at the '50s," says Director Randal Kleiser. "Stylistically, the actors will stop and break into song--that's old--but we are using all the '70s film techniques we can muster, like split screens and high-powered sound."

For the sake of authenticity, three Los Angeles high schools were rented for background, and shooting began last summer, the day after school was out. It ended exactly eleven weeks later, the day before the beginning of the fall semester. Producer Allan Carr treated the whole filming as one of his continuous giant parties, and as soon as Travolta bought his DC-3, he flew several members of the crew to Las Vegas for a weekend. There was so much jollity on the Paramount set that Jack Nicholson, who was making Goin' South on the next sound stage, sent over a note: "Listen, either put me in the movie, or turn off the noise." The whole thing, says Travolta, was "what the English would call a romp."

In Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band the clock moves ahead to the '60s. Stigwood, an Australian who once helped manage the Beatles, had rights to 29 of the best Beatle songs and wanted some kind of Technicolor package. Rock Critic Henry Edwards was hired to write a script--Stigwood's only stipulation was that there be almost no dialogue--and he hit upon the idea of a fantasy. Utopia is Heartland, a place where everyone looks as if he just had a cheery bowl of granola, and happiness is maintained through music. The music makers, Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, are seduced into going to Hollywood by a record producer, and Heartland becomes Gomor-rahland until they see the error of their ways and return.

From the beginning the real world was banned from the set. "If we get into the area of reality with a film like this, we're dead," notes Production Designer Brian Eatwell.

The sets were giant toys: a yacht-length limousine for the Hollywood producer, a seven-story balloon for the trip West, and the Biggest Mac ever cooked up for Heartland's mammoth, 20-ft.-high hamburger, the symbol of the evil Mr. Mustard.

"With no dialogue," sighs Eatwell, "you have to keep coming up with a visual tour de force."

Hair is also a fantasy of the '60s, or, as Director Milos Forman describes it, "a tribal-rock-musical-fairy-tale-comedy-drama." Strewing exclamation points around like love beads at an old-fashioned bein, Producer Lester Persky is even more voluble. "It's a myth!" he says. "A documentary! A docu-myth!"

The original 1968 play had almost no plot and is now remembered for one song, Aquarius, an innocent charm, and perhaps 30 seconds of nudity, a shocking sight in those days. The film had to have something more, and the plot now centers on Claude (John Savage), a young 1967 draftee who comes to New York City for a final fling before being shipped to Nam. The conservative Claude happens upon a hippie band in Central Park, and his eyes are opened to a new, free spirit. He falls in love with Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo), and after a friend volunteers to take Claude's place in the Army, the lovers march off into The End together, probably on their way to Woodstock.

In contrast to its spirit of love, Hair has not been a happy movie to make. Savage goes so far as to label it publicly "a turkey." Says he: "I had four hours to prepare for this role, but I think that's more than enough." The cast spirit was not helped much by a Broadway revival of the play, which received almost universal revilement.

Most of the critics found the restored Hair gray with age, its charm a distant and embarrassing memory. Forman, who won an Academy Award for One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, defends his movie stoutly, however. "When you are in the middle of a storm like the '60s, you do not have time to think about what is going on," he says. "With distance, I can now look at this period and see the contradictions, the humor."

In dollar terms, the greatest risk rides on The Wiz, which is costing $20 million. The producers, basing the film on the Broadway show, made the characters black. Dorothy sets off for Oz not from the plains of Kansas, but from Harlem. When Diana Ross, who is in her 30s, decided she wanted to play Dorothy, who was a young girl in the original, there was another transmogrification. "Since we decided she's a black adult," says Writer Joel Schumacher, "we couldn't just make her a little jerk."

Now the Munchkins are street kids who were imprisoned in a wall of graffiti. The Wicked Witch of the West runs a sweatshop. The Cowardly Lion is one of the two statues that guard the front of the New York Public Library. The Emerald City is the World Trade Center, and Director Sidney Lumet has staged extravagant dances at the towers' base. The sunken plaza was covered over with Plexiglas, and 300 dancers, lit by spotlights from below, pound away on top. Lumet wanted to turn the Brooklyn Bridge into the Yellow Brick Road by putting down 25 miles of yellow vinyl. The New York police gave him a firm no, however, and he settled for paving a footbridge over the East River.

Hollywood people do nothing in twos or even fours. Studios will be watching the returns on these movies closely because many more musicals are on the way. Hot Wax, the story of a '50s disc jockey, is already in production, as is FM, a film about a rock radio station, and Thank God It's Friday!, about a Los Angeles discotheque. Neil Diamond wants to do a remake of The Jazz Singer, and Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin will star in a musical version of Popeye. Annie, the Broadway hit, was just bought by Columbia Pictures for $9.5 million, the highest sum ever paid for a musical property.

All these new music makers like to think they are keeping the spirit of the old MGM musicals like The Wizard of Oz. "One of the things that made an MGM musical work," says Edwards, "was that they created towns filled with happy people who happened to possess musical skills. That fantasy still endures."

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