Recently, on Tom Snyder’s late-night talk show, the celebrated writer- director Quentin Tarantino went into a “these kids today” tirade about how illiterate most young would-be filmmakers are. They want to make movies, he said, but they don’t know the first thing about, for example, the work of the great European filmmakers that he inhaled in his now-legendary days as a video-store clerk in southern California. Cinematically literate Tarantino may be — so literate that he apparently stole chunks of a little-known Hong Kong movie called City on Fire for his screenplay and direction of his first film, Reservoir Dogs — but his literacy in other things is illustrated by a note that producer Jane Hamsher reproduces in her new book Killer Instinct. In it, Tarantino misspells the word “legs.”
Contemporary Hollywood is indeed illiterate — not just where spelling is concerned, but in the most fundamental ways. The movie industry is dominated by people who do not know how to tell a story. This crisis of literacy has been masked by the explosion of special-effects filmmaking, which has kept audiences worldwide gaping in wonder at the sight of a dinosaur on a San Diego street in The Lost World or a Harrier jump-jet floating outside a Miami office building in True Lies. But special effects can get you only so far, and the awe they inspire is time-limited. These sorts of movies will seem hilariously prehistoric to an audience in the twenty-first century, in the same way that the Buck Rogers-sort of serial from the 1930s evokes laughs today.
What grabs us in those movies from the 1930s that do not provoke the giggles is the stories they tell — stories about people who may be living in a different time with different fashions and styles of speech, but who are nonetheless just like us. Without that feeling of commonality, all a movie has is its glittering surface — and as George Lucas’s decision to refurbish the special effects of Star Wars shows, what glittered twenty years ago gets tarnished pretty fast.
The most awe-inspiring technical achievements in Hollywood history are probably not the special-effects films, but the full-length cartoons the Walt Disney studio has been producing since 1937. Each second on film comprises twenty-four separate still photographs. That means, in essence, that for every second of a cartoon, twenty-four different paintings have to be executed in which there is only the most microscopic change from the previous one. That’s 1,440 paintings a minute, 86,400 an hour. Even small children understand what a labor these movies are. “It’s all drawings, right?” a four- year-old I once took to Pinocchio whispered to me. When I said yes, he shook his head and responded: “Boy, they must have used a lot of ink!”
But here, too, there are good Disney movies and bad Disney movies. The studio’s recent The Hunchback of Notre Dame is gorgeous to look at but a stinker, as were Hercules and Pocahontas. But The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin are great works of popular art. All of these films used a lot of ink, but what distinguishes them is the storytelling.
In fact, the great Disney movies may be the supreme acts of storytelling in Hollywood history, because they have to operate within very rigid rules. Since children are their primary audience, the Disney cartoons have a stripped-down simplicity about them. There is no narrative trickery — no flashbacks, no narrator, no title cards announcing “One Year Later,” no devices a five-year-old cannot understand. Shorn of such devices, a good movie for a five-year-old has to do some pretty serious story-telling just to convey the fundamental principle of stories, which is that things change over a period of time.
By far the greatest Disney movie of recent years — and by leagues the most successful — is The Lion King. The studio’s accomplishment is all the more impressive when you consider that it is the only one among the studio’s classics that is not an adaptation of a classic story. The simplicity of the story gives it fantastic resonance. It begins as the populace of the animal kingdom gathers for the presentation of Simba, the baby lion who is to be the future king. It’s a wonderful life at the top of the food chain, but a life burdened by royal responsibility.
Young Simba isn’t interested in that; he just loves the idea of being king and getting to do whatever he wants. His father, Mufasa, tries to explain the “circle of life” to his son, but his lessons are undercut by the manipulations of Mufasa’s younger brother, Scar. By playing on the cub’s heedless vanity and adventurousness, Scar eventually succeeds in convincing Simba that he is responsible for the death of Mufasa.
The tortured Simba runs away and hooks up with a fun-loving warthog and meerkat who teach him a new philosophy: “Hakuna Matata,” which means “no worries.” Live for today, roam the world, plant no roots, have fun. Simba grows to lionhood as the kingdom he fled is run into the ground by the Claudius-like Scar. Simba is unwillingly reminded of his past by running into his childhood friend, the lioness Nala. She demands he return with her to overthrow Scar and restore the circle of life. He refuses until he is visited by the shade of his father, who tells Simba: “You are more than what you have become.” He returns, defeats Scar, marries Nala, and the movie ends with the birth of his cub and the resumption of the circle of life.
The Lion King is hilarious, interesting, exciting, and really quite overwhelmingly powerful — unambiguously a masterpiece of storytelling. Now it has given birth to a Broadway musical that opened last week — and will still be running when Quentin Tarantino applies for Social Security or learns to spell “legs.” Disney had the inspired notion of hiring an avant-garde puppeteer named Julie Taymor to figure out how to stage this all-animal show without turning it into a “Disney on Ice”-style travesty. The company gave Taymor $ 15 million, and in return she has given them something genuinely amazing — a feat of technique so profound that it will redefine the American theater.
The first image is of two giraffes made of wood walking against a morning sun. Look again and you see that each giraffe is a man on stilts — four stilts, his legs the giraffe’s hind legs and his arms the fore legs. He has a giraffe’s head as a hat, so you can see his face. He moves delicately across the stage, looking out at the audience and smiling.
From then on, the wonders never cease. An elephant (in a costume that looks made of wicker) comes lumbering up the aisle with four people inside it, each one a leg. A field of grass is represented by ten actors, each with a hat of grass. An actor plays Timon the meerkat in green face, with a full-length puppet (attached to his hands and feet) that dances when he moves.
The Broadway Lion King gives its audience a stunning stage picture every minute, and critics are falling all over themselves to find words to describe Taymor’s achievement. But in doing so, they seem determined to declare that, unlike the movie, the musical is something special and revolutionary. It is, says John Lahr in the New Yorker, a “theatrical event far more textured and original than the film.”
Lahr, as usual, gets it wrong. As a piece of theater, Taymor’s Lion King is exactly comparable to the story-weak Hollywood special-effects spectacular. It is the most expensive stage presentation in Broadway history, and the long, buzzing lines at the box office of the New Amsterdam Theater (which might as well be renamed The Lion King Theater, since it may never see another show on its stage) are reminiscent of the lines that greeted the opening of Star Wars or Jurassic Park.
Like a special-effects movie, the stage Lion King shows you things you have never seen before, and makes you gasp in wonder. But unlike the movie, it is emotionally remote and a pretty incompetent piece of storytelling. On film The Lion King runs seventy-five minutes, every second of it germane. Taymor has lengthened the show to a running time (with intermission) of two hours and forty minutes. And everything she has added — everything — is extraneous. There are a half-dozen new songs, and only one (a ballad for the grown-up Simba called “Endless Night”) is any good.
There’s a lot of pretty African caterwauling, but Taymor doesn’t seem to know that a little of this goes a long way. Probably ten minutes of the show are sung or spoken in an untranslated Zulu tongue, complete with clicking sounds.
Most telling is Taymor’s inability to keep even a simple storyline coherent. In fact, if you haven’t seen the movie already, it’s going to be nearly impossible to follow the play. Taymor has taken a narrative with the simplicity and universal appeal of an Aesop fable and turned it into a jumble. And she had the liberty to do so only because she knows that the lion’s share of her audience has already seen the movie (which had a worldwide gross, with video sales, of nearly $ 1 billion).
So perhaps it’s best to think of the stage version as The Lion King Variations. That’s probably how Taymor thinks of it as well — and doubtless she is sure that her version beats by a mile the original (written by Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts, and Linda Woolverton). It was her decision to bring the sounds from the movie’s background into the fore, she has said, because they are what drew her to The Lion King. Trust a MacArthur genius- grant winner like Taymor to know so very much about style and so very little about substance.
The stage version of The Lion King is a wondrous production. But beware: The junk that will inevitably follow it is going to make the singing cats of Cats and the singing trains of Starlight Express look like Aeschylus.
John Podhoretz, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the new editor of the NEW YORK POST’s editorial pages.
