We'll Be There to Defend One Another - BTS Commentary
Here is the BTS Commentary for We'll Be There to Defend One Another, originally posted on Pillowfort (again, still getting the hang of the crossposting possibilities). I love this story so much, and I'm delighted to have a chance to talk about it! :)
All right. So, for those of you not in the know, Newsies is a Disney musical originally released in 1992. It tells the story of the New York City newsboys strike of 1899, against Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, in protest of a price hike that would have destroyed the ability of the newsies to make a living. The story is told mainly through the perspectives of Jack Kelly (lower left in the collage, played by Christian Bale) and David Jacobs (upper right in the collage, played by David Moscow). Sarah is David's sister (played by Ele Keats, lower right), and while she has painfully limited amounts of screen time, she is lovely and empathetic and ends up joining in the strike organizing as well. She's also Jack's love interest in the film (and Disney did a whole Victorian, male-lead-marries-his-best-friend's-sister thing there that is actually incredibly accurate for literature circa 1900, but I digress).
The movie did terribly when it was released, but gained a rabid cult following, including yours truly. I love this movie, okay? It has plenty of faults as a movie, but has so many things that later became passionate scholarly interests of mine: U. S. childhood history and the history of child labor, allusions to immigrant women and women who worked in the garment industries, the importance of labor unions in stopping the atrocious and life-threatening working conditions that were normal at the turn of the century, the importance of the press and having a free Fourth Estate, etc. Plus, it's a musical, and I've adored musicals since I was a wee thing.
Before I dive into how this story came about, though, I have to explain about the stage show and Katherine. So because of the aforementioned rabid cult following, Disney resurrected Newsies as a stage musical in 2011, giving it a run at the Papermill Playhouse and then transferring it to Broadway, where it ran from 2012-2014. They made some significant changes to the show itself, and the biggest of those was introducing the character of Katherine Pulitzer, pseud. Katherine Plumber (upper left, played by Kara Lindsay). Katherine is an ambitious female reporter who works for the New York Sun (a rival paper to her father's New York World, it should be noted), and she starts covering the newsies strike as a way to really "break in" to the higher tiers of newspaper reporting, get away from the theater reviewing and fashion coverage that were assigned to women. Katherine replaces the character of Brian Denton from the film (played by Bill Pullman), who is the newsies' ally and gets their story in the press. She also replaces Sarah as Jack's love interest; Sarah doesn't appear in the stage show. In many ways this was a really smart move on Disney's part - it creates more drama, since Katherine hides her identity and then of course the newsies feel betrayed when they learn who her father is, and it's also a nice homage to the woman reporters of the time period, like Nellie Bly and some of her compatriots, who were some of the first women to do really "hard" investigative reporting.
Okay. So how did I end up writing what basically amounts to a historical novel about what happens after the strike? (Even though it's currently a WIP, it's long, every chapter has historical notes, and I have pieces of other installments already written.) I pulled the film of Newsies off my shelf last . . . March, I think it was (that feels like a lifetime ago; this year has been so long). I needed a break, and I hadn't watched the film in several years - about five years, I think, though I've never been without a copy of it. And I watched it, and was just enchanted, all over again. Aside from the realization of how many things I had carried with me from this film, how many things had become part of my adult life and scholarly interests, I was so struck by the dynamics between David and Jack and Sarah. It's been said by many people, and not without merit, that David and Jack were an onscreen gay pair without any intention of that on Disney's part. They are, without question, the central duo of the film, and they clearly have very strong feelings for one another, even without any of their interactions being explicitly coded as gay.
On the other hand, I had always loved Sarah and Jack's relationship, and that still came off to me as very genuine and sweet. Both fans of the movie and fans of the stage musical will tell you that they read Jack as bi (to the point where many of us just consider it canon). Plus, I discovered that I had written a whole personality and backstory and life for Sarah in my head, over years of watching this film, apparently without realizing I had done so. My brain went, "Okay, that's interesting. We have Jack who is bi, more or less, though there's not a real concept for that in 1899. We have these two siblings who he's clearly just head over heels for and that's . . . complicated. We have Sarah, who's a badass Jewish female garment worker and much smarter than everyone gives her credit for. What happens?"
I let my brain sit with that for a little while, and in the meantime I finally sought out the Broadway musical on Netflix. I knew that it had been filmed and was up and available, and I also knew that they had changed the story somewhat, so I was prepared. Jeremy Jordan, as Jack, was amazing (and he was also one of the cult followers of the film), and frankly, I just fell in love with Katherine Plumber Pulitzer. She's ambitious, and spunky, and stubborn, and incredibly smart, and altogether delightful. So I started to ponder how I might fit her into this story, this aftermath of the strike that I had started to build in my head. I found to my surprise that I really saw her fitting into it with relative ease - as a reporting partner for Denton, as another partner-in-crime during the strike, and as a best friend, progressive reform partner, and queerplatonic spouse (not quite right, but it's the best term I've got) for David.
This is an unpopular opinion, but while Jack and Katherine are cute in the stage musical, I find them less believable as a romantic pair (with the exception of the work of one or two fic writers who do them amazing justice, certainly more than they got in the show itself). David and Katherine are friends in the stage musical, and in many ways they seem more suited to one another - smart, well-read, both with at least some formal schooling, and lots of passion and conviction on both sides. Katherine is the extrovert to Davey's introvert, and even in their brief interactions in the show, it's clear there is a lot of trust and affection between them.
I took those thoughts about Davey and Katherine, added them to the mix already in my brain, and went, "Well. If David and Jack and Sarah actually tried to pull off a closed-v polyamorous trio in 1900, that's dangerous as hell from a legal standpoint as well as emotionally complicated. If Kath is Davey's best friend and is willing to be his wife without necessarily being his sexual partner, that actually makes everyone safer. And the ways people thought about sex and marriage in 1900 actually make that more probable, and it's helpful for Kath professionally as well."
That was where I started, and the story took off from there. While I'm using very modern terms for these relationships here, I don't use them in the story - partly because the terms didn't exist, but also because ideas about sexuality and marriage and what made for a functional partnership were very, very different a century ago. The extensive historical notes sometimes are there to help to clarify those differences, and sometimes just there to explain the ridiculous amounts of history that I'm pulling in.
Really, though, this story is my love letter to a film and an era of history that I have loved for a long, long time. It's a piece of pop culture that helped shape me into the person I am, in so many ways, and it delights me that a new generation of people have rediscovered it through the stage musical, and love it for their own reasons. I love these characters for everything they have given me and the place they hold in my heart, and I hope that comes through in my writing. :) <3