True Confessions Time!
Okay, confession #542: when I was a teenage girl, impressionable, in the late 70's/early 80's, my superstar crush was...
Barry Manilow.
No, really. Go ahead and laugh, I'll wait. Done? Okay. To continue. Needless to say this was yet another thing to be beaten the crap out of over by my peers, but the thing was, I actually came up with a movie idea. I had just seen the 20-20-hindsight-horrible-but-back-then-awesome Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie (you know, the one with the Bee Gees? Peter Frampton? Yeah.) And my little tweenage mind actually said, "hey, if you can do that with Beatles music, why not anyone else's?" And I composed a movie using Barry Manilow's music catalog in much the same way. I even remember the plot; there was of course the lead guy, a piano bar player very Manilowesque, and he had a girlfriend Melissa (mentioned once, in Could It Be Magic) but he grows apart from her (Tryin to get the Feeling Again) and eventually hooks up with a woman cop named, you guessed it, Mandy. And there's a big Copacabana bar fight and so on and she gets shot and he gets to sing the main song and so on and so forth. No, really. It was hilarious. Keep in mind this was the very very early 80's. I can be excused this. I wrote the whole thing out and I'm sure I put twenty songs in it. And this was old catalog music, maybe two or three albums after his first Greatest Hits compilation. At the peak of his productivity.
Now of course everyone's doing this, taking a musician's catalog and making a film/play out of it by stringing the songs together and slapping a backstory on it to connect them. Billy Joel did it wth Movin' Out. Mamma Mia is ABBA's version. Across The Universe is another Beatles one. I think they're called Jukebox movies. I filed my idea away under "youthful indiscretions" to be laughed at later and forgot about it.
Until today. Because someone's going to make a movie of strung together Manilow songs.
Admittedly the story treatment idea is totally different, and actually revolves around the actual Manilow as opposed to characterizations of him, but still. It's in the pipe. Along with whatever else needs to be smoked ;-)
So I'm laughing. A 30 year old idea is coming true. The tween in me is giggling like crazy. The adult in me is wishing in a "not really" way that she'd told someone about this idea before now so she could sue them for stealing her idea. But you know, it's like my take on identity theft. If someone wants my credit score, they can have it. They deserve it. Good luck on this movie. Better you than me, guys!
Barry Manilow.
No, really. Go ahead and laugh, I'll wait. Done? Okay. To continue. Needless to say this was yet another thing to be beaten the crap out of over by my peers, but the thing was, I actually came up with a movie idea. I had just seen the 20-20-hindsight-horrible-but-back-then-awesome Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie (you know, the one with the Bee Gees? Peter Frampton? Yeah.) And my little tweenage mind actually said, "hey, if you can do that with Beatles music, why not anyone else's?" And I composed a movie using Barry Manilow's music catalog in much the same way. I even remember the plot; there was of course the lead guy, a piano bar player very Manilowesque, and he had a girlfriend Melissa (mentioned once, in Could It Be Magic) but he grows apart from her (Tryin to get the Feeling Again) and eventually hooks up with a woman cop named, you guessed it, Mandy. And there's a big Copacabana bar fight and so on and she gets shot and he gets to sing the main song and so on and so forth. No, really. It was hilarious. Keep in mind this was the very very early 80's. I can be excused this. I wrote the whole thing out and I'm sure I put twenty songs in it. And this was old catalog music, maybe two or three albums after his first Greatest Hits compilation. At the peak of his productivity.
Now of course everyone's doing this, taking a musician's catalog and making a film/play out of it by stringing the songs together and slapping a backstory on it to connect them. Billy Joel did it wth Movin' Out. Mamma Mia is ABBA's version. Across The Universe is another Beatles one. I think they're called Jukebox movies. I filed my idea away under "youthful indiscretions" to be laughed at later and forgot about it.
Until today. Because someone's going to make a movie of strung together Manilow songs.
Admittedly the story treatment idea is totally different, and actually revolves around the actual Manilow as opposed to characterizations of him, but still. It's in the pipe. Along with whatever else needs to be smoked ;-)
So I'm laughing. A 30 year old idea is coming true. The tween in me is giggling like crazy. The adult in me is wishing in a "not really" way that she'd told someone about this idea before now so she could sue them for stealing her idea. But you know, it's like my take on identity theft. If someone wants my credit score, they can have it. They deserve it. Good luck on this movie. Better you than me, guys!