Picking your way through the Brighton Fringe programme isn’t easy – so0 many titles, so many venues, so much choice.
Sometimes you need a bit of guidance – what youi might call a critical friend. As chance would have it… Listen up
Music For Cats is the latest work by Katy Matthews (Un-titled), satirist for the award-winning ‘The Treason Show’. A quirky comic satire on our ability to monetise anything, it’s a new play about the nature of time, the future of our planet, and a Siamese called Dennis. Starring Eleanor Stourton (Doubt), Matt Vickery (Lucy’s Pharmakon) and Andrew Crouch (NewsRevue). Directed by Cerys Evans (Before the World Ends).
Pryor has come to make a claim on their time travel insurance policy. They believe their child has been substituted with another as a result of a time alteration. This would be fine if this wasn’t already considered a like for like replacement…
The Whistler kicks off its new Arts section – coming soon to a website near you – with a new film column. To start, our new columnist Ruby Ephstein looks forward to Francis Ford Coppola’s new opus Megalopolis and looks back at his greatest hits.
YOU WOULD THINK he’d had enough masochism for one lifetime, but no. Nearly half a century after shooting began on Apocalypse Now, a brutal three-year marathon during which he almost blew up his career and killed himself (never mind several others, including his long-suffering wife Eleanor), the godfather of modern American filmmaking is still hellbound on the trail of his holy grail.
That I feel compelled to identify Francis Ford Coppola as Papa Coppola – in deference to Sofia, herself an extraordinary director, and Roman, Wes Anderson’s favourite co-scripter – confirms how long it’s been since the chef behind the juiciest slices of prime Hollywood beef and dripping devoured by multiple generations concocted something meaty or beaty, or even merely big and/or bouncy.
Happily, Megalopolis, a dish nearly half a century in the prepping and blending and revising and reheating, will finally be served this year, quite possibly as the main course for the Cannes opening gala on May 14.
Has there ever been a more quotable screenwriter? Not unless you don’t have the foggiest what napalm smells like in the morning, don’t consider making offers that can’t be refused or don’t prefer cannolis to guns. Like Van Morrison, Papa deposited enough, early enough and in enough memory banks, not to have to fret overmuch when muse deserted and magic fizzled.
Yet still that soul-naked ambition burns inside Papa like no filmmaker since Orson Welles, the fellow rebel colossus he resembles in too many ways for his own comfort, not least a Jupiternian ego and an obsession with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the legendarily unfilmable novella that thwarted Welles and confined Nic Roeg to a TV movie adaptation yet sired Apocalypse Now, perhaps the most audacious and purely cinematic of all Oscar winners (for sound and camerawork).
The vast cast for Megalopolis, oft-characterised as “a Utopian parable”, ranges from the tried and trusted (Talia “Connie” Shire, Laurence “Mr Clean” Fishburne) to old masters (Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, Ratso and Joe Buck reunited) and new (Adam Driver, Jason Schwartzman, Shia LaBeouf). The woman around whom that hefty pack of chaps revolves, Nathalie “Missandei” Emmanuel, is Julia, a sow in the middle tugged between father pig and lover pig, the latter an idealistic architect designing a post-disaster NYC, played by the ever-noble Forrest Whitaker. Then, inconveniently, came 9/11.
For rather more enlightening insights, dig into Sam Wasson’s terrific The Path To Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story (2023). Note that disarmingly honest and indefinite “A”. This is but one Papa story.
It spins around Zoetrope, Papa’s utopian dream factory, which collapsed under the weight of hubris and what most punters saw, wrongly, as a gossamer-thin romantic musical: One From The Heart, a lavish, adventurous project that suffered most from one of the few times Eleanor wasn’t so tolerant of the philanderer whose agonies birthing Apocalypse Now in the Philippines she chronicled so brilliantly and compassionately in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
By May 2021, Papa had plunged $120m of his own money into Megalopolis, plus a fair chunk of that Napa Valley wine empire. Even this February’s release of the title card was an event. So tightly have the wraps been kept, I can’t whet your appetite any further, although the principals’ names (Caesar, Cicero) might just indicate the script’s origins. Instead, let’s consult Papa himself.
“I am vicino-morte,” Wasson relates him saying while poring over one recent “final” draft, the sense of déjà vu presumably acute. In the vicinity of death. Just as it was in the days of Kilgore and Kurtz.
How can you not love the smell of impending triumphant resurrections in the morning?
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