They Lost It at the Movies

Photo by Craig SchwartzFOR DAYS I HAD BEEN LOOKING FORWARD TO THE premiere of The First Picture Showat the Music Center. After all, it had been 28 years since The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich's masterpiece about a small town in Texas during the 1950s, and a prequel was long overdue. Imagine my shock, then, when the screening at the Mark Taper Forum turned out to be "a new play with music" set in the early days of filmmaking. Curious, I decided to watch the show anyway.

It opens jauntily enough, as ensemble members parade about carrying framed title cards announcing their names -- a gimmick that is coyly repeated throughout the evening as the placards announce shifts in time and place. This choreography, shouldered by a syncopated piano accompaniment, suggests more than walking playbills, as it neatly evokes the nativity and naiveté of silent movies and the period's ragtime optimism for the dawning 20th century. Still, we begin to wonder, isn't it a bit ironic for theater to celebrate the art form that would eventually replace it in popularity? That thought is quickly forgotten, however, when we come to a larger realization, namely that we are witnessing something special, something that will be talked and faxed about for weeks. This something turns out to be a big, hideous misfire, one that reverberates all the louder because it occurs on the city's most important stage.

On paper at least, nothing about The First Picture Showsets off alarms: The subject matter isn't inherently dubious, and neither is the authors' choice to sculpt that material into a musical. (The musicals Ragtimeand Titanicwere cute, weren't they?) For the record, Ain and David Gordon's book focuses on the Furstmanns, a family of Ohio Jews whose lives become fatefully linked to the movies just as films evolve from arcade novelty to two-reel features. Anne (Ellen Greene) is the young woman who dreams of becoming a screen actress, while older brother Louis (Steven Skybell) is content, for a while, to build a regional chain of theaters. Everything is warm and huggy in the family home, but while Ohio may be heaven for the Furstmanns, all truly interesting stories take place in some earthly hell, which is to say most of The First Picture Show is set in Los Angeles. It is to L.A. that Anne flees from the Midwestern steppes and transforms herself into Anne First. (Look again at the title.) Here she becomes a star before realizing her true ambition in life when, in an orgasmic moment of clarity, she utters the words that will become this city's cri de coeur: "I want to direct!"

Anne gets her wish, surprisingly, and before long is shooting her first film. She couldn't have chosen a worse project, however, because it is a movie version (replayed for us by Anne's film actors) of most of what we've just seen -- Ohio life in the house of Furstmann. Why the Gordons, père and fils, imagined theater audiences would want to watch a rerun of what's just been staged is anyone's guess, but this false start is the least of their problems.

Teamed with Anne's story is a recitation of accomplishments and obstacles that female and minority directors, writers and actors faced in Hollywood during the age of the silents. We learn about these thanks to Louis' great-granddaughter, Jane (Greene), who in 1995 discovers his long-lost diary, and soon tracks down the now-99-year-old Anne (Estelle Parsons) to an industry retirement home. The crusty Parsons does not want to talk at first, but grudgingly opens the door to her past, which, along with Jane's interviews of the home's other aged professionals, provides the show with its history lessons.

And bitter lessons they are, as one by one the old folks end their stories of movie-pioneer glory with the way they were eventually silenced or cast aside. Not only that, but during some of the show's many flashbacks we see how the country's self-appointed censors continually attacked what they believed to be the immorality of Hollywood's output. The big problem is that the information dispensed in this overlong evening could be encapsulated in a few pages of program notes -- and it is, on Page P-6 in an essay by Cari Beauchamp.

If nothing else, The First Picture Showand its program inform us about the surprising numbers of minorities, women -- and minority women as well -- who worked for studios or who even founded their own. This unheard-of opportunity mostly came to an end with the great studio consolidations of the 1920s, and the rigid corpora- tization they brought. Unfortunately, the Gordons fail to work these and other facts organically into their book and instead turn the stage into an elementary school classroom, giving us data rather than a story, declamations in place of confessions. (The scenes involving the religious moralists are particularly one-dimensional.)

You know the play's in trouble when Jane utters a coffeehouse aphorism like, "History does not happen linear," as though she were addressing a summer camp for New Age liberals. David Gordon recently defended his ham-fisted approach on KPCC radio, by explaining it mimicked the unsophisticated techniques of the silents themselves, but this sounds suspiciously like an alibi instead of an artistic vision.