Elvis Costello wrote a new ballad for the movie, "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool," about the eccentric actress, Gloria Grahame; after leaving Saturday Night Live, Dana Carvey made a sketch show for ABC that was an epic bust. The tale is told in the documentary, "Too Funny to Fail."
Elvis Costello’s new muse is a forgotten Hollywood starlet
Elvis Costello has been a dedicated explorer of musical styles since his days as a founding father of punk and new wave in the late 1970s.
His 1998 album with Burt Bacharach, “Painted from Memory,” showed his versatility as a vocalist. Since then, he’s collaborated in a range of styles, from the experimental orchestra Metropole Orkest to the hip-hop group The Roots.
Costello's latest single is called “You Shouldn’t Look At Me That Way.” It's a song he composed for the movie, "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool.”
The film is based on Peter Turner's 1986 memoir of the same name. It’s about his relationship with an older woman — the eccentric actress Gloria Grahame, who starred in classic films like “The Big Heat” and “Oklahoma!” Annette Bening portrays Grahame in the film.
Costello was a fan of Grahame’s even before he was enlisted to compose a song for the film. When The Frame's John Horn met Costello at the Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood, he asked how this latest collaboration came about.
Interview Highlights:
On how he got involved with writing music for the film:
I had very coincidentally used a publicity still of Gloria in my show "Detour," which employed the prop of a giant television set that was located behind me. Barbara Broccoli, who produced this film, and Paul McGuigan, who directed it, come to the London Palladium to see my show. They're 20 minutes into the show and Gloria's picture [appears]. They must have thought I was a mind reader.
On what attracted him to the project:
One of the interesting things I responded to about this movie is the way in which we hold people in our memories in their most celebrated period. Then we forget that they're real people who live beyond that moment. And here in Peter Turner's memoir, it's not that [Grahame is] portrayed as an elderly woman. She's only in her early 50s. And here she is now in very different different circumstances, living in London in rented rooms. They're using the tagline from "Oklahoma!" as a way of identifying her for a theater audience. I think that's what attracted me to the story — when I read the script and when I saw the rough cut of the film — was how it makes the connection between the mythic Gloria and the real person.
On how he wrote the song:
When I saw the way Annette Bening portrayed that look of anger, where the look of seduction or affection that Peter was casting to her character, she realized that it could contain judgement and it offended her vanity. When the distance in their ages was pointed out, even when he did it as a joke — all these things were great clues to a songwriter. I don't want to make it sound easy, but the song kind of wrote itself in the sense that you only had to pay attention to what's going on between the characters and you have this tension that's in the emotion.
On the elements in "You Shouldn't Look at Me That Way" that were inspired by his work with Burt Bacharach:
I certainly learned a tremendous amount about what was possible with a ballad. I learned from the fact that he would sometimes combine unusual combinations of instruments to make a sound. So flugelhorn, alto flute and bass clarinet play the motif in this song. Something that he would sometimes do would be to introduce a really unexpected dissonance. There is, in the second verse, a high counter melody [in the violins], which is a little unsettling. It comes where I'm singing, "Don't take more than I offer, all my love or I'll make you suffer." It feels like that's what music should do. It should hint at what that feeling is.
"Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool" opens Dec. 29.
Why 'The Dana Carvey Show' failed despite its brilliance
When Dana Carvey left "Saturday Night Live" in 1993, it was a big deal.
His impersonations of George H.W. Bush, Johnny Carson and 1992 Presidential candidate Ross Perot, as well as his Church Lady character, had made him a household name. So when he decided to return to television in 1996, he was much in demand.
Carvey tapped SNL writer Robert Smigel (who later created Triumph the Insult Comic Dog) to help him create a sketch comedy show called "The Dana Carvey Show." They pitched it to all the big networks. With high hopes of bringing their comedic sensibility to a prime-time broadcast audience, they bypassed HBO in favor of ABC.
The story of what happened to the show is told in the new Hulu documentary, “Too Funny To Fail,” by Josh Greenbaum. He spoke with The Frame's John Horn about what led to "The Dana Carvey Show's" premature death. (Click the play button above to hear the conversation.)
According to Greenbaum, the ABC pitch to Carvey and Smigel was: We're the number one network and we have the number one show — "Home Improvement" – so that's a huge lead-in. The problem was the audience for the family-friendly "Home Improvement" was not the most natural fit for the wild show Carvey and Smigel ended up making.
"We had hired badass nerd pirates to blow up television. This show would represent anarchy. This was blowing up the system." Dana Carvey in "Too Funny To Fail"
Looking at the show's writers, you might think that Carvey and Smigel hired the right people. The team was full of future successes: Charlie Kaufman, Louis CK, Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell.
Colbert and Carell were doing improv in Chicago at Second City in Chicago when Smigel hired them. "The Dana Carvey Show" was a valuable launching pad for them despite its short run. They talk lovingly in "Too Funny To Fail" about their time on the show. The documentary includes many clips from their sketches, which hold up today.
But the sensibility of the writing staff was not in sync with broadcast TV. And as much as that was deliberate, it also didn't help them succeed in that time slot on ABC. "Too Funny To Fail" director Josh Greenbaum told The Frame:
These guys — I don't think they know another gear other than, We're going to do what excites us. I think that's why they've had such successful careers. But it's also certainly why this show didn't work out. They should have never been on ABC on primetime with the mentality and the approach that they took.
At no time was the evidence of their sensibility being out of sync more clear than in the first sketch on the first episode when Dana Carvey came out as President Bill Clinton and he began breastfeeding babies, puppies and kittens in an effort to show that he could be both mother and father to the nation.
The Bill Clinton sketch is grotesque and bizarre and, according to "Too Funny To Fail," it drove away viewers that the show had inherited from "Home Improvement." Sadly,"The Dana Carvey Show" never quite recovered. It was soon canceled. But now all the episodes that exist are on Hulu, along with the documentary that tells the whole story.