Eclectic Company: Celluloid Dreaming

I woke tonight from a restless nap to the opening credits of Tom Hanks's fictional band biopic, "That Thing You Do," playing on VH1 Classic. Apart from the hook-filled '60s-style title tune written by Ivy and Fountains of Wayne bassist Adam Schlesinger, there's a lot to like about this celebration of the rise and fall of a one-hit wonder band, including note-perfect performances by Hanks, Steve Zahn, Liv Tyler, Tom Everett Scott, and Johnathan Schaech. Schaech you will remember, played the villain, Beauxregard "Beaux" Dupuis, in "Little Chenier," the Cajun story filmed in Imperial Calcasieu, featuring loads of local acting folk — including Carol Ann Gayle and Mike McHale — in brief but memorable roles.

I've seen all or part of "That Thing You Do" about a dozen times, because it's a light-handed feel-good-about-getting-into-the-music business movie, and stories like that don't come along every day. Mostly these films show us the personal and professional pain suffered by artists trying to break into the industry or struggling to stay on top once they're inside. These are morality plays, which tell us that success often fails to provide solace or even vindication.

This formula has been the gold standard from the first use of synchronous sound — the technique that made "talkies." The first talkie was "The Jazz Singer," Al Jolson's semi-autobiographical star turn about an immigrant Jewish cantor's son who leaves home to be a popular musician over his father's objection. It's a great melodrama — probably my favorite form of story-telling — and I always start crying when Jolson with outstretched arms drops to both knees to oversell "Mammy." I had wet-eyed moments in all of the following great biopics: "Bird," about Charlie Parker, "Walk the Line," about Johnny and June Carter Cash, "Topsy-Turvy," about Gilbert and Sullivan, "La Bamba," about Richie Valens, "Lady Sings the Blues," about Billie Holliday, and "Ray," about Ray Charles.

For my money, the best films about real musicians include as many whole song performances as possible. For a while there was a vogue for movies about songwriters, with lots of well-known performers drafted to act or sing with the big bands. Doris Day sings in "I'll See You In My Dreams," in which Danny Thomas played lyricist Gus Kahn, who wrote "My Baby Just Cares For Me," "Makin' Whoopee," "Ain't We Got Fun," and "It Had To Be You." Alongside a raft of semi-true pix about George Gershwin ("Rhapsody In Blue"), Cole Porter ("Night and Day"), George M. Cohan ("Yankee Doodle Dandy"), and the like, I was especially taken by "The Five Pennies," starring Danny Kaye as cornet-playing Dixieland jazz bandleader Loring "Red" Nichols, and featuring Louis Armstrong playing and singing trad jazz standard "When The Saints Go Marching In."

I loved the musical "Bye Bye Birdie," the story of a fictional pop star inspired by draftee Elvis Presley's farewell to the fans with a "last kiss" to a lucky WAC as he left for his stint in the Army. In the film the kiss is given, naturally, after the Elvis soundalike sings "One Last Kiss," a curled lip, raised eyebrow cartoon of an erotic number, accompanied by all the hip tricks Ed Sullivan sanitized by filming Elvis from the waist up.

The sixties was also the era of the stylized, arty, mock documentary "Hard Days' Night," about the mop tops' spectacular rise to fame, which rolls faster as The Beatles perform many of their early hits. It surely was one of Rob Reiner's influences on his amazing "This Is Spinal Tap," the "rockumentary" about the clueless heavy metal band that orders up an 18-inch Stonehenge stage prop, writes paeans to girls with big bottoms, and has a guitar-player whose amplifier volume goes up to 11. The catastrophe-prone group constantly succumb to inadvertent self-mockery as when the bassplayer gets stuck in his see-through pod, which traps him until the last notes of the opening song. But life imitates art. Years later, I was talking to Dave Pegg, longtime bassplayer with Jethro Tull, who had watched "Spinal Tap" with Tull's roadies as they traveled by bus on a long US tour. "Oh, my god," he wailed, reliving the moment he realized that the fictional "pod" tour of Spinal Tap closely mirrored his Tull tour, "Under Wraps." "That's me, every night, worrying I won't be able to bust out of the packaging to play."

I've barely scratched the surface of well-made true fictions, which include "The Rose," in which Bette Midler depicts the tragic life of a self destructive female rock star à la Janis Joplin; "Crossover Dreams," about a Salsa singer played by Panamanian presidential candidate/musician/author/actor Ruben Blades, who strives only semi-successfully to cross-over into the pop music mainstream; and "8 Mile," Marshall Mathers' monument to alter ego Eminem's rise to fame as a white rapper in a black art form, which ends on a triumphant note.

All are worthy of your attention.

An excellent, though incomplete list of movies featuring music and/or about musicians can be found at www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/musicmovies.html. Further information about individual movies is available at the internet movie database, on the web at www.imdb.com.