by Berger, Glen
“Rise Above,” suggested Bono. “Rise above the difficulties around you. Above the sadness within you. Be your better self.”
The new anthem for our musical was born.
The rest of the summit was spent chewing over plot points. From one scene to the next Edge and Bono dove into the weeds of dramaturgy with the ardor of regional theatre literary managers.
Also, with nary a half-minute of discussion, the musical’s title was decided upon. Bono and Edge suggested it. It was inspired by the bedtime request of the young daughter of a friend of theirs.
So, good, now the project felt a little more real—we had a title. But it was a secret title. And it would be a secret for four more years. No document could contain the title, lest we blow the surprise. Later the title would blaze with unintentional irony. After that, the title would endure a fusillade of Internet mockery. Still later, the title would point the way to a new beginning for the show. But on that day, all we knew was that we woke up that morning thinking about Spider-Man, and went to sleep that night thinking excitedly about Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
• • •
We were going to land this show right in the middle of the zeitgeist. Gordon Cox was reporting in Variety how “musicals are once again becoming part of the pop-culture consciousness,” with musicals referenced in everything from The Sopranos to Gap Khaki advertisements and the music videos of Beyoncé. Broadway musicals took in a record $850 million in the 2006–07 season alone.
I finished a draft of the whole script by the beginning of 2007. We were seven months away from the big presentation that would showcase a revised script and all the completed music in front of our investors. Right, yes. The investors. David Garfinkle had tapped a network of monied folk based mainly in his hometown of Chicago to put up the funds for the show, and they were anxious to see what their money had bought them to date.
So in January 2007, our two producers, along with Julie and me, went to Ireland for another summit with the boys and to get an update on their progress. After a bracing hill climb through gorse and sheep dung with Julie leading the way like Tenzing Norgay and with David Garfinkle laboring behind in dress shoes, we rang Bono’s bell, and then joined him for a stroll to Edge’s house down the road, discussing on the way how the Democratic Primary was shaping up to be a battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. “Oh, it’s win-win,” said Bono, who then began riffing on a Sesame Street tune, singing, “Oh, a rock star is a person in your neighborhood,” as he waved at honking cars passing by.
In Edge’s little guesthouse, the espresso machine was fired up, and we plunged into the new batch of melodies he and Bono had put together. First up was a sound unlike anything in U2’s catalogue. Playing around with the Phrygian mode, they had laid down an otherworldly wall of sound that could have been constructed by the Bulgarian Women’s Choir. With these harmonics, the audience would be introduced to Arachne. The hubris-infected young woman boasted in her lyrics that anything the gods created, she could make more beautiful, for she was an artist. Julie was thrilled. “Elton John, Andrew Lloyd Webber, eat your heart out.”
But some songs were proving more elusive. There’s a fine line separating the crystalline and the clichéd, the resonant and the cloying. Bono and Edge would sooner impale themselves on sticks than be caught crossing that line, but if you wanted to write the big anthem, you had to dance right up next to it. “Rise Above” was their current concern. Bono stood up—he was getting passionate: “If I’m gonna actually plop something like that onto a fucking page, it better be something that people will sing in football finals in ten years and make everyone cry. I just mean it has to be a classic. In the ‘rising-above-it’-type genre, if you follow me.”
We were following him. The “rise-above-it” genre was a perilous one.
He added, “It better be as good as ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone,’ which is one of the greatest songs ever written.”
“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is from Carousel, the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.
I need to back up. Between the last summit and this one, David Garfinkle decided Bono and Edge needed a crash course in the Broadway musical. The two lads grew up in a rough-and-tumble section of Dublin; they started the rock band when they were teenagers. Bye Bye Birdie? A Little Night Music?
“Em . . . not really on our radar, David.”
So David had the office burn a four-CD compilation. Sixty songs from the last sixty years of musical theatre, divided into the strictest of categories. There were exposition songs, eleven o’clock numbers, Act One closers, charm songs, anti-charm songs, show-stoppers, character-driven songs, torch songs—a fantastic mix, really, if you were into that sort of thing. Bono and Edge would eventually dismiss nearly all the songs as mawkish, dopey, or just “pants.”
But here Bono was extolling “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” from one of the more sentimental midcentury musicals. And the song wasn’t even on Garfinkle’s Fabulous Broadway Mix.
“So did you go out and download Carousel from—”
Edge shook his head—the song happened to be one of the most popular football anthems in Ireland. Of course—football anthems. If you were European, and a musician, that was the brass ring you were going to be reaching for, that was the—
“I’ve got to make a few serious calls.”
Suddenly, Bono was heading out of the room.
What?
“I’ll just excuse myself for half an hour. There’s some stuff I just can’t avoid.”
Rats. We were only in town for three days, and we wouldn’t see each other for another three months. Hadn’t we all vowed to stay focused on this musical for eight lousy hours? Surely whatever Bono thought he needed to do could wait—he had assistants, hadn’t he?
Bono returned in a better mood. The U.S. Congress had originally committed to give funds to African AIDS relief but then, just before Christmas, the commitment started to look ropey. So, Bono was in the other room getting assurances from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi—Pelosi herself—that $1.2 billion in AIDS funding would be reinstated. That was how he had spent the last half hour. I spent it polishing off an espresso.
Julie and I killed time the next morning taking a too-long walk down Vico Road in the blustery wind to Dalkey. I lent her my scarf, which she wrapped like a babushka to protect her freezing ears, and we were exchanging grins and gazes, and I didn’t know what to make of any of this. She was too young to be my mother, too old to be—what—I didn’t know what, but this was getting heady. A maternal, powerful, alluring artist recognized a kindred spirit and they met on a dream-plane outside the workaday world. This was Act Two, scene two.
“With me alone you have nothing to hide,” whispered Arachne to a bewildered, flattered, turned-on Peter.
“And then she starts to pull threads out of his body,” Julie was explaining to Bono.
“It should feel disorienting, and a little terrifying,” I added, suddenly feeling like I was speaking from personal experience.
We were back at Edge’s guesthouse, trying to pinpoint the mood for “Turn Off the Dark,” the title song. Spring Awakening was on Julie’s mind—“Teenagers are lining up—they think it’s gonna be hip and edgy and sexy.”
Steven Sater’s adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play of adolescent angst, with music by Duncan Sheik, had nothing in it production-wise to make Julie envious. Michael Mayer had directed it with minimal design elements, and—by Julie’s estimation—middling rock music.
However, the show had “cred.” It had the most devoted teen following Broadway had seen since Rent. It had songs about masturbation, and songs with titles like “Totally Fucked.” Marvel Entertainment was pretty clear on the latitude we had for Spider-Man. We could have a song called “In a Pickle,” maybe. “Fucked,” no.
So here we were, seeking an angle for Mary Jane’s big Act Two song that was going to get the teens saying “righteous,” or whatever teens were saying these days. The composer
s played a tune we hadn’t heard yet—a tender, haunting piece, with a strong melody, played with nothing but an acoustic guitar. Best thing they had turned out so far. Sounded like a classic.
“Too French,” Julie pronounced.
Too French?
She was ready to send it to the bin, but then she started thinking out loud—thinking about how she began work on this show just months after 9/11, when life in the city had an apocalyptic tenor, and we all felt a certain vulnerability.
“Because I think when people come up against the end, there’s that honest-to-God clarity about what matters. ‘The world is ending, but if you’re with me, it’s okay.’ It’s the husband and wife holding hands as the plane goes down. It’s Romeo and Juliet, vowing to kill themselves together. A double suicide.”
She laughed. “If the Marvel people heard what I’m saying now . . .”
Putting a suicide pact between Peter and MJ in the show wouldn’t make the suits so happy. But this comic-book musical was parched for some authenticity. Call the song “If the World Should End,” said Julie. Act Two was getting dark, and it felt good.
Martin McCallum and David Garfinkle decided lunch on this last day together was the time to have “the serious discussion” about the schedule. As Edge and Bono began going through their calendars, I could see the color drain from Martin’s face. The days our composers had cleared to generate the songs for this show . . . well, they hadn’t really cleared any.
Martin never raises his voice. And his British accent was wrapped in his trademark cottony diplomacy as he expressed to his composers the urgent and sincere need to get this thing accomplished in a timely fashion, as this staged reading in July—“well, it’s going to be a major outlay of funds.”
I put down my fork and watched, full of empathy for both composer and producer, because Bono was doin’ the ol’ tap dance. He was fudging numbers, giving assurances, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Boy, did I recognize that dance—I had been doing it my whole professional life. Bono was arguing they’d get it done in a couple of weeks, and the producers were saying that was impossible.
I had seen plenty of artists—musicians in particular—generate everything required in a couple of intense spurts of productivity, so I wasn’t concerned. Martin, on the other hand, left a lot of his lunch on the plate.
For our final night in Ireland, we all drove into Dublin and dined at the Clarence Hotel, which Edge and Bono had bought and converted into a five-star lodging in 1992. There in the tea room Bono delivered a heartfelt toast to the future of our little project, adding a nod to Tony Adams surely in a cloud above us. And when the bill came, Edge and Bono graciously offered to cover it. Which was great, because I was broke. Julie protested—we should all split the bill evenly. The producers chimed in, agreeing with Julie.
I nodded with a smile, but I was sweating. I was skint. Completely. And that Pinot was off the charts. This was serious—my wife and I made our mortgage by the skin of our teeth every damn month. I looked around the table. I was surrounded by millionaires, multimillionaires—if they saw my bank statements, they’d be stunned. They’d wonder what sort of writer I actually was. They wouldn’t understand that public television had limited funds to pay writers, especially now with the Republicans in charge and—no—I couldn’t let a single doubt creep into their brains. I would pay the bill, and it was going to sting. I pulled out my wallet, ready to fling one hundred dollars onto the table—or, in other words, all the money I had saved for my children’s college fund. But Edge put his foot down—it was their hotel after all, he and Bono insisted on paying. I wanted to tearfully clutch his hands in gratitude, like I was some Russian peasant woman. I was exhausted from the stress. That was almost a catastrophe. Christ, how pathetic.
The next morning, huddling alone over a free scrap of bread in the Delta Business Lounge, waiting for my flight home, I felt—what the . . . !—a pair of hands sliding down my chest from behind, and now something was on the back of my neck! It was nuzzling, it was . . . it was Julie.
She held my head in her hands. “I’ve been looking for someone like you for a long time.”
“You have no idea how I’ve begged the world for a partner like you,” I said, trembling.
“We’ll be working on a lot of things together,” she promised in a whisper. My flight was called. I walked to my gate with cotton fluff for a brain and two pieces of artificially flavored licorice for legs. The rest of the journey passed in a fog.
• • •
“We were dealing with a woman who has absolutely no sense of commercial potential.”
“You try to help her, but it’s only ever a one-way street. She has a narcissistic disorder.”
It was still six months before Across the Universe opened in theatres, but toxic gossip about Julie’s film was being reported with relish on the Deadline Hollywood blog by dirt-dishing Nikki Finke, who larded her article with quotes about the “impossibly artsy-fartsy cut of this $45 million pic which audiences dislike” and about how difficult it was to collaborate with Julie:
At one point, Amy Pascal [cochairman of Sony Pictures] took [Julie] to dinner and diplomatically told her ‘how good it could be’ if only she’d cut the movie. But Julie still refused. . . . Five months had gone by and she didn’t listen and she didn’t care.
I saw an early screening of the film. I thought it was a gas. It was a love story, it was the Beatles, it was eye candy and high spirits, what’s not to like? Would it sell $100 million worth of tickets? Who the hell knew?
The suits didn’t understand that the film wasn’t about the 1960s. It was about what it meant to be in your twenties, no matter what era. And most of all it was about music. For humans, music has the same purpose it has for birds, whales, and other musical animals—mood synchronization, as the scientists would say. Why did Julie gravitate in her work toward musicals and opera? Because singing was a mode of communication more emotional, more immediate (and more ancient) than “talking.” In Across the Universe, where thirty-five Beatles songs were crammed into a 125-minute film, it wasn’t the plot per se that kept us on the edge of our seats so much as wondering how we were going to be made to feel next. When Max sang “Hey Jude”—as earnest and optimistic a song as ever’s been written—the formerly bleak world seemed transformed.
This was an incredibly hopeful and persuasive artistic statement. And those Hollywood philistines weren’t getting it. I wanted to punch them out, they were distressing my cowriter so. But it looked like the chances of Across the Universe opening in the fall with her cut of the film were very slim.
Meanwhile, the Telsey + Company casting agency had been hired to find the actors for our workshop reading, now only three months away. However, with the project cloaked in secrecy, the agency had no idea who they should be looking for. So Julie and I worked up descriptions of the main characters and sent them off to the agency, hoping it would provide some guidance.
Only, it turned out they weren’t seeking guidance so much as the actual descriptions that they would then send verbatim to every talent representative in New York. On April 16, our unedited breakdown went out in an e-mail blast announcing the Actors’ Equity Association–approved staged reading of Spider-Man the Musical.
Within the hour, the announcement was picked up by every single blog that specialized in either comic books or Broadway shows, or Civil War memorabilia, potato salad recipes—I mean it was everywhere. The show was now public knowledge. And Arachne? The one novel narrative element in the show? The element we had been hoping to keep under wraps till the first preview, which was at least two years away? She was out of the bag.
Arachne: Female, 20–35 years old. A beautiful, boastful young woman turned into a spider for her hubris. She subsequently appears to Peter Parker and the audience as—in turn—someone to inspire Peter; a lover; a bride; a terrifying (and sexy) dark goddess of vengeance; and, finally, a lonely, fragile young woman. Strong Celtic, Balkan style. Outside the box ideas ar
e welcome.
Arachne’s entire story arc, just sitting there naked for everyone to pass judgment on. And pass judgment they did. In our naïveté, Julie, David Garfinkle, and I had imagined that word of a Spider-Man musical directed by Julie Taymor with music by Bono and Edge would be greeted pretty unanimously by the fanboys with “Wow!” and also “Cool!” But they didn’t express excitement. Or even cautious optimism. They didn’t even bother with dubiousness. The news sent them straight into brain-melt. They could barely believe the news was true. And they hoped—God, how they hoped—that it wasn’t true. Why? Because they were Spider-Man’s self-appointed guardians, and they feared the show would be an embarrassment for everyone involved, for everyone who had ever been associated with Spider-Man for the last forty-five years—real people, fictional people, everyone.
So at the end of the day, having trawled through the snark and speculation and cris de coeur of commenters like Mr. Bong, laserbrain, Calico Pete, and Jabba the Griffin, I got past my own fear and bafflement and began to think, How edifying. Here was an opportunity to study the comic-book geek in his natural habitat. These blog posts were the raw responses of true Spider-Man devotees. I made a note that the Geek Chorus in our show had to be these geeks—they had to be protective, unfair, dubious, melodramatic defenders of the pure.
But these posts were also a warning shot across our bow. We had to be extra-smart about this. We had to be respectful; we couldn’t stray too far afield, or we would suffer a world of wrath. The fanboy’s imagination was deep. But I was beginning to learn it wasn’t very wide.
• • •
Bono and Edge were ridiculously behind in their writing chores. We were three months away from a massive workshop and how many songs were completed, as in “actually ready to be performed”? Five? How about three? Any?
David Garfinkle, looking distressed, confirmed to me that a whole lot of nothing had shown up from the boys to date. Most of his distress at the moment, however, was from his having just deposited his precious cell phone into a paper lunch sack. Meanwhile, an old man in a homemade Spider-Man outfit was walking by. More spider-men were wandering about. We were in Queens, at the Kaufman Theater, for the premiere of Spider-Man 3. Sony and Marvel were desperate to keep pirated footage off the Internet, so into the lunch bag your cell phone went. The sack in turn was placed on an enormous table containing a sea of completely identical-looking lunch sacks. David was never seeing that BlackBerry again.