Ray Pride

"Repainting the Sistine Chapel": That's the insult one journalist hurled at Keith Gordon at Sundance 2003 for having the audacity to shoot Dennis Potter's film script revisiting his 1986 "The Singing Detective," considered one of television's milestones.

A strange, inventive blend of many film genres, the fever dream of Potter and Gordon's "Singing Detective" burns with the intensity of Robert Downey, Jr.'s performance as hack crime writer, psoriasis-sufferer and tortured soul Dan Dark, hallucinating his life's many misdeeds in musical form while confined to a hospital bed. Like Gordon's earlier "Waking the Dead," a romance whose magical, near-perfect performances by Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly soar, "The Singing Detective" would be a delight for its performances alone, especially the magnetic Downey, but also Katie Holmes, Robin Wright Penn and, in a batty small role, Mel Gibson (whose Icon Productions financed the film).

Talking to Gordon, I wondered how he took the accusations of blasphemy. The script, he says, is "extremely close" to the late writer's draft. "Potter is one of my favorite dramatists of the last half of the twentieth century, and the only reason I wanted to do this was that doing 'Singing Detective' as a feature film was his idea, his rethinking, his changes." Potter's script often feature characters revealing their inner wants by lip-synching old songs. "The song choices were all his except for 'It's Only Make Believe' by Conway Twitty, which replaced Potter's choice of 'Blueberry Hill', which we simply couldn't afford."

There are also what seem to be allusions to recent events. "Even the topical references that most people assume we added, to George Bush, Baghdad, and so on, actually go back to Potter's original script, and the first George Bush." He pauses. "Here we are again..."

Potter moved the story from England to Chicago, but Gordon shot in Los Angeles "since Robert was on probation at the time, and he couldn't leave California. But I thought that change was minimal, since L.A. was a great town for 1950s noir B-movies like 'The Killing' and 'In a Lonely Place. I also thought the whole 'screenplay' theme made even more sense in L.A. I called Potter's longtime agent, and she felt he would have been fine with it. It also let me put the hoods"--a duo of comic incompetents-- "in the desert instead of a cornfield, which I liked better for the 'Waiting for Godot' feel."

It's difficult to imagine a world where the movie wouldn't be compared to the miniseries. "The biggest fear was exactly that, knowing that a lot of people who loved the original would never be able to see this as its own piece. But I didn't expect the anger we hit. I got angry letters from people I'd never met when they first heard we were making the film.

"Even now, I feel a lot of critical response has missed the point, and not seen what Potter was trying to do," he continues. "Instead, the assumption seems to be that wherever this retelling, or rethinking, in Potter's own words, departs from the original, in style, tone or content, it was some unintentional mistake on my part, or Potter's part."

Michael Gambon is magnificent in the original, a burned-out hulk of a man. "Quite a few critics have said Robert is too young, without examining how the context of the character has changed. In setting it in the world of 1950s rock 'n' roll there is a more youthful energy to the man. There's a reason he's named 'Dan Dark', not 'Philip Marlow'. This version is proto-rock 'n' roll and Mickey Spillane, not crooner 1940s songs and Hollywood A-list noir. Potter saw America as a society more about youth than England, and the characters are affected accordingly. To have cast an actor in his mid-fifties, and have him doing these songs would have looked silly, in the wrong way, and missed the social satire Potter was exploring in this script, America's split in the 1950s between 'everything is great'--the sexy, young energy of rock 'n' roll--and the dark, xenophobic, McCarthy, sexually repressive reality."

"I could cite many more of these," the earnest 42-year-old continues, "like those who complain that the noir sections look 'cheap', without thinking about what expressionist, low-budget 1950s B-movies really looked like. Or those who complain that the piece is more choppy and confusing. It is, since Potter, in seeing it compressed into film length thought it should be more visceral, more inside the character's head. He wanted the audience to be piecing it all together right with the character, instead of watching from outside, as had been more the feel of the series. It's not that I mind if people prefer the earlier choices, although I feel many never give the new choices a chance, but I do mind the assumption that they aren't purposeful, but are just arbitrary 'mistakes.'"

I'd met Downey for the first time at an October Chicago International Film Festival function, and his enthusiasm in the moment was startling. So I ask Gordon to describe the look on Downey's face when he takes direction. "When I'd give Robert direction, he would tend to look right at me. Often, for the first few seconds, he'd look a little afraid, like 'I don't know what you're saying'. Or 'I don't know if I can do that'. But usually, before I finished speaking, I'd sort of watch his face settle, and he'd give me a tiny hint of a smile, or a tiny nod, and say something like 'got it'. And he always did."

"The Singing Detective" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2003-11-13)

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