The Dreamgirls Debacle - Op/Ed

Rating: Null/10 (20 January 2007)

In its coverage of the Golden Globe Awards (Hollywood's annual Homecoming bender, in which spurious awards are passed out as the excuse for the town's only chance to party en masse - the Oscars being far too financially influential to risk levity...), the New York Times made a passing suggestion that Dreamgirls had not lived up to its financial expectations, suggesting a grey cloud moving in from the horizon, as its take thus far had only been in the neighborhood of $67 million...
Now, I am not suggesting that Dreamgirls is a perfect movie, a perfect movie musical, or a perfect adaptation of a Broadway hit. As a movie, its structure is sloppy and the director relies on lots of short cuts to get him through the story's 20-year time frame. As a movie musical, its book musical scenes (in which dialogue is sung, rather than spoken, as opposed to songs that are performed as performances) are more than occasionally clumsy. As an adaptation, it's not exactly faithful; more than half of the original score has been lost, a handful of new songs have been thrown in, and large sections of the story have been thoroughly revised. And I object to some of the criticism of the film that has objected to the music in the film. It is not now nor was it ever intended to replicate the Motown product. It is a musical, and a musical has its own set of requirements, most of which the Motown product could not fill. Music in a musical is expected to propel the story and deliver emotional content. Breathtakingly brilliantly hooky music, no matter how breathtaking or brilliant, is not show music. I love musicals,and I love Motown, and the criticism of the musical from the Motown lovers who do not love musicals is just simply ignorant. And that includes the reviewer for the New York Times.
On its terms, in its way, Dreamgirls, the film, works.
And this film has been grossly mishandled by Dreamworks, its studio.
On paper, their choices made sense. They followed the same release formula that worked for Chicago. First, open only in NYC and LA. Second,publicize the hell out of the good reviews. Third, open the movie gradually so that publicity and word-of-mouth create an "event" that will pull in people who might otherwise not go to a musical.
The formula works. It broke down for The Phantom of the Opera, Rent, The Producers, and Idlewild on Step Two: those reviews were miserable.
Now, Dreamworks knew it was facing a unique set of challenges with Dreamgirls that Chicago didn't have to navigate: in addition to being a musical, tricky enough to sell, it is an entirely black cast.
Hollywood is very cautious about black projects. I'm not going to try to address the issue myself, but the box-office receipts are always the proof in the pudding. The films that sell with black audiences are either illiterate minstrel shows (e.g., the Wayans brothers) or violent urban fantasies glorifying gang violence (e.g. anything starring a rapper). When Oprah Winfrey, Oprah Winfrey herself, tried to make an actual movie for black audiences, Beloved, she had an artistic success and a financial disaster and Hollywood walked away from everything except racist, low-budget blaxploitation garbage, with Tyler Perry at the bottom of the heap. He is this century's Steppin' Fetchit. If Oprah Winfrey can't sell an actual movie to black audiences, no one can.
Now, eight years later, Hollywood has another actual black movie on its hands, and it skipped the whole thing by handling it as a musical.
The release of this movie has been seriously botched.
I remember years ago, before beloved, a similar miscalculation took place with Evita. It opened in limited release, and lost its chance to open at #1 at the box office. It opened the same week as The Relic, a long-since forgotten trashy horror flick, which had a lower per-screen gross but opened on more screens, which put it at #1 instead. And then we whispered about how disappointing Evita was... (We also like to forget how good its reviews were, too.) It's bad enough that the same thing has happened to Dreamgirls, as it struggled for recognition against the instantly-forgettable Night at the Museum. The social ramifications of the miscalculation are much, much worse from my perspective.
I am sitting here in a Midwestern town that we'll call Mayberry (probably bigger, but much of the same mentality) and I am reading editorials, on the front page of the paper no less, about the frustration the locals feel about not being able to get to Dreamgirls.
I'll put it right on the line: here we have the first major Hollywood product to tell a black story with A-list black performers in eight years, a real chance to expose underprivileged black youth to positive cultural images, and they can't get to it. These kids, and their families, do not necessarily have the transportation or financial means to drive fifty miles to see this movie. (All right... Jamie Foxx's character isn't necessarily a positive role model... but the sight of an Oscar-winning actor headlining a big-budget musical is...) The people who would like to see this movie and can't get to it because they are too poor to travel are being seriously cheated.
Of course, this town has enough black films now anyway... Code Name: The Cleaner (minstrel comedy) and Freedom Writers (white women saves the black kids from the ghetto)...
I'm sorry, that's not good enough.
I'm not suggesting that the mishandling was any kind of racist conspiracy to deprive anyone of anything. It's not even ironic how insensitive the handling of this movie has been; unfortunately, it's just typical. And now they will blame it on the movie itself.
Meanwhile, every day on television we see the commercials proclaiming "Dreamgirls - now showing everywhere!" No, it isn't.