Whipped Cream Difficulties

1. There was a 1989 movie called “Return From the River Kwai”.

It was not a sequel. Really. That’s what the filmmakers said. It was supposedly based on a book of the same name.

Columbia pulled out of a distribution contract after Sony bought them, and claimed Sam Spiegel’s estate threatened to sue. The filmmakers claimed Columbia pulled out because the movie made the Japanese look bad, and, anyway, Columbia owned the rights, not Spiegel’s estate.

There was a lawsuit.

The case went to trial in 1997. Columbia argued that “if you use a name and it becomes famous you are able to use it in a certain area of commerce, such as the exclusive use of River Kwai in the title of a film. It does not matter where Pierre Boulle got the name.”
In 1998 a court ruled that the title suggested the film implied it was a sequel to Bridge on the River Kwai. It was never released in the US.

Amazon has a region 2 DVD listed.

2. Remember “Hands on a Hardbody”? Remember “Hands on a Hardbody: The Musical”?

Obviously, I knew about this. The subject came up again over the weekend as part of a discussion with Mike the Musicologist about Broadway being out of ideas, and the sheer number of recent musicals based on movies.

What I did not know: Houston’s “Theater Under the Stars” (TUTS) tried to stage a production of “HoH” in 2014. Thing is, the director of the production decided that he was going to make changes:

Having attended the opening night of Hardbody at [Bruce] Lumpkin’s [director – DB] invitation, [Amanda] Green [co-creator – DB] described to me her experience in watching the show. “They started the opening number and I noticed that some people were singing solos other than what we’d assigned. As we neared the middle of the opening number, I thought, ‘what happened to the middle section?’” She said that musical material for Norma, the religious woman in the story, “was gone.”
When the second song began, Green recalls being surprised, saying, “I thought, ‘so we did put this number second after all’ before realizing that we hadn’t done that.” As the act continued, Green said, “I kept waiting for ‘If I Had A Truck’ and it didn’t come.” She went on to detail a litany of ways in which the show in Houston differed from the final Broadway show, including reassigning vocal material to different characters within songs, and especially the shifting of songs from one act to another, which had the effect of removing some characters from the story earlier than before. She also said that interstitial music between scenes had been removed and replaced with new material. Having heard Green’s point by point recounting of act one changes, I suggested we could dispense with the same for act two.

This upset a lot of people. Including Amanda Green and Doug Wright, the other creator. It also upset Samuel French, the theatrical agency that licensed the show.

So Samuel French pulled the plug. They withdrew their license and TUTS was forced to cancel the remaining shows.

That’s what i didn’t know, and honestly, was surprised by. I thought it was extremely rare for a licensing agency to go to that length: then again, I also thought it was extremely rare for a professional theater company to make those kind of production changes without permission of the licensing agency.

I’m still not sure how common this is, but someone in one of the linked articles above mentions a production of David Mamet’s “Oleanna” which was shut down after one performance because the theater company gender-swapped a key role. This may be more common, and less newsworthy, than I think it is. But I still find it surprising that professional productions think nobody’s watching and they can do this (stuff).