Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

..The Characters ..THB Review

Chris Columbus says Rent is the movie he was born to make.

Not Home Alone, not Harry Potter pictures, not Mrs. Doubtfire, but Rent. The amiable 47-year-old director will tell you that he intimately knows the time, the setting, he knows the people. In 1989, the era in which the movie version is set, he was, he says, himself living in an unheated loft, among hopefuls and the hapless, less Puccini's "La boheme" revised than Columbus' own pocket change revisited. As the rare, full-blown, sung-through movie musical, Rent roars, pounding away at just over two hours, with a few numbers trimmed from the "rock opera," and with a restlessly swirling, Steadicam-based shooting style. Rent rushes past with hardly a pause.

Columbus shrugs if you ask how you go from Harry Potter's childhood terrors to the adult set of fears of Rent: mortality, gentrification, AIDS and burning artistic ambition. "It's a big world out there," he says. "As a director, I honestly believe, at least for me, if I start doing the same thing over and over again, I'm going to get bored really quickly. I need a reason to get out of bed in the morning and go to work. I've been waiting nine years to do this movie. I was obsessed. For various reasons, I couldn't do it. Other directors were attached to it. For me, it was really important to do this film. I was like a racehorse at the starting gate when I was finally told I could make this movie."

Larson's family didn't resist this maker of family movies. "I didn't sense resistance from the Larsons. Certainly some people in the press…" He lets that observation trail. "I've always been, y'know, for some reason, I've done films that have been linked thematically by family, whether they were good films or bad films. Home Alone deals with a kid who doesn't have a family. Harry Potter - the kid is always searching for his family. This is about a different kind of family. That's a really extreme connection, but I just felt I was the right guy to do this movie. This movie is more personal for me [than my earlier work]. I lived in Manhattan for seventeen years, I lived in a loft, I knew all these people when I was struggling at NYU: musicians, actors and writers. This was the world that I knew."

Columbus saw Rent in 1996, with the original cast that is largely the cast of the movie. "I had never experienced that kind of emotion in a theater before. I didn't realize until I was casting the film that we had three ways to go: we could cast it entirely with unknowns; the pop-star version with Justin Timberlake and Christine Aguilera; then I started to meet the original cast." He also tips the horrible, unthinkable legend of the birth of Rent upon the death of its creator. "I realized that the thing that I responded to was the connection that they had [as an ensemble], partially because of Jonathan Larson's death. As everyone knows, he tragically died the night before the first preview. That connected these people in a very strong way. There's a very deep connection [especially after] doing that play for sixteen months. There's a chemistry there I'd never seen before, as a director. I met with them all, carefully considered whether they could still do it and it was that connection." (Still, Rent newcomer Rosario Dawson's widescreen smile and ferocious all-American features benefit the most from cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt's grimy night shooting.)

The ratings board allowed a PG-13, and Columbus says he may be "naïve" in his insistence that Rent remains a valuable anthem to acceptance and tolerance. "The picture was given an R-rating originally. The MPAA gave me a list of things to cut, and they gave me five to seven language issues, and they gave me a list of thirty picture edits they wanted. I talked to the studio, and they said, 'No, you don't have to cut anything. PG-13 would be amazing for us, because everyone would see the film. Just do what you feel you need to do.' So I made five language cuts and I didn't touch the film, the picture, at all, and they came back and gave us a PG-13." Columbus says he was told "that they felt the film was strong enough that ages 13-to-17 needed to see this film, and I was actually impressed that a conservative group like the MPAA gave us a PG-13. That may have its drawbacks, you know. If you're taking Grandma and little Joey to see Rent on Thanksgiving, they might not know what to expect. But it's okay to shake people up a little bit, I think. I think it's important that people wake up and see this." (Producer Michael Barnathan notes an omission from an earlier cut, about half-a-dozen frames of a hypodermic needle piercing skin; in the release version, it only touches an arm.)

The fairytale grunge New York of Rent is a composite of backlot and various cities. "Unfortunately, New York City has become a bit like Disneyland now," Columbus says. "The line in the film, 'I'm a New Yorker, fear is my life,' that's my seventeen years here, my motto every day. But to recreate Alphabet City of the late 80s [would be] almost akin to doing a Western. You go down there now, there's Starbucks, wireless internet cafes, DVD stores. We had to pick and choose our locations."

"I wanted to shoot the entire picture here," he continues, "but there's also an ordinance in Manhattan that says you cannot do music playback after 10pm. We did get an extension until midnight on a Friday night to do one song, "Glory," on a rooftop. Other than that, I was confused, because I had no place to shoot the "Rent" number . We were forced to build that street on an L.A. backlot. We found some alleyways in Oakland. Recreating New York City in the eighties was extremely difficult."

Columbus guesses that Larson, whom he describes as having had "a healthy ego," would appreciate what he's done. And this final work from a man who Columbus says would introduce himself as "the future of American theater" still resounds. When I saw the movie at a New York preview last week, the audience was partly reviewers and journalists but mostly enthusiastic teenagers who, from the start of the movie, were audibly thrilled. Throughout the screening, their appreciation was raucous and loud even at higher-volume numbers. As the end credits rolled, a couple dozen stood, lingered, as everyone else filed out. Mostly girls, some guys, most with eyes closed, they swayed as they mouthed the lyrics perfectly. At the very end of Rent, after the copyright notice, there's a final credit as "Seasons of Love" ends, and it seemed that everyone looked toward the screen at just that moment and as they read the words" - the credit reads, "Thank you, Jonathan Larson" - a short, sharp intake of breath was all you could hear, and as one, they bowed their heads reverently, faces lit by the reflection of the light of the Columbia Pictures lady. Are these kids the future of American musicals?

November 26, 2005

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