Inside sources say that the show is being delayed from its slated March 15 opening and that Taymor has left the production, though it is unclear if she quit or was fired or merely left the building for lunch one day and decided not to come back.
The New York Times is reporting that negotiations for Taymor to exit the production are ongoing behind the scenes—a complicated task since she has been the primary driving creative force behind the show since its inception.
Certainly, the show has been a bit of a disaster from the get-go. For one, the safety of the performers was never guaranteed, many injuries (some serious) occurred, and my Broadway friends (yes, I have a couple) were constantly calling for it to be shut down.
It also has received harsh reviews, with many critics saying that the impressive visual aspects of the show cannot make up for its lack of a cohesive and compelling storyline and memorable music (I mean, this is a musical).
Nevertheless, I will be sad to see Taymor go, if the reports are true. She was one of the few female directors today running with the big boys on Broadway and in Hollywood. She is also one of the few directors period who remains faithful to an artistic vision in a world of brainless, lowest-common denominator entertainment franchises.
Two years ago, I interviewed Taymor for one of my first ForbesWoman stories, about the lack of female directors in Hollywood. A year later, Kathryn Bigelow would beat out her ex-husband, James Cameron, for Best Director at the Academy Awards for her work in The Hurt Locker. But at the time I spoke to Taymor, there was a real lack of recognition for women directors.
It was incredibly difficult getting Taymor on the phone, and I was repeatedly warned by her publicist that I would only have a few minutes to speak to her. I was also told she wouldn’t discuss Spiderman, which was only then getting off the ground, but already had bad buzz surrounding its skyrocketing budget, which reportedly ballooned to $65 million.
During our interview, Taymor placed the blame of the lack of working female directors squarely on the studios’ marketing of their movies—that there was a perception that movies headed up by a female director were too “artistic” for a young male audience, the traditional demographic that movie studios strive to reach. (Since Star Wars there has been a perception, mostly wrong-headed, that only 14-25-year-old males go to movies.)
Said Taymor of her 2007 movie, Across the Universe: “[It] was a big summer popcorn movie. It was for everybody.” But the studio marketed it solely as an “artistic” film, though certainly it was that too.
If you haven’t read my story on female directors, you might want to check it out. It also had some very candid thoughts on how Hollywood treats its female directors from Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke, who called out Tinseltown for blatant sexism.
Taymor has a reputation for being tenacious, strong-willed, and risk-taking, and this goes back to her youth. In a New York magazine story, she describes living in Indonesia in her early 20s, where she suffered hepatitis, had her leg operated on without benefit of anesthesia, and almost fell into an active volcano. Sounds kind of like her experiences on Spider-Man.
0 Comments
Posts
