This is turning into Kander & Ebb & Fosse week, I know, but damn do they know how to tell a story.
I saw CHICAGO on Broadway some years ago. It's been there forever, and as a result tickets are cheap, which usually means the show isn't going to be great. But my God, it was. It's got such electricity. If you come to New York once Broadway reopens and you've never seen it, give yourself a treat. Don't worry if there are no big names in it. You will not regret it.
The movie, which came out in 2002 and won six Oscars, including Best Picture--the first musical to do that since OLIVER! in 1968--is surprisingly able to capture the stage experience. Honestly, I can't think of another movie musical that actually feels so much like you're at the theater itself. Some of that might be the vaudeville staging of the show itself, but I don't think so. Usually when you shoot a staged experience for film it actually loses some of that sense of spontaneity. I suspect much of it is the special alchemy of the show itself, as translated to the screen by the great Rob Marshall and Bill Condon.
That, and a technique that the creative team creates specifically for the movie, the parallel editing throughout the film between the musical numbers and the actual events going on in Roxie Hart's life. The film opens on a push in on Roxie's eye (that's the image above). As we get tight into the black of the iris suddenly little sparkles appear, which then become the "C" in the title.
Although we have no idea whose this eye is yet, or what this story is about, that one moment, that simple push, is the whole film in a nutshell. CHICAGO will tell the story of Roxie Hart, a woman who sees the dark world around her and inside her and fill it with shimmering vaudeville lights. We open on Velma Kelly doing her act and just killing it, while Roxie watches. And then in virtually every successive scene, the story is told via a combination of the real life events--her husband Amos saying he killed Fred, her press conference, the courtroom trial--and the vaudeville reimaginings of those moments by Roxie.
It's a brilliant technique that works on multiple levels. It keeps the film from feeling like a series of standalone stage performances--a frequent problem in movie version of musicals; and it does so by making each of these performances a way of expressing what's going on inside Roxie, how she's dealing with the actual events of the film.
One of my favorite examples of this is just after the midpoint, where Roxie has decided she doesn't need Billy Flynn's help, then watches as the one innocent woman on Murderess' Row, the Hungarian Katalin Helinszki, loses her appeal and is hung. The story intercuts between Katalin walking to her death and her on stage doing a disappearing act. At the crucial moment of her death Roxie imagines her leaping off a platform and vanishing, not dead but free. Everything Roxy wants and fears is all right there.
The technique of constantly reinterpreting events through her eyes is also a brilliant way of making us care about Roxie. At the very beginning of the film she's a kid with the stars in her eyes, which is always appealing for an audience. She's us.
But in the scenes that follow, Roxie is pathetic. She's a cheat and a murderer and not terribly good at either. What makes us like her is the way she fills the emptiness of her world and life with color and humor and passion. In a way it's like a more commanding, self-propelled, I will have the life that I want version of THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY.
You actually don't need that opening shot to establish the way the film is going to work. We can completely understand what's happening without it. It's a flourish.
But in a way that's what an opening is for--to reach beyond plot and character to reveal the story's artistic and maybe thematic aspirations. It's planting a flag, establishing one's ambitions and making a promise that the story you're about to watch is going to be just as fucking great and interesting as this moment we're having right here at the start.
You see this kind of technique of making the opening A Thing used more in film than in television. TV tends to look more to final images--end of the pilot, end of an episode, end of a season, and especially end of a series.
But some of the very best television shows--like BREAKING BAD, BETTER CALL SAUL, THE SOPRANOS, MAD MEN--also frequently consider opening images. And I would say part of why we love those shows so much is precisely because of that fact that they go that extra mile and dig into what is the more interesting/bold/evocative/thematically relevant way of opening this episode/season/scene.
Whether you're writing a pilot or an episode, it's always worth considering: What is my opening image? And how can I make it relate in an interesting way to what is to come in the episode or season?
