A week ago, if you were lucky enough to snag the hottest ticket of the week in Los Angeles, it meant you got to see 12 people sitting around on a stage clutching scripts and talking into microphones, shooting one another with finger guns, fake projectile vomiting, fake punching each other in the face, or playing dead for extremely long periods.
Conducted under the stewardship of director Quentin Tarantino, and under the auspices of Film Independent at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and its curator Elvis Mitchell, this was the world premiere of his new movie,The Hateful Eight. Or, rather, an enhanced "live read" of his screenplay, or to be more precise, a "staged reading," with Tarantino both narrating and lightly directing the action. The same script was leaked online in January, causing a furious Tarantino to consider abandoning the entire project.
Apart from the mystery cast, which proved to include Samuel L Jackson, Kurt Russell, Amber Tamblyn and Bruce Dern, the big lure of the evening – at least until Tarantino announced onstage he would be redrafting the screenplay with a view to possible future production – was the notion of catching the fugitive essence of a movie that would never be made or seen, like Robert Altman's Ragtime (he was fired), or Orson Welles's mooted but abandoned Heart of Darkness for RKO.
In the event, the main attraction was Tarantino's announcement that chapter five, the climactic bloodbath, would need a total tear-down rewrite, and no one would ever see this version of it again. Put like that, it's perhaps less of a selling point. But no matter, it sold out anyway.
This odd hybrid form – part rehearsal, part radio-play, part voiceover session – has lately become a new breed of hot-ticket entertainment. In Los Angeles, the live read is a time-honoured tradition that has for decades unfolded in writers', directors' and actors' living rooms or poolside patios, in agency conference rooms and rented studios. Friends occasionally send invites to watch live reads, for generating feedback and audience response (if there's an audience), detecting incoherencies, impracticalities, lulls or narrative dead-zones, or simply for writers and directors to try certain actors or ensembles on for size with their scripts.
The Film Independent live read of Boogie Nights, with Taylor Lautner as Dirk Diggler. Photograph: Araya Diaz/WireImageLive read has always meant backyard, beer, words, writers and actors, all on an intimate scale, so it's surprising suddenly to find that this home-grown form of theatre in bare-bones embryo is selling out a sumptuous old 1927 United Artists movie palace in downtown LA, attracting dozens of celebrities and diehard fan-geeks to pay $200 per ticket for something that's been through three days of rehearsal, and to surrender their cellphones meekly at the door and pass through metal-detectors under Def-Con-1 levels of security (merely standard Film Independent at LACMA policy, and not a Tarantino edict). And yet it really was a great night at the theatre, even if, technically speaking, you weren't watching a play.
Tarantino's big night was part of, but also the lone exception to, a series of live-read events, this time of previously filmed scripts (sometimes in fuller drafts than made it to film) originated by director Jason Reitman in 2011 under the aegis of Film Independent at LACMA, which offers one of LA's most venerable and valuable film repertory programmes. Reitman, a writer-director in thrall to the centrality of the screenplay, inaugurated a series of events in which well-known and classic screenplays – rather than Tarantino's unmade and largely unknown entity – would be re-enacted by entirely new casts.
Reitman recites stage directions; actors' identities are drip-fed in advance on Twitter, or only revealed once the curtain goes up."We started with The Breakfast Club," says Elvis Mitchell, the former New York Times critic who now curates film at LACMA. "Not necessarily a masterpiece, but a movie a lot of people feel strongly about, and very influential. We've always chosen them on the basis that they're very important in many people's lives, and most of our choices were originally done by writer-directors, which obviously speaks to Jason's experience."
The Film Independent all-black live read of Reservoir Dogs.Imagine The Graduate without Dustin Hoffman or Anne Bancroft. Now imagine those roles being filled by Jay Baruchel and Sharon Stone (that was April's other live read), and picture all the different decisions and emphases they will bring to it. All in a stripped-down environment with the actors sitting in a row at a table facing the crowd, with their character names on a card in front of them, like the US supreme court in session.
The approach has produced some happy moments of inspired casting, such as Paul Rudd and Mindy Kaling in The Princess Bride, Seth Rogen as The Big Lebowski, The Usual Suspects with Dexter's Michael C Hall, and the pilot episode of Breaking Bad, which was vigorously rejigged with Rainn Wilson as Walter White and Mae Whitman an absolute riot as Jesse Pinkman (Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul were among those cheering from the stalls).
Other productions have included Ghostbusters, with Rogen, Jack Black and more Rainn Wilson, and a Boogie Nights do-over that was especially well received, with Taylor Lautner as Dirk Diggler and Don Johnson in Burt Reynolds' porn-impresario role. Jesse Eisenberg took the generously-endowed lead in another take on the script at last year's Toronto film festival. For a reading of Hal Ashby's Shampoo, they snagged Kate Hudson for the role her mother Goldie Hawn made famous in the original.
They've had a pop at Tarantino before, too: a 2011 all-black version of Reservoir Dogs, featuring Lawrence Fishburne, Cuba Gooding, Jr and Terrence Howard. "Quentin was delighted," says Mitchell, "he always thought it could be just as easily be a stage play, too." (One is reminded of Welles' Harlem-staged, all-black "Voodoo Macbeth" of 1936.) They've also done Pulp Fiction.
It's an interesting notion – to treat a screenplay and its roles like a stage play – a blueprint text open to an infinite number of thespian interpretations and casting coups, and not frozen on the screen for all eternity. The subtraction of almost all visual elements reinforces the primacy of the words, makes them newly audible.
"First and foremost, these things live, if only for a day," says Mitchell, of the instantly evaporating one-off performances. "We've been very scrupulous about not allowing any recording devices in and we don't record them ourselves, so they just live in that space and that time, for that audience, and there's a magic that happens in that room, the chemistry of the actors onstage, the way the director moves things along. And the audiences have always been really enthusiastic.
In LA people don't see as much theatre as they do in New York, so one of the pleasures is to watch an actor shape a performance from the beginning to the end and to see how they approach the material. And the actors get no rehearsal; that's part of the fun of it. In many cases they're sitting down together for the first time. There's the sense of this thing having to take flight on its own."
Actors and directors have been at it for years. In an age of committee-made, effects-led, merchandise-hawking blockbusters, it's easy to see why audiences are eager to get in on the act.
John Patterson
- The Guardian
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