Ding-Dong

I want to talk about joy, laughter and irreverence. About whimsy as a fruition word. About finding your inner-clown and introducing them to your inner-fool. I want to talk about playing. Not out in the world, but here on the page.

I know we all have our process. That sometimes we need to snarl and spit, straining on the pot and shitting out the words in hard little pellets, but I have noticed that when it comes to family entertainment, it is best to eat a lot of prunes. To stay loose, cool and playful. Because the longer I do this (write kid’s movies), the more convinced I am that the energy I create with gets on the page. That the audience can feel me having fun-- Well, that’s not completely true because it can get fucked up a hundred ways before it reaches the audience, but at least the person reading it can feel it. That’s my experience, and all the best shit I’ve done, the few things that have really stuck with people, were written with no concerns but to blow my little joy-boy heart out, sharing what truly matters to me and to the characters (who are all just parts of me anyway).

Okay, that’s the big wind-up. Now, here’s the pitch.

A few years ago, my son (who is a major music and movie detective and always sleuthing down great shit) turned me onto the outtakes and demos from The Wizard of Oz. There’s some wonderful stuff and some not-as-wonderful stuff, but the one thing that absolutely knocked me out was listening to Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg do the entire Munchkinland section, just the two of them at the piano, which I assume Arlen is playing. They do it all; the voices, the spirit, the whole deal. Two first generation immigrant Jews in their mid-30s, laying down a little number they cooked up for some new MGM flick, a song that every child in America (and far beyond) will end up knowing by heart for the next eighty-five years and counting.

Now, who knows? Arlen may have been going through a horrible divorce and Harburg in trouble with the IRS, but they sure sound like they are having a lot of fun to me. And it’s all there, every word that is in the movie. The powers that be having enough sense not to touch one syllable. This is the stuff-- that Dr. Seuss, Bugs Bunny, hear it when you’re six and never get it out of your head shit. And everything that is so magical in the movie is just as sublime in its stripped-down state.

I want to go on a whole Harold Arlen rant, because he is one of the great songwriters of the 20th Century, having written not just “Over the Rainbow,” and the rest of the songs in The Wizard of Oz but also “Paper Moon,” “Get Happy,” “Stormy Weather,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “One for My Baby, One for the Road,” “That Old Black Magic,” “I’ve Got the World on a String,”  “Ac-Cent Tchu-Ate the Positive” and many more—And as you’ll hear, he can also carry a tune.

I write for an animation studio and before the pandemic, back when people actually went to offices, I wanted to call the entire company together and play this demo for them and say, “This is it, this is the gold standard. Not that we all need to be geniuses and write masterpieces, but we need to remember that it’s about playing and connecting to the childish finger paint whimsy we all have inside.” I wanted “play” to be a company imperative. This was back when I was temporarily insane, and thank God I’m over it, but I am calling my own little company get-together here, so give a listen and get your finger paint on.