The entry begins:
How do you make a movie about story that spans two-hundred years of American history, about an icon who was long dead, and when alive never set foot on America? It’s not easy, but Hollywood has always relished challenges. Some possibilities:Learn more about Beethoven in America at the Indiana University Press website.
In a recent Broadway play, 33 Variations, Beethoven bridged time and space to appear to Jane Fonda. He also visited a dysfunctional twentieth-century family in Beethoven’s Tenth. Why not again? The Transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller wrote passionate letters to Beethoven as if he were there. In the film he could actually respond. Think of the cinematic fantasies that could unleash, think what a director could do with that.
Theosophy, which made great use of Beethoven, grew out of the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement, of the world of séances. Much more exciting than a few random ghostly raps on the kitchen table, Beethoven could announce himself, tap-tap-tap-taaaaaaaaaap.
Katherine...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: Beethoven in America.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
