How I Came to Write Musicals

IT'S A SPECIAL GUEST STAR DAY!

We are thrilled to turn The Film Experience over today to Tom Mizer, one half of the songwriting team Mizer & Moore (The Marvelous Mrs Maisel). In addition to his many career accomplishments, he happens to be a longtime TFE reader! Please give him a warm welcome - Nathaniel R.

by Tom Mizer

It’s a little disturbing to discover that the best way to introduce myself to you, good readers, is by having you meet 10 year-old me. During a lockdown cleaning binge, I found a stack of “scrapbooks” I made as a kid out of construction paper and newspaper clippings. The extreme Tom-ness of who I was and who I’d become is all there. I mean, look at just this one page.

First, note the slipshod but intense workmanship. I have not a crafty bone in my body and clearly needed to avoid the visual arts...

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National Pet Week: "Maggie" from The River Wild

Team Experience has been celebrating pets at the movies (and in our homes) all week. We'll wrap up Sunday. Here's Ginny O'Keefe... 

The best kind of pet in any movie is a loyal one. And it doesn’t hurt if the pet is cute. Also, a sprinkle of badassery is always welcome. All that is nicely packaged in a yellow Labrador retriever named Maggie in 1994’s rafting/crime adventure film The River Wild. For those who haven’t seen this Streep vs. Bacon gem, Meryl plays rafting expert Gail who is forced to take two criminals (John C. Reilly and Kevin Bacon) down a dangerous river all the while trying to protect her son, Rourke (Joseph Mazzello), and husband Tom (David Straithairn). Along for the trip is Maggie. From the get-go, Maggie is sweet, bubbly and you can tell she loves her humans deeply. She’s also good at digging up dead bodies in the woods (spoiler). Overall, she’s a good girl. But when s**t hits the fan, then we see how great of a girl she is...

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National Pet Week: "Sam" from I Am Legend

Team Experience is celebrating pets at the movies (and in our homes) this week. Here's Tony Ruggio...

With my third family dog growing up "Sydney"

I’ve always been a dog person. Some of my first memories are of rolling in the carpet at three years-old next to our first pekingese bruiser Gin Gin. His death at the hands of a roaming pack of stray dogs in our neighborhood was my first real brush with tragedy and emotional trauma. Two more family dogs would come and go over the next twenty-five years, each one’s passing more devastating than the last. 

It’s no surprise then that I would take to the tale of a man and his dog in 2007’s I Am Legend, or its inevitable conclusion. The movie itself is a flawed slice-of-apocalyptic-life blockbuster, a one-man show for Will Smith wherein he and German Shepherd Samantha roam a desolate New York City...  

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National Pet Week: “Si” and “Am” from Lady and the Tramp

Team Experience will be celebrating pets at the movies this week. Here's Lynn Lee...

My cats!

Last fall, my husband and I adopted a pair of Siamese kittens from a local rescue organization.  It was my husband’s idea – I was hesitant at first, despite the extreme cuteness of their pictures and videos.  Not because I don’t like cats; to the contrary, my husband had already converted me into a cat lover with our previous, gone but still-missed pair.  No, the real if silly reason, as I explained sheepishly, was that every time I thought of Siamese cats – especially in twos – all I could think of was the devilish duo from Lady and the Tramp (1955). While I hadn’t seen the movie in years, I vividly remembered two blue-eyed hellions who teamed up to torment poor innocent Lady and frame her as the “bad dog” she assuredly was not.  I also remembered a sibilant signature song that I was pretty sure had not aged well after a half century, even if the movie itself remained one of my Disney favorites...

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2019's Best Screen Animals

Different lists each for our "Year in Review"

We had hoped to put the entire cast of Cats on this list of the big screen's best animal characters but alas... very few of them are worthy to ascend to the Heaviside Layer let alone our year end list of the best big screen animals! This list is dedicated to bunnies as those beady-eyed cuties had a rough year at the movies. They were used solely for unsettling mood, multiplying sybolism and raw meat (gross) in Us and later popped up as an instrument of toxic masculine shaming in Jojo Rabbit. Bunnies deserve better in 2020! Which filmmaker will answer the call and treat them well onscreen?

Without further ado let's talk the screen animals we fell hardest for at the movies this year.  

11 Dumbo (elephant)
Here's the thing. Tim Burton and Screenwriters and (presumably) Disney corporate were so intent on expanding the movie (it's 48 minutes longer than the original Dumbo!) that it keeps pointing to everything but the star mutant attraction. Dumbo is as adorable as his ears are big but he's a supporting player in his own movie. They lost the thread or Dumbo could've topped the list.

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