‘City of Angels’--a Writer’s Revenge? : Larry Gelbart’s new Broadway musical is fueled by anger and affection. His target? Hollywood.

NEW YORK —  Larry Gelbart, who has never much liked the way he and other screenwriters are treated by their bosses, has swathed his grievances in bebop and ballads. Opening on Broadway Dec. 11 is his “City of Angels,” a $4.5-million musical comedy thriller that honors Hollywood films of the ‘40s while trashing the system that spawned them.

“City of Angels” is set in the solariums and sound stages of Los Angeles in 1946. And weaving through its multilayered plot is the same Gelbart anger that fueled the award-winning “MASH” TV series and his current Broadway political satire, “Mastergate.”

Aided by film noir- inspired sets and Raymond Chandler-inspired plot-lines, humorist Gelbart vents some of his frustrations about writing “Tootsie” and other films. “I don’t think there’s anybody in the writing community that likes the writer’s role in the ‘film-making process,’ or the movie business--as we used to say,” Gelbart says. “The phrases have gotten a little grander but the practices haven’t grown any less shabby.”

So learns Gelbart’s protagonist in “City of Angels,” a novelist-cum-screenwriter named Stine (Gregg Edelman). Stine arrives in Hollywood with his detective novel, “City of Angels,” and his protagonist--a private eye named Stone (James Naughton). In the musical, Stine’s travails with his screenplay, egomaniacal producer/director and wife share the stage with the fictitious Stone and his seedy doings.

This is some complicated musical. To distinguish real life from reel life, the sets and costumes for writer Stine’s story are bathed in living color, while the sets and costumes for character Stone’s story are in black and white. The show’s 27 actors alternate roles in both Stine and Stone’s worlds, and they do so through a staggering 46 scene changes. The stage manager has a cue every eight seconds throughout the 2 1/2-hour show.

Staging is so complex that the scene shop, swamped by the crunch of new musical productions this year, delivered sets later than expected. Gelbart’s book, Cy Coleman’s music and David Zippel’s lyrics were set to go, as was the cast. But the previews had to be postponed several times and opening night was moved from Thursday to Dec. 11--changes that producer Nick Vanoff figures will cost about $150,000 in terms of lost revenues and overtime.

“For Broadway, which is hedged about with commercial uncertainties, this is so audacious, not for what it says, but in its form,” says the show’s director, Michael Blakemore. The Australian, who is trying to give this material the same energy and style he gave to Michael Frayn’s hit farce, “Noises Off,” adds: “Whether you like it or hate it, you have to concede its originality.”

“City’s” homage to Hollywood starts even before the curtain goes up. Big wall panels, reminiscent of the highly stylized film theaters of the ‘40s, depict not just such facades as Los Angeles City Hall and Union Station, but also Paramount’s gates, 20th Century Fox’s back lot, Mann’s Chinese (when it was still Grauman’s) Theatre, and a bit of the Hollywood sign.

Tony-winning set designer Robin Wagner estimates he sat through 100 film noir movies soaking up atmosphere, and readily admits his debt to the genre. The Kingsley mansion smacks of the mansion in “Sunset Boulevard,” and the solarium inside is “loosely based” on the stifling orchid house in “The Big Sleep.” And, says San Franciscan Wagner, “if you see a strong resemblance to the opening scenes of ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ it wouldn’t be a mistake.”

While Gelbart speaks of his own great affection for those films, some people close to the production appear worried that “Angels” will be seen simply as Gelbart’s Broadway revenge on Hollywood. Blakemore, in fact, points out that the private-eye movies that form the show’s core were indeed quite faithful to the books that inspired them: “I can’t think of a more faithful book-to-movie than ‘Maltese Falcon’ and the energy of that film comes from the dialogue which is straight from the book.”

But as Gelbart would readily admit, “Angels” mixes its sweets with bitters. When Stine refuses to play ball anymore, the director asks, “Is this some kind of New York snot-nosed revenge?” and one can ask that about the entire show. Zippel’s lyrics can be as caustic as Gelbart’s book, as for instance, a song called “Double Talk” features a lyric--sung by party guests at the director’s home--which goes: “This pompous schmuck is making me nauseous.”

Gelbart doesn’t think much himself of producer/director Buddy Fidler (Rene Auberjonois), a man who greets Stine by saying he’s read a synopsis of every book Stine’s ever written. Fidler tells a composer how to write music, swears he could take 10 seconds out of the Minute Waltz and nobody’d notice, and is dismissed as a man who has nothing beneath him but starlets.

Gelbart, whose “Mastergate” characters include anchorwoman Merry Chase and chief counsel Shepherd Hunter, knows his names. “Although he’s called Buddy, he’s nobody’s buddy at all,” Gelbart explains over coffee at his Fifth Avenue apartment. “Fidler has its own connotation--it’s a euphemism for potchkeh : to fiddle with somebody’s work, to fiddle around.” (In fact, quips Gelbart, “his name was Potchkeh. He changed it to Fidler when he got into the picture business.”)

Everybody rewrites Gelbart’s screenwriter. When Stine sends his wife a letter begging forgiveness, she sings, “It needs work.” His director tells him to take out the “social crap” in his script, and even his mistress makes a few changes.

Says Gelbart: “In motion pictures, unless you’re willing or able to also direct and/or produce your film, once you hand in the pages, other people are going to make the key decisions, including whether or not it is your work that will finally be on the screen. And as often as not, you find yourself sharing screen credit with anyone from a friend--and your friendship might be strained as a result--to a total stranger.”

“Angels” actually began during the time Gelbart was working on “Tootsie,” and the musical clearly reflects his frustration over that film. The 1982 movie went through several directors as well as writers, and while just Gelbart and Murray Schisgal receive screen credit as writers, Gelbart was the fourth to step in.

There was considerable published acrimony at the time, and Gelbart says that he still reads about it, a situation he finds particularly galling given his pride in his work on the picture. Besides, he says, “not a lot of other writers’ work is on the screen, which is one of the reasons I feel a great deal of anger about the credit being tainted.

“I called (director) Sydney Pollack once to complain about all the press attention he was calling to the rewrites, and I asked about one writer he was working with who I never heard of. He said the fellow wasn’t actually writing--he was ‘stitching’ scenes together. I said, couldn’t he have a seamstress credit instead of writer?

“One indication of the seriousness of this ongoing problem is the amount of space in the Writers Guild minimum basic agreement devoted to determining who gets credit on the screen and what is necessary to get credit on the screen. It’s page after page after page of instructions to us all.”

His frustration about this predates “Tootsie,” Gelbart adds. It even predates “Notorious Landlady,” a film he worked on in the early ‘60s, he says. “As a teen-ager, when I worked for Bob Hope on radio and TV shows, it was routine practice for those of us who did that to punch up Hope’s scripts--punch up somebody else’s work. . . . I’ve been on both sides and whichever side you’re on, you’re in the middle.”

The 1966 film version of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” the Tony-winning Stephen Sondheim musical Gelbart co-wrote with Burt Shevelove, was no pleasure either--”I could have been spared that movie in my lifetime.” Asked if he had any say in that film, Gelbart responds that “the purchaser of the rights had all the rights and say. All I could say was how terrible I thought it was. I had the final-insult clause in my contract.”

When asked, Gelbart says Fidler is a “composite” character: “Real people are composites, so why shouldn’t fictional people be composites?” And, yes, he says, “Angels” is “to some extent autobiographical. But then everything is because your life experience informs everything you do. All work becomes personal.”

But “Angels” also has wider resonances for Gelbart. “It’s not just about a writer in Hollywood trying not to cave in to the system,” he explains. “I think that’s something that people deal with in many walks of life and many job areas, where you try to retain your individuality and try to protect your work against other people and against yourself. . . . Victory or defeat on your own terms is what I’m talking about.”

Such concerns put “Mastergate” onstage instead of onscreen, he says. That show began in his head as a film, he says, “but I quickly abandoned that idea. One of the reasons I switched to thinking of it in terms of a play rather than screenplay is that I wanted to be the studio. I wanted to make all the key decisions about not just the writing but where it would go after I wrote it and how it would be advertised, marketed and mounted.”

“Mastergate” is set in the Sherman Adams Room of the John Mitchell Building, where witnesses talk of messages in fortune cookies--at Italian restaurants--and a key question is “what did the President know and does he have any idea that he knew it?” There’s a committee on hindsight and deja vu , and phrases like “March of the same year the previous February occurred.”

And even in this strong satire about foolishness, destructiveness and language abasement in government, Hollywood plays a strong supporting role. Major Manley Battle, a man who boasts of a “head full of shrapnel” and travels only by stealth bomber, uses the olive in his Polo Lounge martini to pick up signals from the gold chains around a colleague’s throat at Master Pictures International. The CIA, it seems, is funneling arms to rebels in Gelbart’s nation of “Ambigua” by mixing some real weapons in with the mock stuff for Master Pictures’ production of “Tet! The Movie.” ( The film has a $1-billion budget--or $1.3 billion if you include catering.)

“Musicals are monsters,” says Gelbart, “There’s so much involved in terms of getting the technical aspect right while still remembering why all that technical business is going on. It’s like trying to housebreak a dinosaur.”

This particular dinosaur started life about eight years ago when Coleman came up with the notion of a jazz musical based on the private-eye genre. The Tony-winning composer of such hit musicals as “Barnum,” “On the Twentieth Century” and “Sweet Charity” felt the late ‘40s “were a rich period for everything we have today in jazz--bebop, traditional, big band. Some music gets dated but jazz continues as a contemporary idiom, so I had the whole rainbow of colors to pick from.”

He took the idea to Gelbart, who hadn’t brought anything of his own to Broadway since “Sly Fox” in 1976. They worked on the show on and off for years, says Gelbart, and what eventually evolved “was the idea of not devoting the entire evening to a private-eye musical but making it what we have now--a cross between that and the story of a writer writing the screenplay.”

The project picked up momentum in 1987 when Coleman brought in lyricist Zippel, a 35-year-old Harvard Law School graduate who’d written songs for Barbara Cook and Off-Broadway revues. Coleman’s Notable Music Co. had published some of Zippel’s work, the two men shared the same lawyer and, says Coleman, “I had a hunch” that Zippel could write lyrics “that made sense, worked on a stage, carried the story forward--and had a few laughs.”

Coleman and Zippel went off to the West Coast, working long days with Gelbart out in the workroom by the pool at Gelbart’s Beverly Hills home. Talking the show through, tape recorders at hand, the three men outlined plot, characters, scenes and songs. By the time Zippel and Coleman left a week later, the scenes and songs that make up the show today were largely in place.

As always on a Gelbart show, the structure is complex. The “real” characters in writer Stine’s life appear in his screenplay, only thinly veiled, while remarks made by Stine’s associates may later be spoken by his fictional creations. Real characters talk to fictitious ones, fictitious characters can control real ones, and the two worlds collide from time to time throughout the show.

There was also the pressure of being faithful to the period. Much as Wagner studied Raymond Chandler, so Zippel worked to free his lyrics of anachronisms. For instance, Fidler’s “six pack of Oscars” became “a half-dozen Oscars.” Zippel says he liked the “belittling” way that Fidler refers to his Oscars--which are prominently displayed onstage--but they didn’t have six-packs in 1946.

They did have great movies, however, which Blakemore and Gelbart, both 61, devoured as kids. Gelbart refers to his “affection for those Saturday afternoon movies that many of us grew up watching--me in Chicago and Michael in Australia--where we had our second, real life.” Adds Blakemore: “I can remember being 15 and seeing the ‘Maltese Falcon’ at the Hoytz Cinema in Sydney. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this. I consider myself marked by it.”

“Angels” is in fact written like a film, says Wagner, who was charged with creating what he calls “cinematic reality.” For example, much of the time the sets move like film frames, across the stage rather than backward, forward, up or down. Created in the proportions of ‘40s film screens, sets might offer a long shot of a mansion in one scene, then cut to a phone booth or a bedroom. And as screenwriter Stine rewrites dialogue, the actors mumble noises that sound suspiciously like rewinding tapes as they move back to start and play the scene over with new dialogue.

“What I spent months on was working out this machine for the play to happen in--the set--so that it can happen as seamlessly as a movie,” director Blakemore says. “A really good script is easy to stage. Buried within it are hundreds of good ideas on how to stage and direct it.”

Set delays slowed things down, however. “The sets have to be like laugh lines,” explains Wagner, who earlier designed such Broadway musicals as “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” “Chess” and “A Chorus Line.” “The timing has to be immaculate. Everything has to be perfect to let the comedy fly.”

At an invitational dress rehearsal just before previews began Nov. 22, the set wasn’t completely ready, voice-overs were so hard to understand that they had to be rerecorded, and flashbacks were sometimes not clear enough. But the biggest problems were mechanical ones, Blakemore said the next day: “The actors are absolutely ready.”

They would, of course, have been more ready had the show first opened out-of-town as did such other big musicals this season as “Gypsy,” “Grand Hotel,” and “3 Penny Opera.” Gelbart readily concedes that “there’s no question that we would have benefited by a longer tryout period and being away from Broadway, but on the other hand, the economics are such that it wasn’t in the cards. Sets, cast costs, and everything would have probably added another million or more in costs.”

Coleman says he had great success--as co-producer and composer both--on “Barnum,” which began on Broadway, but Gelbart knows the value of trying out material first. His musical “One Two Three Four Five,” based on the first five books of the Old Testament, quietly expired after a tryout at the Manhattan Theatre Club last season. (“Its days were numbered,” he explains.)

Although Gelbart is sharing the control on “Angels” with his composer and lyricist that he held largely to himself on “Mastergate,” he can’t say enough good things about his colleagues. “People often ask, ‘What are you going to do next?’ but they should also ask ‘With whom are you going to do whatever you’re going to do next?’ I think it’s important to try and work with friends or at least people who share your sensibilities.”

That’s why his next play will be for Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theatre, the Cambridge, Mass., regional theater where “Mastergate” began. The play will be about the hero vacuum in America, he says, and will look at “how few positive role models we have anymore.” At ART he can also avoid “the pressure-cooker atmosphere of Broadway or a film studio or a network situation. You can work on the work without all the other concerns that are very evident in those other arenas.”

There may also be more movies, “despite all of the above.” Gelbart speaks of “a raft of unproduced screenplays. I seem to have a trunk of stuff that never got done. Maybe it’s just as well, but I might take a look at one or two of those and see if there’s a way to make them more workable or acceptable. . . . Hope springs eternal. And that it springs at all is amazing.”