Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Newsies

It is rarely easy to predict what a film’s real legacy will be at the time of its original release. Once in a blue moon, something like Beauty And The Beast will come along that gets hailed as an instant classic but those are exceedingly rare. The road to your local thrift store is paved with DVDs of movies that were popular for a brief moment but faded into semi-obscurity. And every once in a while, you’ll get a movie like Newsies, a flop of epic proportions that has not only endured but evolved, seemingly in defiance of all logic. This is a weird one, folks.

The road to Newsies begins with Bob Tzudiker and Noni White, a husband-and-wife writing team who will start popping up with some regularity in this column. They’d developed a script inspired by the 1899 Newsboys’ strike, in which the young newspaper hawkers of New York took on two of the most powerful men in the city, Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal. Protesting a rate hike that ate into their ability to earn a living wage, the kids rallied public support and caused the papers’ circulation to plummet. Naturally, the true story is a little more complicated than what ended up on screen but Tzudiker and White were correct. This was good, surprisingly untapped material for a movie.

The couple brought the project to Michael Finnell, a “graduate” of the Roger Corman school who’d gone on to produce most of Joe Dante’s pictures including Gremlins and its sequel. Finnell liked the idea and thought it would fit in at Disney. Again, there are no flaws in his reasoning. A youth-oriented period piece with a predominantly under-18 cast has always been right at home on the Disney lot.

Finnell brought the project to Jeffrey Katzenberg, who liked it quite a bit. In fact, he liked it so much that he suggested turning it into a big-budget musical. This seemingly out-of-left-field idea (until now, nobody had been thinking about Newsies in musical terms) was, in its way, a sign of confidence. Katzenberg was riding high off the success of The Little Mermaid and knew he had another winner on the way in Beauty And The Beast. As far as he was concerned, movie musicals were back and bigger than ever!

The thing about that was The Little Mermaid and Beauty And The Beast were very much exceptions, not rules. Live-action musicals were still just as dead as they’d ever been. Most studios had abandoned them entirely except for the occasional stage adaptation like Annie, A Chorus Line and Little Shop Of Horrors, none of which had been profitable to start. Completely original movie musicals were even harder to sell and, thus, sighted with approximately the same regularity as Halley’s Comet. Disney itself hadn’t attempted a musical without the crutch of animation since the days of The Happiest Millionaire and The One And Only, Genuine, Original Family Band. There was a reason for that but Jeffrey Katzenberg either didn’t know it or didn’t care.

Finnell, Tzudiker and White responded to Katzenberg’s pitch with an enthusiastic, “Um…sure?” The excitement probably became a bit more genuine when Katzenberg brought in Alan Menken, the Oscar-winning composer behind Disney’s recent hits. Menken, of course, wanted to work on the project with his musical partner, Howard Ashman. But by now, Ashman’s time was growing short. He was much too ill to take on anything new and would pass away not long after.

In his place, Menken recruited lyricist Jack Feldman, a frequent collaborator of Barry Manilow. Feldman cowrote Manilow’s hit song “Copacabana” and they’d also worked together on “Perfect Isn’t Easy”, Bette Midler’s big number in Oliver & Company. Menken and Feldman got to work, coming up with almost a dozen original songs.

While Menken and Feldman worked on the tunes and Tzudiker and White massaged the script to accommodate this surprising new direction, Finnell and Katzenberg searched for a director. They hired Kenny Ortega, who had an extensive resume as a choreographer. His first film in that capacity was Xanadu, where he was mentored by no less than Gene Kelly. Since then, he’d directed his fair share of music videos, working with some of the most iconic artists of the 1980s, and had continued working as a choreographer on everything from Francis Ford Coppola’s One From The Heart to Dirty Dancing. If this column’s scope included television work, Kenny Ortega would quickly become a familiar presence thanks to his work on the Cheetah Girls, High School Musical and Descendants franchises. Even removing those from the equation, Ortega will be back.

If Newsies was made today, the cast would likely be composed primarily of young pop stars and musical theatre kids. Ortega cast a few of those in his sprawling ensemble but focused on young people with real acting chops for his leads, assuming (rightly or wrongly) that they could be trained to sing and dance. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the casting of Christian Bale as lead newsie Jack Kelly. Bale was only 13 years old when his performance in Steven Spielberg’s Empire Of The Sun marked him as a talent to watch. But he was not a singer and was, by his own admission, faintly embarrassed to find himself cast in a musical. Even so, he seems to have taken the assignment seriously. He’s a better dancer than he is a singer but he gets the job done.

Bale’s costar, David Moscow, also held no illusions about his musical talents. Moscow’s biggest role to date had been as Josh Baskin, the kid who wishes himself into Tom Hanks in Big. Like Bale, Moscow almost said no when he found out the movie he was auditioning for was a musical. But reassured by the promise of an extended four-month rehearsal period, he signed on. Despite his early jitters, Moscow also acquits himself well in the music department and he shares an easy rapport with Bale that goes a long way toward smoothing over some narrative bumps.

The rest of the Newsies ensemble was played by a mix of seasoned singers and dancers and actors with little to no musical experience. Spot Conlon, leader of the Brooklyn Newsies, was played by Gabriel Damon, who’d made a lot of TV appearances and done some voice acting in animation, including Littlefoot in Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time. Max Casella, who played Racetrack Higgins, was then best known as Doogie Howser’s best friend on that series. These days, he’s probably better known for his supporting roles in such shows as The Sopranos and Tulsa King. Among the kids from a more musical background were Aaron Lohr, who’d danced in Deniece Williams’s “Let’s Hear It For The Boy” music video and would go on to appear in the film version of Rent, and Trey Parker (not the co-creator of South Park), who’d been on the short-lived musical TV series Hull High.

Ortega also aimed high when it came to casting the grown-up roles and it probably helped that most of them were not required to sing or dance. Robert Duvall was allowed to put his own eccentric spin on Joseph Pulitzer, utilizing an untraceable accent that swims in and out. Michael Lerner, then a recent Oscar nominee for his work in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Barton Fink, played “Weasel”, the cigar-chomping circulation manager who sells the newsies their “papes”. Bill Pullman, last seen in this column making his movie debut in Ruthless People, played crusading reporter Bryan Denton and was probably a little surprised to be thrown into the number “King Of New York”, a late addition to the score. Ortega did include one ringer in his adult cast: Ann-Margret as vaudeville entertainer Medda, an ally to the newsies with a somewhat ambiguous relationship to Jack and the boys, part den mother, part sex object.

It's a little hard to know how to approach Newsies, which is probably a major reason why it flopped so hard on its original release. On the one hand, Kenny Ortega and his cast and crew give it their all. I think they delivered exactly the movie they set out to make, so you can’t really say it’s a “bad” movie. It’s just that the movie they were trying to make was such an anachronism, especially in 1992. It takes place in a heavily sanitized version of 1899 New York with a large cast of fresh-faced boys who all sound like they’re trying out for a revival of the Dead End Kids. This was, to put it mildly, not something audiences were used to in the early ‘90s.

A few things that can be said with certainty. The music by Alan Menken and Jack Feldman is, by and large, not up to the standards set by The Little Mermaid and Beauty And The Beast. There are some OK songs but none of them really connect on an emotional level. The movie is on stronger footing with big production numbers like “Carrying The Banner” and “Seize The Day”. Bale’s solo, the plaintive and yearning “Santa Fe”, feels a little thin and it’s not just because of his voice. The movie simply hasn’t done the work necessary to make us care about him.

The movie is also light on the specifics of the newsies’ cause and their strike. It’s very pro-working class and anti-fat-cats in their ivory towers. It nods occasionally at other issues like exploitative labor, especially of children, and punitive and abusive reformatories. But it’s not entirely clear how the newsies win when Pulitzer finally capitulates or what they’ve gained. In reality, Pulitzer did not lower the price of the papes. He simply agreed to buy back any papers that went unsold at the end of the day. Teddy Roosevelt, then Governor of New York, makes a late cameo to congratulate Jack and the newsies but what role he played beyond that in the crisis is a mystery.

Disney released Newsies to a frankly mystified public on April 10, 1992. It landed with a thud in 13^th place on its opening weekend, far behind the two other movies that opened wide, Stephen King’s Sleepwalkers and the animated FernGully: The Last Rainforest. With very few exceptions, critics hated it. Even Leonard Maltin, usually a reliable Disney champion, referred to it as Howard The Paperboy. Gene Siskel was one of the few to give the movie a positive review. Unfortunately, I couldn’t track down the episode of Siskel & Ebert to feature the movie. Given Roger’s extremely negative print review, I’ll bet it’s a fun argument.

The studio yanked Newsies out of theatres as quickly as possible and ordinarily, that would be the end of the story. But over the years, a cult quietly began developing around the musical thanks to home video. Disney took notice of this but didn’t pay too much attention until the stage division, Disney Theatrical Productions, got involved. While they’d enjoyed great success with the Broadway runs of such shows as Beauty And The Beast and The Lion King, they didn’t think Newsies had Broadway potential. But it seemed like something they could license to regional and community theatres and high schools, so they began developing a stage version.

Alan Menken and Jack Feldman reworked some of the music and added some new songs while Harvey Fierstein, the Tony Award-winning playwright of Torch Song Trilogy and La Cage Aux Folles, wrote the book. After some successful out-of-town tryouts, Disney booked a limited Broadway engagement beginning in March 2012. All of a sudden, Newsies was a hit. It went on to eight Tony nominations, winning Best Choreography and Best Original Score. The show ran for over two years in New York, enjoyed a wildly successful national tour and even made it back to movie theatres thanks to Fathom Events. In a 2012 interview, Christian Bale seemed flummoxed by this turn of events, saying, “These things never make any sense. I’m incredibly happy for them. They’re having the success our movie never had.”

He was absolutely right. These things never do make any sense. Even all these years later, it’s hard to watch Newsies and think, “Oh, obviously this was destined for greatness sooner or later.” The movie doesn’t quite work but it has a dogged, let’s-put-on-a-show charm that can be endearing. And its later success as a Broadway musical just goes to prove that you never can tell about these things.

VERDICT: Boy, I don’t know…Disney So-Minus-It’s-Plus?