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Read other letters about this article
If "Dreamgirls" isn't about the Supremes, who is it about ... The Doors?
I know, I know, it's about the Dreams and about Deena. What a load of rot.
No, a roman a clef is not a documentary (nor does the review say the film should be). But you simply can't create a shadow history, a story that is clearly modeled on real people, and then not claim there's any connection.
Even if you consider "Dreamgirls" on its own terms, the movie shows no feeling for either the spirit or the particulars of the era and music it claims to chronicle. The Detroit riots are shown as taking place in 1966, not 1967. When the Dreams back up Jimmy at a white supper club in 1963, their hair-dos are the sort of long falls that didn't come into fashion until four or five years later -- and those years matter in an era when change was as decisive as it was in the '60s. (The equivalent would be making a movie about the Beatles and having them dressed in Sgt. Pepper gear while singing "Please, Please Me.") Even sillier, the new title song written for the movie, also performed in the story around '63, has a line about "making love to you." And that in an era when the Shirelles' singing "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" was enough to get the song banned on many radio stations. When a few years later, the Stones had to sing "Let's Spend Some Time Together" on the Ed Sullivan show, when two years after that the line about "making love in the green grass" was snipped from "Brown-Eyed Girl" on some stations. Nothing in the movie makes sense. How could anyone in the movie business, let alone a novice, claim he was going to make a big-screen film of "Cleopatra" less than ten years after the Liz and Dick version had nearly sunk Twentieth-Century Fox? And the Jamie Foxx character, wanting his girls to cross over to the white pop charts, wanting his music to be supper-club friendly, would never hire Eddie Murphy, whose characters initial numbers are clearly based on James Brown. But that doesn't matter because, as the review astutely pointed out, the movie jams together distinct styles of black pop. I guess black people all sound alike to the filmmakers.
Finally, the notion that a movie that converts some of the sleekest and most sophisticated black pop music ever made into the false rhythms, unfelt emotion, and jacked-up energy of show tunes is about the perils of selling out is just a pants-wetting claim. Selling out is what "Dreamgirls" does. And is anyone surprised? The show is in a line with "Bye Bye Birdie," "Hair," "Grease," "Rent," ad nauseum. Ever since rock/pop/soul pushed Broadway out of its position as the arbiter of American popular music, Broadway has responded by body snatching that music, sucking it of its force and personality and soul and genuine rhythm and emotion, and sending it back out as a show biz pod. This isn't about being a purist -- it's about not getting the most obvious details right. "Dreamgirls" is the latest chapter in a very long line of cultural usurpation. Not black culture being usurped by white culture, but rock and soul culture being usurped by the dregs of what Broadway, no longer having any link to Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields, Harold Arlen et al, has become.
It stinks.
