Houdini was in there at one time, too, but I never even saw him - they cut him out before they gave anything to me."Īnd does Newman know why all the cuts were made? "Maybe it was necessity, I don't know. At a political party where he helped design the fireworks display, Mother s Younger Brother daydreams about Evelyn Nesbit. Emma Goldman was in there, and I wrote a little bit of source music for her scenes. With accessible yet intricate prose, Doctorow weaves the stories of a white, upper middle-class family a black family facing discrimination and oppression and an impoverished Jewish immigrant family. I ended up writing music for a version that was 40 or 50 minutes longer than the one we ended up with. "I had sort of a rough cut, because they were late turning in the final cut about six times. Ragtime describes the experiences of three families, a poor Jewish immigrant Tateh and his daughter, an upper middle class white family and an unwed black. "They wouldn't give me a final cut to work with," says Newman. Not all of this was done at the scriptwriting stage lots of footage ended up on the cutting room floor at the last minute, when Paramount told the filmmakers that more than three hours of "Ragtime" was too much.Īmong those left grappling with the 11th-hour cuts was Randy Newman, the notoriously slow songwriter who wrote "Ragtime's" lilting score. Mothers Younger Brother walks on the beach, head over heels for a famous model named Evelyn Nesbit, whose husband just shot her former. An upper-middle class family Father, Mother, Grandfather, and Little Boyare hanging out in a home Father built back in 1902. Doctorow wrote - in fact, it's missing about half the characters, including the likes of Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud and the central-to-the-book feminist and socialist Emma Goldman.Ĭlearly, director Milos Forman couldn't have cut between all of Doctorow's characters in the same freewheeling way the book did, so a pruning process has reduced the movie to a couple of main plots and an occasional subplot. Its a summer day in New Rochelle, New York, in the early 1900s. The version of "Ragtime" currently in theaters isn't quite the "Ragtime" that E.L. Doctorows novel of historical fiction is mainly set in New York City from early 1900 until the United States entered into World War 1 in 1917. Join T magazine's deputy digital editor, Kate Guadagnino, and writerJonathan Dee for a virtual discussion about E.L.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |