THE SWEATBOX
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: The singer Sting was hired to write songs
for the film THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE. It was a
contract he later had reason to regret as he found
the demands of the job particularly taxing. This
documentary shows what he went through and also
shows the chaos that the process of making a film
can be. The film is similar to, but not as good
as, LOST IN LA MANCHA. Rating: 6 (0 to 10), +1
(-4 to +4)
This is the documentary about production problems making the film THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE. It is directed by John-Paul Davidson and Trudie Styler. The latter is the wife of Sting who was intimately connected with the project. I suspect the documentary started as a "The Making of..." sort of featurette and when the production had problems it was re-packaged as a document of production nightmare. Also at this festival (the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival) we saw the similar documentary LOST IN LA MANCHA, about the problems Terry Gilliam had making his Don Quixote film. That film is probably more downbeat since Gilliam's film never got made and production was canceled. The obstacles encountered making THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE were light by comparison. So this film might have been better out of that context. However, the problems faced in this production were more prosaic and much less memorable. Much more of THE SWEATBOX is filled with accounts of more ordinary sorts of troubles.
The problem was that the company had not settled on even so much as what the story would be about when the various sub-departments of Disney animation were turned loose. Changes late in the creation process are far more expensive than are ones early in the process. The film had serious script problems and well into the production the plot was changed from being a sort of Andean THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER into the plot that was eventually released, in which the young emperor is turned by evil magic into a llama and has to rely on an older man (voiced by John Goodman) as a friend. This meant that a great deal of the work that was done had to be thrown out and redone.
In the case of this film large changes were made far into the production and the resulting expenses turned into what some consider a fiasco. I have a different perspective. I worked most of my career for Bell Laboratories. I saw in and out of Bell many projects suffering from very analogous sorts of problems and in some cases the results were considerably more expensive. The lessons hard-learned at Disney were the same ones we learned many times over at Bell Laboratories. Those same lessons have been learned many times over in other companies in the entertainment industry, that have be learned many time over in many other industries, and I would bet money that they have even been learned many times over on previous Disney projects. The problem is remembering the lessons learned the next time around. The foibles of making THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE were probably common to most large projects. On the other hand many of Gilliam's problems on his Don Quixote project were probably fairly unique to Gilliam.
Particularly aggrieved at the changes was the singer Sting who wrote half a dozen songs for the original film plot and thought he was done. When the plot changed under him all of a sudden his songs no longer made sense. There was a new story and a new context. He had new songs that he had to write that fit the new storyline. This was not a total loss to him. The documentary made clear in other interviews that when work is thrown out and has to be re-done, it is Disney that pays for both the old and the new work. Sting was paid for every song he wrote. His grievance was the loss of audience for the songs he had written and as well as the loss of the freedom to be able to go on to other projects. The documentary shows him, not entirely sympathetically surprisingly, being called back to the project from vacations in places like Tuscany and the Himalayas. He seems to have been caught unaware that writing six songs for a film is a considerably bigger and more demanding project than writing six songs to please himself. Given that one director of THE SWEATBOX was his wife and another was a friend, his treatment by the film is surprisingly even-handed.
The move of the home market to DVDs probably has increased the demand for "The Making of ..." sorts of featurettes made along side of major film productions. Some of these film productions will be failures or will simply run into major problems. The logical thing to do at that point is to turn the side featurette into a document of production problems. That is probably why there were two such similar films at the Toronto festival. We will probably see more of this sort of film until the filmmakers sense that the market has been glutted. In this meantime this is a reasonably entertaining film, though not as much so as LOST IN LA MANCHA. I rate THE SWEATBOX a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a 1 on the -4 to +4 scale. Note: The title has a double meaning. It is the nickname of the screening room, but the title also represents the unfair treatment that Sting feels he suffered at the hands of the Disney people.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Copyright 2003 Mark R. Leeper
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