Amadeus (Deep Dive Into The "Torture Chamber" of Making An All-Time Classic)

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on the show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watch this tonight, there's always something good to watch. Let's get started. Today on the show, I'm doing one of my deep dives into the making of Amadeis.

0:52 Imidais obviously is one of the greatest movies ever made. I think that's not a controversial opinion. At this point, it has lost none of its power. I saw it relatively recently at the Hollywood Bowl and it was amazing. You know, they had the orchestra and the whole thing, and it was packed by the way, and people laughed and just like really had an experience with it. And I always thought when I watched Amadeus that it was fascinating to me that this is clearly an expensive movie and the guys who starring it are not big names. And even back when they made this movie, I still wondered, like, how do you finance a movie like that. I mean, I you know, there's it still is the film business, like, how do you get the money to make this big, lavish period piece without really big name actors. So I was wanted to know, so I dove it in the research and I found out and the answer is actually pretty wild. So I want to just share with you the whole saga of the making of Vamadeus. But I think particularly how there was kind of you know, the way we have a twenty four and Megan Elison now Saul Zaints.

1:53 I think I'm saying his last name right. Hopefully was that for his day. So yeah, this is the making of Vamadeus. Movie nominated for eleven Oscars one Best Picture and is still an awesome, awesome movie. How did this movie get made? Well? New York Times thankfully covered in nineteen eighty four. It starts with this great odd couple of Peter Schaeffer and Melis Foreman, and writing the script for the movie was a huge pain in the ass. I always love this. This makes me feel better when you have a great movie, you know, occasionally you have situations where people were like, well, you know, oh, I just it just kind of came out of me organically or I actually wrote it pretty quickly. It really wasn't that difficult. You occasionally get situations like that, and if you're a creative person you hear that, you're like, fuck that guy, and so it was.

2:40 It was quite reassuring to hear that. Peter Schaeffer and Melis Foreman struggled mightily, According to The New York Times, So the English playwright that's Peter Schaeffer, spent four months hold up in a Connecticut farmhouse with Melish Foreman, the Czech film director, isolated from the rest of the world. In what they called their torture Chain. The collaborators suffered from writer's block together, listen to Mozart records together, and improvised scenes from the play together. Much of their afteran work sessions, however, was devoted to arguing. They argued about scenes and words and the order of scenes and words. They argued about who would say what in the film. They even argued about which of them would cook dinner. In the end, nothing went into the movie that both did not agree upon. This Honestly, this is what I think has led to most movies kind of sucking. Now. If you notice, I mostly do television on the show. And that's not because I don't love movies. I love movies. It's because I think that in general, on average, the quality of film has gone down a bit, and I think it's because of something that in theories sounded great, which is streamers. They're making a ton of stuff. It sounds like the development process is not as arduous working with them, and so it's a great as awesome. But I think that, as you see from this description, nobody likes as Actually many times show nobody likes doing a million drafts of a script and really fighting over every word.

4:03 It sucks, not fun at all. But out of that hard work a lot of times you get the best stuff, apparently. And again this is the New York Timesmil's foreman was so worried the elements from the stage would creep in and make the film stale that he developed a quote unobjective resentment toward everything in the original show. Mister Shaffer, who received screen credit for writing the movie, remained considerably fonder of the play he'd spent two and a half years writing, and found himself trying to quote get in the script as much as possible of the original end quote Given these two points of view, the collaboration between the playwright and the director naturally took on an adversarial, if still amiable air Quota was like playing a good game of ping pong or tennis, says mister former, recalling that an argument over a single word could go on for hours. End quote. Some changes from the play. Salieri had these long monologues that they had to figure out a way to make visual. So instead of Salieri cursing God in a long monologue, he throws a crucifix into a burning fireplace. Instead of confessing to the theater audience, he confesses to a priest. Peter Shaffer said about the movie. He said, you know, in theater, if you play music a lot, it turns into a concert.

5:19 But film welcomes music, it eats it up. In this case, it's not background music. And by the way, you might notice that there's a bit of Mozart playing under this episode. That's because I found and I've learned this from making a lot of stuff. A mozart is in the public domain, but performances of mozart are not necessarily in the public domain. But I did find a royalty free version of this that was posted as being a royalty free and so I'm using that in this episode underneath, just like Peter Schaeffer was saying, it's not background music. It's there to heighten atmosphere, to heightened grief or joy or any obvious emotion. In the film of Amadeus, music almost becomes a character, the most important character in a way.

6:00 Meilish and I, as it were, met on that middle ground. He from film, I from the stage, he from the visual, Ie from the verbal. We met on the ground that is neither visual nor verbal, but acoustic and abstract. We met there in the music. End quote. Now, the movie is not historically accurate, nor is it really supposed to be. But there's been a lot of writing about the movie versus reality and how probably most people assume that it's real and all that there was part of it that's real, like, for example, the way that Mozart was a bit childish. This is from a Slash Film article quote. As for his childishness, Mozart's letters revealed that he had a body and sometimes scatological sense of humor. He even composed a piece called Leck Mitch Marsh, which probably needs no translation, don't I'm missuing let me, I actually will translate because I don't know what that means. Oh okay, I found it. The English translation is lick me in the ass quickly. So there you go, people.

6:57 That makes it feel credible, just that. So, just to finish that quote from flash film. Historians have noted that these kind of yucks were common in middle class Viennese society at the time, and not specific to Mozart in quote. Also, historians apparently place little credence in the notion that Saliari killed Mozart. In real life, the two composers had a cordial, if at times prickly, professional relationship. Unlike the solitary, pious Salieri in the film, the real Salieri was a far more tragic character whose wife and son both died. There was also evidence that Salieri attended Mozart's opera The Magic Flute and raved about the work to the composer afterwards. It's also been documented to Salieri tutored Wolfgang's young son and music, which seems odd behavior for a supposed rival. Enduote. Wikipedia said that they that Peter Shaffery emilish form and did not care if it was based on reality. They called it quote a fantasia on the theme of Mozart and Salieri. Quote. So in the movie, Salieri is again a pious loner trapped in a vow of chastity. In reality he was a married man with eight children and at least one mistress. All right, so now you got these scripts, Now you got to go make the movie. This is from Independent UK. So Saal Zaints almost didn't get to make this movie because the original backers, which is twenty Century Fox, shut it down because Zains declined to cast it with bigger names. Mirramax came to rescue, with Zaints putting up cash of his own to round out the budget. The La Times, quoting Michael Douglas, Michael Dougas apparently said Saul is a wonderful mixture. He's a street smart guy from New Jersey who has

8:30 impeccable taste. There are a lot of people in this town who pretend to have both toughness and good taste. But with Saul, it isn't pretense. His power comes from his joy and enthusiasm for a project. Quote. So, Zaints is from New Jersey. He ran away from home at the age of sixteen, supported himself hawking peanuts at the Saint Louis Cardinals training camp in Florida. In gambling, he served in North Africa and Sicily during World War Two. Never held a steady job until he moved to San Francisco at age twenty six. Or He worked for a jazz producer and then he bought a record company and made millions from Credence clear Out Revival, and that funded him going into the film business. John Lithgow said about Saul Zaints against Ally Times.

9:11 Being on the set playing Hearts with Saul, I realized the secret to his success. He can spot everyone's strengths and weaknesses right away. He was a killer. He shoot the moon three out of every four games end quote. He owned an Italian villa. He had four hundred olive trees in the property and there was a label on his private stock and had said not one lira of profit from this olive oil will go to any worthwhile charity. So real character saw Saints as one of the few remaining independent filmmakers who fund movies with their own money again formally Times. He has a very personal stake in his projects. His box office success, the movie that he did with Lithgow costs him twenty million dollars. It was owney. But and here's a really interesting part, and this is Milischwarman. He said, Saul gives you wonderful ideas, but he never forces them on you. He never meddled in my sphere, the creative decisions. So again, it's very reminiscent of Megan Elson, like someone who's super rich, who has good taste, and who gives artists the money they need to make their movies and doesn't mess with them.

10:13 That's my sense of Megan Elson. That's certainly what people were saying about saltz Ants. As far as the casting, so from DJA, dot Org and Wikipedia, apparently Kenneth Branow was one of the finalists. Mark Hamill was going to play Mozart as well, and Foreman decided not to cast him due to his association with the character of Luke Skywalker. A different actress was cast as Mozart's wife, but she tore a ligament in her leg the day before shooting started. Meg Tilley was that actress. Speaking about f Mary Abraham English, Foreman said to the DGA, he was very obscure. He had been in some films but I think if I had seen him in them, I might not have cast him. He came in to read for a smaller part the opera director Rosenberg, and when he was finished, I asked him to stay and Redtailieri with a young actor I was auditioning for Mozart because nothing seemed to be at stake. He was so relaxed, so natural, so real.

11:03 So I'm a Days finally came out in nineteen eighty four SPIM nineteenth. It made ninety million dollars in nineteen eighties. Money was nominated for fifty three awards and received forty, including eight Academy Awards, including Academy Awards for Best Picture, four Bathto Awards, four Golden Globes, a Director's Guild of America Award. As of twenty twenty three, was the most recent film to have more than one nomination in the Academy Award for Best Actor category. In nineteen ninety eight, the American Film Institute ranked at fifty third on its one hundred years hundred Movies lists, and twenty nineteen the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film and Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally historically or esthetically significant. So yeah, I'm a dais awesome movie still great and could have been could have starred Mark Hamill and or Kenneth Branno. I would love to see those versions. I think both those guys would be interesting.

11:54 But honestly, like, how do you touch what Tom Holst did with the part? I don't know. I would would you go for one of those versions? I would love to see it. That is the show for today. I have a guest interview that I'm so excited about as our next episode that I don't even want to tell you about it because I'm afraid it will jinx it. So I'm not going to say a word about it, but just keep an eye out. If I get this interview, it'd be pretty cool. As always, thank you for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a five star review and Apple Podcasts and you can always reach and you can always reach out to me at Dan Advoyagemedia dot com. Watch This nant on Instagram, bettmore Dan on Twitter, Watch This Night podcast on TikTok, or you can join our Facebook group Watch This Tonight. Thanks for listening. Byeye