Noir for the Next
Generation
by
Lisa Diana Shapiro
My new project, Samantha
Spade, Ace Detective, has given me a mission.
When I was a kid, it was my mother’s rule
that I was not allowed to watch any movies made after 1960. In her estimation,
the only good movies were either black and white, MGM musicals, or Gone with the Wind.
So I knew nothing of Star Wars or E.T., but I
could quote Humphrey Bogart at length.
Then I read Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe books, and that pretty much
sealed my fate - the girl too geeky to ever get a date.
When I grew up I discovered that there
were plenty of other geeks who knew references like, “You know how to whistle”
and I eventually caught up on all the films I had missed growing up. But I
never lost my love of those old black-and-white detective movies.
Recently I was commissioned to write a
new musical for Off-Broadway’s TADA! Youth Theater. I had worked with them
before, writing book and lyrics for the tremendously successful family musical Princess Phooey (music by Eric
Rockwell).
This time, I pitched them a film noir
spoof. I thought, this will be fun - I’ll call it “The Maltball Falcon,” it
will have obscure references to Sam Spade and Miles Archer, a sultry blonde
with legs up to here, a tough-talking detective with all the answers.
I sat down with my 13-year-old niece to
do some research, watching The Big Sleep (who could be cooler than Lauren
Bacall?). I was writing a song that would use all the hard-boiled slang from
the period - you know, jake and hoosegow and palooka. I asked my niece to let
me know what words she didn’t understand.
Ten minutes into the movie, she told me
she didn’t understand a thing that was going on. Not only did she not
understand the slang, they talked too fast and she couldn’t follow the story at
all.
Noir was a foreign language to her.
I realized at that moment that I couldn’t
write a spoof. You can’t make fun of something if your audience doesn’t know
what you’re making fun of. I realized that I had a bigger mission instead - not
to spoof it, but to re-create it. I had to re-imagine noir for the next
generation.
Samantha
Spade, Ace Detective was born. Samantha’s a
lonely kid, cripplingly shy, obsessed with old movies - but in her imagination,
she is Samantha
Spade, Ace Detective, tracking down clues and catching villains on the
rain-washed streets of her black-and-white fantasy world.
The project grew. In order to reboot the
genre for this generation, I needed a much bigger audience - I needed . . . the
Internet. And I needed to make a film.
I wrote a short film based on a song from
the show - “Slingin’
the Slang,” the very song I was working on that day I sat down to watch The
Big Sleep. The music is by the divine Georgia
Stitt.
We’ve launched a Kickstarter
to fund the film, and it will ultimately be the centerpiece of a website loaded
with mysteries to solve, blogs from characters, recommendations of great books
and movies - all designed to save the future of noir fiction and film - and
create more little geeks who will grow up to use their creative powers for good
and not evil.
Log
on and get involved. TADA! Youth Theater is a non-profit, so donations to
the Kickstarter
are tax-deductible!
I gotta dangle now - the gumshoe’s
waiting for me, and everything’s gonna be jake.
For more about Lisa and to get updates on the project, follow on Twitter @SamSpadeMystery
