‘TANTRUMS, TRAIN WRECKS AND FREAK-OUTS’
King of camp producer Ryan Murphy eyes Charles and Diana, Jamie Portman writes.
Does Prince Harry really deserve this?
Must he and other members of the royal family now fall into the clutches of Hollywood’s king of camp — producer Ryan Murphy?
Harry earned a lot of sympathy a few days ago when he talked openly about his continuing anguish over the 1997 death of his mother, Princess Diana.
But even as Harry struggles to put this trauma behind him, Murphy and the FX cable network continue plotting a 10-part 2018 drama series dealing with the catastrophic marriage of his parents, Charles and Diana, and its lacerating aftermath.
Exploitive? Undoubtedly. But it also promises to be compellingly watchable.
Murphy has come a long way since his days as a celebrity journalist for the Miami Herald. He’s now a significant power player in the entertainment industry — perhaps its most accomplished purveyor of slickly executed trash.
But no — sometimes more than trash. Last year’s, The People v. O.J. Simpson was a superb re-enactment of an infamous murder trial and deserved its accolades. However, Murphy is more likely to be remembered for Nip/Tuck, his creepy series about plastic surgeons, or for that notorious American Horror Story episode in which Franka Potente plays a deeply disturbed woman who beats up antiSemites in bars and ends up in an asylum professing to be Anne Frank.
The Murphy brand has lately been on addictive display in his latest enterprise — a new serialized drama series called Feud. This initial eight-episode entry chronicles the scalding personal and professional warfare between two legendary stars — Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Charles and Diana will be next year’s victims.
This year’s Feud may be junk food but in terms of production values, it has, in its own peculiar and sometimes historically dubious way, been a class act. It stars Susan Sarandon as a feisty Davis and Jessica Lange as a paranoid, manipulative Crawford, and focuses on the turbulent 1962 shoot of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, a horror film that those two aging holdovers from Hollywood’s golden age saw as a potential career-saver. Instead, it accelerated their mutual loathing. Theirs was a world in which Davis could famously say of her co-star, “She’s slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie.”
In Feud, that loathing reaches its zenith in the episode dealing with the Oscars — an episode that sees an alcoholic Joan, seething and inconsolable after being denied a nomination for Baby Jane, plotting a revenge of sorts against Bette, who has been nominated — but loses.
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is now regarded as a camp classic — an image eagerly reinforced by Murphy and his team in their fictionalized recreation of two aging tigresses intent on clawing each other to bits.
Entertainment journalists with long memories will remember Murphy’s presence on the junket circuit and his fascination with divas. He now indulges that fascination from a position of power, but one can see a linkage in what he’s doing now with his high-camp journalistic celebration of Bette Midler in 1991: “All curves and cashmere and billowy softness, she looks like a Botticelli subject on Slimfast,” he burbled. “The famous bosom spills precariously out of a jade green Armani suit. On her nose rests a pair of granny spectacles; on her head, a peroxided pineapple of a hairdo.”
It’s probably inevitable that something as juicy as the Charles and Diana train-wreck would tempt Murphy, given his success in giving melodrama a renewed high-gloss lease on life. He is, in his own way, a creative genius who — in the words of an Esquire profile — has brought “campy queerness” to mainstream Hollywood. And he has a thing for female victims, even when they bare their victimization like a medal. He knows what sells.
“Ryan Murphy has a weakness for women having breakdowns,” critic Logan Scherer commented in The Atlantic, recently. Indeed, Scherer suggested that virtually every Murphy show is guilty of diva worship: “taking pleasure in the bad behaviour of gorgeous women ... Like many other gay men — including myself, Murphy finds beauty and high style in scenes of disgraced femininity: tantrums, train wrecks and freak-outs, and the runny mascara, wild eyes and frizzed-out hair that come along with them.”
Feud displayed these histrionics in abundance. But what of next year’s Charles and Diana series? Murphy told the Hollywood Reporter last month that “we’re approaching these people with love and understanding and kindness.”
One wonders. There’s a moment in Feud when Susan Sarandon, excellent as Bette Davis, talks about the pleasures of taking one of her two Oscar statues to bed with her. It’s a moment ripe with sleazy subtext, the kind of moment that Ryan Murphy and his colleagues have trouble resisting.
Will similar moments arise in next year’s Charles and Diana? Unlike the cat fight between Davis and Crawford, it will involve still-living, emotionally scarred human beings.
But perhaps Ryan Murphy’s entry into the world of British royalty was inevitable. After all, it’s more than 60 years since critic Malcolm Muggeridge was denounced for suggesting in a New Statesman article that the Royal Family was in danger of degenerating into a royal soap opera. But at least, Ryan Murphy’s involvement offers some assurance that the soap operatics will represent Hollywood at its slickest.
It’s probably inevitable that something as juicy as the Charles and Diana train wreck would tempt Murphy.