In an upstairs room in Edinburgh Playhouse, Douglas
Day Stewart looks more like a veteran of the New York Beat scene than a former naval
officer of note. Day Stewart is in town to talk about the new stage musical of
his Oscar-winning film, An Officer and A Gentleman, which arrives in Edinburgh
next week, and the veteran screen-writer oozes the sort of blue-collar charm
that reflects everything about the film.
As Day Stewart reflects on how his auto-biographical
tale of a working class kid called Zack worked his way up the ranks and fell for
local girl Paula became one of the biggest big-screen success stories of the
1980s, it’s clear from its brand new guise that it continues to be a labour of
love.
“It’s a dream come true,” he says. “I’d wanted to do
it for a long time, but I never had the right people to be involved with to
take it to that level.”
It was a trip to Japan that proved to be the clincher,
when Day Stewart saw the all-female Takarazuka troupe perform a version of his
story.
“It was fabulous,” he says. “They put their music and
their dancing, choreography and style into it, and I realised that, yeah, this
story really works anywhere, because the movie impacted the world.”
Somewhat fortuitously, Day Stewart met Sharleen Cooper
Cohen, the interior designer turned best-selling novelist, who went on to write
hit stage musicals including Sheba and Stormy Weather before producing others
on Broadway and the West End.
“She had a real dream of doing something with Officer,”
Day Stewart says, “and she had the belief and passion to keep this project
going through about fifteen years of experimentation, which has not always been
easy, and hasn’t always been successful. It took this current situation to
really bring this musical to the life and the spirit that it was meant to have
all along.”
That came when Day Stewart met Nikolai Foster, artistic
director of the Leicester-based Curve theatre.
“He understood this musical on the level that I’d
always felt it should take,” Day Stewart says. “The very first time we spoke we
talked about our love for the musical, Once. Up until then a lot of people had
been pushing for a more bells and whistles kind of version of my story. I’d
always resisted that, because my story was based on my own experiences of going
to this school, knowing that girl, knowing that drill instructor, living most
of the story’s elements.
“Then everyone got fooled by the fact that the movie
became this big blockbuster success. They thought, oh, another one from the
Hollywood hit factory. But it wasn’t. It was just a little film that started
very very small, and was marketed in little tiny theatres, so not everybody
could get in, and there were lines around the block. Suddenly we were up there
neck and neck with ET the whole year. But Nikolai understood it as a simple
working class story.”
Day Stewart was never meant to be a writer. His father
wanted him to become a lawyer. Inspired
by his uncle, Sidney Stewart, who wrote a best-seller called Give Us This Day,
about his experiences in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, Stewart broke into TV.
From 1959 he worked on shows including Bonanza and
Cannon, and scored a hit with TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, featuring
a pre Saturday Night Fever John Travolta. He also wrote the screenplay for The
Blue Lagoon, starring a young Brooke Shields. On a roll as he was, his script
for An Officer and A Gentleman was continually being sidelined.
“Nobody would touch it,” he says. “Everybody hated the
military, and it wasn’t until Reagan came into office and the climate changed a
little bit that anyone noticed it. Then Paramount Pictures was facing a writers’
strike, and out of nowhere they decided to make this movie, even though they
had no faith in it. They made it along with some of the biggest clunkers you’ve
ever heard of, and yet it found its audience.”
Day Stewart puts the success of An Officer and A
Gentleman down to the state of the world in the the early 1980s.
“There was a lack of love,” he says. “Everybody was
seeing everything in a very nihilistic fashion. All the movies were really
dark, and downer endings were the vogue at the time. But when Officer came
along and offered a Cinderella story that people could actually believe, it
gave everybody a kind of a hope. We were starving for a positive message, and today
people are starving for that even more than they were in 1982. Everything is
just dark, dark, dark right now, and I think people wanna’ be lifted up where
they belong more than ever.”
With his first screenplay in twenty years, What About
Love, in post-production, a script for a sequel to An Officer and A Gentleman is
also in the works.
“I think I’ve taken a real exciting turn. I’ve gone
with the female empowerment movement of today, and made the story about the
daughter of Zack and Paula.”
One might argue that the musical of An Officer and A
Gentleman is in part a trailer for its follow-up, introducing both to a new
generation.
“I would love to see it get incestuous like that,” he
laughs.
The show itself is aiming for similar
cross-generational appeal.
“It’s not gonna’ disappoint the ardent aficionado of
the original film,” Day Stewart says. “And I think it will also inspire a new
generation of believers in the story. There’s nothing to stop a young person
from being able to see this as their own and adopt it. I keep thinking they’re
gonna’ go home to mom and dad and say, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta’ see this story, this
is really amazing,’ and they’ll say, ‘Oh, honey, we saw this story 35 years
ago….’”
An Officer and A Gentleman, Edinburgh Playhouse, July
2-7; King’s Theatre, Glasgow, September 10-15.
The Herald, June 28th 2018
ends
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