Girlfriends (1988)

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Movie
German title Girlfriends
Original title Beaches
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1988
length 123 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Garry Marshall
script Mary Agnes Donoghue
production Bonnie Bruckheimer ,
Margaret South ,
Bette Midler
music Georges Delerue
camera Dante Spinotti
cut Richard Halsey
occupation
synchronization

Friends is a film drama by Garry Marshall from the year 1988 . The literary film adaptation based on the novel Beaches by Iris Rainer Dart with Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey in the leading roles shows the changeable friendship between a wealthy Californian and a budding artist who has achieved world fame. The film received an Oscar nomination for Best Production Design and has been nominated for other awards. Bette Midler produced the film with her newly founded production company All Girl Productions and was also responsible for the soundtrack. This is considered her most successful album , with two Grammys and multiple gold and platinum awards.

action

Famous singer CC Bloom received a message shortly before an important concert during her tour, prompting her to drop everything and leave for San Francisco . She goes out of her way to get this done as quickly as possible.

A few decades earlier, wealthy half-orphan Hillary Whitney and child star CC Bloom met as children on the beach in Atlantic City and quickly became friends. CC returns to the Bronx and Hillary to San Francisco, after which they both start pen pals that lasted for years. When Hillary graduates, she breaks out of her life and moves in with her best friend, CC. They see each other for the first time since childhood. CC, who is no longer a star and lives in poor conditions, takes in Hillary and they both live together from then on. Hillary herself has left her family and wealth behind and is realizing herself as a civil rights advocate, while CC tries to get her career going. During a lousy job, CC meets the theater director John Pierce, who books her for his performances and CC soon gives the first leading roles.

CC falls in love with John, but he only has eyes for Hillary and sleeps with her, to which CC reacts with jealousy. No real argument can develop, however, as Hillary must return to San Francisco to care for her dying father. More years passed in which the pen pals were intensified again, Hillary married and CC made the hoped-for career. When Hilary comes back to New York after a few years and visits CC, a lot has changed in both lives, so that the relationship to each other is very cold and distant. A heated argument breaks out that divides the two. CC tries to maintain the pen friendship again, but all letters come back unopened.

So more years pass in which not everything changes for the best. Hillary divorces her husband after cheating on her, and CC also divorces John Pierce because they have grown apart. CC's career is also in a mess, so that she has to accept increasingly poor jobs to be active at all. One of these jobs takes her to San Francisco, where Hilary finds the courage to visit CC again for the first time. After a little argument in which they speak out, both can reconcile.

However, Hillary is pregnant by her ex-husband Michael and plans to have her child and raise it on her own. Since CC's career doesn't really exist anymore, she decides to help Hillary. It was only when her ex-husband John Pierce gave her the chance to play an important leading role on Broadway again that she left everything where she was and did not return until she was born to help Hillary. Then they part ways again and their pen friendship intensifies again.

A few years later, Hillary becomes terminally ill with cardiomyopathy . CC is horrified that she cannot help her best friend. She cancels all appointments and spends one last summer with her friend in a beach house, where, after an initial argument, she also gets closer to Hillary's daughter Victoria and the three spend a mostly relaxed time together. Hillary's health is deteriorating noticeably and the hope for a donor heart is not fulfilled. The news that Hillary is dying is the one that CC received at the beginning of the film.

This news puts CC in such a state of shock that she travels half the country to be with her friend for the last few hours. Hilary dies and CC cancels their entire tour to take care of Victoria. In the will, one of Hillary's last wishes was that CC adopt her daughter so she could look after her. Victoria spends her life by CC's side during her music tour and listens to the stories of the lifelong friendship between CC and Hillary.

production

The director Garry Marshall wanted more humor in the script, which the scriptwriter Mary Agnes Donoghue didn't like, so Marshall fired her and hired some comedy writers from New York to rewrite the script. She then went to one of the studio managers and spoke to him. He, however, had her assured that she should wait three weeks for Marshall's script to be finished. But when this was done, it was so "terrible" that the comedy writers were subsequently fired and Donoghue was reinstated as the sole writer. But Marshall himself didn't really stick to the final script, so it ended up being more sentimental than the actual script, which Donoghue described as "tough and serious" . However, Marshall stuck it more closely to the novel, which also received all sentimental scenes. And yet Donoghue criticized him and commented on how "wonderful it is how much a director can change a script".

The film was shot from April 26, 1988 to July 1988 in California and New York , including Coney Island , Newport Beach , Laguna Beach and San Francisco . The opening scene is at the Hollywood Bowl , Hilary's home in Pasadena and Hilary doing research on her illness at the Denison Library at Scripps College .

There was a rumor that the sequel to the novel Beaches , in English Beaches 2: I'll Be There , would also be adapted into a television film by Bette Midler.

Reviews

The film received mostly mediocre reviews. The Rotten Tomatoes website counted 7 positive out of 24 professional reviews, which corresponds to a value of 29%. However, the film was received extremely positively by the general public, because at the same time 88% of 70,998 users rated the film positively. This in turn is confirmed by the Internet Movie Database , another platform on which normal users can submit their film reviews, because 18,265 users there gave the film an above-average 6.8 out of 10 possible points (as of September 25, 2016).

English language reviews

Janet Maslin wrote in the renowned liberal daily New York Times that girlfriends are a film full of "bitter feuds, tearful accusations, loving affirmations and a deadly disease." And although the actors do their best, the story is just too normal and self Friends of melodramas would expect more irony.

Although the film begins with "impending disaster and an undertone of bittersweet melancholy", said the renowned film critic Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times , the rest of it consists of nothing more than "old film clichés". For him, the film seems incomplete and is rather "constructed from other films [...] which is why he lacks the spontaneity of life". He also noted that the respective characters are doing smarter than they are, because if they were, they would realize "that their life is a bad B-movie ".

For Rita Kempley of the Washington Post , Girlfriends was "a buddy film about love between two dissimilar souls and friendship that forms against all odds". And although the film is mainly driven by Midler's humor and voice, it has “more endings than Beethoven's Ninth ”. But despite its weaknesses, it is a women’s film that points to the value of friendships.

German-language reviews

The TV magazine prisma came to the conclusion that the director had succeeded in making a "very interesting film". The film has its "strong moments" and the "realistic sequence of tragic comedy [is] enriched with a lot of kitsch and teardrop-pressure drama".

Karl-Eugen Hagmann ( film-dienst ) praised the "top-class cast" roles and saw the film as a special star vehicle for Bette Midler, who above all plays herself. He also liked the fact that Marshall "repeatedly breaks up sentimental scenes with comical peaks and thus [circumnavigates] the worst melodramatic cliffs". And also the “pictures are of exquisite beauty and stylish smoothness”. However, the "detailed [and] straightforward" film is too superficial to surprise.

Andreas Obst said in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that girlfriends "are hardly worth mentioning if the film did not have two remarkable actresses". Above all, it is thanks to the two leading actresses Hershey and Midler that the film is halfway interesting, because "whenever the film is about to finally crash into insignificance," The divine Miss M. "pops out of the backdrop again Jumping devil out of the box, twisting her mouth into a grotesque pout, rolling her eyes frighteningly funny and stalking through the scenery as a protest of an excellent actress against the mediocrity of her role. ”However, it should also be noted positively that it was in the decades-long Hollywood -Tradition of Buddy-Film someone finally succeeded in showing a film about a female friendship, with which he managed "to equalize a decade-long neglect in one fell swoop."

In 1996, Der Spiegel mentioned girlfriends as a “cliché story”, in which it was lucky that Bette Midler was involved, since otherwise the film would be “harder to take”.

Cast and dubbing

role actor German speaker
Cecilia 'CC' Carol Bloom Bette Midler Joseline Gassen
Hillary Whitney Essex Barbara Hershey Kerstin Sanders-Dornseif
John Pierce John Heard Hartmut Becker
Michael Essex James Read Detlef Bierstedt
Judge Hector Elizondo Friedrich Georg Beckhaus

So that the then 40-year-old Barbara Hershey could play a younger character around 20, she had her lips injected with collagen and her face tightened . Hershey was not only under strong criticism, but also started a trend that many other celebrities soon followed, including the singer Madonna for a short time . The later actress and presenter Lisa Rinna , who saw the film with her friend, also began to inject collagen into her lips and later to have silicone implants made.

Not only did Gary Marshall play a small mini-role as casting director in the film , he also brought family members on set. So his son Scott Marshall played the while his second son Lori Marshall played a patron in the Tavern on the Green . and his daughter Kathleen Marshall both worked as a production assistant and played housekeeping. His wife Barbara Marshall also played a small role as a nurse.

music

Beaches
Soundtrack by Bette Midler

Publication
(s)

December 1988

Label (s) Atlantic Records

Format (s)

LP, CD

Genre (s)

Vocal music

Title (number)

10

running time

33 min 54 s

production

Arif Mardin

A side

  1. "Under The Boardwalk" (Arthur Resnick, Kenny Young) - 4:18 (incl. Instrumental intro)
  2. "Wind Beneath My Wings" (Larry Henley, Jeff Silbar) - 4:52
  3. "I've Still Got My Health" ( Cole Porter ) - 1:32
  4. "I Think It's Going To Rain Today" ( Randy Newman ) - 3:31
  5. "Otto Titsling" ( Bette Midler , Jerry Blatt, Charlene Seeger, Marc Shaiman ) - 3:13

B side

  1. "I Know You By Heart" ( Dean Pitchford , George Merrill, Marc Shaiman) - 4:40 * (duet with David Pack)
  2. "The Glory Of Love" (Billy Hill) - 3:16
  3. "Baby Mine" (Neil Washington, Frank Churchill) - 2:27 (The CD also contains an alternate version)
  4. “Oh, Industry!” (Bette Midler, Wendy Waldman) - 4:06
  5. "The Friendship Theme" (Georges Delerue) - 1:59 (Instrumental)

The soundtrack to girlfriends became Bette Midler's most successful music album. In particular, the two single releases Under The Boardwalk and Wind Beneath My Wings have sold millions of times. After the producers heard the song by country singer Gary Morris , they, director Marshall and Bette Midler wanted to use this song for their film, so they invited songwriter Jeff Silbar to film the film to present Midler's version. He heard Midler's dramatic rendition and saw the use of the song during the scene in which Hilary dies and was persuaded to release the song. Not only did the single reach # 1 on the Billboard charts , it also went gold, while the album went platinum twice. Even with the Grammy Awards in 1990 was Wind Beneath My Wings both as single of the year as the Song of the Year award.

Adaptations

Remake

Lifetime Television aired a remake of the film on January 22, 2017. Directed by Allison Anders , Idina Menzel can be seen in the role of CC, while Nia Long plays Hilary. The remake differs from the original in numerous details; Menzel contributed a reinterpretation of Wind Beneath My Wings to the film's soundtrack.

musical

In spring 2011 it was announced that there would be a musical version based on the novel by Iris Rainer Dart. Dart wrote the piece with Thom Thomas , the music is by David Aaron Austin ; the film music was not used. It premiered in February 2014 at the Signature Theater in Arlington , Virginia , directed by Eric D. Schaeffer . Alysha Umphress appeared as CC Bloom and Mara Davi as Bertie White.

Another production, again directed by Eric D. Schaeffer, was shown in 2015 at the Drury Lane Theater in Oakbrook , Illinois . The main roles this time played Shoshana Bean as CC and Whitney Bashor .

In 2019 the musical will be performed at the West End Theater in London .

Awards (selection)

Girlfriends received an Oscar nomination and was both nominated and awarded for other film awards:

publication

Freundinnen started in US cinemas on December 23, 1988 and was already able to gross 5.1 million US dollars in 706 cinemas on the opening weekend, which put it in third place on the cinema charts behind Twins - Zwillinge and Rain Man . Overall, the film came to a grossing of 57 million US dollars. The film started in West Germany on September 28, 1989 and was able to attract 100,994 viewers to the cinemas, making it number 100 on the German cinema charts in 1989.

The VHS was available from July 17, 1990, and the German DVD from January 24, 2003 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sabine Durrant : INTERVIEW / The only script, the only writer: The writer Mary Agnes Donoghue talks to Sabine Durrant about Hollywood, French and Saunders, herself and Mamie O'Rourke on independent.co.uk from December 16, 1993 (English) , accessed August 12, 2011
  2. ↑ Hollinger, p. 71.
  3. ↑ Box office / business for for girlfriends. imdb.com, accessed August 12, 2011 .
  4. ^ Filming locations for girlfriends. imdb.com, accessed August 12, 2011 .
  5. ^ Beaches (2010). rottentomatoes.com, accessed September 25, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Janet Maslin : Beaches (1988) Reviews / Film; A Friendship, On and Off the Rocks on nytimes.com, December 21, 1988; accessed August 12, 2011
  7. ↑ Roger Ebert: Beaches on suntimes.com of January 13, 1989 (English), accessed on August 12, 2011
  8. ^ Rita Kempley: 'Beaches' on washingtonpost.com January 13, 1989 (English), accessed August 12, 2011
  9. ↑ Friends - The Logic of Life on prisma-online.de , accessed on August 12, 2011
  10. ^ Critique by Karl-Eugen Hagmann in film-dienst 19/1989, accessed via Munzinger Online .
  11. ↑ Andreas Obst: In the cinema: "Freundinnen" with Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 2, 1989, p. 37
  12. ↑ SUNDAY 28.7. on Spiegel Online from Der Spiegel 30/1996 , accessed on August 12, 2011
  13. ↑ David Denby : … Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey are not seen at their best in Beaches. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels feels tired and remote in New York Magazine January 16, 1989, accessed August 12, 2011
  14. ↑ Barbara Hershey, Oscar material on ew.com from March 14, 1997 (English), accessed on August 12, 2011
  15. ↑ Marjorie Rosen: On the Cutting Edge at people.com, January 27, 1992, accessed August 12, 2011
  16. ↑ Cary Canoun: Silicone lip augmentation: not a good idea. on examiner.com on May 26, 2009, accessed August 12, 2011
  17. ↑ Dale Kawashima: Songwriter Jeff Silbar: How He Co-Wrote The Classic Hit, "Wind Beneath My Wings" at songwriteruniverse.com (English), accessed August 12, 2011
  18. ↑ Bette Midler MileStones at bootlegbetty.com (English), accessed August 12, 2011
  19. ↑ Beaches (2017) on imdb.com
  20. ↑ Beaches changes called ETonline, on April 25, 2018
  21. ↑ Kenneth Jones: EXCLUSIVE: Get Out Your Handkerchiefs! Beaches, the Musical, Is in the Works ( Memento of the original from August 3, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on playbill.com on April 28, 2011, accessed on August 12, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.playbill.com
  22. ↑ Joseph Marzullo: PHOTO EXCLUSIVE: Alysha Umphress and Mara Davi Rehearse Signature Theater's 'Beaches' . In: Playbill . February 11, 2014. Retrieved July 13, 2015.
  23. ↑ Tiffany Draut: 'Beaches' at Signature Theater . March 4, 2014. Retrieved July 13, 2015.
  24. ↑ Hedy Weiss: Test Of True Friendship Drives Emotional 'Beaches' Musical . In: Chicago Sun-Times . July 3, 2015. Archived from the original on July 9, 2015. Retrieved July 13, 2015.
  25. ↑ Beaches expected to play in London , etonline, accessed on April 25, 2018
  26. ↑ Awards for girlfriends. imdb.com, accessed August 12, 2011 .
  27. ↑ January 13-15, 1989. boxofficemojo.com, accessed August 12, 2011 .
  28. ↑ Beaches. boxofficemojo.com, accessed August 12, 2011 .
  29. ↑ TOP 100 DEUTSCHLAND 1989 on insidekino.de , accessed on August 12, 2011