There’s a plan for Martin Scorsese to produce and John Carney to direct “a George Gershwin-inspired musical drama” — not a Gershwin biopic — called Fascinating Rhythm.
4.22 Variety excerpt: “An original musical, Fascinating Rhythm will draw creative influence from the life and music of Gershwin. However, the film is not expected to be a biopic. Instead, the story is centering on a young woman’s magical journey through past and present New York City. The Gershwin estate is on board and the movie will feature his music throughout.”
Excuse me but I always thought the famed Gershwin tune (written in 1924, when Gershwin was 25 or so) was called “Fascinatin’ Rhythmn.”
How many Millennials and Zoomers have even heard of Gershwin? You know the state of education in this country. What would be the point of learning about him anyway? MZs were born toward the end of the 20th Century and into the early 21st — why should they know or care about some Russian-Jewish musician (born Jacob Bruskin Gershowitz) who was born in Brooklyn in 1898? Some guy who never went online in his life, not once.
I’d like it understood that I hand-wrote an essay about the life and music of George Gershwin when I was nine years old. I included my own drawing of him. I’d been instructed by my third-grade teacher (Mrs. Phaff) to compose a paper on a classical musician. I complained to my mother that I was bored by the usual stuffy composers (I hadn’t yet discovered Peter Tchaikovsky), and so she turned me on to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” When I came back with my Gershwin essay Mrs. Phaff frowned and even scolded me somewhat. Gershwin, she said, was “too pop, too modern” — she’d been expecting a paper on Schumer or Handl or Mahler. My mother was enraged when I told her this.
