Eight Cheers for the Music Man

By Gerald Clarke

For years people have been saying that the Academy Awards ceremony is the dullest, as well as the longest, show on earth. This year the producers took note. Faced with tumbling TV ratings, they trimmed the production to a svelte 3 hr. 9 min. (37 minutes less than 1984), banned long speeches and jazzed up the musical numbers. As a result, they met half their goal: this year's ceremony was not one of the world's longest shows. But except for the introduction of a beguiling elephant--symbol of A Passage to India --it was still one of the most boring. The ratings were the lowest ever.

There were no real surprises. One of the women from the year's three farm movies (Country, The River and Places in the Heart) was almost certain to be named Best Actress. And one of them was: Sally Field, for her role as the struggling widow in Places in the Heart. Best Supporting Actress went to the almost inevitable choice, Peggy Ashcroft, a wonderful English stage star who has infrequently been seen on film, for her performance as Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India. The night's few authentic moments included Dr. Haing S. Ngor, who survived torture in Cambodia to appear in The Killing Fields, and thanked "God, Buddha" for winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

But for the most part, the evening belonged to Amadeus, the fictionalized account of the last years of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It won eight awards in all, including those for Best Picture, Best Director (Milos Forman), Best Actor (F. Murray Abraham for his role as Salieri, Mozart's nemesis) and Best Screenplay Adaptation (to Peter Shaffer, who rewrote his hit play). Tom Hulce, 31, also received a Best Actor nomination for his all-American, Huckleberry Finn interpretation of Mozart. Though he was not honored, Jeffrey Jones, 38, deserves a crown of his own for his portrayal of the blandly arrogant Emperor Joseph II.

The eight Oscars were not a record; 1959's Ben-Hur set the mark with eleven little gold-plated statues. But it was a triumphant rebound for Forman, 53, the Czechoslovak director whose five awards in 1976 for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest were followed by two commercial disappointments, Hair and Ragtime. "The Academy members are fans of people like Milos who take chances and succeed," says Director Ivan Passer, one of Forman's best friends. "They like Cinderella stories, and they like to make them come true. That was in their power this year, and they did it."

If the lavish Amadeus is not exactly Cinderella, it is an odd choice for so much Hollywood glory. It is long (2 hr. 38 min.), without the epic quality that often marks lengthy pictures. Its theme, moreover, is rarefied: God's inexplicable gift of genius to a lout (Mozart, as Shaffer conceives his character), and his assignment of mediocrity to someone who is eminently deserving (the devout Salieri). But the biggest obstacle is Mozart, whose very name intimidates many moviegoers. The picture has prospered anyway, grossing $34 million in the U.S. and Canada even before the awards.

What is the explanation? Forman has the best answer. "If people like it, they like it for the same reason the play excited me. It was a very entertaining evening in the theater, and yet I learned a lot I had never known before. I believe that people also identify with the characters. There is a little of Mozart in each of us, and perhaps a great deal of Salieri." For Forman and Shaffer the challenge was to transform Shaffer's stage play, where much is left to the imagination, into a sumptuous movie that includes fully staged operas, grand palaces and hundreds of beautifully costumed extras. For five months the two men worked in virtual isolation in Forman's Connecticut home. At first, Shaffer found disconcerting the process of dismantling his original handiwork. Finally, he says, "I decided it was better to make a good film honoring cinematic laws rather than to make a bad one by retaining my favorite bits."

The Oscar-night triumph will probably transform Amadeus from a moderately successful film into a big hit. "We now have a chance to make $60 million or better in domestic box office," says Producer Saul Zaentz. "And we have a chance to reach an audience that is afraid of classical music, afraid of Mozart." Orion Pictures has deliberately distributed the film to only a limited number of theaters, hoping to create the feeling that it was special, an "event," in the word of Orion's president of distribution, Robert Cheren.

To capture the elusive youth market, Orion provided MTV with an Amadeus video; it consists of excerpts from the movie intercut with clips of 27 rock stars: Mozart meets Michael Jackson. In addition to the music video, the sound-track album is No. 1 on Billboard magazine's classical-albums list; it even has a place on the pop charts.

And of course it is ultimately Mozart--the musician, not the character--who, with a little help from his Hollywood friends, has turned Amadeus into such an unlikely hit. "The true magic of the movie is in the music," says Abraham, 45. "It's the first time in the history of film that music has been the central figure. Amadeus has wonderful acting, directing and costumes, but it is the music that sustains it."

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/New York and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles