Natalie Portman ‘Black Swan’ dance flap just Hollywood selling the dream
Last Modified: Mar 28, 2011 05:45PM
This may come as a surprise to the millions of viewers who watch those preening fools stumbling about on “Jersey Shore,” but MTV actually stands for Music Television, and there was a time when videos dominated the channel.
When the movie “Flashdance” hit in 1983, MTV played a number of accompanying videos, including the title track by Irene Cara and “Maniac” by Michael Sembello. The videos featured snippets of scenes from the film, with Chicago’s Jennifer Beals as that welder-dancer with a dream.
Cut to a closeup of Jennifer’s glistening face as she works out or dances. Cut to medium and long shots of her working out like a Maniac or — what a feeling — auditioning for a panel of stoic ballet-school stiffs.
Turns out Ms. Beals didn’t do all the dancing. The primary double was French actress/dancer Marine Jahan — but when the “Flashdance” collector’s edition was released a few years ago, Entertainment Weekly noted, “Four actors actually appear in Alex’s ‘What a Feelin’ audition: Beals, Jahan, a female gymnast and a male break-dancer who donned a wig, leotard and tights . . . but refused to trim his mustache.”
Gotta love a guy who will sacrifice cinema verite for his rockin’ stache.
Pretty Woman. Er, women.
Seven years after “Flashdance,” another gorgeous actress made a splash with a fantasy-romance about a working-class gal who falls for an older, moneyed prince.
This time it was Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman.” The famous poster had a suit-clad Richard Gere standing back-to-back with Roberts, who is wearing shiny, knee-high boots and a form-fitting skirt and halter as she yanks his necktie and smiles widely.
It was a big poster. Huge.
It was Julia’s face but not her figure in the poster. Shelley Michelle provided the body for the poster, and parlayed that into a Playboy pictorial. On Michelle’s website, we’re told she’s doubled for Madonna, Sandra Bullock and Kim Basinger, among others.
Damn trickery! It’s as if the movies are selling us an illusion!
It was all me! Well, mostly me.
For generations, we’ve seen actors promoting their films on talk shows, telling the hosts they did “95 percent of their own stunts.” They love to talk about how they learned to play the cello or mastered the three-point shot or endured a Marine-level boot camp for their latest role. I’m fairly certain Tom Cruise considers things like parachutes and body armor and brakes on motorcycles to be bothersome precautions.
No doubt many a thespian plunges himself into a role and is adept at learning any number of physical skills — but at the end of the day, it’s called acting because they have to pretend. You can’t really become an Olympic-level boxer in six months, you’re not actually an FBI agent just because you spent weeks hanging out with the real deal — and you’re not capable of dancing “Swan Lake” even if you’ve spent a year and half immersing yourself in the world of dance.
There’s a controversy surrounding Natalie Portman’s Oscar-winning performance in “Black Swan,” after Sarah Lane, the ballerina who was Portman’s double, claimed Natalie did only 5 percent of the dancing. Benjamin Millepied, the film’s choreographer (and Portman’s fiance), told the L.A. Times “85 percent” of the dancing was done by Portman, and Fox Searchlight issued a statement disputing Lane’s version.
No one’s disputing that Portman’s face was digitally grafted onto Lane’s body for some of the more intricate dance scenes. (Similar technology allowed one actor to play the Winkelvoss twins in “The Social Network.” One actor’s head, two bodies.)
Lane is upset she wasn’t given more credit. She tells Entertainment Weekly, “[Portman] doesn’t look like a professional dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff.”
And there goes THAT wedding baby shower invite.
News bulletin: Portman’s Oscar win didn’t come because she got super-skinny and flitted about onstage. She got it for all those Academy-friendly histrionics. The big, crazy-ass performance.
I’m about as much of an expert on dancing as Charles Barkley, but given that Lane is a soloist with the American Ballet Theatre, I’m sure she has impeccable form onstage. But she’s showing bad form with the grousing about “Black Swan.” It wasn’t her movie. That the Oscar campaign for Portman included a glossy semi-myth that she transformed herself into a ballerina for the role only means Hollywood’s doing what it has always done.
Selling the dream.
Copyright © 2011 — Sun-Times Media, LLC
