Stage 28: the story of the story Part 2

Yes, Phantom of the Opera.

One of my first memories is of being in our basement when I was four-years-old, eating dinner with my parents and watching TV, when suddenly I heard the most beautiful music.

And this was high praise from me: I HATED music. Hated the songs we sang in Sunday school, hated the silly rock and roll my parents listened to, hated the ragtime my mother played on the piano. What I did like was classical music, but I considered it such a separate entity from the normal garbage I heard referred to as "music" that I didn't even classify it as such. It was a pretty sound, but not music, to my young mind. Music was crap*.

But this, this was something I'd never heard before, and that deep, spooky voiceover (anyone else remember it?) was calling it music. The images on the screen were also like nothing I'd ever seen before: hundreds of candles on elaborate iron stands in a black room, swirling red velvet drapes, a beautiful woman in a fragile-looking white dress, and then there was the man.

It was his profile, and his hands, he had beautiful hands. I was in love, though I didn't know that. I wanted to sit next to him and listen to him play his organ** and sing forever.

So sprouted the seeds of obsession.

Phantom was all consuming from that point onward, and I didn't even get to see the musical until I was seven, three years after seeing that first commercial. Every film version of the Phantom I could find, I had my parents rent ad nauseum (bear in mind that these were the days before home Internet access, so it wasn't like I was looking these up on IMDB. I just scoured every video store I could find). My father taped a few versions off television, and I watched the tapes so much that today, they're just about broken. I started piano lessons when I was seven, and hated playing (except for classical music, which I had by then learned was also music), but when I got the Phantom piano book for Christmas, I knew them all after a day or two. I started singing by reading the libretto at the back of the Complete Phantom of the Opera. I bloody well talked to Erik. That is not an exaggeration, I constantly spoke aloud to a fictional character. I was a very lonely only child. That, and there's a lot of syphillis on my father's side***.

Phantom as a focused obsession faded into the background eventually, though I still watched the movies often, but the aesthetics, musically and artistically, never did. I loved darkness.

So that night as I sat on the bus and found myself besieged by several of my younger selves to go back to Phantom for inspiration, that commercial, and the montage of images that started it all beckoned first.

I am proud to say that I never even considered the idea of a straight-up fanfic.

I retrieved that body of knowledge from where it had been collecting dust in my memory, and began to turn it over, and look at it from different angles. I kept coming back to the movies. So many movies. All of them had one thing in common: the title. All of them had one thing in common with the original novel: the title. Aside from the first silent film and a very short, cheaply made children's animation in the 80s, all the Phantom movies had pretty much junked the original novel, and just used the basic concept of a crazy man who may or may not be deformed being obsessed with a beautiful young girl who may or may not be a very talented singer. I tried to picture what a truly faithful Phantom movie would look like. It would be tough to do without looking like a prat. There were so many clichés intertwined with Phantom by now that had served a purpose in the original work, but had been relentlessly abused by filmmakers since. The depth of the characters had been stripped away layer by layer, until they could have been convincingly played by cardboard cutouts (I refer you once again to the animated version of the 80s. And the Dario Argento version of the 90s, ba-zing). If someone who truly loved the story, the original story, were to take the reins of yet another remake, what would the result be?

And that's when I first met Telly.

* I should point out that I've since developed a tolerance for rock and roll, a cautious affection for ragtime, and like a whole bunch of other music as well. Classical still kicks your ass though.
** Who's the pervert now, pervert?
*** Just kidding, or am I****?
**** I am.