[Cinema] Rent [2005]

Director: Chris Columbus

Producer: Michael Barnathan, Chris Columbus, Robert De Niro

Written by: Jonathan Larson (play)
Steve Chbosky & Chris Columbus (screenplay)

Music by: Jonathan Larson

Starring:
Rosario Dawson
Taye Diggs
Wilson Jermaine Heredia
Jesse L. Martin
Idina Menzel
Adam Pascal
Anthony Rapp
Tracie Thoms


Rent, directed by Chris Columbus (Harry Potter), is a movie based on award-winning Broadway Musical of the same title. Rent, the musical first opened in New York City on April 29 1996 at the Nederlander Theatre and is the seventh longest running musical in Broadway and had won Tony and the Pulitzer award.

The original idea came from playwright Billy Aronson, who was inspired by Pucini's opera La bohème to create a contemporary musical set in the noise of modern New York. In 1989 Jonathan Larson, a 29-year-old composer, got together with Aronson to swap ideas and Larson came up with the title and suggested downtown New York, where he lived to be the setting. In 1991, he asked Billy if he could use the original concept on which they had collaborated and make Rent his own. Agreement was met.

Jonathan Larson lived for Rent for several years, making several rewrites and changes and writing hundreds of songs for the show- 44 are in the final version. Even as the show solidified, it proved insanely popular. Unfortunately, Larson would not live to see its true success: he died from an undiagnosed aortic dissection in the early morning of January 25, 1996, just a few hours after the musical had its final dress rehearsal at the New York Theatre Workshop; the show was to open that very day.

The show did premiere at the New York Theatre Workshop the very day Jonathan Larson died, January 25, 1996, upon the request of his parents, who were flying in anyway to see the show. That Opening Night show, according to first-hand accounts of cast and audience members, began as a simple sit-down performance, but around the part "La Vie Boheme A", the cast began to do the full performance. It was so popular that a move to Broadway was inevitable; it premiered at the previously-derelict Nederlander Theatre, at the time the only Broadway show south of 42nd Street, on April 29, 1996.

Like the original musical, Rent follows the lives of a handful of New York young astists over the course of a year as they struggle with the purpose of living, housing, relationships, loss, and AIDS.

Characters include Roger, a musician suffering from HIV and recovering from heroin addiction; Mark, a struggling film maker; Maureen, Mark's bisexual performance artist ex-girlfriend; Tom Collins, a teacher at New York University (NYU) who is HIV-positive and a friend and former roommate of Roger and Mark; Angel, Collins' drag queen lover, also HIV-positive and a street percussionist/musician; Benny, an old friend and another former roommate of Mark and Roger who later became their landlord; Mimi, an HIV-positive dancer and heroin junkie; and Joanne, a Harvard-educated lawyer and Maureen's girlfriend.

Production began March 15, 2005. The film's limited release date in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto on November 11, 2005 was cancelled, and the official premiere was at New York's Ziegfeld Theatre on November 17, 2005.

In the 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the character Yitzhak is seen wearing a Rent shirt, and later announces his intention to play Angel in a Polynesian production of Rent. The 2004 movie Team America: World Police included a parody of the musical entitled Lease, the portion depicted in the film being a showy song entitled "Everyone Has AIDS," a parody of the movie's message with the piano bassline of La Vie Boheme.

Many film critics felt the movie had captured the spirit but not the energy of the live show. Others felt that Chris Columbus had not been able to make the show translate well to the screen. There was a feeling among them that Columbus did not understand film musicals as a whole and was not the right person to direct.

Many RENT-HEADS were upset about many of the changes that were made to the film in adapting it from stage. Primarily the biggest complaints were about the cutting of the second two-thirds of "Goodbye Love" and "Halloween", both of which were filmed, and "Contact" and "Christmas Bells", which were not. The cut material is considered by some to be among the most popular pieces in the show.