Chasing Down the 'Dreamgirls'

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Image credit: Dreamgirls: David James

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Heading into awards season, Dreamgirls may have a campaigning handicap in that Murphy pretty much stopped doing press interviews years ago. He's also markedly reclusive. How exactly he'll navigate a full-blown Oscar push remains a huge question mark. But the promotional assault, both to grease nominations and just to help jump-start box office for a movie in a tricky, fickle genre, is going full tilt on other fronts. Knowles sneak-previewed her song ''Listen'' — a tune not in the original score — as a bonus track on her latest album, B'Day. Foxx has been hustling the film for months, and Hudson's been doing meet-and-greet appearances, all in expectation of the heavier-duty promotion yet to come.

Meantime, Condon is fiddling with the myriad fine-tuning adjustments any movie needs but a musical, especially, demands. In a couple of scenes involving sung dialogue that tripped up early test audiences, he's made a few brief trims and substitutions — putting dialogue in place of melody — to help ease the potential discordancy of watching characters who sometimes sing directly to each other, not simply from a stage (as in Ray and Walk the Line).

He's also tweaking the visuals of Jennifer Hudson's big Effie White moment when the camera pulls back and back and she's left alone, belting out ''And I Am Telling You'' to an empty room because her group-mates have walked out on her. ''There's amazing stuff you can do,'' says Condon of the image-manipulation process. ''The shots right at the end where she's sort of just very lonely in the darkness? We're able to take out a few lights there. It makes it even eerier and more expressive.''

As was the case last December, Condon remains anxious about his Effie. He feels the weight of months of hype and expectation. He wonders how all those waves of anticipation will actually break. ''There is a sense of people wanting to take it down,'' he says. ''It worries me like crazy.''

Ready or not, here comes Effie.

Originally posted Nov 09, 2006 Published in issue #907 Nov 17, 2006 Order article reprints

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