Heath Ledger opened the door, I suppose; he was the first person I wrote about for Attention Must Be Paid who was younger at the time of death than I was at the time of writing. In fact, he’s one of the few people I’ve written about who was born after I was; I only make this exception for particularly interesting people who have already died. But the simple fact is, Pride would eventually make writing about people younger than I am when I write about them a necessity. Writing about the dead of the ’80s and ’90s for Pride pretty well means writing about the young. The too young, killed by a government that didn’t care enough about them to research a disease that destroyed a community.
One of the men killed, 41 at the time, was Howard Ashman. He was a star that burned so bright that it’s almost shocking how little he actually did. He has more mentions in his “accolades” section on Wikipedia than he has movie credits, and that’s even including his credits for the live action remakes that came literally decades after his death. He has more posthumous nominations than anyone else in Oscar history—three, including a win, for Beauty and the Beast, and one for Aladdin, losing to Tim Rice, who took over as lyricist after Ashman’s death.
In fact, he announced his illness to long-term songwriting partner Alan Menken after having won for The Little Mermaid. And then went on to write some really amazing—indeed, Oscar-winning as established—songs. Jeffrey Katzenberg considered Ashman and Walt to be the two angels watching every Disney production to help add the magic. He shaped the pattern of every Disney animated movie, codifying the “I Want Song” as something in every musical. In fact, he nicknamed his own “Part of Your World” “Somewhere That’s Dry,” a reference to “Somewhere That’s Green” from Little Shop of Horrors.
Because my goodness but we don’t talk about that man’s sense of humour enough. He could write the beautiful, heartwarming “Beauty and the Beast” and in the very same movie give us “Gaston.” And you can’t write Little Shop of Horrors without a sense of humour. (I’m told that a lot of productions change Audrey’s line “a big, enormous twelve-inch screen” because people don’t get the joke, and that makes me sad.) Yes, all right, he could give real emotion, but he could alternate between emotion and wry wit between lines, and that is a needle worth threading.
Aladdin was, at least in part, his idea. I could weep, thinking about what the Disney Renaissance would have looked like had he lived. Maybe we wouldn’t have had The Lion King, though I don’t see Ashman as completely unwilling to work with Elton John, and after all you could have more than one movie in production at a time. And he could’ve done so many things, even without Disney, and it’s just my biases that make me think about his future with Disney instead of, for example, on the stage, where he also produced good work. But oh, no matter where he would have worked, the work would have been so good, and we lost it.
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