Hollywood's 'Rent' Check

The Broadway Hit Takes a Gamble by Bringing Its Cast, and Conventions, to Film

Of course they wanted the parts. Desperately. But in the laboriously drawn-out process of transferring "Rent" to the big screen, word had filtered to the original cast members of the Broadway musical that the filmmakers -- as often happens in stage-to-movie ventures -- were looking into celebrity power grids of higher voltage.

"We had heard we were going to be replaced with bigger names," says Idina Menzel, a Tony Award winner for her portrayal of the green-skinned witch in the hit musical "Wicked." Overtures were made to brand-name pop stars -- Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Usher among them -- and Chris Columbus, the latest major-league director to be attached to the project, went so far as to sit down with Timberlake.

Menzel braced herself. "I said to my agent: 'Just don't have them waste my time. Don't let them give me a pity meeting.' "

Pity, it turns out, was far from what the director had in mind. Long a fan of the show, Columbus -- director of blockbusters such as "Mrs. Doubtfire," the two "Home Alone" films and the first two "Harry Potter" movies -- ultimately decided that doing justice to "Rent" meant giving the roles back to Menzel and other actors present at the birth.

"It was the power of their relationships that I was taken with," Columbus says. "As I started to meet with the original cast members, I saw that they had created a bond and a kind of chemistry that I've never seen before."

Which is how it came to pass that six of the eight original lead performers of "Rent" -- among them heartthrob Taye Diggs and Jesse L. Martin of "Law & Order" -- made it into the roughly $40 million movie version of a brash, poignantly melodic rock opera. Based on Puccini's "La Boheme," "Rent" opened off-Broadway early in 1996, moved to Broadway a few months later, copped a Pulitzer Prize and became a touchstone for a younger generation eager for a show it could embrace as its own.

Now, the wisdom of Columbus's choices for the project -- indeed, the choice of Columbus himself -- is being put to the customary box-office plebiscite. With "Rent" opening Wednesday across the country, the musical question of the moment is: Will American moviegoers find room in their hearts for a Lower East Side story replete with HIV-positive lovers and singing junkies? (And with Rosario Dawson -- one of two actors not from the original -- playing an exotic dancer with a thing for handcuffs and heroin?)

"Rent" moves to a cineplex near you after years of false starts and delays, flirtatious interludes with such auteurs as Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, and endless debate over how a gritty musical with little dialogue might be brought to the screen. What seems to have stayed constant was faith in the material's potential.

Jeffrey Seller, one of the stage version's producers and an executive producer of the movie, can offer chapter and verse on how "Rent" got stuck in idle in Hollywood, and the difficulties directors encountered in the effort to reinvent it. "Scorsese admired the piece but didn't know what to do with it," notes Seller, most recently a producer of the Broadway musical "Avenue Q." "The hero here is Chris, because he had a burning desire to make the movie. And he had a vision of how to make it."

That vision will be hotly debated in the coming weeks, especially among the musical's legions of devotees -- "Rentheads" -- who over the years have helped to ensure the show's status as a Broadway phenomenon. "Rent" is the eighth-longest-running show in Broadway history, and since 1996 has grossed $460 million from its various North American productions. And Rentheads attending early film screenings are having a go at the movie online, parsing all 2 hours 10 minutes of it, song by song by song.

Anthony Rapp, who for the movie reprises his role as Mark Cohen, the Scarsdale kid turned downtown documentary filmmaker, says he has come across a lot of naysaying on the Web, "a similar kind of skepticism in the press and online communities," questioning the emotionalism of the film and the contemporary relevance of the story. "Rent" is about young people struggling with life-and-death issues -- but it's also about the need to stay true to a bohemian ideal, to one's artistic soul, to resist the temptation in a materialistic age to sell out.

Is there, perhaps, a perception among the cognoscenti that "Rent" -- under the stewardship of the guy who wrote "The Goonies" -- has gone a bit soft? "There is this thing about this show, that it has always worn its heart on its sleeve," Rapp insists, "and there are people who don't want that emotional content in their art."