Every block in the Five Towns has one house that goes all the way on Halloween. The fog machine, the twelve-foot skeleton, the dad on the porch in full makeup who will not break character while your kid takes a third Kit Kat. You know which houses they are. So do your kids.
Charles Addams drew that house for fifty years. His family first turned up in The New Yorker in August 1938, nameless, living in a Victorian pile modeled on one he got caught breaking into as a boy in Westfield, New Jersey. The joke never changed and never got old. The weirdos on the hill are the happiest, most devoted family in America. Everyone else is the problem.
On Thursday, October 29, two nights before Halloween, the Cognitive Film Society is proud to present Barry Sonnenfeld’s The Addams Family (1991) at the Gold Theater — in celebration of Hewlett High School’s production of The Addams Family musical, which opens November 20.
Creepy and Kooky
The film opens on an Addams cartoon brought to life: the whole family on the roof, carolers below, a cauldron of boiling oil tipping over the edge. It never lets up from there. Sonnenfeld had spent the eighties as the Coen brothers’ cinematographer — Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller’s Crossing (1990) — and this was the first thing he ever directed. You can tell. Every shot is a single-panel gag with a wide-angle lens on it.
The production was a mess. Orion ran out of money and sold the picture to Paramount while it was still shooting. Two cinematographers went down, so Sonnenfeld shot it himself. It opened in November 1991 to the biggest non-holiday weekend Paramount had ever had and made $191 million worldwide, and a generation of kids learned to snap on the twos and fours.
(Snap, Snap)
Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston are the reason it works. Gomez and Morticia are the only married couple in American movies who are still visibly, ravenously in love after two kids and a houseful of relatives. He fences with his lawyer and crashes model trains for fun. She snips the blooms off the roses and keeps the thorns. Julia plays Gomez as pure appetite, and Huston — in a face pulled taut by elastic straps that gave her headaches for the entire shoot — never raises her voice and never loses a scene.
And then there’s Wednesday. Christina Ricci was ten years old, and the deadpan she perfected here has outlived the movie, the sequel, the cartoons and a Netflix series. When Sonnenfeld wanted to leave Fester’s true identity hanging at the end, it was Ricci who argued him out of it. He later admitted the actors were right. She was ten.
Altogether Ooky
The 1991 film has exactly one musical number, the Mamushka, in which Gomez and Fester celebrate their reunion by throwing knives at each other. Test audiences hated how long it ran and Sonnenfeld cut it down. He should have let it go on for an hour.
The musical came much later. Andrew Lippa’s The Addams Family opened on Broadway in April 2010 with Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth, and it has since become one of the most performed shows in American high schools, for a simple reason: Wednesday is grown up, in love with a nice boy from Ohio, and dreading dinner with his parents. Every teenager in the cast knows exactly what that’s about.
Hewlett High School performs it Friday, November 20 and Saturday, November 21. The same building sent us the soloists who sang before The Way We Were last month, so consider Thursday the warm-up act. Come see where the family came from, then go see what the kids do with it.
The Evening
7:00 PM — Program begins: a short introduction to Charles Addams and the film
7:10 PM — The Addams Family (1991), 100 minutes
~8:50 PM — Out the door before the library locks up at 9
Location: Gold Theater at the Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library, 1125 Broadway, Hewlett, NY 11557
FREE ADMISSION. Free and open to everyone, as always. Costumes encouraged.
And save the date: Noir-vember returns on Sunday, November 22 at 1:00 PM with Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987).
Cara mia.
See you Thursday night.
The Cognitive Film Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to cultivating film culture through educational programming and community engagement.