Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times Elizabeth Lucas, left, director of “Clear Blue Tuesday,” a movie musical about 9/11, and Jan O’Dell, an actor in the movie who sustained a fractured skull on the real 9/11, near ground zero last week.There have been songs about Sept. 11, 2001, and there have been movies, and so it has always just a matter of time — 8 years and 51 weeks, it turns out — before New York learned whether it is ready for September 11: The Rock Musical.
Its actual title is “Clear Blue Tuesday,” a film opening at the Quad Cinema in Greenwich Village on Friday. Its cinematic forebears are “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” “ Moulin Rouge” and the adaptation of “Rent,” and its backers hope they have accidentally happened into the slipstream of “Glee,” a show that did not yet exist during the film’s 19-day shoot in 2007.
“Clear Blue Tuesday” (see trailer) is not about the attack itself, which occurs off camera in the opening scene and is conveyed with blowing dust and office paper. It is more interested in tracking the changes in the lives of 11 characters as the anniversaries flit past: 2002, 2003, 2004, and so on. The attractive and eccentric cast of New Yorkers fall in love and split up, lose jobs, get jobs, shack up — and sing, roughly one song per character.
The film, often doggedly cheerful, will not please uniformly, and only die-hard fans of musicals, very earnest people and Sept. 11 completists are likely to digest it whole.
The songs are all over the map, stylistically and thematically, and include one called “Help Me Help You,” sung by an executive firing a depressed underling, and “Spank It,” a hair-metal piece about playing the drums. In another song, “Reckless,” the singer’s character — a harpist and science fiction fanatic — imagines marrying an alien in space in a scene replete with twinkling stars and floating planets.
“I have very little interest, as a director, in naturalism,” said the director, Elizabeth Lucas. “I find naturalism a little pedestrian.”
She believes the trouble with films about Sept. 11 in general — they include Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” (2006) and “The Guys” (2002), which starred Sigourney Weaver — are too serious, “overly ponderous about the topic,” she said. She sees a musical, on the other hand, as a way to delve deeper into the characters: “finding the release and the perspective to look at ourselves and laugh at our tragedies,” she said.
For all the film’s upbeat songs and occasional clowning, the beating and wounded heart in its chest is the character Caroline, played by Jan O’Dell, who was 73 when the film was shot.
Ms. O’Dell sustained a fractured skull when she was struck by falling debris on Sept. 11.
Nine years later, she is still recovering. Caroline is, too.
Ms. O’Dell spent a brief early stint in New York in 1960, performing Off Broadway in “Valmouth,” before returning home to Kansas City, Mo., and careers as a “weather girl” and, later, public-radio host and interviewer. In 1998, now retired, she moved to New York to be closer to a son in Hoboken.
In 2001, Ms. O’Dell was acting and working as a “senior model” in advertisements about medicine and such. She heard a huge boom on Sept. 11, turned on the television to see what was happening, called her son to make sure he was O.K., and left her apartment in Battery Park City, looking up.
She was making her way north on the walkway along the Hudson River when the first tower collapsed. She made it into a crowded boat, but on board, she was struck unconscious by debris that affected her brain.
“It had damaged my sense of balance,” Ms. O’Dell, now 75, said. “I had no sense of where the ground was. Every time I turned my head I would vomit.” Her skull was fractured in several places — “my face was askew” — and she spent a week in the hospital before returning home with a cane and an eye patch. “No more modeling,” she said.
But she eventually returned to acting, and was performing in a play on Martha’s Vineyard when a fellow cast member told her of Ms. Lucas and her Sept. 11 movie.
“I went on the Web site and saw she was casting for singer-songwriters,” Ms. O’Dell said. “I thought, ‘Oh no, that’s not me.’ ” But when the two met anyway to talk about Ms. O’Dell’s Sept. 11 ordeal, Ms. Lucas quickly made an exception and hired her.
All the singers in the cast wrote their own songs, and Ms. O’Dell was urged to do the same. Her song in the film is called “The Day the Sky Fell” and it blurs any line between actor and character. “The sky turned from blue to gray, and I’ll never be like I was before,” she sings. “I came out from under, fighting guilt that I survived.” (Ms. O’Dell, for a time after her injuries, was convinced that she must have jumped ahead of a line to get on the boat in time; counselors convinced her that that was unlikely, and that her reaction was normal.)
Ms. Lucas, 36, a native of Indiana, was home in Washington Heights when the towers fell. Six years later, she was struck by a taxi while bicycling on the Upper West Side, broke her foot and was laid up for three months, “sort of forced reflection time,” she said. She thought of changes she wanted to make, and then imagined a movie full of such moments — “disaster as a catalyst for change in our lives.”
She knew right away it should be a musical, however blithe that may have sounded to others. “ ‘Musical’ is such a dirty word in this context,” she said. “I don’t think of musicals so much as a genre. It’s a way of speaking, it’s not the subject matter.”
She filmed at locations she could never afford to rent, but borrowed from the cast and crew’s circles of friends, including an office in Rockefeller Center, the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South and an entire floor of 7 World Trade Center. It was one of three films Ms. Lucas directed in 2007, worried that financing for “Clear Blue Tuesday,” the most ambitious of the three, could drag on; there is the slasher flick “Red Hook,” which was released on DVD earlier this year, and “Fade to White,” a sci-fi apocalypse feature filmed in Central Park after a snowstorm, which is in post-production.
“Clear Blue Tuesday” is booked for two weeks at the Quad. Halfway through its run, the city will pause and observe the ninth anniversary of the attacks. Spending part of that day watching a musical has probably never crossed most people’s minds, but this year, the option is available.
“By dealing with emotions, we’re a little uncomfortable,” Ms. Lucas said, “where, by putting it in a musical context, it makes it O.K.”
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