Tales of the City (original series)

I really soured on Maupin during my years in San Francisco. There's a lot of hat, but not a lot of cattle there. Tales was good in the beginning, but he never seemed to be able to sustain an artistic output that matched the adoration he got.

I think that the charm of the early Tales is that they were seen and told through the eyes of Maupin who was very much not of the San Francisco culture, a lot like Mary Ann. He saw the unique ways in which San Francisco lived life.

Once he became ensconced in that world the way he saw and commented on it lost its charm. I think he is a perfectly fine writer but the magic of his early work has eluded him.

I stopped reading three or four books in. I am sure you are right R2

OP I interviewed Maupin many years ago and he confided the recast of Mona was down to Chloe Webb’s “erratic” behavior. He said the wig drove them (the other Mona) crazy. I never printed it since it was off the record. He loved Laura Linney and is still very close to her.

Agree r2 the books lost that charm. The Night Listener is fascinating because Maupin himself was catfished, not something he ever talks about now in interviews but most who do seem to know very little about his life and work.

The first three books are great fun since it's pre-AIDS. They're funny and charming and very well done. The 4th book, Babycakes is also terrific though more sombre as AIDS enters the story.

The last two books of the original run, Significant Others and Sure of You are vastly different from the first four since they weren't serialized stories. I happen to think both are good though Maupin's "turning" on the Mary Anne character was odd. I get what he was going for, that Mary Anne was always that kind of person (blowing in the wind, constantly aligning herself or attempting to align herself with whatever was the current zeitgeist) but it was still a bit off putting.

The much later four Tales novels are a mixed bag. If you love the characters it's nice to catch up with them but it's just not the same level of joy and the writing starts to suffer.

For the TV versions, the first series is brilliant, then the next two are obviously lower budget, poorly cast, and too Canadian. The HBO thing from a few years ago was awful...Maupin's cash grab with the focus on a bunch of irritating new "kids" (including DL favorite Elliot Page) who were ghastly and produced by some stupid twat unfamiliar with the original books and not a fan.

When they made the original tv series, did they know they were going to make more? There was so much left unresolved. I didn’t hate the Netflix series, but the changes they made were strange. I guess I always cared more the characters than plot because the stories were nonsensical.

I think they new the second was coming, but not the third. There was a long gap between the second and third. I think the first is excellent and really gets the art direction and overall ethos right, the second isn't as good but is entertaining (Alan Poul directed, and it shows). The third was pretty bad.

KNEW* (Oh, DEAR!)

I know Maupin’s family and have read all of his books out of curiosity if he’ll reference them and their world. I’ve done the same with David Sedaris, but their backstories couldn’t be more different.

Maupin is a real blue blood, his father was President General of the Society of the Cincinnati and was a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.

R4, I really liked The Night Listener. I have always thought that he must have been contacted by JT Leroy because of the San Francisco connection and he fits the type of writer that woman posing as JT would have contacted. I have been told that it wasn’t and was some other hoaxer. It would be much more interesting if it were the Leroy hoaxer because another Raleigh native and writer from the small NC upper class was taken in by Leroy and thanked in the foreword in both of the Leroy books. That writer by the way has told me that he still believes that Leroy is a real person and the hoax was invented to allow him to disappear from the spotlight.

R9 I thought that very same thing about JT Leroy. I still think it’s possible. I even had a theory about his then partner Terry Anderson, now that would have been a plot twist!

The later books I think were “written” by his husband with Maupin dictating a few ideas, Barbara Cartland style.

R6 yes, the wanted to film all the books but PBS turned on them and Channel 4 in the UK declined to continue after Further… I was proved right about that Netflix shit - never should have been given to a mid life lesbian who’d never even read the books nor should the gay theys have been added. Linney, Dukakis, Murray Bartlett and the other original stars were outstanding which only emphasised how poor the others were.

I loved the six books and watched the whole series. I REwatched during the pandemic in isolation. I would highly recommend it.

[quote]However….Olympia Dukakis. Wtf? She reads every line like she is in a telenovella. I only ever saw her in Moonstruck and this. Was she a terrible actress? Why did they cast her in the second most central role?

Dukakis plays the character like it's a man putting on a performance as a woman. Which of course it is.

The Netflix series was terrible...Eliot Page was a completely different character to that of the books...so moody and dour (Like Page, I suppose). That series is a master class in missed opportunity; even the books had a better send off for Mrs. Madrigal!

Maupin needed the money to feed his husband habit

Maupin has cameos in each season

When it first played, there were no other gay themed sagas or certainly few. It was a big deal to have such a gay and engaging nighttime mini series.

[quote]The Netflix series was terrible...Eliot Page was a completely different character to that of the books...so moody and dour (Like Page, I suppose). That series is a master class in missed opportunity; even the books had a better send off for Mrs. Madrigal!

I just had to google the series to remember what happened. No I remember the actor who played Mouse's boyfriend is now better known for Natasha Lyonne's Russian Dolls - I think there was a scene at a posh dinner where he lost his temper with them for having old fashioned attitudes? Don't remember Ellen Page's storyline at all but remember that funny looking Mamet girl as a nasty woman. There were a couple of other things that I remember - the flashback scene with Mrs Madrigal as a young woman was well done and the Chinese girl who was dating the trans man Was she the daughter of Beachamp's wife who got pregnant by the delivery boy?

r2 and r5, you sum up the books perfectly. The first two books are perfect to me; if he had ended the Tales there it would have been fine.

[quote] Maupin is a real blue blood, his father was President General of the Society of the Cincinnati and was a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.

***Lucille Bluth eyeroll***

Is the faded actress in BABY CAKES sort of based on Elizabeth Taylor? Am I remembering that correctly?

Never bothered with the Netflix version. Was it a complete re-do of the first books or a sequel to them?

Which novel (I don’t think it was part of the series) was about the small woman who played an ET-like character?

I really, really loved The Night Listener - the novel and the movie.

I have a fairly high tolerance for woke, but I skipped the Netflix series because it looked like a performative California wokefest in the preview clips.

R20, why the eye roll. It’s true. The Society makes Skull and Bones look like Planet Fitness in terms of how hard it is to be admitted.

Billy Campbell not acting ..behaving.

The Cocketeer.

Lovely, lovely Billy Campbell. He should have had a much bigger career, handsome charming and a decent actor.

He and Dracula co-star Cary Elwes were just to attractive for so many roles.

The Netflix version was not so bad. Murray Bartlett was great as Mouse and had lovely chemistry with his younger bf as played by Charlie Barnett. The episode featuring them going to the rich gay dinner party from hell was a standout. It was also nice to see Brian and Mary Ann again, though their storylines didn’t amount to much.

The other younger characters were not as compelling, I admit. Margot was the most interesting but that’s probably because they tied her to an original character (DeDe).

The original series was revolutionary! I was amazed at how it portrayed gays as normal people, something I wasn’t used to seeing on TV at all.

Didn’t Sen Jesse Helms try to strip money from PBS for showing this on TV?

I loved the realistic look and feel of the original PBS series. It really does look like it was filmed during the 1970s.

[quote]The HBO thing from a few years ago was awful.

Wasn't it a bunch of nonbinary they/thems? Oy vey.

I was in high school when the first series was shown on PBS and OMG what a controversy that was! A gay story featuring gay sex and gay men! A lot of conservative types were up in arms about it.

We've come a long way in 30 years.

[quote]Didn’t Sen Jesse Helms try to strip money from PBS for showing this on TV?

I hope hell is hot enough for him, along with Falwell, Robertson and Limbaugh. They were all horrid pieces of shit.

There was a whole decade of Republicans wanting to defund PBS, NPR and most importantly, they targeted National Endowment for Humanities.

Mean-spirited and prejudiced as always - things have become a bit better, but believe it, this feeling is still there.

They live in such rigid conservative rules - they want EVERYONE to be as miserable and tight-laced as they are, at least in public. Behind closed doors, we all know what freaks they are.

Murray Bartlett was excellent casting for Mouse but his casting made no sense in relation to the other original characters since he was quite a bit younger and looked it.

I'm a big Tales fan and I couldn't finish the Netflix series. It was so disrespectful to the original characters and the new characters were terrible. Maupin wimped out and let it happen because he desperately needed the money and didn't want to rock the boat and he was keen to suck up to "new audiences" to appear modern. But, mostly he needed the money.

And, yeah, that first series is just a classic. The subsequent two just had HORRIBLE castings and re-castings. The new Michael was meh and the new Mona and Brian and Frannie Halcyon were dreadful.

I like Mother Mucca from More Tales of the City.

[quote]Which novel (I don’t think it was part of the series) was about the small woman who played an ET-like character?

That was Maybe The Moon, apparently based on the actual little person who worked in the E.T. costume in the movie

Maupin lived across the street from my grandfather in SF (the house is wonderfully described in The Night Listener). I would run into him occasionally on the street. He seemed genuinely nice.

R36, i loved the anna madrigal flashbacks. The younger characters’ arcs bored me, but for the cameo (ex machina) of molly ringwald

I mostly loved the 1993 TV series, especially its spooky mood and most of the casting which was a (mostly) affectionate recollection of a time period. Yes, Olympia Dukakis was clunky and sometimes seemed to be playing in a different series than the other characters. Mona is such a writeched chqaracter who wastes endless time with her ridiculous bad moods and frustrations that it hardly matters what actress plays her. Any scene with Mona moaning was an opportunity for a quick break in viewing.

The second season/installment of that first series was less attentive to details and casting, but not terrible. If I recall, the third season was pretty bad. The later Netflix version was passable but lacked the trace of magic that the 1993 version had. And of course the Netfloix post-finale rethinking of the series was wretched in every way: I hated evryone of those fuckers, and all their new friends, too.

[quote] Any scene with Mona moaning was an opportunity for a quick break in viewing.

that is the character who comes off as much more sympathetic in the book than in the series

Very true, R43, there was a big differencenin the character´s and the pringt Mona was as you say much more sympatheitic than screen Mona. Still, I never thought Mona rang very ytrue in the books, she seemed to me a character cobbled together of various traits to help propel a storyline but never solid enough, never interesting enough, never consistent in anything but cranky moaning aboiut everything to offer much other than a bit of propulsion. Her ins and outs with Mrs. Madrigal were as annoying as they were pointless (except for that interminably long diversion into Garrison Keilor´s Stories from Lake Winnemucca and the Blue Moon Lodge.

Mona was my least favorite character in the books.

I sympathized with her in a way, sorry to say. but I agree with how the drama felt manufactured at times. no wonder he killed her off eventually

The original series was very well cast (even though it felt as though Olympia Dukakis was reciting lines from a poetry slam). The music, the cinematography, location filming, and the acting ran seamlessly through from beginning to end. The atmosphere was very ‘70s San Francisco—I was born there, and I spent a lot time there from the ‘70s-early 2000s. I loved Parker Posey as Connie Bradshaw.

More Tales of the City was cheap and flimsy. Nina Siemaszko was a huge failure as the recast Mona in More Tales of the City. Paul Hopkins, Diana LeBlanc, and Whip Hubley were flea market versions of Mouse, Frannie, and Brian. Even though I’d read all the books, I lost interest in the TV adaptions at that point.

I thought the Neflix series was awful.

Just finished the initial season. Agree that Mona was, well, underwhelming. Honestly an uninspiring opportunistic lesbian. I willl not engage in overly broad generalizations,, but will say that many of the lesbians are similarly situated.

I forgot how ridiculously handsome Brian was.

Lesbians I have known are….damn autocorrect

I loved Olympia. As R13 said, she played it as a man putting on a performance of a woman. That's the character. And the character herself is a larger-than-life, all-accepting mother figure for those who have been rejected elsewhere (Mouse) or are strangers in a strange land (Mary Ann). The first couple of books and the first TV series captured the essence of the best of San Francisco in that era, and to many of us who had grown up without gay main characters in popular books or on TV, was like finally being "seen".. Even if the later books and TV adaptations didn't keep up the same quality, we had already fallen in love with many of the characters (except the pointless Mona) and wanted to see what happened to them.

It’s hard reading the book and watching the shows/movies because they took generous license with the stories.

The episode worth watching in the Netflix series was the flashback to Anna arriving in SF, played by Jen Richards. It’s quite a performance.

The highly esteemed matt baume just released some content about how PBS ran big risks (with things like TOTC) in the nineties.

[quote]The episode worth watching in the Netflix series was the flashback to Anna arriving in SF, played by Jen Richards. It’s quite a performance.

What I really appreciated in that episode was that the ladies were very clearly male. Jen Richards and Daniela Vega don't "pass" as biological women at any level, whereas having Olympia Dukakis play Anna Madrigal was great for the mystery of the first series with Dukasis playing someone putting on a performance.

Like in Baby Reindeer, it helped having a trans woman who didn't pass play the character of a trans woman rather than a biological woman

R52 On what planet is Matt Baume highly esteemed? He just does some VERY minor research (mostly via Wikipedia) to disperse widely known pop culture factoids.

Matt's a good, respected guy and certainly is no attention whore.

The original Mouse was my favorite in the entire series. The actor, Marcus D'Amico, portrayed him perfectly--just the right amount of innocence

I thought Dukakis was great as Mrs. Madrigal and Chloe Webb as Mona! Mrs. Madrigal is supposed to be mysterious and a bit weird and Mona is a flakey nut. Both actresses captured those qualities. The only things that bothered me about the original cast was the fact Paul Gross wasn't hairy chested (like in the books) and Marcus D'amico was too hunky to be Mouse. But, I liked Gross's performance so I got over it.

And, as we've already stated, Nina Siemaszko was just a boring ingenue as Mona #2 and Whip Hubley a wooden mannequin as Brian #2.

I never warmed to Paul Hopkins as Mouse #2. He was actually physically right for the Michael in the book but...he was just so blandly Canadian.

I of course, really liked Olympia. But when she was playing Mrs. magical at 90, or whatever she was, and had a full head of hair in a pattern that you just would not see in someone born a man, it kind of took me out of it.

Paul Gross was the only actor I didn't think was cast well in the original. When I read the books, I had imagined Brian Kerwin. A hairy-chested blonde bimbo, so sexxxxxxxxyyyyyyyyyyy.

sexy