Alternative Film Guide

Notes:

Initially, Miramax wouldn’t even consider German-born director Marc Forster for Finding Neverland. "My agent called and said, ‘They don’t see the relationship between this and your dead-baby movie,’" Forster later recalled, referring to his first feature film, Everything Put Together, a 2000 drama about a mother whose baby dies of sudden infant death syndrome. (Radha Mitchell, who plays Mary Barrie in Finding Neverland, has the lead in Everything Put Together.) Source: Newsweek.

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Finding Neverland was originally scheduled to be released in the fall of 2003. However, Columbia Pictures had the rights to J.M. Barrie’s play for their film version of Peter Pan (directed by P.J. Hogan), which was to be released in December 2003.

Columbia refused to allow Miramax to recreate scenes from the play unless Finding Neverland were released at a later date. In order to use Barrie’s lines, Miramax agreed to open Finding Neverland in the fall of 2004, which happened to be Peter Pan’s 100th anniversary.

…

Dustin Hoffman (who plays impresario Charles Frohman in Finding Neverland) has the title role in Hook (1991), which was based on J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. In that Steven Spielberg film, Robin Williams plays the man who becomes Peter Pan, and Julia Roberts plays Tinkerbell.

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The Peter Pan character first appeared in the 1902 novel The Little White Bird.

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Peter Pan was first presented onstage at the Duke of York Theatre in London in December 1904. Thirty-seven-year-old Nina Boucicault played Peter, and Gerald du Maurier, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies’s brother, played Captain Hook. (Sylvia’s niece was Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel.) Children’s author Geraldine McCaughrean has been chosen to write the official sequel to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

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Fearing that the sophisticated first-night audience would be unresponsive, J.M. Barrie told the orchestra to put down their instruments and clap their hands at the moment where Peter turns to the audience and says, "If you believe in fairies, wave your handkerchiefs and clap your hands." As the story goes, when Nina Boucicault begged for the life of Tinkerbell, the audience response was so overwhelming the actress burst into tears.

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Arthur Lupino, the original Nana (that’s the dog) in the stage play, was the great-uncle of Hollywood actress Ida Lupino.

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Arthur Llewelyn Davies, Sylvia’s husband, was very much alive when J.M. Barrie entered the lives of the Llewelyn Davies family. "There never was a simpler and happier family until the coming of Peter Pan," Barrie wrote in "Peter and Wendy" (later retitled Peter Pan). In his book, JM Barrie and the Lost Boys, author Andrew Birkin suggests that Barrie had in mind his own entrance into the lives of the Llewelyn Davieses. Arthur Llewelyn Davies died in 1907 of cancer of the jaw. Sylvia died three years later of lung cancer.

There were actually five Llewelyn Davies children. Nicholas (Nico) Llewelyn Davies is missing from Finding Neverland. Nicholas’ daughter, Laura Duguid, has a bit part in the film, as the woman who asks the young Peter if he is Peter Pan.

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According to many, J.M. Barrie (left) had more than a fatherly interest in the Llewelyn Davies boys. Yet, author Andrew Birkin, who read much of Barrie’s correspondence and who spoke with Nico Llewelyn Davies, believes that Barrie was "essentially asexual, clearly impotent. He was a lover of children, yes, but not sexually." However, the more than 2,000 letters between Barrie and his favorite Llewelyn Davies boy, Michael, were burned by Peter in 1952.

…

George, the oldest Llewelyn Davies boy, died in Flanders in 1915, one of the millions of World War I victims.

Michael, Barrie’s favorite and the model for the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens, drowned with a male friend while at Oxford in May 1921. He couldn’t swim, and the deaths were believed to have been the result of a suicide pact. The two bodies, when recovered, were found clinging together. Although Peter Pan was an amalgam of all the Llewelyn Davies brothers, Michael is supposed to have been the closest to Barrie’s vision of the boy who would never grow old.

Peter, who hated to have his name associated with "that terrible masterpiece," became a publisher. In 1960, at the age of 63, he committed suicide by throwing himself under a train at London’s Sloane Square station. Two newspaper headlines read: "Peter Pan’s Death Leap" and "The Boy Who Never Grew Up Is Dead."

"Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life," theater impresario Charles Frohman (1860-1915) reportedly said before going down with the ocean liner Lusitania, which had been torpedoed off the Irish coast by a German U-Boat. The actual line in Barrie’s play at the end of Act III, spoken by Peter Pan, is "To die would be an awfully big adventure."

J.M. Barrie died of pneumonia in 1937. He was 77.

Main sources: A. S. Byatt’s "A child in time" in The Guardian and Anthony Lane’s "Lost Boys" in The New Yorker

 

FINDING NEVERLAND on DVD

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CHICAGO (1927) - Notes/Trivia

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA - Awards and Nominations

CRASH - Awards and Nominations

WALK THE LINE Awards and Nominations

FAHRENHEIT 9/11 - Notes

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN - Awards and Nominations

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN - Notes/Trivia

MUSIC OF THE HEART

THE DEVIL STRIKES AT NIGHT

 

 

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