Alek Keshishain-Wuthering Heights

[rtimko@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Roger M Timko)]

Hi all. Marty here. I'm posting two articles that tripped off my KaTe-radar
while I was leafing through some old magazines at work. The stories are
from May (pre-rec.music.gaffa for me) so please ignore them if they were
covered earlier. In the May issue of ROLLING STONE was "Madonna's Favorite
Filmmaker Is One Smart Alek" on Alek Keshishian, the director of "Truth or
Dare". 

	[....He (Alek) also has no trouble speaking up, as Madonna and her
staff learned. "Can you put on something less offensive than Styx?" Alek asks
the waitress, a bubbly sort with a Glaswegian accent, who is startled at the
request. "A place like this should have on some Kate Bush, low level."
	It was Kate Bush, in a sense, who helped Alek get his chance with
Madonna, but Kate Bush had not been his first diva. Cher had been Alex's
first, at Harvard. It happened in 1985, when the Hasty Pudding Club voted her
Woman of the Year. Alek, producer of the award show, drew baby-sitter duty.
Cher's first words to him off the plane were "Parev, inch-bess-yes" - "Hello,
how are you," in Armenian. They got along famously.
	With Kate Bush, Alek says he made Harvard history. As a senior, he
spent $2000 producing "Wuthering Heights" as a pop opera, with music by Bush,
Billy Idol, and Madonna - the first time a theater piece had ever been approved
as a senior thesis in those hallowed groves. "He liked dance music, and Madonna
was the queen of the dance divas and had a killer personality," a school friend
says. "But she was part of his art at that point, one of the characters in this
grand design of his." While the show was in performance at the American 
Repertory Theater, a reviewer called it "Robert Wilson meets MTV." Alek says,
"You couldn't buy a Kate Bush album anywhere in greater Boston after that." ..]


So, has anyone else, other than Madonna, seen this "pop opera"? In another
article, May VOGUE (pg100), Alek says his latest project is adapting his
adaptation of " Wuthering Heights" for the big screen. The ROLLING STONE 
article later states that Irving Azoff wants to develope it also. So, 
maybe we'll all get to see it someday.

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Martin Timko                  "Come over here, Warren, you pussy man!"
rtimko@magnus.acs.                                 -M. Ciccone
ohio-state.edu