Documentary: Bathtubs Over Broadway (2018)

Poster: Bathtubs Over Broadway (2018)

So. How are you?

Yeah, me too.

Last month, in an effort to try to focus on something OTHER than, you know, THE WORLD, I set a goal for myself: To watch at least one movie a day.

(I’m not THAT hardcore, so I’m counting short films, too—though most days I’ve been able to squeeze in a full-length movie… and on weekends, I’ve been watching more like three a day? Yikes.)

So far, I’ve stuck to it. AND I EVEN HAVE PROOF.

(I mean, I guess I could have just written a bunch of pretend reviews? I guess you’ll have to take my word for it.)

ANYWAY. This morning, I watched Bathtubs Over Broadway, and loved it.

Granted, it’s one of those stories that is entirely my jam—I am a huge sucker for documentaries about people who are super-duper passionate about really offbeat or esoteric things.

It’s a documentary about Steve Young, a writer for Late Night with Letterman, who discovered the largely-forgotten world of INDUSTRIAL MUSICALS—basically, musicals written and produced specifically for corporate conventions. So, like, musicals about Burger King. Or Miller Lite. Or spark plugs.

It’s about the history of the form, but it’s also—and I’d say more crucially, at least in terms of my warm and fuzzy feelings towards it—about a guy who stumbles upon a treasure, and about how that discovery leads to him meeting people who share the same passion. It’s about a guy finding his people!! And let’s be real, who doesn’t need a dose of that right now?

I watched it on Netflix, but you can also rent via Amazon.

Oh! And yes, he’s written a book—Everything's Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals—and so of COURSE I put in an interlibrary loan request for it, so I’ll keep you posted on that.

***Because my brain is my brain, amid all of the joy I felt while watching, I did think quite a bit about how just the basic premise of the industrial musical as a THING says a whole lot about how the celebration and belief in CAPITALISMMMM is so integral to our broad idea of “traditional American culture.” (<—If that’s not a phrase that needs scare quotes, I don’t know what is.) And it was also notable how very very white the musicals were, and how very very white and male the conventions appeared to be, as well as the Letterman writers.***