Entertainment

Cohl mines ‘Spidey’ saga

Buried in the deliciously nasty lawsuits between Julie Taymor and her former “Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark” colleagues is a tussle over a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of the musical.

Filmmaker Jacob Cohl, whose father, Michael, is the lead producer of “Spider-Man,” was given almost unlimited access to everything that went on from the first day of rehearsals to the June 2011 Broadway opening.

The movie originally was intended as a marketing tool that would be used to promote the show around the world. But that was before “Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark” achieved infamy as the most troubled show in Broadway history.

As the musical started to go off the rails — cost overruns, delays, injuries, fits, fights, feuds and egos — Jacob Cohl kept his cameras rolling. What he caught on film, he quickly realized, was hardly material for a promotional movie. It was material for a sensational backstage drama — a film that, if put together correctly, could take a place alongside such celebrated theater documentaries as D.A. Pennebaker’s “Company,” about the making of the original cast album of the Stephen Sondheim musical; Pennebaker’s “Moon Over Broadway,” about the flop Carol Burnett play “Moon Over Buffalo”; and Dori Berinstein’s “Show Business: The Road to Broadway” which chronicles the 2003-2004 theater season.

I know this because Cohl interviewed me right in the thick of the show’s travails. It was clear from his questions that he was no longer making a promotional film. We met at Joe Allen restaurant, and I gave Cohl a tour, on camera, of the famous wall of flops. I was looking for a prominent place to hang a poster of “Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark.”

(This was before the show started posting annoyingly high weekly grosses.)

I told Cohl that if his documentary was to be any good — candid, compelling, brutal — he’d have to make it without any interference from his father, Taymor, Bono and The Edge: He would have to be the objective observer of the “Spider-Man” mayhem.

“I know,” he said. “But it’s not going to be easy.”

Cohl’s in the editing room now, and the movie is “starting to take serious shape,” a source says. And I’m told he isn’t pulling any punches. He wants to make a movie that captures the show’s compelling off-stage drama. He’s got footage of clashes between Taymor and her erstwhile collaborators. He was backstage when an actor tumbled into the pit. He was at meetings where press strategies were hashed out. He was at secret meetings where Taymor’s dismissal was discussed.

It’s all there.

But Taymor doesn’t want anybody to see it.

She is seeking, in her lawsuit against the producers, to bar them from using any footage of her in the movie.

The movie “would cause Taymor to suffer irreparable harm . . . to [her] future business prospects and commercial reputation,” the suit says.

Nonsense, say her adversaries.

“Taymor’s attempt to stop the documentary apparently because she is fearful that it may portray her in an unflattering light is a classic prior restraint in violation of the First Amendment,” the producers say in their countersuit, filed this week.

I think Taymor makes a lot of valid claims in her suit. The revised “Spider-Man” remains, for better or worse, very much the product of her imagination.

But I hope she loses the battle over the documentary.

There’s not going to be a book about the making (or mismaking) of “Spider-Man” anytime soon. So Cohl’s movie may be the only record we’ll have of one of the most tumultuous productions in showbiz history.

I’m just praying that he’s got Taymor on film shrieking: “I don’t give a f – – k about audience reaction!”

Now that’s entertainment!