The search for "Temptation" (COMPLETED)

September 31st 2016; The research begins...

9:00 am. study hall and no homework in a computer lab. Normal people: play games, or go onto google hangouts.(my school is weird.) Me? IMDB and useless trivia to stuff my geeky heart to the brink! I decided to go to there and see what I could find out. At the time this was being edited I had completed editing the page with photos I found, and trivia I had collected over the months.

However when I found the page their was absolutely nothing other then the cast and crew, and one review of the film who gave it a 9/10. However nothing on why the film wasn't released. Most people would give up in this situation, but as you can tell I saw this as another obstacle. I decided the best thing to do was to contact the cast and crew and see what they knew. I first found Adam Pascal, the man who played the villain in the movie, and contacted him through a social media platform. I merely asked him about why the film was never released. This is his response:

"I can't really say why it was never shown other than to say that I don't think the final product was hat the filmmaker was hoping for. The film relied heavily on cgi animation and as this was in the early 2000's at the beginnings of what would ultimately become possible, it was very primitive looking. Hope that helps."

After fangirling that he actually messaged me, I saw what he was saying. I could imagine the film would be extremely weird looking. Like MTV music video work. Mr. Pascal then directed me to a post where he talked about Temptation. It read:

"This is purely about singing live on film. I have done this twice. Once in Rent and once in a film called Temptation, which starred Myself, Michael Ceveris, Alice Ripley and Zoe Saldana. Temptation was an experimental film in many ways, however most daring was the desire to have us all sing live and use those live vocals in the final edit. That had never been done before to my knowledge. What I learned about what is required was something most people wouldn't think of. To get a live vocal performance that is of usable audio quality, you need silence. That is why singers in studios always wear headphones, because the playback of the music, if it were played over a soundsystem, would be picked up by the mic. Consequently, as I learned on Temptation, the entire set has to be silent for every take, and the actors need to wear tiny in ear headphones so we could hear playback. All anyone would hear onset during a take is us singing accapella, unless you were listening on a headset as well. As I'm sure you can imagine, it was difficult on a one room soundstage, to get useable takes. Imagine trying to achieve that on a huge outdoor set, with hundreds of people. Also, with multiple takes, over long days "singing out" every take, fatigue sets in and the quality of the performance inevitably deteriorates."

So it would seem filming a movie like this would be pretty difficult, even if you're a musical theatre actor who has worked for years on making your voice strong.

So I continue on looking and digging online until I found out through Looper's "list of films never released" who have a small website related to this.

http://www.bristolmedia.com/temptation/index.html

On the website, i found all of the director's notes. Mark Tarlov, had directed a film called "simply irresistible" many many years ago, and had been mainly a producer and before he was in film, he was a speech writer for the Supreme Court justice in the 1970's. He wanted to make this movie as his passion project and decided to make it a musical with live singing, and have it all be mostly sung, rather then have 50% dialogue 50% singing, and it only made sense to cast those who had professional experience in live theatre, but when casting was said and done, it didn't seem the movie could be successful because of the lack of famous people, with Zoe Saldana at the time just starting out. The production company gave him a limited budget because of this, so in an effort to make use of his limited budget, he used animated backgrounds with the actors in front of it much like MTV music videos. Ambitious right?

As I finished reading his notes on the film, I saw a promotional poster for "Temptation". I scanned through the poster and found a telephone number for the production company "Bristol media". It was time to call people, and let them know I'm curious.