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| 309 Putting the Black Swan Blackout in Context Blog post, March 11, 2011, dancemagazine.com After reading my previous blog, a mutual friend contacted me and put me in touch with Sarah Lane.This is what I posted after that talk. It generated a furor online, both for and against Sarah, and for and against Portman. Some entertainment websites picked it up and escalated the controversy, claiming that Portman would not have won the Oscar if the judges had known how little of the dancing she’d done.The general commotion led to both Sarah and me appearing on the TV news show 20/20 later that month. Sarah Lane, whose heavenly dancing helped make Natalie Portman believable as the ballerina Nina Sayers—thanks to face replacement—was not acknowledged by Portman at the Oscars. Not only that, but Lane was suddenly deleted from a video showing Black Swan’s special effects that was circulating on the web. In my blog last week I called it a blackout. Sarah Lane calls it a more polite word: a façade. I asked her if she was expecting to be thanked when she heard Portman reel off ten or twenty other names during her acceptance speech. Lane said no, because a Fox Searchlight producer had already called to ask her to stop giving interviews until after the Oscars. “They were trying to create this façade that she had become a ballerina in a year and a half,” she said. “So I knew they didn’t want to publicize anything about me.” As she said in Dance Magazine’s December interview, she felt good about her work—though it was exhausting and frustrating—on the set. “It was a great experience to see the whole process of making a movie,” she told me. But she didn’t realize until just before the Oscars just how exploited she was. All the pirouettes, the full-body shots, and just-the-legs shots were her. (She also said that fellow aBt soloist Maria Riccetto doubled for Mila Kunis in one long shot.) The publicity campaign from the studio, however, spread the word that Portman did 90 percent of her own dancing. Is it unusual for real dancers to get shoved under the rug in Hollywood? From the responses I got to my previous blog, no. John Rockwell reminded me that Savion Glover, whose tap dancing and choreography were the heart of the animated movie Happy Feet in 2006, was barely acknowledged. In a very funny take on this (“Penguin, Shmenguin! Those Are Savion Glover’s Happy Feet!” New York Times, December 28, 2006), Rockwell tells us that Happy Feet director/producer George Miller admitted the movie would have 310 | Through the Eyes of a Dancer been impossible without Savion—and yet the tapper’s name appears way down in the credits. Likewise, on IMDb (Internet Movie Database), Sarah Lane’s name appears way down the line, not as a double but as “Lady in the Lane,” which she explained to me was a split-second scene where she appears as an incidental , nondancing figure. Obviously she was not as crucial to the film as Glover to Happy Feet; Darren Aronofsky could have hired a lesser ballerina. But the idea is the same. Get a real virtuoso to make your story believable, but pour all your publicity into the studio’s star. It seems that when a movie star needs a singer to double for her voice, that’s common knowledge. No one is surprised to learn that Audrey Hepburn and Natalie Wood didn’t do their own singing when a trained voice was required. But people seem to believe that Natalie Portman did her own dancing. Of course to nondancers, Portman was entirely believable. (I myself found her upper body fairly convincing.) Sarah says she’s talked to her colleagues about “how unfortunate it is that, as professional dancers, we work so hard, but people can actually believe that it’s easy enough to do it in a year. That’s the thing that bothered me the most.” ...

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