Beloved indie film “Safety Not Guaranteed” — which took Sundance by storm over a decade ago and instantly catapulted director Colin Trevorrow up several rungs in the Hollywood stratosphere — may not have been the most obvious choice when it comes to refashioning IP for other mediums. There’s no superheroes, for one. And while there is some very fantastical time travel, it’s all a bit more metaphor than metaphysical.
But the charming 2012 movie, which follows a man (Mark Duplass in the film) who places a newspaper ad looking for someone to go back in time with, gets a new life in Brooklyn this month as a 100-minute stage musical with a book by Nick Blaemire and music and lyrics by Ryan Miller of Guster. (In addition to Miller, who did the music for the original film, the movie and the musical share another link: producer Peter Saraf.)
Creatives love to say things were serendipitous but, well, the film’s journey to the stage was pretty serendipitous: Blaemire loved the movie when he saw it a decade ago. Years later, he met Miller at a party and came away thinking he was a cool guy who he’d love to work with one day, which is the kind of thing that is nice to think about but rarely happens.
Watching the film again, in addition to tracking that Miller was more heavily involved than he realized, he also noticed another name in the credits: Peter Saraf (“Little Miss Sunshine”). Blaemire had worked with Saraf 15 years prior on the never-released film “Gods Behaving Badly.”
“I ended up being at craft services for five minutes and had a conversation with Peter Saraf, and I was a super-small part in the movie, and he was just so lovely and really down to Earth,” Blaemire told IndieWire. “And that was 15 years ago, and I just thought that was cool. Then I saw his name watching ‘Safety Not Guaranteed‘ that [same] night that I saw Ryan’s [name], and I just threw caution to the wind, and had my agent send a message to Peter to see if he’d be interested in talking to me about about adapting the movie into a musical.”
He added, “He emailed me right back, and we had the rights a week later. Ryan and Peter and I have been off to the races ever since, and it’s been the most magical development process of any piece of art I’ve ever been involved in.”
Led by Broadway regular Taylor Trensch and directed by Lee Sunday Evans, this loyal adaptation is joyful, thoughtful, charmingly lo-fi, and incredibly moving. “I think the thing that that makes it more than the sum of its parts, is that it’s a movie ostensibly about a guy who thinks he can time travel, but it’s really about what that claim does to everybody else in the movie, and how everybody has a thing that they wish they could change and is constantly looking back,” Blaemire said.
He continued, “That was a real lightning bolt moment noticing that my second watch of the movie was really like Jake Johnson’s character, who’s kind of an asshole in the movie, but he’s really affected by this idea of time travel and the way that we all sort of [fall] into our memories, and then we get snapped back into the present. The thing that really made it a musical, to me, was not just the fact that there was already music in the movie, but that songs are time machines. My relationship to Guster is: I fell in love with their music when I was in my formative stage, 14 to 17, when my musical taste was being solidified. And [it’s] the idea that every time I hear ‘Two Points for Honesty,’ I’m sent back to that kid.”
For a show that reckons with nostalgia, second chances, and the full circle nature of life, Miller found some pretty neat life symmetry while composing the primarily rock musical score, which features new original songs.
“This film has played a pretty pivotal role in my life — it was the first “proper” film score which launched my composition career over a decade ago, and in many ways was the first step on a vibrant artistic life outside of Guster,” Miller told IndieWire via email. “There’s some real poetry that ‘Safety Not Guaranteed’ is my first theatrical offering as well — it almost feels like destiny or something? This particular story and these characters are in deeply embedded in my bones and now doubly interwoven into my creative life, a gift that gives once again.”
Check out an exclusive behind-the-scenes clip from the show, of the song “Wanna Go Back” sung by Pomme Koch, above.
“Safety Not Guaranteed” is playing at BAM in Brooklyn through Sunday, October 20.
