“In my credit, it says, ‘Written (six weeks too late) by Marc Shaiman.’ I mean, yeah, it’s totally bittersweet. Barack Obama’s ascension just had us all so giddy. We were thinking of how to film it, and I said, ‘Well, maybe that first section should be all of us on a hill, with poppies, and it snows and we’re put to sleep, and then the Proposition 8 people are looking through the crystal ball, like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.’ Because that’s what happened. We stupidly allowed ourselves to be lulled into a sense of, everything’s fantastic now, look — everything’s changing. And this couldn’t possibly be voted into law. This is just like some little pesky thing that we’re swatting at, and it will go away immediately.” [NYT]
When asked by Arts Beat blogger Dave Itzkoff, “How do you feel, given that it took the passage of Proposition 8 to motivate you to create a video opposing it?” Marc Shaiman — an Academy Award-nominated film composer whose viral video has received more than 2.5 million hits — was refreshingly honest.