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Our Columnists Reflect on Oscar's Best Films |
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"WEST SIDE STORY" |
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"WEST SIDE STORY" |
 Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood as a modern Romeo and Juliet in "West Side Story." |
How West Side Story
morphed into a movie
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
The movie “West Side Story” was one of Hollywood’s most faithful and best-executed adaptations from the stage. The big screen pumped up the brilliant material into an experience that still pulls in audiences 47 years after its premiere.
The movie differs in dozens of details from the stage version but it works. In 1962 it won 11 Oscars, following a triumphant run on Broadway.
I lived in California and never saw the Broadway production but I remember being dazzled by the color, sound and movement that burst onto the screen from the start in the film version. Cinema had never been used to such effect.
I saw it shortly after it opened, and again 30 years later. It was as fresh and exciting the second time around. Now I catch it on cable whenever it comes around.
Leonard Bernstein tends to get top billing for the musical and the movie but he was surrounded by extraordinary talents--Arthur Laurents (book), a young Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) and Jerome Robbins (choreography). When it was all over, they disbanded, reportedly exhausted by the intense creative process, and never worked together again.
Robbins, who had never directed a movie, was given the job of turning the musical into a movie. He was given a most unusual co-director--Robert Wise, who had directed tough films noir ("The Set-Up," "Born to Kill"), sci-fi films ("The Day the Earth Stood Still"), westerns ("Blood on the Moon") and dramas ("Executive Suite"), but had never directed a musical., They wound up sharing the Best Director Oscar. Wise returned to the musical genre in 1965 and, alone, won a second Oscar for "The Sound of Music." That tied him with old nemesis Jerome Robbins, who had won a second Oscar in 1961 for the choreography of "West Side Story.")
Bernstein perhaps deserves to be No. 1 because his music took on a life of its own, several of the songs becoming standards in the pop repertoire. Bernstein’s score, reworked as a single piece, is often performed by established orchestras in Europe and the United States. Crooners have looted the project for its many memorable melodies.
Serious fans of “WSS”, as they refer to it, will already know that the story was originally a Robbins concept. He proposed it to Bernstein in 1949 as a clever Romeo and Juliet remake with a Jewish girl falling in love with an Italian boy. They wanted to call it “East Side Story”.
As their idea bounced back and forth, the Puerto Rico immigration wave was transforming New York, sometimes with gangland consequences. To seize the moment, Bernstein and Robbins worked with Laurents to transpose the story to the West Side, and recreate the Jews as Puerto Ricans. The other side stayed “American”.
The stage musical lasted 732 performances at the Winter Garden, Broadway, before going on tour, a major run for the time.
But getting from stage to screen meant heavy rewriting, reordering of songs, cutting and taming the story. One of Bernstein’s favorite songs, “Sometime” (with a theme borrowed from a Beethoven piano concerto) was cut entirely from the film.
For reasons of mood, two favorite light songs “Gee, Officer Krupke” and “”I Feel Pretty” were moved up front in the film to fit in better prior to the gangs’ confrontation. “America” lyrics were rewritten to toughen up the Shark gang. And a full-cast ballet scene from the stage version was cut from the film.
The character Ice does not appear on stage but was added to the film version as a successor to Riff toward the final scenes. Dialogue throughout was massaged to build up characters and clarify storylines. As moral restraint was still operative in the early 60s in Hollywood, some of the strong street language from the stage script had to go.
Contemporary critics have accused the producers of racism for casting Natalie Wood instead of a true Latina in the Maria role, a choice that would surely go the other way today.
Bernstein was an established classical conductor and ambitious classical composer but never lost his love of popular theater. He came to this project, however, wounded by the Broadway flop of his recent musical “Candide”. Bernstein biographer Humphrey Burton wrote that the resilient Bernstein, although “disconsolate” over the failure, decided he was “ready to bounce back with 'West Side Story'”.
Yet he still harbored doubts. Burton quotes him as saying “I don’t know how many people begged me not to waste my time on something that could not possibly succeed … a show full of hatefulness and ugliness.”
It is perhaps a triumph of the music and choreography that the storyline, a violent faceoff of two street gangs, could appeal to such a broad audience for so many years.
Personally, the music has made the biggest
impression on me. I was always a fan of the Bernstein legend--the
pianist-turned-conductor who made The New York Times front
page in 1943 by subbing for Bruno Walter at a concert of the
New York Philharmonic. And I was aware that he had ambitions
to become the “American Gustave Mahler” by conducting
in winter and composing in summer as Mahler had done.
But he loved the limelight too much to stay focused on his classical
career, sharing his time with television, the stage, socializing
and the life of a professional celebrity.
Soaking up his music in the 1960s, I was captivated by the melodic power, the dissonance, and the orchestration of the movie score. Nothing had quite bridged the classic-pop gap so effectively before. I forgave Bernstein everything.
WSS music fans like to point out the “tritone” kernel of the score, the first three notes of Ma-ri-a that go from C to F-sharp to G. The first two notes are known to musicians as music’s most dangerous interval because it is harmonically unstable--it must go somewhere fast. This instability pervades the score, keeping the listener subconsciously on edge.
Burton notes in his biography that Bernstein intended his song “Somewhere” to be the centerpiece of the production, the song that Maria would sing from the fire escape. Laurents and Robbins talked him out of it, however, and so he and Sondheim set to work under pressure to create a new song that became “Tonight”. “Somewhere” ended up in the second act but was dropped from the film.
Bernstein wrote to his wife, then in Santiago, Chile, visiting her mother, that the public would only hear “my poor little marked-up score. All the things I love most in it are being dropped--too operatic, too this and that.”
The musical’s tryout in Washington was a prelude to the accolades awaiting the production as it evolved into a movie. White House aides, Senators and Supreme Court Justices attended and applauded. Justice Felix Frankfurter was “in tears at the intermission”, Burton writes.
The creative process involved the entire team, egos temporarily set aside. For example, searching for new song material, Bernstein and Sondheim went to the Laurents text and stole the words for “Something’s Coming”. Bernstein said Laurent welcomed the intrusion. “We raped Arthur’s play-writing,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone so encouraging, let alone so generous, urging us, ‘Yes, take it, take it, make it a song.’”
Robbins and Bernstein had previously collaborated on the ballet “Fancy Free”, and this time they were prepared for the good chemistry. Bernstein recalled, “I can feel him standing behind me saying ‘Four more beats there …”
The heartache and the creative tension behind the scenes add a poignant note to an otherwise joyous and lasting production. Today amateur groups throughout the world put on WSS and report their experiences on the official WSS website.
In my case, the impact has been more personal. My Parisian wife barely spoke English when she wandered into the cinema on the Champs Elysées to see what the excitement was all about. Until then, most French movies were black-and-white, often with dark overtones in the story. She ended up going back four more times over the next few weeks, finally deciding that if New York was that exciting, that’s where she wanted to live.
When I met her a year later, she was still talking about "West Side Story." In fact she still is today, 42 years later.
©2008 by Michael Johnson. The photo is courtesy of United Artists and MGM Home Video. This column first posted Feb. 18, 2008.
OTHER 1961 BEST PICTURE NOMINEES: "Fanny," "The Guns of Naverone," "The Hustler," "Judgment at Nuremberg."
OSCAR TRIVIA: Though Jerome Robbins shared the Best Director Oscar with Robert Wise, the men clashed constantly over the time Robbins was taking on the dance numbers, which put the production way behind schedule and over budget. He was finally asked to leave and Wise completed the film alone, using Robbins' assistants to help with the dance sequences....Natalie Wood, who played Maria, could not sing and her songs were dubbed by Marni Nixon. Her co-star, Richard Beymer, another non-singer, was dubbed by Jim Bryant. Beymer's time as a movie leading man was short and he languished in obscurity for years until he resurfaced briefly as Benjamin Horne, one of the nastier characters in ABC's bizarre TV series "Twin Peaks" in 1990-91...George Chakiris, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Bernardo, leader of the Sharks, the Puerto Rican gang, actually played Riff, leader of the Jets, the white gang, in the London stage production.
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