From the moment they met, Maria and the future “Maria” felt they were kindred souls. But unfortunately, the real Maria von Trapp had no say in whether or not Halliday could buy the rights to the book. Reinhardt’s company in Germany had seen to that. So Halliday and his partner, Leland Hayward, made a deal with the German producer. And although legally the American producers didn’t owe Maria a penny, they voluntarily gave her three-eighths of 1 percent in royalties on the Broadway show. It was more than Maria expected, and she was grateful.
Initially Martin and Halliday conceived of their version of Die Trapp Familie as a straight dramatic play, using the actual folk songs and religious numbers the Trapp family sang on tour. So they hired playwrights Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse—whose previous successes had included Life with Father and State of the Union, for which they had won the Pulitzer—to write the stage play. The writing team had also produced many shows on Broadway, including Arsenic and Old Lace.
After securing Lindsay and Crouse, Halliday and Martin approached the legendary composing team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and asked them to write one original song for Martin to sing in the play. But Rodgers and Hammerstein thought that mixing the two styles of music, theirs with authentic Austrian folk songs, would be like mixing oil and water. They did, however, offer to write an entirely fresh new score and to act as coproducers of the show. The one stipulation they had was that Halliday and company wait until Rodgers and Hammerstein completed work on their current project, Flower Drum Song. Halliday and Martin decided it was worth the wait to get the talented duo on board.
The Sound of Music opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater in New York on November 16, 1959. The reviews ranged from indifference to loathing. The critics found it too “sweet” and “saccharine” (terms that would later haunt the film version), but the audience must have had a sweet tooth, because they ate it up. As Richard Rodgers wrote years later, “It’s my conviction that anyone who can’t, on occasion, be sentimental about children, home or nature is sadly maladjusted.”
The show ran on Broadway for 1,443 performances, won six Tony Awards including Best Musical, and sold more than three million cast albums. Martin’s popularity was a big contribution to the show’s success; even before the play opened the box office had garnered $2 million in advance ticket sales. For 1959, when theater ticket prices hovered around $5, a $2 million advance was a notable beginning.
On opening night, legendary motion picture agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar, who represented the show’s writers, Rodgers, Hammerstein, Lindsay, and Crouse, was sitting in the audience with the president of Twentieth Century Fox, Spyros Skouras. Skouras was there because his studio had “right of first refusal” on any new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. (Twentieth Century Fox had adapted three Rodgers and Hammerstein shows as motion pictures: South Pacific, Carousel, and The King and I. When Fox purchased The King and I, it also acquired the right to option any subsequent Rodgers and Hammerstein properties before the other studios had a chance to do so.)
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
As Skouras sat watching the play, Swifty Lazar watched his client, wanting to gauge the studio chief’s reaction to the show. By the middle of the play, Lazar had no doubts. “He was crying like a baby,” the agent recalled, “and I knew I had a customer.”
But Lazar and Skouras were not the only Hollywood visitors to realize the musical’s film potential. Two weeks after it opened, screenwriter Ernest Lehman went to see the show. Lehman had begun his career working in the office of a theatrical press agent in New York, where he learned the ins and outs of show business. He turned this knowledge into numerous magazine articles, short stories, and novelettes, including a novelette that he later adapted as a movie, Sweet Smell of Success. A novelette, The Comedian, which followed Success, brought him to the attention of Hollywood, and he was summoned to the West Coast. His first screenplay was Executive Suite at MGM. The director of the film was a man with whom Lehman would establish strong ties as both a friend and collaborator on four films—Robert Wise.
Mary Martin as Maria von Trapp.
Following his successful Hollywood debut, Lehman went on to write the screenplays of such classics as North by Northwest and Somebody Up There Likes Me. In addition, he penned the screen adaptations of Sabrina, The King and I, West Side Story, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
During the intermission of The Sound of Music, Lehman and his wife rushed to a nearby Howard Johnson’s restaurant for a quick bowl of soup. Over a cup of steaming clam chowder, Lehman turned to his wife and said, “I don’t care what anyone says about this show; someday it’s going to make a very successful movie.” When he returned to California, he repeated this statement to David Brown, story editor at Twentieth Century Fox.
In June 1960, seven months after the show had opened, Twentieth Century Fox exercised its option and bought the rights to The Sound of Music for $1.25 million, against 10 percent of the gross. Lazar had certainly found a willing customer: at that time, this was the largest sum a studio had ever spent on a literary property.
Fox also protected its investment by purchasing a six-year option on the US release of the two German films Die Trapp Familie and Die Trapp Familie in Amerika. Fox combined these two movies into one, hired Lee Kresel to dub the film in English, retitled it The Trapp Family, and released it in the United States in March 1961. Once again, the critics found the story as light as Wonder Bread. A reviewer from Daily Variety wrote that its “uncompromisingly sentimental nature has a tendency to slop over into naivete.” Shades of reviews to come.
Fox’s contract with Rodgers et al. stipulated that the film of its musical could not “be released in the United States or Canada until all first-class stage presentations of the musical have closed in such countries or December 31, 1964, whichever is earlier.” So even though Fox paid a handsome price for The Sound of Music, the property was put on hold. And while it lingered on the shelf, the studio’s finances, which had begun tumbling in the midfifties, took a nosedive.
In fact, the only reason Fox had been able to purchase the property in the first place was the standard industry practice of paying in installments. The contract, dated May 31, 1961 (although the deal was made a year earlier), called for the payment to be made as follows: $125,000 paid in December 1961; $100,000 payable June 30, 1962; $823,850 after worldwide release; and $201,150 to be paid in nine installments of $22,350 each, on each anniversary of the release date. If 10 percent of the gross exceeded $1.25 million, then the additional payments would be made quarterly. The rights would expire on December 31, 1977.
Fox’s financial troubles began in 1956, when Darryl Zanuck left for Paris to start his own independent production company. Zanuck, who had founded the film company Twentieth Century and had then merged with Fox Films to create Twentieth Century Fox, had once been the guiding light of the studio. But after his departure, a succession of studio heads came and went—all supervised by Fox president Spyros Skouras.
Unstable leadership however, was not the studio’s only problem. By the late fifties, the studio had had a series of failures at the box office. To make matters worse, television had by then become the most popular form of entertainment, which spelled poison for the entire motion picture business. At the same time, location shooting was becoming the most cost-effective way to make pictures, and the old studio system was becoming obsolete. Things finally got so bad for Fox that in 1957 Skouras even flirted with the notion of giving up the Fox lot completely and simply renting studio space at MGM over in Culver City. This would have meant giving up both its status as a major studio and its industry muscle.
But instead of shutting down the entire studio, Skouras began drawing up plans to sell off 260 acres of the studio’s backlot property (which eventually became the master-planned business and shopping community Century City). If Skouras hesitated at all to go ahead with the Century City deal, explained Richard Tyler Jordan in a 1989 Los Angeles Magazi
ne article, one out-of-control project convinced him to push the deal through. Skouras told Edmond Herrscher, his director of property development, “I need $48 million…. that damn Cleopatra has put me in such a fix!”
His Cleopatra problems began in September 1960, just three months after the studio paid its phenomenal price for The Sound of Music. Skouras announced the beginning of principal photography on what he thought would be a $2 million quickie to star Joan Collins as the Egyptian queen. But what he got instead was an all-star boondoggle that turned into one of the highest-priced movie failures of all time. It was a film destined to become more famous for bringing together Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton than for its dubious contribution to the annals of motion picture history.
Every calamity that could befall a motion picture struck Cleopatra. Taylor contracted pneumonia, forcing production to close down for six months; two major roles had to be recast; directors quit; the producer was fired; and, while the affair between new lovers Taylor and Burton sizzled onscreen and off, their escapades proved costly to a production already way over budget. The movie wasn’t even completed, and it had already cost the studio nearly $40 million, in 1963 dollars.
As the costs spiraled out of control, Fox’s board of directors forced Skouras out of his position as president and gave him the nominal title chairman of the board. Then, like a knight in shining armor, Darryl Zanuck returned to reclaim his castle. He was a major stockholder in the company and so had a lot to lose if the studio went bankrupt. He also wanted to protect the distribution of his new movie, The Longest Day, which Fox was releasing. But even though the gallant knight had returned to save the kingdom, he didn’t want to live there. Or he couldn’t. There was a rumor circulating around town that the separation agreement he’d made with his wife, Virginia, had stipulated that Darryl could not enter California unless Virginia gave him permission. Whether or not this was true, Darryl ran the studio from either the George V Hotel in Paris or, if he had to be in the country for a board meeting, the St. Regis Hotel in New York. As for the studio in Los Angeles, he appointed his son, Richard “Dick” Zanuck, vice president in charge of production at the California location.
Dick Zanuck had grown up on the Fox lot and was already a seasoned Hollywood veteran at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, having produced two motion pictures: Compulsion, the classic film adaptation about the Leopold and Loeb murder case, and The Chapman Report, a George Cukor film, starring a very young Jane Fonda, about the sexual mores of suburban women. After this notable beginning, Zanuck became his father’s West Coast liaison to the independent film company Darryl had started in France.
When Dick Zanuck returned to Fox after his father regained control of the studio in 1963, it seemed like a different company. Instead of the productive, vital studio he had known in his youth, Zanuck soon discovered he had inherited a chaotic studio on the brink of bankruptcy. The new head of production blamed many of the studio’s troubles on bad management. “When I came back to Fox, they had all these projects and people, and nothing was happening. I read thirty scripts the first few days I was there, and there wasn’t one thing that was any good.”
Zanuck’s first step was to shut down the studio. Only a handful of projects were left in production, one thousand employees were laid off, and even the commissary closed down. He then corralled everyone onto one floor of one building, to “gather momentum.”
By all accounts, Twentieth Century Fox became a ghost town. “Tumbleweeds were rolling down the streets,” Zanuck recalled.
“It was a haunted studio,” concurred Ernest Lehman.
But while the studio looked as if it were about to declare Chapter 11, Dick Zanuck knew he would somehow find a way to bring it back around. “I know there was a big concern at the time as to whether or not we would ever open up the studio again,” related Zanuck. “But by the film community, not by us. We still had some money for production, and we had every intention of opening up again. We knew that we would.”
Zanuck had a few projects in various stages of development, among them What a Way to Go! to star Shirley MacLaine and an all-star cast; and Something’s Got to Give, which was to have starred Marilyn Monroe before she died and was now retitled Move Over, Darling for Doris Day and James Garner.
The Sand Pebbles was in the early stages of development, with Robert Wise as director. Two other films, The Agony and the Ecstasy and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, were in development and would eventually be shot in Europe at the same time as Music. Zanuck also knew that he needed a major project to put the studio back on the map.
The solution was there all along. The Sound of Music had been collecting dust since its purchase by Fox, yet it was still a tremendous hit on Broadway. Zanuck couldn’t understand why no one had put the project into development. “I just thought it was such a wonderful piece of family entertainment. And it had been so hugely successful that it was just an obvious thing to do.”
Once again, Zanuck questioned the studio’s former management. “Even though the studio couldn’t release the picture until the play closed, they could have put a writer on it. What you want to do is have your movie ready for release when your date comes.”
There wasn’t much overhead involved in putting a property into development. It just meant hiring a writer. Ernest Lehman had made it known around town that he was very optimistic about the possibility of a movie based on Music and that he was anxious to do the adaptation. His big successes with adaptations of The King and I and West Side Story convinced Zanuck to let Lehman work his magic again on Music. This would be the film to herald the new regime at Twentieth Century Fox!
When The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety announced on December 10, 1962, that Fox had hired Ernest Lehman to work on The Sound of Music, the news reverberated throughout Hollywood. Not only had Fox eluded bankruptcy, it actually intended to make an expensive, major film.
Hollywood was skeptical. First of all, no one thought that Fox had the money. In fact, Lehman was getting warnings from friends. “Fox is using you,” they said. “They’re not going to pay you. They’re reneging on their contracts!” Even the board of directors at Fox didn’t have confidence in its own project, fearing the movie would be too costly. Then something happened that changed the directors’ minds.
Screenwriter Ernest Lehman
Lehman and Zanuck had a lunch date at Romanoff’s. “It was our first meeting,” Lehman remembered. “I got to the table first, and I saw Irving Lazar approach Dick at the top of the stairs. They were huddled in conversation for a while, and then Zanuck came to the table.” “Swifty just offered me $2 million to buy back the rights to Music,” Zanuck told Lehman. “I told him to go to hell.”
Lazar wouldn’t mention the name of his client, but Lehman and Zanuck were convinced it was Jack Warner. It seems the rumors about Fox were so bad that Warner thought the studio couldn’t possibly afford to make the picture, and he thought his studio might do well with the project. His offer of $2 million to buy out the Rodgers and Hammerstein contract would have provided Twentieth Century Fox with a $750,000 profit. Warner thought the studio was hungry enough to bite. Instead Fox’s board of directors gave Zanuck the OK to begin production.
But it wasn’t just Fox’s financial troubles that made the film community question Lehman’s sanity in taking on the project; it was the project itself. Reputations die hard, and The Sound of Music was still known for its schmaltz. Lehman recalled sitting in the newly reopened commissary one day when Burt Lancaster, who had starred in Lehman’s critically acclaimed Sweet Smell of Success, walked up and asked what he was working on. When Lehman replied, “The Sound of Music,” Lancaster retorted, “Jesus, you must need the money!”
Another example of the community’s distaste for the play came from director Billy Wilder. Wilder and Lehman, guests at Jack Lemmon’s home one night, began discussing Lehman’s upcoming projects. When Lehman told Wilder that he had just started working on Music, Wilder anno
unced to his friend, “No musical with swastikas in it will ever be a success!” (This is precisely the reason Lehman wrote the scene in which Captain von Trapp rips up the swastika.)
As Lehman began developing the screenplay, he and Zanuck decided they’d better start looking for a director/producer. They immediately thought of Robert Wise. Wise was known as a gritty, realistic director, and they felt that his style of filmmaking would help compensate for the more sugary aspects of the story. Wise had also just directed and produced the highly acclaimed film adaptation of West Side Story, for which he had won double Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director (the latter Oscar he shared with codirector Jerome Robbins). But Wise was already on the Fox lot preparing The Sand Pebbles, a sprawling adventure about the lives of a US Navy gunboat crew in 1926 China. The picture was only in the early stages of development, and Wise could have left to do Fox’s Music, but he wanted to stay with The Sand Pebbles. Besides, Wise wasn’t particularly interested in Music. He’d also heard the rumors.
“It’s not his cup of tea,” his agent said.
Lehman’s second choice was director Stanley Donen. Donen had directed such classic musicals as Singin’ in the Rain (codirected with Gene Kelly), Funny Face, and Damn Yankees. But when Lehman called him at his home in Switzerland to ask if he’d be interested in directing Music, Donen declined. Though he had been an investor in the Broadway show, he had no interest in directing the film.
Lehman then approached Gene Kelly. In addition to dancing and acting in more than thirty films, Kelly was an accomplished director. He’d directed On the Town and Singin’ in the Rain (with Donen), as well as Invitation to the Dance. He seemed an excellent choice for Music, and Lehman was excited as he drove to Kelly’s Beverly Hills home on Rodeo Drive.
The Sound of Music Page 2