“As soon as I walked inside the house,” Lehman remembered, “I announced, ‘Gene, I came over to ask if you’d like to be our director on The Sound of Music’.” Kelly walked Lehman back out the door and said, “Ernie, go find somebody else to direct this kind of shit!”
Lehman was undaunted. He knew he and Zanuck would find the perfect director. On January 17, 1963, the two men met with Zanuck’s father, Darryl, in New York. When the talk turned to directors, Lehman mentioned that, in his opinion, one of the best directors in the world was William Wyler. And, indeed, Wyler was a master. Not only did his credits include the haunting Wuthering Heights and the delightful Roman Holiday, but he had also directed three films that went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture: Mrs. Miniver, Ben Hur, and The Best Years of Our Lives. Darryl Zanuck agreed that Wyler would be an outstanding director on Music and immediately phoned him in California.
Wyler flew to New York the next day to see the show with Lehman. This was Lehman’s third visit; he had seen the play a second time with Dick Zanuck just a few nights before. Lehman’s reaction to the show the second night wasn’t particularly enthusiastic, and as he sat for a third time watching the play with Wyler, he began to panic and thought to himself, “My God, what have I done?”
William Wyler scouting locations in Austria.
It had been two years since Mary Martin had left the show, and a new actress, Nancy Dussault, had taken over the role of Maria. Lehman wasn’t too crazy about her or the original production. In fact, as Lehman sat watching the show as if through Willy Wyler’s eyes, he wondered what had come over him that night two years before when he had proclaimed that this would make such a popular picture. Still, he was so anxious for Wyler to like the play and see its potential that he sat on the edge of his seat, almost willing the show to be better.
While Lehman sat nervously watching Wyler’s reactions to the play, Darryl Zanuck waited anxiously at the “21” Club, where he was to meet the two men after the show. As Wyler wandered out of the theater, he turned to Lehman and said, “Ernie, this is terrible. I can’t meet Darryl. I hated the show, and I’m not going to do this. But keep talking to me anyway.”
Lehman and Wyler went for a walk, and Lehman explained all of his ideas for the show, all the changes he’d make, all the strong moments he planned to underscore. Throughout the evening Wyler just kept repeating, “I hate the show, Ernie. But keep talking.”
Finally, at two in the morning, utterly frustrated and talked out, Lehman stopped and said, “Willy, I know you hated the show, but just tell me one thing. What did you feel at that moment when Captain von Trapp started singing ‘The Sound of Music’ with his children?”
Wyler took Lehman’s hand and said, “Funny you should bring up that moment. I almost cried.”
Lehman smiled and said, “Willy, that’s it! That’s what it’s all about!”
Darryl Zanuck, meanwhile, was fuming because he thought he’d been stood up. But when Lehman filled him in the next morning, Zanuck cried, “Stop working on the script! Forget everything you’re doing! Your job is to get Willy Wyler to do this movie!”
On the plane back to California, Lehman explained to Wyler how enormously successful the play had been and what a loyal following it had generated. Every day, in Wyler’s office, Lehman elaborated on his ideas for the film and how Wyler’s contributions were essential to make this not just an entertaining musical but a film of substance. At Wyler’s home every night, Lehman talked about the energy and spirit of the story. This exhausting routine went on for two weeks. Finally, when Lehman was beginning to run out of ideas, Wyler at last capitulated and agreed to direct and produce the picture. Everything was ready to go. There was just one minor problem….
Willy Wyler hated The Sound of Music!
Wyler hired Roger Edens, a well-respected musical supervisor who had done numerous musicals with Arthur Freed at MGM, including Meet Me in St. Louis, Easter Parade, and Annie Get Your Gun, as his associate producer. Edens, Wyler, and Lehman then flew to Salzburg, Austria, to scout locations for the film.
Though Wyler was going through the motions of being the “director” on the film, Lehman was having trouble keeping him interested. “I was very wary of Willy because I’d been through many experiences with him, and I knew you had to watch him very carefully,” recalled Lehman. “You can’t accept what he says as gospel. The fact that he had signed to do the picture didn’t mean all that much to me. I was still very leery.”
And rightly so. Wyler spent much of his time in Austria taking long-distance phone calls from other studios and discussing other projects, sometimes, because his hearing was so poor, asking Lehman to act as “interpreter.” One of the projects he was discussing was an MGM script, The Americanization of Emily, which was at the same stage of preproduction as Music. To add insult to injury, Wyler wouldn’t heed Lehman’s pleas to hire Julie Andrews for the role of Maria in Music, but he did mention that Julie would be a perfect choice for Emily.
Another irritant for Lehman was the presence of Wolfgang Reinhardt, who had directed the German films on the von Trapps and was a close friend of Wyler’s. “He followed Wyler all over,” remembered Lehman. “I felt that he was an interloper. Wyler was consulting with him instead of me, the writer!”
At one point, Wyler and Lehman had a heated argument. “Wyler wanted me to go up in the small plane with him when we were looking for the opening shots,” Lehman said, “and I refused to go up. He demanded that I go along, but I was very stubborn. It wasn’t just the ride. I don’t know why I didn’t want to go. I guess it was my mistrust of Willy.
“Well, when they got back, I got a report from Roger Edens, and he told me that the pilot turned out to be an ex-Nazi. When Wyler found out, they got into a terrible fight. There they were, flying over the Alps, screaming at each other about Nazism! I was lucky I wasn’t there.”
In all fairness to Wyler, he did see this movie as a way to make a personal statement. Wyler was an Alsatian Jew. Although he had left Europe before the Holocaust, unscathed, some of his family members had perished during the war.
“I knew [the movie] wasn’t really a political thing,” said Wyler in his biography, William Wyler—The Authorized Biography, written by Wyler and Axel Madsen. But “I had a tendency to want to make it, if not an anti-Nazi movie, at least say a few things.”
But turning a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical into a political platform was not what Lehman and Zanuck had in mind. “Willy was going to make it very heavy-handed at the end,” said Zanuck. “He wanted tanks. He wanted a real invasion, blowing up the town and everything. I didn’t see any need for all this right in the middle of a musical.”
After the group returned to California, Lehman and Dick Zanuck decided that the only way to ferret out Wyler’s true intentions was for Lehman to quickly complete a first draft of the screenplay so the two of them could carefully observe Wyler’s reactions to it. Wyler had a reputation for being tough on writers and their scripts. “He ate writers alive,” said Lehman. But it was this tenacity that indicated his commitment to a film. The tougher he was, the more he liked a project.
Lehman finished the first draft of the screenplay on September 10, 1963, and immediately sent if off to Wyler. A few days later Wyler came over to Lehman’s office. “Ernie, I’m embarrassed,” Wyler began. “I’ve never read such a perfect first draft. I can’t think of a single thing I can improve. I ought to have a lot of suggestions for you, but I can’t think of anything. Well, I gotta go now. I’m playing gin rummy over at Hillcrest.”
Lehman immediately went to Dick Zanuck’s office and told him to start worrying.
One Saturday afternoon a few days later, Wyler was having a small party at his home in Malibu and invited Lehman to join him. Rex Harrison was going to be there with his wife, Rachel Roberts, and Wyler wanted Lehman to convince Harrison to play the part of Captain von Trapp. As Lehman began his pitch to Harrison, he noticed Wyler huddled in a corner of the room with
another party guest, Mike Frankovich, the head of Columbia Pictures.
An hour later, Lehman was passing Wyler’s study on his way out when he noticed that, among the many scripts in Wyler’s office, one was lying face down, the title hidden from view. His curiosity aroused, Lehman turned the script over and read the title. The screenplay was The Collector, currently in preproduction at Columbia Pictures.
The next day, Lehman went to see Dick Zanuck. “Dick, Willy is going to direct The Collector.”
Zanuck nodded grimly. “I’m ready.”
Then Lehman had an idea. He went back to his office and arranged to surreptitiously slip a copy of the Music screenplay to Phil Gersh, agent for director Robert Wise.
Soon after Wyler’s Malibu beach party, Paul Kohner, Willy Wyler’s agent, visited Dick Zanuck. Zanuck was prepared.
“Wyler would like to do The Collector before he does Sound of Music,” Kohner told Zanuck. “And he’d like you to postpone Music until The Collector is finished.”
Zanuck paused for only a moment. “Tell Willy to go make The Collector. We are not postponing The Sound of Music for five seconds!”
And that concluded Willy Wyler’s association with The Sound of Music.
“I loved Willy, and he was a genius and everything,” conceded Zanuck years later, “but he was a guy that would get cold feet. I think he got scared. Maybe he thought the movie was too saccharine. Maybe that’s why he needed to insert this whole military aspect into it that I thought was unnecessary. So, when we finally had to let Willy go, I didn’t think that it was that great a loss. Oh, we ranted and raved about how awful it was, but down deep inside I was a bit relieved.”
“I know it was very perverse of me,” explained Lehman when asked why he had put up with Wyler’s antics for so long, “but it’s like I was willing to endure what I had to endure in order to get one of the best directors in the world. It’s kind of like figuring out who your executioner is going to be. As it turned out, I guess I was pretty stupid, because Willy wouldn’t have been the best director for the movie.”
At the time Robert Wise was suddenly handed Lehman’s screenplay, he was well into preproduction on Fox’s The Sand Pebbles, but the picture had run into a number of problems, including trouble with the Taiwanese government about shooting the film in their country. The movie was postponed for a year, and Lehman knew that Wise was looking for another film to direct until he could start working on The Sand Pebbles. The timing was perfect. The first thing Wise did, even before he read the script, was call Saul Chaplin, his associate producer on West Side Story. He asked Chaplin for his opinion of the project, as Wise had never seen the stage show. Chaplin not only had been Wise’s associate producer on West Side Story but was also a well-known musical supervisor. He’d won three Academy Awards for Best Scoring of a Musical: An American in Paris (with Johnny Green), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (with Adolf Deutsch), and West Side Story (with Johnny Green, Irwin Kostal, and Sid Ramin). A few of the famous songs he has written are “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” (with longtime collaborator Sammy Cahn, recorded by the popular forties singing group the Andrews Sisters); “Anniversary Song”; and “You Wonderful You” (with Harry Warren and Jack Brooks).
When Wise called Chaplin to ask for his opinion of the project, he unknowingly put Chaplin in an awkward position. Chaplin had disliked the stage version of Music but was a good friend of Lehman’s, so he wasn’t sure if he could give Wise an unbiased opinion. He told Wise how he felt about the Broadway show but did mention that it had been the most successful of all the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals and, in his opinion, contained their very best score. This was enough to pique Wise’s interest, so he read the script and thought Lehman had done an excellent job on the material. Then he bought the cast album and was very impressed with the music.
Next he sent the screenplay to Chaplin and, this time, asked for his opinion of the actual script. Fortunately, Chaplin was pleasantly surprised with Lehman’s first draft and told Wise so. After reading through the script a second time and playing the score once more, Wise decided to take on the assignment.
Immediately after Wise told Zanuck of his decision to direct the film, Zanuck called Lehman into his office. His eyes gleamed. “Ernie, I’ve got a big surprise for you. Guess who would like to direct Music?”
“Who?” Lehman asked.
“Bob Wise!”
“No kidding!” Lehman exclaimed.
Zanuck stared at him a moment, then grinned. “You son of a bitch! You gave him the script, didn’t you?”
“Who, me?” Lehman replied innocently.
And Lehman has never officially admitted that it was he who smuggled that script out to Robert Wise.
Did You Know … ?
Three scenes that were filmed for the movie never made it into the final cut of The Sound of Music:
SCENE 8
Maria is kneeling in prayer by her bed at the abbey when Sister Margaretta comes in to tell her that the Mother Abbess wants a word with her. Sister Margaretta escorts Maria to the hallway outside the mother’s office. Maria waits there until the sister, who has gone in to announce Maria, comes back out to tell her she may go inside. Wise and his editor, William Reynolds, elected to begin the scene with Maria waiting out in the hall; the sister then comes out and tells her that the mother is waiting for her, and Maria goes in.
SCENE 20
In the middle of the “Do-Re-Mi” sequence, at the horse fountain, Liesl spots Rolf delivering telegrams. She invites him over to meet Maria. They cut out this scene because it interrupted the flow of the montage.
SCENE 42
The night the Captain sings “Edelweiss,” he walks out onto the terrace, and it is clear his thoughts are about Maria. The camera moves up to Maria’s room, where she is gazing out the window, thinking about the Captain. Again, Wise felt this scene broke the flow and was unnecessary.
Liesl introduces Rolf to Maria. This scene was cut from the film.
That’s Larri Thomas, not Julie Andrews, hanging from that tree! This is one of the few scenes in which Larri, Julie’s stand-in, is actually shown onscreen. It is, of course, the scene in which the Captain drives by and sees the “street urchins” dangling like monkeys from the trees, only to realize they are his children! No doubles were used for the “urchins”—the kids gladly cooperated.
PROCEED WITH CAUTION—WATCH OUT FOR CHILDREN.
While Wise was conducting his talent search for the seven von Trapp children, he had so many youngsters coming in and out of his office that his associates put this sign on his door.
What’s wrong with this picture? When the crew built the “marketplace,” they made one mistake. If you look closely, you can see a crate of oranges marked “Produce of Israel.” At the time this story took place, Israel was not yet a country!
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“When You Read You Begin with ABC …”
SCRIPT AND MUSIC
The first thing Ernest Lehman did after he was hired to write the screenplay of The Sound of Music was to read the original play script. As he went through it for the first time, he immediately began rearranging and eliminating songs. The play started with the nuns chanting “Dixit Dominus.” Then, in the following scene, Maria is seen sitting high up on a tree branch, looking over the meadow and singing “The Sound of Music.” Lehman switched these two numbers, wisely selecting the more upbeat “Music” to open the film.
In the stage version, the Mother Abbess and Maria sing “My Favorite Things” together: it is a song they both remember from childhood. Lehman thought the song might work better as a vehicle to calm the children during the thunderstorm. In the play Maria and the children sang “The Lonely Goatherd” in the storm scene. Lehman decided to use “Goatherd” later in the movie. He deleted two of the play’s songs right away, both of which are sung by Elsa and Max, secondary characters in the story. Elsa is the Captain’s initial love interest; Max is a family friend.
“How Can Love Survive?” is a
number the two sing together to describe how Elsa and the Captain’s love could never survive because, being rich, the couple wouldn’t have the chance to struggle together like other, younger, poorer lovers. They sing “No Way to Stop It” to the Captain in an effort to convince him that what is happening in Germany is inevitable, so he might as well go along with the political developments. Lehman thought these two songs were weak compared to the other songs in the show. He also wanted to scale down the roles of the secondary characters to streamline the story.
Lehman knew right away that he had to do something with “Do-Re-Mi.” In the play it was a stagnant, twelve-minute number sung in the hallway when Maria first meets the children. He wanted to break the song up into different sections, but he wasn’t quite sure yet how that could be accomplished.
It wasn’t that the placement of these songs didn’t work in the play. Obviously, considering the play’s success, it did. But in adapting the play as a film, Lehman was given an opportunity to “open up” the story to the lavish beauty of the Austrian Alps. In a 1965 article Robert Wise wrote for the Los Angeles Times called “Why ‘The Sound of Music’ Sounds Differently,” Wise described “opening up” a play as “taking some of the action out into the world in order to utilize the flexibility of the camera to emphasize mood and action that, on stage, can only be referred to or implied.” For example, Maria didn’t have to sit in one spot for the entire length of the title song. She could run up a hill, cross over a brook, dance through the trees. Likewise, with the magic of moviemaking, “Do-Re-Mi” was not restricted to one single indoor setting. There could be quick cuts and dissolves to show other locations.
The Sound of Music Page 3