Robert Wise with Sand Pebbles star Steve McQueen on the gunboat in Hong Kong during the surprise Oscar celebration.
If losing the award dampened Julie Andrews’s spirits, she didn’t have time to show it, because the Best Director award was up next, and Robert Wise won. Wise had asked Andrews to accept his award if he won, and, as she moved to the podium, she was hailed with enthusiastic applause by the audience, which seemed to want to make up for her not winning the coveted Best Actress Oscar.
When Jack Lemmon announced that the Best Picture of the Year was The Sound of Music, Chaplin ran onto the stage. He accepted the award on Robert Wise’s behalf and then, from his heart, added a few words of his own.
“I’m going to take this opportunity to thank [Robert Wise] for making the filming of The Sound of Music such a rewarding and stimulating experience.” Julie Andrews let out a yelp and fell into the arms of publicist Mike Kaplan. They both began to cry.
At the exact moment that Andrews and Kaplan clung to each other backstage at the Santa Monica Civic, Robert Wise stood on a gunboat off the coast of Hong Kong shooting a scene from The Sand Pebbles (while it was Monday night in America, it was Tuesday afternoon in China). The Pebbles crew wanted to make sure that Wise didn’t miss any news of the festivities, so the local newspaper in Hong Kong had a hookup to radio reports from the Oscars show, and arrangements were made for the paper to phone the results to a crew member stationed on shore near the gunboat. The crew member would then send the news, by radio, to the gunboat as the winners were announced.
Although shooting did not stop during the initial reports from Hollywood, cheers went up from the film crew every time a win was announced for Music. Finally, when Wise won the Oscar as Best Director and Music was announced as the winner of Best Picture, filming stopped and all hell broke loose.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but the Chinese crew had secretly strung the entire mast on the boat with big firecrackers,” Wise recalled. “Ted Taylor, my public relations man on the picture, had also smuggled aboard a troupe of Chinese dragon dancers and had hidden them in the hold.”
When the final award was announced, the firecrackers exploded, and the dragon dancers came charging out of the hold, banging their drums and dancing all over the boat! So, even though they were thousands of miles away from home, on the other side of the world Wise, Reggie Callow, and Saul Wurtzel—his associates on both Music and Pebbles—had their own way of celebrating their good fortune.
How They Sold
Moviemaking has changed drastically in the five decades since Music premiered. In today’s market films open on a continuous performance basis in several theaters with as much ballyhoo and advertising as possible. In the sixties, developing an audience for a film was a much more subtle affair. From the inception of the project, The Sound of Music was intended to be a road show, a vision reflected in the decision to film in Todd-AO, a wide-screen process to which, at that time, relatively few theaters had been converted. Months before the start of shooting, at the suggestion of mutual friends, Robert Wise discussed the project with publicist Mike Kaplan, who had just finished a yearlong production and distribution campaign on It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. In one thirty-minute interview, the two discovered they had similar philosophies about the care and feeding of an important film project, and Kaplan came aboard.
The publicity campaign began in February 1964, before the first scene of the movie was shot. Most publicity directors of the era started work by creating a “campaign analysis”—a blueprint detailing the steps to be taken to make the public aware of the project. The publicists analyzed which publications and which journalists would be interested in specific elements of the picture. In the case of Music the elements might be the property’s success as a Broadway show, the rising star of Julie Andrews, the challenge of Robert Wise to equal or top his success with West Side Story, or the heart-tugging elements of the story. Because the project was designed as a road show, for which exhibitors in individual cities might bid against each other, Kaplan’s plans also included a heavy concentration of ads in the show business trade papers Daily Variety, Weekly Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter. Exhibitors who read these “trades” were thus aware that something special was only a year away.
The first order of business was to give the film a cachet (a special ad line or slogan) and create a logo, which, the publicist hoped, would have such an impact that anyone seeing them would know immediately what film they represented. After rereading the script, Kaplan came up with the ad line “The Happiest Sound in All the World” and began the tedious process of creating artwork that would complement the line and be a memorable visual asset. He enlisted the help of outside creative agencies to work with the Fox advertising staff, and more than a dozen good pieces of art were rejected before the creation of the key art: Julie Andrews, carpetbag in hand, bursting over a hill with the seven children in the background.
Because of the road show concept, Kaplan avoided the usual broadside publicity campaign, preferring instead to draw up a list of forty key cities that, he was certain, would be among the first to book the film. From the first day of production the publicity campaign was geared toward those cities; even more specifically, to encompass the personal interests of media personalities in those cities. For instance, if one city had three major newspapers, Kaplan would write three separate stories about the movie, tailoring each story to an individual newspaper.
Midway through the Salzburg location shoot, the Music company became the first stop on a three-city press junket launched by Twentieth Century Fox to publicize the musical and its other big European location productions, The Agony and the Ecstasy and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. The stay was short, but with the cooperation of Wise, Saul Chaplin, and the stars, the 120 American journalists wound up with stories and pictures of the production, and all of them could boast at least one exclusive interview with the principals involved. The junket also paid off later, after the film opened; while other critics wrote unflattering reviews of the movie, the journalists who had gone on the trip wrote only sterling critiques.
When the company returned to the studio for interiors, the publicity campaign continued, with weekly feature mailings to the newspapers in the key cities. The buildup achieved such penetration that, when the film was completed and taken out for preview, it drew turn-away crowds despite minimal publicity regarding the screening itself.
The public’s reaction convinced Kaplan that the company had a megahit on its hands. At a midnight snack session after the Tulsa preview, he told Wise and Chaplin, “You could get rid of me tomorrow and you’d still have a smash. Just open the doors and get out of the way.” Less than eleven months later, Kaplan’s optimism was justified when Music, despite its limited road show run, became the most popular picture to date.
By then a new campaign was under way—an effort to win Academy Award recognition for the picture and all the talents involved. The word campaign, of course, makes it seem as if potential Oscar candidates are on a political drive to snare votes. Actually the purpose of such a campaign, whether it be through advertising in the trade papers or arranging special screenings for academy members, is to make sure that everyone who has a vote has at least seen the picture. In the sixties, the usual process at Academy Awards time was for the major contenders to advertise heavily in the trade papers, usually taking a number of “double truck” ads—that is, two facing pages—extolling the appeal of the film, quoting the reviews, and listing its box-office records. In the case of Music, studio support was not completely enthusiastic.
The film had opened the preceding March, and the general theory was that, since the awards are given out in March of the following year, the films released the year before are already forgotten and the big pictures that open at Christmas have a leg up in the academy voting. This seemed particularly true in the early spring of 1966, when most of Hollywood was convinced that Doctor Zhivago could not be beaten. To make matters
even more difficult, a musical (My Fair Lady) had won the previous year, and Julie Andrews had won Best Actress for her role in Mary Poppins. Clearly the drive for academy recognition would need something other than routine advertising; but since screenings and trade paper advertising were the only methods employed, some new wrinkle had to be found. The easiest deviation was in the area of screenings, where traditionally academy members and one guest were invited. For Music, Kaplan set up special Saturday screenings at the studio and invited academy members and their families—as many people as they wished—and made it clear they could come to more than one screening if they so desired.
The turnout was tremendous, as expected. But what was not anticipated was the reaction from the Fox sales department, which, despite the fact that the film was already established as the all-time box-office champion, was outraged at the number of people seeing the film for free!
Finding a variation in the print advertising routine was a bit more difficult. But Kaplan drew on a long-standing theory of his own: Hollywood’s movers and shakers, he insisted, did not read the trade papers; they had secretaries who scanned the papers and marked those items they thought would interest the boss. The executives did not stop to read the ads and did not bother reading anything that wasn’t marked. So to get around this problem, Kaplan devised a series of one-and-a-half-page ads, the half-page being the left-hand page. In an unusual deal with the trade papers, he paid for two full pages with the understanding that the papers would use the top half of the left-hand page for legitimate news stories. Kaplan shrewdly calculated that if serious news stories appeared there, the executives would not pass over that page as they would have if it had contained only an advertisement. Thus, the Music ad would draw the executives’ attention, if only momentarily.
Obviously there is no way of proving how much these innovations meant to academy voters, but the results speak for themselves.
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“What Will My Future Be, I Wonder …”
LIFE AFTER MUSIC
It’s been over five decades since The Sound of Music opened, and the film changed not only movie history and the fortunes of one of Hollywood’s major studios but also the lives of the people who made the picture. Robert Wise became a member of an exclusive Hollywood club consisting of director/producers who have won two double Oscars (he had also won Best Picture and Best Director, the latter Oscar shared with Jerome Robbins, for West Side Story). After Music, Wise went on to produce and direct The Sand Pebbles (1966), The Andromeda Strain (1968), Star! (1971), Two People (1973), The Hindenburg (1975), Audrey Rose (1977), Star Trek—The Motion Picture (1979), and Rooftops (1989).
Robert Wise.
He served as president of the Directors Guild of America from 1970 to 1974 and held the same title for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1985 to 1987. He was active in the Hollywood community up until his death in 2005 at the age of ninety-one.
Julie Andrews, of course, became a major star after Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music and went on to achieve acclaim in many other films as well. The year after Music, she starred in the movie adaptation of James Michener’s Hawaii, another popular road show, and Thoroughly Modern Millie in 1967 was the most successful movie at Universal Studios to that date. She collaborated with her second husband, writer/director Blake Edwards, on many films, two of which were the highly successful 10 in 1979 and Victor/Victoria, which came out in 1982 and won her an Academy Award nomination for the third time.
Julie Andrews.
In 1997, Andrews underwent surgery to remove noncancerous nodules on her throat and when she awoke, found she had lost her singing voice. For many years, she was in denial. So was the world. It was just too ironic that the woman with the perfect pitch, who made a living singing in every venue from vaudeville to Broadway to films, would lose that most precious gift. But using her ever-present strength and positivity, Andrews discovered another creative outlet, writing children’s books (with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton). In a 2015 interview in People magazine she stated, “What I say in the [The Sound of Music] is true: a door closes and a window opens.” If she hadn’t lost her voice, “I would never have written this number of books. I would never have discovered that pleasure.”
Christopher Plummer.
Besides writing, Andrews has continued acting, starring in The Princess Diaries movies and lending her voice to other animated films. In 2017, she began a children’s series, Julie’s Greenroom, which she created with her daughter, about teaching children about the performing arts. Of her experience on The Sound of Music, Andrews, interviewed by Libby Slate for a 1990 Los Angeles Times article, said, “To be part of something that’s still around, that’s brought happiness to so many people, is an honor.”
As of this writing, Christopher Plummer is eighty-seven years old and still going strong. In 2010, he won his first Oscar for his role in Beginners. In fact, he is on record as the oldest actor in academy history to win an Oscar. He has garnered two Emmy Awards and two Tony Awards, and has made more than fifty films. He works continually in film, on television, and onstage all over the world and published an autobiography, In Spite of Myself, in 2008.
The “von Trapp children”: Top row: Charmian Carr, Nicholas Hammond, Heather Menzies, Duane Chase. Front row: Angela Cartwright, Debbie Turner, Kym Karath.
“Music was the highlight of my life!” claimed Dan Truhitte, who never acted in another movie. After Music, Truhitte joined the Marines. By the time he returned home, realism had replaced movie musicals as the new wave in film, and the song-and-dance man was out of work. So Truhitte opened a dance studio in Sacramento, California, where one of his pupils was actress Molly Ringwald. After he closed the school, he worked in Las Vegas performing in the revue Hallelujah Hollywood. Then Truhitte moved to North Carolina. He and that pretty stand-in he met on the set of Music now have six children and six grandchildren.
Many of the cast members have passed away. Peggy Wood died March 18, 1978; Portia Nelson in 2001. Ironically, like Julie Andrews, Nelson’s voice was silenced mid-career—Nelson’s from two bouts of throat cancer. She eventually died from the disease. Ben Wright passed on in 1989, Eleanor Parker in 2013, Gil Stuart in 1977, Anna Lee in 2004, Richard Haydn in 1985, Norma Varden in 1989, and Marni Nixon, the “ghost-singer,” in 2016.
“If there’s one thing we hold special in life, it is The Sound of Music,” said Debbie Turner in a 1990 interview for Us magazine. But while making The Sound of Music was a highlight in the lives of the actors who portrayed the von Trapp children, the years since the film opened have not always been as pleasant. The Music “children” have all become symbols, and they have found it very hard to live up to that image.
Kym Karath, who was a regular on All My Children before quitting acting to raise her son, explained: “We went to London in 1990 to promote a new release of the video, and there were these mobs of people waiting outside the theater door. It was a little weird. They still expected me to be six years old! Then, when we were taping the TV interviews, the producers kept calling us ‘the kids.’ Now we’re all in our thirties and forties, yet they wanted us to sing ‘So Long, Farewell’ with the same positions and the same mannerisms as in the movie. They practically wanted Charmian to carry me up the stairs again. I think people want us to be frozen in time!”
While some people only dream of the kind of adulation and notoriety with which the seven Music “children” have been honored, the actors sometimes found the attention a burden. Many times over the years they have been called on to do promotional appearances for the movie, including TV shows and radio interviews, effectively extending the job for which they were hired almost five decades ago. “I had the time of my life [working on Music],” said Menzies in the 1990 Us magazine interview, “but it’s a chapter in my life that’s over.”
Actors usually form close friendships with each other during a long movie shoot and then rarely see each other again. But because of the movie’s publicizing oblig
ations over the years, the Music “children” have all remained very close.
Kym Karath all grown up.
“It’s like being members of a private club,” described Heather Menzies. Menzies starred in a few movies (she even played Julie Andrews’s sister in the 1966 Hawaii), and she starred in the Logan’s Run television series before giving up her acting career to be a full-time mother to her three children with the late actor Robert Urich. She was also godmother to Karath’s son, Eric. On Christmas Eve, 2017, Heather Menzies passed away at sixty-eight from brain cancer.
Duane Chase lives in Washington state and tests computer software for oil and mining companies; Debbie Turner lives in a small town in Minnesota with her husband and four children (one of which she named Angela, after Angela Cartwright) and owns a floral and event design company. Nicholas Hammond moved to Australia in the mideighties and became an Australian citizen where he still makes his living as an actor, and Angela Cartwright quit acting to raise her children and now works as an artist and photographer.
The von Trapps on top of their own mountain in Stowe, Vermont.
Charmian Carr also gave up her acting career for marriage. She was a big hit after Music opened and did a number of television pilot episodes under her contract with Fox. She also acted in numerous commercials. But in the 1970s she began a new career as an interior designer. One of her most famous clients was Michael Jackson who hired her in part, she said, because he loved Lisel. Sadly, Carr passed away in 2016 at age seventy-three.
Ironically the fictional von Trapp children are not the only ones to feel the frustrations of being frozen in time. The real-life von Trapps have had a similar experience. When guests visit their lodge in Vermont, it seems they expect each of the von Trapps’ lives to have been as pristine and happy as those of their movie counterparts. This is far from the truth.
The Sound of Music Page 16