Leonard Bernstein Went to Hollywood (and Quickly Returned to New York)

Leonard Bernstein, the subject of the new Bradley Cooper film Maestro, conquered the realms of classical music, Broadway, and television, and had the Grammys (16), Tonys (2) and Emmys (7) to show for it. But Hollywood was slower to be won over by him.

Image

The first indication that Bernstein would never need to find a house in Los Angeles came just a couple of years after his legendary 1943 debut with the New York Philharmonic that launched his career. When he was 27, he was called in for a screen test to play Tchaikovsky in a biopic that was also slated to star Greta Garbo as his patron Nadezhda von Meck, with a screenplay by someone you probably did not expect to encounter in this sentence, Ayn Rand. (Perhaps it's just as well that he failed the test.) This is referenced in Maestro.

Then in 1949, his hit musical On the Town was turned into a feature film which jettisoned most of Bernstein's music in favor of a new score by Roger Edens, who, just to make this even more painful, won an Oscar for his efforts. (Bernstein could have consoled himself that Edens had pulled a similar trick on George Gershwin nine years earlier; Edens was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Strike up the Band, which shared only the title and the title song with the groundbreaking Gershwin musical of the same name.)

 In 1954, Bernstein got his only job writing an original film score, for Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront, a seemingly positive milestone in his career (including his only Oscar nomination) that was rendered bittersweet by Kazan's butchering of the score in the editing room, discarding much of it and destroying many of the nuances of Bernstein's carefully crafted underscoring, as well as the troubling politics of the film, a metaphorical justification for Kazan's cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee (Bernstein's less cooperative stance resulted in the temporary revocation of his passport and the New York Philharmonic's refusing to engage him from 1951-56.) In Maestro we hear a snippet from the On the Waterfront score, with its blazing timpani, near the beginning of the film when the young Lenny rushes out of his apartment and through the corridors of Carnegie Hall for his historic debut.

 That same year Alfred Hitchcock used a fairly substantial portion of Bernstein's ballet Fancy Free near the beginning of his classic film Rear Window for which the composer received no credit and little money. You can hear it in this clip beginning at 1:56:

 The release of the highly acclaimed film version of West Side Story in 1961 would seemingly have mended this troubled relationship - Bernstein certainly got plenty of money and credit for it, and it's what earned him his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame - but his own involvement with the film was limited, and he was dissatisfied by the overly thick orchestrations used on the soundtrack and its re-ordering of the score. (In yet another bitter technicality, those orchestrators won an Oscar for their efforts while Bernstein himself wasn't even nominated.)

Perhaps the most intriguing what-if among Bernstein’s flirtations with the movies was his planned collaboration on the soundtrack to Franco Zeffirelli’s 1972 film Brother Sun, Sister Moon, about the life of St. Francis of Assisi with an eye toward the “counterculture” market. The score was going to be co-written by Leonard Bernstein and Leonard Cohen (!), and the two of them actually spent three months in Italy working on it before they gave up. (Paul Simon was also briefly attached to the project.) It wasn’t a complete loss, however, since some of the music he wrote for the film ended up in the similarly themed MASS, including its opening tune A Simple Song. As for the movie, the Scottish folksinger Donovan ended up writing the songs, while the critics found little to like except its sumptuous cinematography.

Decades later and the problems continue. Bernstein's Wall, a highly acclaimed documentary which I had hoped to watch in preparation for this project, isn't currently available to stream, rent or buy, just two years after its release in 2021. Spielberg's version of West Side Story, despite many rhapsodic reviews, spectacularly bombed at the box office, probably due to its coinciding with a new strain of COVID keeping older audiences out of the theaters. And 2022's Tár, a fictional film which contained numerous references to Bernstein including a clip of one of his Young People's Concerts, also fared poorly in the U.S.

And now there's Maestro. Already it’s one of Netflix’s most successful theatrical releases, and has been nominated for numerous awards. Perhaps Lenny is finally ready for his close-up.