… Somehow she manages to make that character so real and never cloying. “And the casting of Julie Andrews is pivotal, it’s just pivotal. I mean, I think Robert Wise deservedly won that Academy Award for best director,” making a nearly three-hour movie that flies by. It has a great score, but so do other films that don’t make a cent. “We’ve all seen movies that we find absolutely wonderful that don’t make anywhere near as much money and don’t endure as well.” “Every time I see it, it still elevates me.”Īs for why it took the world by storm in 1965 and forever after, he’s not quite sure. “I loved it in 1965 and I still love it,” he said. He didn’t really understand who the Nazis were, but he knew they were menacing. It was his sister’s 10th birthday in October 1965, and an aunt had an extra ticket and because it starred the actress from Mary Poppins, he was thrilled to tag along. Monush, whose day job is assistant curator at the Paley Center for Media in New York, first saw the movie as a 6-year-old at a theater in Asbury Park, N.J. I meet people all the time who adore the film, and I meet just as many people who just scowl at the very mention of the name,” he said in a recent phone call. 3 when adjusted for inflation, behind GWTW and Star Wars.Īs for its enduring appeal, Barry Monush, author of The Sound of Music FAQ, has no easy or single answer. The city’s population then was 199,300 and yet a theater there sold 309,000 tickets.įor a time, Sound of Music displaced Gone With the Wind as the domestic box-office champion of all time although it now stands at No. locations and a Fox veep famously pointed to Salt Lake City as an example of its success. The movie musical broke records in 80 percent of those U.S. 18, 1965, it was playing in only 131 of the 14,000-plus theaters in the United States. The Sound of Music was an event, and even by Dec. A popular film might hold for a couple of months before starting its speedy march to DVD, Blu-ray and on-demand viewing. That is the opposite of the release pattern today, where a movie often will open on as many screens as possible and aim to be the box-office champ for the weekend or longer. (In Akron, it ran for nearly two years at the Village Theatre on West Market Street.) It also had an intermission, just like a Broadway play. It began as a “roadshow” engagement, with reserved seating at a very limited number of theaters, higher prices ($1.50 to $3 depending on the day, time and whether you were in the nosebleeds) and scheduled film start times instead of continuous shows. Davis told the leading lady, “The motion picture business is in love with you!” It premiered March 2, 1965, at the Rivoli Theatre on Broadway in front of an audience that included Richard Rodgers, Bette Davis, Salvador Dali and Adlai Stevenson, Richard Stirling’s biography of Andrews reported. After test runs in Minneapolis and Tulsa, 360 audience members rated it excellent, five called it good and no one labeled it fair. The movie also will celebrate its golden anniversary by opening the TCM Classic Film Festival March 26 at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood where Andrews and Plummer are expected for a rare reunion.Ī half-century ago, preview audiences accurately predicted how most of the world would embrace the movie. The restored film will return to 500-plus theaters April 19 and 22, and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment has just released a five-disc edition with a new documentary, The Sound of a City: Julie Andrews Returns to Salzburg. Who needs Lassie when you have nearly 2.5 million Facebook followers and a looming golden anniversary that will revisit the glories of the musical?įor starters, Lady Gaga performed a medley from The Sound of Music at the Oscar ceremony in February and was greeted by Andrews afterward. … I guess when you put all those ingredients - beautiful scenery and beautiful music and children and nuns and all of that - together, the only thing that was missing was Lassie, I guess.” The 1965 musical was so phenomenally popular that it was nicknamed “The Sound of Money” and dubbed “The Mint.” The movie played in American theaters for 4½ years until the studio withdrew it with plans for a re-issue the demand in England was so insatiable that the film set a record with 170 weeks at a London theater.ĭecades later, while promoting a live CBS presentation of On Golden Pond with co-star Christopher Plummer, Andrews said, “I don’t think either of us knew it would take off that way. “This smells as if it might be a success,” Andrews said. Late in The Sound of Music production - after a helicopter’s downdraft had knocked Julie Andrews over, after rain clobbered the schedule and budget, and after an angry farmer poked holes in a manmade brook - the leading lady delivered a tentative prediction.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |