BEFORE: Another century mark reached, and with tonight's film this Movie Year is 2/3 over - so I've lined up a big Broadway smash, a star-studded affair, a film that (hopefully) celebrates the best of Broadway, the movies, hit songs and the creative process. This is focused on one of the world's two PEGOT winners (that's a Pulitzer plus the other four), plus he won three Oscars (in the SAME YEAR), two Golden Globes, four Grammys, four Emmys, and one Tony. Really, Marvin, just one Tony? Couldn't you have tried a little harder? Member of the American Theater Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, here we go, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, Mr. Marvin Hamlisch!
Oh, yeah, and Barbra Streisand carries over from "Billie".
THE PLOT: Composer, conductor, genius, mensch - Marvin Hamlisch was a close to a modern day Da Vinci as it gets. Hit after hit..."The Way We Were", "Nobody Does It Better", "The Sting", "A Chorus Line" - Marvin was irrepressible and prolific, his streak was staggering. So what made a genius like that tick? What was his creative process? And when breathtaking success was followed by flops, how did Marvin cope?
AFTER: By all accounts, Marvin Hamlisch was an over-achiever. Who gets into Juilliard Music School at the age of SIX? They don't just let anyone in at any age, but at six, that's kind of ridiculous, you're talking about a child prodigy, someone like Mozart, who was playing recitals for royalty at around the same age. To have a mastery of the piano, or any instrument, or any THING at six years old seems kind of out there, but these people exist, once in a while anyway. OK, I looked into it, and Juilliard has a pre-college division, which teaches students from elementary, junior high and high school - so it's PART of the same school as the college-level students go to, but it was a division specifically for kids and teens. Still, it's an amazing accomplishment, and it's amazing that a six-year-old knew that he wanted to play and compose music for the rest of his life. But not just classical music, he had a bent even back then for show tunes and theater productions. Nerd.
As a teen, Hamlisch would go to see the stage versions of "My Fair Lady", "Gypsy", "West Side Story" and "Bye, Bye Birdie", and he caught Carol Channing in "Hello, Dolly" and all of this really opened up his mind, he was hooked. So while he was supposed to be learning the classical music at school, he was playing theater music for fun. Hey, to each his own, right? There may have been other teens like him that were also theater nerds, but most of them probably ended up as theater actors, not composers. Statistically speaking, anyway, because there just seem to be a lot more wanna-be actors out there than wanna-be composers. But he still went to college, Queens College, and got his B.A. in 1967, and his first job was as a rehearsal pianist for "Funny Girl" with Barbra Streisand.
But before a school-mate of his was dating Liza Minnelli, and Liza was looking to make a record of songs that she could give to her mother, Judy Garland, for Christmas. So Liza hired Marvin to write her some songs, one of which was "The Travelin' Life", and also this got him invited to Judy Garland's house for a Christmas party, during which he ended up at the piano, and he already knew how to play every song in Judy Garland's repertoire, so naturally he was a big hit there, at the age of 19. A producer at that party, Sam Spiegel, hired him to play piano at other parties, and also score the film "The Swimmer", which came out in 1968. Three years before that, Marvin had his first hit, which was called "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows", that played in another movie, "Ski Party" with Lesley Gore singing it. (It was like one of those Frankie Avalon beach movies, only not at the beach.)
It seemed like Hamlisch was setting himself up for major Hollywood success, he was meeting the right people, performing at the right parties, another song he wrote for Lesley Gore went to number 16 on the charts and Gore also sang it on the hot TV series "Batman", when she played an accomplice to Catwoman. Hamlisch then found work writing music for a couple of Woody Allen's early films, "Take the Money and Run" and "Bananas". And in 1973, forget about it, he won THREE Oscars on the same night, he won Best Original Song and Best Original Dramatic Score for "The Way We Were" and Best Original Song Score and/or Adaptation for "The Sting". This feat would be impossible today, because they phased out that last category at some point. But who the hell DOES this? Nobody but him, apparently.
That's it, that's the mountaintop, there's really nowhere to go from there but down, I mean, part of me says you should probably quit the business right then and there, because the chances of someday winning FOUR Oscars in one night are practically zero, no wait, actually zero. If nothing else, he guaranteed that he could work the rest of his life on movie soundtracks and scores, because who doesn't want to hire an Oscar-winning composer?
So, naturally, he packed up and left L.A. and headed back to New York to work on stage productions. No, no, I get it, he probably just missed the Carnegie Deli or Katz's or something, or like Woody Allen he needed to know that he could get Chinese food at 2 am if he wanted to. But he really wanted to conquer the stage world, too - he'd only worked at those "Funny Girl" rehearsals and done one event playing piano at Carnegie Hall for Groucho Marx. He fell in with a group of dramatists and lyricists, and the result was "A Chorus Line", which won him a Tony Award and a Pulitzer (he had to share the Pulitzer with four other guys, but hey, 1/5 of a Pulitzer is better than nothing). Again, this was his FIRST Broadway score, and it was a runaway boffo best-selling giant smash hit, like the whole Times Square area was a decrepit bunch of porn palaces and junkie music stores and one Howard Johnson's, but suddenly with "A Chorus Line" playing there was the start of the giant transformation of the neighborhood, and it only took a few thousand performances to make this happen.
Seriously, though, "A Chorus Line" started on Broadway in 1975 and ran for 6,137 performances, I don't even know how many years that is. 16? 17? Counting matinees, but the show was dark on Mondays? Let's say 8 shows a week, 400 shows a year, that means 15 years, and it was a record until "Cats" broke it in 1997, and then "Phantom" broke THAT record. By the end of all that, Broadway had become a place that people could take their families, and Disney could run shows for kids and the porn theaters were closed or exiled to other neighborhoods, and by then we had DVDs and the internet so who cares?
But the big problem with having the biggest hit on Broadway became the same problem with winning three Oscars for "The Sting" and "The Way We Were" - what do you do next? Hamlisch struggled with success because he was neurotic that way, and for five years it had seemed that everything he wrote turned to gold, so mentally he was not prepared for a time when that didn't prove true. He wrote a musical with Carole Bayer Sager about their relationship, and it was called "They're Playing Our Song", and it starred Robert Klein and Lucie Arnaz, and it didn't do well because people really liked going to see "Sweeney Todd" that year. I guess somebody forgot to tell Hamlisch that other Broadway shows would also be playing in other theaters, and that people had choices when they bought tickets. Hamlisch threw himself into two other productions, "Jean", based on the life of actress Jean Seberg, and "Smile", based on a movie about beauty pageants, and neither production was successful. He teamed up with Neil Simon for a musical version of "The Goodbye Girl", but it closed after 188 performances.
One could probably make a backwards argument here for never, ever, having a successful musical on Broadway, because you could spend your entire career trying to repeat that feat and never be able to do it. It's a tough market - so is the film industry, but at least with movies all he had to do was write music, he didn't have to worry about the story, the cast, the audience, and more importantly, the New York Times drama critics. Really, Marvin, the writing was on the wall, forget about Broadway and get back to scoring movie soundtracks - and that's exactly what he did, he co-wrote one James Bond theme, "Nobody Does It Better" for the film "The Spy Who Loved Me", and Carly Simon sang it. The scores for "Ordinary People" (hey, there's Mary Tyler Moore again...) and "Sophie's Choice" did well, so really, he found his niche as a film composer for hire.
I wish I could say he stuck with movies, because the list of successes he had with Hollywood films is extensive - "Frankie and Johnny", "The Mirror Has Two Faces", "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days", and "The Informant!", not to mention the older films "Same Time, Next Year", "Ice Castles", "Starting Over" and "Seems Like Old Times". Plus he was musical director and arranger for Streisand, and was a conductor on tours for Linda Ronstadt, in addition to being the "Pops" conductor for symphony orchestras all over the U.S., in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, San Diego, Seattle, Dallas, Buffalo, and Baltimore, like how is that even possible? But no, for some reason he tried to go back to Broadway, and his musical "Sweet Smell of Success" tanked because it opened six months after 9/11, and come on, audiences just weren't ready. I remember that in 2002 there wasn't much tourism going on in NYC at all.
Depression hit Hamlisch hard when his Broadway plays didn't do well, and he was incredibly lonely when his mother passed away. But as his friends and associates all say in this doc, he was an extremely nice guy who LOVED eating great food in fancy restaurants, he loved his New York Yankees, and he dated a LOT of beautiful women, actresses and singers and such, and it was NOT a Rock Hudson thing, if you know what I mean. And after a long string of "Hey, let's just be friends now" relationships, he finally got married in 1989, and that one was for keeps.
Really, though, don't watch this for the performances by Streisand and others at his memorial concert, watch this for the clips of Marvin Hamlisch at Yankees fantasy camp, his wife bought the experience as a gift for him, and through this he formed a lasting friendship with Yankees manager Joe Torre, who happened to be a big Broadway fan himself as a teen. Sure, it's a bit weird, but it's darn cute to see Hamlisch in a baseball uniform catching a fly ball in the outfield. He was never allowed to play sports as a kid because his mother didn't want him to hurt his piano-playing hands. I feel you, Marvin, my mother didn't let me play sports either. Famous people, they're just like us, only they get to sleep with other famous people!
If I'm posting late tonight, I have to apologize, I'd recorded this movie from the PBS "American Masters" series and dubbed it to DVD, but somehow my DVD was all screwed up, after an hour it started getting all digitized and wonky. Maybe the original DVR recording was bad, and I put it on VHS and then DVD, but I just couldn't watch the last half hour last night. So I had to wait for this afternoon and find the film on my pirate site, just to see how it ended. I know, it's a documentary about someone's life, so of course I already know how it ended, but still, I wanted to be a completist about it. Spoiler Alert: Marvin Hamlisch died August 6, 2012, from respiratory arrest, brought on by hypertension. Well, he did love his fancy restaurants, and he was 68.
OK, just three documentaries left in this year's Doc Block - then I have three things left to do in the next 100 films - 1) link to "Deadpool & Wolverine" 2) link to the start of the horror chain, whatever it is, and 3) link to Christmas. I've got 100 slots left to do that, starting tomorrow.
Also starring Ann-Margret (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Lucie Arnaz (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Bob Avian, Carole Bayer Sager, Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman, Terre Blair, John Breglio, Craig Carnelia, Kevin Cole, Raul Esparza (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Peter Filichia, Maria Friedman, J. Ernest Green, Lorin Hollander, Rupert Holmes, Nicholas Hytner, Brian D'Arcy James (last seen in "West Side Story" (2021)), Quincy Jones (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop"), Robert Klein (last seen in "Yogi Berra: It AIn't Over"), Joe Torre (ditto), Baayork Lee, Valerie Lemon, John Lithgow (last seen in "The Homesman"), Melissa Manchester (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Joann Mariano, Patti Mariano, Donna McKechnie, Idina Menzel (last seen in "Disenchanted"), Kelli O'Hara (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Tim Rice (also last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Carly Simon (last seen in "Carly Simon: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Steven Soderbergh, Howard Stringer, Leslie Uggams (last seen in "American Ficiton"), Christopher Walken (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), Maury Yeston
with archive tootage of Marvin Hamlisch (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Woody Allen (last seen in "Remembering Gene Wilder"), Burt Bacharach (last seen in "If These Walls Could Sing"), Scott Bakula (last seen in "Life as a House"), Lucille Ball (last seen in "Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed"), Burt Lancaster (ditto), Nancy Reagan (ditto), Michael Bennett, Klea Blackhurst, Victor Borge, Carter Brey, Clancy Brown (last seen in "Dumb Money"), Richard Burton (last seen in "Ira & Abby"), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Jane Curtin (ditto), Liza Minnelli (ditto), Gilda Radner (ditto), Diana Ross (ditto), Gene Shalit (ditto), Jimmy Carter (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Rosalynn Carter (last seen in "Irresistible"), Carol Channing (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Judy Garland (last seen in "Beauty"), Matt Damon (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Lesley Gore (also last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Merv Griffin (last seen in "Mike Wallace Is Here"), Jacqueline Kennedy (ditto), Larry King (ditto), Groucho Marx (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Vladimir Horowitz (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Lynn-Holly Johnson (last seen in "For Your Eyes Only"), Edward Kleban, Barack Obama (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Michelle Obama (last seen in "You've Been Trumped Too") Cole Porter, Gene Rayburn (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Robert Redford (last seen in "We Blew It"), Charles Nelson Reilly (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Charlie Rose (last seen in "Nothing Compares"), Neil Simon (last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Brett Somers, Connie Stevens (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Jule Styne, Elizabeth Taylor (last seen in "Moonage Daydream"), James Taylor (last seen in "American Symphony"), Arturo Toscanini,
RATING: 7 out of 10 performances at the White House (Carter through Obama)
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