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But Hollywood never had the one thing Broadway reveled in: creative freedom. In addition to the interference of studio chiefs and tone-deaf line producers, Hollywood has its own form of self-censorship. The Production Code, better known as the Hays Code, was introduced in 1934. Even if film producers wanted sophisticated Broadway material reproduced intact on its sound stages, the Hays Code made that impossible. The most benign lyrics were tweaked with idiotic regularity by inane sensibilities.
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| Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers in a scene from the film MAKERS OF MELODY. |
Rodgers and Hart suffered in Hollywood. For example, they were shunted around from studio to studio, doctoring pictures, writing songs for films that were either cut or rewritten by other hands. Control was always important for Rodgers, so he convinced Hart to escape back to Broadway in 1935. Ironically, the only other Broadway songwriter who had a similar experience in Hollywood was Oscar Hammerstein II, who went about his dreary studio assignments without much enthusiasm. (He did, however, win an Oscar in 1941 for "The Last Time I Saw Paris," with music by Jerome Kern.)
Hollywood soon relied on its own stable of songwriters, many of whom wrote some of this country's most immortal songs. Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer had some early Broadway notoriety, but it was on the West Coast that their talents really blossomed; songs like "Blues in the Night," "One for My Baby," and "That Old Black Magic" came from some utterly forgettable movies. Sadly, their one great ambition was to write a hit Broadway musical back east in the 1940s and 1950s; it never happened. The most spectacular songwriting team in Hollywood was Harry Warren and Al Dubin, who created the scores for the Busby Berkeley movies with such legendary numbers as "I Only Have Eyes for You" and "Lullaby of Broadway." Other writers like Dorothy Fields, Frank Loesser, and Jule Styne were nurtured by the studio system and able to extend their successes to Broadway in the late 1940s and 1950s when Hollywood musical production was slowing down.
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| Cole Porter in Hollywood during the making of the film of his musical KISS ME KATE. |
When Hollywood did buy the rights to a Broadway property, it rarely, if ever, made its way to celluloid intact. In general, even the most faithful versions were shorn of several songs for length, but wholesale revisionism was typical of Hollywood, especially with shows from the 1930s. Even small changes in the book musicals of the 1940s and 1950s can change their tone: the 1950 version of ON THE TOWN throws away the World War II setting so crucial to its meaning and KISS ME, KATE in 1953 keeps most of the score, but idiotically has someone pretending to be Cole Porter sort of introducing the movie.
Broadway producers, songwriters, and librettists learned to cry all the way to the bank as film options on their material became more and more frequent in the 1950s, with record sums going for the rights to shows like "My Fair Lady," which topped out at $5 million. Well into the 20th century, it was Hollywood that would have the last laugh on its East Coast detractors by flooding Broadway in the 1980s and 1990s with stage versions of original Hollywood musicals -- a complete inverse of the situation decades earlier -- such as GIGI, 42ND STREET, SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, and FOOTLOOSE, as well as the Disney animated films like THE LION KING.
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photo credits: Photofest, Lorenz Hart, Jr., and the Cole Porter Trust
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