West Side Story, Pt 3: Tonight Won't Be Just Any Night

Occassionally Team Experience passes a movie around amongst the team for a retrospective. This month's installment is West Side Story (1961), one of the most popular films of all time and winner of 10 Oscars.

Part One - by Lynn Lee
Part Two -by Eric Blume

Part 3 by Nathaniel R

Growing up I watched West Side Story as often as I could. It was surely my most formative film though as a kid I didn't really know the hows and whys of movies, only how they made me feel. Some movies were good for laughing, others for crying, and a lot of them just to get caught up in adventures and stories. West Side Story was, no, IS, all the things a movie could be in one massive tuneful package. I devoured it every chance I got as a kid. 

When Eric left us in Part Two Maria and Tony had just symbolically wed, lit by heavenly golden light, as they finished singing "One Hand, One Heart". A soft, reverent hush fell over the scene as the lovers kissed and the music faded. Then an abrupt cut to:

01:34:59  This impossibly bold red sky. It's a hard image with a blaring aggressive music cue signalling a major shift within the movie.  From here on out: tragedy. The juxtaposition of the wedding with this image, remains to this day, one of the most violent cuts I've ever seen in a movie. Red is the only choice for it. The camera then swoops down to street level as the Jets begin to sing "Tonight"...

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West Side Story, Pt 2: I Feel Pretty in America

 Team Experience is passing West Side Story around in honor of Leonard Bernstein's Centennial

In part one Lynn brought us through the first 50 spectacular minutes of West Side Story, tossing the baton to me exactly at one of the film’s highlights, "America" where Anita (Oscar-winning Rita Moreno) and Bernardo (Oscar-winning George Chakiris have begun to argue about their lives and opportunities as immigrants... 

Part 2 by Eric Blume

50:32 The first thing you should note about the transition from the first refrain to the full number is a lovely piece of blocking where everyone rearranges themselves for a slightly different tableau, while the camera remains blessedly static. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, co-directing, had great filmmakers instincts for when to keep something “theatrical” (in this case, proscenium with a change in blocking) and when to do something “cinematic” (e.g., cutting, which they do throughout this number mostly to highlight individual performance lines).

Quite simply, there are few dance numbers in cinema equal to “America”...

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West Side Story, Pt 1: Something's Coming at the Dance

Three-Part Mini-Series
Occasionally we'll take a movie and baton pass it around the team. If you missed past installments we've gone long and deep on Rebecca (1940), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966),  Rosemary's Baby (1968), Cabaret (1972), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Thelma & Louise (1991), and A League of Their Own (1992). 

Team Experience is proud to present a three-part retrospective of Leonard Bernstein's masterpiece West Side Story (1961) to honor the composer's centennial. West Side Story premiered on Broadway in September 1957 (though a success, it lost the Best Musical prize to a bigger Broadway hit, The Music Man). Four years later in October 1961 the film version opened in movie theaters, becoming the the top-grossing film of its year, winning 10 Oscars and cementing the musical's place in the cultural consciousness forever.

Part 1 by Lynn Lee

There’s something about West Side Story that inspires obsession.  Blending high concept drama and musical theater at its very best, this classic American love story balances delicately between delirious romance and sharp-edged realism until the two collide in a tragedy so gutting it still reduces me to a puddle. What’s more, it’s all transferred so seamlessly to the screen, I’ve yet to see a stage production that equals the power of the film. What’s not to obsess about... 

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Links: Lynskey, Castillo, Cho, and Missing 80s Movies

• THR a reporter on the next tense moments at Netflix as they try to make their original movies more culturally impactful to continue to lure filmmakers. Roma and The Irishman are going to be crucial to their plans
• Awards Daily Melanie Lynskey talks about her work on Castle Rock
• EW high powered producer Craig Zadan, who brought lots of musicals to the screen and also produced the Oscars, died unexpectedly at just 69. Hollywood is paying tribute.
• Playbill cast announced for the Broadway aimed Beetlejuice musical. Includes Kerry Butler in the Geena Davis role!

• ScriptNotes a great discussion about the new silent-movie like loss of old movies (particularly from the 70s and 80s) in the streaming era. It springs from this article...
• BlackList "In search of the last great video store" - the writer had a craving for Fresh Horses starring Molly Ringwald and couldn't find it. (We've been there MANY times)
• Filmmaker Raúl Castillo talks about his career from his theater roots, through Looking, and on to We the Animals
• Variety Aretha Franklin apparently didn't leave a will before she died
• Coming Soon Crazy Rich Asians sequel is moving forward. That's great news for Gemma Chan and Harry Shum Jr who feature prominently in the book's sequel
• My New Plaid Pants John Cho seven times
• The AV Club Hulu wants to revive Veronica Mars
• Vulture looks into the climactic mahjong showdown in Crazy Rich Asians

Barbara Harris (1935-2018)

by Nathaniel R

Barbara Harris in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979)

Sad news yesterday. One of the nation's best and most underappreciated actresses Barbara Harris passed away at 83 from lung cancer. The Chicago native got her start as a teenager on local stages and was an original member of Chicago's famed Second City troupe. Her intermittent screen career sprang initially from her stage successes. Though her filmography is mostly in the 1970s, she made a few 80s movies before retiring including Peggy Sue Got Married, Grosse Point Blank, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Curiously for such a talented thespian of both stage and screen, she seemed somewhat ambivalent about her career, stating that she didn't miss acting after her retirement...

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