The Sound of Music Companion: The official companion to the world's most beloved musical by Laurence Maslon & Julie Andrews

Author:Laurence Maslon & Julie Andrews [Maslon, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910496503
Publisher: Pavilion Books Company Limited
Published: 2015-01-29T23:00:00+00:00

Not Salzburg, but a magical re-creation: the Fox lot provided the landscape for the von Trapp villa. One can glimpse the gazebo—re-created from the one left behind at the Salzburg location.

When the original television special Cinderella was broadcast on March 31, 1957, it was watched by 107 million people in the United States—more people than there were television sets. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote a charming score, full of sentiment without being sentimental, and Julie Andrews had the opportunity to share the soundstage with playwright Howard Lindsay, who, in one of his forays into the acting world, played the befuddled King. The show introduced Andrews to a far wider audience than had admired her on the Great White Way.

Six years later, when Robert Wise went to Julie Andrews with the offer to star as Maria von Trapp, she had not yet appeared in a feature film. The opportunity presented by The Sound of Music was a huge one, but Andrews was not immediately sure she wanted to be in another musical. Mary Poppins had yet to be released and she was enjoying filming the straight dramatic lead in The Americanization of Emily. Andrews had another concern, as well: she thought the original material might be too saccharine to play well on the big screen. However, once she agreed to take the part (according to Julia Hirsch’s history of the movie, Fox eventually offered her $225,000 for a two-picture deal), she sat down with Wise at the Fox studio restaurant and expressed her reservations. He explained to her that he wanted to take a less sentimental, more textured approach to the material. Apparently, a spoonful of medicine helped the sugar go down and Andrews was both appeased and inspired to begin her work with Wise, whom she later credited for giving her a master class in movie-acting technique.

With Andrews signed (Wise and Saul Chaplin first discovered the news in Louella Parsons’ gossip column while they were scouting locations in Salzburg), the attention turned to casting Captain von Trapp. Fox executives were keen on Bing Crosby, but Wise never took that suggestion seriously. William Wyler, during the time he was considering directing the picture, courted Rex Harrison. (Although the thought of a My Fair Lady reunion with Julie Andrews is a provocative one, Harrison would have been badly miscast.)

Other names submitted to Wise included Sean Connery, Peter Finch, Louis Jourdan, and Maximillian Schell. Yul Brynner lobbied extensively for the part. The notion of having Brynner reprise a stern patriarch in a Rodgers and Hammerstein score might have seemed like a sure thing at the box office, but Wise was determined not to weigh down The Sound of Music with more clichés than it could already handle. He had been impressed with a classical actor who, while only thirty-five years old, had taken the stages of London, New York, and his native-born Canada by storm: Christopher Plummer.

Plummer had extensive experience performing onstage and in serious drama on television, but his movie career, in 1963, was nothing to write home about.

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