Broadway To Hollywood

The director, screenwriter, and playwright provides a look into his world, introducing the wide array of stars he has met over the years and revealing the hardship and joy that comes with a life in show business.

This book is about the transition that musicals went through when they traveled from the stage to the screen. While the approach is critical, the style is readable and yields fascinating knowledge on the many things that did and didn't happen as theatre and film have merged throughout the past century.Hischak'sanalysis covers productions from The Desert Song (1927), to Chicago (2002).

When films like The Jazz Singer started to integrate synchronized music, in the late 1920s many ambitious songwriting pioneers of the Great White Way - George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Lorenz Hart, among many others - were enticed westward by Hollywood studios' promises of national exposure and top dollar success. But what happened when writers native to the business of Broadway ran into the very different business of Hollywood? Their movies had their producer despots, their stacking of writing teams on a single project, their use of five or six songs per story where Broadway fit in a dozen, and it seemed as if everyone in Hollywood was uncomfortable with characters bursting into song on the street, in your living room, or in "a cottage small by a waterfall." Did the movies give theater writers a chance to expand their art, or did mass marketing ruin the musical's quintessential charm? Is it possible to trace the history of the musical through both stage and screen manifestations, or did Broadway and Hollywood give rise to two wholly irreconcilable art forms? And, finally, did any New York writer or writing team create a film musical as enthralling and timeless as their work for the stage? In When Broadway Went to Hollywood, writer and celebrated steward of musical theatre Ethan Mordden directs his unmistakable wit and whimsy to these challenging questions and more, charting the volatile and galvanizing influence of Broadway on Hollywood (and vice versa) throughout the twentieth century. Along the way, he takes us behind the scenes of the great Hollywood musicals you've seen and loved (The Wizard of Oz, Gigi, The Sound of Music, Chicago, West Side Story, The Music Man, Grease) as well as some of the outrageous flops you probably haven't. The first book to tell the story of how Broadway affected the Hollywood musical, When Broadway Goes to Hollywood is sure to thrill theatre buffs and movie lovers alike.

Describes the history of the screen adaptations of Broadway musicals from Showboat to Grease and tells the story of the composers, stars, and directors

Fans of musicals will sing when a division president of MGM and industry insider presents her entertaining, illuminating insights on exactly what happens when stage meets screen.

This book offers a different take on the early history of Warner Bros., the studio renowned for introducing talking pictures and developing the gangster film and backstage musical comedy. The focus here is on the studio’s sustained commitment to produce films based on stage plays. This led to the creation of a stock company of talented actors, to the introduction of sound cinema, to the recruitment of leading Broadway stars such as John Barrymore and George Arliss and to films as diverse as The Gold Diggers (1923), The Marriage Circle (1924), Beau Brummel (1924), Disraeli (1929), Lilly Turner (1933), The Petrified Forest (1936) and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Even the most crippling effects of the Depression in 1933 did not prevent Warners’ production of films based on stage plays, many being transformed into star vehicles for the likes of Ruth Chatterton, Leslie Howard and Bette Davis.

This text tells the story of the combined genres of Hollywood films and Broadway musicals. The book relates their histories, with much material never before published and reminiscences from the film makers, composers and stars themselves.

... both fresh and informed, as well as a pleasure to read. --Film Quarterly Since 1982, when this book first appeared, the Hollywood musical has undergone a rebirth, with the rise of teen musicals such as Dirty Dancing and Flashdance. In a chapter written especially for this second edition of her well-known study, Jane Feuer shows how this new development in the genre relates to important changes in the cinema audience itself. It is the text for the study of Hollywood musicals.