The Sound of Music

by Hirsch, Julia Antopol;

  But as usual, Andrews tried to make light of a tense situation. As the company sat on Maria’s Mountain, waiting for the rain to let up, she, Marc Breaux, and Saul Chaplin would sing songs on the rainy hillside for hours. As described in Robert Windeler’s biography of Andrews, they dubbed their group the Vocalzones, their main selection being the “Hawaiian War Chant.” She also sang such operatic numbers as “The Bell Song” from Lakme in perfect pitch, but she’d counter by singing the “Indian Love Call” slightly off-key.

  Singing among the “trees.”

  Saul Chaplin.

  Back on the set at Fox. Behind Andrews is script supervisor Betty Levin. Levin married associate producer Saul Chaplin, one of the three marriages whose courtships began on the set in Salzburg.

  But the rain wasn’t the only problem. When the company first looked at the meadow on top of the mountain, they were impressed by the high fields of hay and grass. Wise paid the farmer for the use of the field and told him not to mow the hay. Yet when they finally returned to shoot the number, the farmer had cut down the vegetation until there was nothing left but short stalks of grass!

  The meadow’s young birch trees, which Maria grasps, swinging from trunk to trunk, were all brought in and planted a few days before the shoot, and the crew hung a large piece of canvas over the area to create shade. The crew also created the brook into which Maria throws stones. The crew dug a ditch, lined it with plastic, and filled it with water. But the same farmer who had cut the grass got very angry with the company. It seems the longer they stayed, the more their presence interfered with his cows, who suddenly refused to give milk. So he grabbed a pitchfork, stabbed it into the brook, and drained the water!

  Wise certainly had his hands full. Finally, after four frustrating days of rain and headaches, the director had all but one piece of the puzzle completed. But that one piece of film happened to fall right in the middle of the number. At this point Wise started getting pressure from Dick Zanuck back at the studio. Zanuck had spoken to Wise about the situation before, but now the film was twenty-five days behind schedule and $740,000 over the $7,995,000 budget.

  “I’d called Bob about two or three times before,” recalled Zanuck, “and he’d convinced me that he would be done soon and everything would be great. I was enormously pleased with the film that was coming back, so I’d kept backing him. But there had to be a time when the company would eventually have to come home.”

  “Bob, you’ve got to get the troupe out of there!” Zanuck had urged. “It’s just costing too much, and we’re so far over!”

  Wise pleaded, “Dick, I’ve still got this one piece I have to get, and I don’t know how we’ll do it!”

  But Zanuck was adamant. “You’ve got to get them home.”

  Wise responded, “I’ll tell you what. If I don’t get this missing piece by Thursday, I’ll come home Friday whether we have it or not, and I’ll figure out a way to shoot it at the studio.” He later confided, “How in the world I was going to get it I didn’t know.”

  Thursday began as another dreadful day. “Everyone was sitting around under the tarps sweating it out,” Wise continued, “because they knew I had a deadline. We had the shot all lined up, the dolly tracks were down, the lighting ready. All the equipment was covered with tarps. It was about midafternoon. Then, suddenly, the weather broke for about half an hour. We ran out, zipped off the tarps, and finally got the last shot. That’s one of the tightest situations I’ve ever been in.”

  Wise finally did move his troupe home on Friday, July 3. By Monday, July 6, they were all back at the studio shooting the dining room scene, in which Maria scolds the children for the “precious gift” they left in her pocket. All the interiors in the Trapp villa and the outdoor scenes that couldn’t be shot on location still had to be filmed.

  The kiss that took more than a dozen takes.

  The production ran much more smoothly now that the company was home and didn’t have to worry about outdoor elements. Oh, there were a few complications. For instance, in the song “So Long, Farewell,” Carr had so much trouble carrying Kym Karath up the stairs at the end of the number that she got a backache. It seems Karath’s three-month diet of bananas and fried artichokes had had an adverse effect on her little figure.

  “You Are Sixteen.”

  Director of Photography Ted McCord had trouble shooting inside the gazebo where they filmed the numbers “You Are Sixteen” and “Something Good.” He didn’t have “day for night” to contend with, but he still had the problem of the lights reflecting off the glass. Besides taking extreme care to set the camera up in such a way as to minimize glare, he resorted to having the stagehands actually lie on the floor so that their images would not be reflected in the gazebo walls.

  Half of the number “Something Good” was shot in silhouette, a daring technique that wasn’t used much in film. Actually, it may not have been used in this picture either if its stars had been able to control themselves.

  By the time the company returned to the studio, they were all exhausted. They’d had only one weekend to catch up and recover from their jet lag before they had to be back at the studio to begin work again.

  “By the time we got back, I was so tired and nervous that I couldn’t keep going,” recalled Andrews. “And when I get nervous, I get very giggly.”

  It all came out when they filmed “Something Good.” Ted McCord lit the gazebo with a powerful photo floodlight hung from rafters and tipped downward to suggest a shaft of moonlight. These huge arc lights, which are not used anymore, worked by having two pieces of carbon come into contact. But when the carbons got worn down or old, they would make a terrible noise, like a groan or, more often, a “raspberry.”

  “Chris and I were standing very close,” explained Andrews. “We were face to face, about an inch away from each other, looking into each other’s eyes. We were just getting to the point where we would say ‘I love you,’ or we’d start kissing … and then those old arc lights would let out a loud ‘raspberry’! It was like a comment on our scene! Well, Chris and I would start laughing. We couldn’t help it. Then we’d go back to the scene again, and those lights would start groaning at us again! Our giggling got even worse. In fact, it got to the point where we couldn’t get through the scene!”

  After almost a dozen takes, there still wasn’t any film of the kiss worth saving, so Wise finally called a break, sending everyone out for lunch.

  “I was in a high state of nervousness by now,” recalled Andrews. “I walked around the studio … talking to myself, trying to calm myself down.”

  But when the actors returned to the set, it happened again. They just could not stop giggling.

  Wise finally got fed up. “Shoot ’em in the dark!” he yelled. “Then no one can see them laughing!”

  “I, for one, was very grateful,” said Andrews. “Otherwise I could never have gotten through that scene.”

  Andrews and Plummer completed filming on August 13. The only scene left to do was “You Are Sixteen.” One of Charmian Carr’s most vivid memories of the film was shooting that number with an Ace bandage wrapped around her sprained ankle.

  “They made special dance shoes [for the number],” Carr told the Fox publicist, “and they forgot to put the rubber on the heels so I wouldn’t slip. I did a step where I jump up on the bench, turn around and kick, and instead of turning and kicking, my feet slipped and I went right through a windowpane and flopped on the floor. Nothing serious happened, but I got a few cuts and sprained my ankle. The number goes by so fast that you don’t even notice.”

  They finished that scene on August 19. The following day, Plummer, Eleanor Parker, and Richard Haydn were called back to reshoot a scene inside a car, where they react to the children hanging from the trees. This was a processed scene, using a rear projection of the children, to make it seem as if the actors are riding past the trees.

  With that scene finished, principal photography was officially completed.

  The
next day was spent doing inserts; for instance, a shot of the pinecone sitting in Maria’s dining room chair or the frog hopping up the stairs. Plummer, Parker, and Haydn were then called back a second time, on September 1, to retake the car scene again. Unofficially, that was the last scene shot in the movie.

  Postproduction schedule.

  Although the cast and crew had completed shooting the movie, work was far from over. There was still a tremendous amount of postproduction work to be done on the film. Because of the constant rain in Salzburg and the extraneous noises of planes, cars, or pedestrians, much of the sound quality was lost and had to be corrected through dialogue looping.

  Wise explained, “You always hope to use the original track, but if there are interferences you go back into the studio, and you take a section, and you run it and run it, and then you redo the dialogue. It’s very time consuming, and you have to be careful about the sync.” So the cast spent hours in the looping room dubbing the dialogue.

  As Wise and Dick Zanuck had promised months before, Christopher Plummer was now given the opportunity to redo his singing with the hope that his new voice tracks would be good enough to use in the picture. Plummer spent two days in the dubbing room with Wise, Chaplin, and the technicians, re-singing his numbers. Wise and Chaplin were concerned not only with the quality of Plummer’s singing but also that his new voice tracks would synchronize with the rest of the picture.

  Then came that fateful day when Christopher Plummer would listen to his own voice on tape and decide whether or not it was good enough for the film. Chaplin already knew it wasn’t. So did Wise. But they had agreed that Plummer could make the final decision. Wise ran three songs for Plummer—“The Sound of Music,” “Edelweiss,” and “Something Good.” He let him listen to the songs alone. After listening to them four times, Plummer came into the looping room where Wise was waiting, and they walked out into the hall together. Plummer told Wise that he was surprised that he wasn’t embarrassed by his singing, and Wise said that he shouldn’t be. He had made big improvements in his voice since the beginning of the film.

  Then Plummer asked Wise what he thought of his voice. Wise was honest. “I don’t think it’s good enough for our picture,” Wise told him. “I don’t think it’s up to the standard of the rest of the picture, and the fact that your voice isn’t that good will bring down the level of the marvelous performance you gave as the Captain.”

  Plummer listened carefully and then said, “I know exactly what you mean. It’s just not musical enough.”

  Bill Lee was hired on October 1 to dub Plummer’s singing in the film. Plummer later reflected, “If I had been singing with someone else other than Julie, my voice might have been OK to use, but Julie’s voice is so perfect, there’s just a difference in quality. But I learned a lot from the film.”

  Irwin Kostal not only orchestrated the musical numbers; he also underscored the entire film, providing the background music for every scene. Kostal could not create his own music to suit the needs of the film: all of the music had to be variations on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s original songs. “The scoring couldn’t be foreign to the general texture of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s original music,” explained Kostal.

  Telegram from Dick Zanuck to his father relaying the exciting results of the preview.

  The orchestrations for the stage version, by Robert Russell Bennett, added a Viennese feel to Rodgers’s melodies. Kostal took these out in every scene except for the one where the Captain and Maria dance the traditional Laendler, and instead used the action of the picture to dictate his use of note sequences, tempo, and phrasing. For the escape scene, for instance, he used what he calls “Nazi and nun music.” Saul Chaplin had asked for “wisps of wind” for the opening sequence on the mountain, and Kostal complied with an underscore that conveyed just that.

  With his score, Kostal amplified or added nuances to Wise’s visual image. “Postscoring was all fixing,” recalls Kostal. “You have the music editor in the screening room with you, and you time every piece of music. You’re looking through a moviola; you count the frames to see how long it runs: forty seconds; two minutes. Before ‘Something Good’ I had five minutes of underscoring before it meets the bar of music that’s prerecorded. I used a flute solo for Julie. For the camera shot of Chris I used a cello.”

  Before Kostal could do his musical fine-tuning, of course, the film had to be edited. Wise and film editor William Reynolds had to decide which of several camera angles to use for each scene, what order the shots should be in, when to end each image and begin another. They also had to be sure that the action was seamless, that scenes shot on different days or in different locales seemed to have been shot chronologically and in one place.

  After the dubbing, looping, editing, and scoring were somewhat completed, the film was ready to preview. Wise felt that the audience reaction in the previews would help direct them to other areas that needed work.

  “I’m a very strong believer in the value of a ‘sneak’ audience,” Wise wrote in a memo to Dick Zanuck. “We spend years, much effort and millions of dollars getting a picture on film, and then, so often, we don’t spend the additional time and effort to give it the proper acid test before a non-professional audience.”

  They chose Minneapolis and Tulsa as sites for their two sneaks. Minneapolis was chosen because West Side Story had tested very well in its preview there. They picked Tulsa because Wise asked the Fox sales department where the film would find its toughest audience.

  On February 1, 1965, at 8:15 PM, the film previewed at the Mann Theater in Minneapolis. “Minneapolis was the most incredible preview I’ve ever been to,” said Dick Zanuck. “It was about thirty degrees below zero, blizzard weather. Yet people were standing in line outside to see the show. The response was incredible. They even gave us a standing ovation at the intermission!”

  After the preview everyone went back to the hotel to review the critique cards the audience had been asked to fill out. “We all sat around having a beer,” Zanuck continued, “and started looking at the cards. Every single one of them read ‘excellent.’ All except three. Those just read ‘good.’ Suddenly we were all focusing in on those three ‘good’ cards, trying to figure out what we did wrong!”

  Unfortunately, the Tulsa screening did not go as smoothly, because the audience was angry before they even walked through the theater doors. It seems the theater managers opened the building late, and the audience had to stand waiting in freezing weather. So this was an audience with an attitude.

  Then they ran the film, which began with no dialogue and no music—just beautiful mountain scenery—and the audience went crazy. They thought there was something wrong with the theater’s sound system, and they responded by stomping their feet all the way through the opening credits, calming only when Andrews sang the opening number. As the movie progressed, however, the audience settled down, and to everyone’s surprise the movie was received as favorably by this crowd as it had been by the audience in Minneapolis.

  Still, when Wise got back to the studio, he did more touch-ups on the dubbing and the editing. He trimmed a shot here, balanced the music there. Then, finally, the big day came when the movie would get its premiere. While Wise and company should have looked forward happily to the world’s reaction to their masterpiece, no one breathed easily. Chaplin remembers only one person who had no doubt that the movie would be a success. That was Mike Kaplan, the movie’s publicist.

  “But it was his job to be optimistic,” said Chaplin, “so no one believed him.”

  Storyboards

  Storyboards are a very important element in filmmaking. They are a virtual map of the film: a series of drawings (these days, computer drawings are used), matched with dialogue or action, that depict each scene to be shot. To begin the process for Music, Robert Wise met with his sketch artist, Maurice “Zuby” Zuberano, and together they walked through each scene. Wise then explained his objectives, what feeling he wanted to express in each scene, and wh
at visual information needed to be conveyed. After this initial meeting Zuberano went back to his office and began drawing sketches that would illustrate what happens in each of those scenes.

  He penciled in as much coverage as he could. This means he anticipated all the many angles, distances, and other variations from which the director might want to shoot. Zuberano then captioned the sketches with a description of the scene or the dialogue from the scene. The meetings with Wise continued until the sketches were perfected. A sketch artist normally spent about seven weeks on the layout of a movie, but because Music was so intricate, Zuberano needed ten weeks to complete his sketches. He then arranged the storyboards in a folder, and Wise referred to these sketches as a kind of guideline when shooting the picture.

  The following are the storyboards from the opening sequence of The Sound of Music. The first four sketches are the very beginning of the scene. There is no dialogue; the camera zooms in to meet Maria running up the hill. The remaining sketches plot out the various segments of the opening song.

  6

  “I Must Have Done Something Good …”

  THE SOUND OF MONEY

  The great big color movie Mr. Wise has made from [the play] … comes close to being a careful duplication of the show as it was done on the stage, even down to its operetta pattern, which predates the cinema age … Julie Andrews … provides the most apparent and fetching innovation in the film … [her role] is always in peril of collapsing under the weight of romantic nonsense and sentiment…. The septet of blond and beaming youngsters who have to act like so many Shirley Temples and Freddie Bartholomews when they were young do as well as could be expected with their assortedly artificial roles, but the adults are fairly horrendous, especially Christopher Plummer … staged by Mr. Wise in a cosy-cum-corny fashion that even theater people know is old hat…. The Sound of Music repeats, in style—and in theme.