The Sound of Music Companion: The official companion to the world's most beloved musical

by Laurence Maslon

  The peak of the Untersberg, courtesy of the Greatest Scenic Designer of Them All, provides a striking background for the picnic that finishes the “My Favorite Things” montage and begins “Do Re Mi.”

  DO RE MI

  Let’s start at the very beginning,

  A very good place to start.

  When you read you begin with—

  A, B, C.

  When you sing you begin with do re mi.

  Do re mi?

  Do re mi.

  The first three notes just happen to be

  Do re mi.

  Doe—a deer, a female deer,

  Ray—a drop of golden sun,

  Me—a name I call myself,

  Far—a long, long way to run,

  Sew—a needle pulling thread,

  La—a note to follow sew,

  Tea—a drink with jam and bread.

  That will bring us back to do!

  Do re mi fa so la ti do.

  Near the finale, at the Mirabell Gardens.

  Maurice Zuberano’s storyboards were the first attempt at breaking down the visuals for this complicated sequence, as the meadow picnic moves to the Winkler Terrace. Recognize the scene where the kids playfully pop in and out of the hedges? No? That’s because the scene never made it past the storyboard stage.

  If any musical number from the movie has come back to deliver a surprise to audiences of the stage version of The Sound of Music, it is “Do Re Mi.”

  In its theatrical setting, “Do Re Mi” is the first number between Maria and the children; meeting the children in the living room of the von Trapp villa, the new governess teaches the children the rudiments of the musical scale. It is a very effective number—even more effective than its precursor from The King and I, “Getting to Know You”—and choreographer Joe Layton had worked out a charming bit of business where Mary Martin patted each of the children on the head with a respective note on the scale, treating them rather like a human xylophone. The problem, however, was that she had memorized each note by the color of each child’s hair. According to her co-star, Theodore Bikel, when one of the children grew too big and had to be replaced, Martin demanded that the replacement have his or her hair dyed to match the color of the original child; otherwise, she could not possibly remember which head to pat. Still, the number was buoyant and fun and worked tremendously well in the show, as Maria and the children trooped up and down the living room, forming a confident and trusting bond between each other.

  But they never left the living room.

  That is, until the screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, opened up the number for the screen. In his earliest drafts, Lehman knew he wanted to place the number later in the movie and let it play all over the famous sights of Salzburg. Wise agreed; as he said forty years later on the Anniversary DVD, “In films, you get to do so much of the lyrics here, and you cut over here to another location, do the lyrics over there. That’s the advantage of film. So when we had a chance to do that with ‘Do Re Mi,’ it just worked wonderfully well.”

  It was one thing to spring the musical number from its constraints on the proscenium stage in theory; the practice of it would take, well, quite a lot of practice. It fell to the film’s choreographers, Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood, to begin the meticulous planning process. First, the song itself was rearranged to accommodate the various Salzburg locations; then Maurice Zuberano, the sketch artist for the production, created a large number of storyboards that matched the lyrics to the locations. Of course, rehearsing the choreography in Salzburg itself was a practical and financial impossibility, so the dancing sequences were created and rehearsed back on the Fox lot in Culver City. Eventually the choreography for “Do Re Mi” would be transferred to the nine separate Salzburg locations selected for the movie. (There were another seven locations chosen for a pre-“Do Re Mi” sequence, set to the music of “My Favorite Things.”)

  Ernest Lehman’s handwritten notes on the screenplay block out the various sequences.

  Richard Rodgers’ musical manuscript shows the simple, but effective, breakdown on the song’s harmony. From left to right: The hills in Werfen; the meadow beneath the Untersberg; Winkler Terrace and two different spots in Mirabell Gardens—six of nine separate locations for “Do Re Mi,” shot out of chronological sequence over the course of a month.

  There are some things that only movies can do: a stunning location, a great cinematographer and a spirited cast come together for a magic moment.

  In the Broadway version, Mary Martin makes friends with the von Trapp children by singing them the musical scale in the living room, soon after their first introductions.

  Marc Breaux and Saul Chaplin were sent ahead to Salzburg (it would be Chaplin’s second trip) for the meticulous task of timing out the dance sequences at the locations. According to Wood in an interview for the fortieth anniversary DVD:

  Mark and Saul went to Salzburg to time the length of the streets, the length of going here to there, and they were in the middle of the city and Mark was dancing in and out of traffic. Solly had his little tape recorder, playing back the music. Mark was dancing in and out and a policeman came up and spoke to them in German, asking what they were doing. They tried to explain and then finally the policeman said “Well, where are you from?” Saul said, “America,” and the policeman said, “Oh,” and left.

  Salzburg’s cold cloudiness forced sunny smiles when sunny skies weren’t available; the children huddle together between takes.

  The cast and crew at Winkler Terrace. Passers-by under the terrace kept hearing the playback of “Do Re Mi” broadcast on speakers and couldn’t figure out what was going on.

  The genius moment was when Chaplin realized there were enough steps leading out of the Mirabell Gardens to accommodate the seven notes in the scale—one step for each note, then back down again for the final “do.” That provided a neat and unforgettable finale for the number.

  Back at the Fox lot in February, the choreographers began working out the sequences with Andrews and the seven children. Even the bicycling was worked out on the tiny streets separating the sound stages on the lot. As Wood put it, “The bicycles had to be rehearsed. Because if you notice, in one scene they’re coming at the camera, straight on, and on certain notes where two kids would sing, their bikes would come forward and the other bikes would go back, then forward. They had to pace themselves so that they would stay in this formation.” Before actual shooting began at the end of March, all of the musical numbers had been rehearsed and prerecorded.

  It took ten different shooting days over the course of a month to capture the sequences for “Do Re Mi,” including several days when shooting was rained out. Only a director with Robert Wise’s precise sense of editing could have constructed such a sequence so successfully. In addition to using the song to convey Maria’s increased intimacy with the children, it gave her the opportunity to teach them how to sing after she had already earned their trust, which seems to be a more dramatically satisfying sequence of events. In the anniversary documentary Julie Andrews explained that Lehman’s transposition had an additional bonus: “He used it to signify a passage of time, so by the end of the song, the summer has passed. And Captain von Trapp is coming home with the Baroness. It’s a lovely way of saying what fun we had during the summer. Filming that montage was probably for me the quintessential moment of the film.”

  The end of the song also gave Andrews a chance to add a signature moment of her own. In the Broadway version, Mary Martin, who had a particularly low register, dropped an octave on the song’s final “do.” But Andrews had her own magical vocal range. While climbing the stairs, she thought “how fun it might be to go higher—and higher and then higher. And so I asked if I could do the huge octave leap (actually I do it in halfoctaves) and everybody said, ‘Go for it’ and that’s sort of how it came about.”

  Remember this sequence, in the middle of the “My Favorite Things” montage, where Liesl introduces Maria to her suitor, Rolf? No? That’s beca
use it was one of two scenes shot in Salzburg that Wise cut from the final movie. (The other was Christopher Plummer gazing wistfully at Maria’s bedroom window.)

  SOMETHING GOOD

  LYRICS BY RICHARD RODGERS

  Perhaps I had a wicked childhood,

  Perhaps I had a mis’rable youth.

  But somewhere in my wicked mis’rable past

  There must have been a moment of truth.

  For here you are,

  Standing there,

  Loving me,

  Whether or not you should.

  So, somewhere in my youth or childhood

  I must have done something good.

  Nothing comes from nothing,

  Nothing ever could.

  So, somewhere in my youth or childhood

  I must have done something good.

  Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, framed in the hastily contrived silhouette that did so much to enhance the scene— and keep their giggling from showing up on camera.

  Theodore Bikel and Mary Martin sing “An Ordinary Couple” from the original stage version.

  For a leading romantic couple, Maria and the Captain have surprisingly little to sing to each other. In fact, confirming the real Maria von Trapp’s assertion that she fell in love with the children, she has more to sing with them. But after Maria and the Captain confess their feelings for each other in the show’s second act, a duet was a practical and emotional necessity. Hammerstein’s words for “An Ordinary Couple” conjure up a world of simple domesticity, very much like a song he wrote in 1939 with Jerome Kern, “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.”

  An ordinary couple

  Is all we’ll ever be,

  For all I want of living

  Is to keep you close to me;

  To laugh and weep together

  While time goes on its flight,

  To kiss you every morning

  And to kiss you every night…

  An ordinary couple,

  Across the years we’ll ride,

  Our arms around each other,

  And our children by our side.

  When the movie version was going into production, screenwriter Ernest Lehman voted to eliminate the song, and his opinion was seconded by director Robert Wise and Associate Producer Saul Chaplin. They met with Richard Rodgers in New York and diplomatically brought up their concerns about the song. Rodgers concurred immediately; in fact, he said, if they had had more time, and Hammerstein were in better health, they would have replaced the song out of town. “She’s a nun who renounced her vows and he’s a decorated naval captain—what’s so ordinary about that?” he felt.

  Rodgers was more than willing to try his own hand at crafting lyrics as well as music for a new song, and the movie’s creative team was thrilled with the results. By 1964, Rodgers had written music and lyrics for some new songs for a movie remake of State Fair and had a considerable hit with an original Broadway musical in 1962, No Strings, for which he created both music and lyrics to some of the best romantic duets of his entire career. Perhaps on a roll from that assignment, Rodgers concocted something simple, sincere, and charming with “Something Good.” (Rodgers even manages a sly inversion of King Lear’s line: “Nothing will come of nothing.”) He also had the added muse of writing a melody specifically for Julie Andrews, a task he had performed so beautifully before in the 1957 television special of Cinderella. (He was less lucky with the other song assigned to him by Lehman and company—“I Have Confidence” had to go through several drafts and eventually required a final revision by Saul Chaplin.)

  Still, if writing “Something Good” was a comparatively easy task, performing it for the movie was not. The gazebo setting had been reassembled back on the Fox lot, and its many glass panels required the director of photography, Ted McCord, to employ complicated lighting effects. He positioned some extremely powerful, oldfashioned Kleig lights to point directly downward along the columns of the gazebo. Unfortunately, the Kleig lights worked by shooting carbon arcs against each other and they made a terrible flatulent sound every time they were fired up. This noise sent Andrews into gales of laughter, while Christopher Plummer started giggling at the idea of the Captain and Maria proclaiming their eternal love for each other nose to nose. “I could see your eyes squeeze down into little f-stops,” recalled Andrews in the 2005 reunion documentary. The two of them lost it. Wise called “Cut!” and set up the cameras again. Frrrrrmpff! went the carbon arcs, and the giggling began all over again. Wise called a two-hour lunch break, prevailing upon the actors to curb their “unprofessional idiotic laughing.” Once lunch was over, it was back to the set and again the carbon arcs made their flatulent sound. More laughter. Wise, normally the most patient of professionals, threw up his hands—after all, by this time he was behind schedule—and decided to shoot the entire sequence in silhouette, so the camera would not catch his stars’ childish misbehaviour. It turned out to be a happy accident.

  Whatever childhoods Andrews and Plummer might have had, they were certainly wicked that day on the Fox lot.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AROUND THE WORLD

  Charmian Carr bids farewell to Nicholas Hammond; the Pan Am shoulder bag was a sure sign that travel was in order—Carr would stay in Salzburg after the company returned to Los Angeles to film a travelog, sponsored by—surprise!—Pan Am, among others.

  Was it just a coincidence that the first signs of the immense success of The Sound of Music would be seen in—of all places—Oklahoma?

  Robert Wise and his crew returned to Hollywood at the beginning of July 1964 and managed to finish filming within eight comparatively uneventful weeks. (Christopher Plummer was not happy to discover he was going to be dubbed after all and Charmian Carr crashed through a piece of plate glass during her dance number, but that was about it.) Wise was relieved to escape the vagaries of location shooting, and control the vast array of Hollywood craftsmanship that the Fox Studios had to offer. After the footage was edited by William Reynolds, under the unerring gaze of Wise, and underscored by Irwin Kostal, the movie was ready to be shown to a preview audience.

  Every producer takes a different approach to screening a preview of a rough cut. Some ignore the process entirely, but for those who do not, location—as in real estate—is of prime importance. Richard Zanuck and Wise selected two family-friendly locations in the Midwestern United States—Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Minneapolis, Minnesota—and held the screenings in early February. The results transcended even the wildest dreams of the most optimistic Hollywood mogul. The combined tally of score cards from the audience was incredible: Fair—0, Good—5, Excellent—460. Clearly this was an unprecedented state of affairs and Fox executives, who had shelled out the not-inconsiderable sum of $5.5 million on their screen musical, breathed a collective sigh of relief. If the review card scores were to be trusted, the movie could become that great and rare commodity in the entertainment world—a phenomenon.

  As long as the movie reviewers liked it, too, of course.

  A widescreen version of the famous poster for the film.

  When the movie critics filed their reviews during the first week of March 1965 (the Los Angeles opening gala was scheduled eight days later, on March 10), Wise and Richard Zanuck were astonished. The Sound of Music received a critical drubbing from the major East Coast critics, which made the Broadway opening-night notices seem like a round of nosegays. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote that the movie was “staged by Mr. Wise in a cosy-cum-corny fashion that even theater people know is old hat.” Judith Crist of the New York Herald Tribune weighed in with “this [icky-sticky movie] is for the five-to-seven set and their mommies who think their kids aren’t up to the stinging sophistication and biting wit of Mary Poppins.”

  Even worse was a review written by Pauline Kael for McCall’s, a genial magazine that catered to suburban housewives. According to Kael, the movie was “a sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat . . . Wasn’t there perhaps one little von Trapp
who didn’t want to sing his head off. . . or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage?” McCall’s readers thought Kael was so out of touch with their tastes that they demanded she be fired; she was. She was also soon hired as the movie critic for the New Yorker, where, in the witty words of her eventual successor on the film beat, Anthony Lane, “she remained supreme for the next quarter of a century, thus proving that The Sound of Music is so saintly that it confers a happy ending on all who touch its hem, even those of little faith.”

  Moviegoers around the country had plenty of faith, however. In its initial month-long engagement, The Sound of Music played in only twenty-five theaters nationwide in what was then called a “road show” rollout—reserved tickets in advance, two showings a day, a souvenir program, an actual intermission—in an attempt to convey a Broadway kind of prestige on the picture. Even in this limited engagement, the movie quickly became number one at the box office. By the end of 1965, The Sound of Music had earned $50 million in box-office receipts—already a $30 million net profit. Within a year of its release, it had passed Gone with the Wind as the most successful picture of all time, an honor it held until The Godfather won the crown in 1972. As of January 1, 2006, The Sound of Music had grossed, $163 million at the box office, and sat at number 119 in a list of all-time box-office champs, having been pushed to the back of the line by the deluge of action/science fiction/comic book juggernauts of late twentieth-century cinema. However, when The Sound of Music’s theatrical box-office receipts were adjusted for inflation in 2005, it ranked number three among all Hollywood movies, trumped only by Gone with the Wind and Star Wars.