Oscar Profile #160: Arthur Laurents

Born July 14, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York, Arthur Levine, known professionally as Arthur Laurents, was a noted American playwright, stage director and screenwriter.

After graduating from Cornell University, Laurents took a radio writing course at New York University which led to his first produced work, a radio play for Shirley Booth, who would later star in one of his most successful Broadway plays.

Home of the Brave became his first Broadway play in 1945. It would be made into a successful film in 1949. In the interim he worked on the screenplay for 1948’s The Snake Pit but failed to receive screen credit due to a dispute. He then got his big break when Alfred Hitchcock hired him to write the screenplay for 1948’s Rope. He was blacklisted in 1950, reportedly because of a review of Home of the Brave that appeared in the Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker. He went back to writing for the Broadway stage, where 1952’s The Time of the Cuckoo became a hit for Shirley Booth. David Lean’s 1955 film version with Katharine Hepburn was called Summertime.

Back in Hollywood, Laurents wrote the screenplay for 1956’s Anastasia and 1958’s Bonjour Tristesse. While shuttling back and forth to New York, he also managed to turn out the books for two landmark musicals, 1957’s West Side Story and 1959’s Gypsy, both of which earned him Tony nominations for Best Musical, which would lose to The Music Man and The Sound of Music, respectively.

Laurents directed his first Broadway play, Invitation to a March in 1960 and his first Broadway musical, I Can Get It for You Wholesale in 1962. The latter made a star of Barbra Streisand. In 1964 he would direct Anyone Can Whistle, Angela Lansbury’s first starring role in a Broadway musical. He did not direct another Broadway production until Lansbury’s Tony winning performance in the 1974 revival of Gypsy for which he would himself receive a Tony nomination for Best Director. In the meantime he would write the books for the 1965 musical Do I Hear a Waltz? based on The Time of the Cuckoo and 1967’s Hallelujah, Baby! for which he would win a Tony.

One again in Hollywood, he wrote the original screenplay for 1973’s The Way We Were for Barbara Streisand. His next and last big screen film would be 1977’s The Turning Point which he also produced, earning Oscar nominations for both Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

Back on Broadway, he received a second Tony, this time for directing 1983’s La Cage aux Folles. He would be nominated again for directing both the 2008 revival of Gypsy with Patti LuPone at the age of 91. All three of the actresses Laurents directed in Broadway productions of Gypsy, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, star of the 1989 revival, and LuPone, would win Tonys for their performance. The two who were directed by others, original star Ethel Merman and 2003 revival star Bernadette Peters, would not. His final work was the 2009 revival of West Side Story.
Arthur Laurents died from complications of pneumonia on May 5, 2011. He was 93.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

ROPE (1948), directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s film is famous for two things – the director’s almost continuous tracking shot throughout the party in the killers’ apartment and Laurents’ masterful writing of gay characters under the nose of the Hollywood Production Code.

Laurents took the job as an opportunity to work with Farley Granger, his then lover, who plays the weaker of the two thrill killers in the film version of Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play based on the sensational Leopold-Loeb case. John Dall plays the mastermind. Most audiences get that these characters were supposed to be gay, but few including James Stewart himself, realized that Stewart’s character was also supposed to be gay. Granger and Stewart would famously work with Hitchcock again, but Laurents never did, turning down offers to write the screenplays for Torn Curtain and Topaz because the material didn’t interest him.

WEST SIDE STORY (1961), directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins

Laurents wrote the book for the original Broadway version of the musical, itself loosely based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. His contemporary, Ernest Lehman, who received an Oscar nomination for his adaptation of Laurents’ work was coincidentally another of Hitchcock’s collaborators, having received an earlier Oscar nomination for his screenplay of North by Northwest..

Laurents remained connected to the work throughout his career and, in fact, re-wrote much of the dialogue in Spanish for the 2009 Broadway revival which he himself directed at the age of 91. Only partially successful, this version was cut from contaning18% of the material in Spanish to just 10% in the national touring version after Laurents’ death.

GYPSY (1962), directed by Mervyn LeRoy

Leonard Spielgelgass, whose adaptation of his own A Majority of One was a success for Rosalind Russell the previous year, wrote the screenplay for the film based on Laurents’ book for the 1959 Broadway musical. Although Ethel Merman’s fans have always maintained that Russell couldn’t sing, the actress has a Tony for the 1953 musical Wonderful Town to prove that she could indeed sing. She just wasn’t able to reach the high notes demanded of the role. That wasn’t a problem for the filmmakers who seamlessly blend Russell’s voice with that of Lisa Kirk.

Laurents would be forever linked with the property, later respectively directing Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly and Patti LuPone in the 1974, 1989 and 2008 Broadway revivals of the musical, winning a Tony himself for the LuPone version.

THE WAY WE WERE (1973), directed by Sydney Pollack

Having given Barbra Streisand the role that launched her acting career in the 1962 Broadway musical, I Can Get It for You Wholesale, Laurents was commissioned by producer Ray Stark, Fanny Brice’s son-in-law and producer of Funny Girl, to write something new for Streisand. He came up with this nostalgic romance in which Stresiand’s character was essentially the whole show. When Sydney Pollack came on board, he had other writers beef up Robert Redford’s part to give the actor’s role more heft. Eventually Laurents was brought back to finish the script.

Although both Laurents and Streisand were not happy that Pollack excised much of the Streisand-Redford break-up scene, making it appear that she left him because of a brief fling rather than over political beliefs, Laurents later admitted that it didn’t make any difference. The audience loved it just the same.

THE TURNING POINT (1979), directed by Herbert Ross

Laurents received two of the film’s eleven Oscar nominations, one for his screenplay and the other as one of the film’s producers.

The film works both as a valentine to the ballet world and a sharply written domestic drama centering around the love/hate relationship of two former rivals, one now a prima ballerina nearing the end of her reign and the other, a long retired dancer, who runs a ballet school in Oklahoma. Long in gestation, the film had various stars attached to it before it was finally produced as a showcase for Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine at the top of their game.

The general public has never been a big supporter of ballet films and this one has more than its share of dance, but what kept audiences glued to their seats was waiting for the showdown between the two actresses that they all knew was coming. When it did, it was a doozy. Laurent’s writing couldn’t have been better.