MUSICAL / DANCE FILMS

Best Picture-Winning Musicals in the 60s:

West Side Story - 1961From 1958 to 1968, there were five musical Best Picture winners out of eight nominees. Four musicals in the decade of the 1960s adapted for the screen won the Academy Award for Best Picture. All four were based on Broadway hits, but with a distinct difference - each one involved a major cast change:

All of the directors of the Best Picture-winning musicals in the 60s were long-overdue recipients of a Best Director Oscar:

- co-directors Jerome Robbins (with his sole nomination) and Robert Wise (with his second nomination) for West Side Story (1961)
- director George Cukor (with his fifth nomination) for My Fair Lady (1964)
- director Robert Wise (with his third nomination) for The Sound of Music (1965)
- director Carol Reed (with his third nomination) for Oliver! (1968)

The Demise of the Musical in the Late 60s and 70s:

Hello Dolly! - 1969The adaptation of stage material for the screen remained the predominant trend in Hollywood with extravagant, lavish productions that attempted to duplicate the successes of the 60s, in films such as: Bells Are Ringing (1960), Bye Bye Birdie (1963), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), director Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof (1971) based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem about changing times and the life of a milkman's family in pre-revolutionary Russia, Man of La Mancha (1972) and more. However, by the end of the 1960s and early 70s, musicals were virtually extinct and had significantly diminished in popularity.

For a few decades (until the 80s), major musicals, whether adaptations or original productions, seemed to have disappeared or fared poorly at the box-office, and were regarded as insipid and overblown. A number of disappointing flops and sometimes disastrous films spelled an end to the large-scale film musical:

Younger directors experimented with re-creating the splendor of 1930s musicals, with limited success:

Best Picture-Nominated Musicals in the 1970s:

Cabaret - 1972Hollywood musicals generated 50 Academy Award nominations in the 70s. There were only three musicals nominated for Best Picture in the 1970s, and none of them won the top Oscar. Two of them, directed by dynamic choreographer-director-screenwriter Bob Fosse, received high praise for their cinematic innovation, bold approach and dramatic quality:

Alan Parker succeeded with Fame (1980), a story of struggling young dancers - so popular that it helped launch a television show. Director Michael Apted's Coal Miner's Daughter (1980) with Best Actress-winning Sissy Spacek was a quasi-musical/biopic about country music singer Loretta Lynn. Pink Panther-director Blake Edwards' Victor/Victoria (1982) with a Henry Mancini score featured the director's wife Julie Andrews in a 1930's Parisian story "of a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman." [In 1996, Victor/Victoria was transformed into a Broadway musical, again directed by Edwards and starring Andrews.]

Barbra Streisand's directorial debut film Yentl (1983), the story of a young Jewish woman disguised as a boy, won only one Oscar (Best Original Song Score) from its five nominations. And the 1984 Best Picture Oscar victor, Amadeus (1984), was a drama/musical about child prodigy Mozart. An off-Broadway musical called Little Shop of Horrors (1986) that was based on horror film director Roger Corman's 1961 low budget cult favorite, was also successful.

Rock 'N' Roll Films:

Jailhouse Rock - 1957Inventive rock 'n' roll films and rock musicals have become a popular musical sub-genre. The first mainstream feature film to use rock music (Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock) - during the opening credits - was in Richard Brooks' Blackboard Jungle (1955). The original musical film was becoming an endangered species, pushed out by rock 'n' roll songwriters and new tastes among the record-purchasing public. The hip-swiveling king of rock 'n' roll, singer Elvis Presley broke into films, making a total of thirty-three films in his career from the mid-50's to 1970. Although most of them were forgettable, formulaic, low-budget, sappy 'boy-meets-girl' pictures sprinkled with hit songs, Jailhouse Rock (1957) captured the real magnetism of the music star. Elvis' hit film tunes included "Love Me Tender" and "Can't Help Falling in Love."

The Beatles' improvisational and imaginative first film was producer Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (1964), made at the peak of "Beatlemania" popularity. It captured a surrealistic day and a half in the lives of the "Fab Four" Beatles from Liverpool, and heralded a new kind of musical. Their music was also featured in Yellow Submarine (1968), an animated musical feast. Two great rock documentaries focused on the life of singer/writer Bob Dylan: D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (1967) followed his 1965 tour of England, including appearances by Joan Baez and Donovan, and Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home (2005) focused on the first six years of Dylan's career.

Jim Henson's The Muppets:

Puppetmaster Jim Henson's loveable creatures, the Muppets (from Sesame Street and The Muppet Show (1976-1981)), including Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, and a host of others, crossed over to family-oriented feature films in the late 70s. Inevitably, the films in the original trilogy included energetic and silly musical numbers:

A Revival of Dance Pictures:

Saturday Night Fever - 1977Dance pictures were revived in the late 1970s by director John Badham's classic dance film Saturday Night Fever (1977) that starred John Travolta (with the film's sole nomination for Best Actor) as a vulgar, blue-collar Brooklyn paint-store clerk - transformed into a pulsating, white-suited disco king Tony Manero who struts across a dance floor of rainbow-colored squares. The famous disco film featured a popular Bee Gees soundtrack (un-nominated by AMPAS!). Dance champion Denny Terrio and choreographer Lester Wilson trained Travolta, who was a teen idol and starring on TV's Welcome Back, Kotter (as Vinnie Barbarino), to swivel his hips on the dance floor. The film, costing about $3.5 million, made almost $300 million for Paramount Studios.

The next year, Travolta co-starred with Australian singer Olivia Newton-John in Randal Kleiser's popular, spirited, nostalgic 50s film Grease (1978) with smutty dialogue - it was a former 1972 hit Broadway musical that brought two big hit songs: "Summer Nights" and "You're The One That I Want", to the charts. (The film's only nomination was Best Song for "Hopelessly Devoted to You.") It was about two lovers, Australian transfer student Sandy (Newton-John) and American greaser Danny Zucko (Travolta), who enjoyed a summertime romance but had to adapt to new roles back in their high school cliques, the T-Birds and the Pink Ladies. Its popularity made it one of the highest grossing movie musicals ever. Olivia Newton-John's follow-up film was a disaster -- the musical roller disco fantasy Xanadu (1980), in which she starred as a Greek muse in Los Angeles alongside co-star Gene Kelly.

Patricia Birch's lesser sequel, Grease 2 (1982), her debut film as director (she had choreographed the original film) maintained the same locale, Rydell High School, but brought a new cast including Michelle Pfeiffer and Maxwell Caulfield. A run of hippie/religious musicals included Godspell (1973) - adapted from the successful Broadway musical, Norman Jewison's Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) (with an Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice score), and Milos Forman's version of Broadway's Age-of-Aquarius hippie stage hit Hair (1979). One of the most enduring cult musicals of all time was The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) - adapted from a 1973 stage production. It was a bizarre midnight movie favorite that built a reputation for audience participation during screenings. Herbert Ross' energetic rock/dance film Footloose (1984) with Kevin Bacon was a culturally-significant film with a pounding, hit soundtrack. Similarly, the sleeper hit film Dirty Dancing (1987) with Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze provided nostalgia, great dance routines, sexy young stars, and a coming-of-age story. The film sparked a short-lived revival of the sexy Latin dance - the lambada - with such exploitative films as Joel Silberg's Lambada (1989), and The Forbidden Dance (1990), starring Laura Elena (Martinez) Herring (the first Latina to win Miss USA - in 1985).

Arnold Glimcher's The Mambo Kings (1992) celebrated Latin American music with its story of two Cuban brothers Nestor and Cesar Castillo (Antonio Banderas and Armand Assante) in a NYC mambo band in the early 1950s. Martin Brest's dramatic Scent of a Woman (1992), with a Best Actor-winning role for Al Pacino as blind, irascible army veteran Frank Slade, was most notable for his passionate tango scene with Donna (Gabrielle Anwar). Australian director Baz Luhrmann's first film, Strictly Ballroom (1992) told the story of ballroom dancer Scott Hastings (Paul Mercurio) and his Hispanic partner Fran (Tara Morice) who refused to follow the conventional rules of a Dance Federation during the film's final Pan-Pacific dance competition. Although The Mask (1994) was basically a fanciful comedy, the film featured a memorable dance routine ("Cuban Pete") by the mild-mannered, geeky bank teller (Jim Carrey) while wearing his magical mask to successfully woo the beautiful Tina Carlyle (Cameron Diaz in her screen debut).

Rock Musicals:

Woodstock - 1970The three best films that documented the counter-cultural era of the 60s and 70s were the concert picture rockumentaries:

Tommy (1975) was highlighted with music by The Who. Technically, director Alan Parker's visually impressive and highly-stylized rock musical Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) wasn't a true musical but a very long music video. The mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (1984), director Rob Reiner's debut film, was a marvelous satire-spoof on the subgenre of rockumentaries - it followed the career and US concert tour of a fictional British heavy-metal band called Spinal Tap.

Cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth's and director Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense (1984), featuring the influential rock band Talking Heads, was considered by many critics as the best rock concert film of all-time, featuring lead singer/guitarist David Byrne. The film won the National Society of Film Critics' Best Documentary Feature Award - a rare occurrence for a concert film. In its documentation of the group during three nights in December, 1983 at Hollywood's Pantages Theater, the film was notable for being the first made entirely with direct-to-digital audio techniques. It captured many memorable moments without intrusive upstaging by the photography (it was basically devoid of audience shots, quick-cuts, artificial lighting, etc.), including Byrne's solo performance of "Psycho Killer" on a bare stage in the film's opening, played with an acoustic guitar to the simple accompaniment of a portable boom box (providing synthetic percussion drumming).

Animated Musicals from Disney Revived:

Animated musical blockbusters from Disney's studios also succeeded with high-quality feature films that kept musical scores alive:

Dreamworks' attempted to compete with the Disney animated musicals with Prince of Egypt (1998), and won the Academy Award for Best Song (Stephen Schwartz) for "When You Believe." Another unbelievable animated musical was director Trey Parker's tasteless and independent South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999), based upon a cable-TV series with foul-mouthed characters, had an obscene title song ("Blame Canada") that was nominated for Best Original Song.

Modern Day Musicals:

Live-action musicals seemed to almost fade in the 1990s. There was only one successful live-action musical in the 90s - director Alan Parker's musical drama Evita (1996), adapted from the 1976 theater version by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, with Madonna (singing the Oscar-winning Best Original Song "You Must Love Me"). There were just a few other musicals to be mentioned in the 90s:

It would take the new millennium to bring more well-received musicals, but the first few struggled to find audiences: Kenneth Branagh's Shakespeare-inspired musical comedy Love's Labour's Lost (2000), Lars von Trier's dramatic musical Dancer in the Dark (2000) with Bjork, and John Cameron Mitchell's rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). Baz Luhrmann's eye-catching and dazzling, Best Picture-nominated Moulin Rouge (2001) (the first live-action musical to be nominated for Best Picture since All That Jazz (1979)), and choreographer Rob Marshall's debut feature film and razzle-dazzle film Chicago (2002) (at $171 million) proved that adaptations of modern stage musicals (a rock-opera bio in this case) or inventive fantasy musicals were still possible. Marshall's film was a musical drama and a screen adaptation of the 1975 Broadway hit musical Chicago from John Kander and Fred Ebb, originally directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, and revived on Broadway in 1996. It garnered six Oscars from its thirteen nominations, including Best Picture. It was the first musical since Oliver! (1968) to win the top award.

However, the trend could be short-lived, due to the total box office failures of stage-to-screen adaptations of such acclaimed and popular Tony-winning musicals as Joel Schumacher's The Phantom of the Opera (2004) (at $51.2 million), Rent (2005) (at $29.1 million) and the get-rich-quick scheming of theatrical con-men in The Producers (2005) (at $19.4 million), as well as other notable musical flops, such as From Justin to Kelly (2003) (starring American Idol singers Justin Guarini and Kelly Clarkson), Beyond the Sea (2003), Camp (2003) and De-Lovely (2004).

Director Bill Condon's Dreamgirls (2006) (at $103.1 million) was a lavish and vibrant screen adaptation of Michael Bennett's popular Broadway musical about a trio of Motown-style soul singers The Dreams, in a thinly veiled roman a clef of the real Motown singing group The Supremes. It acquired eight nominations but came away with only two wins: Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Hudson), and Best Sound Mixing, even though it won at the Golden Globes awards as the Best Musical or Comedy. Hairspray (2007) (at $119 million) - the song-and-dance adaptation of the Broadway smash hit, with stars Nikki Blonsky and John Travolta in early 1960s Baltimore, became one of the few movie musicals that grossed over $100 million, joining Chicago (2002), Dreamgirls (2006), and Grease (1978). However, it received no Oscar nominations, although it did have three Golden Globe nominations. Also, Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd (2007) (at $52 million), with Johnny Depp as a Victorian-era vengeful barber, was recognized with three Oscar nominations (and only one win). In some respects, the entire musical genre wasn't being blamed for the decline in big-screen movie musicals, only individual films.

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