The Sound of Music

1965’s The Sound of Music would eventually become known as “The Sound of Money” but initially no one wanted to be a part of the film - especially Christopher Plummer. Join Lizzie and Chris as they discover why everyone was embarrassed to be a part of this enduring classic, how a helicopter kept knocking Julie Andrews over, and why the boat scene turned dangerous for one of the children. Get an exclusive 15% discount on your first Sailydata plans! Use code [wrong] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to to https://saily.com/wrong Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Making a movie is no easy picnic. War films and musicals and sci-fi and chick flicks. Think you could do it? Listen to the song. These are a few of the things that go wrong.

• 2:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Shooting with Kubrick till Tom Cruise is broken. Ben Hur was gay, but it shall go unspoken. Swayze and Jennifer can't get along. These are a few of the things that went wrong.

• 2:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Wilder takes sleeping pills right up the anus. Disney hates humans. My cartoons are famous. J Lo jacked Mariah Carey's best song. These are a few of the things that went wrong. If the script sucks, there's regime change, terrorists attack. I simply remember the things that went wrong, and then it won't seem so bad.

• 3:04Chris Winterbauer?

  And action. Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a timeless classic that, again, unfortunately feels oddly relevant to our current times in some interesting ways.

• 3:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 3:30Chris Winterbauer?

  As always, I am Chris Wintour, joined by Lizzie Bassett, who will be our intrepid guide through which film.

• 3:37Lizzie Bassett?

  The Sound of Music, Chris.

• 3:40Chris Winterbauer?

  The Hills Are Alive.

• 3:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 3:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Or, as you said, "The Hills Have Eyes and Music."

• 3:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. I kind of wish that's what it was, but no, it's very much for, I think, children, but also very enjoyable for adults. We're going to talk about how it came to be, how Seemingly, no one really wanted to be a part of this and was pretty embarrassed for most of the production.

• 4:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, really?

• 4:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 4:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting.

• 4:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, but I agree. I do think this is a timeless classic. This was, of course, the winner of our musicals poll. I did not think this was going to win. I thought for sure it would be West Side Story or All That Jazz. However, Chris is looking very smug right now because he said immediately The Sound of Music will win.

• 4:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Because Chris also is a plebeian with no taste and thought, yeah, I'd pick The Sound of Music. It's the one I recognize the most.

• 4:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you were right. It's a good one. I'm glad you all chose it. It's not the one that I would have picked out of that poll. We'll probably do some of the others. We are going to cover All That Jazz, which was in that in a little bit. But yeah, this was a really fascinating one. So, Chris, I'm assuming you had seen The Sound of Music before.

• 4:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 4:43Lizzie Bassett?

  But what was your experience the first time you saw it? And what was your experience rewatching for the podcast?

• 4:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I'd seen it a couple of times as a kid. Didn't make a big impression upon me. Knew the melodies to a few of the songs, obviously. Knew that it dovetailed into the Anschluss, as I learned this time.

• 4:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 4:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Nazis' annexation of Austria. Lizzie, I loved it.

• 5:04Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great.

• 5:05Chris Winterbauer?

  I was utterly, I was stunned. I was in.

• 5:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 5:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I was locked in for three hours. I started tearing up when he starts singing for his children. Oh, what a scene.

• 5:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 5:19Chris Winterbauer?

  And his final performance when he sings Edelweiss for the crowd is amazing. I was like, is this maybe the best movie we've covered this year? It's up there with Dr. Strangelove for me. I really, I don't want to oversell it, but I actually, I really thought this movie looks incredible. I thought all the performances were amazing. I really liked the music. And I'm not a huge musical fan, generally speaking, but all the songs, I think, do a great job of furthering the story. And it's a very heartfelt story that can feel, I think, a little sentimental at times, but has just enough of that undercurrent of real stakes with what Captain Gurg von Trapp is facing and his family,

• 6:00Chris Winterbauer?

  with, you know, the loss of a sense of national pride and Austria's independence that, again, I was blown away. And so I just, I'm very excited to talk about it. And I was, when you just said no one wanted to be involved, I'm a little stunned.

• 6:12Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 6:13Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's held up so well.

• 6:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 6:16Chris Winterbauer?

  So, anyway, I, I had a great time watching it.

• 6:18Lizzie Bassett?

  I had a similar experience. I'm sure I'd seen this a bunch of times growing up, you know, very familiar with the songs. I did not appreciate how great the songs are. I think that they are amazing. It is just banger after banger in this. There's really no duds, which is hard to come by in a musical. I have sort of the opposite experience of you. I remembered the Nazis being so much more prominent in this than they are.

• 6:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, interesting.

• 6:41Lizzie Bassett?

  They really don't show up heftily until the last like 30, 40 minutes of this.

• 6:47Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like post intermission is really when they start to really materialize as a threat.

• 6:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. Which I have to admit, maybe this is just because I recently rewatched Cabaret, which is one of my all time favorite movies ever. I felt like it wasn't quite enough. I, I still really, really enjoyed this movie. I agree with you. I think that there are extremely relevant themes here, you know, in terms of the conversation he has with Max, his friend, when he's like, whatever. They're like, let them do whatever they want. It's not going to affect you. And Gayorg is just, you know, has a bit of a hissy fit and an understandable one. But yeah, I guess because the final chase sequence had always stuck so much in my head as a kid because I thought it was very scary. I really thought that that was more of the movie and it's not.

• 7:34Lizzie Bassett?

  So I think that's interesting. And I, the reason I bring up Cabaret is because that one does such a fantastic job of really seeing the slow burn build in the background of the hold that Nazis end up having on Germany. So I missed that a little bit here, but I understand that was a very conscious decision, as we will get to, as to why they didn't build that up more. But I, you know what? I could have used a little bit more of it, maybe.

• 7:59Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. So the note from Lizzie is more Nazis, as we've learned today.

• 8:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Honestly, it is, which as you'll see, someone involved in this production agreed with me.

• 8:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Fair enough.

• 8:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Right. Well, let's get into it. The Sound of Music was released March 2nd, 1965. That was the New York premiere. The wide release was April 1st, 1965, directed by Robert Wise, written by a lot of people. Here we go. Of course, Maria von Trapp, based on her own book, The Story of the The Trapp family singers, Ernest Lehman, who wrote the screenplay, Russell Kraus and Howard Lindsay, who wrote the book for the stage musical, and then partial ideas from Georg Hertelik. It stars, of course, the absolutely fabulous, and I would argue linchpin of the whole movie, Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Charmian Carr, Heather Menzies,

• 8:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Nicholas Hammond, Dwayne Chase, many, many more people. Just a million children, we'll get to some of them. Debbie Turner, Kim Caruth, Angela Cartwright, Peggy Wood, Richard Hayden, Eleanor Parker, and more. Produced by Saul Chaplin and Robert Wise. And the IMDb logline, as always, is, "A young novice is sent by her convent in 1930s Austria to become a governess to the seven children of a widowed naval officer."

• 9:17Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the beginning.

• 9:18Lizzie Bassett?

  That is the beginning. So, Chris, let's start at the very beginning. It's a very good place to start with the real Maria von Trapp.

• 9:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 9:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Because if anyone is not familiar, the von Trapp family is a real family. Although they took, this is a loose adaptation of their...

• 9:36Chris Winterbauer?

  As Hollywood adaptations tend to be.

• 9:39Lizzie Bassett?

  So, the real Maria von Trapp was born Maria Augusta Cuchera, I'm probably mispronouncing that, I'm sorry, on January 25th, 1905, just before midnight, on a moving train en route from Tyrol to Vienna.

• 9:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 9:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Apparently, the conductor politely asked her mother to please, for the love of God, get off this train. And her mom was like, nope. I told my husband to pick me up in Vienna, so that's where I'll be scooting off to today. So she just had the baby on the train and then got off in Vienna. It seems a strong will runs in the family.

• 10:10Chris Winterbauer?

  It was probably as sanitary as an actual hospital in the early 20th century.

• 10:14Lizzie Bassett?

  At that point, sure. Although, side note, you know this, Chris, but I had to fly at 38 weeks pregnant and I was so sure I was going to give birth in the aisle of the Alaska flight. So I cannot imagine actually doing it on a moving train in 1905.

• 10:27Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 10:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Sadly, two years later, her mom died of pneumonia, though, so Maria never really got to know her. Her dad then promptly dumped Maria at a house full of his elderly relatives with no kids. So she always imagined having a huge family of her own to keep herself entertained because she grew up around a lot of older adults. Specifically, in her head, she had 11 children. And she will almost meet that goal, Chris, but not quite. Eventually, she wound up living with a mentally ill and abusive uncle after her father died, who was constantly spanking her. So she figured, you know what? If I'm gonna get spanked no matter what, I am just gonna break all the rules and do whatever the hell I want. So she had a very rebellious streak and described her upbringing as that of a wild boy.

• 11:11Lizzie Bassett?

  And though the first relative she lived with had taken her to church, her uncle raised her as an atheist. So in college, when she attended a lecture by a Jesuit priest, she decided afterwards to go give him a piece of her mind, but she left the meeting very moved. And after college, she went off to Salzburg to become a nun. Just as she was in the movie, she was indeed a problem in the abbey. She was running around, whistling, sliding down banisters, and just generally being a giant pain in the ass to all of the nuns. She also had terrible headaches, so the Mother Superior called her in and said that for her health, she needed to leave the mountains for a few months and go be a governess for Captain Georg Von Trapp, father to seven children, whose wife had died a couple of years earlier from scarlet fever. So off she went.

• 11:56Lizzie Bassett?

  And Chris, in many ways, the similarities to the movie kind of end there.

• 12:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Got it.

• 12:02Lizzie Bassett?

  First of all, Captain Von Trapp was 25 years older than she was and decidedly not as smokin' hot as Christopher Plummer. She did end up marrying Georg, but it sounds like it was very much not out of love for him, but instead out of love for the children. She would grow to really love him over time, but she said she was basically marrying the kids. She really, really loved them.

• 12:25Chris Winterbauer?

  I think they try to honor that a bit

• 12:27Lizzie Bassett?

  A little bit, yeah.

• 12:28Chris Winterbauer?

  by starting their relationship on such starkly opposing terms and points of view, but...

• 12:33Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it was less that she just didn't care about him at all

• 12:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 12:37Lizzie Bassett?

  early on.

• 12:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 12:38Lizzie Bassett?

  But they had three more kids, for a total of 10, so she got pretty close to her goal of 11.

• 12:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 12:43Lizzie Bassett?

  And at that point, I think they were pretty much required to form a family band. So they did.

• 12:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:49Lizzie Bassett?

  They toured around Europe, but when Hitler invaded Austria, they fled. By train, not on foot, to Italy, then to France, then England, and eventually arrived in the US with $4 total in their pockets.

• 13:02Chris Winterbauer?

  But that was 7 million.

• 13:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true. In the current economy, you can buy a house with $4. So yeah, what you see in the movie, of course, is this very exciting chase sequence and then them escaping on foot over the Alps. That did not happen, as far as I understand. They basically just got on a train and left. Not saying it wasn't traumatic, I am sure that it was. They performed as the Trapp Family Singers and for at least two years actually lived in their tour bus. Remember, there are 12 of them. So Chris, how do we know all of this? Because in 1948, one year after the captain died, Maria wrote a memoir called The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. So, pretty soon after the book was released, some Hollywood producers came calling, but

• 13:45Lizzie Bassett?

  there was a problem. They only wanted to buy the title rights. Chris, can you explain what that means?

• 13:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Meaning literally, they just want the title?

• 13:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Correct.

• 13:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, so they want to make up an entire story behind it?

• 13:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I think so.

• 14:00Chris Winterbauer?

  They literally just want the title rights. Fair enough. Probably because if they were a well enough known family band, then they could use that name as a way to sell the movie. But then, obviously, they don't have to honor any of her actual lived experiences and she doesn't have to be involved.

• 14:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. Well, she didn't think that sounded too great, so she said no. But in the mid 50s, Wolfgang Reinhardt, a producer and son of famous director Max Reinhardt, showed up and offered her $10,000 for the rights to the entire story. Now Maria's lawyer pushed her to ask for royalties, but then Reinhardt decided to swindle her. He told her that it was illegal for a German film company to pay royalties to foreigners. Of course, at this point, she had become an American citizen. This was, of course, a complete lie. That law did not exist. And he told her if she agreed to only $9,000, he could pay her in full now. And sadly, she needed the money, so she took the deal.

• 14:57Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 14:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. So unfortunately, the real Maria did not see...

• 15:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Much money.

• 15:03Lizzie Bassett?

  She saw a little bit of the money of success, but not very much. In 1956, Die Trapp Familie premiered and was successful enough to garner a sequel, Die Trapp Family in America.

• 15:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, we've just been doing it forever. The bad sequel that nobody ever needed, and not just Americans, obviously.

• 15:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Germans are at it, too.

• 15:25Chris Winterbauer?

  The Germans, too.

• 15:26Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 15:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 15:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, in the two years between those films, Paramount bought the film rights and began planning to turn it into a Hollywood movie.

• 15:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 15:33Lizzie Bassett?

  They hired Broadway and TV director Vincent Donahue to direct, but something odd happened. He decided he wanted to buy the rights from Paramount and make it into a play instead, starring Mary Martin, who by that point already was a huge Broadway star and a muse of musical powerhouse duo Rogers and Hammerstein. She actually had originated the lead role in South Pacific in 1949. But Paramount just let the rights lapse and dropped their option. So Vincent started writing letters to the real Maria von Trapp, not realizing that Wolfgang Reinhardt's company actually held the rights.

• 16:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Now Maria was busy. She was doing missionary work in New Guinea when she got the letters and she was like, A, how could this possibly be on stage? B, who the hell is Mary Martin? And C, why do I care about any of this? So back into the jungle she went. She just tossed those letters in the garbage.

• 16:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:27Lizzie Bassett?

  But Vincent, and now Mary Martin's husband, producer Richard Halliday, did not give up. Halliday actually waited for Maria's ship to come in to the San Francisco harbor, met her at the dock, and basically accosted her and was like, please come see my wife, Mary Martin, in Annie Get Your Gun tonight. She agreed. She loved what she saw. She loved meeting Mary in person. She's like, sure, go right ahead. And they're like, fantastic. And she's like, by the way, I don't own the rights. Thanks for the dinner and show.

• 17:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, go to Germany where my life rights were taken with the Anschluss.

• 17:04Lizzie Bassett?

  So Halliday made a deal with the German producers, and even though he didn't have to, he did cut Maria in, giving her three eighths of 1% in royalties. So not great, but not nothing.

• 17:17Chris Winterbauer?

  But this movie, I believe, did very well.

• 17:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it did.

• 17:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 17:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, originally, they wanted to use the traditional folk music that the Von Trapp family actually sang with only one song from Rodgers and Hammerstein. But Rodgers and Hammerstein said, no, thank you. We will be doing all of the music ourselves. And so they did. And The Sound of Music opened on Broadway November 16, 1959. Maria Von Trapp absolutely loved it. Critics, however, did not.

• 17:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 17:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, can you guess what their problem with it might have been?

• 17:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Not enough Nazis in the first half, so it feels like a left turn in the back half. Lizzie Bassett's criticism?

• 17:55Lizzie Bassett?

  They seem less concerned with the Nazis and more concerned with the fact that it's just too saccharine, that it's just too sweet, too sort of childish. They really didn't like it that much, but, just like cats, it didn't matter because audiences absolutely ate this up.

• 18:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Lizzie Bassett?

  It ran for over 1,400 performances and won five Tonys.

• 18:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 18:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Spiros Skouras, then president of 20th Century Fox, was in the audience on opening night, and he apparently was crying like a baby by the time the lights came up. And that was good news, because it turns out Fox actually had first right of refusal over any Rodgers and Hammerstein show. Chris, do you want to explain what first right of refusal is?

• 18:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so when the show premieres, and presumably then Hollywood Studios would be interested in optioning it, and it's perhaps possible that even before the show premieres, this could happen, Fox has a first look or first right of refusal, meaning they can buy the rights, option the rights, without the script or project being shopped around town. They don't have to open it up to everybody else, and that's an exclusive relationship. And they may be paying Rodgers and Hammerstein, you know, some fee to have this overall deal, where they get first bite at the apple of whatever work that they're producing.

• 19:09Lizzie Bassett?

  And does that kind of mean that they're inherently avoiding a bidding war?

• 19:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 19:13Lizzie Bassett?

  In June of 1960, Fox went ahead and bought the rights. Do you have any guesses on what they might have paid? And this is 1960 money.

• 19:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Are you suggesting it's a lot or a little?

• 19:22Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know.

• 19:24Chris Winterbauer?

  $500,000.

• 19:26Lizzie Bassett?

  $1.25 million.

• 19:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Holy shit.

• 19:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 19:31Chris Winterbauer?

  That's, I think, because I just had Ben heard, that's over $10 million in today's money.

• 19:37Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a lot.

• 19:38Chris Winterbauer?

  For just the rights.

• 19:39Lizzie Bassett?

  It was 1.25 million against 10% of the gross for a 15-year lease on the property.

• 19:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 19:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Variety reported that was the most a studio had ever paid for a literary property.

• 19:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe that.

• 19:53Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a lot.

• 19:54Chris Winterbauer?

  This is our James Cameron musical. This is where the money is.

• 19:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, clearly.

• 19:59Chris Winterbauer?

  We gotta go for it.

• 20:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Audience, just so you know, Chris and I have semi jokingly, but not jokingly, been noodling the idea of a musical entitled, "I Told You So," a musical in Titanic proportions, following James Cameron's life. If you'd like to see it, let us know. Maybe we'll make it.

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• 20:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Chris, as you mentioned, this is a ton of money. So you would think that they would want to get right to work on this. But it turns out, they couldn't. Because the deal stipulated that the movie could not be released in the US or Canada until the musical had stopped running or until December 31, 1964, whichever came first.

• 21:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 21:17Lizzie Bassett?

  But while they waited around, Chris, something else was costing them a whole assload of money. We have covered this film already. Any guesses what was gobbling up all that cash?

• 21:28Chris Winterbauer?

  It's gotta be Cleopatra, right?

• 21:29Lizzie Bassett?

  It is Cleopatra.

• 21:32Chris Winterbauer?

  That's the one.

• 21:33Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the one.

• 21:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Hoover vacuuming all the money into those enormously amazing sets and that dead, lifeless script.

• 21:41Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 21:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Making that movie.

• 21:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Into so much blue eyeshadow. It's fun, sort of.

• 21:46Chris Winterbauer?

  It is fun.

• 21:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Give it a watch. Listen to our episode.

• 21:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, it's huge. Yeah.

• 21:50Lizzie Bassett?

  So many gold bikinis, more than you would anticipate.

• 21:52Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a Katy Perry music video before there were Katy Perry music videos.

• 21:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, this wasn't Fox's only problem. The studio was essentially falling apart at this point. They'd had a revolving door of leaders since Daryl Zanuck left, a string of box office flops, and stiff competition from TV. And of course, again, Cleopatra eating up, I believe, more than $40 million.

• 22:14Chris Winterbauer?

  It wasn't just the most expensive movie. It just kept leapfrogging so far beyond what any movie had ever cost before.

• 22:22Lizzie Bassett?

  I think adjusted for inflation, it may be one of the most expensive movies still.

• 22:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Even today?

• 22:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. So Scorsese avoided shutting down the entire studio by selling 260 acres of the backlot, which, fun fact, would eventually become Century City. But that wasn't enough. In 1962, he was demoted and replaced by Daryl Zanuck, who came back and immediately put his son, Richard Zanuck, in charge as head of production. Richard shut down the studio, laid off 1,000 employees, moved everyone who was left to one floor, and said, "We're gonna gather momentum." Sounds like Amazon's policy of frugality.

• 22:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, the return to work call begins.

• 23:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, return to office, which is now 10 square feet on this one floor. So he started poking around for their next big project that was going to save the studio. And much to his surprise, the Sound of Music was just sitting on a shelf gathering dust. He couldn't believe that no one was working on it. They did not even have a writer on it.

• 23:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 23:18Lizzie Bassett?

  His point was, even though you can't release this movie until December...

• 23:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Get it ready?

• 23:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, get it ready!

• 23:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, movies take a while, guys.

• 23:28Lizzie Bassett?

  He's like, "What the hell?"

• 23:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Can't be December 30th. We're gonna, hey, we should probably crack this thing open.

• 23:33Lizzie Bassett?

  I wanna go ahead and start working on that. So in December of 1962, Zanuck hired Ernest Lehman to write the screenplay. At this point, he had been nominated for three Academy Awards for writing Sabrina, which was based on a play, North by Northwest, and of course, West Side Story. He had also adapted The King and I, which was a musical originally written by Rodgers and Hammerstein. So he's pretty much a perfect pick. He got to work right away, much to the chagrin of all his friends and professional contacts, who kept insisting that Fox was using him. They told him, "There's no way they're actually gonna pay up. You're making a huge mistake." And they also thought the musical itself was a bit of a career killer. Billy Wilder reportedly said, "No musical with swastikas in it will ever be a success."

• 24:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Which I wonder if Mel Brooks was like, "Hold my beer."

• 24:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I was gonna say. Well, I mean, isn't the producer, isn't Springtime with Hitler-

• 24:25Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the whole point, yeah.

• 24:26Chris Winterbauer?

  -a riff on The Sound of Music?

• 24:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know if it's a riff on The Sound of Music. I mean, their goal is to make the least successful musical of all time, so they cast Hitler as the lead.

• 24:34Chris Winterbauer?

  The concept, yeah, exactly. It's the inverse of The Sound of Music.

• 24:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. It's more Nazis. It's all of the Nazis.

• 24:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 24:40Lizzie Bassett?

  But Lehman had been in the audience of the Broadway show, and unlike the critics, he felt strongly that it was going to be a hit movie, and he didn't care what anyone else said. So he pulled mostly from the stage play and the original memoir, though he did adapt a few scenes from the German movies. For example, the German movie included a shadow play, which, of course, he takes and transforms into the lonely goat herd puppet show, which I love.

• 25:02Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a great sequence.

• 25:03Lizzie Bassett?

  The most complex puppets, there's no way a child could possibly operate, and that's fine.

• 25:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Those are German children. They are very good at engineering.

• 25:11Lizzie Bassett?

  You're right. I'm sorry. They're very dedicated. There were at least a couple of songs he removed entirely, and he also rearranged the order of appearance of a few other songs. And finally, to add suspense, he is the one who added the car chase between the Von Trapps and the Nazis and the sort of chase through the abbey at the end of the movie.

• 25:28Chris Winterbauer?

  So they didn't return to the abbey in the earlier iteration?

• 25:32Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm not sure about that, but they definitely didn't have that kind of chase sequence as the way it's set up in the movie.

• 25:37Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so effectively done, the way that, you know, she says, "This is not a place to keep the problems of the world out," and yet that's precisely what they do in the third act of the movie when she tries to help them. It's really well-written. It's like, structurally, very tight.

• 25:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I also love that the nuns have ripped all the cables out of the cars.

• 25:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I've committed a sin. Yeah, it's so good.

• 25:56Lizzie Bassett?

  So right away, Lehman suggested Robert Wise, who had just won an Oscar for West Side Story. But he said, "No, thank you." Technically, he was busy on another project called The Sand Pebbles, but it seems like he could have shifted things around to make this work, especially because I believe The Sand Pebbles was also being produced at Fox. However, his agent told Lehman it was, quote, "not his cup of tea." And so begins the long string of people turning down The Sound of Music because everyone thought it was hot trash.

• 26:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, it's like Middlebrow, right? It's commercially successful and it's not dissimilar from Ben-Hur, the way people viewed Ben-Hur when they were going to adapt that. It sounds like everybody thought, "This is a really popular book, biblical fanfiction," as Lizzie says, "but it's not highbrow, fair. I'm not interested."

• 26:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Twilight for the Bible. Or sorry, not Twilight for the Bible. It would technically be Fifty Shades of Grey for the Bible.

• 26:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Even worse.

• 26:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Even worse. Now, to your point, yes, this was a huge commercial success. It was not a critical success. They're very worried that it is made for kids, that it's too sickly sweet, and they also do worry if the whole musical with Nazis thing may turn people off a little bit. So next, they tried Stanley Donan, who had directed Singin' in the Rain, Funny Face, and Damn Yankees. He actually lived in Switzerland and had been an investor in the original show, and he still said no. Lehman then pitched the idea to Gene Kelly, who apparently said, quote, "Ernie, go find somebody else to direct this kind of shit." Gene!

• 27:23Chris Winterbauer?

  He tap danced his way out of frame.

• 27:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Lehman's fourth choice, Chris, was someone we just talked about, and you just mentioned his movie. It was Ben-Hur director William Wyler.

• 27:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Billy Wyler.

• 27:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Go listen to our episode on Ben-Hur for more. Now, he was available. He was looking to get back into directing after a little break, and there was just one problem. Can you guess what it was, Chris?

• 27:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Aside from not loving the material?

• 27:48Lizzie Bassett?

  No, that's it. He hated The Sound of Music.

• 27:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, yeah, exactly. He didn't like it.

• 27:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he hated it. Lehman actually took him to see the Broadway musical, and as he walked out, he said, quote, "Ernie, this is terrible. I hated the show, and I'm not going to do this, but keep talking to me anyway."

• 28:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is basically what happened with Ben Hur. He did not like it. And then Sam Zimbalist, the producer, basically had to say, look, I will give you a million dollars and we will spend more than anyone's ever spent. And he said, fine. And then he won best director. So there's a formula here that they can follow.

• 28:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, but as you said, he and Lehman kept talking that night. Lehman was desperate to convince him, so he's just throwing out all of his ideas to make the movie better. Someone call Gore Vidal and see if they can make it gayer.

• 28:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. So everyone's gay.

• 28:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Everyone's gay. Everyone's gay. It's full of gay Nazis. You're gonna love it. If you're wondering why we're talking about that, go back and listen to Ben Hur.

• 28:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 28:39Lizzie Bassett?

  At 2:00 AM, he finally asked Wyler, quote, Willie, I know you hated the show, but just tell me one thing. What did you feel at the moment when Captain Von Trapp started singing The Sound of Music with his children? And Wyler apparently told him, I almost cried. And Lehman said, that's what it's all about.

• 28:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's the linchpin scene of the movie.

• 29:00Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. But still, Wyler told a friend, they want me to make this picture and I don't know what to do. The people in this musical are playing a scene and all of a sudden, somebody starts to sing. Sometimes they're just walking along and somebody starts to sing. Why the hell do they start singing?

• 29:15Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, so William Wyler's not watched a lot of musicals, clearly.

• 29:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, okay, yes.

• 29:20Chris Winterbauer?

  It's kind of the conceit.

• 29:21Lizzie Bassett?

  He did just describe a musical.

• 29:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 29:24Lizzie Bassett?

  But I think his point was more that he didn't understand the motivation for any of the songs.

• 29:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure.

• 29:28Lizzie Bassett?

  But yeah, to your point, I think pretty much everything prior to Really Cabaret was this convention of musicals where people would just break out in song randomly. That's like one of the first ones where they started to sequester the music separate from conversation, basically. Regardless, he very reluctantly said yes. But it wasn't just Wyler who had doubts. Lehman was second guessing his decision to work on it, all while trying to convince Wyler. Basically, everyone who goes to see the musical on stage goes, oh, oh, no.

• 30:01Lizzie Bassett?

  So I don't know what it was about the stage musical that they really didn't like, but it's so funny.

• 30:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, every once in a while, you'll be brought in. I've had a couple of instances where I've been brought in to consider pitching on something, you know, writing job or something, and they'll say upfront, we know this is terrible. Like, we know this thing, like this original movie or short story, we don't think it's very good or script, and we're going to acknowledge that, but we think we could make it great. I think they take a slightly different tack these days in approaching people. It's just, hey, we're going to lean into it. We understand it's not working. Here's why it could be great.

• 30:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, in some ways, this is kind of the inverse of Katz, or sort of similar to Katz, because like huge, huge commercial success, people are going, they're looking at it, they're going like, I do not think this is going to translate well to the screen. Of course, it does, but that was sort of the same problem with Katz. So in May of 1963, Lehman had a finished outline, and he and Wyler were off to scout locations in Salzburg, but he had a nagging feeling that old Willie was not 100% in, and he had reason to be concerned.

• 31:03Chris Winterbauer?

  As he slept through the location scouting.

• 31:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he had a few reasons to be concerned. So Wyler was actually good friends with Wolfgang Reinhardt, remember the original German producer, and he was often consulting with him on the film instead of Lehman. Wyler was also taking calls about other projects, and Chris, how did Lehman know this? Well, apparently, Wyler asked him to be his interpreter on them because he was hard of hearing.

• 31:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Wyler could only, he had like one bad ear, we discussed in our Ben-Hur episode.

• 31:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Get it together, Willie.

• 31:34Chris Winterbauer?

  And he's a 10-time Oscar, maybe 11 by this point, Best Director nominated, four-time winning director. He's, I'm sure, getting a lot of phone calls.

• 31:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, for sure. And one of those projects was a film called The Americanization of Emily. It was in the same stage of pre-production as The Sound of Music and was set to star a young British actress named Julie Andrews. By July, Wyler was officially attached to direct and produce The Americanization of Emily, but somehow he also still planned to do the sound of music. In fact, when Lehman turned in his full draft of the script in September of 1963, Wyler was like, "I love it!" There was just one little point of contention, Chris: the Nazis. Wyler said, quote, "I knew it wasn't really a political thing. I had a tendency to want to make it, if not an anti-Nazi movie, at least say a few things." So you know what? You know who agrees with me that they needed to up the Nazis a little bit? William Wyler.

• 32:28Lizzie Bassett?

  His solution, according to Zanuck, was, quote, "to make it very heavy-handed at the end. He wanted tanks. He wanted a real invasion, blowing up the town and everything. I didn't see any need for all this, right in the middle of a musical." I didn't need them to blow up the town.

• 32:44Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I think you were saying, "Let's feather in a little more at the beginning." And Wyler is suggesting the full might of the Third Reich rolls through the town as we sing, "It'll light..." Yeah, the tanks going off.

• 32:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, exactly. So when Wyler threw a party at his house just a few days later, Lehman took it as an opportunity to do a little snooping. In Wyler's office, he found a pile of scripts. Only one was placed face down. It was for a film called The Collector. And Lehman immediately sent the updated script to Robert Wise again because he correctly guessed that Wyler was planning on making The Collector. He was, and his agent almost immediately asked them to postpone the sound of music so he could make that, to which Zanuck basically said, "No, absolutely not." He was like, "We're not postponing the sound of music. You go ahead and make that. You've been enough trouble. Get out of here." So, turns out, Robert Wise was now available. And did he just sign on right away?

• 33:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course not.

• 33:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Certainly not. He took a lot of convincing. It sounds like Lehman called up Saul Chaplin, Wise's associate producer on West Side Story and a good friend to both of them, and asked him to read the new script. And he ended up being able to, kind of alongside Lehman, convince Robert Wise to do it. Now, Chaplin was dreading this, just like everybody. He had seen the musical, thought it was absolute crap, and was preparing himself to tell Wise to run away screaming. But then he read the script, and he said, quote, "I was never so happy reading a script in my life." So it was Chaplin who convinced Wise to go for it, and he signed on as a producer on the project himself.

• 34:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, I'm wondering if, since Robert Wise directed The Haunting right before Sound of Music, based on the Shirley Jackson novel or short story, I can't remember which, that movie I don't think did very well. I think it flopped decently hard, and I wonder if The Sound of Music, the commercial appeal was suddenly a little more appealing, possibly coming off of a flop like The Haunting, although that movie's been acclaimed in the years since.

• 34:36Lizzie Bassett?

  That would make sense. I mean, this is something where it was commercially extremely successful onstage. I'm sure they're offering a lot of money. I could see that being the case.

• 34:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I just wonder.

• 34:46Lizzie Bassett?

  And they did really like the script. Wise and screenwriter Lehman immediately sought eye to eye on a few things. First of all, the sentimentality and, this is a German word, Gemütlichkeit, or feeling of coziness, worked onstage, but it was going to be overwhelming on screen. So they wanted to make sure that they dialed that back. Second, they wanted to take advantage of not being confined to a stage, so they moved various numbers outside, most notably do re mi. They also wanted two more songs for the movie to improve Maria's emotional story arc. The first is "Something Good", which is written by Richard Rogers because Hammerstein had actually died back in 1960. And the second is "I Have Confidence", however, this one ended up being a collaboration with Saul Chaplin because they wanted something more upbeat than what Richard Rogers was turning in.

• 35:31Lizzie Bassett?

  So Chaplin and Lehman pieced together a new version. And Chaplin actually used a woman who we're going to talk about in just a minute, named Marnie Nixon, to sing the demo of it to send to Rogers and not Julie Andrews, because he didn't want Julie Andrews to know she was singing a song not fully written by Richard Rogers. Marnie Nixon, as we'll get to, was someone who was frequently used to dub actresses in musicals on film. Richard Rogers listened to it, said, "It's fine. I liked mine better. Go ahead and use it." And by the way, Chaplin had a background as being a music supervisor as well. I believe he was on West Side Story. Now, I briefly mentioned Julie Andrews earlier, so let's go ahead and talk about her now. Though other names were tossed around, including Doris Day,

• 36:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Grace Kelly, Anne Bancroft, and Audrey Hepburn. And Bancroft is a bit of a weird choice.

• 36:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Did she, I didn't know if she sang.

• 36:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I don't know if that mattered that much. It sounds like there was really only ever one top choice for the role of Maria von Trapp, and that was Julie Andrews. Julie Andrews was not a household name yet, and she was only 28 years old, but she'd already been around for a long time. Andrews was something of a child prodigy, performing both with and without her parents from a very young age. She made her West End debut in 1948 at only 13 years old and debuted on Broadway in The Boyfriend in 1954 at just 19.

• 36:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 36:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, in 1956, and this is why I said I'm not sure if it matters if they can sing, she originated the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady on Broadway, only to lose the role in the film to Audrey Hepburn.

• 37:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 37:04Lizzie Bassett?

  There was a rumor at the time that people didn't think Andrews was photogenic, and that's why she wasn't cast, which is, she's gorgeous. I don't understand that at all. And fun fact, Chris, they ended up dubbing almost all of Audrey Hepburn's singing with Marnie Nixon, who, as we just mentioned, is who tempt the vocals for I Have Confidence, who was also used to dub Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Deborah Care in The King and I. Even funner fact, Marnie Nixon appears in The Sound of Music as Sister Sophia. And the funnest fact, she was born in Altadena, California.

• 37:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 37:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Chris Winterbauer?

  You just one-upped yourself three times.

• 37:38Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 37:39Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm impressed.

• 37:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, back to Julie Andrews. After seeing her play Guinevere in Camelot, Disney cast her in Mary Poppins. Now, Mary Poppins was still in production when The Sound of Music was casting, and there's some debate as to who brought her on to the project. William Wyler said he saw her in My Fair Lady and was so impressed, he was considering her for the role. However, according to Lehman, it may have been that he was considering her instead for the Americanization of Emily, which of course she did eventually get, but Wyler did not end up directing. According to Julie herself, though, Bob Wise was invited to see some of her footage from Mary Poppins, and it was this that sealed the deal for him and Zanuck, and they wanted to sign her immediately. But just like everyone else in this episode, Julie Andrews really wasn't sure about The Sound of Music.

• 38:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Carmella made the point, I don't think this is true, but it was a funny joke in the first five minutes, and she said, is Maria von Trapp the first manic pixie dream girl?

• 38:31Lizzie Bassett?

  David said the same thing. I do think the answer is yes.

• 38:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 38:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, she had actually already played a version of Maria von Trapp in a parody of The Sound of Music as part of a special she'd taped with Carol Burnett. I want to play you two little clips from this, Chris. It is absolutely delightful.

• 38:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, great.

• 38:46Lizzie Bassett?

  They're called the Pratt Family Singers in this, and the first one is going to be them introducing themselves.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  I'm Mama. I'm Papa. I'm Pedro. I'm Franz. I'm Ludwig. I'm Johann. I'm Wolfgang. I'm Hans. I'm Rickard. I'm Rudolph. I'm Adolf. I'm Bert. I'm Gustav.

• 39:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm Gerhard.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  I'm Gustav. I'm Kurt. I'm Bernard. I'm Lilo. I'm Balder.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  I'm Fritz.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  I'm Paul. I'm Friedrich. I'm Cynthia.

• 39:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I have to wonder if the Lawrence Welk sketch with Kristen Wiig and I'm Denise honestly is ripping this off a little bit.

• 39:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Is based on this, yeah.

• 39:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Because this whole thing is, at the end there, you heard Carol Burnett just show up from the side saying, "I'm Cynthia."

• 39:33Chris Winterbauer?

  As the drunk child.

• 39:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. I want to show you one more section, which is even more reminiscent of Sound of Music and very, very clearly making fun of it. Day, night.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  That's what the bell says. Yum, yum. That's what we say when we're eating. Oh.

• 39:52Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, you get the idea. Love Carol Burnett. They're having a great time. They're very clearly ripping on the actual Von Trapp family and Sound of Music.

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• 40:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, in addition to being concerned that the role was, again, way too saccharine, she was also worried that this was her second nanny role. Because, of course, Mary Poppins is also a nanny. She was concerned she may have to fake an Austrian accent and that it would be a long time away from home. Now, the last one, I think, was true, but, of course, the Austrian accent was not. Bob Wise and Saul Chaplin convinced her they were taking a far less sentimental direction in the stage production. No Austrian accent required. I think they're doing sort of a mid-Atlantic accent across this movie. So she signed on to a two-picture deal. Both Bing Crosby and Yul Brynner were considered for the role of Captain Georg Von Trapp. I think Yul Brynner would have been interesting. But Bob Wise always wanted Christopher Plummer.

• 41:27Lizzie Bassett?

  He had seen him on stage and felt like his edge was what the character and the movie needed. But Plummer was mostly known as a theater actor at this point.

• 41:34Chris Winterbauer?

  How old was Plummer at this point? Do you know?

• 41:37Lizzie Bassett?

  He's not old at all. He's in his 30s.

• 41:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, wow. He looks 40s. He looks 10 to 15 years older than Julie Andrews.

• 41:44Lizzie Bassett?

  He's not. Yeah, they're almost the exact same age. They age him up a little bit in the movie with some makeup. And by the way, this was not the first time he'd been considered for this role. Speaking of the age gap, he was actually considered for the original stage production when he was only 26.

• 41:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 41:59Lizzie Bassett?

  But when he found out he'd be performing opposite Mary Martin, who was 50-ish at the time, he told the team he was meeting with, "I hate to say this, but don't you think our age differences are a little staggering?"

• 42:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Apparently, they were just seeing anybody at that point. So to your point, he was now 34, so still technically too young. But it didn't even matter because he read the script and he said, "No, thank you."

• 42:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 42:23Lizzie Bassett?

  So Wise went on to see Yul Brynner, Sean Connery.

• 42:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh.

• 42:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Give me that one.

• 42:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Would have been, would have been such a stinker.

• 42:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Stephen Boyd, Richard Burton also. How drunk is Captain Georg Von Trapp?

• 42:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Quite.

• 42:40Lizzie Bassett?

  David Niven, Peter Finch, Walter Matthau, Patrick O'Neil, and more. But he still wanted Christopher Plummer, so he flew out and managed to convince him in person. Then he even let Plummer work with Lehman to adjust the character of the captain. Plummer said, "Ernie Lehman was not just one of Hollywood's best screenwriters. He was a prince among men. He made me feel that all his valuable ideas were mine alone. Of course, it was impossible to turn Von Trapp into Hamlet, but Ernie had made remarkable strides, and the result was a far cry from the tepid original. At least now, the poor, soft-centered captain had some edge to him. Interestingly, they didn't seem to care much about what the actual Captain Von Trapp was like. Maria was a little pissed that nobody on the film production had asked her anything. With the musical, she'd said it was very out in the open, but the only

• 43:24Lizzie Bassett?

  thing she hadn't liked was that her husband was portrayed as a strict disciplinarian when she said, actually, he was very, very sweet to the kids. And, quote, "that he called his children with a boatman's whistle was really because of practical reasons." I get it. There were seven of them, Chris.

• 43:38Chris Winterbauer?

  And it was a big house. But, look, we need a dramatic arc. We need somewhere for him to go. If he just starts out warm and fuzzy, we don't really have a movie, Maria. Come on.

• 43:48Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true. Now, as you said, there was the concern that he wasn't old enough. So Wise slapped some old age makeup on him, dimmed the lights, and sent some pictures back to Daryl Zanuck.

• 43:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, he's definitely lit dark compared to Maria because he looks so tanned.

• 44:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. I know. Yeah, they're just putting him in the corner in some shadow and they're like, it's fine.

• 44:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. It's effective, though. I bought it. I thought he looked at least 10 years older than her.

• 44:12Lizzie Bassett?

  I always wondered about that because then he's, you know, he's not that old later on. So, but yeah, it's because he was 34. And by January of 1964, he was cast. Now, Charmian Carr, who wound up playing Liesl, wasn't even an actress and only did the audition because her mom, a former vaudevillean, signed her up for it. She also had zero time to prepare and thought the name Liesl was pronounced Lysol.

• 44:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I probably would have made the same mistake.

• 44:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it didn't matter. She got it. They had a really hard time filling this role. They saw tons of actresses, including Mia Farrow, Patti Duke, and Teri Garr. But according to Carr, the notes on the other actresses included, quote, "too hammy, too short, too tall, too old, too young, too too, can't act, nothing great but nice face, good looking but awful reading, too bad, heavy in the legs, big in fanny, not strong enough, not outstanding, not for us, a little too worldly, and pregnant." No, Wise was still hesitant when they came back to car worrying she might look too old, I would argue she does, and that her super blue eyes might look weird on camera. They do.

• 45:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Her eyes are strikingly blue.

• 45:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, she's beautiful.

• 45:17Chris Winterbauer?

  She's like, I am 16.

• 45:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Going on 32.

• 45:21Chris Winterbauer?

  22.

• 45:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Apparently Chaplin told her she temporarily had the part, but still had to pass a screen test. By the time she was cast, almost everyone else was well into rehearsals. I believe she was the last of the Von Trapp family to be cast, and she was almost the last person cast in the movie, but that honor actually goes to Daniel Truhi, who plays Rolf. He was the last person cast. By the way, those are the two oldest teenagers. I mean, I know that they did this all the time, but she and-

• 45:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Nazi youth Kiefer Sutherland?

• 45:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Yes, they're both clearly in their twenties at least.

• 45:53Chris Winterbauer?

  No, he's shaving between takes. That was more of a Grease style casting.

• 45:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, yes, indeed.

• 45:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And both actors are great, and it doesn't matter, but it is funny.

• 46:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Also beautiful dancers. He's a really beautiful dancer, which I did not appreciate.

• 46:06Chris Winterbauer?

  The choreography in that scene is really good, where they're dancing in the gazebo.

• 46:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I didn't look into him a ton. He must have been a dancer, because he was really, watching it again as an adult, I was like, my god, that Nazi can move.

• 46:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 46:17Lizzie Bassett?

  As soon as rehearsal began, they immediately asked Christopher Plummer to record the guide tracks with Julie Andrews. Now, if you don't know what that is, that means that they are recording the tracks that are going to be used in playback when they're on set, so they can, you know, sing along, know what they're singing to, because of course, they're not actually recording their live singing out in the meadows in a movie like this. But Christopher Plummer was pissed, because he felt he was not ready at all. He's singing opposite Julie Andrews, who is absolutely incredible, and they were like, oh, by the way, some of these recordings also might be used in the final film. And he's like, no, no, they're not. So his agent convinced him to do it, as long as he could rerecord before the film was locked, but more on that later. But when he got back to set, Richard Zanuck was there.

• 47:01Lizzie Bassett?

  He shook his hand and according to Plummer said, quote, "in soft spoken tones but tinged with an unmistakable hint of somber warning, congratulations, Chris, welcome back to The Sound of Music." Dun, dun, dun.

• 47:14Chris Winterbauer?

  What does that mean?

• 47:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I think saying we would have fired you.

• 47:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting.

• 47:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 47:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, we were willing to let you go, basically.

• 47:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Which makes sense. He's not a big name to be, you know, throwing his weight around like this.

• 47:27Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 47:27Lizzie Bassett?

  So principal photography started at the end of March 1964 at Fox in LA. By the end of April, they were on location in Salzburg. The shoot in Austria was supposed to last six weeks, but ultimately took 11. Because, Chris, you may have noticed how lush and green all of the exterior locations are in this film. Now, given the verdant greenery, what do you think might have been a challenge for them on set?

• 47:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Was rain a problem?

• 47:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Rain, that's right. Longtime friend of the pod.

• 47:56Chris Winterbauer?

  It looks spectacular. They make fantastic use of the dramatic mountains. Obviously, you can see whatever that peak is from the edge of their veranda, or I'm not going to call it a porch, it's very grand.

• 48:09Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not a porch.

• 48:09Chris Winterbauer?

  And the meadows, so I would imagine quite a bit of rain would be needed to grow all of that greenery.

• 48:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Julie Andrews said, quote, "Someone had evidently forgotten to mention to our production crew that Salzburg has Europe's seventh highest annual rainfall. The rains began in our first days there, and from then on, our budget and our schedule were totally governed by the weather. The crew had found cover sets to grab a few additional interior shots if needed, but those were quickly used up. At that point, we had no choice but to go to one of the exterior locations, which were sometimes miles away, and wait and wait for the weather to clear."

• 48:43Chris Winterbauer?

  So a cover set is a backup location that's indoor or will not be affected by the rain? So if on a given day when you're scheduled to shoot exterior or a scene in which rain will prohibit you from filming, you can retreat to your cover set, but like Lizzy said, you only have so many of those built into the schedule as relief valves.

• 49:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, you can't use them every day.

• 49:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly, because eventually you gotta shoot something outdoors.

• 49:08Lizzie Bassett?

  A lot of- The movie is outside.

• 49:09Chris Winterbauer?

  So, yes, they used all their backups in short order.

• 49:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Julie Andrews went on to say, "Many days went by when we only got a single shot, too, if we were lucky." Fun fact, though, it takes a lot of rain to actually register on camera, so some of the scenes in this are actually shot in the rain, though it doesn't look like it, including "I have confidence." She's confident and a little damp.

• 49:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, you gotta really backlight rain in order to get it to show up on camera. So if the sun is directly overhead, you don't really see it.

• 49:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I feel like you can see it a little bit if you re-watch that now. She just looks really sweaty, but she's not. It's just raining.

• 49:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, now, in like the wonderful high-resolution scan, by the way, this is streaming on Disney Plus, and I think the scan looks amazing.

• 49:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, it looks great. The colors are so beautiful.

• 49:51Chris Winterbauer?

  They must have shot this in like Panavision 70mm or something. It looks, the widescreen looks incredible. I'm sure it was a very technical process, but anyway, you can see a lot more in high-def than you could back in the day.

• 50:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, for the Alpine shots, there were no roads to get up there, so they literally had to hike up and put the cameras on carts pulled by oxen. I guess they also didn't believe in porta-potties because they were just pooping in the woods when nature called up on the mountains. I get it. You're not gonna drag a porta-potty up there with the ox. Now, the opening shot of Maria on the mountaintop was particularly difficult. As we know, there were no drones in the 60s, so this is, of course, captured via a helicopter. The speakers and crew were disguised and hiding in the trees, so you can't see them, and the helicopter was waiting over the side of the mountain from Julie Andrews. They would yell at her to start running and spinning, but she couldn't hear them.

• 50:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Just screaming.

• 50:45Lizzie Bassett?

  There's a helicopter. She can't hear.

• 50:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Notably loud.

• 50:49Lizzie Bassett?

  A poor cameraman was strapped to the door opening of the helicopter to capture the shot. The problem was that it had to get pretty close to Julie Andrews to get the shot that Bob Wise wanted. Watching this again, it's really close to her. Any guesses why this might have been tricky? Other than the possibility of decapitating your star.

• 51:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. The hills are alive with the blood of Julie Andrews' decapitated arterial spray. The wind

• 51:15Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 51:16Chris Winterbauer?

  is going to not only whip all of the Flowers around her, but her hair, and she's wearing a very loose skirt as she's running around as well.

• 51:23Lizzie Bassett?

  That is correct. Every time she did the spin, the downdraft from the helicopter would knock her on her ass. She got blown over on the side of the mountain.

• 51:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I would love to watch just the repeat cuts of her getting flipped over by the wind.

• 51:39Lizzie Bassett?

  She said, each time the helicopter encircled me, I was flattened again. I became more and more irritated. Couldn't they see what was happening? I tried to indicate for them to make a wider circle around me. I could see the cameraman, the pilot and our second unit director onboard, but all I got was a thumbs up and a signal to do it again. Finally, the shot was deemed acceptable and I was grateful to return to my hotel and take a long, hot bath.

• 52:03Chris Winterbauer?

  You know that they knew what she was saying, but Bob Wise was like, just keep giving her thumbs ups. Do not acknowledge, just keep saying she's doing great.

• 52:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Thumbs up, Julie. Looks great. Now, shooting the rest of this opening sequence also proved difficult, thanks to more rain. It was taking way more time than they had allotted, so much so that the farmer whose land they were on got pissed that they were disrupting his cow's milk production. You remember that perfect little brook that she skipped over? It is manmade, dug out by the crew and lined with plastic. So in the middle of the night, the angry dairy farmer showed up with a pitchfork, punctured the plastic and drained all the water.

• 52:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Get off my land. Now, as we know, working with kids can be difficult, even when they're sweet and well behaved, which apparently these kids were. Debbie Turner, who played Marta, started losing baby teeth during the shoot and they had a dentist on call to show up and glue new little teeth into her mouth.

• 52:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, no. I hope the tooth fairy was giving her a lot of money for those teeth.

• 53:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Poor Debbie.

• 53:05Chris Winterbauer?

  The kids are really wonderful, except if you watch the oldest boy in the background watching Julie Andrews. He has just this one expression that he like defaults. It's, I mean, he's very sweet. It works. But especially Gretel, the youngest, is the cutest. She's such a little cheerio.

• 53:22Lizzie Bassett?

  She is so cute. We're gonna get to her in a minute. Absolutely adorable. Well, you mentioned the oldest boy. Nicholas Hammond, who plays Friedrich, was in the midst of a growth spurt and was growing so quickly, they were actually worried he would surpass Julie Andrews and possibly Christopher Plummer.

• 53:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Are they just like adding like soul inserts to the adult actors?

• 53:41Lizzie Bassett?

  They did. They had to put them in Charmian Cara's shoes.

• 53:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Really?

• 53:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Because he was so much taller than she was by the time they were shooting.

• 53:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 53:47Lizzie Bassett?

  They actually had to get pretty crafty with certain shots to hide how tall he was.

• 53:51Chris Winterbauer?

  That makes sense because I'm guessing they had cast based on this idea that the kids would get, you know, evenly shorter when they're in line, but that isn't quite the case for the first few kids.

• 53:59Lizzie Bassett?

  No, because they're all growing at different rates.

• 54:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 54:02Lizzie Bassett?

  But Chris, by far the most problematic scene to shoot was the scene where they capsize in the boat. Just before they shot the first take, the assistant director waded over to Julie Andrews and whispered, quote, "The little one can't swim," and then scuttled back off to shore, referring to, of course, five-year-old Kim Caruth, who played Gretel, who, as you said, is just the cutest. It's not good.

• 54:28Chris Winterbauer?

  It's not the way you should run your set. That is not the way that should be communicated. That should not be her responsibility. That's terrifying. And even though it's probably only a few feet of water, as any pediatrician can tell you, it takes a few inches of water for a child to potentially drown.

• 54:43Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 54:43Chris Winterbauer?

  So that's very terrifying.

• 54:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Julie Andrews responded with, "What?" understandably, to which the A.D. said, "We'd be most grateful if you could get to her as quickly as possible, once you're in the water."

• 54:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And this is where you should have divers, for example, would be standard moving forward.

• 54:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe don't dump a five-year-old who can't swim into the lake. Just a thought. Anyway, he scoots on off to shore and they call action. The first take actually went okay. Julie Andrews managed to get to her. It was all right. The second take did not. Instead of going forward over the front of the boat when the crew members hiding underwater shook the vessel, Julie went over the back, too far for her to grab Kim right away. She saw poor tiny Kim sputtering and struggling in the water and said she had never swum so fast in her life, but it wasn't fast enough. Kim was going under. Fortunately, Alan Callow, the son of the A.D., who also plays a Nazi soldier in the film, dove straight into the lake and pulled her out. But of course, Chris, they needed just

• 55:40Lizzie Bassett?

  one more take. This time Heather Menses, who played Louisa, was supposed to grab Kim. She did, but not before Kim swallowed even more water and then whirled around and barfed on Heather's shoulder.

• 55:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Jesus.

• 55:52Lizzie Bassett?

  They decided that was enough. Poor, poor Kim. That's terrible.

• 55:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's not the worst thing, you know, unfortunately, that's ever come up on this podcast, but-

• 56:01Lizzie Bassett?

  It's pretty bad.

• 56:03Chris Winterbauer?

  And again, it shows why you do need oversight on film productions from people whose job is not the film, but instead the protection of those involved.

• 56:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 56:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I was gonna say, based on the way you described it, it sounds like the second take is the take that goes in the movie.

• 56:20Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it is.

• 56:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Because I noticed that Julie Andrews goes over the back of the boat, and I wondered if that was intentional.

• 56:26Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it was an accident.

• 56:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting.

• 56:27Lizzie Bassett?

  So they actually smashed the second and third takes together, I think, are the ones that they ended up using.

• 56:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Got it.

• 56:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Now Julie Andrews was just as sweet and wonderful to all the children as you would hope she would be, all while going through a tough time personally. She had her own 17-month-old daughter to take care of, and when she wasn't able to spend time with her, she was feeling very sad. Work had been pulling her apart from her then-husband, particularly all the travel. She was becoming more based in L.A. and on location, and he in New York. They would go on to divorce in 1968. She sounds like the absolute best, and it seems like she at least could tell that the movie was going to be a big deal, and she was really putting her heart into it. Apparently, at one point during shooting, she actually turned to Christopher Plummer and whispered, "Do you think we might be famous one day?" Which is very sweet, especially since towards the end of the production of

• 57:15Lizzie Bassett?

  this, she actually would be nominated for an Oscar for Mary Poppins, which of course she would eventually win.

• 57:20Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very cute.

• 57:21Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very sweet.

• 57:23Chris Winterbauer?

  The movie really rests upon their chemistry, in particular, the chemistry when they're not getting along.

• 57:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Which I would argue is way better than when they are getting along.

• 57:32Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think the chemistry works very well in the final act between the two of them.

• 57:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 57:38Chris Winterbauer?

  It feels very chaste and I don't fully believe the sparks. So I still loved the movie.

• 57:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Me too.

• 57:43Chris Winterbauer?

  But it works extremely well when they're at odds in the beginning of the film.

• 57:47Lizzie Bassett?

  I think they were both more comfortable with those performances. And speaking of Christopher Plummer, I love him, you love him, he's the hottest gay org this side of the Alps, but he was quite a pain in the ass on set, which even he will admit. His nickname for the film was S and M, and he did indeed treat it like torture, though not the pleasurable kind. He felt that the film was beneath him and according to Plummer himself, quote, "The moment we arrived in Austria to shoot the exteriors, I was determined to present myself as a victim of circumstance, that I was doing the picture under duress, that it had been forced upon me and that I certainly deserved better. My behavior was unconscionable."

• 58:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 58:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Apparently Andrews didn't really see too much of him outside of the shoots because as soon as they'd wrap, he would just head on over to the pub where according to Julie Andrews, quote, "He apparently spent his evenings at the bar getting quite smashed and playing Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky until the wee hours." Turns out he was actually a trained concert pianist and was actually really good. So he'd get super hammered and play piano.

• 58:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, in a way, his behavior though does, I mean, I'm not excusing it. That sounds miserable for everyone else involved, but it at least had the externality of he is playing a meta version of Von Trapp avoiding his children and the people that love him in the film.

• 59:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't think he was that bad by what went wrong standards from what we've seen.

• 59:06Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, no.

• 59:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Not that bad at all.

• 59:07Chris Winterbauer?

  And it sounds like he has the self-awareness to have eventually, obviously, given the mea culpa.

• 59:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Now, he was frequently extremely hungover when he'd show up on set the next day. One day with a particularly bad hangover, he woke up and didn't see a call sheet outside his door. He figured that the crew had just left him behind and in a rage, he went wandering around all of Salzburg until he found them. Then he walked into the shot, pitched a hissy fit, screamed at Bob Wise, to the point where one of the A.D.s had to calmly pull him aside and explain that this was not a personal slight. He just wasn't in any of the shots that they needed to capture that day. So embarrassing.

• 59:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Your character is with the Baroness in Fieno right now.

• 59:48Lizzie Bassett?

  That's literally what I had to tell him.

• 59:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he's like, I skipped those pages when I didn't see my name.

• 59:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Probably right, but I mean, listen, he was a theater actor at this point. He did not have a lot of experience on film. He didn't really understand the ins and outs of making a movie, especially one at this scale. He was also going through a tough time personally himself. His own marriage would end in 1970. But despite all of his drunken, hungover, screaming, running around Salzburg antics, he said, quote, "The one person who seemed to understand my motives completely and acted as if there was nothing untoward was Julie, the busiest of us all. I was so grateful to her for that, but I never told her. It was as if she'd been hired not just to act, sing, and carry the entire film, but to keep everyone's spirits up as well. She did. She held us together and made us a team." But Julie Andrews, the classiest actual dame around, credits Plummer with pushing them

• 1:00:39Lizzie Bassett?

  all to keep some edge and not get too sappy. She described him as disciplined and knowledgeable while also being gentle and constructive in terms of criticism around their acting.

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• 1:01:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Seems like despite everything, these two really did like each other.

• 1:01:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe it.

• 1:01:35Lizzie Bassett?

  You might be wondering why that scene in the gazebo when they first fall in love is shot completely in the dark, Chris.

• 1:01:41Chris Winterbauer?

  There were only two moments, because I think the lighting in this movie is

• 1:01:45Lizzie Bassett?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:01:45Chris Winterbauer?

  incredible. And they do remarkable work with very high contrast, high key lighting, which can feel very over the top and dramatic, but it feels very natural to me. The gazebo scene, and then I was going to mention when the mother superior is singing to her right before she goes back to the abbey.

• 1:01:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep, climb every mountain.

• 1:02:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, she's just in dark. I didn't, it must have been a creative choice, but I couldn't see her face the whole time.

• 1:02:06Lizzie Bassett?

  So that one was, I believe, a creative choice. This one, not so much. So in the gazebo, they are supposed to be nose to nose, almost touching, as they are in the film, and they could not keep their shit together. They kept laughing so hard. And then two of the big lamps they were using started to make what Andrews described as, quote, "loud raspberry-like sounds at the most intimate moments in the scene." Or as Plummer says, "a sound as if someone was prodigiously and continuously farting."

• 1:02:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, maybe like the Fresnel on the lamp vibrating against the metal enclosure or whatever.

• 1:02:39Lizzie Bassett?

  That would make sense. So they were just absolutely falling apart, so much so that Plummer says Andrews actually took a Valium to try and chill out, but it didn't work. So Bob Wise just said, "Fuck it, we'll shoot this in the dark."

• 1:02:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, silhouette. It's very pretty.

• 1:02:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Plummer also accidentally gained too much weight during a few weeks off, and they had to contour the hell out of him so he wouldn't look like Orson Welles. I think there is a point at which he is straight up strapped into a girdle.

• 1:03:04Chris Winterbauer?

  He looks a little stuffed, Devina Schittsel, in a few of these scenes in the movie. No, we don't want to body shame anybody. Christopher Plummer looks amazing at all weights, but there's a continuity.

• 1:03:14Lizzie Bassett?

  There is a change. There is a shift.

• 1:03:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Maybe problem as a result.

• 1:03:17Lizzie Bassett?

  That perhaps Gayorg Von Trapp spent a little too much time in the pubs.

• 1:03:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22Lizzie Bassett?

  And fun fact, the real Maria Von Trapp does appear in the film. She's in the background behind Julie Andrews when she's skipping through that arch at the beginning on her way to the Von Trapps. Apparently, Maria decided movies were not for her after this experience because of how long it took to get one shot. She did not enjoy it.

• 1:03:39Chris Winterbauer?

  When I started in film, I remember there were a lot of people that I went to film school with, or when I P A'd for the first time, who they would P A for like a day, and then they'd realize it was like 12 seconds of footage that had been captured, and they'd say, "Nope, I'm out. I'm good."

• 1:03:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Gotta go.

• 1:03:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, just not for me.

• 1:03:53Lizzie Bassett?

  That was Maria. Now, Chris, as we said, this was shooting on location in Salzburg, Austria in 1964, a mere 26 years after, as you mentioned, the Anschluss, or the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany, had actually happened. And of course, the Anschluss is depicted in the second half of the film. So when the time came to film the scene where a bunch of Nazis marched through the town square, the production team informed the town fathers that they would need to hang swastikas in the square. And the town fathers were like, no, no, no, absolutely not. They said the people of Salzburg were not sympathizers. We're not going to let you do that. So the production crew is like, mm-kay, fine. We'll just use the actual newsreels. And they're like, wait a minute now, hold on, hold on. Roll that back.

• 1:04:35Lizzie Bassett?

  You guys can go ahead and actually film in here. Now, I wondered about this. I was like, hmm, what's in the actual newsreels? I watched some of them and I think they would have been a whole lot more damning than what you see in the movie. The unfortunate reality is that many Austrians did not oppose the Anschluss when it really happened. I think what they have in the movie is very effective. It's very quiet. You'll notice that there are no crowds cheering, which that was the stipulation from the town fathers was you can do it. You can show them marching in. Don't show anybody cheering for them, even though I will tell you, the newsreels did. Now, one of the big challenges in editing the film was achieving continuity and a seamless look because it had been shot out of order, obviously.

• 1:05:20Lizzie Bassett?

  And in so many different locations, a lot of the post-production was also spent looping and dubbing dialogue because of the rain and outdoor noises from shooting in Salzburg. I think they probably had to dub almost all of this movie from the exterior scenes.

• 1:05:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:33Lizzie Bassett?

  But as Charmian Carr points out, that dubbing did not include the kids singing voices. I don't know if you'd ever heard this, there were always sort of rumors that the voices were dubbed for the soundtrack. That's not true. All of the kids are singing in the movie. The only thing is I think they added three or four additional kids to give the group body.

• 1:05:52Chris Winterbauer?

  The choral effect, right? You would need just a few more voices, but it's funny. The voices seem to match up.

• 1:05:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Chris Winterbauer?

  There's one voice in this movie that I wondered about, and I can tell you who I think it is. Something you've already told me has made me wonder more, which is I've wondered about Christopher Plummer.

• 1:06:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:06:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Because I didn't know if he was a singer or not, but everybody else I assumed was.

• 1:06:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Plummer is dubbed.

• 1:06:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, interesting.

• 1:06:16Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not that he can't sing. I think he can.

• 1:06:18Chris Winterbauer?

  No, he was a concert pianist, which you mentioned, but whoever dubbed him, and by the way, also, a really good match for Plummer.

• 1:06:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Really good.

• 1:06:26Chris Winterbauer?

  It didn't bump me at all. I only wondered it because I hadn't seen Plummer sing in any other context, but an amazing voice.

• 1:06:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Ultimately, he and Wise agreed that especially because he had to sing opposite Julie Andrews, his voice was not quite good enough for the movie. I do wonder about this a little bit, though, because if you look at the soundtrack, there's like maybe one track where he is listed as a singer, and the other ones, he is dubbed over by a man named Bill Lee, who, as you said, has an absolutely beautiful voice. Though I believe, actually, you can go on YouTube and hear Christopher Plummer's original vocals on Edelweiss. It's not bad at all. Do you want to hear it, Chris?

• 1:07:02Chris Winterbauer?

  If you have it, let's listen.

• 1:07:14Chris Winterbauer?

  He has a very nice voice, and I actually think by modern standards, so for example, if you think of Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born, this feels on that level, if not even maybe a little better than, and I thought Bradley Cooper did a great job, but I do think when you're going up against somebody like Julie Andrews.

• 1:07:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Chris Winterbauer?

  You, and even those children, there's a purity in tone and a confidence in delivery, and that's actually the bigger thing I noticed. It's that even though he's very good, he doesn't have that singer's confidence I didn't feel when I was listening to it.

• 1:07:44Lizzie Bassett?

  He can sing. I don't think he would consider himself a singer.

• 1:07:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 1:07:48Lizzie Bassett?

  But yeah, and also, like, there's a certain theatricality to the singing of the kids and Julie Andrews that I think you need to pull this off, and he has a much more natural, albeit, I think, very beautiful singing voice. Now, this premiered, as we said, March 2nd. That was the New York premiere in 1965, and it released wide April 1st, 1965. And again, Chris, reviews were quite mixed, with the New York Times coming down particularly hard on Christopher Plummer.

• 1:08:15Chris Winterbauer?

  The damn New York Times.

• 1:08:17Lizzie Bassett?

  The goddamn New York Times. Getting it wrong every time. But you know what? It didn't matter, because the audiences absolutely loved it. The movie grossed roughly $286 million on a budget of about $8 million, or 20 million after marketing. It became known as The Sound of Money, because of how much money it had made.

• 1:08:38Chris Winterbauer?

  The sound of cha-ching. 1965, 286 million.

• 1:08:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:44Chris Winterbauer?

  That is worth 2.9 billion dollars.

• 1:08:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:08:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Today's money.

• 1:08:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:08:52Chris Winterbauer?

  That's crazy.

• 1:08:53Lizzie Bassett?

  That's amazing. The initial release actually lasted a record-breaking four years, too. It was so popular.

• 1:08:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Crazy.

• 1:09:00Lizzie Bassett?

  It was nominated for 10 Oscars and it won five: Best Picture and Director for Robert Wise, Best Sound for James Corcoran and Fred Hines, Best Film Editing for William Reynolds, Best Music Scoring of Music Adaptation or Treatment by Erwin Costel. It absolutely crushed, and of course, it has become a classic for many, many years.

• 1:09:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, adjusted for inflation, it's number six all time.

• 1:09:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. What's number one?

• 1:09:26Chris Winterbauer?

  It's Gone with the Wind.

• 1:09:27Lizzie Bassett?

  We're never gonna beat that.

• 1:09:28Chris Winterbauer?

  It will always be Gone with the Wind. Yeah. It's Gone with the Wind, Avatar, Titanic, Star Wars, the 1977 A New Hope, Avengers: Endgame, and The Sound of Music, E.T., The Extraterrestrial, The Ten Commandments, Doctor Zhivago, and then Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

• 1:09:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting. Okay.

• 1:09:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Lizzie Bassett?

  I think the only one on there I've never seen all the way through is Doctor Zhivago, so I should get on that. So that wraps up our coverage of The Sound of Music, Chris.

• 1:09:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Thank you so much, and thank you to our audience for voting for this movie.

• 1:09:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Because it's not a movie I probably would have sought out, although, you know, with Nora, with my daughter, I definitely would throw this on at some point. She's a little too young. We're still doing baby steps into fascism with her, but...

• 1:10:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Better pick that up, Chris. Make sure she's with the times.

• 1:10:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. I always fear that, I always like to think I would be staunchly a man of my integrity, like Captain Von Trapp, and fear I would be loosey-goosey with my morals, like Max, Richard Hayden's character. But anyway, I will give my what went right.

• 1:10:32Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm gonna give it to Ernie Lehman.

• 1:10:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 1:10:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm gonna give it to the screenwriter. We often neglect the screenwriter as they are often neglected on these movies. But it sounds like he really, in a weird way, was the glue more so than in a lot of other films with the way that, for example, Plummer talks about how he kind of helped his character out. And obviously, he worked tirelessly to sand off some of the less attractive edges of the, or lack of edges off of the stage play. I think he did a wonderful job adapting this. I think the script is very smart.

• 1:11:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And so my what went right goes to Ernie Lehman.

• 1:11:03Lizzie Bassett?

  And also a testament to him that so many people saw the play and thought that it was just really not gonna work.

• 1:11:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Way too ooey gooey, way too for kids. And he managed to turn it into something that has lasted decades and will continue to last for decades to come and enjoyable for adults and children, I think.

• 1:11:20Chris Winterbauer?

  It is still those things.

• 1:11:21Lizzie Bassett?

  It is.

• 1:11:22Chris Winterbauer?

  But it is also more.

• 1:11:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:11:23Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think that's a testament to its success.

• 1:11:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Well, I have to give my what went right to Dame Julie Andrews because I truly don't think this movie works without her. She is so genuine and she works both in the scenes with the kids where she's being very sweet. She's being very fun. She works in the abbey as this, you know, pain in the butt nun running around, whistling. She's funny. She's got so much physical comedy. But she also really works in the scenes opposite Christopher Plummer where they're sort of angry at each other. I think one of the best scenes in the movie is when the boat capsizes and he's kind of chewing her out for, you know, taking his kids out to play. And she kind of goes on a laundry list of like, these are all the things you're doing wrong

• 1:12:10Lizzie Bassett?

  and you need to step your game up and actually take care of your kids. And that's a really hard scene to pull it off. She does it beautifully. I think she's a fantastic actress. Obviously, she has one of the best voices ever. She's just so much fun to watch and it was so nice to learn about this and hear that she was exactly as wonderful in person as she was on screen. So I have to give it to Julie Andrews. Please keep those helicopters away from her. We need to make sure she stays intact. But I really enjoyed this.

• 1:12:40Chris Winterbauer?

  To that point, Lizzy, what I was gonna say is I completely agree with you. And I think what you're referencing, there's a steeliness.

• 1:12:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:12:46Chris Winterbauer?

  To her. She does not seem like she'll wilt despite being fun. And her relentless positivity does not come across as naive.

• 1:12:53Lizzie Bassett?

  No, nor does it come across as annoying, which is really hard to pull off.

• 1:12:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I would also just briefly like to shout out, we didn't talk about her at all, but Eleanor Parker, who plays the Baroness.

• 1:13:05Lizzie Bassett?

  The Baroness is great.

• 1:13:06Chris Winterbauer?

  She was a very great actress. So I came across her a little bit more when I was researching Ben Hur. She was in The Detective Story, which William Wyler directed, and she's wonderful in it. I think she had an Oscar nomination. And she's aged, she was older, I think, than Plummer in this movie. And she's really good. And she's really good in that scene where he breaks up with her and then she breaks up with him.

• 1:13:25Lizzie Bassett?

  She's so good.

• 1:13:26Chris Winterbauer?

  She's really, really, really wonderful. And I think that would be an easy character to turn into a cartoonish caricature. That's kind of what I worried she would be in that first scene where she's talking to Max.

• 1:13:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Sort of a wicked stepmother.

• 1:13:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. But they don't do that. They let her be a person and she does it very, very well.

• 1:13:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. She ends up being very gracious and just extremely glamorous all the way through.

• 1:13:46Chris Winterbauer?

  A good contrast between her and Julie Andrews.

• 1:13:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:13:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Throughout the film.

• 1:13:49Lizzie Bassett?

  All right.

• 1:13:50Chris Winterbauer?

  All right.

• 1:13:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, what do we have coming up next, Chris?

• 1:13:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Next week, we are finally going around the world to go back in time to find the laws of physics with 1978's Superman, directed by Richard Donner, starring Christopher Reeve. This movie, not only is it four movies in one, as we'll discuss, but this production went through nearly every hellish obstacle that we've discussed on this podcast. I'm so excited to talk about it with you guys. So that is 1978's Superman, just the first one, not Superman 2. Watch it. We are so excited to talk to you guys about it.

• 1:14:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, would you like to let the audience know how they can support us?

• 1:14:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I'd love to, Lizzie. David, you want to play me in?

• 1:14:40Chris Winterbauer?

  If you are enjoying this podcast and you'd like to help us out, there are four easy ways to help this show. Rate, subscribe, review, or join our Patreon.

• 1:14:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Patreon, you don't have to pay, you can join for free. Join for free. Join for free, but if you join our full stop tier, you'll get a little shout out like this.

• 1:15:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Made the knife in L'Angeles, Kay Habana half gray hound. Tom, Kristen, Zach, Everton. Scary Carrie, stick around. Lana, so much I need. Brooke, Jen, Maestro, Marino. And the Provost family, where the Os all sound like O. C, Grace B, and Shined Old Man. D, Apomans David's mom. A, Adrienne, Pankoria. L, Stater, Kate, Arrington.

• 1:16:01Chris Winterbauer?

  J, J, Rapido, so fast. Jason, Frankel, you're my boy. Blaze, Ambrose, you're never last. Hello Slipknot's nine and James McAvoy. Cameron Smith, film it yourself. Galen MXodia. Brittany Morris and Chris Neil. Scott, girl, when Suzanne Johnson. Mike McGrath, Richard Sanchez. Chris Saka and Chris Elner. Sadie, that's all that there is. Ramon Villanueva Jr.

• 1:16:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Steve, my dad, Winterbauer. Rosemary, she's my in-law. Lydia House, Kathleen Olson. Also Jewish, Risa Mont. Ellen Singleton and Don. Shy, well, Brian Donahue.

• 1:17:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, Jerome Wilkins' son. Adam Moffat, we did not forget you. Dale and Darren Conkling and David Frisco Lanting. Grace Potter, apologies for the grinning way I sing. Jake, you know you're killing it, as is Matthew Jacobson. Brace yourselves, because this is it. We are grateful, full stop. This song is done. Thank you again to everybody that's supported this podcast, be it through Patreon, through spreading the word, or just through listening.

• 1:17:53Chris Winterbauer?

  We really appreciate it, and we couldn't do it without you. We're so excited to talk all things Superman next week. Until then...

• 1:18:04Speaker 05

  What we're for is a sad boom podcast, presented by Chris W. and Lizzie Bassett.

• 1:18:18Speaker 05

  Edits and music took David many hours.

• 1:18:22Speaker 04

  So did research by Jesse Winterbauer.

• 1:18:34Speaker 04

  Karen Krupso helped make the edits just right.

• 1:18:45Speaker 05

  So long, farewell. Our feet are saying goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.