Hollywood took notice of the production’s success and looked to capitalize with a movie version of the musical. The stage musical opened in the fall of 1957 and enjoyed a successful run of almost two years on Broadway.
Laurents worked on several drafts of the book before centering the adaptation around New York’s Upper West Side neighborhood and the turf war between the Jets, a white gang, and the Sharks, from Puerto Rico. The project was shelved for five years, then revived yet again in 1955. Over dinner one night, Laurents and Bernstein were discussing the major coverage by the press of juvenile delinquent gang turf wars, a recent phenomenon in big cities. Robbins originally imagined the modern version revolving around the conflict between Irish Catholic and Jewish families living on New York’s Lower East Side. In 1947, famed choreographer Jerome Robbins approached composer Leonard Bernstein and playwright Arthur Laurents about making a musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Throughout the next two decades, directors such as Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier filmed their own variations on Shakespeare’s classic stories.Īt the same time as cinema was embracing the Bard, Broadway was also looking to him for inspiration. The next one after that wasn’t released until 1944. The first straight adaptation of one of the Bard’s plays was As You Like It in 1937. As sound was introduced in movies, it took several years for cinema to catch up to Shakespeare’s eloquent dialogue. In 1899, a very simple photographic record of a stage production of King John was produced. The first Shakespeare adaptation in film came very early in cinema history. Hundreds of years after his death, the Bard continues to influence modern storytellers around the world. In total, the Guinness Book of World Records lists him as the most filmed author ever in any language. Unsurprisingly, a number of screenwriters, directors, and studios looked to one of the greatest playwrights of all time: William Shakespeare.
From comedy to tragedy, theatre offered a wide range of incredible stories for filmmakers to choose from. Since the beginning, cinema has looked to the stage as a source of inspiration for new material. Sit back, grab some snacks, and expand your film knowledge with old Hollywood cinema. Each week focuses on a different film considered to be essential to the cinema’s golden age. Welcome to a weekly classic movies column here on.