Sondheim, Rob Reiner, and the movie musical that never was
Plus, a festive crossword, an invitation, and more...
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Today, an essay on Sondheim’s would-be film collaboration with Rob Reiner, Singing Out Loud; a very festive crossword; and more from our conversation with Bianca Tadini. Also,
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Sondheim, Reiner, and the movie musical that never was
In 1992, Stephen Sondheim supplied the songs for a movie musical by the name of Singing Out Loud. The screenplay was written by William Goldman, younger brother of Follies writer James, and Academy Award winner for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men.
The movie was never produced, but it was to be directed by Rob Reiner.
In the wake of last Sunday’s unspeakable tragedy, let’s take a moment to explore and celebrate the Sondheim-Goldman-Reiner movie that might have been.
Singing Out Loud was, in Sondheim’s own words, “a musical movie about a movie musical that’s in trouble.” That neat description points to what makes it such a tantalising what-if. This wasn’t a stage show Hollywood tried to “open up.” It was conceived as cinema from the start: written for the camera, for cutting, for montage, for the uniquely filmic sleight-of-hand which allows for changes in scale, in perspective, in even the laws of physics.
Sondheim had wanted, as he put it, to write songs “for the camera”—to let film and music do what they can best do when they’re allowed to cooperate rather than compete.
The timing matters. In 1990, Dick Tracy had proved that Sondheim could flourish in a movie’s bloodstream: he wrote five songs for Warren Beatty’s film, including “Sooner or Later,” which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. That success helped open a door to something rarer than a film adaptation: a true, original screen musical. Goldman, already Reiner’s friend and collaborator, brought Sondheim in.
Sondheim’s summary of the set-up is brisk and vivid. The year is 1992. Charlie Lake is a superstar—actress, producer, conglomerate—attempting her first movie musical, starring herself. The shoot is underway; the film is not working; the studio wants blood. Charlie calls in Griffith Bean, a famous director and her ex-lover, to replace the writer-director and salvage the wreck. Griffith, in turn, wants to replace the score. He hires Jed Lazenby, a hot young pop singer-songwriter, to write something Paul Simon-adjacent, contemporary, saleable. Jed falls for Charlie; Charlie and Griffith fall back into each other; the movie inside the movie begins to buckle under the weight of its own competing desires.
Without hearing a note, we understand the argument. Singing Out Loud is about the perennial embarrassment of movie musicals: the way singing on screen can feel, in Sondheim’s words, “faintly ridiculous” unless it’s motivated as performance (nightclub, concert, rehearsal) or pushed safely into voiceover and inner monologue. Rather than politely avoiding that problem, this film was built to stare it down.