Star! (film)

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Star!

Directed by	Robert Wise
Produced by	Saul Chaplin
Written by	William Fairchild
Starring	Julie Andrews Richard Crenna Daniel Massey
Music by	Lennie Hayton Jay Thompson
Cinematography	Ernest Laszlo
Editing by	William Reynolds
Distributed by	Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Release date(s)	1968
Running time	176 min.
IMDb profile

Star! is a 1968 musical film starring Julie Andrews as Gertrude Lawrence, an actress and musical performer, and Richard Crenna. It was directed by Robert Wise. The film was loosely based on Gertrude Lawrence's life. The film ran 176 minutes long.

[edit] Awards & Nominations

Star! was nominated for 7 Academy Awards including:

Best Actor in a Supporting Role- Daniel Massey
Best Art Direction-Set Decoration
Best Cinematography
Best Costume Design, Color
Best Music, Original Song for the song "Star!"
Best Music, Score of a Musical Picture (Original or Adaptation)
Best Sound

Star! also won 1 Golden Globe:

Best Supporting Actor- Daniel Massey.

It was also nominated for an additional 3 including:

Best Motion Picture Actress, Musical or Comedy- Julie Andrews
Best Original Song for the song "Star!"
Most Promising Newcomer - Male- Daniel Massey

[edit] Trivia

Julie Andrews' wardrobe (designed by Donald Brooks) set a record for the largest number of costume changes for an actress in one film.

After this musical flopped at the box office, Fox decided to substantially cut and re-market the film. They did some primitive market research, and tested audience response to three titles: "Music For The Lady, Star!" and "Those Were The Happy Days". The latter got the best response, but (possibly to avoid confusion with a couple songs about happy days) the final title was "Those Were The Happy Times". Robert Wise didn't believe revamping the film would work but he didn't interfere. He declined to be involved in the re-cutting and asked that his credit "A Robert Wise Film" be removed. William Reynolds, the film's original editor, was hired to cut down the film based on instructions from Richard Zanuck. The cuts were a bad idea but they were very adeptly done. They hired the same artist who did the poster for "The Sound Of Music" and every attempt was made to make audiences think this 120 minute version was a similar film. The original title was tucked into a corner of all the ads, so audiences were not fooled and this desperate effort only convinced people who hadn't seen the original that it really was a bad film. By the time it debuted on American television, the original title was restored, but the picture was still cut. At almost the same time, it debuted on TV in England, but in the full original version, missing only the overture and entr'acte.

Apart from Richard Aldrich, a certain amount of dramatic license was taken with the men in Lawrence's life. In the movie, her first stage manager husband is called Jack Roper and is shown as not much older than she. In real life, his name was Frank Gordon-Howley and he was twenty years her senior. Her upper-class, Guardsman boyfriend was not called Sir Tony Spencer, but Captain Philip Astley; he later married Madeleine Carroll. And the Wall Street banker she met while on Broadway was named Bert Taylor, not Ben Mitchell as depicted here.

Ballard Berkeley is credited by several sources as having been in the movie, but does not actually appear.

This film grew out of a massive attempt by Twentieth Century-Fox to duplicate its earlier success with "The Sound of Music" by producing three expensive, large-scale musicals over a period of three years, "Doctor Dolittle" and "Hello, Dolly!" being the others. Unfortunately, tastes in popular entertainment were beginning to change and all three films' box-office performance reflected this. All were released amidst massive pre-release publicity and all lost equally massive amounts of money for the studio. The result was that several top studio executives lost their jobs, and the studio itself went into such dire financial straits that it only produced one picture for the entire calendar year of 1970.^{[citation needed]} In truth, it would never recoup its losses until a highly successful theatrical reissue of "The Sound of Music" in early 1973.