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[0:00] David Armstrong: Hello, everybody. This is David Armstrong here with a very special YouTube edition of Broadway Nation.

[0:06] David Armstrong: We haven't done a lot of this, but I'm excited to do it today, and I'm thrilled, actually, to have as my guest, first of all, the editor of the Oxford Guides to Film Musicals, as well as the authors of each of the first three books in this new series.

[0:22] David Armstrong: I really enjoyed reading these books back-to-back to have this opportunity to just read one after another within a few days, actually, especially because they cross-reference and relate to each other in so many aspects and instances, which is why I thought the best way to talk about them would be to have a panel discussion like we're going to have today. And I thought that would be the most interesting way to explore them.

[0:43] David Armstrong: And I'm so happy that despite the challenges of several different time zones, we were able to gather the entire team together today. So now I'm going to introduce them and bring them onto the stage one by one.

[1:00] David Armstrong: First, let me introduce to you Dominic Broomfield McHugh, who is professor of musicology at the University of Sheffield in the UK. He's published widely on Broadway and Hollywood musicals, including seven previous books, and has collaborated with many of the world's leading arts organizations, ranging from the Sydney Opera House to the Library of Congress.

[1:23] David Armstrong: Longtime Broadway Nation listeners will remember him from episodes 51 and 52, where we discussed his really outstanding book, The Big Parade, Meredith Wilson's musicals from The Music Man to 1491. His latest book is The Oxford Handbook of the Disney Musical, and you can be certain that we're going to have him back on Broadway Nation very soon to talk about that. Please welcome Dominic Broomfield McHugh. Hi, Dom.

[1:50] Dominic Broomfield McHugh: Hi, how are you?

[1:52] David Armstrong: Good. Thanks for joining us today. I'm so excited that you have put this together. And before I ask you some specific questions about the series, let's bring the other authors onto the stage as well.

[2:05] David Armstrong: The author of the first book in the series, Love Me Tonight, is the movie that it's focused on, is another returning champion to Broadway Nation. Author Jeffrey Block is distinguished professor emeritus of music history and humanities at the University of Puget Sound. He's the series editor of Oxford's Broadway Legacies and has published widely on American musical theater and film.

[2:30] David Armstrong: His previous books include Enchanted Evenings, the Broadway musical from Showboat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, The Richard Rodgers Reader, and if you did not hear them, I encourage you to listen to episodes 118, 119, and 120 of Broadway Nation, where Jeffrey and I discuss his book, A Fine Romance, Adapting Broadway to Hollywood in the Studio System Era. Please welcome Jeffrey Block. Hey, Jeffrey.

[2:56] Jeffrey Block: How are you doing? Nice to see you again.

[2:58] David Armstrong: Good to see you. Absolutely. Yes, a bold applause for each of you. The author of the second book in the series, which focuses on Singing in the Rain, is Andrew Buckman, who's a member of the Faculty for Humanities and Performing Arts at Evergreen State College. Previously, he's contributed to these books, Sondheim in Our Time and His, the Oxford Handbook to the Hollywood Musical, and the Oxford Handbook to Musical Theater Screen Adaptations.

[3:25] David Armstrong: Please welcome Andrew Buckman. Hey, it's a pleasure to be here.

[3:29] Andrew Buckman: Thanks so much. So interesting that we have three of us from the Pacific Northwest here.

[3:35] David Armstrong: Small world, isn't it?

[3:38] Andrew Buckman: Exactly.

[3:38] David Armstrong: And joining us from Texas is Hannah Lewis, who is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Texas at Austin, who specializes in music for film and visual media, American popular music traditions, musical theater, early 20th century French music, and American avant-garde and experimental music. So she runs the gamut. She's the author of French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema, and co-editor of Voicing the Cinema Film Music and the Integrated Soundtrack. And for her, the Oxford Guide to Film Musicals, she's focused on a very recent 21st century film, La La Land. Welcome, Hannah.

[4:19] Hannah Lewis: Hi, I'm so happy to be here.

[4:22] David Armstrong: So happy to have you. I'm so thrilled that we've got all of you together to talk about this series. So, Dominic, let's start with you. What is the idea behind the series? Why did you and Oxford presumably think we need this series? What's the intent behind it?

[4:38] Dominic Broomfield McHugh: First of all, thank you so much for having us all on. It really is a joy to be back. When I started out in scholarship on musicals, we were really lucky to already have the Yale Broadway Masters series, which was edited by Jeffrey. And then we had the Broadway Legacy series, which was also started and edited by Jeffrey. And so we had this big body of scholarship on stage musicals and on Broadway. And scholarship has continued, at least from the musicology perspective, to be very focused on the stage. Musicologists haven't written so much about film musicals. There is scholarship from film studies, so from film scholars on film musicals. They tend not to deal with the music.

[5:20] Dominic Broomfield McHugh: So the idea of setting this up was to come up with a kind of equivalent series to Broadway Legacies, a little shorter, but similarly accessible, similarly including original research. So new information in each of the books, whether it's through archival research or through interviews or a mixture of the two, and strong critical readings as well. So each of the books has to have perspectives on the subject. So there's quite a lot of scope for the authors to do what they want with them. But I'm kind of interested in coming up with an equivalent set of books that kind of helps us navigate some favorite movies and also some that are maybe more at the cult level, but very beloved or very admired or very interesting, which is the case with Jeffrey's book Love Me Tonight, which those of us who love film musicals all know about Love Me Tonight, but maybe the general public is less familiar.

Such a great film. It deserves a book. So that's kind of the idea behind the whole thing. And we've got already two more under contract, one on Mary Poppins, another one on The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. So they won't all be American. Some of them will be from elsewhere in the world. And going forward, it will similarly be hopefully global or semi-global and certainly throughout the whole history of the genre.

[6:40] David Armstrong: Which leads me to ask why these three books that you decide should be the first ones in the series?

[6:46] Dominic Broomfield McHugh: I'm very persuasive. So I twisted the arms of these people. It was always my ambition to have Jeffrey write the first volume, if possible, because of his importance to the field and in setting up Broadway legacies and kind of demonstrating that there is a relationship between that kind of scholarship and this kind of scholarship. So it's not exactly the same books, but it's the same kind of scholarship. And then in terms of choosing the works, I was interested in starting with three films that would show what the series can do. So we have to have a Singing in the Rain volume in the series. The La La Land, I was desperate to have something contemporary so that it's not just like a very long Wikipedia article on older films, but that actually we show that there's real value from bringing musicological and scholarly insight into newer films.

And La La Land is the perfect pairing with Singing in the Rain because both of those movies engage with the idea of making movie musicals, what it's all about. They both unpack and deconstruct the genre in very different ways. And obviously La La Land is very conscious as a film of Singing in the Rain. So they were a great pairing. And Love Me Tonight, if you've seen the front cover of the Love Me Tonight book, which is on the shelf behind me, but perhaps, oh, yes, excellent. Hold it up. So I'm obsessed with this photograph. This is the second time I've referred to this photograph in the podcast this week because the photograph shows, which I'm so grateful to Jeffrey for finding, it shows a musical number from Love Me Tonight being filmed with the orchestra on the set.

So this movie is from 1932, and it shows that in those days, studios had different approaches to how on earth do you make all of this work in the early days of sound when you haven't yet worked out how to do the genre. So the three films work brilliantly together as studies because they're all helping us to navigate what is a film musical. And these are three great scholars who each in their way have different strengths and complementary strengths. And so we have these insights into what we might do overall. So that's what it's all about.

[9:18] David Armstrong: Well, I think you achieved that brilliantly because they do speak to each other in so many ways. I'll have some more questions about that as we go. You mentioned that they're relatively brief, short books, but they are packed with information. Describe just a little bit of your instruction to everybody in that regard. How did you achieve that? We've seen other books of this size where you think, well, there's not going to be much content. This is loaded with content and information.

[9:33] Dominic Broomfield McHugh: I won't let people go to work until they show me that they are going to find new information. It is the key to research. All research, even if it's very academic and theoretical, it all comes from a source somewhere. Even philosophical research is derived from other academic texts. So in the case of this subject, I want to see either there's going to be a long list of archival holdings, drafts of screenplays, or drafts of songs, or demo recordings of songs that we can access. Or I want to know that you can access the people who made the movie, which is the solution in Hannah's book on the whole, which is, don't start writing this book unless you can convince me that you can speak to the people, which then, not to steal her thunder in terms of what she might want to say about her own research, but that then presents its own problems in terms of dealing critically with the subject, as well as having got information from the subject.

But the key to the whole thing is, can you say something new? Because a good publisher like Oxford is not interested in simply regurgitating what we can read in a hundred other places. And so the thing that underpins all three of these books and the future ones is something new, accessibly communicated with a critical lens that's very clear.

[11:06] David Armstrong: Well, I think you definitely achieved that. From my point of view, and just very personally, first of all, the Love Me Tonight volume made me deeply interested in a movie that I have seen and enjoyed in the past, but actually don't know very well. I actually couldn't tell you the last time I saw it. So it's not one of those movie musicals that I really know, but now I'm fascinated by. Jeffrey has made me want to see it again and really drew me in. And then on the other hand, Singing in the Rain is a movie I've seen hundreds of times, probably literally hundreds of times and know every word, note and frame of it. And yet Andrew was able to really draw me in. And I did discover new things about it that I didn't know and have a renewed passion for it.

And then finally, with La La Land, frankly, that was a movie I was very disappointed with when it came out. And so I was actually quite surprised to then be so deeply captivated by this book that you made me interested in how this movie happened, what it's about, everything about it. So I do think you have succeeded, all of you and Dom as your leader, to achieve this goal of very disparate movies and yet still making them work for, I'm not necessarily representative of the overall audience, but I think for me, they certainly worked in that capacity.

[12:34] David Armstrong: And the one thing I want to pick up on is, as I said earlier, these books relate and even seem to respond and talk to each other in some ways. For all of you, how aware of you as you were writing it, how aware of you were what was going on with your colleagues, what they were working on? Did you have interaction between each other? Did you read drafts of each other's books? Did Dom point out things? Oh, he's talking about that. So Hannah, you should know about this. Talk a little bit about that process.

[13:03] Hannah Lewis: Yeah, I seem to remember there was very little during the actual writing. I mean, our timelines were somewhat different, right? A lot of this took form during the pandemic. So we weren't having the opportunity to get together and chat at a conference or something like that. But I do think that it's probably no accident that there were resonances because, I mean, I can speak for myself, like both Jeffrey and Andy's work has influenced mine, right? So I think it's only natural that that could come out in different ways as I'm writing my book. And we've been lucky to have conversations since we've written our volumes and to meet up at a couple of different conferences to be able to just sort of enjoy the aftermath. And several times in maybe all three of the books, I'm not certain, but certainly in several of them, you referenced the other scholars' work and the other movies that are being talked about.

[13:46] Andrew Buckman: Well, both my colleagues here have long bibliographies like Dom. And Hannah wrote a great article about integration in 2017 that appeared in Musical Quarterly. And Jeffrey wrote an article about integration that was in the Cambridge Handbook. Is that right, Jeffrey?

[14:12] Jeffrey Block: An Oxford Handbook.

[14:12] Andrew Buckman: An Oxford Handbook. And so Singing in the Rain is kind of an episodic film that nevertheless feels integrated.

[14:20] Geoffrey Block: So I was thinking about their work quite a bit. And that said, you know, if you read the books, they're all three quite different. You know, I think one of the great virtues of Dominic as an editor is he gave us license to be ourselves, and then obviously reviewed the entire manuscript, gave really substantive critical suggestions. This is a peer-reviewed scholarly press, so we got anonymous reviews, and that led to major revisions for me. Anyway, I found those very useful. But we see each other at conferences and so forth, so it's almost like I got to know Hannah before I started working on the book. Jeffrey and I are only 30 miles apart, so we've been talking and walking and going to concerts and musicals together for 40 years, I'm afraid.

And we shared each other's drafts as we went along and talked about it. And I also read Hannah's wonderful article. And not only was it on integration, if I've got the right article, the key work was Love Me Tonight. And she had already done some excellent research. She'd looked at the Love Me Tonight manuscripts too, several years before I did. And Hannah, you actually reference that the opening number in La La Land is somewhat inspired by the opening number in Love Me Tonight. Talk a little bit about that. And I want to hear also from each of you, what are other ways that the movies reflect one another? Obviously, Love Me Tonight can't reflect movies that came after it, but the other two movies are very aware of Love Me Tonight.

[15:54] Hannah Lewis: Well, I guess La La Land as a movie is very self-consciously referencing all of these older films. And these references are intentional. They're meant to be picked up on for people who know the history. I think the references to Singin' in the Rain are more obvious, but I definitely see resonances with Love Me Tonight. And I may talk about this more later, but the director, Damien Chazelle, is just such a fan of the genre and really has watched extensively. And so we didn't talk a lot in my discussion with him about Love Me Tonight as a film, but it seems clear to me that it's a film that interests him in part because of all the interesting moments. So I'll back up for a second. My first book was about the transition from silent film to synchronized sound film in France, but I'm also very interested in how it played out in Hollywood.

And it's something I published about in a couple of places. And what's so fascinating about that moment is there was no rule book for how do we make a musical as a film rather than on stage. And so I think you really feel that playfulness in Love Me Tonight, but the sort of self-consciousness of, we are experimenting with a new form, right? And that is clearly something that so many years later, Chazelle was interested in playing on in La La Land, I think. Can you describe that opening number to us a little bit? What is the opening of Love Me Tonight?

[17:18] Geoffrey Block: The opening number is a number that some of you may have seen in Porgy and Bess. That is the waking, a small, it's not a small town, but it's a small part of a town waking up in the morning and getting to work and making sounds, noises. What was the actual phrase? Symphony of noises.

[17:38] Hannah Lewis: Symphony of noises, thank you. The broom sweeping and the hammering, and it creates a composition of noise, which happens in one scene in Porgy and Bess. And it's not an accent because when you mentioned about why people see Love Me Tonight, the director of Love Me Tonight, Ruben Mamoulian, was a big deal in early film. And he also had a strong connection with the stage. And he was the director of Porgy and Bess, both the play and the opera, and the director of Oklahoma and Carousel. And most film directors, in my final chapter, when I talk about reception, I talk about the fact that many directors, for example, Vincent Minnelli and others, were extraordinarily influenced by Love Me Tonight, even though most people had never heard of Ruben Mamoulian, or if they'd heard of him, they didn't know that he was a film director.

And so the connections with the stage, of course, Rodgers and Hammerstein work with Mamoulian, and in this movie, it's Rodgers and Hart. And so the connections between stage and film are really enormous.

[18:47] Hannah Lewis: And then you described that opening, how the symphony of noise influenced La La Land.

[18:54] Sure. Well, the opening number of La La Land, which is, I think, the most stunning number in the film, begins with a traffic jam on the freeway in LA, right? And you hear honking horns, you hear people's radios. And it's this sort of soundscape of what a traffic jam might sound like in LA. And from that emerges the opening strains of the accompaniment of the song Another Day of Sun. And so it has very much the same spirit of Love Me Tonight, where we have the symphony of noises that slowly coalesces into music, and then it becomes the vehicle for the first opening number. So I think that the spirit of the two openings are very similar in that way. And it sort of introduces us to the setting, to where the rest of the story will unfold. Again, in similar ways, even though stylistically, they couldn't be more different.

[19:42] Geoffrey Block: Absolutely. But the relationship is so evident, especially when pointed out to us. Andrew, from your point of view, what are the resonances between Singing in the Rain and the other two movies, either one intentional and the other non-intentional, by the creators of Singing in the Rain?

[20:05] Andrew Buchman: Well, I think they're all innovative films within the Hollywood context, right? Which means they're not avant-garde. But I was very struck in Hannah's book and started recognizing the influence of the French New Wave on Damien Chazelle and Justin Hurwitz, too, because the way music is used in the film, it is a lot of what we call diegetic music in the frame that's really good and includes a lot of jazz, which became a controversial topic in the film's reception, as we say, what people said about it as the years went by. Love Me Tonight, it was like you, David, I did not know it that well. And it's just so ahead of its time. It's got these moving shots. It's got complex montages. The sound is recorded in advance.

So unlike the point you were making about the cover, Dominic, it used state-of-the-art recording techniques. And then Singing in the Rain also has a great opening scene, I must say. But I think all three films share a kind of real connection between Broadway, between live performance and even vaudeville. Before Broadway, there was vaudeville. And I think all three films have kind of schticks in them that really recall the past in direct ways. Although La La Land is the coolest of the three. And all three of them have Broadway creators involved with them to an extensive degree. I'm going to turn the attention to Jeffrey now because we're going to talk chronologically through these three films, because I think that makes the most sense.

Jeffrey, you took on a movie from the earliest days of the film musical, as we've talked a little bit about. And again, reading these three books allows us, as Dominic alluded to, to sort of follow the progression of the technology, how the technology of making movies changed over this time. And in fact, Singing in the Rain is talking about how technology changed. That's the subject matter of it. But Jeffrey, this is one of the most revered but least known film musicals. Critically acclaimed, but most people, I think it's fair to say, have probably not seen this movie or only rarely seen this. First of all, why is it? Why do we not know this movie?

[22:25] Jeffrey Block: That's a great question. I think the starting point is because of the production code. When the movie was made, the production code was there. It began between 1930 and 1934, but it was not enforced until after Love Me Tonight. And Joseph Breen, who was the head of the production code, when it came time to show the movie again in the 40s, he said no. I mean, he didn't say completely no, but he wanted certain changes and even ripped out a short scene with Myrna Loy in her nightgown. He thought it was too provocative. And then, the worst thing, not that much was cut. So some things were cut and permanently cut, snipped out, but it was because he also wouldn't distribute it. And so it was poorly distributed until basically it had a late VHS, it had a late DVD.

In my book on Rogers, I had not seen the whole film. That was in 2003. And so shortly after that, or around that time, it finally was released on DVD. And so people had a chance to see it. But again, going back to the reception chapter about Mamoulian, I made the analogy, it seems really highfalutin, but the analogy with J.S. Bach was the average person really didn't know Bach. I mean, the average European didn't know about Bach, even in his lifetime, except that he was an organist. And after his death, nobody knew about him except for, in my opinion, the people who count. Haydn knew about Bach, Mozart knew about Bach, Beethoven was playing the Temporal Clavier at the age of 10. The people in the know knew about Bach.

And that's why it was like, so Mamoulian was able to exert a big influence on future filmmakers without the people having a wide knowledge of Mamoulian until just really recently. And Love Me Tonight got lost in the shovel. When I told people that I was writing this book on Love Me Tonight, most people did not know this film, including scholars. And so the first thing I would say was, have you ever heard of the song, Isn't It Romantic? And almost everybody say, yeah, I love that song. And that's a major scene in the movie, a montage scene with a traveling song, a traveling song or a passing song, where a song starts in one place at the tailor shop and ends up at the castle, the tailor shop of Maurice Chevalier, and ends up at the castle with Jeanette MacDonald, the princess.

And it goes from it's an amazing scene. I had seen that scene, that whole scene before, and I knew parts of the film. But anyway, I think it was Vincent Minnelli who said, I never directed a film unless I watched Love Me Tonight again, that kind of thing. He's not the only one. So that's what happened. But the connection with Broadway, because everybody's heard of Oklahoma, and everybody's heard of Carousel, by default, Mamoulian gradually got better known as mainly as a stage director. But his film work is, I guess that's the best way I could say, combination of censorship. And then those movies became old fashioned. Maurice Chevalier, who was the biggest star in film for its first five years of sound film, moved to Paris, and he wasn't making films.

And then Jeanette MacDonald teamed up with Nelson Eddy, which sort of canceled out the work. And then of course, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers came along. The very next year, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did the Rio film. And then also, sorry, the ensemble dance numbers in 42nd Street the next year. And so they became old fashioned films, in a way, too. And not only old fashioned, but they weren't even allowed to be shown. So I guess the big surprise is that so many people did know about Mamoulian, and the right people, from the history of films perspective. And now everybody gets a chance. It's on DVD, and almost everybody I've known who's watched this film, really enjoy this film. I mean, it's not so much ahead of us. It's just timeless, I guess you'd say.

[27:08] Geoffrey Block: Well, and a lot of it has to do with craftspersonship of it. It is so brilliantly crafted. So let's talk a little bit about the creators there. These are Broadway creators at their height. Rogers and Hart are big deals already, movie at play. And Ruben Mamoulian is a big deal. Yeah. Talk a little bit about that collaboration and how involved they were. It seems to me it was almost more like the collaboration that happens on a Broadway musical than most films.

[27:35] Andrew Buchman: It absolutely was. And there's something else that doesn't happen with most films, is that Mamoulian really thought that Rogers had it in him to write the underscoring. The background. And that was extraordinarily unusual. I don't know if it's unprecedented, but it's extraordinarily unusual. And there's even mini ballets and things like that. He actually created all the underscoring. So every note of music in that movie is by Rogers. Not only the songs, but the musical scoring. That's correct. That's correct. Maybe in a way more than he did in some of his stage works. So even in the stage works, Rogers did a lot of... I mean, there are other people that worked on transition music and dance music, people like Trudy Ripman, people like that.

But Rogers really still had a controlling hand on what went into the Oklahoma Ballet or the Carousel Ballet. I mean, he was concerned more than just with the songs. And so that's also something unusual in Love Me Tonight as well.

[28:41] Geoffrey Block: This is sort of written with the songs in mind first, is that right?

[28:46] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: No. I don't want to say no categorically, but it began as a French play. The controlling hand here was Mamoulian. He supervised writers doing various drafts. I think that they had a pretty complete script. The songs came in later, and then the songs had to be approved, particularly the lyrics, through the censorship board and so on. I think they had a placement of the songs in mind, as far as I know. It sounds really strange to say this, but I actually have to reread the book to recall exactly the chronology.

[29:37] Geoffrey Block: I completely understand. I'm in the same boat myself. That was two years ago, I have to remember. It was actually even longer than that. I don't want to rub it in, but it was a long time. Maybe what I'm alluding to is I remember reading that it seemed like Ruben Mamoulian was insistent that the songs be formulated as early as possible so that the movie could be shaped around them.

[30:03] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: Yes, that's true. Absolutely. That is absolutely true. The songs have a lot of variety. Some are traditional theater songs, but a lot of them are through composed and there's talking. Hart developed this idea of talking and singing musical speech, which he also did in other stage works, which was unusual, but it keeps a through line. In some movies, people are talking and all of a sudden somebody sings. That doesn't happen. All the songs come in in a natural way.

[30:42] Geoffrey Block: We'll come back to this as we go along, but just give us a little sense of why is this movie, as you said, even alluding to Bach. Bach was the composer's composer at a certain period before he became famous. The composers knew about him. In a way, Mamoulian is the movie director's movie director because they know about him and they're paying attention, even if the general public is still not very aware of him. How do you see this movie in the legacy of film musicals? What's its major importance as a movie musical?

[31:18] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: I think it showed what's possible. I think people have been, in one way or another, building on what happened in Love Me Tonight. They're important to any kind of a film, but the casting is just absolutely amazing. We have these two giant figures of the film musical, Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier. Their name in the film is Jeanette and Maurice. They were major, major figures, but the supporting cast is also extraordinary. They're really funny. It's everything.

[31:58] Geoffrey Block: Mamoulian didn't write the script, but he supervised it. The script is still really funny. Myrna Loy and Charlie Ruggles. These are characters that were in many films, but he brought out the best of all these people. They're just hysterical things. Then he did camera tricks that you wouldn't do on a stage that are also really funny, like having a horse move so fast, or really slow, mixtures of things, and the ballet between the deer and the dogs going back and forth, and each have their own little musical theme. There are just so many things that you can see this film just many times. If you're interested in the production code, you can also see how Mamoulian thwarted the production code.

[32:47] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: Even in the 50s, everyone knows that all the sitcoms, they had separate beds. Television and movies, you had to have separate beds too. How did Mamoulian get around that? Title song called Love Me Tonight, he has Maurice and Jeanette in bed together, but actually they're separated. They're actually in two different beds in two different places, and they're singing the love duet as a voiceover. It has a split screen so that they seem to be lying in bed next to each other, even though we know they're in separate rooms.

[33:25] Geoffrey Block: Exactly. Things like that. Even the play on the prince who's the tailor, the poor tailor who's really a prince, becomes a prince, saves the life of the princess. It's reversed in Mamoulian. He worked on the ending. He said, I want a different ending here. He said, I want the princess to rescue the prince. She stops the train at the end and saves his life. Meanwhile, the three aunts, the old aunts, they're like the Macbeth witches, only nice ones, are doing a tapestry of the prince rescuing the princess that we see at the end of the film.

[34:07] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: Of course, they've got it all wrong. There are just so many little edges like that. Let's move on to Andrew for the moment. We'll come back to you, Geoffrey. So, Singing in the Rain, Andrew, is one of the most written about and discussed movies of all time, probably. Was that daunting to take on when you were asked to do this? What else is there to write about Singing in the Rain? Talk a little bit about your approach to that. Then what did you find new to talk about?

[34:36] Andrew Buchman: First of all, the hardest kind of book to write is the book you wrote, David, to try to create an innovative portrait of the entire field. There's really a great deal of pleasure in diving deep into one work.

[34:48] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: I'm looking forward to that.

[34:53] Andrew Buchman: But you're right, the literature is fairly vast. I was really intent on not repeating what other people had said unnecessarily. That said, it was kind of a pleasure. I came back to three books over and over again. Hugh Forden's Portrait of the Freed Unit, as it was called. This little book by Peter Wallen, which is even thinner than the books in our series and is really more a work of criticism than a work of what we call history musicology. But it's a wonderful book.

[35:27] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: May I interject one thing? I hope you don't mind. In terms of what makes this book different and all the books in the series is that there's a lot written on Singing in the Rain, but they don't address the music at all. That's what all three of these books do.

[35:43] Andrew Buchman: I was trained as a composer and music theorist, David. Another of my interests, I teach mostly undergraduate music and I wanted to dive deep into the work but make it accessible to a broad audience. So my basic strategy was to say what time point I was talking about in the film throughout. If I'm going to talk about some musical detail, I don't expect you to read music notation. I just say, go to this scene and listen to this five seconds. That was another pleasure for me.

[36:15] Andrew Buchman: I would say another reason I was happy doing the film is because I wanted to adopt a critical stance. The way I think of it is that films and shows are like stocks. They have highs and lows. Singing in the Rain has had a great run as a masterpiece, difficult word, but it is a great movie. But is it as great as Love Me Tonight or La La Land or some of the upcoming films in the series, Mary Poppins, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg? I think they're kind of peers.

[36:51] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: So in the context of the series, it was really interesting to think about what is there to say about film musicals that is about the music, that is critical, that relies on primary sources, and all three of us spent a lot of time in the archives. Luckily, the archival material for singing is particularly rich.

[37:13] Andrew Buchman: I guess another interest of mine, and then I'll stop, David, is the creative process. It's like George Firth used to say, Sondheim and I are great collaborators. I collaborate with him and he collaborates with me. One of the minor controversies around Singing in the Rain is between claiming credit for the work. Kelly is recognized as an auteur, as we say in film theory, and I problematized that identification from the beginning. I talk about the people who I think deserve more credit, including the queer folks in the Freed unit, the women in the Freed unit, and Arthur Freed himself, who's often portrayed comically as a guy who jingles his change in his pockets a lot.

[38:02] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: Another really interesting thing was the contrast between Broadway and film. You know, writers don't get no respect to L.A., and one of the things that Comden and Greene, who wrote Singing in the Rain, were so conflicted about was they really wanted even more autonomy than Freed accorded them. That said, Freed was remarkable because he didn't only hire people from Broadway, he adopted Broadway methods. He said, go do a script. So that was exciting, too, trying to unravel who was really responsible for what is great about Singing in the Rain and what problems remain with the piece.

[39:01] Andrew Buchman: It's an all-white world, let's face it. We're not living in an America that can really be comfortable with that kind of portrayal of the creative process, fortunately, anymore. I mean, especially among creative folks. It just doesn't make sense. But there's their hidden texts within Singing in the Rain, I think. In terms of Comden and Greene, what I think is interesting about that is the conflict between, you know, later disputing who wrote what and who was responsible for it. To me, what they're missing is it was much more like a Broadway musical, where it is a collaboration that you can't separate.

[39:49] Andrew Buchman: No one of those artists can claim authorship of that. And there was some, you know, discussion whether Adolph Greene was claiming too much, that he had too much to do with it. But again, you go back, I bet it's impossible to tell who did what. And if it's a great work of art, which that one is, a great musical, it will be impossible to tell who contributed exactly what idea, what moment, that then inspired somebody else to actually do something that was based on the idea that the book writer had or the lyricist had. So I find that discussion really interesting in your book and sort of revealing that it was, I think, more like a Broadway show than a movie is sometimes, which can be more of an auteur, or at least in theory, can be more of an auteur approach.

[40:09] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: I hope I give full credit to Gene Kelly, too. And one of the things that was fascinating was Comden and Greene wrote a pretty talky first script that was really a send-up of Hollywood. And then Kelly, with some help from Donnan, toned down the satire, upped the romanticism, but also created some great satire that is very Kelly-esque. So the scene where he's enacting a love scene in a silent film, but he's saying things to Lena like, I'd rather kiss a tarantula.

[40:46] Andrew Buchman: Finally, Stanley Donnan actually is on record as saying, once I'm in the editing suite, I'm in control, or words to that effect. And Donnan really is an incredible film artist. He was part of a team at MGM that enabled him to do some of his best work. And I think everybody in the film field has a favorite Stanley Donnan film. I think Singing in the Rain stands up pretty well. And keeping in mind the three films that Donnan and Kelly made together, they're all important, really, On the Town. And also, It's Always Fair Weather, which was their swan song.

[41:26] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: Which is so interesting because it's a movie that disappoints you. At the same time, it's thrilling you all the way through.

[41:36] Geoffrey Block: Nicely put. Very ambivalent about that movie.

[41:39] Andrew Buchman: Well, really, another great strength of Comden and Green is that they can really create great characters. We tend to be kind of episodic writers and relying on words. For instance, the first script also had almost no camera directions, and yet the film is so full of innovative camera movement. And that's something Chazelle picked up on and kind of upped the ante. He kind of paid the debt back with interest.

[42:06] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: Well, let's turn to that. Let's go to Hannah. It's interesting to me that you had some of the initial ambivalence that I had about the movie, and you write about that right in the beginning of the book. So talk us through that process. Did you choose? Did you lobby for this movie? Or did Dom assign it to you? And then how did you come to embrace it so?

[42:28] Hannah Lewis: Yeah. As you mentioned, I did feel ambivalent about this film. When I saw it, there were aspects of it that I loved that I still love, and some aspects that trouble me about it, and some aspects that I just feel kind of, you know, middling about, I guess we'll say. But I had done a little bit of work on it. I'd done a conference presentation, I think, as an attempt to myself to really kind of understand, unpack why I felt this complex sort of range of feelings about the film.

[43:01] Geoffrey Block: Sometimes we pick a subject to research because it's so near and dear to our hearts and we love it and we want to just spend every minute with it. Sometimes we pick a research subject because we despise it, and sometimes it's somewhere in between, right? And I think that it's been one of the most fulfilling projects for me to work on because of the complexity that I feel towards the film. Dom did suggest the film to me for this series, but I very quickly picked up on that idea and was really excited about it. So it was really enjoyable to write about, but as something we talked about at the very beginning, posed some challenges too, especially because of how integral the interviews with members of the creative team were for my research and wanting to be respectful and do their work justice while also giving, hopefully, an even-handed sort of critical examination of the film.

[43:58] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: Just interject that you're the only of the three authors that got to talk to the creators of the movie.

[44:04] Geoffrey Block: Yes, that's the one benefit, I guess, or one of the benefits of recent topics, right? It's a double-edged sword though, right? Again, you feel kind of responsible to them in some ways as well. But I was really fortunate to be able to interview — this was kind of early in the pandemic, so I may have benefited from the fact that Hollywood shut down for a period of time, right? But I was really fortunate to be able to Zoom interview with Damien Chazelle, the director, Justin Hurwitz, the composer, a brief phone conversation with Pasek and Paul, the lyricists, and then Mandy Moore, the choreographer. And I really... My conversations with them gave me, I think, a deeper respect for their vision, even while it didn't change my mind about certain things that I talk about in the book as well.

[44:48] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: Just following up on that, in talking to each of those creators, which obviously was a great opportunity, did you worry at all that they would influence your critique of the movie?

[45:00] Geoffrey Block: Yeah, it was something I was thinking about, right? And especially when there were aspects of the film that I knew I was going to write about critically. So, for instance, I spent a whole chapter on the film's treatment of jazz as a genre, and the fact that Sebastian, the male lead, is a jazz musician, and he sort of takes it upon himself to save jazz. And there's a lot of problematic racial dynamics in the way that it's presented in the film, and it's also received a lot of criticism in the popular press. So I'm certainly not the first person to point that out. But I wanted to address some of these issues and give the creative team a chance to tell the story from their perspective, while also being aware that I had to address it in this particular way as well.

And I hope that I struck that balance. And it's interesting that this movie was one that had huge initial reception to it, and Academy Award nominations, and almost winning, or whoever that was. And then a big backlash very quickly, which I think is maybe a product of the 21st century.

[46:21] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: Did you feel a sense that they had been burned by the backlash? You were dealing with wounded people to a certain extent, I suspect.

[46:25] Geoffrey Block: Yeah, yes and no. I mean, they've all done very fine for themselves. Yeah, I'm not worried about them. They're doing well, right? So in that respect, I don't think they felt particularly wounded. But I did notice that in talking about the sort of legacy of the film, I think that there were certain aspects that Chazelle in particular didn't seem to necessarily want to address, which I don't blame him. I mean, it's probably a thorny area for him to kind of revisit. But to be fair to the film, even despite the backlash, it continues to have such a huge fan base, and something that I find really interesting. So I teach courses to undergraduates on musicals and on film music. And I have often taught this film, I often pair it with Singing in the Rain, which I think is a fun pairing.

But I find that a lot of students, or this is anecdotal, but a lot of students come in with a lot of love for this film, and maybe not a lot of knowledge of the film musical genre's history. So it's really interesting to me that this has become a point of entry for a lot of maybe new fans of the genre, and maybe encourages them to explore more.

[47:43] Hannah Lewis: One issue that has always puzzled me, and Hannah, you deal with this directly in your book, but I'm also interested in hearing from everybody, is because film is such a realistic quote medium, filmmakers and critics and academics and just people who hate musicals have struggled with film musicals, have struggled to appreciate them, acknowledge them, understand them. And I think I'm going to quote you, Hannah, you write, of course, no one really navigates the world singing and dancing. The film musical genre poses a unique challenge for filmmakers how to reconcile the purported realism of cinema with the flights of fancy prompted by characters bursting into song. And that sort of sums up this sort of problem that people have.

My response has always been is that, of course, no one navigates the world as a superhero or a vampire or battling zombies. Why do we have this resistance to a film musical that we don't have to these other completely unrealistic genres? And in fact, for me, the job of a filmmaker is to make these alternate versions of reality seem real to convince us that this world exists. Why do you think musicals are so challenging for so many people?

[49:15] Andrew Buchman: You set that up so nicely. I just think it's such a fascinating question. And that's part of what drew me to research the film musical. I mean, I think when it comes down to it, the film musical is one of the most brashly experimental audiovisual forms that we have. But because it's sort of done in the guise of a commercial genre, we don't give it that kind of credit. And yeah, I don't know. I'm curious to hear what everyone else thinks in terms of answering this question. But I think that there's something about the earnestness of singing your feelings that can sometimes cause discomfort. But, you know, we forgive it on stage a little bit more because of the very obvious divide between, you know, audience and performer. But on screen, it's close up. It's in your face. It's kind of impossible to ignore. And so I wonder if that accounts for some of the resistance people may have to the idea. But I agree. How different is it than a superhero film, really?

[50:15] Geoffrey Block: Yeah, I'd like to say a couple things. One is that the idea of realism is also something that a lot of people have trouble with in stage musicals. So many people make fun of West Side Story, dancing is in the streets and things like that. It's not just film. Another thing interesting to me is that in recent marketing about film, people still like film musicals, but they don't want to know that they're musicals. And you can verify this if you look at commercials. I'm sure you probably know about this. You can see a preview or that for Wicked, and you'd be surprised that they're singing when you go there because they're not part of the end. So just the idea of singing seems unnatural.

[50:21] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: Anybody else want to chime in?

[51:03] Andrew Buchman: I want to add one more thing about that is that the Williams response is he had a war throughout his whole life against naturalism and realism. And his favorite word was stylization. And he wanted things to make sense, even silly things to make sense. But later on in the film, towards the end, when one of the ants knocks off a vase from the table, there's a gigantic explosion. I mean, it sounds like a cannon is roaring. It's really funny. And it's also unreal because vases don't make that much noise. And he wanted to show, through stylization, the effect the had on people, of the people in the room. It was shocking to people. It's actually more real than real because it's showing the impact of it as a reality of it.

[52:04] Andrew Buchman: The actual reality of it. And so I think this issue about reality in a movie, that a movie is more real, I think that's a debate that a lot of us are still having.

[52:06] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: The surreal.

[52:22] Geoffrey Block: I have an opinion. I have two opinions. My first opinion, well, both of my opinions are about the 1930s, really. But my first opinion is about playback. I think because film gives the appearance of being very realistic, unless it's a very heavily stylized film, then one really notices and can be quite disengaged from the singing when the actor is obviously lip syncing to playback, which became the norm by the end of the 1930s. It's pretty interesting how many of these great 30s films, though, are trying different solutions, sometimes different solutions within the same movie according to the performer and the circumstances. Like an interesting number is A Fine Romance from Swing Time. They filmed the vocal track live on set and recorded the vocals live on set.

The actors could hear a piano playing and then the orchestra was added later. And if you re-watch that number on YouTube, Ginger Rogers in particular pulls the time around so much, which is why the number is so conversational and has so much character and flair about it. So then it feels realer because it feels a bit more like experiencing a performance rather than a mediated performance.

[53:48] Andrew Buchman: And then the second thing is my controversial opinion, is I think the problem with musicals is that they became self-referential too quickly. So the 30s film musicals, so many of them are interesting. Of these three movies, Love Me Tonight is the one that I find the most striking and interesting because they were inventing the rules. And I mean, I would go even further than what Geoffrey said a few minutes ago. I think the lesson of Love Me Tonight, the thing that filmmakers loved, is it said, make it up. It didn't say do it like this. It says make it up. And that's what they were doing in the 30s. So even though some of those films can be a bit rough, when they're doing something interesting, it's so interesting.

Whereas by the time you get to Singin' in the Rain, the thing that people get pretentious about that movie because it's so, aha, we're all in the know about this is how you do it. And when by the time you get to La La Land, we're there again. It's sort of the same again and again and again and again. The thing with the sweeping of the brooms, opening of Hello Dolly film, that has a moment of that. We've seen so much of it before. I think that's the problem with a lot of Broadway musicals now. It feels like we've heard this music before. We've heard all of this before. I think that's not so creative, whereas I think the early stuff is creative. So I think that's the crisis of the genre, regardless of the medium is that.

But I think that the medium specific thing with film is to do with how do you capture that liveness that's exciting in a really great theatre performance that's not over-reliant on auto-tune and click track.

[55:32] Dominic Broomfield-McHugh: The challenge of the moment we're in, definitely. Andrew, do you want to chime in on this?

[55:37] Andrew Buchman: Well, Dom, to follow on to your point about playback, most of my students know lots of music videos, and I end the book talking about videos by Michael Jackson, BTS, Andrea Mack, who's a UK rapper, and they're all playback, voiceover, lots of…

[55:55] Geoffrey Block: It's because they're all heavily influenced by Singing in the Rain, references to Singing in the Rain.

[56:01] Andrew Buchman: Exactly. I think people find their way to musicals, sometimes through a great work. Almost every year, I have a student who's memorized all of Hamilton when they were in high school. West Side Story is another one. By the way, West Side Story is one of the test cases of this switching between singing and talking because the end of West Side Story, controversially to some musical lovers, is all talk. It's a play. That may seem like a deficiency on Bernstein's part, but it also seems like a recognition that for most people in the audience, when somebody's been shot, it's not time to sing. Whereas in opera, even when somebody's being tortured in Tosca, everybody's singing about it. And I love Tosca, I should say. Not my favorite opera, but that scene speaks to the current moment.

[57:01] Geoffrey Block: Even Sweeney Todd has talking at the end.

[57:05] Andrew Buchman: I think the great musical theater creators, and Sondheim at the top of the list, knew when to have music and when not to have music. He chose not to sing at very specific times, to not have the characters, on purpose, because he knew what was going to be the most…

[57:21] Dominic Broomfield—McHugh: Dramatic and the most effective and that's that sort of separates the great people and you know not to disparage Andrew Lloyd Webber but sort of like Tosca everybody sings all the time everything no matter what's going on and everyone else it's music too I might add they never heard before.

[57:42] David Armstrong: I want to continue this thread Hannah related to this you write that Chazelle's intention was to make what he called a realist musical and as a result he intentionally cast leading actors who are inexperienced singers and dancers opting for a raw understated style of musical performance and then he tries to make up for this lack of virtuosity from the stars through camera work and effect and for me I think this is the fatal flaw of the movie and you talk about this as well and it relates to these other movies movie musicals have always been showcases for the stars from Love Me Tonight especially through Singing in the Rain where all of the MGM musicals to me the reason they exist is to take the greatest musical stars who ever lived and give them an opportunity to shine in a way that you know you'll never replicate again because you had all these resources with the best choreographers and the best songwriters and everything it's all about showcasing the stars and that's the opposite of what Chazelle is doing with this movie just talk a little bit about your observations on that and how it relates to the history of film musicals which seems like it's now doing something else.

[59:01] Hannah Lewis: Sure I think that the idea of a realist musical is just a fascinating idea because what does that even mean right um there are lots of ways we could interpret that and what I take away from it is that his choice to cast very talented actors who are not trained singers or dancers that's a stylistic choice just as it would be to cast someone who is very well trained in singing and dancing right and so um you know I we do see elements of virtuosity come through in the acting performances but not necessarily in the musical numbers and so the musical numbers end up serving a very different function I think rather than becoming sort of larger than the moment in in this way through the the performances we yeah we have interesting camera work we have cgi where they float up into this and dance among the stars right um and that's always been an aspect of filmmaking especially in film musicals but it it felt to me a little bit different than what had come previously but it is interesting if you go back to through the history of the Hollywood musical technology has always been used to this is sort of a negative way of putting it but to compensate for perceived lack of talent or whatever it might be right um first and foremost in many cases where you have performed great performers who spend their entire career with someone else's voice right exactly and I mean it's so interesting the way that singing in the rain thematizes that even while partaking in that very practice at the same time right but also editing together different takes of a dance sequence to make it look a lot more effortless right and and we all know these stories of effort of intense effort that went behind the scenes sometimes maybe knowing those stories brings us more joy at the sort of seeming effortlessness of the final product I'm thinking of the sort of anecdotes that get passed along about Gene Kelly recording you know filming the the title number of singing in the rain with a fever right I mean but in any case um I do think that singing in the rain is trying to handle this issue in a contemporary way but it certainly has preoccupied film make Hollywood you know film musical directors and creators for for a long time in different ways the one exception is or not maybe not the one exception but not the only exception in the opening number of La La Land the people who happen to be in those cars stuck on the freeway are better than the average people dancing a number of people just stuck on the freeway right and so they are more I think Chazelle wanted to have people who could dance for that opening number so he wasn't always trying to get for the stars.

[1:02:02] Dominic Broomfield—McHugh: Yes and not for even with the stars I would say he still chose extraordinarily beautiful movie stars so why didn't he choose extraordinarily talented movie stars what's the difference between the two.

[1:02:13] Hannah Lewis: Yes I yeah you know it's hard for me to understand but talk a little bit about the importance of the stars in those other two movies because I think there's a great contrast to play there you mentioned Chevalier and Jeanette McDonald who are incredibly talented performers and dynamic personalities those movies exist only to showcase Chevalier really to begin that's the reason the movie is made.

[1:02:40] Geoffrey Block: Yes and same thing with Gene Kelly that movie is made for Gene Kelly he was the big star in the cast the others were relatively unknown relative to Kelly he was the one carrying the franchise.

[1:03:00] Dominic Broomfield—McHugh: Yeah and you know part of this is just the times we live in we don't have great musical stars in the same way that we that they did that we did in the past and especially movie stars there's a short list of great of movie stars who then also have all these talents yeah it's interesting that Hugh Jackman started out as a musical theater star and then became a movie star and that was almost the end of that and I mean I think he's I think his singing is not so great nowadays so it's like he's a recovering musical theater star or something but Cynthia Erivo has had an interesting he's having an interesting career for someone that is not that old it's interesting who that she's she's really making it in the movies now she's doing all kinds of major performances and more so the Ben Platt who is like more of an almost more of a music star now but is still doing legit stuff on the stage but hasn't made it in the movies because the Dear Evan Hansen film didn't really do him any favors but there does seem that problem more of a problem now of transitioning from being a stage star in musicals onto the screen whereas I think actors still can do that James Norton or you know all kinds of non-musical actors many of them start on the stage or want to go back to the stage because they actually enjoy it more they consider it proper acting or so there is some barrier around talent it does seem and the perception of talent and the commercial aspect of talent which is a bit different in terms of stardom than it I guess it used to be but there's still a problem with writing though and it takes a lot of money to make a movie musical and so it's a huge risk to make an original movie musical that is not an adaptation so I think that's that's the one area in which I'm willing to give La La Land some slack is that actually he made a hit original movie musical in the 21st century which is a kind of extraordinary really and it is artistic even if it doesn't give me any uplift I think that the deficit is that the musical numbers don't give any sense of kind of expressivity and expression and uplift that you get from a real musical but still he found a way to do it.

[1:05:29] Dominic Broomfield—McHugh: Number does but yeah after that I had the same feeling but then Darling Lily was like that with Julie Andrews where it has a great opening number and then well it's so hard to do I mean that's the thing that making a musical is one of the hardest endeavors in human existence whether it's on the stage or in the movie it's really really almost impossible to do so that anybody pulls it off is we should celebrate and I think as Hannah said we have to give credit for this movie that was is was and is a big hit and people love this movie and does help to send people to investigate the rest of the genre to investigate musicals of all kinds.

[1:06:09] David Armstrong: Let's end with each of you giving us a little pitch give us your elevator pitch for why we should not only read this book but see these movies what is it about these that and uh let's go backwards Hannah go ahead and start with yours you don't mind.

[1:06:27] Hannah Lewis: Sure well I'd say the the sort of through line of my book is that La La Land tells us a lot about what the film musical does and can do and how it reflects its particular cultural moment which I think La La Land certainly does and I hope that my book kind of helps explicate that in various ways.

[1:06:48] Geoffrey Block: Fantastic Jeffrey let's go with you next I think Love Me Tonight is a film that is the cream of the crop of its era and it's an era long gone but it still has relevance and still has one of the finest scores I think of any film musical and it also is in terms of why I read the book it also it also tells you a lot about how musicals were made in the 30s and the obstacles with the production code to the you couldn't just it's hard enough to make the movie but then you've got to get it past the production code so I mean you've got another layer of uh issues which is it's really fascinating how they got around it too so to me that's something interesting.

[1:07:40] Hannah Lewis: I think that's fascinating I love that in your other book also Geoffrey that you talk us through the that navigation of how and how they get away with so many things.

[1:07:58] Geoffrey Block: Yes absolutely you know yeah we're able to have adult content and I mean that in in a not in a x-rated way but just in a life way in these movies in spite of efforts to try to keep that from from keep us from seeing that.

[1:08:19] Andrew Buchman: Go ahead look we all love wonderful more serious musicals we all love Sondheim but Singing in the Rain is suitable for children and yet it's a great work of art and I've met many kids who watched it repeatedly when they were two three four with their parents I'd say read the book and find out some of the stories behind that uh anomaly that this film has a kind of a dual identity.

[1:08:56] Dominic Broomfield—McHugh: Absolutely it's one of those amazing pieces works of art that you could just return to and return to and return to and it never disappoints you at least that's my experience with it.

[1:09:03] Dominic Broomfield—McHugh: Tell us from your point of view just the you already told us why this series exists but give us a little pitch on why we want to go out and find these books immediately and especially then what's coming up you mentioned Mary Poppins you mentioned what was the other one the Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

[1:09:19] Dominic Broomfield—McHugh: Umbrellas of Cherbourg which figures prominently in Hannah's book absolutely yeah we're seeing so many connections between the films as we go through them because they encounter the same things and they have to navigate the same language so Mary Poppins is going to be great one of my absolutely favorite writers Nathan Platt who's a wonderful film music scholar but hasn't written so much about musicals I persuaded him to write about a film musical and I expected him to come up with something quite classical or serious and he said Mary Poppins and he's actually managed to get access to the Disney archives so there are definite new insights coming from that and Umbrellas of Cherbourg is being written by Walter Frisch who's one of America's or the world's most distinguished musicologists too from Colombia and he also has managed to become the first person to access the Michel Legrand archive so there's also a lot of new information in that I think that that is what I was keen to have happen in all these books is something new not just hot takes on things that might reflect the times in which we're writing but actually information that will stand the test of time in this published form the books are accessible accessibly written and they're really not expensive either I think you can pick these up on some for something like ten dollars on Amazon and all local retailers too so I think it's a really fun way to spend a weekend reading about the making meaning and reception of three great films and then you can sit down on a Sunday night and watch it.

[1:11:01] David Armstrong: That's fantastic I want to thank you all so much for joining us today on Broadway Nation to talk about your amazing in a book so I'll hold them up here and I see that I have the title not quite right on the screen there it's the Oxford guides to film musicals that's what we're gonna have to redo the entire last hour and a half so thank you again so much for joining us thank you and I can't wait to have the follow-up edition of this when the new books great thank you so much David.

[1:11:36] Dominic Broomfield—McHugh: Thank you thanks everybody we'll see you soon bye-bye.

[1:11:40] David Armstrong: Thank you David.