| DIRECTED BY |
| ROBERT WISE |
| ... |
| .... |
| DIRECTED BY |
| SCREENPLAY BY |
| SCREENPLAY BY |
| Robert Wise's love of movies began in his Indiana boyhood, and a family move to California helped change the dream of working in motion pictures into a reality. His early work as a film editor at RKO Studios is among his most memorable, notably Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and, without credit, several of the Astaire-Rogers musicals of the 1930s. His directing career took off in 1944 with The Curse of the Cat People and continued to escalate throughout the decade, when his 1949 The Set-Up took a critics' jury prize at Cannes. A partial list of his films during the 1950s includes The House on Telegraph Hill, The Day the Earth Stood Still, So Big (featuring a teen-aged Richard Beymer), Executive Suite, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Run Silent Run Deep, and I Want to Live! During the 60s and 70s, Wise brought to the screen such varied works as Two for the Seesaw, The Haunting (with Russ Tamblyn), The Sand Pebbles, The Andromeda Strain, The Hindenberg, and the first of the Star Trek movies. In 1965 he won his second Oscar for his direction of the perennial favorite The Sound of Music. In 2002 a special sccreening of West Side Story was held in Los Angeles, a gala event presented as a special tribute to Robert Wise. |
ERNEST LEHMAN |
| In addition to West Side Story, Manhattan-born Ernest Lehman has used New York City as the setting for several of his other works, notably Sweet Smell of Success and Somebody Up There Likes Me, the latter directed by Robert Wise. He also wrote of events as far away as exotic Siam, adapting for the screen the story of Rodgers and Hammerstein's beloved The King and I, with choreography by Jerome Robbins. His novella The Comedian was adapted as an Emmy-winning television vehicle for Mickey Rooney. Mr. Lehman's other screenplays include Sabrina (1954), Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Executive Suite (again with Robert Wise), and John O'Hara's From the Terrace, which starred Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Re-uniting yet again with Robert Wise, he provided the screenplay for the box-office giant The Sound of Music. Other adaptations include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Hello Dolly!, and Portnoy's Complaint, which he also directed. He worked again with Alfred Hitchcock for the master's final film Family Plot, and in 2002 he was a producer of the Broadway musical version of his Sweet Smell of Success. Ernest Lehman's warm-hearted essay, My West Side Story, constitutes the introduction to his screenplay (and other material of interest) included in the special Collector's Edition DVD of West Side Story. |
 |
| Back to SCREENING ROOM |
Biographical info for the original Broadway collaborators can be found at Home>Personalities>Production Bios |
 |
 |
| ... |
| .... |