TRANSCRIPT 🔗
DISCLAIMER:
Thank you for listening to this episode where I talk to “Blue Moon” screenwriter Robert Kaplow. A quick note: during our conversation, the audio got patchy and cut out at parts during. So, I have made the transcript for this episode available via a link in the body of the description. Here’s my episode about the film “Blue Moon” featuring Robert Kaplow. And caution: there will be spoilers. 82 year-old spoilers.
VO: “Blue Moon” is Richard Linklater’s new film that follows Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart at the opening night of “Oklahoma”, co-written by his former writing partner Richard Rodgers. Now, I’ve personally been a great admirer of Rodgers and Hart, with a particular soft spot for Larry Hart’s story. Like, ten years ago, when I had a few hours left to kill in New York, didn’t walk the high line or go to last-minute. No, I looked up a bus schedule and made my way to Queens to see where Larry Hart was buried. Why? Because I’m me.
Larry’s story is fascinating, sometimes a troubling one. And the tragedy of his life occupies a particular place in my, and I suspect, many people’s imagination. So, I was, of course, very intrigued to hear about this movie about Larry Hart premiering in Berlin earlier this year. After months of correspondence and waiting for “Blue Moon”’s theatrical release, I recently spoke with screenwriter Robert Kaplow about the film and I wanted to know how he first became acquainted with the Rodgers and Hart.
Robert Kaplow: I remember taking the Rodgers and Hart songbook out from the library and playing it and I didn't even know half those songs. They’re so inventive, melodically. Alec Wilder, the songwriter who said about Rodgers that the middle-eight, the release of the songs, the melodies are as strong as anybody else’s is major melodies. There's a there's a quotation, I think it’s Noel Coward who said that, “Richard Rodgers pisses melody.”
You know, I thought in my early 20s, I thought I might be a songwriter. That was something I was thinking about actually as a career, 'cause I had some feeling and some talent in that area. And I went to one day to the Library of the Performing Arts at up at Lincoln Centre in New York and they have a big audio listening lab. I listened to this interview with these gigantic headphones. This is when everything was on reel-to-reel tape back in those days. There's this moment where he talks about Larry Hart to move onto Oscar Hammerstein...
Richard Rodgers, 1961 Interview: "... And I went to see Oscar and I said 'This man is gonna go. He's not going to be able to work much longer. What would you think of our working together. And he said I accept your proposal of marriage."
Robert: ...And there's something so cold and business-like. It really stayed with me. I think I knew right then I was going to write about this someday.
VO: Through the 1920s and 30s, Rodgers and Hart were one of the most successful composing teams in the Broadway theatre, with shows that may not be done so much today. But songs like “Manhattan”, “My Funny Valentine”, and “Bewitched” just to name a few have sustained their legacy. The partnership of Rodgers and Hart was, in a word, complicated, and not one that would be write about to tell. Larry Hart’s part alone would have been difficult to bring to light in the years after his death in 1943. Generally agreed today to have been gay and closeted, Larry’s alcoholism and mysterious private life that no one is ever really sure of, would be downplayed or omitted altogether, which perhaps makes some accounts of the story subjective and, at worst, not totally reliable.
Robert: So much of those books, particularly about Larry Hart are, “Well, you know, he did this show and he went there” and, you know, I thought what was missing was the waste the guy who could have written those lyrics, you know. That's what I missed in those books. His whole life, he's been the funniest I in the room. That's what he trades in. He doesn’t have anything else to trade in.
VO: Rather than trying to barrel through a quarter of a century in a two hour movie, “Blue Moon” plays out in real time through the course of one evening. Like Robert Kaplow’s 2003 novel “Me and Orson Welles”, the scope of the story is focussed to a specific moment in time. In the case of that novel, a week in November 1937 that sees the mounting Orson Welles’s s historic production of “Julius Caesar.”
Robert: I think the idea was that if you look close enough, you'd see his talent and his self-destructiveness and his ego. And I thought in the same way, if you saw Larry Hart on that night, you would amplify twenty-five years that he's worked with this guy and what he's proud of and in many ways how hurt he is, too. How alone he is and… That was the idea. That anybody made the movie is pretty astonishing to me.
VO: And who better to make this movie than director Richard Linklater, having directed the film version of “Me and Orson Welles” in 2008. A few years after that film’s release, about the time Kaplow was starting work on his Larry Hart screenplay, he got a call from Richard Linklater, out of the blue, as it were.
Robert: He said “What are you working on, Robert?” I said, “I'm trying to write this thing about Lorenz Hart” and he said “Oh, I'm really interested in Lorenz Hart. Would you send it to me?”
For a long time, I thought maybe it wouldn't get made. He [Linklater] held that option for, I don’t know, twelve years and he Ethan Hawke and I would meet in New York and we would read the script, and I'd sit there with my pen and tighten it up. It was, it was probably about 20 minutes longer than the version that we finally ended up with. The script was the same. It was all Sardi’s that night. I mean, that never changed. But it was more discursive, characters that came in with that you really didn't need. And those guys were really good at saying to me, you know, “We’ve heard this already. We don't need to do this again. The audience is going to get
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this, or maybe we need a better joke here.
Kevin: Can I just sort of ask from your perspective, is that frustrating where you're just like in this weird limbo of like, is this happening or is it not?
Robert: No, that's a legitimate question. It was so long, the process, that some part of me thought Richard is going to renew his option on this thing every other year or so to keep the rights to it. not really 100% sure it's ever going to be made. I must have thought at some point, OK, if it's never made, I'll make a novella out of it. I'll do something with the material. I think I would have done like “Me and Orson Welles”, like a short novel.
I don't know, maybe a year or so ago, Richard had had this film that Netflix put out called “Hitman” with Glenn Powell in the lead. And I went, I was invited to the opening. Then there was an after party across the street and I went there. And the producer of this film came up to me and he said, “Robert, we're going to make your film this summer in Ireland.” I go, “You’re kidding me.” He goes, “No, we're going to shoot it in Ireland this summer.” It was astonishing.
I actually went for about two weeks of the rehearsal, right before the cameras rolled. They built Sardi's at Ardmore Studios. It was fun just to sit with Cannavalle and Hawke and, you know, have them do the lines. And I'm sitting there, fixing the script up and hearing what they laugh and the lines that they're bobbling over that I've got to smooth over. And I never met Andrew Scott. I was leaving as he was coming in.
VO: Most of “Blue Moon” takes place at Sardi’s. But it actually opens with a brief prologue seven months ahead. For those familiar with the Rodgers and Hart story, the sight of Larry Hart staggering down a dark rainy alleyway is ominous. But there’s a practical reason for it here, particularly for those not familiar with the story.
Robert: I think it was Richard's idea to add that. Collapsed in the alley in the beginning. You hear his radio obituary. I think those Richard’s idea just to educate an audience in, you know, 40 seconds. So, they would go, “Oh, yeah, ‘My Funny Valentine.’ Yeah, I heard of that.” And it gets it out of the way in less than a minute. And then you're concentrating on, you know, on Hart alive and funny, sardonic. I don't wanna see him collapsed in an alley, you know?
Kevin: I feel like when you're reading those biographies, like say a Dick Rodgers biography and a Larry Hart biography. They’re kind of like lawyers [in that] they’re representing them. And so, in Dick’s biography, Larry is the culprit. In Larry's biography, Dick is the culprit. And I thought what this did really well is actually, even though it's a movie very much about Larry it, when it came to their relationship, it represented both of them and it just saw how much, you know, there was love. And as much as this change is going to cost Larry, it's costing Dick as well.
Robert: There's a long scene on the staircase that they have. You're right
that they just adore each other and are completely exasperated by each other in equal measure, you know. Like you said, equal measure of love and “I just, I can't take it.”
VO: On its own, the opening night of “Oklahoma” might have been enough to sustain this film. But Robert Kaplow also draws inspiration from a series of letters between Larry Hart and a young poet that, as far as I’m aware, has eluded all biographies of the man to date. Enter Elizabeth Weiland.
["Blue Moon" scene]
Robert: The letters surfaced in through an estate sale in Nyack, New Jersey. And they're not love letters. They’re friendship letters from summer of 1942 [to] fall 1942. And you know, they’re friends. She's going to Yale School of Fine Arts. They talk about the theatre. They went away to a lake house together, but we don't know if they went alone or what happened there. That's all my invention. She has a boyfriend that hurt her on the night of her 20th birthday but she says, “I'll tell you that when I see you in person.”
You know, I think I thought when I was writing this, if the only thing I have in this story is that Larry Hart showed up at the opening of “Oklahoma” and we see how, you know, hurt he is to be sort of passed by, that would be enough to give me 90 minutes of story. [Then I had a half hour] out of that, 40 minutes out of that, but I couldn't do that. And then when I thought, wow, if I could use this idea that this thing with this girl, that would give me enough. And then not only would the story be about his professional life unravelling, his personal life unraveling at the same time.
Ethan Hawke came into the room one day and he said to me, “You know, that scene in the coat room,” he goes, “We should play it like a little three act play.” He's a performer, a stage performer and he understands [how] to get the audience from here to there to there, and that's the way can do a 14-minute scene in a cold room. And I was really grateful that he brought that to the table.
And I like that it's not a play. It's too intimate, in a way. I don't know how you'd get that in a theatre. When, you know, he has that speech about, “You tell your mother that Ethan Hawke/[Larry Hart] is drunk with beauty and italicize the word drunk.” And then he pulls the hair for eyes. You're an inch away from her face, you know. I don't know how it would work anywhere else.
Kevin: Do we know what happened to Elizabeth?
Robert: No, I don't think we do. I think there was some discussion at the beginning of the movie, “Let's try to find her. We’ll interview her for this. But I don't think anybody was able to do then. And now that the film is sort of coming out, I think I'll take these letters that I own –which are carbons of letters – and I'll donate them to the Library of the Performing Arts or something, and let some more scholarly type than I am [do some] sleuthing, you know, and find out all about it.
VO: Kaplow includes other real-life figures to the evening’s events, including Andy White, better-known as E.B. White, the man who would later pen children’s books like “Stuart Little” and “Charlotte’s Web”. Through the first half hour of the film, as Larry Hart banters with Eddie the bartender, we become very aware of a man in grey sitting by himself at the back of the room, writing in his notebook. When Larry finally addresses his presence, it’s a great relief to the audience.
Robert: I'm a big E.B. White a fan, and thought Larry needed to talk to another writer, a writer of his level, you know. E.B. White would be a fan of his. And in fact, in one of E.B. White's children's booka, “The Trumpet of the Swan,” the Swan plays “There's a Small Hotel”. And then the more I worked on that, the more I thought, yeah, it's revealing. You learn more about Hart when he says like, you know, “I love your essays and I love that line you wrote, [‘The sea answers all questions and always the same way’],” you know, he's quoting him. He says, “I'm in love with your language. You can't change a comma. You're a musician.” And then White goes, “You’re the musician.”
I met Patrick Kennedy who played E.B. White when I was in Ireland when he was rehearsing. And he's really working, listening to audiotapes of E.B. White to try to get the voice to right 'cause you know, Patrick Kennedy’s English, he's an Englishman. He's asking me all these things. “What kind of notebook would E.B. White write in?” I mean, it's a relatively small part. That he was so invested! I was thinking at the time, “God, I wish I list part a little better.” And that's actually – that night, I wrote that line for him, “I don't think the adjective ‘great’ should ever proceed the word ‘war’,” in my attempt to make his part a little bit better.
VO: At one point in the film, Elizabeth introduces Larry to a classmate who introduces himself as George Hill.
Robert: I was trying to soak up because of Elizabeth. She's going to Yale School of Fine Arts. On eBay, I got a Yale University yearbook. I'm going through it, looking through the dramatics club, and there's somebody named George Roy Hill, and I go, this can't be [him]. And I look it up, and he is! He's Yale Class of 1943. So, I said, “Oh, I have to use that somehow.” That whole business where Hart says to him “Avoid love stories,” you know, “The real interesting stuff is friendship stories.” And I thought that's, you know, that's what George Roy Hill is going to do for the rest of his career. And if you don't get that stuff, you still get the movie.
VO: And of course, there’s an appearance from another soon-to-be-well-known-figure. A young boy simply credited as ‘Stevie’. Even though the young Stephen Sondheim likely wasn’t at that particular opening night, Robert Kaplow acknowledges…
VO: I couldn't resist it. It was just too much fun not to do, you know. You gotta be on your toes, but it's there if you want to get it. I'm sure you got it.
Kevin: Larry's life is really sort of a tragedy and I felt like what this film – or
can be viewed as a tragedy – and I thought what this film did well is it addressed those demons. It addressed sort of how painful that night might have been in the end of this friendship. But it also showed, even if it is in this small, you know, bar, that there were still people who loved and appreciated him. And I'm wondering what do you want people to think of Larry when they leave the cinema?
Robert: Well, that's a big question. But it is a tragic story, as you said. It’s a heartbreaking story. I think you see also Larry is resilient and adored by a small handful of people. As he says somewhere in the movie, “I've got this small handful of people I love and who love me.”
There's a moment where you think he might be leaving. They start singing “Blue Moon”, and he's like, “Well, this isn't a bad song,” you know.
In rehearsals, Ethan and Richard came in and they said, “You know that beat you wrote about how ‘Blue Moon’ had these other identities before it became ‘Blue Moon’?’” ‘Cause we had cut that for time. And they said, we're going to put that in at the end. So, as the camera’s moving away, Hart’s being funny at the end. He's being a storyteller. He's sort of psychologically back on his feet, even having sustained the injuries of Elizabeth and Richard Rogers, you know.
VO: Even now having seen a “Blue Moon” and even after speaking with Robert Kaplow, there’s still a part of me that can’t believe that a movie about Larry Hart was made at all, like it’s almost weird that people remember him. And then, I remember that trip to New York. The one where I made time to visit Larry’s grave at Mt. Zion Cemetery in Queens. Now, I’m not Jewish and I’m not religious or spiritual in life. But wanting to be respectful, I remembered the custom and pocketed a stone on my way to the cemetary. Walking towards his grave, I must have been ill-kept, forgotten-looking forgotten. Instead, I found the Hart family plot beautifully kept. Laid to rest across from his mother and father, Larry Hart’s headstone is pristine. Or at least it was 10 years ago. It reads “Beloved Brother, Lorenz Hart. Always in Our Hearts” with lyre or harp instrument engraved at the top. And as I reached in my pocket to lay the stone on the flat of the grave, I was stunned to see a dozen stones placed there already. It turns out there were others like me that I cared enough to make this trip. He hadn’t been forgotten. He’s remembered. And I hope with “Blue Moon” that he’ll continue to be remembered.
Thank you for listening to this episode. And a huge thanks to Robert Kaplow for speaking with me for this episode. I hope you get a chance to see “Blue Moon” at a city near you very soon. If you want to Robert Kaplow’s screenplay, you now have a chance to order it online. I’ve linked it in the description. Don’t forget to watch my companion episode to “Blue Moon” on YouTube. And if you want to support Staged Right in a flexible, affordable way, please consider contribution via my Ko-Fi or Patreon. Thank you for listening and stay tuned for more!