Marc and Dee Dee: The Choreographers You Never Knew

When Walt Disney began production on Mary Poppins (1964) in the early 1960s, he intended from the very beginning it would be a musical. Disney gave extra attention to each detail of the film, including hiring Julie Andrews to play the title role, Robert Stevenson to direct, Bill Walsh to co-produce, and Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman to write the music. Finding choreographers to stage the musical numbers, however, was a challenge for Walt, although he hired Tom Mahoney to choreograph Babes in Toyland (1961) as well as various episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club (1955-1956) and The Magical World of Disney (1954-1991), Mahoney, at this point, wasn’t available as he was committed to choreographing Bikini Beach (1964), which starred fellow Mouseketeers Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. 

Disney relied on “Poppins,” actor Dick Van Dyke to see if he knew any choreographers, and Van Dyke recommended a husband and wife team, Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood, with whom he had worked with on The Andy Williams Show (1962-1963). Prior to television, they had also choreographed the original production of the Broadway musical Do-Re-Mi, which has nothing to do with the song from The Sound of Music (1965). Although both husband and wife had made dancing credits on television and on Broadway, neither had ever choreographed a motion picture but it didn’t stop at Disney. 

In addition to choreographing all the dance numbers in the film, (from “Jolly Holliday,” to “Step in Time,”) both Breaux and Wood made other unique contributions to the film. Wood suggested that during the Jolly Holiday sequence, Mary Poppins’ umbrella and Bert’s cane, do an animatronic dance of their own. She originally thought that that would be impossible, though she was later told by someone “Never say that anything at Disney is impossible!” Breaux also provided the singing voice of the cow in the Jolly Holiday sequence. When they heard the Sherman brothers’ score, they both knew they were a part of something special, as did everyone else who was involved with the movie. 

Helping “Poppins,” become the blockbuster that it became, Breaux and Wood, were then hired to choreograph “The Sound of Music,” which reunited them with Julie Andrews and “Poppins,” conductor Irwin Kostal. In 1967, they were re-hired by Walt Disney to stage the musical numbers for The Happiest Millionaire, which ignited the film career of Lesley Ann Warren, and would also be the last live-action movie that Walt Disney would supervise. (He passed away during the film’s production.) Their next film after that was MGM’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), which also featured Irwin Kostal’s conducting, another score written by the Shermans, and was also a reunion for the two of them with Dick Van Dyke. 

Although their marriage would unfortunately end in divorce, they remained close and also choreographed movies such as United Artists’ Huckleberry Finn (1974), and Universal’s The Slipper and the Rose (1976), both of which also featured songs by the Shermans. In the later 1970s, Marc Breaux had some health issues and went to work as a film editor for Sunset Gower Studios until his retirement in the mid-1990s. Wood choreographed for a while longer and is also known for having choreographed the Touchstone Pictures film, Beaches (1988), which starred Bette Midler, as well as another episode of “Magical World of Disney.” She retired to Mesa, Arizona where she currently lives—and while her former husband remained in Los Angeles, he later rejoined her, where he sadly passed away on November 19th, 2013. Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood’s legacy of dance will live on: for most of us it will be in beloved favorites primarily in “Poppins,” “Sound of Music,” and “Chitty Chitty.”     

Disney on Broadway Part II!

This blog continues our tribute to Disney shows launched on Broadway. Starting with (“Beauty and the Beast,” and “The Lion King,”) Disney has become a “force of nature,” drawing huge crowds with their Broadway shows, largely re-working their film masterpieces for the stage. Please feel free to comment on anything you find interesting  

• “Mary Poppins,” opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre on November 16th, 2006. It received seven Tony Nominations, including Best Musical, and won the award for Best Scenic Design, playing a total of 2,619 performances. Gavin Lee originated the role of Bert the Chimney Sweep in “Mary Poppins,” on Broadway, in the first National Tour, and also in London’s Original West End Production which premiered two years prior at the Bristol Hippodrome. In addition to featuring the original film’s Academy-Award-Winning Score by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, the show also featured new music written by George Stiles and Anthony Drew.
• In 2007, Disney produced an original stage adaptation tour of the hit movie-musical, High School Musical. It was Disney’s first stage adaptation of a made-for-television movie. The tour started in Chicago, Illinois on August 1st, 2007 and ended in Salt Lake City, Utah on August 3rd, 2008. After closing in Utah, the tour went on to Canada and then the UK, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, and various other countries. In addition to all the classic songs from the original 2006 film being included in the show, the show also featured new music from a various list of composers.
• Disney’s Broadway Adaptation of The Little Mermaid, opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on January 10th, 2008. Starring Sierra Boggess as Ariel, Norm Lewis as King Triton, Eddie Korbich as Scuttle, Titus Burgess as Sebastian, and Brian D’Addario as Flounder, it was a smash success. (Incidentally, I am thrilled to have personally met each of them after seeing a performance in New York.) The show closed on August 30th, 2009 after a total of 685 performances and received Tony Nominations for Best Lighting Design of a Musical and Best Original Score Written for the Theatre for Alan Menken who also won the Best Original Score Oscar for the film version.
• In 2011, Disney collaborated with Whoopi Goldberg and Stage Entertainment to produce Sister Act: The Musical based on the 1992 Touchstone Pictures film of the same name (which starred Goldberg). The show opened at the Broadway Theatre on April 20th, 2010 and closed on August 26th, 2012 after a total of 561 performances. It was nominated for five Tonys, including Best Musical and featured the music of Alan Menken and the direction of Jerry Zaks, who had previously collaborated together in the 2003 Original Broadway Production of Little Shop of Horrors. “Sister Act,” also starred Fred Applegate as the Monsignor—he had previously played Lumiere in the first National Tour of “Beauty and the Beast.” 
• In 2012, Disney produced the play Peter and the Starcatcher, a prequel to the story of Peter Pan. The plot serves as a backstory for the characters of Peter Pan, Mrs. Darling, Tinker Bell, and Captain Hook. Written by Rick Elice, the play was nominated for nine Tonys. It won five, one of which was for Christian Borle who won in the category of Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play, for his performance as Black Stache, who is the character who goes on to become Captain Hook. (Prior to this play, Borle replaced Gavin Lee in the role of Bert in “Mary Poppins.)
• The same year as “Peter and the Starcatcher,” Disney also produced Newsies on Broadway. Opening at the Nederlander Theatre on March 29th, 2012 and closing on August 24th, 2014 after 1,004 performances, the show was nominated for eight Tonys, including Best Musical, and won two: Best Original Score and Best Choreography. Harvey Fierstein was the librettist for the show, and he received a Tony Nomination for his efforts. In addition to being a talented actor and librettist, Fierstein is also known at Disney for being the voice of Yao in Mulan (1998). Jeremy Jordan was also nominated for a Tony for his performance of Jack “Cowboy” Kelly, a role originated by Christian Bale in the 1992 film of the same name.
• In 2014, Disney produced Aladdin on Broadway. The show opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre on March 20th of that year and is still currently playing today. The show starred Adam Jacobs as Aladdin, Courtney Reed as Jasmine, and James Monroe Igelhart as the Genie. Jonathan Freeman, who ironically voiced Jafar in the original 1992 film, reprised his role as Jafar for the Broadway version (and still does). The show was nominated for five Tonys, including Best Musical, and won one for James Monroe Igelhart, which makes him the first actor ever to win a Tony for a performance in a Disney show on Broadway. I also had the blessing of getting to meet Mr. Igelhart and receive his autograph. He even agreed to pose for a selfie with me, along with Adam Jacobs and several other members of the cast. Currently, Adam Jacobs’s sister, Arielle Jacobs is playing the role of Jasmine on Broadway. (Arielle originated the role of Gabriella Montez in the Disney’s tour of “High School Musical.”)
• Most recently, on March 22nd, 2018, Disney produced Frozen on Broadway. The show opened at the St. James Theatre and continues its run, receiving three Tony Nominations, including Best Musical. The live show features a slightly different plot from the film (i.e. the song “Let it Go,” takes place after the songs “Reindeers Are Better Than People,” and “In Summer,” and The Duke of Weselton is credited as just “Weselton” in the show, and he is younger than he appears in the film). The show features music by Robert and Kristin Anderson-Lopez and the librettist is Jennifer Lee who co-directed the original 2013 film with Chris Buck. While the stage version didn’t win, Lee, Buck, and the Lopezes all won Oscars for their contributions to the film (the Lopezes for Best Original Song “Let it Go,” and Lee and Buck for Animated Feature Film, along with Peter Del Vecho as Producer). Each of the above have reunited for Disney’s upcoming sequel to Frozen, Frozen II which will be released on November 22nd, 2019.   

Disney has had a great track record on Broadway for a quarter of a century, and with the development of shows such as Father of the Bride, Alice in Wonderland, and Bambi, more great shows should be on their way soon.  

Disney on Broadway Part 1!

On February 8th 1993, Ron Logan, a former executive vice president of Walt Disney Entertainment, founded the Walt Disney Theatrical Group (now better known as Disney Theatrical Group). In the 26 years since its founding, the group has produced a total of 12 shows on Broadway and numerous national tours, along with some non-Broadway original shows. I thought we could explore interesting facts about what the Great White Way’s adaptations of classic Disney stories. Please feel free to comment on anything you find interesting. 

• The very first Disney film adapted for Broadway was Beauty and the Beast. The show premiered at the Palace Theatre on April 18th, 1994. It played a total of 5,461 performances, from 1994-2007, and won a Tony Award for Best Costume Design. Terrence Mann, Susan Egan, and Gary Beach, who originated the respective roles of the Beast, Belle, and Lumiere, all received Tony Nominations for their performances in the show. (Egan, would later be hired by the Walt Disney Studios again to provide the voice of Megara or “Meg” in Hercules (1997)). 
• Two months after “Beauty and the Beast” premiered on Broadway, Disney released their original film adaptation of The Lion King on June 24th. “Lion King,” would get its Broadway treatment three years later on November 13th, 1997 at the New Amsterdam Theatre and is currently playing today at the Minskoff Theatre. The original company won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical. It also starred Samuel E. Wright in the role of Mufasa, and he received a Tony Nomination for his performance. Ironically, Wright had previously voiced Sebastian in The Little Mermaid (1989) nearly a decade earlier.
• The same year that “Lion King,” premiered on Broadway, Sir Tim Rice, who collaborated with Alan Menken on the film version of Aladdin (1992) as well as the Broadway version of “Beauty and the Beast,” collaborated with Alan Menken on King David, which is a concert—not a fully staged musical—based on the Bible Story of David. The show opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre and played for a total of only nine performances. The cast featured Roger Bart as David’s friend Jonathan, and Judy Kuhn as Michal, David’s first wife. Bart is known at Disney for having been the singing voice of Hercules in Hercules (1997) and Kuhn is known at Disney for being the singing voice of Pocahontas in Pocahontas (1995). 
• The first Disney Theatrical Group show to open outside the U.S. was The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It opened at the Musical Theater Berlin in Berlin, Germany, on June 5th, 1999 and closed in June 2002. A readapted version played at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, California and ran from October 28th-December 7, 2014. Directed by Scott Schwartz, son of Stephen Schwartz, in collaboration with Alan Menken and was later transferred to the Paper Mill Playhouse where it ran from March 4th to April 5th, 2015. In 2017, the Berlin version reopened, transferring to Stuttgart in 2018.
• After Sir Elton John and Sir Tim Rice won well-deserved Oscars and Tonys for the Film and Broadway adaptations of “Lion King,” Disney was eager to rehire the pair for another project and they originally considered producing the opera of Aida as an animated movie-musical. It was Sir John, however, who convinced them to produce it directly as a stage musical, and Rice agreed. “Aida” premiered at the Palace Theatre on March 23rd, 2000 and played a total of 1,852 performances. It won four Tonys including Best Original Musical Score for John and Best Actress in a Musical for Heather Hedley who portrayed the title role in the show, and who had previously originated the role of Nala in “Lion King,” on Broadway.  
• Disney’s Tarzan opened at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on May 10th, 2006. Although the show managed to run over a year, it was critically a flop, failed to sell enough tickets, and only played 486 performances. Despite these failures on Broadway, the show later moved to the Netherlands where it ran for two years, and then Sweden where it played for one year, and then Germany where it played for ten years from 2008-2018. The show was also revived for the Tuachan Center for the Arts in Ivins, Utah where it ran from June-October 2010 and The Muny in St. Louis, Missouri where it ran from June-July 2014.
• In 2004, Disney Theatrical produced On the Record, a musical revue which featured an extraordinary range of music from Disney films, Disney shows on Broadway, and even Disneyland Attractions. The show toured for nine months, premiering in Cleveland, Ohio in 2004 and closing in Denver, Colorado in mid-2005. This wasn’t based on any specific plot, but it did feature two male leads and two female leads, one of whom was Ashley Brown. Brown would later become one of many actresses to succeed Susan Egan in the role of Belle in “Beauty and the Beast,” and after that she originated the title role in Disney’s next theatrical adaptation, Mary Poppins.

This brings us to the intermission of Disney on Broadway! More to come in next week’s blog. 

Roger Bart: He Who Helped Hercules Go the Distance

When filmmakers hire an actor to voice an animated character who also sings, a second actor is often hired to provide the singing voice, and the filmmakers have to make a completely seamless transition between the two different voices on screen. This happened a lot at Disney throughout their “Renaissance Period,” in the 1990s, and in this blog, I wanted to tell you about one of the actors who lent his singing voice to two Disney films: Roger Bart.

Roger Bart was born in Norwalk, Connecticut on September 29th, 1962, though he grew up in Bernardsville, New Jersey. He earned his BFA in Acting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 1985 and made his Broadway debut two years later in Big River, as Tom Sawyer. (replacing John Short who had originated the role). Next, he starred in touring productions of The Secret Garden (from ’92-’94) and The Who’s Tommy (from ’93-’95), and in 1996 he starred in the very first national tour of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (which also starred Ralph Macchio).

In 1997, Roger Bart made his official film debut when he was hired by Disney to provide the singing voice of the young teenage Hercules in Hercules (1997). Joshua Keaton was the speaking voice of the teenage Hercules and Tate Donovan voiced Hercules as an adult. Keaton originally supplied his singing voice for the character, but Disney decided to use Bart instead. For the film, Bart recorded the song “Go the Distance,” which earned an Academy Award Nomination for Best Original Song, though it lost to “My Heart Will Go On,” in Titanic (1997). 

In 1999, Roger Bart starred in the Broadway revival of the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which earned him the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his performance as Snoopy. He starred opposite Kristin Chenoweth, who also won a Tony for her performance as Charlie Brown’s sister, Sally Brown. The show played a total of 149 performances at the Ambassador Theater. 

Two years later, Bart was hired by Mel Brooks to originate the role of Carmen Ghia in the first Original Broadway Production of The Producers, starring Nathan Lane as Max Bialystock and Matthew Broderick as Leopold “Leo” Bloom. Bart was later cast as a replacement for Broderick in the role of Leo Bloom, though the role of Carmen Ghia earned him his second Tony Nomination. The show played for a total of 2,502 performances at the St. James Theatre and Roger Bart later reunited with Nathan Lane for revival of a musical called The Frogs in 2004 in which Lane both starred in and co-wrote the book. Bart also reunited with both Lane and Matthew Broderick for the 2005 film version of The Producers again playing the “Ghia” role. (The film was directed by Susan Stroman who had also directed and choreographed the Broadway version.) Two years later, he reunited with Mel Brooks and Stroman for the Broadway musical adaptation of Brooks’s comedy classic, Young Frankenstein, in which he played the role of Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, the role originated by Gene Wilder in the film.   

The same year that he starred in The Frogs, Roger Bart was hired by Disney to sing as Scamp, Lady and Tramp’s rebellious son, in the direct-to-video sequel, Lady and the Tramp 2: Scamp’s Adventure (2004). Scamp has a female love interest in the film, a dog named Angel voiced by Alyssa Milano, (though her singing voice was done by Susan Egan, a reunion of sorts for Bart and Egan since she provided both the speaking and singing voice of Megara or “Meg” in “Hercules.”)

Aside from his many film and theatre credits, Roger Bart also had numerous roles on television: Desperate Housewives (2004-2012), Revenge (2011-2015), Perception (2012-2015), and the Disney Channel Original Movie How to Build a Better Boy (2014). He is currently on the Freeform series Good Trouble (2019-present). 

Roger Bart is a very talented actor and singer, and had it not been for his exceptional voice, “Hercules,” wouldn’t be the underrated classic that it is.                       

Carl and Rob: Like Father, Like Son

When we think about talented show business families, we think the Barrymoores, the Redgraves, the Douglases, or even the Cusacks. One other name that would fit that bill would be the Reiners. Like all show business families, the Reiners have many generations of talent. Carl and Rob, in particular, both have exceptional skills in telling funny stories, though they also have other talented people in their families and in my own personal view, their range of talent hasn’t been given all the attention it deserves, so I thought we could explore that.

Carl Reiner was born in the Bronx, New York City on March 20th, 1922. He started on Broadway in his early 20s, performing in musicals like Inside U.S.A. and Call Me Mister, but ultimately worked his way up to television as one of the regular performers on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows (1950-1954). (Prior to his career as an entertainer, at 21 years old, Reiner married Estelle Lebost, who was eight years his senior.) Five years after “Your Show of Shows,” he developed a television pilot titled Head of the Family which was to be sit-com that parodied his real life with himself in the lead role of Rob Petrie. But CBS, who was to distribute it, disliked him in the leading role and suggested that he find someone else to play himself. Reiner then discovered Dick Van Dyke, and cast him along with Mary Tyler Moore as Laura, and Head of the Family was renamed The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966). Reiner cast himself as Rob, and his writing buddies, Buddy and Sally’s prima donna of a boss, Alan Brady on “Dick Van Dyke.” 

During and after “Dick Van Dyke,” aired on television, Carl Reiner also wrote and starred in the Doris Day/James Garner film The Thrill of It All (1963), and began a career in directing with the romantic comedy Enter Laughing (1967) based roughly on an autobiographical play that he wrote for Broadway in ’63. He also starred in the war comedy, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966). Reiner also directed Steve Martin in four movies, The Jerk (1979), Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), The Man with Two Brains (1983), and All of Me (1984), the middle two of which he also wrote with Martin. Reiner is also an accomplished author having written 16 books. He announced his 17th book, Too Busy to Die in 2017. 

Rob Reiner was born on March 6th, 1947 in New York City, New York. Rob made his acting debut in “Enter Laughing,” though the role that made him a household name was that of Michael “Meathead” Stivic in the sit-com All in the Family (1971-1978). Though he was talented as an actor, Rob Reiner aspired to follow in his father’s footsteps to be a director, and he became a true revolutionary of a director when he directed the very first film ever that defined the genre known as the mock-documentary or “mockumentary,” when me made This Is Spinal Tap in 1984. He followed that film with The Sure Thing (1985) and then the cult classic The Princess Bride (1987) and When Harry Met Sally (1989). Although his career as a director skyrocketed throughout the ‘80s, he never completely went away from appearing in front of the camera, alongside good friend Billy Crystal in Danny Devito’s Throw Momma From the Train (1987) and in Sleepless in Seattle (1993) which was written and directed by Nora Ephron (who also wrote “When Harry Met Sally.”) He achieved the highest honor of his career when A Few Good Men (1992), a film that he directed and co-produced was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture. 

Both “Princess Bride,” and “When Harry Met Sally” were special projects for Reiner because “Bride,” was based on his all-time favorite book and he was more eager to make it than any of his other movies. “When Harry Met Sally,” was also special because he identified with the character of Harry Burns in the sense of what it was like to be a bachelor after his divorce from Penny Marshall. He cast both his mother, Estelle, and his adopted daughter from his marriage to Marshall, Tracy Reiner, in small roles in “When Harry Met Sally.” Estelle is the woman in the Katz Deli scene where Meg Ryan “fakes it” and the woman next to her says “I’ll have what she’s having,” and Tracy plays the woman who is dating Harry in the “Pictionary.” Ironically, while making the film, Rob Reiner met his second wife, Michele Singer, which inspired he and Nora Ephron to have Harry and Sally get together by the end of the movie. He and Singer were married on May 19th, 1989, two months before “When Harry Met Sally,” was released to theaters.

The Reiners have a special legacy of humor in the entertainment industry. No doubt film and television audiences will continue to benefit from it.   

Women Directors: Great Work for a Long Time

Women have been directing films for nearly as long as men have, but unfortunately they haven’t always received all the credit they deserve for their talent and achievements. Alice Guy-Blache became the first female director ever in the history of film when she directed the French short Les demoilisseurs in 1896. Dorothy Arzner later became the first female director in Hollywood when she directed the drama Fashions for Women in 1927. Before Vincente Minnelli’s movie-musical version of Lerner and Lowe’s Gigi in 1958, there was a French version of that film, produced nine years earlier, directed by a woman named Jacqueline Audry. Let’s look at some of the finest female directors and the work that proves their skills as exceptional as their male counterparts. 

1. Penny Marshall made her directorial debut with an episode of the show Working Stiffs (1979) and various episodes of her own sit-com Laverne & Shirley (1976-1983), which was produced by her brother, Garry, her directing mentor. Then she moved to movies, directing Whoopi Goldberg in Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986) and Tom Hanks in Big (1988) which earned Hanks his first Academy Award Nomination for Best Actor and made Marshall the first female director to make a movie that grossed over $100 million dollars. Marshall and Hanks reunited on the film A League of Their Own (1992) which also made over $100 million. Her last theatrical film as director was Riding in Cars with Boys (2001) with Drew Barrymoore, though she continued to direct for television with episodes of According to Jim (2001-2009) and the television movie Women Without Men (2010). She also directed a documentary called Rodman (2019) about NBA Hall of Famer Denis Rodman before her unfortunate death on December 17th, 2018.      
2. Nancy Meyers co-wrote the screenplay for Private Benjamin (1980) with Harvey Miller and her then-husband Charles Shyer. The trio received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Original Screenplay as a result. She and Shyer officially married in ’80 and continued writing and producing in films such as Baby Boom (1987), and Touchstone’s remakes of Father of the Bride (1991) and Father of the Bride part 2 (1995), all of which starred Diane Keaton, with Shyer directing. Meyers, was also interested in directing, but remained focus on raising her family, until she received the offer by Walt Disney Pictures to direct the remake of The Parent Trap, released in 1998. Meyers and Shyer unfortunately divorced in 1999, but she continued to direct exceptional romantic comedies, including Something’s Gotta Give (2003), The Holiday (2006), and The Intern (2015). Most recently, she produced Home Again (2017) with Reese Witherspoon, and was directed by her daughter, Hallie Meyers-Shyer.     
3. Nora Ephron, before becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, began her career as a newspaper reporter at The New York Post. While there Ephron did a re-write for the script of All the President’s Men (1976) with her then-husband, Carl Bernstein, (who Dustin Hoffman plays in the movie). Although her script was not used, her efforts caught the attention of Paramount, who offered the chance to write the television movie Perfect Gentlemen (1978). This ultimately led to Nora Ephron's opportunity to write the screenplay for Silkwood (1983) starring Meryl Streep and it earned an Oscar Nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The same year as “Silkwood,” she wrote a novel called Heartburn which was based on the trauma she experienced while pregnant with her second child, only to discover that her husband was having an affair with their mutual friend. Heartburn was eventually made into a movie in 1986, which again starred Meryl Streep along with Jack Nicholson. Ephron wrote When Harry Met Sally in 1989 earning another Best Screenplay Oscar Nod and she worked her way up to directing in This Is My Life (1992). Next, she directed Sleepless In Seattle (1993) which reunited her with “When Harry Met Sally,” star Meg Ryan and was her first pairing with Tom Hanks. Ephron, Hanks and Ryan teamed up five years later, in 1998, for You’ve Got Mail. Her last film to write and direct was Julie & Julia in 2009, which was her third reunion with Meryl Streep. Before her sad death on June 26th, 2012, she wrote a Broadway play called Lucky Guy which reunited her for the third time with Tom Hanks and premiered after her death at the Broadhurst Theater on April 1st, 2013.      
4. Kathryn Bigelow became the very first female director ever to win a Best Director Oscar as well as the Best Picture Oscar when she produced and directed The Hurt Locker in 2009. The other four director nominees were men that year, one of whom ironically, was her former husband, James Cameron who was nominated that year for the blockbuster smash hit, Avatar. Bigelow originally was a painting student at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts, though she entered the film program at Columbia University, where she earned her Masters and while there directed her first film which was a short called The Set-Up in 1978. She made her official directorial debut three years later in 1981, co-directing The Loveless with Monty Montgomery which catapulted Willem Dafoe to stardom. She married James Cameron in 1989, though they divorced only two years later in 1991. Despite their divorce, they collaborated together on the Crime Drama Strange Days (1995) starring Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett. Cameron wrote and produced the film while Bigelow directed. Bigelow also directed The Weight of Water in 2000 and K-19: The Widowmaker in 2002. Three years after her two Oscar wins for “Hurt Locker,” she directed Zero Dark Thirty in 2012, which earned another Oscar nod for Best Picture.

Pixar Animation Studios have produced a total 20 feature length films and nearly 40 shorts that have been collaborative efforts with Walt Disney Studios. And they usually are directed by men. But in 2012, Brenda Chapman co-wrote and co-directed Brave with Mark Andrews and Steve Purcell which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film, making Chapman the first female director ever to win an Oscar for directing an animated film. And this past year, Domee Shi wrote and directed the Short film Bao (2018) which played in theaters in front of Incredibles 2 (2018). In addition to being a story writer on several beloved Disney classics (i.e. Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994), and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996),) Brenda Chapman also co-directed The Prince of Egypt (1998) for Dreamworks with Simon Wells and Steve Hickner. Domee Shi was a story artist on The Good Dinosaur (2015), Inside Out (2015), and “Incredibles 2,” before she worked her way up to directing “Bao,” and she is currently scheduled to direct an untitled Pixar film to be released in 2022. 

Thankfully, there are many fantastic female directors working today, and not enough time to make this an exhaustive discussion of all of them. Greta Gurwig (Lady Bird), Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman), Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation), Dee Rees (Mudbound) and Ava Duvernay (Selma) all come to mind…no doubt movie fans everywhere are benefitting from their continued contributions.        

1961: The Beginning of the End

The 1960s was an incredible decade in our nation’s history, especially in the year 1961. On January 20th of that year John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was sworn in as President of the United States of America. On April 23rd of ’61, Judy Garland performed her legendary “comeback” concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City, and on August 5th the theme park Six Flags Over Texas officially opened in Arlington, TX. The 1960s was also the decade that all movie studios had to modernize their styles of filming because the “counterculture” revolution began. Cultural and political perspectives around the globe were beginning to change the way audiences viewed movies and they demanded more from their films. So, Walt Disney made his contribution to the ‘60s by producing films that experimented with new technology. 1961 is a year full of special films, along with some other notable accomplishments. 

On January 25th, 1961, Walt Disney produced 101 Dalmatians. The film was a major ordeal at the studio because it was their first animated feature since Sleeping Beauty (1959), which unfortunately had been a flop two years earlier. It was also their first animated feature to be completely produced using “Xerox photography” instead of their usual “Ink and Paint photography” which was used on every animated film prior to “Dalmatians.” Walt’s long-term friend and business partner, Ub Iwerks was the inventor of the “Xerox,” process and in inventing it, he made it possible for drawings to be applied to Xerox cells as opposed to a piece of paper. He actually first applied it to the dragon fight sequence in “Sleeping Beauty.” “Dalmatians,” was a huge hit for Disney, thanks to the new technology. It received a great deal of critical acclaim, some of whom said it was the closest to a real “Disney” film in years. They had never seen that many animated characters…just think about all those spots.  

In ’61, Disney also released both The Absent-Minded Professor and The Parent Trap. Like “Dalmatians,” both films were the studios first uses of a new technology. Petro Vlahos, who is credited with having invented the sodium vapor process (live actors performing on a set piece surrounded by lights combined with background footage filmed at a completely different time). Vlahos had originally invented it for Ben-Hur (1959), but came to Disney in the ‘60s where he recreated his process. The sodium vapor process was first applied to “The Absent-Minded Professor.” Robert E. Mattey and Eustace Lycett also added miniatures and wire-supported mockups to Vlahos’s work and the film was nominated for a Best Special Effects Oscar as a result. “Parent Trap,” combined the sodium vapor process with split-screen technology, which is what created the “twins” illusion even though the twins were played by one actress, Hayley Mills. Disney continued use of the “sodium vapor process” in Mary Poppins (1964), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and various other films during the 1970s and ‘80s.

’61 was also the year that Walt Disney had the Disneyland Monorail System extend to the Disneyland Hotel. It was also the year in which he co-founded the California Institute for the Arts, or CalArts for short. CalArts was established as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United States for students of visual and performing arts. Several people who attended later became employees of the Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios. Famous alumni include Tim Burton, Brad Bird (writer/director of The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007)), and Glen Keane (supervising animator of Ariel in The Little Mermaid (1989) and the Beast in Beauty and the Beast (1991)). Bird and Keane were both mentored by Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men.

Walt Disney achieved many other “firsts” until the very end of his life, which sadly would only be five years later, in 1966, at 65 years of age. But 1961 was a unique year for the studios, and helped set the stage for more to come.