The Brooklyn Rail

The new film Blue Moon began with a phone call twelve years ago, when filmmaker Richard Linklater contacted his friend and collaborator, the writer and former-teacher Robert Kaplow, and asked what he was up to. When Kaplow said he was trying to write something about the song lyricist Lorenz Hart, Linklater said, “I’m really interested in Lorenz Hart. Could I read it?”

The film begins with WQXR’s radio obituary of lyricist Lorenz “Larry” Hart, called one of America’s foremost songwriters. With Richard Rogers, Hart created such songs as, “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “Bewitched,” and “Blue Moon.”

Blue Moon, starring Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart, with Kaplow as screenwriter and Linklater as director and co-producer, opens in New York City and Los Angeles October 17 and enters wider release October 24. The film is being distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.

D.Z. Stone (Rail): What is it about Lorenz Hart that drew you to write about him?

Robert Kaplow: Songwriting has always interested me—particularly that era which produced so many American standards. I thought, at one point in my younger days, that I might even become a songwriter since I showed some talent in that field. In my early twenties, I was at the Library for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Center listening to a three-hour audio interview with Richard Rodgers. When Rodgers got to the part about leaving his partner, Lorenz Hart, he was so cold and businesslike that I actually felt a chill in my heart, sitting in that little listening booth wearing those gigantic headphones. I knew then I wanted to write about the end of their partnership. I thought about it for decades.

Richard Linklater: Just a fan I guess. I’d grown up with Rodgers and Hammerstein, but, somewhere in my twenties, really dialed into Rodgers and Hart, first via Ella Fitzgerald’s songbook album. It took me a while to realize this Rodgers was the same Rodgers I had grown up listening to—the music is so different and seemingly from such different eras, I didn’t comprehend it. I remember reading a little about their collaboration, Hart’s life, and what a character he was. And let’s just say it: Robert’s idea to see the opening night of Oklahoma! through Larry Hart’s perspective is the big idea here—sad, funny, perverse, but exhilarating, I thought.

Rail: Does Oklahoma! mean something to you personally?

Kaplow: To tell the end of Rodgers and Hart, you really have to use the opening of Oklahoma! It’s the first show Rodgers would write without Hart, and, aside from some Hart interpolations into old shows, Rodgers would never look back. One of the producers of Oklahoma!, Theresa Helburn, wrote about Larry Hart in her autobiography A Wayward Quest: “I have always believed that it was seeing the play [Oklahoma!] on opening night that broke his heart and hastened his death. Poor Larry, so warm and exuberant and sweet in spite of his underlying sadness. Larry, who was never quite in tune with life.”

Rail: Growing up in Texas, when did you first encounter Oklahoma!?

Linklater: After growing up with the soundtrack, I first saw it in a school play environment, probably like 98 percent of the population. I always liked the music, of course, but had no real critical perspective on it one way or another. In the Blue Moon script, I really responded to Larry’s irreverent, sharp-edged angle on it, with the knowledge that it’s coming from such a wounded place. So witty and biting, but I think Oklahoma! can take it.

Rail: The film is set entirely within one evening at the famous Broadway restaurant Sardi’s. What was the thinking behind this choice?

Kaplow: It seemed the only choice. And I think that choice would have scared away many directors and producers. I can just imagine some producer flipping through the script and saying, “Uh, and exactly when do they leave the bar, Robert?” In making Blue Moon, no one ever said that to me.

Linklater: Well, that’s Robert’s idea of course, and fits nicely with my sensibility—I’ve done these enclosed stories before, and in real time too, which this pretty much is. I think Robert was tempted to open it up a bit over the years, but I was always into the minimal time and space framework and the cinematic challenge that presents.

Rail: Blue Moon is grounded in New York City but was shot entirely in Ireland. Was it hard to create a New York mood somewhere so far away?

Kaplow: That’s more of a question for Richard than for me.

Rail: Well, was it difficult?

Linklater: Not at all. First off, the New York of 1943 isn’t easily accessible, in New York or anywhere else. It has to be constructed, and that goes for the mood and atmosphere too, so you can bring that spirit anywhere, I believe.

[Linklater and Kaplow’s first collaboration began in 2006, when Linklater purchased the film rights for Kaplow’s 2003 novel Me and Orson Welles. The novel, set in 1937 New York City, is a fictional account of a young actor tagging along with Welles as he creates his theatrical and radio careers. Kaplow would visit the set and advise the production. The film was released in 2008.]

Rail: Blue Moon takes place in 1943 on the opening night of the musical Oklahoma! Your last collaboration, Me and Orson Welles, was a 1937 Broadway story. What is it about Broadway of the 1930–40s that intrigues you? 

Kaplow: Hard to say. The pure craftsmanship of those plays, songs, and librettos is still thrilling. The best of those songs and shows still stand tall—still speak with eloquence, humor, and passion.

Linklater: I think people might see a disconnect between some of my more rock-and-roll movies and these, but what can I say? I grew up in a living room full of show tunes—my mom always had a soundtrack going. And somewhere along the way, I realized I was also obsessed with big band music. I’d go home from a punk show and be listening to Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, or Artie Shaw—my grandparents’ music, but I loved the sound and energy of it. When we did Me and Orson Welles, I was like, “No music supervisor necessary. I got this.”

Rail: For Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke gave you notes on your script. What was it like for your creative process to have the actor playing the lead role give you feedback?

Kaplow: The best part about Ethan’s notes and Richard’s notes were that they were always in the best interests of the story—and nothing else. Richard’s films often have a spontaneous and playful feeling to them, but I saw firsthand how hard-won that sense of spontaneity is. It emerges after months of script editing and revisions and rehearsals. Richard’s gift is his ability to render all that work invisible.

Rail: Do you encourage actors in your films to give notes on scripts?

Linklater: “Give notes” sounds so official. I don’t really want to hear an actor’s notes, I want to start working with them, hearing it out loud, and see what ideas are conjured in that process. I appreciate other’s ideas, especially actors who are portraying the characters, but I most look forward to the new ideas I’m going to have in this process.

Rail: So how is it that a former teacher from New Jersey and a filmmaker from Texas developed such a creative rapport?

Kaplow: “Creative rapport” is a lovely phrase—and I’m not really sure I understand what that means or how it works. But there it is. Linklater’s got this European sense of directing—he’s willing to let a scene breathe, play long, move at its own pace. The first Linklater film I ever saw—years before I met him—was Before Sunrise, and there’s a long sequence with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy where they’re simply playing a pinball machine, asking questions of each other. I remember watching that scene and thinking, “This is a play. That’s why it’s so good.” (Plus I loved those old electromagnetic pinball machines.) It’s the kind of scene François Truffaut or Éric Rohmer could have pulled off—but it had its own sly sense of comedy. A lot of my writing probably aims for a similar vibe. Maybe that’s the connection.

Linklater: Well, I don’t think of it in geographical terms, but rather in a synching of sensibilities. We’re interested in a lot of the same things and are both oddballs when it comes to certain cultural histories: we’re comfortable and really happy in these other eras.                                   

Rail: Lorenz Hart had a successful career that ended in a tragic way. Why the decision to focus on perhaps the saddest night of his life?

Kaplow: I don’t think it was the saddest night of his life. I think it may have been the bravest night of his life. And Blue Moon dramatizes the unravelling of two friendships in Hart’s life: one personal, one professional. It’s just a good story.

Linklater: By all accounts he was at the opening with his mom and having a great time. I’m pretty sure the saddest night of his life was when his mother passed away shortly after this, and he never really recovered from that, as in, he was probably never much sober from then to the end, seven months later. So yes, a sad, premature end to such an inspired life, but here we are eighty-two years later still loving his songs, and him.

Rail: After all your research for the film, what is your opinion of Hart’s ex-collaborator Richard Rodgers?

Kaplow: He’s the great talent of American popular songwriting—more talented, I think, than even George Gershwin. The Rodgers and Hart songs have lasted. “My Funny Valentine” is eighty-eight years old—and I think it will be sung as long as people still sing popular songs. What songs from our contemporary culture will still be around eighty-eight years from now? What songs will be around eighty-eight weeks from now?

Linklater: It’s only gone up over the years, the closer I get. I think he’s one of the top five composers of the twentieth century, and this two-part career—the Hart and Hammerstein eras—is amazing. That he could keep developing and adapting, and have such a long and staggeringly successful run—it’s kind of breathtaking.

Rail: The film is about the collapse of a famous creative partnership. Do you think such a breakup has the emotional intensity, the sadness, and the grief of a divorce?

Kaplow: Having never been divorced, I can’t meaningfully answer that one. But I do think the film is a powerful lament for the death of a friendship.

Linklater: I find artistic breakups much more interesting and sad than couples parting—that happens all the time, and everybody can kind of understand it. Artists calling it quits—it’s harder to fathom exactly what’s wrong. Like here with Larry’s drinking and unreliability, it is often something outside the art itself causing the problems. I’ve been through a couple: it’s a slow-moving and painful journey usually, when you realize you just can’t do it anymore, and you have to protect your art over the person who’s making themselves impossible to work with any longer. We see the love, frustration, and toll it’s taken on Rodgers, and it’s devastating.

Rail: How did you decide how Blue Moon should end?

Kaplow: I don’t know how else the film could have ended. In one of my endless revisions of the screenplay, the film actually ended with a musical sequence—a sort of fantasy. It was great fun to write, but I’m glad it never made the final cut. Would probably have undone the mood of the film.

Linklater: Endings are delicate, but it made the most sense for this story to realize it’s really over for Larry when Rodgers and Elizabeth Weiland leave, but he’s going to sit there, drinking and telling stories, until they kick him out. My tagline for this has always been: “Forgotten, but not gone.”