HOLLYWOOD REUNION: BEHIND THE MUSICAL 

LA Weekly 

September 20, 2002

It's almost 45 minutes before the screening to honor the 50th anniversary and new DVD release of Singin' in the Rain, perhaps the greatest American screen musical ever, but the theater at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is already packed. The best seat I can find is in the back on the far right-hand side, in a row just in front of a manager type who is conducting a very loud, lengthy, public, coddling cell-phone conversation with a very busy celebrity.

"Sally Struthers," he announces grandly to his date when he finally hangs up.

While trying to wrap my head around that, I spot Gene Kelly's third and last wife, Patricia Ward Kelly, settling into a power spot - next to host Michael Feinstein and just ahead of the film's stars Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor. Meanwhile, Kelly's eldest daughter, Kerry Kelly Novick, locates a seat as far away from Ward Kelly as possible. Novick hasn't set eyes on her younger stepmother since her father's death six years ago. Her grievance? According to her quotes in yesterday's New York Post, "[Patricia] isolated my father from all his old friends, the family retained lawyers and doctors and had his will rewritten to give her everything." The lights begin to dim.

Kelly's insanely radiant musical-comedy classic appears onscreen, and suddenly it's 1927, Hollywood is in turmoil over the conversion from silent to sound pictures, and Don Lockwood (Kelly), a womanizing, nearly over-the-hill movie star, is falling for the dancer-ingénue played by a 19-year-old Reynolds. Together with Lockwood's wacky studio-musician best friend (O'Connor), the trio set out to turn a lavish howler of a talkie into a glittering, all-singing, all-hoofing musical.

For 108 minutes, the crowd explodes into noisy applause after every dance number, with sustained bouts of cheering for O'Connor's wall-sprinting acrobatics in "Make 'Em Laugh" and Kelly's now-iconic puddle-splashing tap dance, "Singin' in the Rain." After
the credits roll, the audience jumps to its feet and roars. Then, something amazing occurs, at least for a Los Angeles weeknight crowd: It's 10 o'clock, and virtually everyone stays for the Singin' in the Rain reunion panel discussion.

Assembling on the stage are a trim O'Connor and Reynolds, who bounds up the stairs with a shower of light bouncing off her figure-hugging, royal-blue sparkly Las Vegas headliner getup. Cyd Charisse and Rita Moreno, who both make cameo appearances in the film, find seats. New York­based Singin' in the Rain screenwriters Adolph Green and Betty Comden, both eighty-something, roll out in wheelchairs. Green broke his leg. What happened to Comden? "I got jealous," she jokes. Actually, she slipped and bruised her hip at a Singin' in the Rain screening at the Telluride Film Festival, but in the end she's a comedy writer - she couldn't resist punching up the scenario.

The way Green and Comden tell it, writing Singin' in the Rain was one of those uniquely peculiar Hollywood tasks: Producer Arthur Freed handed them a pile of songs he'd written with his partner, Nacio Herb Brown - most of them back-catalog Freed-Brown songs from other movies, and one of them, "Make 'Em Laugh," a direct
rip-off of Cole Porter's "Be a Clown." Their job was to find a story using the songs.

"We were in total despair. What were we going to do?" says Green, describing how they holed up for more than eight weeks in their dinky MGM office before cracking the structure.

When asked about choreographing the gravity-defying "Make 'Em Laugh" dance number, O'Connor admits to throwing in so many stunts and pratfalls that he feared he'd be left with only one possible ending. "I was building to such a crescendo," he says, "I thought I'd actually have to commit suicide."

The most outrageous antics of the evening belong to Reynolds. When Moreno gushingly describes Elizabeth Taylor as "my idol," Reynolds springs from her seat and pretends to storm off the stage. "Get over it!" Moreno shoots back with a shrug and dismissive wave of her hand. (Taylor broke up Reynolds' marriage to Eddie Fisher back in 1959.)

Then there is the moment when Adolph Green compliments Charisse on her show-stopping dream-sequence ballet. Reynolds pipes in, "Oh, you just like her legs!" She leans over, ogles Charisse's still shapely gams and does everything but let out a wolf whistle. "I like her legs! And I'm straight!"