Every time Steven Spielberg asks me to put in writing for him, I discover myself doing one thing I’ve by no means achieved earlier than. For “Munich,” I had to determine how one can write prolonged motion sequences, a ability they don’t educate you in playwriting faculty. Below Steven’s steering, I finally discovered these automobile chases and gun fights and conflicts exhilarating to put in writing and upsetting in the way in which I wish to be upset once I’m working. The screenplay for “Lincoln” required distilling Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 800-page “Group of Rivals” right into a feature-length script. My first draft was 500 pages. Six years and eight drafts later, I had gotten it to 150 pages — shorter than “Munich”!
When Steven requested me to put in writing the screenplay for a brand new model of “West Aspect Story,” he invited me to a feast of formidable challenges. I like “West Aspect Story,” I at all times wished to work with Stephen Sondheim, and I’ve come to appreciate that my writerly self-respect is snarled in scaring myself. I had by no means written the guide for a giant display screen musical, and a cherished traditional at that. So how may I say no?
After I referred to as Sondheim, he jogged my memory that I’d at all times insisted I didn’t wish to write a guide for a musical. Possibly, he prompt, I lastly received what he had tried a number of instances to elucidate to me: Musicals, like movies, are intensely collaborative, and a guide author offers the construction that makes it doable for the assorted artists — author, composer, lyricist, choreographer and director — to work with a single objective in telling a narrative. It’s what Arthur Laurents had achieved when he condensed Shakespeare’s five-act tragedy [“Romeo and Juliet”] right into a two-act narrative that made house for 11 yet-to-be-written songs and several other prolonged dance sequences for the 1961 model.
I started to grasp that my activity was principally the identical as that confronted by each author: to determine the bare-bones construction of a world, to assemble the topography that rests upon it, after which to populate it. Armed with this job description, I finished relating to Leonard Bernstein’s and Sondheim’s magnificent rating as a string of immortal, immutable moments I needed to join with dialogue. As a substitute, I felt I had permission to dig into each nook of “West Aspect Story,” to put in writing not round however alongside and thru its songs and dances, treating them as continuations of the plot and the characters’ journeys — basically what I’d discovered to do from the motion sequences in “Munich.”
Steven and I had no want to make modifications merely for the sake of constructing modifications, and we wished to keep away from alterations that will betray the musical’s spirit and soul. However I felt it could be doable to “complexify” and deepen the story by fleshing out the lives of the characters, making some modifications within the track order, setting some songs in new places and even, in a few situations, altering which characters would sing them.
For instance, I wished to specify that Bernardo had turn out to be an area hero, a neighborhood star. Whereas I used to be studying about Puerto Rican boxers within the Nineteen Fifties, a couplet from “America” got here into my head: “Life could be vivid in America / When you can battle in America,” together with the percussive beats within the music meant to simulate punching. So Bernardo grew to become a boxer.
I wished to know extra about Bernardo’s buddy Chino, who turns into María’s shy, awkward suitor after which Bernardo’s avenger. So I wrote a scene during which we be taught that Bernardo admires Chino’s brains and gained’t enable him to battle. Within the dance on the gymnasium, towards the tip of the mambo part, there’s a musical passage that struck me as reckless and goofy. I assumed it could be an ideal second for Chino to danger embarrassing himself by taking to the dance ground to impress María.
It appeared to me that Tony ought extra to resemble the opposite Jets, particularly Riff. In our model, Tony is striving to interrupt together with his powerful, violent previous. His first track, “One thing’s Coming,” is a stupendous, hopeful soliloquy, however Sondheim’s lyrics have an ambiguous depth; they’re a succession of tentative goals that start with a query: “May very well be, who is aware of?” The track ends on a word of certified, unassertive optimism, as Tony sings “Possibly tonight …” To underscore this division between hope and doubt, I made the track Tony’s response to Valentina, the widow of the unique proprietor of the pharmacy, who’s Tony’s boss and his benefactor and the one main character I invented. Her presence provides Tony a brand new motive, a brand new have to sing the track.
I moved “America” from the nighttime rooftop the place it was set within the 1961 movie to the morning streets of San Juan Hill; it’s a debate about racism, discrimination and financial alternative that comes to incorporate your entire neighborhood. Gimbel’s division retailer grew to become the setting for “I Really feel Fairly,” which we restored to its authentic place after the rumble, the place the enjoyment María is saying positive factors a horrible poignancy.
In our model, María and Tony trade vows and sing “One Hand, One Coronary heart” on the Cloisters Museum, certainly one of my favourite locations in New York, the place modern-day lovers can take a subway to the medieval world of Romeo and Juliet. I requested Steven if we may give “Someplace,” sung by Tony and María within the movie and by a dream character within the authentic musical, to Rita Moreno. I knew she’d make audiences hear the track’s eager for a greater world and its undercurrent of grief that that world has not but arrived. And I modified “Cool” to deepen the battle between Riff and Tony, and to provide a spot of prominence to the story’s final instrument of tragedy, the gun.
“West Aspect Story” has the mysterious capability of most nice works of dramatic artwork — it presents room for transformation whereas remaining its unmistakable self. One of many causes Steven wished to make this film, and a motive I used to be thrilled to hitch him, was the chance to point out our love for the musical by it from a unique approach, to deliver it to life for individuals who have by no means seen it earlier than, and to deliver it to new life for individuals who have.
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