Movie, She Wrote: Singin' in the Rain and Betty Comden
Did you know that many of your favourite film classics were written by women? Here's the second instalment of our mini-series looking back at some of our favourites.
Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen created the legendary dance scenes, the songs were existing hits from the 1920s and 30s – but who pulled the moving parts together to create one of the biggest Hollywood musicals of all time?
One half of Singin’ in the Rain’s hit writing team was American lyricist, playwright and screenwriter, Betty Comden.
Betty was part of the longest-running creative team in theatre history. She and Adolph Green started working together in a nightclub act in 1939 Greenwich Village, drawing a crowd of fans including a little-known composer called Leonard Bernstein.
A few years later, Bernstein needed writers for a new project - the lyrics and book for his new Broadway musical about three sailors on leave in New York: On the Town. He asked his old pals, Betty and Adolph. Betty said, “You don’t know you can do it till you do it. It was the first time we’d written not just the whole show but also real songs.” (They also threw in a couple of parts for themselves.)
The show’s huge success led to a contract with MGM Studios, and the duo began writing for some of the most iconic musicals on screen – including the screen adaptation of On the Town for Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly and The Barkleys of Broadway for Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.
It was 1949 when their boss, famed lyricist and producer Arthur Freed, called them into his office and gave them their next assignment. They didn’t know then that they were about to embark on their biggest ever hit.
Betty tells it best:
“‘That's right, kids,’ - he always called us kids ‘- Well, kids, your next movie is going to be called Singin' in the Rain, and it is going to have all my songs in it.’ And that was that. That was the whole assignment. And it may not sound very difficult, but it was terribly hard to do, almost impossible … you have to create a whole new story with characters and situations that fit the already existing songs. It's like working backwards.”
They were given around a hundred old songs to sift through and told simply to ‘Go write a movie’. All they knew was that, at some point in the film, someone would be out in the rain and singing about it!
[Did you know the song Singin’ in the Rain existed before the musical? It was first used on screen in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Watch this…]
Betty and Adolph laboured over the screenplay and were soon delighted to be reunited with Gene Kelly. They met with Gene and co-director Stanley Donen to go over the film shot by shot, which meant long days in the studio, and even longer evenings hanging out at Gene’s house. [Can you picture them all, ‘Old Fashioned’s in hand, singing around the piano and laughing off the bad ideas? That’s how we see it anyway!]
“We had a great shorthand with both Gene and Stanley because we were all old friends, going back to our nightclub days. So we didn't have to explain things to them. Another director might have said, ‘What is this craziness? What do you think you're doing?’ Or ‘How the hell are we going to do that?’ But Gene and Stanley were used to the way our minds worked.”
Betty Comden
Betty first saw a full cut of their film in a “grubby little equipment room” at MGM. She and Adolph carried in two chairs and sat down to watch - just the two of them. “It was wonderful!” said Betty, “… it just knocked us out.” Imagine them seeing this part of their script coming to life…
Betty and Adolph’s working partnership spanned six decades of theatre and screen work and they were known to finish each other’s sentences. Adolph passed first and at his Broadway memorial in 2002, while reminiscing about her long-time partner, Comden remarked: "It's lonely up here.” She died four years later, aged 89.
If you enjoyed this backstory, we’d really appreciate it if you subscribe to follow along (if you haven’t already). We’d love to have you as part of our backstory gang! It’s quick and all it takes is an email address.
Loved seeing the old Singing in the Rain clip and how they had to “work backwards”. Thank you!
Sounds like a pretty unconventional movie making process! Look at them at the end there - sweet duo ❤️