Back in the summer of 2008, I went with my older brother and his friend to the movie theater to see Wall-E. As the film began, there was this song playing in the background and was repeated a few times throughout. The song was apparently coming from this old movie musical that the title character occasionally watched while he wasn’t cleaning up all the trash that was left behind on Earth. I remember whenever Wall-E watched that old movie, I kept wondering what it was suppose to be. Later on, I found out what the movie was on the IMDB page for Wall-E as well as a certain actor whose voice was heard from it...
Hello, Dolly! is an adaptation of the 1964 Broadway musical by Michael Stewart & Jerry Herman which in part is based on Thornton Wilder's 1954 stage play, The Matchmaker.
In 1965, Richard Zanuck purchased the film rights to Hello, Dolly! from David Merrick. In the deal, Zanuck agreed with Merrick not to release the film until the Broadway show ended its run.
When the film was completed, the original contract was renegotiated to allow for its release (at a significant penalty to Fox). The film did open in December of 1969, even though the show was still going strong on Broadway. Twentieth-Century Fox announced its purchase of the rights to film the musical on March 9, 1965 with Merrick, the producer of the stage musical, to receive $2,000,000 and 25% of the film gross.
Determined to have another Sound of Music on their hands, the studio forged ahead on Hello, Dolly!. Written into the contract was a seemingly insignificant clause which stipulated that 20th could not release the film until the play closed on Broadway or until June 20th, 1971-whichever came first.
When Barbra Streisand was signed on as Dolly Levi, it was done with all possible fanfare. At 25, Barbra Streisand might have been an odd choice to play the middle-aged widow Dolly Levi in the film version since the musical had won a Tony Award for Carol Channing. Channing was considered too zany and wacky to repeat her signature role for the screen. Having seen the result of Thoroughly Modern Millie, screenwriter Ernest Lehman felt her outsized personality would be too much for an entire film. Box office favorites who were considered and courted for the role before Streisand accepted it were Lucille Ball and Elizabeth Taylor. Barbra was a fresh, new, and immensely talented performer, so giving her the chance to reinvent the age-old character of Dolly only seemed logical.
At the time of the planning stages, Streisand was shooting the film that would earn her the Best Actress Oscar, Funny Girl. Unfortunately for Streisand she was seen as an ‘upstart’ by those in Hollywood who felt she had stolen the part from Channing when Richard Zanuck announced her casting on May 8th, 1967. Richard Coe summed up the feeling in the May 11th, 1967 edition of The Washington Post writing, "Would you believe Barbra Streisand for the screen's Hello, Dolly!? Well, that's the knuckle headed fact...With all due respect to young Miss Streisand, the mournful Nefertiti is clearly not the outgoing, zestful Irish woman whose vitality brightens Thornton Wilder's mature, life-loving Dolly Gallagher-Levi. The perversity of not choosing to get Carol Channing's musical-comedy classic on film is hard to fathom”.
Channing later remembered, "I was doing Hello, Dolly! at Expo '67 at the time, and when they announced the star for the movie on that great day I had the feeling I was Mark Twain and had just died and become an observer at my funeral".
Reports were also coming from Columbia Studios over Streisand's repeated demand for retakes on Funny Girl which supposedly cost the studio an extra $200,000.
Streisand accepted the role and went to the studio for wardrobe fitting on February 13th, 1968. She was unhappy in the role, which she really didn't want and which Carol Channing desperately did. Channing, however, made one concession to Barbra in her 2002 memoir Just Lucky, I Guess. According to Broadway's Dolly, Barbra Streisand's singing in the film "was beautiful."
All in all, it was not a happy shoot. There was an 89 day shooting schedule on Hello, Dolly!, and at the end of the first week’s shooting producer Ernest Lehman still did not have a completed budget. This was only the second film he was producing. The first was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The disparity between the two films at the time overwhelmed him. From a four character film to this! Ernest Lehman was primarily a screenwriter. He received 6 Academy Award nominations during his screenwriting career. In 2001, he received an honorary Oscar for his body of work, the first screenwriter to receive that honor.
For one gargantuan parade scene, over four thousand extras were hired. Hello, Dolly! went on location for a month in Garrison New York and the weather in the east was always a problem. The budget for Hello, Dolly! had begun at $10 million and by 1968 had swollen to $25 million, $2 million alone was spent on the recreation of Fifth Avenue on the Fox lot.
They filmed it in 1968, but the film wasn’t released until almost a year and a half later-and then, only after a large cash settlement had been made with Merrick. Life Magazine reported in its February 14th, 1969 issue that Richard Zanuck of 20th Century Fox wanted to release it but David Merrick would not let him. The film would be released in December of 1969. Merrick was too shrewd a businessman to play out this string much longer. He did, however, hold on as long as he could. His one goal was to break the previous record that My Fair Lady held as longest running show. He didn’t want anything to get in his way of making that happen.
Besides being one of the last of the old-time Hollywood musicals Hello, Dolly!, at a production cost of approximately $25,000,000 (in 1968 currency), is also one of the most expensive ever made.
20th Century Fox lavishly recreated several blocks of New York's 14th Street, circa turn-of-the-century, on its back lot. In addition the Harmonia Gardens set cost a reported $375,000 dollars to build.
At any rate the end result certainly looks expensive. Despite its seven Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture), the film was perceived as a major critical and financial disappointment. Gene Kelly handled the directorial chores, while Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau played the leads.
It suffered from bad press due to escalating costs touting it as the most expensive movie musical of all time and a box office star who was obviously too young. MGM veterans: Gene Kelly (as Director) and Roger Edens (as Associate Producer) brought all the dazzling ‘spit and polish’ of the Arthur Freed unit (famed in-house factory of MGM musicals) to the screen.
This film, along with two other musical failures Doctor Dolittle and Star! wiped out all the profits Fox had earned from The Sound of Music. Susan Sackett attributed the film's failure to the fact that "the movie-going audience was comprised of mostly under-30s, and young people just weren't impressed with lavish musicals”. Costs seemed to escalate out of control. Fox took a gamble, and lost. So where did the Dolly film go wrong? A case can be made for the studio's, or perhaps director Gene Kelly's, reliance on overproduction.
Problems with Hello, Dolly!:
The opening shot of the film is pretty weird. It consists of a paused image of New York City in the year 1890 that goes through different shades of colors. It also lasts almost a minute long. After the opening shot is unpaused, we the audience get through the introduction number, ‘Call on Dolly’. Whenever the title character would pass out her cards throughout that number, the film would pause on whoever received them. I think it would’ve been smarter to have the film keep on going and let the people who received the cards read them out loud.
While Barbra Streisand does get to show off her many of her great talents as Dolly, she was still way too young to be playing a widowed matchmaker. Not to mention that she was playing opposite Walter Matthau, who was 21 years older than her. Even in the scenes where she says “Look at the old girl now, fellas”, it seemed odd watching that performed by an ingenue as she clearly wasn’t old back then.
In both the stage musical and the film, there's a subplot with Horace's niece, Ermengarde and the poor artist, Ambrose Kemper who wants to marry her. On stage, they both seem to make some fun side characters, but after getting invested with the main characters in the film, it’s almost easy to forget about Ermengarde & Ambrose until the next time they appear.
I also wasn’t fond of how ‘Ribbons Down My Back’ was rearranged for the film. In the stage version, it’s presented as a moving ballad for the character of Irene Molloy. While actress Marianne McAndrew does perform it well in the film, it still sounds more like a pastiche of the old Hollywood musicals.
The executives at 20th Century Fox actually requested Jerry Herman to write a new song, so they could be eligible for an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. However, Herman ended up pulling a cut song from another musical of his, Mame. The song was ‘Love is Only Love’, which was given to Barbra Streisand after the number, ‘Elegance’.
While I can understand the need to have a cameo appearance by Louis Armstrong during the title number since he famously did a cover version of that, I thought the film could’ve done without it. Though since it’s in the film, the title number feels a little longer than it should be.
When Barbra started to sing ‘So Long Dearie’ near the end of the film, her transition from talking to singing seemed off to me. While I didn’t mind the rearrangements for that song as much as I minded the rearrangements for ‘Ribbons Down My Back’, the tempo still seemed way too fast to me.
Lastly, I thought the finale was weirdly put together. While I didn’t mind the cut from Dolly & Horace’s duet to a reprise of ‘Put On Your Sunday Clothes’, it felt odd to me that the camera kept moving around to different characters singing reprises of some of the other songs in the film. I think it would’ve been a better idea to fade from Dolly & Horace to the full company singing a reprise of the title number.
In 1965, Richard Zanuck purchased the film rights to Hello, Dolly! from David Merrick. In the deal, Zanuck agreed with Merrick not to release the film until the Broadway show ended its run.
When the film was completed, the original contract was renegotiated to allow for its release (at a significant penalty to Fox). The film did open in December of 1969, even though the show was still going strong on Broadway. Twentieth-Century Fox announced its purchase of the rights to film the musical on March 9, 1965 with Merrick, the producer of the stage musical, to receive $2,000,000 and 25% of the film gross.
Determined to have another Sound of Music on their hands, the studio forged ahead on Hello, Dolly!. Written into the contract was a seemingly insignificant clause which stipulated that 20th could not release the film until the play closed on Broadway or until June 20th, 1971-whichever came first.
When Barbra Streisand was signed on as Dolly Levi, it was done with all possible fanfare. At 25, Barbra Streisand might have been an odd choice to play the middle-aged widow Dolly Levi in the film version since the musical had won a Tony Award for Carol Channing. Channing was considered too zany and wacky to repeat her signature role for the screen. Having seen the result of Thoroughly Modern Millie, screenwriter Ernest Lehman felt her outsized personality would be too much for an entire film. Box office favorites who were considered and courted for the role before Streisand accepted it were Lucille Ball and Elizabeth Taylor. Barbra was a fresh, new, and immensely talented performer, so giving her the chance to reinvent the age-old character of Dolly only seemed logical.
At the time of the planning stages, Streisand was shooting the film that would earn her the Best Actress Oscar, Funny Girl. Unfortunately for Streisand she was seen as an ‘upstart’ by those in Hollywood who felt she had stolen the part from Channing when Richard Zanuck announced her casting on May 8th, 1967. Richard Coe summed up the feeling in the May 11th, 1967 edition of The Washington Post writing, "Would you believe Barbra Streisand for the screen's Hello, Dolly!? Well, that's the knuckle headed fact...With all due respect to young Miss Streisand, the mournful Nefertiti is clearly not the outgoing, zestful Irish woman whose vitality brightens Thornton Wilder's mature, life-loving Dolly Gallagher-Levi. The perversity of not choosing to get Carol Channing's musical-comedy classic on film is hard to fathom”.
Channing later remembered, "I was doing Hello, Dolly! at Expo '67 at the time, and when they announced the star for the movie on that great day I had the feeling I was Mark Twain and had just died and become an observer at my funeral".
Reports were also coming from Columbia Studios over Streisand's repeated demand for retakes on Funny Girl which supposedly cost the studio an extra $200,000.
Streisand accepted the role and went to the studio for wardrobe fitting on February 13th, 1968. She was unhappy in the role, which she really didn't want and which Carol Channing desperately did. Channing, however, made one concession to Barbra in her 2002 memoir Just Lucky, I Guess. According to Broadway's Dolly, Barbra Streisand's singing in the film "was beautiful."
All in all, it was not a happy shoot. There was an 89 day shooting schedule on Hello, Dolly!, and at the end of the first week’s shooting producer Ernest Lehman still did not have a completed budget. This was only the second film he was producing. The first was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The disparity between the two films at the time overwhelmed him. From a four character film to this! Ernest Lehman was primarily a screenwriter. He received 6 Academy Award nominations during his screenwriting career. In 2001, he received an honorary Oscar for his body of work, the first screenwriter to receive that honor.
For one gargantuan parade scene, over four thousand extras were hired. Hello, Dolly! went on location for a month in Garrison New York and the weather in the east was always a problem. The budget for Hello, Dolly! had begun at $10 million and by 1968 had swollen to $25 million, $2 million alone was spent on the recreation of Fifth Avenue on the Fox lot.
They filmed it in 1968, but the film wasn’t released until almost a year and a half later-and then, only after a large cash settlement had been made with Merrick. Life Magazine reported in its February 14th, 1969 issue that Richard Zanuck of 20th Century Fox wanted to release it but David Merrick would not let him. The film would be released in December of 1969. Merrick was too shrewd a businessman to play out this string much longer. He did, however, hold on as long as he could. His one goal was to break the previous record that My Fair Lady held as longest running show. He didn’t want anything to get in his way of making that happen.
Besides being one of the last of the old-time Hollywood musicals Hello, Dolly!, at a production cost of approximately $25,000,000 (in 1968 currency), is also one of the most expensive ever made.
20th Century Fox lavishly recreated several blocks of New York's 14th Street, circa turn-of-the-century, on its back lot. In addition the Harmonia Gardens set cost a reported $375,000 dollars to build.
At any rate the end result certainly looks expensive. Despite its seven Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture), the film was perceived as a major critical and financial disappointment. Gene Kelly handled the directorial chores, while Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau played the leads.
It suffered from bad press due to escalating costs touting it as the most expensive movie musical of all time and a box office star who was obviously too young. MGM veterans: Gene Kelly (as Director) and Roger Edens (as Associate Producer) brought all the dazzling ‘spit and polish’ of the Arthur Freed unit (famed in-house factory of MGM musicals) to the screen.
This film, along with two other musical failures Doctor Dolittle and Star! wiped out all the profits Fox had earned from The Sound of Music. Susan Sackett attributed the film's failure to the fact that "the movie-going audience was comprised of mostly under-30s, and young people just weren't impressed with lavish musicals”. Costs seemed to escalate out of control. Fox took a gamble, and lost. So where did the Dolly film go wrong? A case can be made for the studio's, or perhaps director Gene Kelly's, reliance on overproduction.
Problems with Hello, Dolly!:
The opening shot of the film is pretty weird. It consists of a paused image of New York City in the year 1890 that goes through different shades of colors. It also lasts almost a minute long. After the opening shot is unpaused, we the audience get through the introduction number, ‘Call on Dolly’. Whenever the title character would pass out her cards throughout that number, the film would pause on whoever received them. I think it would’ve been smarter to have the film keep on going and let the people who received the cards read them out loud.
While Barbra Streisand does get to show off her many of her great talents as Dolly, she was still way too young to be playing a widowed matchmaker. Not to mention that she was playing opposite Walter Matthau, who was 21 years older than her. Even in the scenes where she says “Look at the old girl now, fellas”, it seemed odd watching that performed by an ingenue as she clearly wasn’t old back then.
In both the stage musical and the film, there's a subplot with Horace's niece, Ermengarde and the poor artist, Ambrose Kemper who wants to marry her. On stage, they both seem to make some fun side characters, but after getting invested with the main characters in the film, it’s almost easy to forget about Ermengarde & Ambrose until the next time they appear.
I also wasn’t fond of how ‘Ribbons Down My Back’ was rearranged for the film. In the stage version, it’s presented as a moving ballad for the character of Irene Molloy. While actress Marianne McAndrew does perform it well in the film, it still sounds more like a pastiche of the old Hollywood musicals.
The executives at 20th Century Fox actually requested Jerry Herman to write a new song, so they could be eligible for an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. However, Herman ended up pulling a cut song from another musical of his, Mame. The song was ‘Love is Only Love’, which was given to Barbra Streisand after the number, ‘Elegance’.
While I can understand the need to have a cameo appearance by Louis Armstrong during the title number since he famously did a cover version of that, I thought the film could’ve done without it. Though since it’s in the film, the title number feels a little longer than it should be.
When Barbra started to sing ‘So Long Dearie’ near the end of the film, her transition from talking to singing seemed off to me. While I didn’t mind the rearrangements for that song as much as I minded the rearrangements for ‘Ribbons Down My Back’, the tempo still seemed way too fast to me.
Lastly, I thought the finale was weirdly put together. While I didn’t mind the cut from Dolly & Horace’s duet to a reprise of ‘Put On Your Sunday Clothes’, it felt odd to me that the camera kept moving around to different characters singing reprises of some of the other songs in the film. I think it would’ve been a better idea to fade from Dolly & Horace to the full company singing a reprise of the title number.