For the director Richard Linklater, the tone of his new film Blue Moon, about the lyricist Lorenz Hart, was obvious from the jump.
“It’s like, well, perhaps a Rodgers and Hart song,” he says in a video call not long before the movie’s Oct. 17 limited release. “Kind of beautiful and super sad and forlorn and all those things too. A catchy tune where you’re devastated by the end.”
Blue Moon chronicles a quietly tragic evening near the end of the life of Hart, played by Linklater’s frequent collaborator Ethan Hawke. Written by Robert Kaplow, it conjures a scenario in which Hart, known for songs like “My Funny Valentine,” attends the opening-night party for Oklahoma! in March 1943. That venerated show would mark the first collaboration between Richard Rodgers, formerly Hart’s longtime musical partner, and Oscar Hammerstein II. Dramatic irony means we know that Hart will die just a few months later, and Rodgers and Hammerstein will revolutionize the Broadway musical.
On screen, Hart holds court at the Sardi’s bar where the tender, played with warmth by Bobby Cannavale, is reluctant to serve him, knowing his battles with alcoholism. Hart waxes about his obsession with a college student named Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), and awaits what he knows will be a tense interaction with Rodgers (Andrew Scott), who is frustrated with his delinquency when it comes to writing. The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival where Scott won the Silver Bear for best supporting performance, and since then it’s continued to garnered acclaim and Oscar buzz for Hawke’s transformative work.
Linklater calls the movie a “little howl into the night from an artist being left behind.” He adds, “That’s what it felt like then. That’s what it feels like now. That’s what Ethan captured.”
Blue Moon, for what it’s worth, is not a historical document. It’s an “imagined” evening, Linklater says. It has been documented that Hart attended the opening night performance of Oklahoma!, but Kaplow thinks it’s unlikely he went to the party. For that matter, Kaplow isn’t sure the party was even held at the hallowed New York restaurant Sardi’s.
“Maybe I’ve read that somewhere or I just made it up,” he says. “It’s a good place for it.” (The production was actually filmed on a set built in Ireland.)
Blue Moon’s decades-long origin story
Kaplow, whose historical showbiz novel Me and Orson Welles was turned into a 2008 film by Linklater, started writing the screenplay for Blue Moon about 12 years ago, but the seed of the idea came to him long before that. Sometime in the 1970s, he was listening to a long interview with Rodgers and a detail struck him.
“Rodgers got to the point where he talked about leaving Hart, and it was so cold and utilitarian and you sensed there was armor in his voice that he wasn’t going to admit being broken up by this or how emotional it might have been. It was actually a little chilling,” Kaplow says in a separate Zoom call.
Hart’s fractured relationship with Rodgers is central to the plot of Blue Moon, but over the course of this night, a number of other figures come into his orbit. One of them is the author and essayist E.B. White, who Kaplow inserted so Hart would have someone with whom to discuss the art of writing. Another is Stephen Sondheim, then glued to Hammerstein as his child protegé, who dismisses Hart’s work as Sondheim really did in his later years. Most crucially is Qualley’s Elizabeth. Though the character seems potentially entirely fictional, she is based on a real person. A bookseller in Nyack sold Kaplow carbon copies of letters sent to Hart, signed “Elizabeth Weiland.”
“That really felt like a Larry Hart lyric to me,” Kaplow says. “It started out he’s her mentor and she admires him for listening and, of course, he falls for her impossibly and illogically.” (Although it’s widely reported that Hart was gay, a detail addressed in the script, he did propose marriage to two women.)
Crafting the Hart of the movie
When Kaplow mentioned his Hart project to Linklater, the versatile director’s ears perked up. He was a big Rodgers and Hart fan. When he first showed the script to Hawke—without even the notion that Hawke would play Hart—the actor was well aware of his longtime colleague’s interest in this corner of musical theater.
“When we were writing Before Sunset, he played Ella Fitzgerald’s Rodgers and Hart songbook nonstop, over and over again,” Hawke says during an in-person interview.
Once he signed on, Hawke realized that in addition to listening to Hart’s “heartbreaking” lyrics, he would have to transform himself into the balding, five-foot-tall lyricist, who Kaplow says was “so uncomfortable in his own skin that the way he probably got through life was he knew he had to be the funniest, smartest guy in the room.”
Hawke didn’t want to use prosthetics or a bald cap so he shaved his head. He also worked with the actor and inventor Latham Gaines, who he calls the “height wizard,” to figure out how to recreate Hart’s small stature. Hawke says he had to dispose of his normal “tool kit,” which utilizes aspects of his own personality, especially when working with Linklater on films like the Before trilogy and Boyhood. Linklater affirms that.
“I was kind of a naggy director because Ethan had to disappear as much as possible,” Linklater says. “I had this metaphor: all Larry was was a wit. He was a brain and a mouth and a charm but bodily he was definitely not Ethan. It was kind of a carving away of Ethan Hawke as much as possible.” Linklater jokes that Hawke would have punched him if they hadn’t known each other so well.
Devotion to the era and the artistic struggle
The film is filled with Easter eggs for savvy students of cultural history. Hart encounters a man named “George Hill” who wants to be a director, a reference to George Roy Hill who would later make The Sting. (That’s because Kaplow encountered a George Roy Hill in a 1943 Yale yearbook he bought off eBay.) There are also winking music cues, including a segue into “It Ain’t Necessarily So” after a reference to George Gershwin.
But there’s also a poignancy within Blue Moon that will feel relevant to all artists who’ve had creative relationships—whether they are the Rodgers or the Hart in the film’s setup. Linklater explains he’s had his own artistic breakups due to his collaborators’ self-destructive behaviors, but everyone who creates also has a delusion that they will always be able to make their art. Looking at Hart, the grim reality sets in.
“None of us think we have a programmed-in expiration date,” he says. “No painter, no sculptor, no musician, no writer ever thinks, when I get to this point, I won’t be able to do my art anymore.”
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