Behind the Scenes: The Sound of Music (Wise, 1965) with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer

The Trapp family singers toured extensively during World War II. In 1944, they established a summer music camp at an abandoned military training barracks near the farm. When the war ended, an Austrian relief fund was set up. At every concert, common goods were collected and sent to the family's devastated homeland. One concert resulted in a most unexpected encounter. While waiting for some forgotten musical instruments to arrive, Maria von Trapp proceeded to tell stories about her family to keep the audience entertained. After this concert, a man came backstage and he said to my mother, if you can tell stories like this, you can write a book. She said, oh, for heaven's sake, I wouldn't dream of it. I just like to tell stories. He said, that's right. And I'll print And it was Mr. Lippincott. And that was her first book, the story of the Trapp family singers. In 1947, while Maria was writing, Captain von Trapp died in Vermont. The entire family was by his side and he was buried on the property. The tours, the ski lodge and the music camp continued and Maria's book was published in 1949. It was the height of the family's popularity. But by the mid 1950s, the children felt a desire to start families of their own. Their farewell tour was in 1956. But a year earlier, Maria had sold the movie rights to her book to a German film company. Photographed in Salzburg, the Trapp family starred two popular German stars, Hud Leverich and Hans Holt, and became one of Germany's most successful films. Two years later, it was shown to a director at Paramount Pictures, Vincent Donoghue, who thought it would be an ideal property for his friend, Mary Martin. And so Maria's story was brought to Broadway and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Rodgers and Hammerstein were extraordinary in the musical theater because they had, when they started to work together in 1943, they'd each had 20 some years of working in musicals, writing musicals with other people. And obviously when they started to write Oklahoma, something in that collaboration worked. It was a magical collaboration. They wrote 11 scores in 17 years. And in a funny way, The Sound of Music was kind of a wonderful recapitulation for them. The fact that Mary Martin brought this to them, Vincent Donoghue was the one who had founded, but Mary Martin, he took it to Mary Martin and Mary Martin brought it to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Originally, I am told to write one song because they wanted to use the songs that the Trapp family used in their concerts. And Rodgers and Hammerstein obviously sensed in this story some of the kind of universal truths that they liked writing about. And it was worth Mary Martin's time and Richard Halliday, her husband, and Lindsey and Krauss, who wrote the book, to wait for Rodgers and Hammerstein to finish Flower Drum Song before they could write an entirely new score for The Sound of Music. I think the material was uplifting. My father did believe in the ultimate nobility of man in the sense that he's not that everyone in humanity has this nobility, but that it does exist now and then. And this is one of the cases where he could dramatize that. The original production of The Sound of Music starred Theodore Bickell as the captain. Starting with the German film, Howard Lindsey and Russell Krauss condensed the narrative so that Maria arrived at the von Trapp villa shortly before the Anschluss. The secondary romance between Liesel and Rolf was developed and Max Detweiler, as the character responsible for developing the family's singing, more or less replaced the role of Father Wassner in the real life story. The captain's engagement to Elsa was used to communicate the show's political theme, which for Oscar Hammerstein was a personal one. They wrote the score in the summer of 1959, and the Broadway opening was on November the 16th. In attendance was Maria von Trapp, accompanied by her son, Johannes. A lot of people felt that the play was too schmaltzy, and the reviews were not uniformly favorable, which was sad, but there was also a lot of positive response. And there was a great party at the St. Regis afterwards. The strengths of the piece are its weaknesses, which is that you have children, music, and nuns personifying the good, and you have a peasant girl and a baron, and then on the other side you have that almost operetta-ish relationship, and then you have the Nazis as the evildoers, that the question becomes whether it is a true story or whether it's manipulated. And there's so many forceful, dramatic elements that it's so easy to say, I was manipulated. And the only answer I have is, yeah, but it happened. The show was to be Oscar Hammerstein's last. He died of a terminal illness on August the 23rd, 1960, leaving a library of inspired poetry as his legacy. And even as the sensation of The Sound of Music continued and expanded through countless touring productions, a success beyond comprehension was still to come. In 1958, South Pacific, produced by Rogers and Hammerstein and distributed by 20th Century Fox, became the year's biggest success, solidifying a partnership that took its next step when The King and I screenwriter Ernest Lehman saw The Sound of Music in its second week on Broadway. And at the intermission, my wife and I went to a nearby Howard Johnson's to have a bowl of clam chowder, and I said, I don't care what anyone says about this show, someday it's going to make a very successful movie. 20th Century Fox purchased the film rights in May of 1960, but Darrell F. Zanuck had stepped down to set up his own production company in Europe, and it was a difficult time for the studio. The studio ran into a series, a string of unsuccessful films at that time, tapped by the, what they thought was going to be the picture that would save them, which was Cleopatra, a picture that was just plagued by troubles from beginning to end, and that really brought the studio down to its knees. A glimmer of hope came with Darrell Zanuck's production of The Longest Day, an all-star recreation of the D-Day landings in which he himself had fought. When it was time to release the picture, the studio wanted to get it out as quickly as possible, in as many theaters as possible. He didn't like that idea. He wanted a much more special release of the film. Over that issue, the fate of the studio really rested, and so he simply went before the board and took over the company, and that was how he came back and why he came back to 20th Century Fox. We virtually closed down the studio operation, but we wanted to prepare a slate of projects so that we would never have to close down the studio again. One of the projects that had been sitting on the shelf, and I don't know why, was The Sound of Music. It had just been sitting there gathering dust, and there had been no activity on the project at all. Ernest Lehman's initial enthusiasm was remembered by Zanuck, so the writer was approached to do the screenplay. The first thing Dick and I did was to go to see the show. We met with Daryl the next day and started talking about casting, talking about directors. All we've got is this writer, and I said, what about the greatest director in the world, Willie Weiler? Three-time Oscar winner William Weiler flew to New York to see The Sound of Music with Lehman. The director was thoroughly unimpressed, but urged Lehman to convince him otherwise. So I said, I've just got one question to ask you, Willie. Remember the moment where the captain starts singing The Sound of Music with his children? He said, yeah, it's funny you bring up that moment. He said, you know, I almost cried. I said, that's it, Willie. That's why this is going to make a very successful movie. Lehman finally convinced Weiler, and together they took a 30-page outline to Salzburg to scout locations. While I'm there in Salzburg, Willie seems to be calling Hollywood a lot, and all I could remember was that he had hated this show, and yet I had talked him into saying yes. We go back to California, and I'm left alone, and I confer with Dick Zanuck, and I say, listen, Dick, I'm worried about Willie, because in his office I see a stack of books about a mile high, and they're all about the Anschluss. He was very interested in making a war story out of the last part of the film. He wanted to show that invasion of the town, and all of, you know, all of that, tanks rolling through the streets, and guns exploding, and all of that. So I wrote that first draft as fast as I could, and I finished it, and handed it in to Willie, and he called me up right away, and he said, Ernie, I'm embarrassed. I've never read such a wonderful first draft screenplay. I can't think of a single suggestion to make. So I hung up the and I called Dick Zanuck. I said, Dick, we're in trouble. Eventually, the truth was revealed. Weiler was biding time while he negotiated a deal to direct The Collector for Columbia. We had to find a new director right away, and there was one who was just as prominent on the lot at the time as Willie, and that was Robert Wise. He was going to make the sand pebbles in Taipei but there was a monsoon, and his picture was postponed, so he was seated in the commissary with nothing to do. So I called his agent, Phil Gersh, and I said, Phil, I'm sending a copy of the screenplay of The Sound of Music over to you. Would you please give it to Bob Wise? At 20th Century Fox, Robert Wise had directed the 1951 science fiction classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still. He had begun his career editing pictures for Orson Welles before directing his own films at RKO. But before calling Lehman, Wise forwarded the script to Saul Chaplin, his associate producer on West Side Story. I saw The Sound of Music in New York when it was on Broadway. I was very impressed with the score, but I must say, in general, I wasn't all that crazy about it. Then I read the script, and I was wild about it, because it may not seem that way to the average audience, but actually it's quite different than the show. So not only did I read the script, but I got ahold of the cast recording of the score, and listened to that, and loved the song, loved the numbers, most of them, and so it was a combination of the script that I thought Ernie had done his usual outstanding job on, and the fine score that made my final decision that I wanted very much to do it. My phone rings, it's Dick Zanuck. He said, come on down. I went down to his office, and he said, I've got a surprise for you. What would you say if I told you that I could get Bob Wise to direct this picture? And I said, great. And he looked at me, and he smiled, and he said, you son of a bitch, you slipped in the script, didn't you? And I said, me? Never. In writing the first draft, Ernest Lehman drew upon the Broadway show, the German film, his visit to Salzburg, Maria's book, and Maria herself, whom he'd met in New York. His script eventually departed from the stage play in many ways, immediately felt the two songs sung by Elza and Max didn't belong in the movie. When Wise and Chaplin later consulted Richard Rogers, the composer agreed, Rogers also agreed to write a new love ballad to replace An Ordinary Couple, which became Something Good. He also approved of Lehman's repositioning of several songs in the score. My Favorite Things would no longer be sung by Maria and their mother, Abbas, but by Maria to the children during the thunderstorm. The stage play had used the Lonely Goat Herd here, so Lehman created the puppet show as a new setting for it. And Do Re Mi, rather than being sung immediately upon Maria's arrival, now showed the passage of time and became a dramatic musical and visual anchor. Once we had the script in good shape, the next thing obviously was who was going to be in it. Everyone agreed, Maria had to be played by Julie Andrews. But there was a little kind of underground buzz around Hollywood, questioned whether Julie was really photogenic enough for the big screen. And so that gave us just the slightest bit of pause because she hadn't been seen on the screen yet. She had done Mary Poppins, but it wasn't in release yet. They were still working on it. Bob and I went over to Disney, sat in a little projection room, saw some film of Julie, looked at each other, and Bob said, let's get out of here before someone else finds her first. And he went right back to the studio and said, sign Julie Andrews. Ironically, on their first musical variety special in 1962, Julie and Carol Burnett did an outrageous spoof of the sound of music in a skit called The Pratt Family Singers. Five years earlier, Rodgers and Hammerstein had showcased her in their landmark television production of Cinderella. But after Mary Poppins, would Julie Andrews want to play another singing nanny? I think the fact that I had done a nanny role as Mary Poppins crossed my mind. And I'm very glad that I had done the Americanization of Emily sort of in between the two films, because I hoped it would show that I didn't always just play sort of nanny roles. And as it was, it was a hard image to get away from, because Sound of Music was so successful, and Poppins too, I guess. But I'm glad I had Emily in there. But listen, I wouldn't have turned down the role for anything. So I was going to do it come what may, if they asked me. My only concern was whether it would be very saccharine, because when you add the beautiful scenery of Austria, and you've got seven children, and everything else that's kind of gooey, and icky, and nuns as well, it could get very saccharine. So she came over, and we met outside in the kind of courtyard outside the restaurant at the 20th Century Fox studio, and we met everybody. And then we went inside to have lunch. And I was sitting right next to Julie. And as we started to sit down in the chair, she leaned over and whispered to me and said, what are you going to do about taking all the schmaltz out of this? All of a sudden, I grabbed her hand, and I said, listen, we're going to get along just fine, because that's what we've been working on from the beginning, to really get the over sweetness out of it. And that was the beginning of what's turned out to be a marvelous relationship. In casting the captain, Robert Wise made a slightly more daring selection. The idea of having Chris Plummer for the captain was my idea. I had seen the play in London, and I felt that the captain was a fairly stock character. So I very much pushed to have him play the captain, because I thought he would give it another kind of dimension, kind of a little edge to the captain, a little dark side maybe to him, and find him far more interesting than what I'd seen on the stage in London. As a child, I was a skier, because I grew up in the Laurentian Hills, north of Montreal. And I used to ski right down the east with all my friends. And I stayed sometimes with my mom at the old chalet, which belonged to the Baroness von Trapp. And I never knew, in those days, God, I was about 12, 13, 14 years old, that one day I would play her 12, 13, or 14-year-old husband. The portrayal of the captain was dictated largely by the wishes, thank God, of Christopher Plummer. The poor guy on the play has absolutely nothing to do. He comes on, says a few words, is rather nasty to the children. And then Mary Martin comes breezing on, and for the next half hour belts out number after number. And the guy sneaks on again, is nasty to the children again, goes off. And so there was no part at all for the Baron von Trapp. So we had to do something about that, I thought, when we were going to do the movie. He once spent four consecutive days in my office, going over every one of his scenes with me, insisting that I write it so that he was strong and real. Ernie didn't smoke too much. I wanted to kind of fill the room with a lot of smoke, to make it look like we were two very real old-time screenwriters put together, old novelists like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, I mean, put together in a room, a smoke-filled room, working out, trying to make something great out of something small. But he didn't smoke, so the room had no atmosphere. But he had a great sense of humor. And I think, between us, my tiny contribution and his vast one, we infused some humor into the character of von Trapp. Because, you know, I knew the Baroness. She couldn't have married a dull man. She could not have married a dull man, because she had too much humor, and too much naughtiness and spark twinkled in her eye. The talent of the other leading actors assured Wise and Chaplin that the Sound of Music would have the superlative cast. Richard Haydn as Max, Eleanor Parker as Baroness Schrader, and Peggy Wood as the Mother Abbess, all brought professionalism and stature to the portrayal of these roles. Most of the casting process was devoted to the children. We saw hundreds and hundreds of kids here and in New York, and London people were consulting. Couldn't find a proper Liesel until Charmy and Carl came in. Well, I must tell you, I fell head over heels for Charmy. The minute I saw her, I said, that's it. This agent that was a friend of my mother's knew she had three daughters. And she called her and said, isn't one of your daughters over 18 and looks 16 and can sing and dance and act? Well, I happened to fit into that category, and I had not done anything before Sound of Music. I had studied dance all my life, and both of my parents were singers, so I inherited the singing from them. And then they actually hired me without a contract. They felt that my eyes were too blue, and they had to see my eyes on the camera before they could officially hire me. So I did my screen test, and they officially hired me, and there I was. Kim Karat, who plays the little girl, the youngest girl, came in with a portfolio under her arm and walked in and said something to the effect, this little kid, here I am, I'm what you need, I'm perfect for this part, I know what you need, and this is perfect, and here's my portfolio, here's the things I did. And I'm whispering to Bob, get her out of here. She was climbing walls, and Bob said, cool it. And he interviewed her, and then when she left, he told me something which was very true. He said, how else do you think you can get a five-year-old kid to read lines and do what you want unless she's like that? She's outgoing, and she's anxious, and she's perfect. The end result is all the children came out of the Los Angeles Hollywood scene except for Nick Hammond, the oldest boy. He's the one I had tested in New York. The halls were just filled, every hallway, every spare rehearsal room was just filled with dozens and dozens and dozens of Friedrichs and Brigittes and Kurts and Martas and Gretels and Liesels. Every single one of them, to me, looked perfect. Suddenly I thought, what am I doing here? I'd broken my arm skiing on this vacation. I had my arm in a cast. I was missing two front teeth because I'd fallen down and my baby teeth had been knocked out. I had hair this color, dark brown hair. I was like one of the only brunettes in there. When they called my name, after the entire Hitler youth had been there to audition before me, and this kid with his arm in a cast and no front teeth and the wrong hair steps forward and has to say, I'm Friedrich, I'm 14, and I'm impossible. Production illustrator and second unit director Maurice Zuberano did extensive sketches and storyboards as the film entered pre-production. Working with production designer Boris Levin and cinematographer Ted McCord, The Sound of Music took on a simplicity of design that Robert Wise carefully monitored in order that the story's powerful dramatic elements would not drown in visual overstatement. There was a pervading feeling of success around that picture from the very beginning. I got it when I first started to do the sketches. I could see there was going to be a very interesting, spectacular looking picture of that type. Costume designer is always very important too on a film and Dorothy Jeakins is somebody that both Sally and I knew. So we met with Dorothy and talked to her about it. She loved the script, loved the idea, and she came on and did the whole show. She didn't make it too sweet and treatly. If you see what they really wore, you know those fancy dirndls and all that, it wouldn't do, you know, for this picture. And Dorothy knew just how to tone it down. The cast began working in February of 1964. Over a six-week period, dialogue and music was learned, songs were pre-recorded, and the choreography was planned and rehearsed. There was an absolute structure to the day, every day. So we would, as I remember it, except for the hours we spent in school, we would roughly spend half the day going over musical numbers with Bobby Tucker, who was the musical director, and then the other half of the day we'd spend with Mark Brough and Dee Dee Wood. We had done Mary Poppins. That was our first film. It was very, very successful. We got a call from Bob Weiss about, and probably Miss Julie Andrews might have had something to say about this, to go and talk to him about doing The Sound of Music. Working on this project and planning the choreography was working with Solly Chaplin extensively. And we worked probably a couple of weeks doing pre-production before we even had anyone come in to the rehearsal hall. We worked with Julie's stand-in, Larry Thomas, and planned out everything for the children and for the captain and for Maria in that way. During pre-production, the script underwent a major change. Ernest Lehman suggested that a new song be written to take Maria from the abbey to the villa. He and Sol Chaplin wrote dummy lyrics and sent them to Richard Rogers. After a couple of tries and some suggestions from Chaplin, I Have Confidence was added to the score. Now musical supervisor Erwin Kostel, another West Side Story and Mary Poppins alumnus, began preparing the songs for pre-recording. Harper MacKay played the piano behind the curtain so they could just have enough piano to know they were singing the song, and they sang it in one shot. My job later was to remove the piano track and substitute an orchestra track behind it. Do Re Mi and I Have Confidence and me are both shot in exteriors in Salzburg. And both of them, Julie moves and the kids keep moving. We recorded a certain amount of music to fill those distances, but we didn't know if those distances were exact. So we put all the tracks on a piece of tape and Mark, Bro and I went to Salzburg with the tracks. We would both stand at one end of the street with the traffic light, and when the light turned red, I turned this machine on and Mark would go dancing down the street. The funniest thing is a policeman came up to me, and I know some German, and he said, what the hell are you doing? You know, and I suddenly realized I can't explain it to him. I mean, I couldn't explain it to him in English, certainly not in German, but he went away and thought, crazy American. Principal photography commenced on March 26, 1964. On stage 15 at 20th Century Fox stood the set for Maria's Bedroom at the Pontrath Villa. Julie Andrews and Norma Varden as Frau Schmidt shot the first takes of the film. The following day, Charmian Carr made her wet screen debut, and the song My Favorite Things began shooting. I was nervous, and the children certainly were nervous, and that's supposed to be such a joyous, easygoing song. So I did my best to jolly them along. I would pull silly faces off camera to make them smile. I would tickle them. I would try to sort of make us feel like a jolly, happy group, and it worked, and I think it cemented a friendship that has gone on for the last 30 years. Also photographed early was the song Maria, shot on the huge Abbey Courtyard set with several talented actresses playing the nuns. I think, first of all, my agent had suggested that I might like to play the Baroness, and when I talked to Bob Wise, he said, no, that's already been cast, but how would you like to play a nun? And I said, I think I'd like to play a nun very much, and that I had played nuns before, so I told him I came from a long line of nuns. I'm very glad I played Sister Margaret. I wouldn't have liked to have played the nasty nun. I much prefer playing a nice nun. Robert Wise has this genius of casting to type, which I'm not sure I liked in sound music, being so mean, but I had the job, and I was floored, and it was one of the nicest things to probably ever happen. Sister Sophia was played by Marnie Nixon, who had become famous for providing singing voices for The King and I, West Side Story, and My Fair Lady. When I got the part in the movie, I had already dubbed My Fair Lady, and so it was interesting to now be actually working with the real Julie Andrews, and of course, everybody was sort of worried that Julie would be upset that I was hired, because they imagined that she'd have this great envy related to me, because I had done the dubbing on a part that she should have done in My Fair Lady, and when they said, and Julie, this is Marnie Nixon, and everybody was kind of, how is she going to be? And she stood up, strode across the room, and extended her hand. She said, Marnie, I'm such a fan of yours, and everybody went, ah, you know, it's going to be all right. Filming continued on the Abbey graveyard set for the climax of the picture. I love doing that scene, because it was a real acting scene, and also, I remember the wonder I felt of just being on a soundstage that had been so perfectly built, as to look exactly like a rooftop graveyard in the moonlight, and I remember being thrilled walking onto it, and, you know, walking across that, through those graves with Christopher Plummer, and Julie Andrews, and Peggy Wood, and this huge camera on a crane, and thinking, I'm in the movies. The company traveled to Austria in late April. The first scene filmed was the wedding, shot at Monserre Cathedral, just outside of Salzburg. Technically, it was an amazing accomplishment, that scene, because in those days, they didn't have the kind of film stock, and the kind of cameras that can film in really low light, like they can now, and Ted McCord did an amazing job, I think, of what is visually one of the most scenes in the whole film, was done under incredibly difficult conditions. Nobody warned us how cold it was going to be. It was freezing, and of course, the church, really, the cathedral wasn't heated, and so I was in this beautifully fragile dress, designed for me by Dorothy Jeakins, and it was the most glorious creation to wear, but it was paper thin, and I was cold. We started in the Monserre Cathedral, and we only had it for one day, and we had all these extras, and it was a great deal of excitement, and everybody was a little tense, because there was so much pressure to get that day's shooting finished, and they're doing the wedding procession, and I'm sitting on the bottom of the crab dolly with Bob, and the crab dolly crabs up to get the two principals as they go up towards the altar, and go up the steps, and go towards the altar, and no minister there to marry me, and I was mortified, and of course, Bob wasn't very happy. We had to do it over again, and we got the scene for it. I felt very responsible, but if I had not been sitting down, I would not have missed it. The next day, rain sent the company to their first bad weather cover set at the St. Margaretan Chapel. The following day, it rained again. Suddenly, it became clear why Austria was so green. But it used to be almost a pattern. Rain three days, be good for three days. Rain for three days, be good for three days. Unfortunately, there was a small studio in Salzburg. It had a couple of stages, small stages there, so anticipating weather problems, we had the Mother Abbess's office interior all shipped over. It was made in Hollywood, and shipped over there, and set up in the small studio, so for days, we had, for a while, where we had bad weather, we'd pull in and work away, maybe get five or six hours shooting on the Mother Abbess's set. Filming on the cover set included the song, Climb Every Mountain, which Robert Wise very carefully planned with Ted McCord, so that this operatic, inspirational number was contrasted by visual reserve. A harsh photographic approach was used for the music festival, which was shot with 2,000 extras at the Felsenreitschule, an outdoor concert hall where the Trapp family singers had actually performed. A lot of very cold nights, I remember doing that. Quite exciting, though, in a way, because it had that kind of slight madness to it that you get at about 2.30, 3 o'clock in the morning, and so I thought that worked quite well for the feel of that scene, where it's all so on edge about whether they're going to get away or not. The 1,200-year-old Nonnberg Abbey, where the real Maria had been a postulant, gave the film another dose of realism. We got an okay to shoot the approach, the outside, and the outer courtyard where the children come to visit and try to find it. They were able to let us do that. They would not let us inside the abbey to shoot anything there, so all the other things in the picture that had to do with the abbey were studio sets back stages in Hollywood. Do Re Mi was shot all over Salzburg. It was lots and lots of little scenes, a complete montage of visual shots of Salzburg and around it, and it was heavenly because all one had to do was a little bit here and a little bit there, and yet suddenly when the whole song came together, I had no idea it was going to be as powerful as it was, and I think it came together wonderfully. I remember when we were shooting on what was called Winkler's Terrace. That's overlooking the town. We were doing the section of Do Re Mi that takes place up there, and of course we had our playback there with the big horns directed right at them because when you work the playback, the actors actually have to sing and try to sing over the loud playback that's playing. They're lip-syncing too, and it so happened that my wife, Pat, was down below the terrace in the town, and she said that evening when I got over, she said, you should have seen those people because you were doing the number up there, and that music was blasting out all over the place, and they were looking up wondering what the hell was going on in their town because of that playback that we were having. The final section of Do Re Mi was photographed in the gardens at Mirabelle Palace following specific locations picked by Ernest Lehman a year earlier. At the end, they do it. They sing the scale. They sing Do Re Mi. If I saw like the rest of the show, and how I got that idea is when I saw the steps outside Mirabelle Garden, I said, my god, there's at least eight steps there. They're perfect for her to sing the scale, and the kids are singing something else, and that's how that happened. The high note at the end was Julie Andrews' idea. I would never dare to ask her, like she always did, shall I do this? And she went, what? And there was that snow. I said, my god, yes, let's have it. That little Bristol hotel had more atmosphere than any of the other hotels. It was a family, proper family hotel. You had a mixture of everything. Our aristocrats who came, impoverished aristocrats who came in with monocles and sat and watched the artists and get drunk, which of course we did every night for 11 weeks. I put on so much weight that Bob Wise finally said to me when I came back to do my final day shooting. He said, we're going to have to do it, get a whole new costume for you. You look like Orson Welles. I had eaten so much of the torts and the, you know, you can go crazy in Austria with all the sweets that they make so deliciously. And then the beer and the quiche and the schnapps that you're drinking all the time, all the time in your mouth. On June 4th, 1964, a rare day when the sky was especially clear, two important scenes were photographed using a helicopter. On a meadow across the border into Bavaria, the film's trademark image was captured. It was quite hilarious because the main part of that shot was shot by a helicopter, from a helicopter. Camera was kind of hanging out over the side of the helicopter, which meant that I would be told to start striding across the field. All of this done with bullhorns because of course nobody could be in sight on that vast field except me. And so it was, okay, Julie, the helicopter's coming in over the trees. You can start walking now. And so I would stride and stride across the field and the helicopter would kind of come in sideways in a sort of crab like way towards me. And at a particular moment when I judged it had come close enough, I did a big turn and began to sing. Once that particular moment had been captured, the helicopter of course would go around me and go back to the end of the field and I would race back to the other end of the field and we'd start all over again. Well, the downdraft from the jets of the helicopter, it was very close by the time it got to me and it was so strong that it would just level me onto the field. So I don't know how many takes we took, but about eight or nine times I was absolutely leveled into the mud. And I kept thinking I will stand up next time. I will definitely not be flattened by this incredible sort of storm that attacked me from the jets. Fell down every time. A few hours later, the picture's final shots were photographed at another Bavarian location near the Eagle's Nest hideaway that had belonged to Hitler. This small irony was counterpointed by the difficulties photographing the scene depicting the Anschluss. The city government had resisted the idea of adorning the streets with swastikas and Nazi soldiers, but when the production manager told them they would use newsreels, which show Salzburg's Nazi supporters, permission was granted and the scene was captured. As post-production began, Christopher Plummer had one more challenge to face. Between my agent and myself, we insisted on recording at the end of the film instead of at the beginning because I worked all the time on my voice. I constantly worked through that six months or however long it took to make the film. I was always taking singing lessons to improve my voice. And then when I did do record, they let me, and it was very, very decent of them to do. He is a singer, and he proved it. He did a play on Broadway where he sang. The problem here was that the script absolutely calls for a professional singer. At one point, Maria says to the captain, I understand you were wonderful. So he's got to be not just a singer, but he's got to be a terrific singer. We did record together, and I remember she held on to me and both our hands were absolutely shaking like mad. It's a terrifying thing. It's a terrifying thing to be locked up in that little booth with 60 musicians outside scraping away absolutely beautifully under Erwin Kostel's lovely arrangements. Terrifying. When our voices were put together, the long sustained notes were not simply good enough beside her. In the end, the singing was recorded by Bill Lee, who like Marnie Nixon, was a well-known vocal double. His wife, Ada Beth Lee, played Sister Catherine in the film, working beside Marnie Nixon. And although Peggy Wood had been a singer throughout her illustrious career, she no longer felt able to perfect a song as difficult as Climb Every Mountain. Consequently, her singing was dubbed as well. In January of 1965, the completed film was taken to Minneapolis and Tulsa for sneak previews. The response was unanimously overwhelming. Six weeks later, 70 millimeter release prints were ready, and The Sound of Music had its world premiere at the Rivoli Theater in New York on March the 2nd to a wildly enthusiastic audience, setting the stage for one of the most successful Hollywood premieres ever at the Fox Wilshire Theater on March 10th. I've never in my life sat in a movie theater and had the kind of reaction that that one got, with people gasping. And this was a pretty sophisticated crowd too. I mean, you know, the whole theater was made up of movie stars and, you know, studio execs. And I think that's probably then when everybody thought, this is going to be something that we'll probably remember for a long time. The picture didn't open like a smash hit. It was a perfect example of what word of mouth can do to a good film. And it opened, I would say, rather soft. And in a strange sort of way, the picture kept at a level pace. And suddenly there came a day where somebody called me and said, we think this picture is going to be a hit. And I said, you're kidding. The repeat business on The Sound of Music was enormous. The fact that people would see the picture over and over again, not only in this country, but around the world.