Cinema: Face The Music

HOLLYWOOD AT LAST AWAKES AND SINGS

Hollywood is the upside-down town--brazen when it should be cautious, craven when it could be smart. Studio bosses blithely green-light teen comedies gross enough to bring a blush to the ghost of Lenny Bruce, yet they shudder at mounting a musical. Apparently that's the last dirty word you can't say in Hollywood.

What went wrong? Time was when American movies couldn't stop singing. In the '30s, perhaps a third of all films were, in some way, musicals. Top Broadway composers went West and wrote tunes that were the most popular of their day and still play in the nation's memory-jukebox; Harold...

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