Blue Moon (2025 film)

[Woody]

[YouTubeHD]https://youtu.be/qo7gRHip0lI?si=8MWWw7Qp5o2B34sy[/YouTubeHD]


This is sort of tangential to 78s and phonographs, but my wife and I watched Richard Linklater’s new movie (well, one of his new movies, at least), Blue Moon earlier this week. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s about Lorenz Hart and the opening night of Oklahoma (“with an exclamation point”). Hart, of course, didn’t contribute to this show, and the movie centers on the fact that he (a) hated it but (b) knew immediately it would be more successful than anything he’d made with Richard Rodgers.

This is not a straight bio-pic; it is definitely fictionalized, though I think that it gets at real truths through that fiction. (Frankly, all of the old bio-pics about Broadway composers were also fictionalized.)

We absolutely loved it.

The next day, I made sure to play my 78 of Benny Goodman doing “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.”

[OrthoFan]

Hope it's more upbeat than Lorenz Hart's real life!

BTW, have you ever heard "Blue Moon" with the original lyrics as it was performed in "Manhattan Melodrama?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ2qYxAqlkk

A good example of a great melody in search of better lyrics.

OrthoFan

[Woody]

I hadn’t heard that before! It’s kind of fascinating, as the version with the original lyrics is . . . not good.