I love A Star Is Born, the 1954 Warner Brothers musical by George Cukor starring Judy Garland and James Mason.


The film is based on a 1937 non-musical drama directed by William Wellman. The story and script were by Wellman, Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker and Parker's husband, Alan Campbell. It starred Janet Gaynor as an aspiring actress who is discovered by drunken leading man Fredric March. As her star rises, his declines. Unable to deal with his alcoholism and the harsh way Hollywood treats has-beens, he commits suicide not only to end his life but to save her career.

Garland had not made a movie since MGM had unceremoniously canceled her contract in 1950. In many ways, the film mirrors Garland's own life, and her struggle with alcohol and drug addiction, as well as her many nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts.

Judy Garland was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress for her tour performance. On Oscar night, NBC (which was televising the awards) sent a crew to the hospital where Garland was recuperating (she had just given birth to her son, Joey) to carry her acceptance speech if she won. In one of two great Oscar robberies, she lost to Grace Kelly in the relatively minor The Country Girl. That night, Groucho Marx sent Garland a telegram saying it was "the biggest robbery since Brinks". (The other big Oscar robbery came four years later, when Rosalind Russell lost to Loretta Young in 1958.)

Garland suffered a nervous breakdown after the film was released.

Warner Brothers cancelled Garland's contract and refused to make any further films with her. Seven years passed before Garland made another film. This time it was a dramatic role in the courtroom drama, Judgment at Nuremberg.


MGM had hired Garland, a vaudeville veteran, in 1935, but it wasn't until Broadway Melody of 1938 (where she sang and danced alongside Buddy Ebsen; it was released in 1937) that she became a popular actor. In 1938, she made Love Finds Andy Hardy with Mickey Rooney, then one of the best-known stars in America. Rooney had made more than 44 pictures in the last six years, and this was the third Andy Hardy movie he starred in. (He would make 11 Hardy pictures over the next decade.) Cast as the plump girl Andy Hardy rejects, she and Rooney had real chemistry on screen and became an overnight sensation.

Based on the public's adoration of Garland, she was cast in The Wizard of Oz, and shooting began in October 1938. It lasted until April 1939, and Garland went immediately back on the set -- this time, in May 1939, to star with Mickey Rooney in the "let's put on a show" musical, Babes in Arms. Rooney would be nominated for an Oscar for the film, and Garland would win a non-competitive Best Juvenile Performer Oscar for her work in Oz and Babes in Arms. Garland would do two more Andy Hardy movies in the next two years (Andy Hardy Meets Debutante and Life Begins for Andy Hardy), as well as star in a 1941 Babes sequel, Babes on Broadway.

It was during this period that Garland became addicted to drugs. Always insecure, she was given amphetamines in the morning to boost her mood and energy levels, and barbiturates at night to make her sleep.

At the age of 19 in 1941, she wed musician David Rose (she had had to wait a year while Rose's divorce from singer Martha Raye was finalized). Garland became pregnant in 1942, and had an abortion. She and Rose separated in 1943, and they divorced in 1944.

Garland made the musical Meet Me in St. Louis in 1944. Three of her standard songs -- "The Boy Next Door," "The Trolley Song," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" -- came out of the picture. She and director Vincent Minelli were married in June 1945. In 1946, Garland starred in The Harvey Girls, and yet another standard ("On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe") entered her repertoire. She gave birth to her first child, Liza Minelli, that year.

She was filming The Pirate, a terrible musical with Gene Kelly, when she suffered her first nervous breakdown. She had to be institutionalized. She completed the film, and then tried to commit suicide by slitting her wrists. The public was never told of her troubles. She went back to work almost immediately, making three more musicals for MGM: Easter Parade with Fred Astaire, In the Good Old Summertime with Van Johnson, and Summer Stock with Gene Kelly. During filming of Summer Stock, she missed almost 75 percent of her shooting days as she was either too drunk, depressed, or drugged up to perform. On the days in which she did appear, she was often so drunk or high that she could barely stand up. Her best number from the film, "Get Happy," was filmed four months later during pick-ups and reshoots. She had lost 20 pounds and was off the sauce, and it shows.

Garland was cast in several features in 1948 and 1949, but she could not finish any of them. MGM replaced her in one film with Ginger Rogers, in another with Betty Hutton, in another with Jane Powell. Twice MGM suspended her contract (meaning she got no pay and was given no assignments, but could not work on any other projects). Finally, MGM canceled her contract. Garland attempted to commit suicide by slashing her next with a broken glass.

Garland divorced Vincent Minelli in 1951. Later in the year, she went on a four-month concert tour of the United Kingdom. Her four-week engagement at London's Palladium in April sold out, and she won rave reviews and wild applause for her shows. In October 1951, she opened a 19-week engagement at the Palace Theater on Broadway. She did two shows a day, a matinee and a night-time performance. The shows sold out. She won a Tony award for the gig. Garland became romantically involved with her manager, Sid Luft. In February, 1952, she became pregnant. She and Luft married in June, and gave birth to her second child, Lorna Luft, that November.


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Luft and Garland believed it was time for Judy to return to motion pictures. They formed an independent production company, Transcona. They approached Warner Brothers, offering to either produce a new picture or remake one of Warner's existing properties. After a number of projects were suggested and discarded, Warners and Transcona settled on A Star Is Born. Legendary Broadway playwright Moss Hart wrote the script. George Cukor, coming off big hits such as Adam's Rib (1949; starring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy), Born Yesterday (1950; starring William Holden and Judy Holiday), and Pat and Mike (1952; Hepburn and Tracy again), was hired to direct. It was inauspicious: Cukor would make only one more hit film (It Should Happen to You in 1954) and then enter a dry spell that would not be broken until My Fair Lady in 1964. He would make pictures for a decade beyond that, but it would be his last great film.

Filming on A Star Is Born began on October 12, 1953. The first scene shot was the train station sequence, in which Esther Blodgett (on her first day as a real actor) doubles for a movie star and waves a handkerchief out a train window.

The film was soon plagued with technical delays. Warner Brothers, which was supplying the film equipment, had insisted that the picture be filmed in "WarnerScope," a wide-screen photographic process designed to compete with CinemaScope. But WarnerScope wasn't perfected yet, which the studio knew but never told Cukor. After two weeks of technical disaster after technical disaster during filming, the studio agreed to allow Cukor to use CinemaScope. A musical number, "The Man That Got Away," was shot in WarnerScope and CinemaScope. It was obvious which version was superior.

Cukor threw away all the existing footage, and reshot the entire film using CinemaScope -- at a cost of $300,000. "The Man That Got Away" also had to be re-choreographed and reshot, because CinemaScope offered a wider image.

Cukor was not an expert in using CinemaScope. CinemaScope used an anamorphic lens which stretched an image vertically. An image which took up a frame of film would then be re-imaged super-wide on a movie screen -- with its normal height and widthy restored. CinemaScope came with a number of problems. If an image is squeezed down too much, it will look like it's bulging outward toward the viewer when projected on screen. It took a hell of a lot of light to make it work, and some movies came off too dark. Close-ups looked distorted at the margins, and the film could look grainy without the right color composition. With so much room in the screen, directors felt compelled to "fill up the space." Moving the camera on a dolly track could creat the bulging effect, too, and quick editing cuts tended to leave the audience disoriented.

Frustrated by the many "rules" regarding CinemaScope, Cukor eventually threw all the CinemaScope technicians off the set. After a few days of experimentation and viewing the dailies, Cukor and his two camera assistants came up with a new set of do's and don't's. The film is a masterpiece of CinemaScope.

Initially, Garland was a model actress. She showed up on time, knew her lines, and stayed all day. After all, her career rode on this picture, and her husband's company was producing it. But she soon lost control. She called in sick on November 9, after just six weeks of shooting. She was "ill" for four days. When the production moved outdoors the next week for the elopement scenes, she "fell ill" again and was out for three days. She was sick again the first two days of December. She began leaving early every day, complaining she was too tired or sick to continue.

By February, the film was 41 days behind schedule.

In late March, after a long day's discussion with Cukor and Luft, Garland took two weeks off. She went cold turkey on her drugs (which included morphine). It worked....for a while. But she went right back on the dolls, and a picture which should have taken three months ultimately dragged on for nine.

Garland wasn't always sick, though. She'd leave early, too tired to go on, and then spend the night carousing at a club. She'd call in sick, but go to the track instead. Cukor was livid. Photos of Garland at the horse track or singing at a nightclub at 2 a.m. would make the papers, and Cukor would scream. But nothing could make Garland stop the lies. As the production fell further and further behind, Warner Bros. told the press that it was Garland's "perfectionism" that was causing delays.

Cukor used Garland's emotional instability to good effect. Cukor had always harassed, taunted, and terrified his actresses, and then captured the emotion on film. Now was no different. In one scene, Esther breaks down in her dressing room. Before shooting began that day, Cukor forced Garland to rehearse over and over and over. He screamed at her. He accused her of being drunk, of taking drugs, of having had another abortion, of cheating on her husband, of her husband cheating on her. He interrupted her, shouted, threw things, pushed her around. After three hours, Garland was a nervous wreck. Cukor told the cameras to roll; Garland vomited on the floor, and then walked onto the set. The emotion and nervous exhaustion on film is real.

And yet, Cukor knew when he had gone too far, or when Garland couldn't take any more. One day, Cukor screamed and taunted and broke Judy down again and again. She begged for water under the 100-degree lights; he grabbed her and threw her down on the set, demanding that the cameras roll. He ridiculed her acting, mocking her. he said that her vicious, cruel, stage-driving mother (who had died the year before) was right: Judy was worthless. The cameras rolled again and again, and Garland began to break down between takes, gasping for breath, trembling as Cukor lashed her over and over, wincing whenever he approached her. Take after take was made. Finally, Garland gave him what he wanted. Garland fell into a chair on the set, put her head down onto her arms, and began sobbing hysterically. The crew was stunned, silent. Cukor went to her, pulled up a chair, sat next to her, and put his arm around her shoulders. "Judy," he said softly, pulling her against him. "No one could have done better in that scene. You are an Oscar-worthy actress." She clung to him like a drowning person to a life preserver, and thanked him over and over and over.

In March, six months into the production, studio executives asked to see what had been done. With Garland on her two-week vacation, Cukor put together a rough cut of the picture. Cukor was very critical of the work, especially the cinematography and some of Garland's scenes with Mason. But studio executives were over-awed.

As the shooting neared completion in June, Sid Luft asked to see the rough cut. Luft then met with Cukor, and said he felt that a musical number was needed to make it clear that Esther Blodgett had triumphed in her first film. Cukor said it wasn't needed, but Luft insisted. Writing a big song, though, would take weeks. They had days. Knowing how Garland had bowled audiences over the year before in her stage show, Luft slyly agreed that the music staff should simply put together a medley of old standards. Jack Warner agreed: The cheap bastard knew that using music which Warners already owned would make halve the costs on the sequence.

Thus, the fantastic "Born in the Trunk" number was created. Cukor had fully intended to stop shooting by mid-June, and already had booked his summer vacation in Europe. As choreography and singing rehearsals went forward, Jack Warner took Cukor off the picture! Choreographer Richard Barstow directed the sequence (but would not be credited). Cukor's cinematographer shot the 18-minute sequence to ensure visual continuity.

The number cost an additional $250,000 to choreograph, costume, cast and film. Believing Garland would benefit from a night-time shooting schedule, Jack Warner agreed to let the shooting go on into the evening. The union contracts required time-and-a-half for evening shoots, which drove the cost up and up.

The final day of shooting was July 28, 1954. Retakes of "The Peanut Vendor Song" from the "Born in a Trunk" sequence were shot that day.

The film's final budget was $5,019,770, making it Warner Bros.' most expensive film ever up to that point in time, and the second costliest motion picture in Hollywood history (David Selznick's 1946 film Duel in the Sun had cost just $205,000 more).

The first preview was only five days away. Thankfully, the existence of the rough-cut edits created in March and June helped make the final assemblage of the picture a far easier task than anticipated. In those days, directors very rarely (if ever!) helped edit their pictures. Folmar Blangsted was a journeyman editor who had worked on more than 20 pictures in the last decade. Working as fast as he could, nearly night and day, Blangsted pasted the film together. His work on A Star Is Born would launch his career. He would work on several notable pictures over the next 20 yeares, including The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955), Band of Angels (1957), Rio Bravo (1959), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), PT 109 (1963), Taras Bulba (1962) Camelot (1967) and Summer of '42 (1971) (for which he would be nominated for an Oscar).

As shooting ended, Garland learned she was pregnant.

The first preview was held on August 2, 1954. The audience gave it a standing ovation for five minutes. Garland had snuck into the theater, but fans caught sight of her as the film ended. As she was hustled to her car, fans shouted over and over, "Don't cut a single minute!" (The film ran a whopping 193 minutes.)

The second preview the next day went just as well.

By this time, however, Cukor had returned from Europe. Cukor himself believed the film ran too long, and he forced Warner Bros. to cut 12 minutes from the picture. Gone were Esther's duet with her father ("When My Sugar Walks Down the Street"), slashed from the "Born in the Trunk" number; a scene where Norman Maine returns to the Shrine Auditorium to try to learn Esther's name; a scene where Norman and Esther plan to build a beach house; and a montage of scenes from Norman Maine's leading roles. The musical number footage was rediscovered in the 1980s; the other footage is considered lost.

A Star Is Born premiered at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood on September 29, 1954. More than 10,000 fans crowded into the street. Every radio and television network in the country showed up at the premiere. Judy Garland was astonished and overwhelmed by the media response. Her brief remarks on the red carpet were broadcast live across the nation. The New York premiere occurred on October 11. Public response was so strong that Warner Bros. decided to debut the picture in two theaters, the Victoria and the Capitol.

In those days, a movie would open in a few cities, play for two or three weeks, and then move on. It would take a motion picture nearly a year to finally play in every single movie theater in the country. Marketing was minimal; word-of-mouth and reviews were relied on to promote films.

But as A Star Is Born slowly rolled across the country, hitting the major theaters in the biggest cities first, theater owners began to whine. The movie was too long, they said. They could only get in two showings a night, they said. The picture has to be cut down so they can show it three times a night, and make more money, they said.

Jack Warner agreed. Although nearly every movie critic had already seen the film, Warner decided to cut additional scenes from the picture and not tell the public. He told his brother, Harry Warner, to cut another 27 minutes from the picture. Cukor was now in India shooting his new motion picture. No artist, Harry Warner began to slash, slash, slash... Cut from the picture were an entire sequence eaeerly in the film in which Norman and Esther lose touch with each other while Norman is on location; a scene where Esther gets butterflies and vomits on the way to her first preview; "Here's What I'm Here For," a song Esther sings on a movie set before Norman proposes to her; and "Lose That Long Face," a song Esther sings before and after she breaks down in her dressing room. Harry Warner than had the studio labo melt down the cut footage so that the silver backing could be recycled.

Word of the cuts hit the press.

The public was so outraged that attendance dropped precipitously.

Thus, even though the film had opened so strongly in Los Angeles and New York, A Star Is Born ended up losing money.

The failure of A Star Is Born nearly bankrupted Garland and Luft. Warner Brothers had advanced Luft money against his share of the profits from the picture. Now that the picture was losing money, they wanted their cash back. Warners sued Garland and Luft: The studio took nearly everything they had, and cancelled the studio's contract with Transcona for future pictures.


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Desperate for cash, Garland agreed to appear on television. She signed a three-year, $300,000 contract with CBS for a series of specials, but only two were produced. In 1956, she did four weeks in Las Vegas Strip at a salary of $55,000 per week. Later that year, she returned to New York City for another month of shows at the Palace Theatre. Garland fell ill with hepatitis in November 1959. In August 1960, she did another month of shows at the Palladium and moved permanently to England. She appeared at Carnegie Hall on April 23, 1961. The show is considered "the greatest night in show business history." The double-album recording of the show, Judy at Carnegie Hall, spent 95 weeks on the Billboardchart, including 13 weeks at number one. it won five Grammys, including Album of the Year and Best Female Vocalist of the Year.

In 1961, Garland again agreed to do a weekly TV show for CBS. She was several hundred thousand dollars in debt to the Internal Revenue Service for having failed to pay income taxes in 1951 and 1952. She did three highly-rated specials in 1962. Her weekly series debuted on September 29, 1963. But the show lasted only one season. Still in financial difficulty, Garland returned to London Palladium in November 1964. She divorced Sid Luft in 1963, claiming he beat her. Garland toured Australia in 1964, but many of the concerts were disasters. She caught pleurisy, and nearly died. She married her tour promoter, Mark Herron, on November 14, 1965. Garland was cast in the motion picture Valley of the Dolls in 1967, but was fired for missing rehearsals. She made her last American stage appearance at New York's Palace Theatre in July 1968. Garland moved to England, and did a five-week nightclub act at London's Talk of the Town. She made her final stage appearance in Copenhagen in March 1969. She divorce Herron on February 11, 1969, and married manager Mickey Deans on March 17.

Judy Garland died on June 22, 1969. Her in-laws discovered her body in the home she and Deans had rented. She had unwittingly overdosed on barbiturates. Judy Garland had turned 47 years old just twelve days prior.


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In 1974, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was doing a George Cukor retrospective. A brochure featured stills from the cut scenes from A Star Is Born and descriptions of what was missing. Intrigued by the brochure, an apprentice film editor at Warner Bros. discovered the complete three-hour soundtrack in the studio's storage vaults.

In 1981, Fay Kanin asked Warner Bros. to restore the film. Kanin was president of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, the people who do the Oscars), and a member of the National Committee for Film Preservation. Warners gave the go-ahead. Researchers due through film storage vaults on both coasts to locate snippets of footage. Rumors about illegally obtained footage held by private collectors were tracked down. Warner Bros. agreed not to prosecute if the footage was turned over to them for restoration. In one case, a collector who had a 35mm negative of "Lose That Long Face" refused to turn over his footage, and demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars for it. The police were called in, and the footage seized.

Along the way, other treasures were also unearthed: A negative and print of the 1932 version of The Animal Kingdom, a film long thought lost; a pristine 35mm print of the 1934 version Of Human Bondage; the original negatives for the 1937 version of A Star Is Born; and costume and photographic tests for the 1954 version. Newsreel footage and kinescopes of the film's premieres in Hollywood and New York were also uncovered, and the first CinemaScope footage of "The Man That Got Away."

About 20 minutes of the missing half-hour, including both cut musical numbers and the proposal scene, were recovered. Ultimately, a 176-minute restored print was created. It includes footage cut from the 193-minute version and footage cut from the 181-minute version. Where footage could not be found, production stills were used over the complete three-hour soundtrack to restore the film.

The restored A Star Is Born received its world premiere at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on July 7, 1983. George Cukor was to have attended, but he died the day before the screening. Liza Minnelli and Lorna Luft were in the audience. As the film ended, they both began weeping. They had to be taken to a dressing room backstage; it took them 20 minutes to stop crying.

When the first lost musical number appeared, the audience applauded. At the end, the audience gave the film a 5-minute standing ovation.

The restored version was released on DVD, and this is the only version currently available from Warner Bros.