Donald McKayle

Inspired by a Pearl Primus performance, New York-born Donald McKayle began dancing in his senior year in high school, winning a scholarship to the New Dance Group. There he studied with Primus, Sophie Maslow, Jean Erdman, and others. He made his professional debut in 1948, and choreographed his first pieces with the New Dance Group when he was 18 years old. In 1951, he, along with Daniel Nagrin and others, founded the Contemporary Dance Group, which premiered McKayle's "Games" in 1951. Perhaps his best-known piece, "Games" juxtaposes the innocent imaginings of urban children with the real dangers they face. McKayle received a scholarship to the Martha Graham school and then joined her company from 1955-1956. In addition to his work with Graham, he danced with Merce Cunningham, Anna Sokolow, and Charles Wiedman, among others. A free agent, McKayle danced as a guest artist with various companies, as well as in Broadway musicals.

But McKayle's central focus was always choreography, and though he was a well-known choreographer, he never maintained a permanent company. He choreographed for other companies or assembled dancers as he needed them for specific concert seasons; two popular examples are "Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder" (1959) and "District Storyville" (1962), both in the repertory of the Ailey company.

Successful in the worlds of dance and theater, McKayle created dances for concert stages, Broadway, television, and film. His Broadway credits include "Golden Boy" (1964), "I'm Solomon" (1969), "Raisin" (1974), and "Dr. Jazz" (1975); he was also one of the four choreographers for "Sophisticated Ladies" (1981). Beginning in 1963, McKayle choreographed for television programs about once a year, including THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW (1966-1967), THE BILL COSBY SPECIAL (1968), the 1970 OSCAR PRESENTATIONS, and the Marlo Thomas special FREE TO BE WITH YOU AND ME (1974). He created dances for films in THE GREAT WHITE HOPE (1970), Disney's BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS (1971), and CHARLIE AND THE ANGEL (1972). In the field of popular music, he has choreographed stage acts for singers such as Harry Belafonte and Tina Turner.

McKayle's sensibilities were formed by the theatrical dance of the 1950s. A humanistic choreographer, he uses narratives and deals with potent emotion conveyed through dramatic characters. At times his stories are specific to the African-American experience, as in his protest dance "Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder," but his choreography is universal in its implications.

McKayle has taught at Bennington College, the Juilliard School, the American Dance Festival, and in Europe. His closest associations are with the repertory group at the Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center and with the School of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts, to which he was appointed artistic director in 1975. As a prolific craftsman whose dances exist in many repertories and in many mediums, Donald McKayle has been one of the most influential African-American choreographers of the postwar era.

Donald McKayle

Born: July 6, 1930
 Dancer, Choreographer, Teacher

Lavinia Williams

Lavinia Williams was born in Philadelphia and began taking dance lessons at the age of three. Her family relocated to Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1920, where she studied ballet through her high school years. As a young adult, Williams moved to New York after she won a scholarship to the Art Students' League in 1935. In order to raise money to buy supplies, she became a dance teacher at the Urban League in Brooklyn. One of the models at the Art Students' League was a dancer with Eugene Von Grona's American Negro Ballet. When Williams began attending rehearsals to sketch the dancers, Van Grona invited her to audition, and she was accepted into the company. Williams danced with the American Negro Ballet for three years in the late 1930s; when the company disbanded in 1940, she danced for one season with Agnes de Mille's American Ballet Theatre, appearing in the debut of de Mille's "Obeah!" ("Black Ritual").

Katherine Dunham, who had recently relocated from Chicago to New York, saw Williams perform with the American Ballet Theatre and asked her to join the Dunham company, where Williams remained from 1940 through 1945 as a dancer and instructor. In her work with Dunham, Williams received a solid background in Caribbean dance, with an emphasis on Haitian traditions, and she discovered an interest in ethnic dance that she developed throughout her life. She danced numerous solos with the company in works such as "Rites de Passage," "Bolero," "Rara Tonga," as well as the broadway musical "Cabin in the Sky" (1940) and films such as STORMY WEATHER (1943). Williams left the Dunham Company to join Sivilla Ford as a ballet instructor at the first Katherine Dunham School of Dance in Manhattan, where Williams remained for one year, drawing upon her knowledge of folk dance as well as her skills in classical ballet. She then toured Europe in Noble Sissle's revival of "Shuffle Along" (1945-1946) and returned to New York in 1946 to dance in a revival of "Showboat" and the first production of "Finian's Rainbow". She later appeared in a production of "My Darlin' Aida "(1952).

While she was performing in "Finian's Rainbow," Williams married Shannon Yarborough, purchased a house in Brooklyn, and converted the basement into a dance school. In 1953 the Haitian Education Bureau and the Bureau of Tourism hired Williams to develop their national school of dance. In Haiti, she trained the National Folklore Group, taught at a girls' high school, and trained monitors from the Bureau of Sports to become dance teachers. In 1954, she founded the Haitian Institute of Folklore and Classic Dance and became the director of Haiti's Theatre de Verdure. She remained in Haiti for 26 years, training hundreds of dancers, including her daughter, Sara Yarborough, who became a professional dancer.

From 1972 to 1980 Williams traveled to other countries -- including Guyana (1972-1976) and the Bahamas (1976-1980) -- to develop national schools of dance. In 1985 she returned to Haiti to assist the government in organizing the National School of Dance of Haiti and the Ballet National d'Haiti. She returned to New York in the late 1980s and taught dance at Alvin Ailey American Dance Center School, New York University, Steps, and Jo Jo's Dance Factory until she suffered a heart attack and died on July 19, 1989.

Carmen Jones: The Film (1954)

Carmen Jones is a 1954 American musical film produced and directed by Otto Preminger. The screenplay by Harry Kleiner is based on the libretto for the 1943 stage production of the same name by Oscar Hammerstein II, which was inspired by an adaptation of the 1845 Prosper Mérimée novella Carmen by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. Hammerstein also wrote the lyrics to music composed by Georges Bizet for his 1875 opera Carmen.

In 1992, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Set during World War II, the story focuses on Carmen Jones, a vixen who works in a parachute factory in North Carolina. When she is arrested for fighting with a co-worker who reported her for arriving late for work, foreman Sgt. Brown assigns young soldier Joe to deliver her to the authorities, much to the dismay of Joe's fiancée Cindy Lou, who had agreed to marry him during his leave.

While en route, Carmen suggests she and Joe stop for a meal and a little romance, and his refusal intensifies her determination to seduce him. When their army jeep ends up in the river, she suggests they spend the night at her grandmother's house nearby and continue their journey by train the following day, and that night Joe succumbs to Carmen's advances. The next morning he awakens to find a note in which she says although she loves him she is unable to deal with time in jail and is running away.

Joe is locked in the stockade for allowing his prisoner to escape, and Cindy Lou arrives just as a rose from Carmen is delivered to him, prompting her to leave abruptly. Having found work in a Louisiana nightclub, Carmen awaits his release. One night champion prizefighter Husky Miller enters with an entourage and introduces himself to Carmen, who expresses no interest in him. Husky orders his manager Rum Daniels to offer her jewelry, furs, and an expensive hotel suite if she and her friends Frankie and Myrt accompany him to Chicago, but she declines the offer. Just then, Joe arrives and announces he must report to flying school immediately. Angered, Carmen decides to leave with Sgt. Brown, who also has appeared on the scene, and Joe severely beats him. Realizing he will be sentenced to a long prison term for hitting his superior, Joe flees to Chicago with Carmen.

While Joe remains hidden in a shabby rented room, Carmen secretly visits Husky's gym to ask Frankie for a loan, but she insists she has no money of her own. Carmen returns to the boarding house with a bag of groceries, and Joe questions how she paid for them. The two argue, and she goes to Husky's hotel suite to play cards with her friends. When she draws the nine of spades, she interprets it as a premonition of impending doom and descends into a quagmire of drink and debauchery.

Cindy Lou arrives at Husky's gym in search of Carmen just before Joe appears. Ignoring his former sweetheart, he orders Carmen to leave with him and threatens Husky with a knife when he tries to intervene. Carmen helps Joe escape the military police, but during Husky's big fight, Joe finds Carmen in the crowd and pulls her into a storage room, where he begs her to return to him. When she rebuffs him, Joe strangles Carmen to death just before the police arrive to apprehend him for desertion.

The Broadway production of Carmen Jones opened on December 2, 1943 and ran for 503 performances. When he saw it, Otto Preminger dismissed it as a series of "skits loosely based on the opera" with a score "simplified and changed so that the performers who had no operatic training could sing it." In adapting it for the screen, he wanted to make "a dramatic film with music rather than a conventional film musical," so he decided to return to the original source material - the Prosper Mérimée novella - and hired Harry Kleiner, whom he had taught at Yale University, to expand the story beyond the limitations imposed upon it by the Bizet opera and Hammerstein's interpretation of it.

Preminger realized no major studio would be interested in financing an operatic film with an all-black cast, so he decided to produce it independently. He anticipated United Artist executives Arthur B. Krim and Robert S. Benjamin, who had supported him in his censorship battles with The Moon Is Blue, would be willing to invest in the project, but the two felt it was not economically viable and declined. Following the completion of his previous film, River of No Return, Preminger had paid 20th Century Fox $150,000 to cancel the remainder of his contract so he was surprised when Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck contacted him and offered to finance the film while allowing him to operate as a fully independent filmmaker. In December 1953, he accepted $750,000 and began what became a prolonged preproduction period. He hired cinematographer Sam Leavitt as director of photography, Herschel Burke Gilbert as musical director, and Herbert Ross as choreographer and began to scout locations.

On April 14, 1954, six weeks before principal photography was scheduled to begin, Preminger was contacted by Joseph Breen, who was in the final months of his leadership of the office of the Motion Picture Production Code. Breen had clashed with Preminger over The Moon Is Blue and still resented the director's success in releasing that film without a seal of approval. He cited the "over-emphasis on lustfulness" in Carmen Jones and was outraged by the screenplay's failure to include "any voice of morality properly condemning Carmen's complete lack of morals." Preminger agreed to make some minor adjustments to the script and even filmed two versions of scenes Breen found objectionable, although he included the more controversial ones in the final film.
Because he himself was sensitive to the issue of racial representation in the film, Preminger had no objections when Zanuck urged him to submit the script to Walter Francis White, executive secretary of the NAACP, who had no objection to it.

Preminger began to assemble his cast. Harry Belafonte, a folk singer who recently had introduced Calypso music to a mainstream audience, had only one film to his credit, but he had just won the Tony Award and Theatre World Award for his performance in John Murray Anderson's Almanac, and Preminger cast him as Joe. Pearl Bailey's sole screen credit was the 1948 film Isn't It Romantic?, but she had achieved success as a band singer and was familiar to television audiences from her appearances on Your Show of Shows, so she was assigned the role of Frankie. Joe Adams was a Los Angeles disc jockey with no acting experience, but Preminger felt he had the right look for Husky. Diahann Carroll auditioned for the title role, but she was so terrified of the director she could barely focus on the scene, and Preminger cast her in the small supporting role of Myrt instead.

Preminger was familiar with Dorothy Dandridge but felt she was incapable of exuding the sultry sex appeal the role of Carmen demanded, particularly after having seen Dandridge's performance as a demure schoolteacher opposite Belafonte in 1953's Bright Road, Her agent's office was in the same building where Preminger's brother Ingo worked, and he asked Ingo to intercede on his client's behalf. At his first meeting with Dandridge, Preminger told her she was "lovely" and looked like a "model" or "a beautiful butterfly," but not Carmen, and suggested she audition for the role of Cindy Lou. Dandridge took the script and left, and when she returned she was dressed and behaved exactly as Preminger envisioned Carmen. The director was impressed enough to schedule a screen test for mid-May, after Dandridge completed a singing engagement in St. Louis. In the interim he cast Juilliard School graduate Olga James as Cindy Lou.

On May 21, Preminger announced Dandridge had been cast as Carmen. Initially thrilled by the prospect of playing one of the best film roles ever offered an African American female, Dandridge quickly began to doubt her ability to do it justice. After several days, she told her agent to advise Preminger she was backing out of the project. The director drove to her apartment to reassure her and assuage her fears, and the two unexpectedly began a passionate affair.

Although Dandridge and Belafonte were singers, neither was capable of singing the operatic score, so Marilyn Horne and LeVern Hutcherson were hired to record their vocals, and soundtrack recording began on June 18. Horne later recalled, "Even though I was at that time a very light lyric soprano, I did everything I possibly could to imitate the voice of Dorothy Dandridge. I spent many hours with her. In fact, one of the reasons I was chosen to do this dubbing was that I was able to imitate her voice had she been able to sing in the proper register."

Following three weeks of rehearsal, filming in CinemaScope began on June 30. Preminger had opted to remain in California for the shoot, with El Monte doubling for the Southern exteriors and the Chicago interiors being filmed at the Culver Studios. Principal photography was completed in early August, and Preminger and the Fox publicity studio began promoting both the film and its star. Dandridge was featured in Ebony and photographed for the cover of Life and appeared on a live television broadcast on October 24, four days prior to the opening, to sing two songs from the film.
The opening title sequence is the first film title sequence created by Saul Bass, and marked the beginning of Bass's long professional relationship with Preminiger.

The film had its world premiere at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City on October 28, 1954. The following February, it opened in London and Berlin, and in both cities it played for more than a year in exclusive first-run engagements. Because of a technicality in French copyright laws, the film was unable to have a theatrical release in France, although it was permitted to open the 1955 Cannes Film Festival, where for the first time Preminger and Dandridge openly flaunted their relationship.

Dorothy Dandridge became Hollywood’s First Black Theatrical Movie Star. She made the cover of Life Magazine, Billed as "Hollywood’s Fiery Carmen Jones". It was the first time a Black Woman made the cover of Life Magazine, breaking another color barrier.

Soon after, the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences announced the nominations
for the 1955 Oscar Awards. Dandridgewas nominated for Best Actress along with; Judy Garland, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Jane Wyman. Only two Black’s who had previously been nominated for Oscars, they were; Hattie McDaniel, who won in 1939 for "Gone with the Wind" and Ethel Waters, in 1949 for "Pinky". Never before had a Negro been nominated in a Leading Category.
While America was in a Race turmoil with Boycotts, Sit-Ins and The House of UN-American Activities Committee Blacklisting. Dandridge was signing contracts with 20th Century Fox for an astounding salary. Making her the highest paid Actress in the History of Motion Pictures.
This immediately broke the color barrier with a six-week engagement at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Dandridge became the First Negro Entertainer to work and stay at the Exclusive Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manahttan. On Oscar night Grace Kelly took home the award. But, Dandridge was a winner for all Negro Americans; it was a Historic occasion. She became the first Negro to present at the
Oscar’s at Academy Awards Ceremonies.

The film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. It was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Film from any Source but lost to Richard III.
Dorothy Dandridge was also nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress, but lost to Betsy Blair in Marty.  At the 5th Berlin International Film Festival and the film won the Bronze Berlin Bear award The film was also honored at the Locarno International Film Festival.
Herschel Burke Gilbert was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture but lost to Adolph Deutsch and Saul Chaplin for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
Harry Kleiner was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Musical.

                                                       Carmen Jones: The Film (1954)

Joyce Bryant

Joyce Bryant would become the first dark-skinned African-American woman celebrated by the mass media as a 'sex-symbol'. Internationally-acclaimed in the early 1950's for her four and a half-octave vocal range, Bryant packed 'the big rooms' in the U.S. and abroad.

Nicknamed "The Bronze Blond Bombshell," Joyce never achieved Eartha Kitt, Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge popularity, but the supper club chanteuse is still fondly remembered. The four octave singer, aka "The Black Marilyn Monroe", "The Voice You'll Always Remember," and "The Belter," was born in Oakland, CA, but raised in San Francisco (the oldest of eight children). She moved to Los Angeles to live with cousins when she was in her late teens. An impromptu singalong in a Los Angeles club in the late '40s was Bryant's first public performance. From there, she picked up other gigs and built a strong reputation by 1950.

Her act was outrageously sexy; she wore provocative, tight, backless, cleavage-revealing mermaid dresses that left little to imagine and they were so tight, she had to be carried off-stage. Supposedly, Bryant twisted so much she lost four pounds a performance. The blond hair probably inspired Etta James -- who, like Bryant, was also raised in San Francisco and lived in Los Angeles -- to copy the blond hair image later. Bryant's hair was naturally black, but not wanting to be upstaged by Josephine Baker at a club, she doused it with silver radiator paint, slithered into a tight silver dress and voila: the Bronze Blond Bombshell and even Baker was impressed.

The gimmick and Bryant's elastic voice elevated the singer to heavyweight status; she earned as much as 3,500 dollars a gig and 150,000 dollars a year in the early '50s. She was called one of the most beautiful black women in the world and regularly appeared in Afrocentric magazines like Jet. A Life magazine layout in 1953 depicted the sexy singer in provocative poses. She recorded a series of 78s for OKeh Records with the Joe Reisman Orchestra around 1952 that includes "It's Only Human," "Go Where You Go," "A Shoulder to Weep On," "After You've Gone," and "Farewell to Love." Two recordings, "Love for Sale" and "Drunk With Love," were banned from radio play– because it was to sexy. As meteoric as her career took off, it landed even faster.

The paint damaged her hair and, raised to fear God, she started having second thoughts about her image. She disliked working on the Sabbath and hated the clubs and the men (often gangsters) who frequented them, lusting after her body. She was once beaten in her dressing room for refusing an admirer's advances. Years later, she told Essence magazine that she never enjoyed her career. She wanted to quit earlier, but couldn't because of nefarious managers and prior commitments. She found solace in pills: pills for sleeping and pills for energy. The first phase of her career ended in 1955 when she denounced it for the church.

She enrolled at Oakwood College, Ebony the most widely circulated African-American magazine in the U.S., ran a five-page feature article on her conversion in its May 1956 issue titled "The New World of Joyce Bryant." According to the church's primary publication, Review and Herald, the piece accurately described the church's doctrines and pictured her present life on campus in a favorable light. In 1957, Bryant became a Bible instructor in the Allegheny Conference, a regional black conference, initially working in related Washington, D.C., area churches. In 1958, she and Richard Penniman (Little Richard), a recently converted pop music superstar, worked with E. E. Cleveland, famed black evangelist, in a twelve-week series in Washington, D.C. The write-up about that event in the September 11, 1958, Review and Herald, related the following: The last night of the series will long be remembered by those in attendance. 

 Two former stars of show business, Joyce Bryant and "Little Richard" Penniman, said to be the creator of rock and roll, boldly witnessed to the saving power of God.As Miss Bryant, who has been billed at the nightspots of two continents, told of her struggles to get away from God, many felt the tears rolling down their cheeks. Two months ago her former booking agent offered her $200,000, tax free, if she would take the leading role in a picture to be made. In relating this experience Miss Bryant said, "Peace of mind, and the knowledge of working with God in saving the souls of men, bring more comfort and lasting joy than all the money and glamour."

She returned to entertaining in the '60s, finding work with touring foreign opera companies. She returned to the rocky club scene and sang on cruise ships; this time without the theatrics, blond hair, and tight dresses. Although never as famous as Eartha Kitt and Dorothy Dandridge, noted popular black singers, Bryant because of her talent was, like them, able to help break racial barriers, gaining access to the most prominent stages in that area of popular music performance. Along the way, she endured her share of indignities, including being burned in effigy when she stayed and sang in a Miami hotel. Martin Luther King, Jr., nationally famous civil rights pioneer, particularly enjoyed her singing and, following Sunday services, she would often join King and his family for dinner at an Atlanta, Georgia, restaurant.

She later became a vocal coach of note, working with such diverse artists as Phyllis Hyman, Raquel Welch, Michelle Rosewoman, and Jennifer Holiday. Often woefully miscategorized as a "quitter," extensive research uncovers a rather different tale of a woman who succeeded in reinventing herself as an artist on her own terms - refusing to be a victim of the entertainment machine. Bryant was honored at the Arlington County Library in Arlington, VA, during Black History Month at an event hosted by jazz historian and WPFW radio host Jim Beyers (who calls her the Lost Diva).

Joyce Bryant
http://www.joycebryant.net/

Porgy and Bess The Film (1959)

Porgy and Bess is a 1959 American musical film directed by Otto Preminger. It is based on the 1935 opera of the same name by George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and Ira Gershwin, which is in turn based on Heyward's 1925 novel Porgy, and the subsequent 1927 non-musical stage adaptation he
co-wrote with his wife Dorothy. The screenplay for the film, which turned the operatic recitatives
into spoken dialogue, was very closely based on the opera and was written by N. Richard Nash.
The project proved to be the last for Samuel Goldwyn, who had produced Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Guys and Dolls, among many others, during his lengthy career. Due to its controversial subject matter, the film was shown only briefly following its initial reserved seat engagements in major cities, where it drew mixed reviews from critics. Two months after its release, Goldwyn grudgingly conceded, "No one is waiting breathlessly for my next picture." In 2011,
the film was chosen for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

Set in the early 1900s in the fictional Catfish Row section of Charleston, South Carolina, which serves as home to a black fishing community, the story focuses on the titular characters, crippled beggar Porgy, who travels about in a goat-drawn cart, and the drug-addicted Bess, who lives with stevedore Crown, the local bully. While high on cocaine supplied by Sportin' Life, Crown kills Robbins during a fight prompted by a craps game, and Bess urges him to flee. Sportin' Life suggests she accompany him to New York City, an offer Bess declines. She seeks refuge with her neighbors, all of whom refuse to help her. Porgy finally agrees to let her stay with him.
Bess and Porgy settle into domestic life together and soon fall in love. Just before a church picnic on Kittiwah Island, Sportin' Life once again approaches Bess, but Porgy warns him to leave her alone. Bess wishes to stay with Porgy, since he cannot attend the picnic because of his disability, but he urges her to go. After the picnic ends, and before Bess can leave, Crown, who has been hiding in the woods on the island, confronts her. She initially struggles to resist him but Crown rapes her.

The others, not knowing exactly what has happened, leave and return to the mainland.
Two days later, Bess returns to Catfish Row in a state of delirium. When she recovers, she remembers what happened. Feeling that she betrayed Porgy, she begs his forgiveness. She admits she is unable to resist Crown and asks Porgy to protect her from him. Crown eventually returns to claim his woman, and when he draws his knife, Porgy strangles him. He is detained by the police merely to identify the body, but Sportin' Life, who has fed Bess cocaine, convinces her Porgy inadvertently will reveal himself to be the murderer. In her drugged state, she finally accepts his offer to take her to New York. When Porgy returns and discovers she is gone, he sets off to find her.

The original 1935 Broadway production of Porgy and Bess closed after 124 performances. A 1942 revival, stripped of all recitative, fared slightly better, as did a subsequent national tour and another revival in 1953, but in financial terms the work did not have a very good track record. Still, there were many who thought it had potential as a film. Otto Preminger was one of several producers, including Hal Wallis, Louis B. Mayer, Dore Schary, Anatole Litvak, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Harry Cohn, who had tried to secure the film rights without success. Cohn even wanted to cast Fred Astaire, Al Jolson, and Rita Hayworth and have them perform in blackface, something that the Gershwin estate was violently opposed to. (They had stipulated that unless it was absolutely impossible given a certain set of circumstances, Porgy and Bess must always be performed by real African-Americans.) For twenty-five years, Ira Gershwin had resisted all offers, certain his brother's work would be "debased" by Hollywood. On May 8, 1957, he sold the rights to Samuel Goldwyn for $600,000 as a down payment against 10% of the film's gross receipts.

When Langston Hughes, Goldwyn's first choice for screenwriter, proved to be unavailable, the producer approached Paul Osborn, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Sidney Kingsley, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, Clifford Odets, and Rod Serling, all of whom expressed varying degrees of interest but cited prior commitments. Goldwyn finally signed N. Richard Nash, who completed a lengthy first draft by December 1957. For director, Goldwyn sought Elia Kazan, Frank Capra, and King Vidor without success. He finally settled on Rouben Mamoulian, who had directed the original Broadway productions of both the play Porgy and its operatic adaptation.
Nash's screenplay changed virtually all of the sung recitative to spoken dialogue, as in the 1942 stage revival. For example, in the original opera Porgy sings the line "If there weren't no Crown, Bess, if there was only just you and Porgy, what then?", upon which Bess launches into the duet I Loves You Porgy. In the film the line is spoken. The recitatives themselves did not have to really be rewritten, because they do not rhyme, while the words in all the songs do.

Because of its themes of fornication, drug addiction, prostitution, violence, and murder, Porgy and Bess proved to be difficult to cast. Many black actors felt the story did nothing but perpetuate negative stereotypes. Harry Belafonte thought the role of Porgy was demeaning and declined it. So many performers refused to participate in the project that Goldwyn actually considered Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson and singer Clyde McPhatter for major roles. Only Las Vegas entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. expressed interest in appearing in the film, and arranged to audition for a role during a party at Judy Garland's home.

Goldwyn offered Sidney Poitier $75,000 to portray Porgy. The actor had serious reservations about the role and turned it down, but his agent led Goldwyn to believe she could persuade her client to star in the film. She proved to be unsuccessful, and Goldwyn threatened to sue the actor for breaching an oral contract. When Poitier realized his refusal to star in Porgy might jeopardize his appearance in the Stanley Kramer film The Defiant Ones, he reconsidered and grudgingly accepted, assuring Goldwyn he would "do the part to the best of my ability - under the circumstances."

Goldwyn's first and only choice for Bess was Dorothy Dandridge, who accepted the role without enthusiasm. Her Carmen Jones co-stars Pearl Bailey, Brock Peters, and Diahann Carroll also accepted roles, but all of them had concerns about how their characters would be portrayed. Bailey warned costume designer Irene Sharaff she would not wear any bandannas because she was unwilling to look like Aunt Jemima.

Completing the primary creative team were production designer Oliver Smith, who recently had won the Tony Award for Best Scenic Design for My Fair Lady, and André Previn and Ken Darby, who would supervise the music. Because Poitier could not sing and the score was beyond Dandridge's range, their vocals would be dubbed, and Goldwyn insisted only black singers could be hired for the task. Leontyne Price, who had portrayed Bess in the 1952 European tour and the acclaimed 1953 Broadway revival, was invited to sing the role on film but responded, "No body, no voice." Adele Addison and Robert McFerrin eventually were hired, but neither received screen credit.

Despite Goldwyn's intention that the music sound as much as it did in the original opera as possible, he did allow Previn and his team to completely rescore and even change the underscoring heard during the fight scenes and at several other moments, as well as in the overture to the film.

A full-cast dress rehearsal was scheduled for July 3, 1958, but slightly after 4:00am a fire destroyed all the sets and costumes, a loss of $2 million. Rumors that the blaze had been started by black arsonists determined to shut down production immediately began to circulate. Goldwyn publicly denounced the story, although studio insiders were certain the fire had been set deliberately. The production was placed on hiatus for six weeks to allow for reconstruction. During this period, director Mamoulian repeatedly clashed with the producer about every aspect of the film, and Goldwyn fired him.

William Wyler was willing to step in if Goldwyn could postpone the project for a few months, but the producer opted to replace Mamoulian with Otto Preminger, who had started preparing both Exodus and Anatomy of a Murder but was willing to set them aside for the opportunity to helm Porgy and Bess. Mamoulian was incensed not only that he had been dismissed after eight months of pre-production work, but that he had been replaced by Preminger, who in 1944 had taken over Laura when Mamoulian had ignored all of Preminger's directives as producer of that film. Claiming Goldwyn had fired him for "frivolous, spiteful, or dicatatorial reasons not pertinent to the director's skill or obligation," he brought his case to the Directors Guild of America, which notified all its members, including Preminger, they could not enter into a contract with Goldwyn. This prompted the Producers Guild of America to become involved. They insisted Goldwyn had the right to change directors and was not in breach of contract because he had paid Mamoulian in full. When Mamoulian changed tactics and attempted to raise charges of racism against Preminger, he lost any support he had managed to gather, and after three weeks the matter was resolved in favor of Goldwyn.

The change of directors was stressful for Dandridge who, had ended an affair with Preminger years before. In any event, Dandridge was unhappy and lacked self-assurance, especially when the director began to criticize her performance.
Preminger objected to the stylized sets and elaborate costumes - "You've got a two-dollar whore in a two-thousand-dollar dress," he admonished Goldwyn and wanted Previn to provide orchestrations favoring jazz rather than symphony, but the producer wanted the film to look and sound like the original Broadway production he had admired as much as possible. He grudgingly agreed to allow the director to film the picnic sequence on Venice Island near Stockton, but for the most part Preminger felt his creative instincts were stifled. Only in the area of actual filming did he exert complete control by shooting as little extra footage as possible so Goldwyn couldn't tamper with the film once it was completed.

Principal photography ended on December 16, 1958. Columbia executives were unhappy with the film, particularly its downbeat ending, and one suggested it be changed to allow Porgy to walk. Goldwyn, however, was determined the film should be faithful to its source, going so far as to insist it be described as an "American folk opera" rather than a "musical" in all advertising. He opened the film on a reserved-seat basis at the Warner Theatre in New York City on June 24, 1959 and the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles on July 5. Shortly after opening in Atlanta in early August, the film's run there was cancelled because it angered some black viewers, and although the Atlanta Journal accused Goldwyn of censoring his own film, he pulled the film from several other areas throughout the country as well.

Although the film won one Oscar and one Golden Globe, and its soundtrack album won a Grammy,
 it was critically and commercially unsuccessful, earning back only half its $7-million cost. It was broadcast on network television only once - Sunday night, March 5, 1967, on ABC-TV (during a week that also saw a rebroadcast of a TV adaptation of Brigadoon, as well as the first telecast of Hal Holbrook's one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!). The 1959 Porgy and Bess has not been seen in its entirety on network TV since, although clips have been shown on some of the American Film Institute specials. The film had multiple presentations during the 1970s on Los Angeles local television, KTLA-TV, Channel 5, an independent station with access to the Goldwyn Studios output, most probably using the special pan and scan 35mm print which was made for the ABC-TV network presentation, as was KTLA-TV's practice (it and competitor KHJ-TV telecast 35mm prints in strong preference to 16mm prints).

Goldwyn's lease of the rights was only 15 years, and after they expired, the film could not be shown without the permission of the Gershwin and Heyward estates, and even then only after substantial compensation was paid. Despite repeated requests, the Gershwin estate repeatedly refused to grant permission for the film to be seen. As a consequence, the film has never been officially released on video or DVD, however bootleg videos, made from a 35mm anamorphic release print, circulate among collectors, preserving 115 minutes of the original 138-minute whole.

There exists one 35mm Technicolor dye-transfer print, with 4-track magnetic sound, but it is in the UCLA archive library and is not generally available for public presentations. This print has had at least two presentations at university-sponsored festivals, and which presentations required special permission from the Gershwin Estate. It was long believed that there are no surviving 70mm prints, and that the 65mm negative is "unprintable". Likely, any restoration would have to be effected from the silver separation protection masters, assuming those could be found. A faded 70mm print with faulty 6-track magnetic sound and with German subtitles was recently discovered and was screened in Europe.

It wasn't until 2007 that it was given a theatrical showing again when, on September 26 and 27, the Ziegfeld Theatre in midtown-Manhattan presented it in its entirety, complete with overture and intermission and exit music, followed by a discussion with Preminger biographer Foster Hirsch.

André Previn and Ken Darby won the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. Leon Shamroy was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography (Color) but lost to Robert Surtees for Ben-Hur. Irene Sharaff was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design (Color) but lost to Elizabeth Haffenden for Ben-Hur. Gordon Sawyer and Fred Hynes were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Sound but lost to Franklin Milton for Ben-Hur.

The film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy. Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge were nominated in the musical/comedy performance category but lost to Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe, both for Some Like It Hot.
N. Richard Nash was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Musical but lost to Robert Smith, Jack Rose, and Melville Shavelson for The Five Pennies.
The film's soundtrack album won the Grammy Award for Best Sound Track Album or Recording of Original Cast From a Motion Picture or Television.

PORGY AND BESS 1959