Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series featuring the most talked-about scripts during awards season continues with Blue Moon, the Robert Kaplow-penned tale about the impact on famed lyricist Lorenz Hart of his real-life breakup with his longtime musical theater partner, the composer Richard Rodgers.
Blue Moon became the second in a nostalgia double-bill this year for director Richard Linklater, who also put Nouvelle Vague, his snapshot of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic Breathless, out into the world.
Sony Pictures Classics landed Blue Moon and released it in theaters in October.
In Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke plays Hart, who struggled with mental health issues and increasingly alcoholism during his life, steeling himself at the Sardi’s bar for the 1943 opening night of Oklahoma!, the first outing of Hart’s former partner Richard Rodgers with Rodgers’ new partner Oscar Hammerstein.
The idea had been in the works since Kaplow sent Linklater a rough script more than a decade ago; Kaplow previously wrote the script for another Broadway period movie Linklater directed, 2008’s Me and Orson Welles. Kaplow constructed the crux of the Blue Moon story out of a series of correspondences between Hart and an unidentified Yale student named Elizabeth. The script grew out of the letters and Kaplow asked questions like, What if they met? What if Hart loved her? The action was also set in once place — the bar at Sardi’s, the famed restaurant in the New York theater district — which tightened the frame of the picture of a man who felt the culture he helped create was passing him by, trying for a glimmer of happiness with a girl he may have loved.
Margaret Qualley plays Elizabeth, and Andrew Scott plays Rodgers (Scott won the Supporting Actor Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival where the film premiered). Bobby Cannavale plays the loyal Sardi’s bartender Eddie. Hawke and Scott both scooped up Gotham Awards nominations, while Hawke landed a Best Actor nom and the film a Best Picture nom from the Golden Globes.
The screenplay was recognized as the best of the year by the Chicago and St. Louis film critics groups.
Linklater said he and Kaplow (and later Hawke, who was too young to play Hart when this project first surfaced) jell because they are “guys from another decade.”
‘He’s a historian, he’s a romantic, he really likes to jump into these moments in history,” Linklater says of Kaplow. He called the resulting movie “a crazy, perverse idea, to see the triumph of this hit musical [Oklahoma!] but through the eyes of the old lyricist.”
Read the screenplay below.
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