What Blue Moon’s Robert Kaplow Really Thinks of ‘Oklahoma!’

Robert Kaplow’s Oscar nomination for Blue Moon might have been the biggest surprise on Oscar-nomination morning. The film was only expected to get one nod, for Ethan Hawke’s leading performance, and Kaplow is not exactly a hyperconnected industry vet. He spent 30 years as a high-school teacher, also writing comedy songs for NPR’s Morning Edition. In 2003, his book Me and Orson Welles was published, and Richard Linklater adapted it into his 2008 movie of the same name. But Kaplow was not credited with writing that screenplay, making Blue Moon his first-ever screenplay credit. Now, he’s an Oscar nominee.

So, how’d it happen? Well, with a wordy, hyperliterate, funny, historical drama steeped in nearly forgotten musical-theater lore. Blue Moon follows Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), a real man who wrote multiple successful musicals in the early 20th century (including Pal Joey, Babes in Arms, and The Boys From Syracuse) with his writing partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). But Blue Moon is set after all those were already written and the success was had. It follows Hart on just one night — the night that Rodgers’s new musical, with his new writing partner, is opening on Broadway. That musical is Oklahoma!, and Rodgers has just formed the writing group known as “Rodgers and Hammerstein,” which would become the most successful in musical-theater history. In real time, we watch the gay drunkard Hart get left behind. In 1943, while war wages on, the world wants sunnier, more optimistic shows than Hart’s tricky, lyrically deft writing allows. And so he drowns his sorrows at the opening-night party, whining to a bartender (Bobby Cannavale) and pining after a college student named Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), even though she’s both too young and a woman. It’s a sad movie, but the script is so funny and joke-packed that it’s still a good time. “The challenge for me as a writer was to invent a voice for him that plausibly reflected the work,” Kaplow says. “You read those lyrics and they’re very smart, funny, ironic, and playful with language. There’s a thread of melancholy and yearning that runs through them — even the funny ones.”

What was the initial seed for Blue Moon?
In my early 20s, I thought I wanted to be a songwriter. I had some talent in that regard, and eventually I wrote comic songs for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. In the mid-’70s, I went to the New York Library of the Performing Arts to listen to an audio recording of this long interview with Richard Rodgers. It must have been three hours long, and I got to a part where Rodgers dismisses Hart. Something stayed with me from that moment. There was something icy and chilling in Rodgers’s tone. It was as if this was an emotional thing for him, but he was not going to reveal that he was armoring his heart and making it very businesslike. And I thought about that a long time, and I knew even then that someday I would write about it.

I spent my career writing novels about other things, but I had this character in my head of Lorenz Hart. He was just dying to talk. One day I bought a school notebook and a ballpoint pen, and when I stopped writing, he had been talking for 71 handwritten pages. And then I was talking on the phone with Richard Linklater, who had made a film of a novel that I wrote called Me and Orson Welles. He asked me what I was working on, and I said, “I’m trying to write this thing about the last days of Lorenz Hart.” And he said, “I’m really interested in that — could I read that?” That sentence is the reason we’re speaking today.

What research did you do in between hearing that interview and writing your script?
I was interested in songwriting, so any biography about Rodgers or Hart or Sondheim, that whole crew, I read myself. Unknowingly, I was gathering material. There’s some part of your brain that knows, I’m going to use this sometime. If you were writing about Sondheim now, there are hundreds of hours of interviews you could listen to and get his speech rhythm. There’s none of that with Hart. He’s almost invisible. To me, that was the challenge: to make a voice that was playful and funny, but where, a millimeter below the surface, was a guy who was sort of desperate to find a reciprocal love and also on some level knew he never was going to.

Your Lorenz Hart also toys with archetypes of gayness.
It’s a 1943 gay man. Here’s this Jewish man who lives with his mother and is 47 years old. The gayness had to be couched in that universe a little bit between the lines, although it’s not between the lines by the time the movie ends. But it’s not the same gayness we’d see now, where people might be prideful.

The self-loathing is endemic to his gay presentation.
There’s a shame and a self-loathing that’s percolating right there under the surface in 1943. In Blue Moon, you feel it leaking into the margins of what he’s talking about.

When you were writing, what level of knowledge did you assume from your audience? 
A lot of people don’t know that Richard Rodgers wrote with somebody before Oscar Hammerstein. I wanted to take Lorenz Hart out of the shadows and reanimate him. There was a guy that Richard Rodgers wrote with for 25 years. And Hart only lived to be 48, so that’s half his life. There was a kind of love story between Rodgers and Hart — they acknowledge the need for each other, and they’re also exasperated by each other. The film opens with Lorenz Hart collapsing and then with what’s supposed to sound like an archival radio obituary from 1943. That was Richard Linklater’s idea, because people aren’t going to know who this guy is, and in 40 seconds, we do all the exposition we need to do.

Given that it’s heady and takes place in one bar for 90 minutes, I recognize the script more as a play than as a movie. Why is it a film?
I wanted to keep it really feeling theatrical since these are composers, lyricists, and producers. But there’s something large about plays, where the actors are projecting emotions to the back of the house. This is a more intimate story than that. It’s more like an Ingmar Bergman movie that’s got three or four characters in it, but it’s not a play. I think you don’t see Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage and say, “This should be a play. It’s only got four people.”

There’s that long scene in Blue Moon with Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley in a coatroom. That’s a 14-minute scene with two people in a coatroom. A lot of directors would have been scared or nervous to shoot that. They would have said, “Can we get out of the coatroom? Can the camera swirl around in circles around them?” Linklater just said, “No, it’s these characters and these words.” One of the reasons the scene works is that the camera’s a foot away from their face. When Margaret Qualley finally has to say to him, “Of course I love you, Larry, but just not that way,” you see her eyes are filling with tears because she knows, I have to say this. I want to do it in a way that is not going to devastate him because I do love him.

Onstage, Ethan Hawke’s performance would feel a little more “normal” — not far off from normal stage acting. Here, he’s kind of gloriously grotesque. 
Onstage it might be too much, in a way. You can just see some ham actor wrecking this thing.

In regional theaters across the country.
That’s coming down the road. The way it’s shot, there are moments when Ethan Hawke is supposed to be very short, and you see that. Then, for a lot of the film, you can forget that. Onstage you’re stuck with that. The whole time he has to be shorter than everybody else. In the movie, when he’s holding court at a bar stool then it’s about what he’s talking about. It’s not, Let’s pity the short gay guy.

What was the public perception you were working off with Oklahoma!?
Oklahoma! was and is a massive hit. For Rodgers and Hammerstein, it may have been the biggest hit of their career. And they follow it with Carousel, South Pacific, The Sound of Music. Here’s Lorenz Hart bemoaning the sentimentality of Oklahoma!. What if he was forced to sit through The Sound of Music? I think he’d be rooting for the Nazis in that movie because at least they would stop those kids from singing.

In 1943 the war was going on, and Oklahoma! was the perfect show for that moment. That’s the thing that irritates Hart: It’s corny, it’s sentimental, and as he says in the film, it’s nostalgic for a world that never existed. They’re churning butter and singing, “Oh, what a beautiful morning.” It’s beautiful, and those songs are beautiful. They’re unassailably beautiful songs, but it’s not the kind of thing that Hart is going to write. And Rodgers did ask him first to adapt it, and it’s good that he didn’t do it. It would have been terrible.

At the same time, Oklahoma! is also an innovation in musical theater. It pushed the art form forward by introducing the idea of songs that were written in character and moved the plot along.
The songs inextricably advance the plot, and Hammerstein is better at that than Hart. Those songs could only have been sung by one person in the vernacular of that person. Hart is more of an entertainer. In Mary Rodgers’s autobiography, she says the reason that Pal Joey has never worked as a musical is that the songs don’t advance the story. Hammerstein is much more of a musical dramatist, and Hart is much more of a lyrical craftsman or a lyrical comedian.

Within your movie, does Hart recognize that Oklahoma! has outclassed him as a dramatic piece?
He probably does. He’s not going to own up to it in those words that you said. But when he says to Rodgers, “This is going to run longer than Abie’s Irish Rose,” he recognizes it is an astonishing work. As the reviews start coming in that night, this pyramid of praise leading to the New York Times review, Hart is brave about it. He says to Rodgers, “I’ll put that on the marquee: ‘Quite clearly approaches perfection,’” about the show that he didn’t write and that is going to end his career, really.

It ended everybody’s careers besides those of Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves, in a way. 
It raised the bar to a point that somebody like Frank Loesser, the songwriter behind Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, then has to say, “I have to write character songs as good as this.”

Even Cole Porter paled in comparison, with his musicals all stuffed with trunk songs, or previously written songs that are brought out of “the trunk” for new musicals, despite not being specifically written for them. 
After 1943, Porter will write Kiss Me Kate, and that’s about it for him in terms of these hits. Even in Kiss Me Kate, the song that the two gangsters sing, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” that’s just there because it’s wonderfully funny. It could be in any show.

There’s something about these witty, light trunk songs that feels gayer than the sturdy musicals that Rodgers and Hammerstein started writing. Does that make sense?
I’m afraid it does. It shouldn’t make sense. But the kind of stuff that comedy playwright Noël Coward is going to write is a different universe. It’s ironic. It’s more playful. It’s sexier in a funnier way than Oscar Hammerstein is ever going to write. He does “Some Enchanted Evening,” which is a beautiful song, but it’s got the stamp of middle-class morality on it. A lot of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s stuff has endured, and those plays by Rodgers and Hart haven’t. The songs have endured. Nobody puts on the musicals anymore.

The Rodgers and Hammerstein ones are uplifting. They tell a well-made story: beginning, middle, and end with a resolve. There’s usually a tragic subplot. The best of the Rodgers and Hammerstein’s stuff is South Pacific, because Josh Logan wrote the book and he’s a much better writer than Oscar Hammerstein is. Logan was in the war, and he knew the way men really speak. It’s a tougher musical.

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s work also has enough backbone that it can lend itself to reinterpretation. Daniel Fish’s 2019 Oklahoma! highlighted the violence of the American West. I don’t know if a Rodgers and Hart musical like Pal Joey or Babes in Arms would stand up to that level of reinterpretation.  
I don’t think they would. People can appreciate a Marx Brothers movie like Duck Soup, which is a parody of war and a musical. I think Rodgers and Hart work on that level. They’re much more playful and goofy even. I think there’s an audience for that. It’s the same audience that would go see Little Shop of Horrors — you’re not meant to take it seriously. It’s an entertainment.

Do you think that America lost something when it lost Lorenz Hart?
Yeah. I think musical theater lost something. The satirical stuff that Hart was writing in the 1930s no longer would play in the 1940s with the war on. But if he had lived a little while longer, it would have reemerged with the early 1960s satirical works. Think of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Larry Hart could have written that show, and it would have been probably just as funny as the Sondheim version.

You include Sondheim in a cameo in Blue Moon. Why?
It was irresistible to me. He was Oscar Hammerstein’s protégé, and they lived next to each other in Doylestown. The first opening of a Rodgers and Hammerstein show he went to was actually Carousel. Sondheim said that he spent the evening crying into Dorothy Rodgers’s fur coat, and she was furious at him for wrecking it. But it was just too playful and funny. To have Hart say, “What do you think of my work?” And then to represent what Sondheim thought. In his book of lyrics, Finishing the Hat, Sondheim was a little harsh.

He’s very harsh.
I think part of that’s because Sondheim realizes that his mentor is not viewed as artfully as Hart. It’s Sondheim’s defense of his mentor saying, “No, he’s a great musical dramatist, and Hart is sloppy.” I just couldn’t resist giving the 12-year-old Sondheim the same sting.

It was also the two gay characters seeing each other and having a little bitch-off.
Maybe that’s true. I love that Hammerstein comes to interrupt him talking to Margaret Qualley. He says, “I hope I’m not interrupting anything too weighty,” and Hart goes, “Weighty affairs will just have to wait.” Sondheim, 20 years later, is going to use that line in “Comedy Tonight.”

When you’re doing those winks, do you worry about taking people out of the film?
No, I thought it was funny enough and short enough that I could get away with it. Richard Linklater said to me, “I wish Sondheim had lived a little longer. I would have shown him the script. I think he would have loved it. I think he would have found it really funny.”

The function of Hart giving Sondheim a line he’ll later use — or giving E.B. White the idea for Stuart Little — is that it inscribes him even further into history.
That’s a nice way to put it. It’s a kind of overcorrection because it’s a way to say he influenced people, whether he literally did that or not. When I was researching this, I wanted to get a sense of what Yale University was like in 1943. I went on eBay and bought the 1943 Yale yearbook. I’m just looking at the pictures and I go through the drama section, and one of the big guys in the drama club is George Roy Hill. I said, “Is this the same George Roy Hill that directed Butch Cassidy and The Sting?” And he was a senior. So, that’s Elizabeth’s date at the party. Hart says to him, “Don’t make love stories, make direct stories about friendship.” And George goes, “I’ll remember that.” I’m having some fun with it.

Elizabeth is not based on a real person. How’d you come up with her?
I came upon a used-book dealer with these 12 letters. They’re carbons of her own letters that she kept, which she wrote to Hart. His letters probably existed somewhere, but I don’t have them. They’re probably in a landfill somewhere. There’s a friendship between them in these letters. They did go off to some lake house together, but I don’t know whether they went alone, and I don’t know what happened there. She said she has a disastrous 20th birthday with some guy she has a crush on, but she doesn’t say what happened.

The fun for me was to invent a story for her that could italicize Hart’s story. She’s telling a story about unrequited love with her boyfriend from Yale, but that’s not the way Hart is hearing it. He’s hearing it as “I have an unrequited love and it’s about me.” She says, “Do you know what it feels like when a woman loves a man and she gets nothing back in return,” and Hart goes, “Nobody ever loved me that much,” which is a line from Casablanca. I like that they’re talking to each other, but they’re also talking past each other.

Why did you choose to make the object of his affection a woman?
Because I had the letters. I also thought that it made it more heartbreaking because it’s so much more impossible. We all see that as an audience immediately. It takes him maybe until that coatroom scene to finally realize, She perceives me as a friend and a confidant and that’s all it’s ever going to be.

How did you approach writing his real-life alcoholism?
You have to put it in there because it’s one of the reasons Rodgers doesn’t want to work with him anymore. A lot of people I know who’ve been addicted to a lot of substances say, “It’s behind me. It’s a problem I used to have and I’ve dealt with it.” And that’s not true at all. It’s like anesthesia for him. This is a night where his professional and his personal heartbreak are happening simultaneously. That’s why he’s drinking. It’s nice that, at the very end, when he’s annihilated, the bartender pours them both a drink. What do you have to lose at this point? He’s never going to go to the party that he’s been talking about.

What do you personally think of Oklahoma!?
I like the songs a great deal.

Okay …
It’s one beautiful song after another. They really are beautiful melodies. I think the show is corny and embarrassing, actually.

I was wondering because you don’t go out of your way to praise it in the movie. His opinion is not far from yours?
When he starts saying that “‘The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye’ is the stupidest line in the history of American songwriting,” I think he may be right. The line makes sense, and it scans but, as he says, the image of an Oklahoma cornfield with an elephant standing in the middle of it suggests that whoever wrote that has a tin ear. But I like the songs when I go see Oklahoma! — I trance out at the story.

So you like Rodgers’s work, but even the lyrics you’re not so crazy about.
The lyrics don’t bother me that much. I’m enough of a musician that Rodgers’s music is just so thrilling to me. I wrote Rodgers two fan letters in my life, and he answered me both times in the 1970s. I have them framed on my office wall. He wasn’t doing too much in the 1970s, so he had time to answer a letter from me. I told him how much his music had meant to me. And I’m glad I wrote to him.

When the film takes place, not only has Rodgers moved past Hart’s work, America has too. It’s moving toward the early 1950s and focusing on the nuclear family.
Rodgers is a heterosexual married man with children. He has that 1950s nuclear-family respectability — the big office with the grand piano in it. Hart is staying up till five in the morning picking up chorus boys. Rodgers is finding him increasingly repellent.

To him, Hart’s a degenerate.
He’s degenerate. But given the choice to hang out with Rodgers or Hart, I would hang out with Hart. I just think he would be a riot. My hope in the movie was that you’d watch it and you go, “This was a difficult 90 minutes to hang out with this guy, but I’m never going to forget it for the rest of my life that I was hanging out with him at the bar.”

Are you at all involved in Linklater’s adaptation of Merrily We Roll Along that is currently filming over a span of 20 years?
No, no, no. I just know about it. I think he’s filmed about a third of it already.

You’re going to the Oscars for this film. What are you hoping to get out of that night?
There was a nominees luncheon at the Beverly Hilton, and I went to that. Sony was very generous, and they flew me out for that. Ethan Hawke was there because he’s nominated, and it was a lot of fun just to meet these big-time directors. Paul Thomas Anderson came up and said, “I really wanted to meet the man who wrote Blue Moon.” I’m thinking, You even know that that film exists? They give you a certificate as you leave to say you got nominated, and Hawke says to me, “This may be the only thing we get here, Robert.” I thought, All right.

Will you walk the red carpet?
I did that at the nominees luncheon, and I felt like a stranger in a strange land.

They have some pretty swanky gift bags.
I look forward to it. They’re flying me in on Saturday. The show is Sunday. They’re flying me home Monday.