Trivia / West Side Story (1961)

For the musical, see here.

For the 2021 film, see here.

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• Acting for Two: Tucker Smith not only plays Ice, but provides Russ Tamblyn's singing voice, in addition to using it as his own.
• Billing Displacement: A strange example. Natalie Wood is given top billing, while her co-lead Richard Beymer (who if anything, is the larger role) then has to share his credit with supporting players Russ Tamblyn and Rita Moreno. Then George Chakiris, whose role is about the size of Tamblyn's and Moreno's has to share credit with Simon Oakland, Ned Glass, and William Bramley, who all play fairly minor roles that don't take part in any singing or dancing. Although billing them together like that does make sense since they're all veteran actors and their parts don't mesh like those of the smaller gang members. Still, a more accurate version of the credits would be Beymer and Wood together, followed by a trio of Moreno, Chakiris, and Tamblyn, and then Oakland, Glass, and Bramley.
• Cast the Expert: Russ Tamblyn is a former gymnast, explaining the flips and tumbles Riff pulls off during the film.
• Cast the Runner-Up:
  • Russ Tamblyn auditioned for Tony before being cast as Riff. It was down to just him and Richard Beymer, and Beymer ended up getting it. But then the casting directors called him back and asked him to read for Riff, and he got the part. The same thing would happen for Mike Faist on the 2021 film.
  • George Chakiris auditioned for Riff (a role he originated in the 1958 West End production) before being cast as Bernardo.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Richard Beymer later felt his performance as Tony was subpar. He felt there was too much dissonance between Tony's personality as a Nice Guy and his backstory - feeling Tony should have been a bit rougher. According to him, it was hard not to avoid Corpsing on some of the more romantic lines.
  • Rita Moreno was displeased with some of the creative decisions made for depicting the Puerto Rican characters, particularly how she, an actual Puerto Rican, was forced to wear Brownface to invoke the Latino Is Brown trope. She also persuaded the creators to change some of the more disparaging lyrics towards the location in "America".
  • Leonard Bernstein was dissatisfied with some of the orchestrations made for the film.
• Dawson Casting: Defied to an extent. Most of the original Broadway cast were rejected for the 1961 film version, being thought too old to believably play teenagers. Even some of the few who made the transition are recast in different, slightly older roles (the original Baby John, David Winters, plays A-Rab in the film, while the original A-Rab, Tony Mordente, plays Action.). Still, most of the film's actors in the "teen" roles were in their 20s, with Eliot Feld (Baby John) and Susan Oakes (Anybodys) the two youngest at 19 and 17.
  • Amusingly, Richard Beymer and Russ Tamblyn, who were 22 and 26 when the film was made, were actually younger than Ansel Elgort and Mike Faist, respectively, who were 25 and 27 when they shot the 2021 remake.
• Disowned Adaptation: Arthur Laurents, who wrote the musical's book, was unimpressed with the film's acting, Richard Beymer's bland Tony, the excessive makeup on the actors, and the "Day-Glo" costumes on the Puerto Rican characters, which he viewed as making them look like racist caricatures.
• Dueling Works: With Romanoff & Juliet, another 1961 film based on a Broadway version of Romeo and Juliet - this one being a Cold War satire.
• DVD Commentary: The 50th anniversary Blu-Ray has lyricist Stephen Sondheim provide commentary for the musical numbers, discussing abandoned concepts, differences between the play and the movie, and which songs he does and doesn't feel proud of in retrospect.
• Enforced Method Acting: While filming the movie, the actors playing the Jets and the Sharks were roomed separately in order to heighten the tension between the two groups. They were also encouraged to play pranks on each other off the set to keep up the tension. They were even told to only have breaks with members of the gang they belonged to (which Susan Oakes, who played Anybodys, commented on, mentioning having to eat lunch by herself). Russ Tamblyn claims that two actors from different sides roomed together during filming anyway and the Jets actors broke the protocol when Rita Moreno began suffering from post-traumatic anxiety during the assault scene and comforted her.
• Fake Nationality: In the film, several of the actors playing the Sharks and their ladies are not Puerto Rican. Maria is played by Natalie Wood, who was a Russian-American. Greco-Americans George Chakiris and Gus Trikonis portray Bernardo and Indio, respectively. Trikonis' sister Gina actually played Riff's girlfriend Graziella.
• Hostility on the Set: Richard Beymer later revealed that he and Natalie Wood didn't have a close rapport off-camera, describing her treatment of him at the time of filming as aloof at best. Beymer believed part of the problem was a screen test from a previous film that went south, while additionally it has been speculated that Wood herself was upset that Beymer won the role of Tony over her then-boyfriend Warren Beatty who was just one of many non-singing actors to audition for the part. Ironically, Beymer says that a few years later he and Wood crossed paths at a night club, she said hello to him and chatted with him for a few minutes, and he was left surprised at how sweet and kind she was to him.
• Looping Lines: In addition to recording Maria's singing voice, Marni Nixon also looped some of Natalie Wood's dialogue that needed to be fixed in post-production. Specifically, Maria's last lines: "Don't you touch him!" and "Te adoro, Anton".
• Non-Singing Voice:
  • Natalie Wood wanted to do her own singing and trained very hard for it, but her vocal abilities were still below what was required and so she ended up dubbed by Marni Nixon. Nixon also supplied Rita Moreno with a few high notes in another number (something she would do for Moreno again in The King and I). Wood's singing would be dubbed again in The Great Race and Inside Daisy Clover for the same reason.
  • Betty Wand also dubbed Rita Moreno for "A Boy Like That", but Moreno sings "America" and "Quintet" herself. Tucker Smith (Ice) also dubbed Russ Tamblyn for "The Jet Song".
  • Richard Beymer's singing voice was dubbed by Jimmy Bryant.
  • Russ Tamblyn was dubbed for "The Jet Song" by Tucker Smith, who played Ice, his lieutenant in the movie.
  • George Chakiris was the only castmember whose singing wasn't dubbed, and that was because he didn't have any big solos.
• Production Posse: One of the co-directors and the producer of the movie, Robert Wise, would later collaborate with the associate producer, Saul Chaplin, again on two Julie Andrews movie musicals: The Sound of Music and Star!. The former also shares West Side Story's screenwriter, Ernest Lehman (who wrote four Wise-directed movies in total), and musical director, Irwin Kostal.
• Real-Life Relative: Gus Trikonis who played Indio, one of the Puerto Rican Sharks - and who is actually Greek - is the brother of Gina Trikonis, who played Graziella, the tough red-haired Italian girlfriend of Riff, leader of the Jets.
• Reality Subtext: When filming "The Taunting Scene", Rita Moreno was reduced to tears when she was harassed and nearly raped by the Jets, as it brought back memories of when she was raped as a child. When she started crying, the Jets immediately stopped what they were doing and tried to comfort her, while pointing out that the audience was going to hate them for what they were doing.
• Referenced by...: If you find a flick knife in Far Cry 4, it has this flavour text:
  Your dreams of re-enacting a 1950s New York City Street gang dance fight are dashed when this turns out to be a comb instead of a knife.
• Role Reprise: William Bramley (Officer Krupke) reprised his role from the original Broadway production for the film.
• Troubled Production: During production, Jerome Robbins, with his background in stage, shot and re-shot until the film was over $1,000,000 over budget and six months behind schedule. He was fired, and co-director Robert Wise, who was supposed to helm only the non-dancing scenes, had to finish the film alone, including the numbers Robbins was supposed to direct. Despite directing the majority of the film (and also being the producer), Wise still insisted Robbins share the directing credit with him, and actually invited Robbins up on stage when both men won that year's Oscar for Best Director.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Early casting choices for the movie's Tony included Elvis Presley and Warren Beatty. Ironically, both of them had real-life affairs with Natalie Wood. Anthony Perkins also pursued the role of Tony, as he was looking to avoid Typecasting after playing Norman Bates in Psycho. Richard Chamberlain, Dennis Hopper, Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds also tried out. Chamberlain was thought to be "too mature", while Reynolds was thought to be "too tough".
  • The directors originally wanted Audrey Hepburn for Maria, but she had to turn it down, as she was pregnant at the time. Angie Dickinson and Jill St. John were also considered.
  • According to the shooting script (a replica of which was included with an anniversary edition of the DVD), there were some things that never made the final filmed version. In the stage version, the Prologue was subtitled "The Months Before" and was meant to be an abstract representation of a few months of growing hostilities between the Jets and Sharks, culminating on the afternoon the story starts. The film version makes it appear as if all this happened in one afternoon...but according to the screenplay, there were originally supposed to be costume changes during the Prologue and switches from day to night to day again, indicating that all this happened over an extended period of time.
  • That shot of Schrank and Krupke in the squad car during "Tonight: Quintet" was originally supposed to give them some lyrics! The screenplay, without being specific as to what these lyrics actually would have been, describe Schrank as telling Krupke, in a hybrid of speech and song, that they were going to get those punks, stop the rumble, clean up the neighborhood, with Krupke answering "right!" to every line. Both of them would end the verse with "tonight!" This was wisely abandoned...all the music in West Side Story belongs to the youth.
• You Look Familiar: George Chakiris (Bernardo) originally played Riff in the 1958 West End production.

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