Trivia / The Jazz Singer

• Actor-Shared Background:
  • Al Jolson, like his character, was a Real Life son of a cantor who turned to pop music instead. Samson Raphaelson had initially conceived the plot while watching Jolson perform and noting that his emotional performing style was similar to cantorial singing (not knowing about his background at the time).
  • While not sharing that particular detail in their biographies, the stars of the 1959 (Jerry Lewis) and 1980 (Neil Diamond) versions were Jewish. Not so with the 1952 remake, with Danny Thomas, a Maronite Catholic son of Lebanese immigrants, in the lead role.
• Billing Displacement: Despite playing the rather important role of Jack's mother in the 1927 version, the posters bill Eugenie Besserer below Cantor Yosselle Rosenblatt, whose role only really amounts to a roughly four-minute cameo.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: The 1980 version is less remembered than the three hit songs its star, Neil Diamond, wrote and performed for it: "Hello Again", "Love on the Rocks", and "America".
• Dueling Works: The 1980 version was released not long after another Jewish singer-songwriter's Non-Actor Vehicle—Paul Simon's One-Trick Pony.
• Follow the Leader: The 1980 version was inspired by the success of the 1976 A Star is Born remake.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The 1959 TV remake has never been rebroadcast and was not released on DVD until 2012.
• The Other Marty: Lucie Arnaz replaced Deborah Raffin as Molly Bell in the 1980 version when Richard Fleischer took over as director.
• Troubled Production: The 1980 version was snakebitten from start to finish.
  • It was conceived in 1976 in response to A Star is Born, but it took a year to disentangle exactly which studio could grant rights for a remake (Warner Bros. and United Artists both claimed ownership of the 1927 version).
  • Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer greenlighted the film to start production in the fall of 1978, but canceled it at almost the last minute. A new deal was worked out and filming was supposed to start in the spring of 1979, but Neil Diamond asked for a delay so he could have back surgery and finish writing the songs. The producers were ticked off and briefly considered replacing Diamond with Barry Manilow.
  • Once filming finally commenced at the start of 1980, initial director Sidney J. Furie rewrote the screenplay beyond recognition and made several bizarre decisions such as hiring Laurence Olivier — who had no known Jewish ancestry, and was well into his Money, Dear Boy phase — to play the all-important part of Cantor Rabinovitch, and having lead actor Neil Diamond perform a scene in blackface in total seriousness. After seeing how much money Furie had already wasted on useless footage, the producers fired him after just a few weeks and replaced him with Richard Fleischer.
  • After checking the dailies that Furie shot, Fleischer realised he had an enormous task at hand. Diamond was wooden and unconvincing, while Olivier had decided to be as much of a Large Ham as possible. Then original lead actress Deborah Raffin quit in protest of Furie's dismissal. She was replaced by Lucie Arnaz, who was cast so hastily that they didn't even have time to screen test her. Fleischer decided to reshoot virtually everything shot so far (except, bizarrely, the blackface sequence).
  • Things ran a lot smoother under Fleischer, though the reshoots meant that they badly overran the original shooting schedule, causing the budget to balloon; Olivier for instance had time to leave the country, film scenes for Brideshead Revisited and direct a play, while being paid for this film all the while. Then, just to add insult to injury, after the film wrapped Olivier went out to dinner with some friends and talked about how disastrous the shoot had been, only for a reporter at a nearby table to overhear this and publish the story the following day, while conveniently leaving out the fact that Olivier had been talking about when Furie was directing the film, not Fleischer's subsequent work.
  • There was a slight silver lining, as the film itself did surprisingly well at the box office, making back double its budget, with Diamond's soundtrack album spawning three huge hits. But it was poorly reviewed and, with the cost overruns, was much less profitable than the studio had hoped for.

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