Trivia for
West Side Story (1961) More at IMDbPro »

• The original stage version of Maria's song "I Feel Pretty" included the lyrics "I feel pretty and witty and bright / And I pity / Any girl who isn't me tonight." In the film this night scene was changed to the daytime, and presumably for this reason, the rhyming words "bright" and "tonight" were changed to "gay" and "today."
  
  
• Borrowed its plot from William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet".
  
  
• Natalie Wood's singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon.
  
  
• The actors in the rival gangs were instructed to play pranks on each other off the set to keep tensions high.
  
  
• Richard Beymer's singing voice was dubbed by Jimmy Bryant.
  
  
• Rita Moreno's singing voice was dubbed by Betty Wand only for "A Boy Like That" since it was below her range. Moreno sang "America" and "Quintet" herself.
  
  
• Betty Wand sued to get a percentage of the movie-album sales, having dubbed part of Rita Moreno's singing. The dispute was settled out-of-court.
  
  
• George Chakiris (Bernardo) had previously played "Riff" in the London production. Tony Mordente (Action) had played "A-rab."
  
  
• Opening dance sequences were shot on the upper west side of Manhattan where Lincoln Center stands today. This area was condemned and the buildings were in the process of being demolished to make way for Lincoln Center. The demolition of these buildings was delayed so that the filming of these sequences could be completed.
  
  
• Was the first film to win a Best Director Oscar for two directors (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins). This would not happen again until 46 years later, when Joel Coen and Ethan Coen shared the award for No Country for Old Men (2007).
  
  
• Although the producers tried to keep the different gangs separate during filming to create tension, Russ Tamblyn (Riff) said that he knew of at least one "Jet" who was roommates with a "Shark" through filming.
  
  
• The stage version was originally planned as a story about a Catholic boy falling in love with a Jewish girl. The working title was "East Side Story". After a boom of Puerto Rican immigration to New York in the late 1940s and 1950s, the story was changed, and the show opened on Broadway in 1957 as "West Side Story".
  
  
• Many shots imitate the work of modern American painters of New York City, especially the work of Ben Shan and Robert Vickery.
  
  
• Original plans for the play to involve a Jewish boy and an Irish Catholic girl were abandoned because producer Arthur Laurents felt it too closely mirrored the play "Abie's Irish Rose".
  
  
• Director Robert Wise hired New York gang members to control crowds on location, and fought to shoot on location in New York City.
  
  
• Film rights to the play were bought for $375,000.
  
  
• The interior sets were built six feet off the ground to allow for low-angle shooting with large 70mm cameras.
  
  
• The boys' jeans were dyed, re-dyed and "distressed," using special elastic thread to allow for the severity of the choreography.
  
  
• Six members of the original Broadway cast appeared in the movie: Carole D'Andrea (Velma), David Winters (movie: A-Rab, Broadway: Baby John), Jay Norman (movie: Pepe, Broadway: Juano), Tommy Abbott (Gee-Tar), Tony Mordente (movie: Action, Broadway: A-Rab), William Bramley (Officer Krupke).
  
  
• Robert Wise's original choice to play Tony was Elvis Presley.
  
  
• Riff and Tony repeat an oath of loyalty to each other: Riff says "womb to tomb" and Tony answers "birth to earth." On stage Tony's original answer was "sperm to worm," but this was changed for the movie because it was beyond the censorship standards of the time.
  
  
• Lee Theodore, who played Anybodys in the original Broadway production, served as an assistant choreographer for the film. Russ Tamblyn reports that he and most of the rest of the dancers in the film suffered from shin splints at one time or another, the result of extended dancing on pavement as opposed to a wooden stage or soundstage floor.
  
  
• Filmed on-location on West 61st Street.
  
  
• The songs "I Feel Pretty", "Gee Officer Krupke" and "Cool" were moved for the movie. The first two originally followed the Rumble, and "Cool" was performed outside Doc's Candy Store. It was felt that the message of "Cool" was more appropriate for how the Jets would handle being approached by the police. The light tone of "I Feel Pretty" was felt wrong for the mood of the piece after the Rumble, so it was moved to the start of the second act.
  
  
• Audrey Hepburn was offered the role of Maria, but she turned it down, because she was pregnant with Sean H. Ferrer at the time.
  
  
• Throughout the movie, Natalie Wood wears a bracelet on her left wrist, not for any aesthetic reason, but because she had injured her wrist on in the scene of The Green Promise (1949) when she fell on the bridge that collapsed during the severe rainstorm, causing an unsightly bone protrusion on her wrist. She wore the bracelet to hide the injury. It became her trademark in all of her movies.
  
  
• A major controversy developed because Carol Lawrence, who played Maria in the stage version, was passed over for the role in favor of Natalie Wood.
  
  
• In the scene on the roof before the musical number "America", when the girls are mocking Bernardo's speech, one of the girls say ,"We came with our hearts open", one of the Sharks says, "You came with your pants open!" This line had to be changed to "You came with your mouth open," for the movie because of censorship standards.
  
  
• The stage lyrics for the song "Gee, Officer Krupke" are "My father is a bastard, my ma's an s.o.b. My grandpa's always plastered..." The lyrics had to be changed for the movie to: "My daddy beats my mommy, my mommy clobbers me, my grandpa is a commie..." Also, the stage lyric was, "Dear kindly social worker, they say go earn a buck, like be a soda jerker, which means like be a schmuck." For the film, the lines were changed to "Dear kindly social worker, they say go get a job, like be a soda jerker, which means I'd be a slob."
  
  
• Marni Nixon (who dubbed for Natalie Wood) had to do the end of quintet for Rita Moreno. The reason was that Betty Wand and Moreno both had colds and could not sing, so the filmmakers asked Nixon to do the end. So she is singing two voices at once.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• In a few scenes, a poster can be seen for Palisades Park, which was a real amusement park which operated in Cliffside Park (or Fort Lee), New Jersey from 1898 to 1971.
  
  
• The lyrics to "America" were substantially changed for the movie. There had been complaints that the Broadway version was too belittling to Puerto Ricans, in that the song mainly ridiculed Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. The movie lyrics emphasize the racism and discrimination that Puerto Ricans were subjected to in America.
  
  
• The ship seen in the opening aerial view of the city is the SS United States of the United States Lines. It first sailed in 1952 and was laid up in the late 1960's and has been idle ever since. It was recently bought by NCL to be refurbished as a cruise ship. The SS United States currently sits rusting away at a pier on the Delaware River in Philadelphia. PA.
  
  
• Russ Tamblyn had originally tried out for the role of Tony. 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.
  
  
• In 1998, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #41 Greatest Movie of All Time. It fell to #51 in the updated list released in 2007.
  
  
• Eliot Feld (Baby John) collapsed and ended up hospitalized with pneumonia during the demanding filming of "Cool".
  
  
• Even though dubbing Natalie Wood was Marni Nixon's chief assignment, Nixon also did one number for Rita Moreno, which required a relatively high vocal register. Having dubbed Wood as well as Moreno, Nixon felt she deserved a cut of the movie-album royalties. Neither the movie or the record producers would bow to her demands. Leonard Bernstein broke the stalemate by volunteering a percentage of his income, a gesture of loyalty-royalty since Nixon had been a performer-colleague of his at New York Philharmonic concerts. He ceded one-quarter of one percent of his royalties to her (a generous amount).
  
  
• The song "One Hand, One Heart" was written for the earlier musical "Candide," but later discarded by Leonard Bernstein and revived for "West Side Story."
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• Jerome Robbins completed four numbers - the Prologue, "Cool", "I Feel Pretty" and "America" - before he was removed from the project.
  
  
• The "America" sequence on stage was conceived as a duet between Anita and Rosalia. For the film, it was altered to be one between Anita and Bernardo.
  
  
• Shooting lasted for 6 months, sound mixing and editing for 7.
  
  
• The film ran in Paris for a grand total of 249 weeks, making it the longest running film in French history.
  
  
• During the entire production, the actors wore out 200 pairs of shoes, applied more than 100lbs of make-up, split 27 pairs of pants and performed in 30 different recording sessions.
  
  
• The song "Gee Officer Krupke" was banned by the BBC because of its mentions of drug use and sexual ambiguity.
  
  
• The second highest grossing film of 1961, coming in just behind One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961).
  
  
• With its win of 10 Academy Awards, this became the biggest Oscar-winning musical of all time, beating the record Gigi (1958) set three years before with its nine Oscars.
  
  
• At the time, this became the biggest selling soundtrack album.
  
  
• Shooting in 65mm was prohibitively expensive. After their experiences making this film - and especially Jerome Robbins' extensive reshooting - the Mirisch brothers refused to make any more films in the format.
  
  
• Russ Tamblyn (Riff) was dubbed for "The Jet Song" by Tucker Smith, who played Ice, his lieutenant in the movie.
  
  
• "Cool" was such a demanding number for the performers, Harvey Evans (aka Harvey Hohnecker), who played Mouthpiece, later stated that the actors ritually burned their kneepads upon wrapping the scene.
  
  
• In 1962, the Columbia Records soundtrack release commanded the number-one spot on the "Billboard" popular albums chart from May 5 through June 16, and again from October 6 through October 13.
  
  
• Most of the original Broadway cast were rejected for the film as either photographing too old or actually being too old for the teenaged characters. Since Hollywood was accustomed to dubbing the singing voices of many stars, dozens of non-singing actors and actresses were tested or considered for the leading roles. Among them: Suzanne Pleshette, Jill St. John, Audrey Hepburn, Anna Maria Alberghetti, Elizabeth Ashley, Anthony Perkins, Warren Beatty, Bobby Darin, Burt Reynolds, Richard Chamberlain, Troy Donahue and Gary Lockwood.
  
  
• Jerome Robbins' propensity for filming and re-filming scenes in his quest for perfection led to the movie going over budget and falling behind schedule. Robbins was fired by Mirisch Pictures, the production company, when shooting was about 60% finished, and director Robert Wise completed the filming alone (the original arrangement had been for Robbins to direct all of the song-and-dance sequences and Wise to direct everything else).
  
  
• Jerome Robbins initially refused to work on the film unless he could direct it. Producer Walter Mirisch was nervous about handing the reins entirely over to Robbins, who had never made a film before, so he enlisted Robert Wise to direct the drama while Robbins would handle the singing and dancing sequences. Robbins developed a habit of shooting numerous takes of each scene, to the point where the film went over budget and behind schedule. This led to his firing.
  
  
• Jerome Robbins rehearsed with the dancers for three months before shooting began. Once location shooting began, however, he kept revising and revising his original choreography. The dancers all claimed that they had never worked so hard on a dance piece, and most of them at one point or another sustained injuries during shooting.
  
  
• The original Broadway production of "West Side Story" opened at the Winter Garden Theater on September 26, 1957, ran for 732 performances and was nominated for the 1958 Tony Award for the Best Musical.
  
  
• Chita Rivera originated the role of Anita when West Side Story premiered at New York's Winter Garden Theatre (September 26, 1957). Rita Moreno later played Anita in the film adaptation of the show.
  
  
• "West Side Story" played for almost two years on stage in New York, racking up a total of 732 performances.
  
  
• When the musical premiered in Europe in 1958, it was staged at the Manchester Opera House (UK).
  
  
• The first of only two Best Picture winners to have more than one credited director (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise).
  
  

• SPOILER: Robert Wise wanted the film to have a single rising line of tension, with no light moments after the rumble. Therefore, "I Feel Pretty" was moved earlier, and the positions of "Cool" and "Gee, Officer Krupke" were reversed. Those who feel that the sassy, light-hearted tone of "Gee, Officer Krupke" is out of place following the deaths that end the first act prefer the film's ordering of the numbers. The placement of "I Feel Pretty" and "Gee, Officer Krumpke" after the Rumble in the stage version was meant to help cheer people up after the deaths of Bernardo and Riff, as audiences were not used to death occurring in Broadway musicals. This issue is still heatedly debated among the film's fans.
  
  

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