Moon River and Me

According to legend, after a successful preview of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), the then supervisory chief of production at Paramount, Martin Rackin, although happy with the test audience’s positive assessment of the film, insisted that the scene of Audrey Hepburn singing “Moon River” be cut from the picture. Some accounts aver that Rackin had been an opponent of the song all along. Others say that he preferred a different composer than Henry Mancini. Is there any truth to these rumors? Composed by Henry Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, “Moon River” went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and additionally received the 1962 Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Given the song’s huge success and popularity, could the production head at Paramount really have been so obtuse? How could he have failed to recognize the song’s greatness?

Pure speculation, but perhaps the reason why he wanted the song cut was because he felt the scene was narratively unnecessary. For the sake of argument, I might even say that I agree with him: the scene doesn’t advance the plot. However, plot is only one dimension of a movie. The “Moon River” scene is essential to the film—imagine Breakfast at Tiffany’s with the scene omitted. What is lost? Holly singing “Moon River” contributes nothing to the plot, but has everything to do with mood or atmosphere. The song’s subject—wanderlust, the lure of the river—deepens our understanding of Holly’s character and also invokes a wistful, melancholic mood that haunts the rest of the movie. The scene is an instance of diegetic music, music that is actually played within the fictional space of the film’s story.

Of course, the movies are loaded with such moments, and the best of these moments remain indelibly etched in our memories. For author and critic Umberto Eco (1985’s “’Casablanca’: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage”), the greatest movies are “great” precisely because they contain such moments. The challenge presented to us is how to write about such moments in a way to do them justice. As Christian Metz stated in his now famous epigraph (cited by James Monaco in How to Read a Film), “[M]ovies are difficult to explain because they are easy to understand.”

Nancy & Lee, Part V: Pop vs. Rock

The summer of 1967 became known as the “Summer of Love,” in effect an opportunity to market new fashions, rock music, and alternatives to Western (or European) thought and religion to the young people of America. As a moment in history, the designation was supposed to signal a profound shift in consciousness. A pop song was written to announce this shift, John Phillips’ “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” sung by Scott McKenzie. Thousands of young people, celebrating the American values of freedom and the open road enabled by the automobile, flocked to San Francisco, later to Monterey (for the Pop Festival), where that summer “bohemian chic” was all the rage. Fashion designer Thea Porter was responsible for most of the bohemian chic fashions of the 60s and 70s—caftans, diaphanous patterned shifts, and Middle Eastern (or Oriental) influenced dresses and blouses.

“The hippie look started out as more of a political statement, a type of anti-fashion, but it soon became the fashion itself,” states Laura McLaws Helms in her book, Thea Porter: Bohemian Chic, co-written with Venetia Porter, the designer’s daughter. Changes in fashion allowed for new, exotic, and, occasionally, bizarre expressions of individuality. The Fall of the Summer of Love began on October 17, 1967, when the musical Hair had its off-Broadway debut at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York, later opening on Broadway in April 1968. The Monterey Pop Festival was to rock (a noun that once had been a verb) what Hair’s “tribe” was to Bohemian chic. The entertainment industry realized that it was time to market products specifically for the counterculture.

Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, released in August 1967, featured the band members in jackets designed by Thea Porter on the album cover.

The vaguely Oriental jackets, coupled with the band being photographed using a prism lens, all suggested an hallucinatory “trip.” As purveyors of Bohemian chic, the band announced itself through the album cover as playing a new kind of music signaling a new form of consciousness. Any number of terms were applied, correctly or incorrectly, at the time to the band’s music—psychedelic, hallucinatory, “mind-expanding,” “trippy.”

NANCY SINATRA: My music was left behind in a way…since I was never embraced by my peers. I was stranded, on my own, to fend for myself . . . . I remember, years later, meeting Stevie Nicks and Sheryl Crow at the Clinton White House. They virtually snubbed me. I was hurt.

An interesting comment, to be sure. However, I’m not sure that it was Nancy Sinatra’s music that was left behind. She represents a pop music aesthetic that signifies values that certain individuals, such as those named above, hold in disdain. She is a representative of a fashion style that was considered conservative—miniskirts, go-go boots, simple A-line dresses—that was rejected by rock culture’s adoption of the values represented by Bohemian chic—non-Western, Oriental, and superficially radical. Anti-fashion became fashion, earnestness became pessimism, and the supposed shift in consciousness became an obsession with sex and hallucinatory drugs. Pop music was for so-called “empty people,” superficial in thought and feeling. In contrast, rock was for those who felt deeply, those who adhered to the fundamental modernist values: individuality, spontaneity, inspiration. By associating itself with modernist values (previously adopted by jazz culture), rock leveraged itself into the position of being the superior pop musical form.