You don’t have to be a music nerd to know Marvin Hamlisch. Or a theater nerd. Or a film nerd. Or a television nerd. Because even if you don’t know him by name, Hamlisch’s work will have seeped into the soul of anyone who was alive in the latter half of the 20th century. He was, after all, that rare creative beast (there have been only 11 others) who attained what has come to be known as an EGOT: winning an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. If you were a baseball nerd, you might call it hitting for the cycle. And even within that rarefied group, Hamlisch was something special: the guy had also won a Pulitzer for A Chorus Line.
A prodigy who was accepted into Juilliard at age six, Hamlisch initially planned to follow the classical pianist path. But in a move that would delight popular music lovers for years to come, Hamlisch veered off the usual track and into the theater world, scoring a gig as a rehearsal pianist for Funny Girl with Barbara Streisand. One thing led to another — when you’re as good as Hamlisch, that’s how things tend to go — and it wasn’t long before Hamlisch was scoring Woody Allen films like Take The Money and Run, and Bananas. Soon after that, he adapted Scott Joplin’s ragtime era tune The Entertainer for use in the Paul Newman/Robert Redford smash The Sting. If you saw that film, you’re probably hearing Hamlisch in your head right now, which is about the best praise one can give a musician.
But if he was a prodigy, it’s also true that many of Hamlisch’s biggest successes came early. His Broadway claim to fame would always remain A Chorus Line, which dated back to 1975. In film, his biggest splashes had turned to ripples by the late ’80s. Yet he never sat back and coasted on old glories. When he died in August of 2012, he had just seen his musical version of The Nutty Professor open in Nashville, and completed the music for HBO’s Liberace drama Behind the Candelabra. He was also working on a new musical with Tony-award winning producer Dori Berinstein (Thoroughly Modern Millie).
In the wake of his death, Berinstein — who is also a filmmaker — decided that Hamlisch’s story needed to be told, and his life — not just as a musician, but also as a man, a husband, and a friend — honored.
The result is Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did For Love, screening at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst this Sunday at 2 p.m. Featuring interviews with friends and creative partners including Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Carly Simon, Steven Soderbergh, and Quincy Jones, the film is nonetheless Hamlisch’s own, very much by design: Berinstein was determined that Hamlisch would tell his own story, and gathered up every scrap of archival footage she could find to help give us the best representation of the man that she — and he — could.
Also this week: Amherst Cinema serves up three special screenings to appeal to a wide variety of filmgoers. First up on Saturday morning is The Boy and The Beast, an animated fantasy from Japan that features a nine-year-old boy hiding out in a secret world of beasts, where he meets an ursine warrior who takes him under his wing. The following Tuesday, filmmaker Haile Gerima brings his Ashes and Embers to the theater. The 1983 prize winner, about a Vietnam vet coming to terms with his status as a black American, has been recently restored. As timely as ever, the film serves as a jumping off point for a wider discussion about race in America. And finally, an old audience favorite returns as part of the theater’s ongoing 10th anniversary celebration: The Lives of Others is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s hothouse drama about government surveillance in East Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In it, a famous playwright is placed under surveillance by a Stasi head who wants to steal away the man’s lover, leading to fallout on both sides. Bill Newman, Western Massachusetts ACLU director, will be on hand to speak about civil liberties and surveillance in the modern age.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
