Adolph Green

 Adolph Green met Betty Comden through mutual friends in 1938 while she was studying drama at New York University. They formed a troupe called the Revuers, which performed at the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village. Among the members of the company was a young comedian named Judy Tuvim, who later changed her name to Judy Holliday, and Green's good friend, a young musician named Leonard Bernstein, whom he had met in 1937 at Camp Onota (a summer camp in Pittsfield MA where Bernstein was the music counselor), frequently accompanied them on the piano. Together, Comden and Green's act earned success and a movie offer. The Revuers traveled west in hopes of finding fame in "Greenwich Village," a 1944 movie starring Carmen Miranda and Don Ameche, but their roles were so small they barely were noticed, and they quickly returned to New York. Their first Broadway effort teamed them with Bernstein for "On the Town," a musical romp about three sailors on leave in New York City that was an expansion of a ballet entitled Fancy Free on which Bernstein had been working with choreographer Jerome Robbins. Comden and Green wrote the lyrics and book, which included sizeable parts for themselves. Their next two musicals, 1945's "Billion Dollar Baby" and 1947's "Bonanza Bound," were not successful, and once again they headed to California, where they immediately found work at MGM.

They wrote the screenplay for "Good News" (1947), starring June Allyson and Peter Lawford, "The Barkleys of Broadway" (1949) for Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and then adapted "On the Town" (1949) for Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, scrapping much of Bernstein's music at the request of Arthur Freed, who did not care for the Bernstein score. They reunited with Kelly for their most successful project, the classic "Singin' in the Rain" (1952), about Hollywood in the final days of the silent film era. The film was directed by elly and Stanley Donen and starred Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor. Together Comden and Green received a nomination for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written Musical. Considered by many film historians to be the best movie musical of all time, it ranked No. 10 on the list of the 100 best American movies of the 20th century compiled by the American Film Institute in 1998. They followed this with "The Band Wagon" (1953), in which the characters of Lester and Lily, a husband-and-wife team that writes the play for the show-within-a-show, were patterned after themselves (though Green and Comden were never married).

When Louis B. Mayer mused wistfully, "Whatever happened to the songs of yesteryear?" Green repliec, "I don't know, I don't know, where did I put them? Betty, Andre (Previn, who happened to be present), where did we put those songs of yesteryear? Can you remember?" He then ran around the room looking in drawers and yelled, "Didn't we put them somewhere here?"

Happy Birthday, Adolph Green!