Arthur Freed (Music)
(September 9, 1894 - April 12, 1973)

Arthur Freed was born Arthur Grossman in Charleston, South Carolina. He was an American lyricist and a Hollywood film producer of Jewish descent.

Freed began his career in vaudeville, and he appeared with the Marx Brothers. He soon began to write songs, and was eventually hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. For years, he wrote lyrics for numerous films, many set to music by Nacio Herb Brown.

In 1939 he was promoted to the position of producer, and helped elevate MGM as the studio of the musical. Freed chose to surround himself with film directors such as Vincente Minnelli and Busby Berkeley. He also helped shape the careers of stars including Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Red Skelton, Lena Horne, Jane Powell, Esther Williams, Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Cyd Charisse, Ann Miller, Mickey Rooney, Vera-Ellen, and many others. He brought Fred Astaire to MGM after Astaire's tenure at RKO and coaxed him out of semi-retirement to star opposite Garland in Easter Parade. His team of writers, directors, composers and stars came to be known as the Freed Unit and produced a steady stream of popular, critically acclaimed musicals until the late 1950s.

Freed served as associate producer of The Wizard of Oz (1939), though his name does not appear on the actual screen credits, nor on posters used to publicize the film. His first solo credit as producer was the film version of Rodgers and Hart's smash Broadway musical Babes in Arms (also 1939), released only a few months after The Wizard of Oz, and in itself not a very distinguished film due to the fact that it gutted most of the original stage score. But it did star Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, and was so successful that it ushered in a long series of "let's put on a show" "backyard" musicals, all starring Rooney and Garland. However, Freed did bring an outstanding amount of talent from the Broadway theaters to the MGM soundstages including Vincente Minnelli, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Roger Edens, Kay Thompson, Zero Mostel, June Allyson, Nancy Walker, choreographer Charles Walters, orchestrators Conrad Salinger, Johnny Green, Lennie Hayton, and many others.

He allowed his directors and choreographers free rein, something unheard of in those days of committee-produced film musicals, and is credited for furthering the boundaries of film musicals by allowing such moments in films as the fifteen-minute ballet at the end of An American in Paris (1951), after which the film concludes moments later with no further dialogue or singing, and he allowed the musical team of Lerner and Loewe complete control in their writing of Gigi (1958).

Two of his films won the Academy Award for Best Picture: An American in Paris and Gigi. On the night that An American in Paris won Best Picture, Freed received an Honorary Oscar, and his version of Show Boat (1951) was also up for two Oscars that year, though it lost both to An American in Paris. But what is now his most highly regarded film, Singin' in the Rain (1952), won no Oscars whatsoever.

He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972.

Freed left MGM in 1970 after failing for almost a decade to bring his dream project, a biopic of Irving Berlin entitled Say It With Music, to the screen. He died three years later surrounded by family.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green (Book)

The team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, 1991 recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors, and the longest running creative partnership in theatre history, began writing and performing their own satirical comic material in a group called The Revuers, which included the late Judy Holliday. They went on to collaborate with Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins on what was the first show for all of them, On The Town. Also with Mr. Bernstein they did the score for Wonderful Town. With Jule Styne they wrote the book and/or lyrics for Bells Are Ringing, Do Re Mi, Subways Are For Sleeping, Peter Pan, and others, wrote the book for Applause, with Cy Coleman the book and lyrics for On The Twentieth Century, lyrics for The Will Rogers Follies, and book and lyrics for A Dolls Life, with Larry Grossman. Five of these, Applause, Hallelujah Baby, Wonderful Town, On The Twentieth Century, and The Will Rogers Follies, won them six Tony Awards.

Their many film musicals include Singin' In The Rain, The Band Wagon, On The Town, Bells Are Ringing, It's Always Fair Weather, Good News, and The Barkleys Of Broadway. Their musicals: The Band Wagon and It's Always Fair Weather, received Academy Award Nominations, and those two plus On The Town won the Screen Writers Guild Award.

Singin' In The Rain was recently voted one of the ten best American films ever made and, by a vote of international film critics conducted by the prestigious Sight and Sound, was chosen as Number Three of the ten best films of all time.

As performers, Comden and Green appeared in On The Town, and later did an evening at the Golden Theatre, A Party With Betty Comden and Adolph Green, comprised of material from their own shows and movies, and from their act, The Revuers. In 1977 they did a new A Party to unanimous acclaim at the Morosco Theatre, and toured with it. A Party received an Obie Award when it was first performed.

They are both members of the Council of the Dramatists Guild, have been elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and have received the Mayor of New York's Certificate of Excellence, as well as the 1994 NYU Musical Theatre Hall of Fame Award and the 1994 Governor Cuomo Award.

Ms. Comden received the Woman of the Year Award from the Alumni Association of New York University. She appeared in the films Garbo Talks and Slaves of New York, and on the stage in the Playwrights Horizons production of Wendy Wasserstein's Isn't It Romantic Mr. Green appeared in the films Simon, My Favorite Year, Garbo Talks, Lily In Love, and I Want To Go Home.

Some of their best-known songs include Just In Time, The Party?s Over, Make Someone Happy, New York, New York, Neverland, It?s Love, Lonely Town and Some Other Time.

Stars they have written for in their musicals and films include Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Lauren Bacall, Rosalind Russell, Judy Holliday, Mary Martin, Phil Silvers, Carol Burnett and Nancy Walker.????? Ms. Comden has written a memoir Off Stage about her non-professional life. Adolph Green is married to the actress, Phyllis Newman.