A new book co-authored by Bayside resident and long-time Milwaukee marketing and public relations professional David Fantle chronicles Judy Garland’s final film at MGM.
C’mon, Get Happy: The Making of Summer Stock is written by Fantle and Tom Johnson, film historians and award-winning authors of Hollywood Heyday: 75 Candid Interviews with Golden Age Legends. The book comes out Oct. 16.
The 1950 MGM musical Summer Stock was the end of the road for Garland at the studio she called home for 15 years while her close friend and co-star Gene Kelly was at the peak of his abilities and would star in An American in Paris a year later. Falling at a critical point in both of their storied careers, Summer Stock would be their final pairing.
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C’mon, Get Happy, includes a foreword by Tony Award-winning choreographer, director and dancer Savion Glover.
The book, published by the University Press of Mississippi and available for pre-sale, has already received advance praise from Garland’s daughter, Lorna Luft, Michael Feinstein, David Shire, Rob Marshall, Richard Maltby Jr., Tommy Tune, Alan Bergman and Susan Stroman.
While at MGM, Hollywood’s fabled dream factory, Garland starred in such classic films as The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Harvey Girls, Easter Parade and In the Good Old Summertime.
However, Garland’s personal trek became progressively bumpier due to studio pressures, a rocky marriage to director Vincente Minnelli and a growing dependence on prescription medications. The book tells the backstory of how this film was brought to the screen—a tale with enough drama, heartache and genuine selflessness to fuel the plots of a score of MGM melodramas.
It took a herculean effort and the endless empathy of Kelly, co-stars Phil Silvers, Eddie Bracken, Carleton Carpenter and director Charles Walters to “pull” a performance out of a drug-addled and emotionally spent Garland, who was the locus of some production delays and made completing the fraught project one that defied odds.
And yet, Summer Stock is a film packed with musical gems, including two of the best solo numbers that Kelly (his Squeaky Board/Newspaper number) and Garland (Get Happy) ever performed, as well as a duet—a challenge tap dance in the barn that’s chock-full of nuance.
Other books that reference Summer Stock tend to point the finger at Garland as the sole reason for the production problems that plagued the film. C’mon, Get Happy dispels that persistent, commonly held myth, as well as others.
In a final section that brims with fresh insight, contemporary artists offer their perspective on Summer Stock. This “Taking Stock” chapter features the voices of Luft, Feinstein, Kerry Kelly Novick (Gene Kelly’s daughter), Marilyn Michaels, Mario Cantone, Ben Vereen and Mikhail Baryshnikov, among others.
Fantle, whose career included a stint as Deputy Tourism Secretary for Wisconsin, is an adjunct professor in film at Marquette University. He began his collaboration with Johnson in 1978 when they were student journalists at the University of Minnesota, where they co-wrote an arts and entertainment column for the Minnesota Daily. Johnson was a senior editor at Netflix and has written movie reviews and features for E! Online, Moviefone and People, among other publications.
Fantle and Johnson will embark on book tour that includes two local stops – at 7 p.m. on Oct. 13 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Waukesha campus (1500 N. University Drive in Waukesha) and at 1 p.m. on Oct. 15 at the Jewish Community Center (6255 N. Santa Monica Blvd. in Whitefish Bay).
Other stops on the tour include Chicago, Minneapolis, New York City and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
