When I think of great songwriting teams, a few names rise to the top:
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice,
Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. Probably the first songwriting
partnership whose music made its way into my life was the Sherman
Brothers, Robert and Richard. Given my love of both Disney and the craft
of songwriting, I knew as soon as I heard of it that I would have to
see The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story.
This
documentary, created by Jeff Sherman (Robert’s son) and Gregory Sherman
(Richard’s son), tells an eye-opening tale that is sometimes inspiring,
sometimes dreadfully sad. It turns out that Robert and Richard, or as
they are generally referred to in the movie, Bob and Dick, may have been
able to create pure magic when they sat down to write songs together,
but their personal relationship was – and, unless a lot has changed in
the last couple of years, is – a far cry from congenial.
The Boys,
which is how most of their colleagues referred to them during their
time at Disney, includes quite a bit of archival footage, as well as
current interviews with the brothers and those who know them. While the
DVD includes a number of interesting bonus features, there’s not a
making-of segment, so I’m not sure where all this footage from the 1980s
came from. Was this in the works that long ago, or were those parts
filmed for another purpose? I’m glad, though, that we get to spend so
much of the movie watching the Shermans at work together, as they did so
magnificently. The recent interviews with each man individually are
just as intriguing, but there’s a certain tone of desolation about it,
especially in the interviews with Dick.
Together, the Shermans
crafted some of the happiest and most memorable songs of the century. I
always thought, “Wow. How incredibly cool that must have been to be able
to do that with your own brother.” They do say that when a song idea
came to them, there was no greater thrill. But you also get the sense
that theirs was, for the most part, not a very pleasant partnership.
Their personalities were so different, they had a tendency to clash. On
the documentary, Bob, the primary lyricist and elder by a couple of
years, often comes across as gruff and no-nonsense. He looks like he’s
at least a decade older than the vivacious Dick, who seems very
emotionally open. Dick laughs and smiles a lot throughout the film, but
he also gets choked up more often, and in the estrangement, he seems
more victim than perpetrator.
Although lyric-writing is my
primary area of interest, I found myself more drawn to the bubbly Dick,
and my heart went out to him on several occasions, the first time being
when each man was asked about whether they were close as children. First
we saw Bob’s response, an almost shockingly dismissive, “I barely knew
him.” And then Dick: “Oh, yeah, he was my hero!” Whenever the
conversation topic lingered too long on the divergent directions their
personal lives took, Dick became disturbed. He reflected on how he
missed being the ebullient uncle; his voice broke as he read the
eloquent note Bob wrote to him for his 50th birthday. More than once, he
simply said that he didn’t want to talk about it. Bob, meanwhile,
generally came across as having little emotional investment in Dick.
Then again, the film also delves a bit into Bob’s time as a teenage
soldier during World War II, which deeply scarred him. He says that he
was the first American to arrive at Dachau when it was liberated, and
many of his later creative endeavors were an effort to override the
horror of what he saw there. It’s little wonder that there seemed to be
something standoffish about him.
But brotherly rivalry was only
one part of this movie. There was also the great American story of two
young men, the sons of songwriter Al Sherman, who discovered that they
had a certain knack for writing songs together. This led to pop hits and
eventually a recurring gig writing songs for Annette Funicello to sing
on The Mickey Mouse Club. Then came the first meeting with Walt
Disney himself, a moment clearly ingrained in both of their minds. The
brothers, but particularly Bob, speak of Disney’s founder with such
warmth and reverence; it was clear that their relationship with him,
from both a professional and personal viewpoint, was something that they
never took for granted.
I’m fairly certain that the first Disney song to utterly capture my imagination was Feed the Birds. It’s my favorite song in Mary Poppins,
and I still think it’s one of the most beautiful film segments I’ve
ever seen. When I went to England during college, one of the absolute
highlights of my trip was going to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and this song
is the reason for that. So I found it incredibly touching that it was
after they presented this song to him that Walt Disney invited them to
become staff songwriters. Later in the film, they mention that it always
remained his absolute favorite of their songs, and some afternoons,
they would sing it together, just for him. While the men seem miles
apart in most of their interviews, their reflections upon the moment
when Walt officially hired them and his final farewell to them less than
a decade later were remarkably similar, and it was bittersweet to see
each of them break down over those memories.
It surprised me to learn that Mary Poppins
came so early in the Sherman Brothers’ Disney career, since it really
is a movie that is “practically perfect in every way,” and the songs are
a huge part of that. Because it is such an iconic movie and so
important to them, the documentary spends a fair bit of time on it,
casting P. L. Travers, author of the original Mary Poppins books, as a
wicked witch doing her best to stop the film from going forward and
discussing the genesis of some of the biggest songs. For instance, Bob
was inspired to write A Spoonful of Sugar after hearing his son talk about receiving the Salk vaccine, which was administered with… a spoonful of sugar.
The
Shermans’ output during their main stretch of time with Disney in the
1960s was incredible, and one can’t help but wonder what might have
followed if Walt hadn’t died at the young age of 65 but had continued to
oversee the company for years. In the wake of his death, Disney lost
much of its magic for them, though they did continue on for a while,
with Bedknobs and Broomsticks and The Aristocats their most notable Disney projects of that time. The movie also mentions some of their non-Disney work, like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Charlotte’s Web, which Bob identifies as his favorite of their joint efforts. Winnie the Pooh also gets a fair amount of attention, both their work in the 1960s and their collaboration with Kenny Loggins on The Tigger Movie
in 2000. Despite their initial inability to connect with A. A. Milne’s
stories, they seem to have found it very moving to have the chance to
write new Pooh music together again after all that time, especially
since their Disney output had pretty much dried up in the 1980s.
Scattered
throughout the movie are comments by a number of prominent
personalities. These include Roy Disney; screenwriter A. J. Carothers; Mary Poppins stars Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke and Karen Dotrice; Angela Lansbury of Bedknobs and Broomsticks; film scholar Leonard Maltin; Parent Trap
star Hayley Mills; actor Ben Stiller, who seems to have been
interviewed mostly just as a Disney enthusiast; and several others. A
look at the bonus features, most of which are between five and ten
minutes in length, gives you an even greater sense of how these men
affected the world of movies, along with the Disney theme park
experience. I enjoyed each of the special features, but my favorite was
the Sherman Brothers’ Jukebox, which includes about a dozen of their
songs. Click on each one, and you’ll get to hear it and usually hear one
or both of them talking about how the song came to be written. It’s a
fascinating peek into the songwriting process.
I still think
that Richard and Robert Sherman had one of the coolest jobs imaginable.
I’m sorry to learn that their incredible harmony rarely extended to
their personal lives – to the extent that the sons who took this project
on went decades without seeing each other. It’s really a rather
depressing story. But just think of all the amazing music that came out
of their contentious partnership…
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