Categories: Showbiz

21 “The Sound Of Music” Behind-The-Scenes Facts That’ll Make You Watch The Movie In A Whole New Way

It took two months of rehearsal to get the moment in “Do-Re-Mi” when Maria and the von Trapp children ride their bicycles while singing.

1. First, Julie Andrews was always at the top of the list for the role of Maria von Trapp. According to The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Musical, writer Ernest Lehman said, “As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one person to play this role, and that’s Julie Andrews.” At the time, Julie had filmed only two movies, and they had not been released yet. Also, after Warner Bros. executive Jack Warner passed on her for My Fair Lady, there was also a reported rumor that she was “not photogenic” enough for Hollywood. After seeing early footage of Mary Poppins, director Robert Wise said, “Let’s go sign this girl before somebody else sees this film and grabs her!”

20th Century Fox / Everett Collection

In The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Musical, the list of actors considered for the role were: Julie Andrews, Doris Day, Leslie Caron, Grace Kelly, Anne Bancroft, Angie Dickinson, Carol Lawrence, and Shirley Jones.

2. Julie Andrews reportedly signed on to The Sound of Music (and a second picture for 20th Century Fox) for only $225,000, with no share in either film’s profits. At the time, Julie was a relatively unknown star, and her leading this movie was a gamble. After the stage version of My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins were met with critical acclaim, Julie was then being offered a reported $1 million per film.

20th Century Fox / Everett Collection

According to The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Musical, prior to signing on to the film, Julie was concerned about the amount of “sugar” in the role. During her first meeting with director Robert Wise, she reportedly asked, “How are you going to get all the sugar out of this picture?” Robert said that’s when he knew she was on the same page as the rest of the creative team.

3. Christopher Plummer repeatedly turned down the role of Captain von Trapp because of the initial way the character was written. Since Christopher kept turning down the role, the creative team auditioned numerous other actors, including Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Bing Crosby, and Yul Brynner. The only reason Christopher signed onto the project was because director Robert Wise and writer Ernest Lehman agreed to work with him to improve the character.

20th Century Fox / Everett Collection

According to The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Musical, Christopher wrote Ernest a letter detailing everything he wanted to change. The basic gist was that he wanted to make the Captain more “worldly” and “complex.”

He suggested giving the Captain a wry sense of humor and he really wanted to dig into the contrast between the Captain and Elsa’s relationship vs. the Captain and Maria’s relationship. He wanted the conversations with each woman to be very distinct.

Christopher also requested that a solo song be written for him to sing that showed his inner struggle as his love for Maria grew.

4. As for the von Trapp children, some of the young actors who reportedly auditioned for roles included Mia Farrow, Teri Garr, Patty Duke, Kurt Russell, and more.

20th Century Fox / Everett Collection

According to The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Musical, Mia read three times for the role of Liesel. In director Robert Wise’s notes on her auditions, he reportedly wrote, “good reading — quality very nice, but soft … lack of energy.” He also allegedly thought that her dancing wasn’t good enough, which was an essential quality for Liesl.

5. Julie Andrews’s natural hair color is brown, but for The Sound of Music, they wanted to add some blonde highlights. However, when they initially went to dye her hair, it turned out more orange, and everyone was “mortified.” Ultimately, they dyed her hair completely blonde. Daniel Truhitte, who played Rolfe, also had to have his hair bleached and dyed blonde. He said, “My hair never grew back right after that. I lost half my hair, and it thinned out a lot.”

Tplp / Getty Images, 20th Century Fox

Throughout the entire production, in order to keep Julie’s hair as blonde as possible, it had to be “colored repeatedly.” 

6. Pre-production on The Sound of Music nearly came to a halt after Christopher Plummer reportedly threatened to quit after he found out that his singing voice would be mixed with a professional singer’s voice. Christopher took singing lessons and tried to strengthen his voice enough, but ultimately, the Captain’s final singing voice is a mix of the two.

20th Century Fox

7. One of the first scenes they filmed for The Sound of Music was when Liesl climbs into Maria’s bedroom window soaking wet after she meets Rolf. It took 15 takes to get the scene just right with all of the different angles required. In order to make it look like Charmian Carr was just caught in a torrential rainstorm, they used a sprayer they affectionately called “Mr. Rainstorm,” which doused Charmian with cold water in between takes.

8. It rained for the majority of the film’s shoot in Salzburg and Bavaria. When they filmed “Do-Re-Mi” and “The Sound of Music,” it was pouring so much that the cast and crew often had to spend hours waiting out the rain in tents and a nearby barn. The ground was so wet that when they had to transport the camera equipment, cast, and crew up the mountain for the opening scene, the road had washed away, so instead of taking a Jeep, they had to be transported by carts pulled by oxen.

20th Century Fox

In the book The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Musical, director Robert Wise said one of his “favorite memories of Julie” was watching her travel up the hill in an ox cart “with her fur coat wrapped around her against the cold.”

Speaking about the intense rain while filming the opening scene, Robert recalled, “We’d sit up there under the tarps and wait. You don’t want to go down the hill because it’s such a big deal to get everything down there and then up again.”

9. To achieve the iconic moment when Maria spins on the mountain singing “The Sound of Music,” a cameraman was strapped to the side of a helicopter and flown towards Julie Andrews, who met it in the middle of the field. Due to the helicopter being so loud, choreographer Marc Breaux was hidden in a bush and used a megaphone to tell Julie when to start running and singing.

20th Century Fox

Speaking about filming the scene on The Tonight Show, Julie recalled, “Every time the helicopter had finished, it went around me, but the downdraft from the jet engines just flung me into the grass. So we did this about six or seven times and I was spitting dirt and hay and things like that, and I kept saying, ‘Couldn’t you take a WIDER circle around?!'”

10. The field where “The Sound of Music” was filmed was owned by a local farmer that director Robert Wise paid. When they scouted the location, the crew was reportedly “impressed by the high hay and grass,” and they asked the farmer “not to mow the hay.” However, when they got to the top of the mountain to film, he had trimmed everything. The crew also created the brook, where Maria skips stones by digging a ditch. The farmer was not pleased.

20th Century Fox

11. The real Maria von Trapp makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance in the movie. She can be seen walking with her daughter and granddaughter while Julie Andrews as Maria leaves the abbey and sings “I Have Confidence.” Director Robert Wise recalled filming the moment, saying, “We got her a costume and everything, but like in every film, we had to do a number of takes, and it took, I think, three hours. She didn’t know you have to do it again and again.”

20th Century Fox

Years later, Julie and Maria also reunited on an episode of The Julie Andrews Hour in 1973. They sang “Edelweiss” together and Maria taught Julie how to properly yodel. 

12. Julia Andrews’s stand-in, Larri Thomas, was only used for one scene in the final movie. It’s actually Larri who is hanging from a tree when the Captain drives by and sees all of the children. No doubles were used for the children because they gladly wanted to climb the trees.

20th Century Fox

Larri was an accomplished actor and singer and also worked with Julie on Mary Poppins. In Mary Poppins, she reportedly did some of the flying sequences in the film. 

13. It took over 12 takes to film the kiss between the Captain and Maria because Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer could not stop laughing. Apparently, in order to create the shaft of moonlight that lights the scene, huge arc lights were used that emitted a groan or “raspberry” sound when used. Every time the noise happened, the duo would start giggling. Their laughter was so bad director Robert Wise ended up filming the duo mostly in the dark.

20th Century Fox

“Well, Chris and I would start laughing. We couldn’t help it,” Julie said in the book The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Movie. She continued, saying, “We’d go back to the scene again, and those lights would start groaning at us again! Our giggling got even worse. In fact, it got to the point where we couldn’t get through the scene!”

In an interview with Julie in 2005, Christopher said that the fact they had to be so close to each other also made him start to laugh. 

14. They also did four takes of the moment when Maria and the children fall out of the boat and into the water. In fact, Kym Karath, who played Gretl, couldn’t swim at the time, so a crew member instructed Julie Andrews to try and “fall forward from the boat and get to her as quickly as possible.” Of course, Julie ended up falling backwards, so crew members rushed in to try and get Kym quickly.

20th Century Fox

“She was very brave,” Julie recounted to Diane Sawyer in an ABC News special, The Untold Story of The Sound of Music, which celebrated the film’s 50th anniversary. 

In the final scene, you can see Heather Menzies, who plays Louisa, carrying Kym out of the water.

15. It took two months of rehearsal to get the moment in “Do-Re-Mi” when Maria and the von Trapp children ride their bicycles and sing just right. In fact, before they even traveled to Salzburg to film the iconic scene, Julie Andrews and the children would practice riding their bikes down a street on the Fox lot so they could time the riding with the music.

20th Century Fox

The dance sequence for “Do-Re-Mi” in The Sound of Music was so intricate that choreographers Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood would “judge the distances” from the storyboards that Maurice Zuberano created and plan the dances accordingly. 

16. The young actors who played the von Trapp children grew up a lot over the course of filming. For starters, Nicholas Hammond, who played Friedrich, grew a reported “six inches” during the six months of filming, and because of this, he was now taller than Charmian Carr, who played Liesl. So, they had to put Charmian on boxes so they would be around the same height. Also, Debbie Turner, who played Marta, lost her two front teeth during filming, so the props department had to make her two fake teeth.

20th Century Fox

On set, Julie Andrews was a mentor to the young actors, many of whom had never worked on a professional film before.

17. The puppets used by Maria and the von Trapp children were specially designed for the film. Bill and Cora Baird, the puppeteers, worked hand-in-hand with choreographers Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood to make sure the puppets could easily perform the choreography. It took a reported three weeks of rehearsal for Julie Andrews and the children to make it seem like they were operating the puppets.

20th Century Fox / Everett Collection

Yes, Marc and Dee Dee choreographed a specific dance number for the puppets to perform in “The Lonely Goatherd.”

18. During the filming of “Sixteen Going On Seventeen,” Charmian Carr accidentally danced through one of the plate-glass windows in the gazebo. This was one of the final sequences they filmed for the movie, so they bandaged up her ankle, disguised it with makeup, and removed it as much as possible during post-production.

20th Century Fox

“Sixteen Going On Seventeen” and “Something Good” were the final two scenes filmed for the movie because they actually recreated the gazebo back in Los Angeles on the Fox lot because the real gazebo was very small, and it was hard to film inside with all of the windows.

19. While all of the music was the same as it was in the original Broadway musical, one of the biggest changes was Julie Andrews adding “an extra octave” to the very end of “Do Re Mi.” She told Diane Sawyer in 2015 that she did it “because [she] could, and so [she] did.”

20th Century Fox

Sadly, Julie can no longer sing the notes from The Sound of Music that are so iconic. In June 1997, she underwent surgery after experiencing a problem in her throat from years of singing on Broadway. It was reportedly supposed to be a routine surgery, but it ended up permanently damaging her singing voice. 

In 1999, she sued the throat surgeon, and in 2000, the lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed amount. Due to the settlement, Julie isn’t allowed to divulge many details about her surgery.

20. The city of Salzburg was reportedly “very cooperative” with where in the city the movie needed to film, except when it came time to depict the Anschluss, where Nazis marched across the Residenzplatz and took over Austria. The scene required the hanging of swastika banners from buildings and recreated a cheering crowd. The crew was originally told they couldn’t do that because “the people of Salzburg were not sympathizers.” Then, second unit director Maurice Zuberano said they would use real-life footage of Hitler marching into Austria with crowds of sympathizers instead, and they changed their minds.

20th Century Fox

In the book The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Movie, Maurice said, “They didn’t want us to use a newsreel showing the Austrians cheering Hitler, so they gave in. But they insisted that we take down the banners as soon as the shot was over. The only thing we still weren’t allowed to do was use a crowd cheering, but I think we made our point without it.”

21. And finally, there were reportedly only three scenes that didn’t make it into the final version of the movie. One of the scenes that was cut came during the “Do-Re-Mi” sequences. Leisel was originally going to spot Rolf delivering telegrams and invite him over to meet Maria. However, the moment was cut because it “interrupted the flow” of the montage. There was also going to be a scene where the Captain sings “Edelweiss” while walking around the garden thinking about Maria. The scene would then show Maria looking out her window, thinking of the Captain.

Bettmann / Bettmann Archive / Getty Images

According to the book The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Musical, director Robert Wise cut the scene with the Captain and Maria thinking about each other because it also messed up the flow of the movie and felt “unnecessary.”

The third scene that was cut was ultimately just trimmed. It featured Sister Margaretta going to Maria and telling her that the Mother Abbess wants to see her. In the final cut of the film, the scene ends up starting with Maria waiting in the hallway and Maria going in to see the Mother Abbess.

Is there another The Sound of Music behind-the-scenes fact that you love that isn’t mentioned above? Tell us about it in the comments below!

And you can buy the book The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Movie by Julia Antopol Hirsch here.

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