Irving Berlin vs. Edmund Goulding: The Troubles of Reaching for the Moon and Alfred Newman's Unexpected Hollywood Break

Scandals & Feuds2/5 wildness

Irving Berlin vs. Edmund Goulding: The Troubles of Reaching for the Moon and Alfred Newman's Unexpected Hollywood Break

Reaching for the Moon / Irving Berlin / Edmund Goulding / Alfred Newman / 1930s

The 1930 musical Reaching for the Moon is a small, early-sound era scandal in which the film’s famed songwriter, Irving Berlin, came into open conflict with director Edmund Goulding. Berlin had been invited to provide songs for the picture, but creative and production problems between composer and director led to most of Berlin’s numbers being excised from the finished film — an embarrassing public sign of a creative rift at a moment when Hollywood was still figuring out how to handle musicals onscreen. Alfred Newman, invited by Berlin to conduct the score, survived the blow: despite the removal of Berlin’s songs, Newman retained credit for directing the music, made a successful Hollywood debut, and immediately attracted studio attention. Within a year he was working for Samuel Goldwyn on Street Scene (1931) and had effectively used a fraught production as the springboard for a dominant career at the major studios.