You may have read that roughly six years ago there were two competing Leonard Berstein film projects, Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro and Jake Gyllenhaal and Cary Fukanaga‘s The American, which focuses mostly on Lenny and Felicia Montealegre‘s early years and deals specifically with Lenny’s dishonesty and duplicity about boyfriends along with Felicia’s telling him in so many words that she won’t be humiliated if they marry, etc. Not to mention their break-up and reconciliation.
Here’s Michael Mitnick‘s nearly six-year-old draft for the Gyllenhaal-Fukanaga Bernstein project, dated 5.21.18. The subtitle is “A Musician in Five Movements.” And it’s only 89 pages!
The Gyllenhaal project collapsed when Cooper landed the music rights.
