Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix), a biopic about legendary composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, only began shooting this month. It will almost certainly open during the fall Oscar season of 2023, as it is obviously Oscar-bait plus and Cooper’s makeup after his direction of A Star Is Born failed to land a Best Director nomination in early ’19.
With Maestro we’re talking Best Picture (produced by Cooper, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Todd Phillips, et. al.), Best Director and Actor (Cooper), Best Actress (Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife of 27 years, the half-Chilean Felicia Cohn Montealegre), Best Original Screenplay (Cooper, Josh Singer) and so on down the line. Jeremy Strong costars as John Gruen.
The main dramatic meat, I’m presuming, will be about Bernstein’s conflicted emotional and sexual life. He was a gay man who was at least partly motivated to marry Felicia (whom he cared for and had three kids with) “to dispel rumors about his private life to help secure a major conducting appointment, following advice from his mentor Dimitri Mitropoulos about the conservative nature of orchestra boards.”
A longtime heavy smoker, Bernstein had developed emphysema beginning in his mid 50s (i.e., mid 1970s). He died in 1990 at age 72.
Variety‘s Clayton Davis recently tweeted that he was a bit perturbed about Mulligan playing Felicia because a Brit shouldn’t play a Chilean or Costa Rican. One, upscale Chileans are “light-skinned mestizos of Southern European appearance,” according to ContactChile.com. Two, Felicia’s dad was U.S. mining executive Roy Elwood Cohn. Three, look at the below photo of the real Felicia at the 1970 “Radical Chic” Black Panther party that she and Lenny hosted. Does she resemble anyone in particular?
