TWO GEMS ARE RE-BORN!

Expanded reissues of WEST SIDE STORY and A STAR IS BORN to include previously unreleased material.

(April 8, 2004) - New York, NY – On May 18, 2004, Columbia/Legacy/Sony Music Soundtrax will release the expanded, re-mixed, and re-mastered classic movie soundtracks from A STAR IS BORN and WEST SIDE STORY, which together earned 17 Academy Award™ nominations.

Next to THE WIZARD OF OZ, A STAR IS BORN is Judy Garland’s most celebrated film role, featuring the classic song “The Man that Got Away”. The musical retelling of a 1937 drama, A STAR IS BORN was a triumphant comeback for Judy Garland, whose career had been put on hold after her 15-year tenure at MGM, and marked the first time she worked for a different studio. Garland and then husband producer Sid Luft, tapped director George Cukor, composer Harold Arlen, lyricist Ira Gershwin, and score composer Ray Heindorf for this production.

Studio heads deemed the film too long, at just over 3 hours, and demanded that it be recut. In the process, three musical numbers performed by Garland were deleted. Even in this truncated form, A STAR IS BORN earned 6 Academy Award™ nominations including Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, Best Song, and Judy Garland’s only nomination as Best Actress. In 1983 historian/archivist Ron Haver edited the film close to its original length—which is the version now available on DVD and VHS. Today it is one of the few musicals earmarked for protection and preservation by the Library of Congress and the National Film Registry.

Though the soundtrack has never been out of print since 1954, Sony Legacy’s new version of A STAR IS BORN-Original Soundtrack is the first time it is presented in an expanded format with three never-before-released vocal outtakes and a dozen tracks of previously unreleased score music. It also features liner notes by John Fricke, author of Judy Garland/World’s Greatest Entertainer and Judy Garland/A Portrait in Art.

By the time the film version of WEST SIDE STORY was released in the fall of 1961, it was already a worldwide hit musical on stage. The film starred Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer as the star-crossed lovers in this retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, set in modern-day New York City. It was both a critical and box-office success, eventually earning 10 Academy Awards™, including Best Picture, Director, Scoring of a Musical Picture, Supporting Actress (Rita Moreno) and Supporting Actor (George Chakiris).

As was the common practice in Hollywood, the singing voices of the four lead actors were dubbed. Jim Bryant offered vocals for Richard Beymer, Betty Wand for Rita Moreno, and Tucker Smith some of the vocals for Russ Tamblyn (father of Joan of Arcadia’s Amber Tamblyn). Marni Nixon, best known for providing the vocals for Deborah Kerr in THE KING AND I and Audrey Hepburn in MY FAIR LADY, did the singing for Natalie Wood.

This reissue of WEST SIDE STORY—Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is the most complete version of the music from the film. It contains the “Intermission Music", which has never been released on CD. As an added bonus, Richard Ridge, the host of the weekly television show Broadway Beat, wrote extensive liner notes for this recording, which is part of the Columbia Broadway Masterworks series.

The original motion picture soundtracks A STAR IS BORN and WEST SIDE STORY will be in stores on May 18, 2004.