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Netflix Scoops Up Bradley Cooper's Leonard Bernstein Biopic

The film will chronicle the lavender marriage between the gay "West Side Story" composer and his wife.

Fresh off losing some Oscars for his remake of A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper is getting back in the musical filmmaking saddle with a biopic about legendary gay composer Leonard Bernstein, known for musical classics like On the Town and West Side Story and the score for the film On the Waterfront.

NewNowNext reported on the news in 2018, but now Netflix has acquired the film, which will include a glitzy list of producers such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Joker director Todd Phillips, and Cooper. In addition to directing, producing, and starring in it, Cooper will also share script duties with Josh Singer, the Oscar-winning screenwriter behind Spotlight.

The film will tell "the beautifully complex story of the marriage between Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre," reports Deadline.

Erika Stone/Getty Images

American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918 - 1990) with his fiancee, actress Felicia Montealegre (1922 - 1978) and a student at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer institute in Massachusetts, 1946. (Photo by Erika Stone/Getty Images)

Leonard Bernstein with his then-fiancée Felicia Montealegre in 1946.

Bernstein was married to Montealegre for 25 years, during which both were well aware of his homosexuality. In a letter to Bernstein, Montealegre once wrote, "You are a homosexual and may never change—you don't admit to the possibility of a double life, but if your peace of mind, your health, your whole nervous system depend on a certain sexual pattern what can you do?"

As gay playwright and Bernstein's West Side Story collaborator Arthur Laurents put it, the composer was "a gay man who got married. He wasn't conflicted about it at all. He was just gay."

Al Ravenna/PhotoQuest/Getty Images

View of American composer Leonard Bernstein (1918 - 1990) as he sits at a piano and makes notations to a musical score, New York, New York, 1955. (Photo by Al Ravenna/PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

Bernstein in 1955.

Bernstein reportedly had flings with men while married to Montealegre, though they still loved one another and had three kids. In 1976, however, Bernstein decided he couldn't conceal his homosexuality any longer and separated from Montealegre, moving in with the director of a classical music radio station in San Francisco.

When his estranged wife was diagnosed with lung cancer, Bernstein returned to live with her until her death in 1978. After that, he truly immersed himself in gay life, exhibiting behavior that some considered "reckless and crude."

While that's clearly the film we want to see, Cooper has been working closely with Bernstein's children on the film for the past two years, so we might be stuck with a bunch of straight folks dramatizing a lavender marriage—albeit a loving one.

Netflix plans to release the Bernstein biopic in theaters next year before making it available for streaming. It has had a similar strategy with its Oscar bait this year, including the films The Irishman, Marriage Story, and The Two Popes.

Jake Gyllenhaal had been working on a biopic about the legendary composer titled The American, but after the Leonard Bernstein estate granted Cooper and the filmmakers exclusive rights, that project was shelved.

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