DGA Monthly

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 5 I 1 1 In the parade of great sequences from Hollywood's golden age of musicals, movie lovers often agree that it starts with a downpour: Gene Kelly's beaming, drop-drenched solo from the beloved 1952 MGM classic Singin' in the Rain, as celebrated a song-and-dance number as has ever been committed to fi lm. With an almost uncanny choreographic sense of how happiness buoys the spirit and ignores the world's peskier realities, Stanley Donen and his directing partner/star Kelly took a cheerful, '20s-era ditty written by the fi lm's producer, Arthur Freed, and fashioned a backlot reverie of exquisitely timed, smile-inducing, just-so grace. "I think it nicely expresses an emotion we all feel, that moment of euphoria that comes with being in love," says Donen. "It's that moment when rain doesn't mean anything." Getting to that point where a heart-happy man's burst of melodic self-expression feels as natural on fi lm as the character's breathing wasn't easy, though. From the careful planning of the star's every rain-soaked step to the engineering of a drizzly street on the MGM lot, there was much to consider in getting the sequence, which amounts to only a handful of shots, pitch-perfect. "There is no such thing as just another dance number," says Donen, a trained dancer who honed his directing chops at MGM as an apprentice before making his directorial debut (also with Kelly) on On the Town. "They're all agony. Three or four minutes is an eternity to entertain people and make them surprised." S H O T T O R E M E M B E R Still Singing MORE THAN 70 YEARS AFTER IT WAS MADE, SINGIN' IN THE RAIN REMAINS THE HIGH-WATER MARK OF AMERICAN MUSICALS. STANLEY DONEN REMEMBERS SHOOTING THE ICONIC SEQUENCE WHERE GENE KELLY BLISSFULLY IGNORES THE WEATHER | BY ROBERT ABELE The sequence starts with Gene saying good night to Debbie Reynolds at the door. Musical pictures are not like anything else because they include a stylistic device. If there were rules and regulations, everybody could do it. Somebody said, 'It must be fun making these pictures. And I said, 'Fun? It's torture. It's worry. It's anxiety. It's confl ict, argument, indecision.' It's not fun. The only fun is looking at it after. Gene was very tough on himself and everybody else. He was very defi nite about how he wanted to do it. We were [lucky] that we had him; there's nobody who could have expressed it the way he did. This was just perfect for his gifts and talents 1 In this reprint from 2009, Director Stanley Donen recalls how he and Gene Kelly created one of the most iconic scenes in fi lm history. To make the rain, there had to be big stretches of pipes with holes in them, and water pressure. You had to control from the valves how much pressure you put into the pipes, just like in your bathroom. We had a funny kind of trouble, though, in that we were at MGM in Culver City, and it was a hot summer, so what would happen is that at 4:30 or 5 in the afternoon, when the sun was starting to go down, the people of Culver City watered their lawn, which made us lose water power. So every afternoon between 4 and 5, we had to stop, because there wasn't enough pressure to make rain. We had to work with the reality of life 2 — continued on page 12

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