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In the roughly 125 years that Hollywood’s been making movies, nothing — including streaming — has  been more disruptive than the advent of sound.

Talkies replaced silent pictures after Warner Bros.’ phenomenal success with its October 1927 NYC premiere of Al Jolson singing & speaking in THE JAZZ SINGER. Many stars’ careers were destroyed by talking pictures because they didn’t sound nearly as good as they looked.

Sound’s impact on Hollywood was a storyline waiting to become a movie, which it did with MGM’s SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, which premiered in NYC Mar. 27, 1952. The now classic musical romantic comedy was directed & choreographed by Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen with Kelly, Donald O’Connor & Debbie Reynolds playing movie stars just as silent films and their colorful stars were suddenly on the way out.

The film’s title song was originally to have been sung by the three stars while leaving a restaurant after a terrible preview that night of their silent swashbuckler movie-within-the-movie, THE DUELING CAVALIER, which they now hope to save by turning it into a musical.

Much of RAIN’s plot revolves around Reynolds, as ingenue Kathy Selden,  dubbing the shrill voice of Monumental Pictures mega-star Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen). But for the song “Would You?” and for part of “You Are My Lucky Star,” Reynolds, herself, was dubbed by the richer singing voice of Betty Noyes. It’s Reynolds, however, who sings the rest of her songs. But when we see Kathy dubbing Lina’s dialogue, it’s not Reynolds’ voice we’re hearing. It’s actually Jean Hagen, who in real life had a lovely speaking voice.
Reynolds suffered terribly working on her dances with perfectionist choreographer Kelly. Before production started, Kelly was meeting with MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer, who then brought Reynolds in and told Kelly he wanted to introduce him to his leading lady. Kelly’s first question to Reynolds was, “Can you dance?” When she replied, “Well, a little,” Kelly turned to Mayer and asked, “LB, what are you doing to me?”

It was all downhill from there. Kelly pushed Reynolds so hard during production that she wound up in hospital for exhaustion. One day during rehearsals, she started sobbing sitting under a piano in an empty dance studio where she was found and comforted by, of all people, Fred Astaire, who was working in an adjacent room on his own dances for another picture.

Betty Comden & Adolph Green wrote the role of silent movie diva Lina Lamont hoping their friend Judy Holliday would play it. They’d worked with Holliday in New York in the legendary satirical group The Revuers, but after her huge success in the 1950 romantic comedy BORN YESTERDAY, a supporting role like Lina was no longer good casting. Instead, the role went to Hagen, who’d been Holliday’s understudy in BORN YESTERDAY on Broadway four years earlier.