‘Maestro’: Read The Screenplay For The Leonard Bernstein Biopic Orchestrated By Bradley Cooper

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with Maestro, which is directed, co-written, produced by and stars Bradley Cooper.

Cooper wrote the Maestro script with Spotlight Oscar winner Josh Singer. The former plays legendary conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein as the Netflix film tells the complex love story of Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (Carey Mulligan) — a story that spans more than 30 years. Matt Bomer, Maya Hawke, Sarah Silverman, Josh Hamilton, Scott Ellis, Gideon Glick, Sam Nivola, Alexa Swinton and Miriam Shor also star.

Maestro world premiered to a nearly 10-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, going on to play at New York, London and AFI. It won an AFI Movie of the Year award, and has eight Critics Choice nominations as well as four Golden Globe noms. It was also named a Top Film by both the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle.

Maestro is Cooper’s directorial follow-up to the Oscar-winning A Star Is Born. He spent six years developing the project, telling Deadline in November, “This movie has messed time up for me. It’s bent time, it really has.” He said his obsession goes back further than the time since he got the rights to Bernstein’s music and life from his family, recalling asking Santa Claus for a conductor’s baton as a child, having seen it in Bugs Bunny cartoons.

“I did want to serve his legacy musically,” Cooper said. “The best thing is to tell a story we can all relate to hopefully and it’s all to the rhythm of his music. The movie is all scored to his music. That is the best way I can present to you this man.”

The movie was born in the research. Poring over their correspondence, private papers, home movies and the like, Cooper discovered so much more about Lenny. As the classical music world knew very well, Leonard Bernstein was bisexual, and continued having homosexual affairs throughout his marriage to Felicia, a classically trained actress. But this was not a marriage of convenience; it was a partnership of equals, albeit one that suffered bitter ups and downs. So, Cooper went back to the Bernstein kids and informed them that this was going to be no ordinary biopic.

“In order to make a movie,” he told them, “there has to be something else. And I think that what moves me in your father’s story is the relationship between your parents.”

In his review, Deadline’s Pete Hammond wrote, “It is a fascinating portrait Bradley Cooper paints and a choice that seems inspired… It is the work of a very assured filmmaker bringing a strong vision to the screen.”

Click below to read the script.