Looking for the Maestro

You won't find him in Venice.

The other day, The Wrap posted that Bradley Cooper is skipping the Venice Film Festival premiere of his new movie Maestro in solidarity with the SAG/AFTRA strike. Respect. I wish more of the top-of-the-top actors would do likewise instead of seeking exemptions for their own projects. Still, I hadn’t heard much about Maestro beyond a few leaked set photos, which look terrific. Bradley Cooper’s transformation into Leonard Bernstein is really incredible. The festival starts at the end of the month but to my knowledge, Netflix still hadn’t released a trailer. I couldn’t find one on YouTube, but I did end up going down a fairly lengthy Leonard Bernstein rabbit hole that included a BTS on West Side Story, a fascinating interview with Mr. Bernstein for the Kennedy Center Honors, and a really great lecture he did at Harvard on music and music theory. If you don’t want to watch the whole lecture, here’s a clip of Mr. Bernstein tracing the history of harmonics in music in just a few minutes. Oh, and if you just can’t wait to see Bradley Cooper on screen again, here’s a look back a few years at the making of A Star is Born.

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