So I know I promised another post about Marvin Hamlisch, so here it is. Like I mentioned in my post about the film festival the Friday night movie was the Way we Were and the nights special guest was Marvin Hamlisch, who wrote the music to the movie.
Well Mr. Hamlisch had flown into Atlanta that day and was driven to Athens by one of the film festival’s board members, Gene Younts . My job was to meet him at the stage door and basically stay with him for the evening, well that turned into one amazing story…
After Robert introduced the film and Marvin as the special guest, we all went backstage, were I learned that my Dad(who I made come to the festival for one night) and I along with Gene were going to dinner with Marvin Hamlisch!! I thought my heart was going to beat out of my chest, I was going to go to dinner with a three time Academy Award winner not to mention a musical genius and well I’m just me.
So we went to The National and my Dad and I manged to make intelligent conversation. We talked about what we thought were the best movies over the past 5 years, we talked Broadway and we even shared a dessert.
After dinner we headed back to the Classic Center so that Mr. Hamlisch could speak after the movie. He and Robert talked about the process of writing the score for the theme song and of course about Barbara( I love her too!) then he went to the piano and began to play the Way We Were. I am not ashamed to admit that it moved me to tears, it is in my opinion one of the most beautiful songs of all time. I am not doing the story justice, I tell it better in person so if you see me ask about my dinner with Marvin Hamlisch, one of only 12 people to win all four major US performing awards, the Grammy, the Oscar, the Tony and the Emmy!
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