Well before three-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg and two-time Academy Award-nominated actor Colman Domingo worked together on the alien thriller Disclosure Day, the director revealed the two nearly collaborated on a scrapped project about famed Broadway duo Ira and George Gershwin.
“I was going to make a movie about Ira and George Gershwin, and I was going to make a movie about the process of writing and staging Porgy and Bess,” Spielberg told Amy Poehler on a recent episode of her Good Hang podcast.
He continued, “I had a script, and I was excited, and I was casting it. And I was looking for Todd Duncan, who played Porgy, and I met a lot of actors, and when Colman came in to the meeting, that was the first time I met Colman, but I intended, after that meeting, to cast him as Todd Duncan.”
The opera, an adaptation of Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s play (itself an adaptation of the latter’s 1925 novel), tells the story of a disabled Black beggar hailing from Charleston, who attempts to rescue Bess from her drug dealer and controlling lover. The well-known and frequently performed show was later adapted into the Samuel Goldwyn-produced 1959 musical drama film starring the legendary Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge.
“What happened was, I had actually cast a lot of the movie and then I had a — something that doesn’t often happen when I’m that far down the line — but I had a kind of second thought about the project, and I decided not to continue making it,” Spielberg explained. “That’s the only reason Colman and I didn’t work together then.”
However, having remembered the Sing Sing star “as well as I did,” the Jaws helmer cast him in 2012’s Lincoln as Private Harold Green. The two also worked together on 2023’s The Color Purple, which Spielberg produced.
Though Porgy and Bess didn’t pan out, Spielberg further explored stage-to-screen adaptations with 2021’s West Side Story, which garnered seven Oscar nominations and clinched one for Supporting Actress for Ariana DeBose.
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