“West Side Story” star George Chakiris shared a few thoughts on five other favorite-film moments — along with two less-than-stellar ones.

“Song of Love” (1947), his first film — as a member of a Long Beach church choir: “The choir was used for a sequence filmed at MGM with a full orchestra. I think I was 12, or in my early teens; it was very heady for me. I remember we got to see the famed MGM schoolhouse, where Liz Taylor and others went. There was a Halloween party, and the guys in the choir were invited. Liz Taylor was there, and one of the guys got up the courage to ask her to dance. Walking around MGM, I saw Mario Lanza and Frank Sinatra. I had this sheet music, and I got their autographs, along with Katharine Hepburn and Liz Taylor. And I’m so sorry — I don’t know what happened to that sheet music. I wish I still had it.”

“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953), where he’s one of the tuxedo-clad dancers escorting Marilyn Monroe in the famous “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number: “Marilyn Monroe was amazing. She was quiet and deeply, deeply concentrated in her work. What we feel about her is not all because she died so young. She was intensely and beautifully talented. Her impulses were wonderful. Her singing was delicious. Her presence was unique, and she knew where all the comedy was. It’s one of my favorite credits — I got to be one of the guys behind Marilyn Monroe.”

“White Christmas” (1954), in which he appeared in a scene with Rosemary Clooney: “I got a medium shot with her, not a close-up. But I got a lot of attention being next to Rosemary for that short time — it led to ‘The Girl Rush.’ Rosemary was a great person, such a down-to-earth human being. And Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye were wonderful, too.”

“Bebo’s Girl” (1963), with Claudia Cardinale: “It’s a serious film with a good story, about the Italian resistance in World War II. It’s a love story and a true story. It was to Claudia what ‘Two Women’ was to Sophia Loren.”

“The Young Girls of Rochefort” (1967) with Catherine Deneuve: “I loved this. I think it still holds up. It’s a beautiful film to look at. Catherine is one of the few French actresses who has an international career, she’s known throughout the world. We had a very, very nice time. I got to know her and her sister (the late Francoise Dorlèac, who died in a car crash the same year) very well.”

“The Big Cube” (1969) with Lana Turner: “I turned it down a couple times. I read the script and couldn’t take it seriously. They came back to me a third time, and I said OK. I did the film and I went back to theater — what can I say? But once you commit, you commit. And Lana Turner was terrific. She was gregarious and talked to everyone on the set. She never did more than one or two takes — she knew her craft that well. And I do love saying, ‘I once did a film with Lana Turner.’ “

“Pale Blood” (1990), his last film: “Ooooh, that was a tough one. I took it because the writer-director had come up with this totally different take on a vampire film. But lo, and I don’t know what happened, she got replaced and a producer ended up directing it. I ended up not doing anything in it; it was boring, I thought. I’ve never seen it. I never want to see it. I know if I did, I wouldn’t like it.”

Brett Johnson

———————– Contributed photo George Chakiris was in France in May to attend the premiere of “Les Bien-Aimes” at the Cannes Film Festival. Accompanying him was writer-producer Mei Chen Chalais.

The 2011 Ventura Film Festival opens tonight and continues through July 18 with more than 250 films and screenplays. The George Chakiris and Russ Tamblyn tribute Saturday night includes a dinner at the Ventura Beach Marriott, an 8 p.m. screening of “West Side Story” at the Majestic Ventura Theater, and a 10 p.m. presentation of their lifetime achievement awards, followed by a question-and-answer session with the two.

Other highlights include a July 16 screening of the Oscar-winning documentary “Inside Job,” about the Wall Street financial crisis. More than 100 filmmakers are slated to attend the festival. One of the documentaries, “A Handmade Life” by Burbank director William Stetz, chronicles the “trials and tribulations” of Ventura County resident Rick Mecagni as he tries to build his dream home. It will screen at 10 a.m. Wednesday in the Grand Ballroom at the Ventura Beach Marriott Hotel.

In addition to the Ventura Theater and the Marriott Hotel, film screening locations will include the Century 10 Downtown Theater and the Regency Buenaventura 6.

Ticket prices range from $16 for individual film screenings to $160 for an all-access pass; the Chakiris and Tamblyn tribute is $98, which includes dinner, limousine and red carpet, the film, the award and an after-party at the Ventura Beach Marriott.

For tickets, passes and more information, visit venturafilmfestival.org/tickets or call 644-9981.

For more on Chakiris and his late-budding jewelry career, visit georgechakiris.com.

———————– MGM George Chakiris (left) dances with Rita Moreno in a scene from “West Side Story.” “The music and the choreography are so extraordinary,” Chakiris says. “And Leonard Bernstein’s score is classic.”

A half-century ago, George Chakiris danced his way to lasting fame and an Oscar as Bernardo, the Sharks gang leader in the 1961 film adaptation of “West Side Story.”

Today, Chakiris remains a proud, enthusiastic supporter of the film, which won 10 Oscars total (including best picture), sparked a hit soundtrack and perhaps started a national finger-snapping epidemic.

“It’s one of those movies you can’t leave without having felt something,” Chakiris said in a recent interview from his Los Angeles home. “It touches people emotionally.”

Chakiris figures to do a lot of reminiscing this year, including this weekend in Ventura, as the film’s silver 50th anniversary rolls around.

Chakiris and “West Side Story” co-star Russ Tamblyn will receive the Ventura Film Festival’s lifetime achievement awards in a Saturday night event that includes a screening of the 1961 classic. The 11-day festival opens today and continues through July 18, featuring some 250 films and screenplays.

Chakiris noted a spate of “West Side Story” at 50 celebrations. The Los Angeles Philharmonic will tackle the score and songs tonight and Saturday night at the Hollywood Bowl as a newly remastered, high-definition version of the film plays on the bowl’s big screen. As of this late June interview, Chakiris was slated to take part in a “West Side Story” salute in France.

These days, the 76-year-old Chakiris is content with making and selling jewelry (this after taking silversmithing classes), and hanging out at home with his beloved Italian greyhound, Sammy.

“It just took over,” he said of his jewelry pursuit. “I’ve always enjoyed being creative making things. Show business has now taken a back seat, though not intentionally.”

It’s been more than 20 years since his last film, though he’s done sporadic theater and a short-lived French TV series since.

But he certainly remembers when “West Side Story” was all the rage.

Ingredients for success

It all starts with great material, a theme Chakiris would revisit when discussing his uneven post-”West Side Story” career.

“West Side Story,” of course, is the musical adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” transplanted to the streets of New York, featuring the rival street gangs the Sharks and the Jets, and the doomed young love of Maria and Tony.

Chakiris also cited the quartet involved in the original 1957 Broadway musical — Leonard Bernstein (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Arthur Laurents (book) and Jerome Robbins (choreography).

“The music and the choreography are so extraordinary,” Chakiris observed. “And Leonard Bernstein’s score is classic.”

“West Side Story” still resonates with modern audiences for raising societal problems such as racial and class distinctions and having at its core two young people “ruined by what goes on around them,” Chakiris said.

“It’s true today,” he said. “It’s a universal feeling and thought.”

And perhaps why “West Side Story” has become fodder for countless high school musicals, regional theater, summer stock and the like.

Given his Greek heritage and upbringing, Chakiris said he could identify with his Bernardo character and the story’s themes. During his days at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, Chakiris recalled kids picking on others and being unkind to them. Much of it was driven by social and class status, he added.

“Later, I was asked to join a fraternity,” he said, “and I didn’t join it for that reason. I did not appreciate nor like that some kids were treated that way.”

By the late 1950s, Chakiris was an established dancer who’d appeared in such film musicals as “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “The Girl Rush,” “White Christmas” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” (See related story on Page 19.)

Chakiris headed to New York, hoping to break into Broadway, and instead wound up in London when he heard Robbins was casting a “West Side Story” production there. Chakiris played Riff, Bernardo’s opposite number as leader of the Jets, for an 18-month run.

That helped rather than hindered him when the film version rolled around, Chakiris said, because he became familiar with Bernardo and the story.

A tip of the cap to a trio

Chakiris had high praise for Robbins, who also masterminded the music and dance sequences in the film version.

“When I look back on it,” he said, “the thing that was difficult was coming up to Jerry’s expectations. It was a great challenge, but it was wonderful he had those expectations. He was a perfectionist and a genius. That’s what I felt, and I’m sure the other dancers did as well.”

Things were on a higher level, he added. In many film musicals, the songs interrupt the story. But in “West Side Story,” the song and dance numbers are “dialogue. They all move the plot forward and are rich in feeling as well.”

Chakiris also had nothing but glowing things to say about co-stars Natalie Wood (who played Maria, Bernardo’s sister) and Rita Moreno (who played Bernardo’s girlfriend).

“My god, I loved Natalie,” Chakiris said. “There was something unique that came to the screen with Natalie. She had it, so did Audrey Hepburn, so did Marilyn Monroe.

“And she was a darling, darling person. We came to be friends, though not close friends.”

He called Moreno a “fantastic person” and a “great cook.”

The two women figure prominently in his three favorite scenes from the film, including the one on the roof where Wood is dancing around in a blue dress thinking of Tony and then is told that her brother is dead. Another is the scene in the drugstore where Moreno is brutalized by the rival Jets and then tells them “don’t you touch me” as they close in again. “It’s so strong and intense,” Chakiris said.

The third is the finale, where Maria’s love Tony dies in her arms.

“It gets me every time, a tear or two,” Chakiris said. “Natalie moves me that much. Natalie does it like I’ve never seen it done.”

Life after the big hit

Chakiris keeps his best supporting actor Oscar in an alcove along the main hallway of his home, next to his Golden Globe (for the same performance), a stone sculpture and pictures of people he’s worked with over the years.

“It’s a nice but not flamboyant display,” he said.

The smashing success of “West Side Story” led to a five-picture deal for Chakiris, but it was a “pay or play” contract, meaning that if they didn’t have specific work by the pay deadline, they’d “stick you in anything.”

“So I wasn’t always used well,” he said.

Two exceptions were “Bebo’s Girl,” a 1963 drama he did with Claudia Cardinale, and “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” a 1967 film musical that teamed him with Catherine Deneuve and Gene Kelly.

But apart from those two and “West Side Story,” Chakiris observed, “I wasn’t having a great time making movies. I’d have loved better material.”

Good material, he noted, is hard to come by, especially today, when it seems even more people are in the business.

“You do have to keep visible,” Chakiris said, “but keeping visible with good material is very difficult.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, Chakiris played Las Vegas and migrated over to TV. He did a Las Vegas nightclub act at Caesar’s Palace, once opening for Woody Allen. Chakiris found him “so funny” but said Vegas audiences “just didn’t get him.”

On the tube, he did a string of one-off roles in “Hawaii Five-O,” “The Partridge Family,” “CHiPs,” “Scarecrow and Mrs. King” and the like. “Dallas” devotees might remember he had a recurring, 11-episode role on that series. “Now that was a beautifully done show,” Chakiris said.

His last film was “Pale Blood” in 1990.

On the way to the West Side

Chakiris said he never thought in terms of a career, nor strategized over getting plum roles.

He was born in Ohio to parents who’d emigrated from a Greek village in Turkey and later met in a train station in Florida. They moved around a lot, living in Miami, Ohio and Tucson, Ariz., where Chakiris sang in a boys choir.

When he was about 12, the family moved to Long Beach, where Chakiris sang in the choir every Sunday at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.

That led to his first film role, in 1947′s “Song of Love” with Katharine Hepburn. The St. Luke’s choir was used for a singing sequence in it.

That gave Chakiris the showbiz bug, but he had no idea how to get into it. After high school, he briefly attended Long Beach City College in the early 1950s, but then a friend told him about the American School of Dance in Hollywood.

“That was it,” Chakiris recalled. He took the train to Tinseltown, enrolled in the school and got an 8-to-5 job at an old May Co. department store, where he was a gofer in the advertising department.

The job allowed him to rent a room on Hollywood Boulevard and pay for his night classes in dance, singing and drama. Later, he shared an apartment on Orange Grove Avenue with two colleagues before he got his own studio in the Hollywood hills. “We were young; it was fine,” he said of those days.

His chorus dancer days in that spate of musicals soon followed.

Ahead was a date with “West Side Story.” Some 50 years later, Chakiris is still snapping his fingers over the whole thing.

“It was,” he said, “an amazing experience. All of us in the movie loved it so much.”

Similar Posts:

• ‘Grease’: Welcome back to high school
• Serena Williams Flaunts Her South Beach Body!!
• Experience a diverse slate of music with ‘Big! World! Fun!’
• Jim Messina’s creativity just keeps on flowing
• Shiloh Sixth Avenue Church marks 100th with Universal Gospel Choir