In an early scene, set in 1929, Moss Hart (George Hamilton) listens to a news broadcast on the radio which reports that former President Theodore Roosevelt is currently in Africa on a safari.
Theodore Roosevelt died in 1919, ten years earlier.
"Act One" was a 1963 Dore Schary production, released through Warner Bros. and written and directed, as well as produced, by Schary, based on Moss Hart's entertaining memoir of his start in the theatre.
In this movie, the play seems to falter with the 2nd act, even after 2 rewrites.The first part of the movie is quite good as Moss Hart writes a comedy and tries to get people to sign on to it.
Playwright Moss Hart delighted readers with his bestselling memoir of his early career. But when producer Dore Schary turned the book into a script after Hart's death, something got lost.
I am an actress and the book "Act One" is one of my favorites and a must-read for every actor, director, producer, etc. I know.
Act One is of interest for, among other things, being the only film directed by producer Dore Schary. As previous reviewers have commented, it is somewhat bland and disappointing.
Perhaps if I had seen this movie before seeing the 2014 Broadway play at Lincoln Center based upon Moss Hart's autobiographical novel, I would have ranked this a bit higher. Everything is good here; the cast, the script, the pacing, the direction.
Four years before his death in 1961 Moss Hart wrote his incredibly successful autobiography Act One where he detailed the story of his life as the son of a cigar maker until the opening night of his first Broadway success, Once In A Lifetime. The film skips all of his childhood and early adulthood and concentrates on the creation of that first success and the process that went into it.
