Best known for the hit musicals West Side Story and Gypsy, Arthur Laurents began his career writing socially minded plays such as Home of the Brave and Time of the Cuckoo. He also garnered impressive credits as a screenwriter (The Way We Were) and stage director (La Cage aux Folles). Such a varied professional life makes for absorbing reading, as unleashed in his lively 2000 autobiography, Original Story By. Laurents passed away early in 2011 but...

"Director, playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents--author of Gypsy, West Side Story, Anastasia, The turning point and other plays and films--takes us into his life, and into the dazzling world in which he worked, among the artists, directors, actors and personalities who came of age in the theatre and in Hollywood after the Second World War."--Jacket.

Playwright, screenwriter, and director Arthur Laurents writes about directing Broadway musicals, especially Gypsy and West Side Story, about other musicals and other directors, interacting with producers, writers, and actors, and about life with his late partner, Tom Hatcher.

A group of congenial friends have restored several adjoining houses in one of New York's more attractive neighborhoods, and plan to move in en masse -- setting up a sort of urban commune. However, one of their number, a confirmed bachelor, has resolved to confront the others with the fact of his long-concealed homosexuality and to bring along his young male lover as a permanent addition to the group. Although his friends have always prided themselves...

Ernest Lehman's screenplay of the motion picture with accompanying promotional material.

Loosely based on the 1957 memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, the famous striptease artist, with focus on her mother, Rose, whose name has become synonymous with the ultimate stage mom. It follows the dreams and efforts of Rose as she raises two daughters to perform onstage and casts an affectionate eye on the hardships of show business life.--