Yip Harburg Quotes

Words make you think. Music makes you feel. A song makes you feel a thought.

All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.

Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree; And only God who makes the tree Also makes the fools like me. But only fools like me, you see, Can make a God, who makes a tree.

It's a Barnum and Bailey world, just as phony as it can be. But it wouldn't be make-believe if you believed in me

When I lost my possessions, I found my creativity,” said E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, the lyricist behind The Wizard of Oz. “I felt I was being born for the first time.”11

It is a Barnum and Bailey world, just as phony as it can be, But it would not be make-believe if you believed in me ............................It is Only a Paper Moon Billy Rose and E. Y. "Yip" Harburg.....(opening page of 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami)

Hammacher Schlemmer is selling a shelter, worthy of Kubla Khan's Xanadu dome; Plushy and swanky, with posh hanky panky that affluent Yankees can really call home. Hammacher Schlemmer is selling a shelter, a push-button palace, fluorescent repose; Electric devices for facing a crisis with frozen fruit ices and cinema shows. Hammacher Schlemmer is selling a shelter all chromium kitchens and rubber-tiled dorms; With waterproof portals to echo the chortles of weatherproof mortals in hydrogen storms. What a great come-to-glory emporium! To enjoy a deluxe moratorium, Where nuclear heat can beguile the elite in a creme-de-la-creme crematorium.

Lydia the Tattooed Lady" Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia? Lydia, the Tattooed Lady She has eyes that folks adore so And a torso even more so Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclopydia Oh Lydia the Queen of Tattoo On her back is the Battle of Waterloo Beside it the wreck of the Hesperus, too And proudly above waves the red, white, and blue You can learn a lot from Lydia La, La, La La, La, La When her robe is unfurled, she will show you the world If you step up and tell her where For a dime you can see Kankakee or Paris Or Washington crossing the Delaware La, La, La La, La, La Oh Lydia oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia? Oh Lydia the Tattooed Lady When her muscles start relaxin' Up the hill comes Andrew Jackson Lydia oh Lydia, that encyclopydia Oh Lydia the queen of them all For two bits she will do a mazurka in jazz With a view of Niagara that nobody has And on a clear day you can see Alcatraz You can learn a lot from Lydia La, La, La La, La, La Come along and see Buff'lo Bill with his lasso Just a little classic by Mendel Picasso Here is Captain Spaulding exploring the Amazon Here's Godiva but with her pajamas on La, La, La La, La, La Here is Grover Whalen unveilin' the Trilon Over on the West Coast we have Treasure Island Here's Najinsky a-doin' the rhumba Here's her social security numba Oh Lydia, oh Lydia that encyclopydia Oh Lydia the champ of them all She once swept an Admiral clear off his feet The ships on her hips made his heart skip a beat And now the old boy's in command of the fleet For he went and married Lydia I said Lydia (He said Lydia) They said said Lydia (We said Lydia) Groucho Marx, At the Circus (1939) Written by Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen

His 1968 film of Finian’s Rainbow, a fanciful 1947 Broadway blast from the left by Fred Saidy, E. Y. “Yip” Harburg and Burton Lane, is a guidebook to other movies and musicals. Coppola packs his film with intrusive references that proclaim the artifices of filmusical style and the tension between credible storytelling and musical convention. The editing of an arrival by train comes directly from Hallelujah; a dance with laundry on a clothesline from Dames; the aerial floating on that clothing from Mary Poppins; the spray of fire hoses on a burning church from Strike; the passing of water pails, “Keep the water coming,” from Our Daily Bread; the use of blackface from two decades of filmusicals between The Jazz Singer and The Jolson Story.

The Hottentot Venus was well known in her time and even after. In the 1939 cinematic version of The Wizard of Oz, Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion asks in song, “What makes the Hottentot so hot?” He answers his own question with the word courage. The correct answer, though it is not said in the film, would most logically be: her derrière. Or perhaps Wizard of Oz songwriters Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen meant that it took a certain measure of courage to live through such degradation.

The lyricist Yip Harburg, author of many classics including “Over the Rainbow,” said it simply: “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought.”22 Feel a thought. For me, that captures the essence of artistic truth.

In the process, he created the image of himself he wanted future generations to embrace. Much of what Yip has said, quoted throughout this book, in fact, is a result of the numerous public appearances and radio and television interviews he participated in during the 1970s.

Most important, in late 1980, Yip joined Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Sheldon Harnick at a news conference announcing the creation of a new musical theater program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, a program that has gained international renown.

A couple of weeks before, while going over a Variety list of the most popular songs of 1935 and earlier, to use for the picture’s sound track – which was going to consist only of vintage recording played not as score but as source music – my eye stopped on a .933 standard, words by E.Y. (“Yip”) Harburg (with producer Billy Rose), music by Harold Arlen, the team responsible for “Over the Rainbow”, among many notable others, together and separately. Legend had it that the fabulous Ms. Dorothy Parker contributed a couple of lines. There were just two words that popped out at me from the title of the Arlen-Harburg song, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”. Not only did the sentiment of the song encapsulate metaphorically the main relationship in our story – Say, it’s only a paper moon Sailing over a cardboard sea But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me – the last two words of the title also seemed to me a damn good movie title. Alvin and Polly agreed, but when I tried to take it to Frank Yablans, he wasn’t at all impressed and asked me what it meant. I tried to explain. He said that he didn’t “want us to have our first argument,” so why didn’t we table this conversation until the movie was finished? Peter Bart called after a while to remind me that, after all, the title Addie Pray was associated with a bestselling novel. I asked how many copies it had sold in hardcover. Peter said over a hundred thousand. That was a lot of books but not a lot of moviegoers. I made that point a bit sarcastically and Peter laughed dryly. The next day I called Orson Welles in Rome, where he was editing a film. It was a bad connection so we had to speak slowly and yell: “Orson! What do you think of this title?!” I paused a beat or two, then said very clearly, slowly and with no particular emphasis or inflection: “Paper …Moon!” There was a silence for several moments, and then Orson said, loudly, “That title is so good, you don’t even need to make the picture! Just release the title! Armed with that reaction, I called Alvin and said, “You remember those cardboard crescent moons they have at amusement parks – you sit in the moon and have a picture taken?” (Polly had an antique photo of her parents in one of them.) We already had an amusement park sequence in the script so, I continued to Alvin, “Let’s add a scene with one of those moons, then we can call the damn picture Paper Moon!” And this led eventually to a part of the ending, in which we used the photo Addie had taken of herself as a parting gift to Moze – alone in the moon because he was too busy with Trixie to sit with his daughter – that she leaves on the truck seat when he drops her off at her aunt’s house. … After the huge popular success of the picture – four Oscar nominations (for Tatum, Madeline Kahn, the script, the sound) and Tatum won Best Supporting Actress (though she was the lead) – the studio proposed that we do a sequel, using the second half of the novel, keeping Tatum and casting Mae West as the old lady; they suggested we call the new film Harvest Moon. I declined. Later, a television series was proposed, and although I didn’t want to be involved (Alvin Sargent became story editor), I agreed to approve the final casting, which ended up being Jodie Foster and Chris Connolly, both also blondes. When Frank Yablans double-checked about my involvement, I passed again, saying I didn’t think the show would work in color – too cute – and suggested they title the series The Adventures of Addie Pray. But Frank said, “Are you kidding!? We’re calling it Paper Moon - that’s a million-dollar title!” The series ran thirteen episodes.

Yip saw the purpose of the songs as simplifying the plot, “to take the clutter out of too much plot and too many characters . . . to telescope [it all] into one emotional idea. You had to throw out the unnecessary to make the songs work . . . All the songs in Wizard were plot, a kind of revolution in picture musicals.”5 As