Stephen M. Silverman, a longtime entertainment reporter and author who wrote a critically acclaimed biography of the notoriously quiet British director David Lean and a forthcoming book about Broadway, died July 6 in Manhattan. titan Stephen Sondheim. He is 71 years old.
His death, at a hospital, was caused by kidney disease, his executor Diane Reid said.
Once asked Mr. Silverman what he felt was the most common misconception about his beat. “That’s fluff,” he told the website Muck Rack.
As a journalist, he wrote about Broadway and Hollywood for The New York Post from 1977 to 1988. He joined People magazine in 1995 as the founder of its website, originally called People Daily (now people.com), and has been its news editor for 20 years. He also went into detail celebrity doings for the site — Mickey Rourke gets arrested, Betty White hosts “Saturday Night Live,” Halle Berry exercises post-baby — and writes obituaries of many stars.
He idolized Mr. Lean, a meticulous filmmaker known for directing intimate films like “Brief Encounter” (1945) and “Great Expectations” (1946) and epics like “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) and “Doctor Zhivago” ( 1965). In fact, Mr. Silverman has a large “Lawrence” poster hanging on the wall in his Manhattan apartment.
He spent time with the director in London, interviewed him several times in the 1980s for the book “David Lean” (1989), with an introduction by Katharine Hepburn.
“I think I just got him at the right time,” he told United Press International, explaining why the publicity-shy Mr. Lean to talk to him. The stars of some of his films, including Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness and Julie Christie, also spoke to Mr. Silverman.
“They all had such admiration for him,” he said, “but Omar Sharif said — like several others, ‘I can’t believe David authorized a book.’ He was approached for two decades, mostly by British journalists, and said no.
Film critic Jay Carr, reviewing “David Lean” in The Boston Globe, wrote that the “pleasure” of Mr. Silverman on Lean and his films, aside from the fact that this is the first, and perhaps the last, to get the notoriously taciturn Lean to speak for the record, rests on the behind-the-camera images that have become such an elusive part of Silverman’s diligent reporting and interviewing.”
Mr. Silverman had also written a biography of then-movie mogul Darryl Zanuck and went on to publish several other books in the 1990s — about Los Angeles movie palaces, female comedians and Stanley Donen, a master of Hollywood musical directed, among others, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (1954) and “Funny Face” (1957).
In “Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies” (1996), the authorized biography of Mr. Silverman of the director, Mr. Donen was critical of Gene Kelly, with whom he shared the director’s chair on “On the Town” (1949). ) and “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952) — Mr. Kelly also starred in both — saying Mr. Kelly has been given more credit than it deserves for their collaborations.
“If you substitute the word ‘fight’ for ‘co-direct,’ you have it,” Mr. Donen said in the book. “It wasn’t always like that with Gene, but it gradually became that way and eventually it became impossible.”
Stephen Meredith Silverman was born on Nov. 22, 1951, in West Covina, Calif. His father, Raymond, owned a grocery store and later a liquor store. His mother, Shirley (Garfine) Silverman, was a homemaker.
Stephen edited his high school newspaper and graduated in 1969. Four years later, he earned his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California, Irvine, then received a master’s from the Columbia Journalism School in 1975 .
In the 1980s, Mr. Silverman produced a musical based on “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” the slapstick comedy about a pair of Black characters that began in radio and moved to television before CBS pulled it from syndication in 1966 amid protested by civil rights groups, who found it offensive. His hopes were dashed when a federal judge, ruling in 1987 in a lawsuit Mr. Silverman brought against CBS, barred him from using the names of the show’s characters and other in- trademark materials.
Some of the books of Mr. Silverman deviated from his specialty in entertainment. In 2015, he and Raphael D. Silver, a film producer, published “The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America.” Mr. also wrote Silverman of “The Amusement Park: 900 Years of Thrills and Spill, and the Dreamers and Schemers Who Built Them” (2019).
When interviewed by “CBS This Morning” at Luna Park in Coney Island, he described the appeal of a quintessential amusement park ride: “Even just a roller coaster, when you’re on top, you don’t think about paying the mortgage. ”
He left no immediate survivors.
After Mr. Sondheim’s death in late 2021, Mr. Silverman was asked by the publishing house Black Dog & Leventhal, part of the Hachette Book Group, to write a book about Mr. Sondheim — a mix of biography, analysis and opinion. Has a title “Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy,” the book will be published in September.
“He was really conscious of everything that was written about and by Sondheim and his friends, and talked to his friends and colleagues,” says Joe Davidson, his editor at Black Dog (which published his book in amusement parks), in a telephone interview .
In the book, Mr. Silverman describes Mr. Sondheim’s conflicts with Leonard Bernstein when they were composing. “West Side Story,” which opened on Broadway in 1957. Mr. Sondheim, then 27, wrote the lyrics; Mr. Bernstein, then 39, wrote the music.
“What Sondheim didn’t appreciate was Bernstein’s admiration for himself as a lyricist,” Mr. Silverman. “Let him sketch something that is purple prose, not poetry. It shouted, ‘Look at me, I’m making a poem!’ said Sondheim.”
