Arts Editor

Why has this genius not been profiled in a documentary? That's the question that Silver Spring filmmaker Walter Gottlieb asked himself when he saw a revival of Guys and Dolls in the 1990s and looked into the life of its composer, Frank Loesser.

"I thought there should be one about Loesser because he was one of the great songwriters of the 20th century," says Gottlieb. So his production company, Final Cut Productions, made that documentary, Heart & Soul: The Life and Music of Frank Loesser, and has received a CINE Golden Eagle Award for it. (CINE is a 50-year-old organization dedicated to fostering excellence in nontheatrical films.)

Loesser, says Gottlieb, "was energetic, temperamental, volatile, creative, bighearted and romantic, and his work seems fresh today. And he was lyricist and the composer for all his Broadway shows."

In addition to Guys and Dolls, Loesser's credits include the Broadway musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and the songs "Heart & Soul," "Baby It's Cold Outside" and "On a Slow Boat to China."

The filmmaker is not sure why the composer/lyricist was not previously profiled in a film. "Loesser died relatively young at 59 [in 1969] so he didn't have the longevity of some of the more famous composers," says Gottlieb, who notes that the composer was much more famous when he was alive. "He also came on the cusp of the great generation of celebrated composers like [George] Gershwin, [Cole] Porter, [Oscar] Hammerstein and [Irving] Berlin."

Whatever the reason, Gottlieb decided to correct the oversight. He approached Loesser's widow and musical estate and seven years later, in 2006, finished the film, which was produced in cooperation with them. It has been on various PBS stations since, including Maryland Public Television, which aired it in March.

Gottlieb is not surprised that he ended up doing documentaries. "My dad was a journalist, a reporter for Reuters," he says. "I was always steeped in the world of reporting and media, and I watched a lot of TV as a kid. It was natural that I gravitated toward TV and nonfiction."

And a film about Loesser seems natural for someone who describes himself as a "lifelong fan of musical theater" and who performed in the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington's Summer Theater for Youth in the 1970s (where he met his future wife, Becky Granatstein).

Gottlieb was born in Hartford, Conn., in 1961, but only months later, his parents realized the error of their ways and moved to the Washington area. He grew up in the District and in Silver Spring.

After graduating from Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, Gottlieb studied film and television at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, graduating in 1983.

His next 12 years included working in TV news in Florida and on Capitol Hill and producing talk shows for PBS.

In 1995, he launched Final Cut Productions, whose works, in addition to Heart & Soul, have included Silver Spring: Story of an American Suburb, which was telecast on WETA in 2002 ("People still stop me on the street to talk about it," he says); The Tivoli: A Neighborhood Landmark Reborn; and a short documentary about the District's Shepherd Park neighborhood.

His next project is a sequel to the Silver Spring film, Next Stop: Silver Spring, about the history and restoration of the B&O Railroad Station, which is slated to be aired on WETA in December.

Gottlieb ‹ who recently took part in the first father/daughter b'nai mitzvah ceremony in memory at the Reform Temple Emanuel in Kensington, with his daughter, Leora ‹ notes that Loesser was Jewish.

The composer's family had immigrated to the U.S. from Germany and considered themselves more German than Jewish, he says. But Loesser rebelled against them, as many second-generation Jews have done, recognizing his Jewishness and peppering his speech with Yiddish.

Loesser joins other Jews, including Berlin, Hammerstein, Jerome Kern and George and Ira Gershwin, who were among the 20th century's leading songwriters.

"We're a musical people," says Gottlieb, trying to explain this phenomenon. He points to the importance of the cantor in Jewish religious services.

But there was a practical reason, as well. "The great Broadway composers were mostly immigrants and children of immigrants," he says. "Music, like the film industry, was a door that was open to them, and they walked right through the door."