Producers: Susan Lacy, Margaret Smilow
Screenwriter: Susan Lacy
Director of Photography Terry Hopkins
Editor Deborah Peretz. Narrator Harris Yulin.

To commemorate Leonard Bernstein's 80th birthday comes this stirring biography of the great composer, conductor, and educator. Told largely in his own words via diary entries, the film charts Bernstein's life from the early days as "the Orson Welles of the music world" through the monumental West Side Story, his tenures with the New York and Vienna Philharmonics (including the famous Young People's Concerts), his autobiographical A Quiet Place and his stirring Beethoven's Ninth at the Berlin Wall in 1989. It's all here, with personal dramas as well, profusely illustrated with pho-tos (many with his head thrown back in laughter), archival footage, home movies and remembrances from such friends and admirers as Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, and Isaac Stern. This engrossing portrait is a true ode to joy. Eddie Cockrell