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That Hollywood Smile: Sometimes It Just Ain’t Right
Recently, I’ve been catching up on all the Oscar bait movies and I’ve enjoyed them immensely, except for one glaring detail: the teeth.
As I made my way through Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s tour de force epic about the great conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, I couldn’t help but ask myself: Is it possible that the talented and fastidious Cooper went through every detail to make his film look right except for the gleaming toothy smile that is surely Cooper’s own, and not Bernstein’s?
Bernstein is seen smoking throughout the film, which covers decades of his life; it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to surmise that he smoked at least two packs a day, starting at a young age until his death at age 72. Especially as a middle-aged and older man, there is no way his teeth would have been that white! Pepsodent wasn’t that great!
Now, I did look up some old photos of Bernstein (most black and white) and he did appear to have a good set of straight teeth, but surely they were yellowed or stained. Were fancy whiteners available to the wealthy back then? Would he have cared?
Was Bradley Cooper, so meticulous as a filmmaker (I mean, the trouble he went through to get the nose just right), in the end too vain to allow his own teeth to be yellowed for the sake of the film?
