Bradley Cooper can picture himself playing legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein in a bigscreen biopic. (Photos: Bradley Cooper by Gilbert Carrasquillo/Film Magic; Leonard Bernstein courtesy Playbill; collage by MaxTheTrax )

Bradley Cooper will direct and star in a biographical film about Leonard Bernstein, according to Variety, which reports Paramount Pictures and Amblin Partners will co-finance the project. The legendary conductor is now the subject of dueling biopics, with actor Jake Gyllenhaal developing a competing project that he will star in, with Cary Fukunaga set to direct. That project doesn’t yet have a distributor but is being shepherded under the auspices of Endeavor Content.

Cooper, a guitarist and avowed music fan, is just coming off his directorial debut, a remake of the melodic melodrama A Star is Born that Warner Bros. has scheduled for release Oct. 18. Cooper crashed the Glastonbury Festival set of actor Kris Kristofferson, who played the male lead in the 1976 version directed by Frank Pierson with Barbra Streisand as leading lady. Lady Gaga (Stefani Germanotta) plays the titular star in the Cooper version.

In addition to directing and starring, Cooper will also produce through his company Joint Effort, which is living up to its name with Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Fred Berner, Amy Durning and Kristie Macosko Krieger also listed as producers. The Bernstein estate is said to be in negotiations with the interested parties over the conductor and composer’s life rights. When Bernstein died in 1990 former Metropolitan Opera general manager and later New York City Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Schuyler Chapin was the estate executor and a trustee. Chapin also produced several of Bernstein’s albums.

Gyllenhaal is also a music lover who has appeared in several music videos. Fukunaga is best known as the screenwriter of the mega-smash Stephen King’s It, has proven his range, having directed 2011’s Jane Eyre, starring Mia Wasikowska. To show he’s up to the task of tackling short, larger-than-life men with outsized egos, Fukunaga is also set to direct an HBO miniseries about Napoleon for HBO (produced by Amblin’), working from a script by the late, great Stanley Kubrick.

Born in 1918 in Lawrence, MA, Bernstein “was among the first conductors born and educated in the US to receive worldwide acclaim,” according to Wikipedia. Educated at Harvard, Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music and the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood, where he studied with Serge Koussevitzky, Bernstein ultimately found fame and fortune in New York, where in 1943 he was named assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic at age 25.  He made his conducting debut a few months later, subbing in for a flu-stricken Bruno Walter. The radio broadcast concert earned Bernstein acclaim and made him in-demand as a guest conductor worldwide.

From 1945-1947 Bernstein was the conductor of the New York City Symphony, founded by Leopold Stokowski. He was named music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1958, a post he held until 1969.

While Aaron Copeland was also a significant influence on Bernstein, it was Koussevitzky who is credited with Bernstein’s emotionally charged way of interpreting music — a style on display in Bernstein’s celebrated film score for West Side Story (1961), as well as a scores for On the Waterfront (1954) and On the Town (a 1949 project to which he contributed a partial score). He wrote three full symphonies, and numerous orchestral compositions and chorals, three ballets and three operas.

Bernstein’s life was as colorful as his music.  He and his wife, the Chilean-born American actress Felicia Cohn Montealegre, flirted with society’s fringe, a pursuit that eventually got him labelled a communist, and lampooned by journalist Tom Wolfe in the famous New York Magazine essay “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” for a gathering the Bernsteins hosted to raise awareness for the Black Panthers.

In 1976 Bernstein left his wife for a man, eventually returning to her. In a 2013 book of letters Montelealegre was officially on record as stating Bernstein was homosexual. He retired from conducting in 1990, and three days later died of a heart attack at age 72 at his New York apartment in The Dakota, a fatality believed to be brought on by a lifetime of smoking.

He is buried next to his wife in Brooklyn’s park-like Green-Wood Cemetery, with —  according to Wikipedia —  “a copy of Mahler’s Fifth lying across his heart.”

We look forward to seeing how all this translates to the screen (and learning who is up to the formidable task of tackling a contemporary retelling of the story of Beethoven).

Updated 05/15/2018: Paramount Pictures confirmed it has secured distribution rights to the Bernstein biopic to star and be produced and directed by Bradley Cooper, who has secured rights from the Bernstein estate.