The Competition: Why Musicians Are Still Watching 46 Years Later

He practices on a briefcase.

No keys, no sound, no instrument. Just a flat surface across his lap and Beethoven moving under his fingers while the world goes by outside the window. It looks absurd. But pianists do it in hotel rooms, in green rooms, in the back seats of Ubers.

That's the opening of THE COMPETITION, and it told me that the filmmakers had talked to someone who did this for a living.

Joel Oliansky's 1980 film follows six pianists into the final round of an international competition in San Francisco. Paul Dietrich (Richard Dreyfuss) is nearly thirty, has never won, and is about to age out. Heidi Schoonover (Amy Irving) is younger, more gifted, and doesn't know it yet. Greta Vandeman (Lee Remick) is Heidi’s overbearing teacher. And Andrew Erskine (Sam Wanamaker) is the pompous conductor.

The reviews of the film were mixed. But let me be clear. I'm not here to revisit any of that.

What interests me is a narrower question: How much did they get right about the profession?

The answer is far more than the reviews suggest, and viewers can most certainly feel the authenticity, even if they can’t name it. And that’s the point: Great world-building requires a genuine commitment to realism.

THE COMPETITION made that commitment. And it shows.

Here’s what stood out to me.

"Are you a musician?"

On the plane, someone asks Heidi that. She answers, "Good question."

I have been asked that question more times than I can count, and as a young musician on the audition trail, I, too, didn’t have a clean answer ready. The honest response is always some version of ask me after the audition. Heidi’s answer, “good question,” says it all. It’s the question of whether you’ll get the chance to be what you’ve worked your entire life to be.

What THE COMPETITION understands better than almost any film about performers is that the competition circuit has an age limit, but the art does not.

Paul is months away from turning thirty, and he sees this competition as his last shot. But artists mature at different rates. Most musicians don't really come into their own until much later in life.

The problem is that the competition system is built to identify prodigies, and it passes over everyone whose development doesn't fit their arbitrary timeline.

Paul knows this, and it’s what motivates him in every scene.

The Warm-Up Rituals

The practice-room montage is one of the best things in the film.

• One competitor checks out his own biceps mid-phrase.

• One practices naked.

• One shows up with a piano tuning wrench, because of course he does.

Each is a complete portrait of a relationship to the instrument: the vanity, the ritual, the compulsive control, the nerves dressed up as confidence. I have met all of these people. And I’ve conducted most of them.

And in the middle of it, Heidi is simply playing more beautifully than anyone else in the building, with no apparent awareness of that fact. Irving plays that unawareness as a physical quality: a looseness in her shoulders, an ease about her combined with fierce intensity and focus.

It's the montage's entire point, made without a line of dialogue.

The Hands

Neither Irving nor Dreyfuss is a professional musician, let alone a pianist. Yet the film invested heavily in the authenticity of the piano performances.

Irving’s performance is incredibly convincing. During the Prokofiev Third, her hand movements correlate to what's being played with real accuracy. The shape of the attack, the weight, where the hand has to be a beat before the sound arrives. Watch her right hand in the finale. It holds.

Dreyfuss was equally convincing, but in a different way. While his hand movements were less accurate than Irving’s, the playing he emulated was spot on for what many competition pianists sound like. The Beethoven "Emperor" Concerto we hear from his character is strong, assured, but somewhat mechanical. Contestants are often so afraid of making a mistake that they overcompensate, playing accurately and safely. But safe rarely wins competitions.

The credited piano consultant was Jean Evensen Shaw, whose work ensured the technical credibility and the wrist-and-arm coordination that keep these scenes from collapsing into keyboard-flailing. It took the cast four months of daily rehearsal to portray it this well. And it paid off.

The Podium

Paul and Erskine argue over interpretation. Erskine challenges Paul to take the podium to “prove his point.” He does, and he teaches the arrogant maestro a lesson.

That scene contains some of the best conducting I've seen on screen. Not the best technical conducting, but the best leadership from the podium. Paul gives the orchestra clear, specific, usable direction. He tells them what he wants from the passage: strong, energetic, angular. He references Beethoven’s specific dynamic markings. And then the orchestra plays it, precisely, and the maestro has no choice but to concede.

A conductor clearly wrote those lines, or was consulted in their creation. Nobody else knows what to say to an orchestra to get that result, and nobody else knows that the demonstration is the argument. You don't win a musical dispute by explaining. You win it by producing the sound.

Now, for the real surprise: Throughout the film, Sam Wanamaker delivers some of the most convincing technical conducting I’ve seen in film. And it’s a testament not only to his dedication to getting that aspect of his role correct, but also to the filmmakers’ commitment to authenticity.

Wanamaker was not a musician. He was coached for the film by Leo Arnaud, the French-American composer and conductor who spent three decades at MGM, earned an Oscar nomination for The Unsinkable Molly Brown, studied composition with Ravel and conducting with Weingartner. And as a bit of trivia, in 1958, he wrote a short military fanfare called Bugler's Dream, which billions worldwide have recognized for decades as the Olympic fanfare.

That's who they brought in to teach an actor how to stand in front of an orchestra.

Insider Moments That Land for Outsiders

Three such moments really stood out.

First, Jerry DiSalvo's family applauds in the wrong place, and he stops them. His reaction is the funniest thing in the movie. He's more mortified than they are. That joke was clearly written by someone who’s sat in a hall and watched it happen, most likely someone whose own family did it.

Second is a smaller moment I love. Paul and Heidi are leaving the bar, dance music starts, and she pulls him to the dance floor. They are both terrible, tragically so. They’re just stiff and painfully self-conscious. And it's spot on. Classical musicians have rhythm the way you'd expect. We can nail the mixed meters of The Rite of Spring in our sleep. But, with a few exceptions, put us on a dance floor, and the mind-body connection short-circuits. Ask anyone who's spent a summer at an arts camp and watched the dancers watch the musicians attempt to move at a party.

The third one isn't funny at all. In the film, the conductor walks on stage ahead of the soloists, every time. This is simply bad etiquette. The soloist enters first; the conductor follows. It's among the most fixed conventions in concert performance, and reversing it speaks directly to the arrogance of Wanamaker’s Maestro Erskine.

In the case of Paul’s final performance, it’s also an insult. The tension backstage between Paul and Erskine is palpable. Erskine walks on stage ahead of Paul, but not before a stone-cold stare. But after Paul's performance, Erskine’s posture changes entirely. Backstage, he straightens Paul's tie, and then pushes him back on stage for the curtain call. The insult and the retraction are delivered in the same visual language, and neither is ever explained.

The Backstage Finale

Paul is in the wings, as is Greta (Lee Remick).

Heidi is on stage, playing the hell out of the Prokofiev.

Paul knows. You watch it hit him in real time: She is better, and the thing he has hoped for his entire life is happening to someone else on stage.

Greta also knows. We see her feel the win in her bones.

But what’s so striking is that Amy Irving's playing in that sequence is the strongest acting in the entire film, and she does most of it facing away from the camera. But it’s not just the hands. It’s the body. The intensity. The passion. And the catharsis when the final chords arrive.

This scene is an absolute masterclass in using music as narrative. Not a single word of dialogue.

Just a young woman at the piano, an orchestra behind her, and one unmistakable artistic and personal triumph.

It’s a scene that completely flips the script from a romance to a coming-of-age story in under three minutes.

The Verdict

The critics argued that THE COMPETITION isn't the greatest of films. But a film can be ordinary in its portrayal of people and unusually precise in its depiction of their profession and the world they live in.

That authenticity is rare. Someone on that production team insisted on the hands, the rehearsal language, the podium, and the eccentricities of the profession. And they hired the people who could actually deliver all of it convincingly.

Forty-six years later, that's why musicians (and undoubtedly others) are still watching this film.

I’m writing stories in the beautiful, treacherous, and deliciously dysfunctional world of the performing arts.

From the inside.

Ethan Danov

Conductor | Screenwriter