The Sound of Music

There are few movies that stand near the top of the all-time list for income. One of those movies is The Sound of Music.

With a budget of about $8 million when it was produced in the 1960s, it was one of the bigger budget films when it was made. That $8 million is about $62 million in today's United States dollars.

When it was released in 1965, it raked in over 35 times that amount, about $286 million on its way to an impressive five Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture in 1966. That equates to about $2.1 billion dollars today. Yes, that's billion with a "b". And since then it's made a couple hundred million more. So when you adjust for inflation, as of this writing, that ranks The Sound of Music as the fifth-highest grossing film of all time. That's behind Gone with the Wind at number one, followed by Avatar, Star Wars, and Titanic.

In a 2008 interview, the youngest of the von Trapp family portrayed in the film, Johannes von Trapp, said, "The Sound of Music was great, but it was an American version of my family’s life. It wasn’t what we were."

So if the movie isn't who they were, that begs the question: who were the real von Trapp family?

Links

• Maria, My Own Story by Maria von Trapp
• The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria Von Trapp
• The History of the Von Trapp Family: The Story Behind the Story
• The Real Story of the Von Trapp Family
• The History of the Real-Life Von Trapp Family
• The Real History Behind “The Sound of Music”
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