Annie Get Your Gun (musical) Show Business", "Doin' What Comes Natur'lly", "You Can't Get a Man with a Gun", "They Say It's Wonderful", and "Anything You Can Do." Dorothy Fields had the idea for a musical about Annie Oakley, to star her friend, Ethel Merman. Producer Mike Todd turned the project down, so Fields approached a new producing team, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. After the success of their first musical collaboration, "Oklahoma!", Rodgers and Hammerstein had decided to become producers of both their own theatrical ventures and those by other authors. They agreed to produce the musical and asked Jerome Kern to compose
Annie Get Your Gun (film) at $1.5 million, with $600,000 paying for the score and the book. Betty Hutton, played Annie Oakley, with Howard Keel (making his American film debut) as Frank Butler and Benay Venuta as Dolly Tate. Louis Calhern played Buffalo Bill, replacing Frank Morgan, who died in 1949. Judy Garland, MGM's biggest musical comedy star, was originally cast as Annie Oakley. She recorded all her songs for the soundtrack and worked for two months under the direction of Busby Berkeley and dance director Robert Alton. Berkeley and Garland had worked together previously in the late 1930s and early 1940s in a successful