Annie Get Your Gun (musical) Annie Get Your Gun (musical) Annie Get Your Gun is a musical with lyrics and music by Irving Berlin and a book by Dorothy Fields and her brother Herbert Fields. The story is a fictionalized version of the life of Annie Oakley (1860–1926), a sharpshooter who starred in Buffalo Bill's Wild West, and her romance with sharpshooter Frank E. Butler (1847–1926). The 1946 Broadway production was a hit, and the musical had long runs in both New York (1,147 performances) and London, spawning revivals, a 1950 film version and television versions. Songs that became hits include "There's No Business Like
The Wild Wild West with each other when we did these, but I wasn't happy with them only because CBS imposed a lot of restrictions on us. They never came up to the level of what we had done before." In January 1992, "Variety" reported that Warner Bros. was planning a theatrical version of "The Wild Wild West" directed by Richard Donner, written by Shane Black and starring Mel Gibson as James West (Donner also directed three episodes of the original series). In 1999, a theatrical feature-length film loosely based on the series was released as "Wild Wild West" (without the definite article used