‘Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It’ Examines the Highs and Lows of Moreno’s Life and Career

Sandra Miska

No one has had a career quite like actress Rita Moreno, the first Latinx woman to earn the coveted EGOT. Best known to most for her Oscar-winning role in “West Side Story,” and, in more recent years, her hilarious turn as grandmother Lydia on the sitcom “One Day at a Time,” the legendary actress has had a rich and varied career that has spanned over 70 years. Now, Mariem Pérez Riera’s documentary “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It” not only examines Moreno’s career, from her early days performing as a teen in NYC to her upcoming appearance in this year’s “West Side Story” remake, but also provides an intimate portrait of the woman herself. 

The idea for the documentary came from producer Brent Miller, who also served as a producer on “One Day at a Time.” Pérez Riera came on board after she pitched the idea for a documentary that would showcase the different sides of Moreno. She told Entertainment Voice during a recent Zoom chat, “To be honest, I really wanted people to know Rita from another perspective, not just the Rita you see in front of the camera with all that glamour, but someone who’s vulnerable, who’s insecure, and like any of us. Women and Latinas have [to endure] a lot of struggles in order to succeed in this industry, and I wanted that to show in the documentary.”

Moreno opens up her life and struggles in a candid interview featured in the documentary in which she recalls the intense sexual harassment she endured early in her career by Hollywood power players, and even reveals that she was raped by her own agent. Despite others abusing her and making her feel small, she persevered in her career, although she admits that for most of her life, deep down she felt like the scared little girl who immigrated to New York from Puerto Rico with her mother at age five. 

“That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, okay. She’s more like me, and if she’s more like me, she’s more like any other woman who has gone through all these struggles in life,’” recalled Pérez Riera, who also hails from Puerto Rico. “That’s when I realized that this documentary isn’t all about Rita, but it’s more about what it means to be a woman in Hollywood, what it means to be an immigrant and Latina woman in Hollywood in the span of her 70-year career, and that’s what I wanted to show, because through her, we can see that. We can understand that better.”

Pérez Riera brought her cameras to the set of “One Day at a Time,” and in a memorable scene that ties into the theme of what it means to be a woman, Moreno watches the Brett Kavanaugh hearings on her TV in her dressing room, and her commentary leaves no doubt that she fully identifies with Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who testified that the now-Supreme Court justice sexaully assualted her when they were both teenagers.

“That was magic that the day that she goes to set and turns on CNN the hearing of Brett Kavanaugh was going on,” revealed the director. “That was, for me, one of those gifts that happens when you’re shooting a documentary. It was so important to show that, because Rita went through that a long time ago, and we still go through that today.”

Moreno proves that growth is a lifelong process. Not only has she gone through various transformations in her career, but also in her personal life. In one of the doc’s most revealing moments, she admits that she and her late husband Leonard Gordon, to whom she was married to from 1965 to his death in 2010, were not a good couple. Now, we see her here at almost 90, comfortable in her own skin and relishing living alone with no one left to answer to.

As for her career, Moreno teaches us a thing or two about the importance of diversifying. Early on, she was typecast as the token ethnic minority in a variety of films, often playing the exotic plaything of powerful men. The actress reveals that her skin was darkened for some of these roles. Eva Longoria, one of several performers inspired by Moreno who appears here, discusses how Moreno had to use a “universal ethnic accent” for a variety of roles, as most directors and producers back then did not know or care about the differences between different dialects back in the day. Others who appear to speak about Moreno and the role she played in shaping Hollywood include Norman Lear and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who also serve as executive producers on the documentary, as well as Héctor Elizondo, Gloria Estefan, Morgan Freeman, Whoopi Goldberg, Justina Machado, Terrence McNally and Karen Olivo. 

After winning the best supporting actress Oscar for “West Side Story” in 1962, Moreno didn’t make another film for seven years. This wasn’t due to a lack of interest in her from Hollywood, but the offers she was receiving were all for stereotypical gangster girlfriend roles. Refusing to be boxed in, she went on to prove herself in the worlds of television and theater. When she did return to the silver screen, it was for “The Night of the Following Day,” a crime film co-starring Marlon Brando, her ex-boyfriend. Moreno opens up here about her turbulent relationship with Brando, which ended with her attempting to take her own life following a botched abortion.

Pérez Riera, who watched all of Moreno’s films in preparation for the documentary, was tasked with choosing which clips to feature. In the end, she decided to show clips that best went along with Moreno’s emotional journey. The actress opens up about the scene in “West Side Story” in which her character Anita is pushed around and almost raped by a group of men and how it triggered painful memories she used in her performance. In another emotional scene, Moreno looks back at a scene in “The Night of the Following Day” in which her character fought with Brando’s, remembering how her inner feelings and turmoil spilled out into her performance.

Explained Pérez Riera, “The idea behind it was not just to do a chronological order of her career, but I wanted to touch on specific themes and [feature] the movies that go with it. For example, the movie that she made with Marlon Brando, it’s not an important movie, because it’s not a very good movie, and it’s not a movie that anybody saw, but, to me, it was important because what happened to her inside, what the movie meant to her. It was the first movie she did after winning an Oscar, and it was also the movie that somehow closed that circle in the relationship she had with Marlon Brando.”

Finally, we see Moreno come full circle on the set of Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” a new adaptation of the musical in which she plays a new role, store owner Valentina. Pérez Riera, like many other Puerto Ricans, has mixed feelings about the original film. She opened up about her hopes for this new version, which is set to hit theaters later in 2021.

“I wanted the audience to know that [the 1961] movie, even though it is a great movie for everyone and historically a great movie, it’s a movie that, for Puerto Ricans, has a very different feeling. It’s bittersweet, because although it’s the first time that Puerto Ricans are on the big screen, at the same time, it portrays us in a way that we don’t want to be portrayed…. I wanted [Moreno] to know that and to be able to give that information to the production over there as well. Hopefully, they did a good job with the remake.”

“Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It” opens June 18 in select theaters.