Hollywood tends to ruin its remakes of classic movies with clumsy attempts to update them and make them “relevant.” Two examples are the cheesy 1976 “King Kong” and Amazon’s current desecration of “Cinderella.” So, like many others, I cringed when I heard that Steven Spielberg was filming a new “West Side Story.”  The 1961 original is a national treasure. How many ways would they find to mess it up? Before answering that question, here’s some background. The Making of ‘West Side Story’ In 1949, the great choreographer Jerome Robbins approached composer Leonard Bernstein with an idea: How about updating “Romeo and Juliet,” replacing Shakespeare’s feuding families with Jewish and Italian gangs in the slums of New York? They could call it “East Side Story.” “Prejudice will be the theme of the new work,” Bernstein explained, but he and Robbins were too busy. The project was shelved, according to Humphrey Burton’s “Bernstein.” …