BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: FILM #25

ANIMALS IN THE MOVIES (1938)

"While Bringing Up Baby was being filmed much was heard about the leopard and the way the whole cast had to be sprayed with perfume to keep him in a good temper. The filming of Marco Polo revealed that elephants rent for $50 a day, camels for $25."

Margaret Farrand Thorp. American At The Movies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939) 
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REAL LIFE IN THE 1938 MOVIE BRINGING UP BABY

"The scene in which Susan's dress is ripped was inspired by something that happened to Cary Grant. He was at the Roxy Theater one night and his pants zipper was down when it caught on the back of a woman's dress. Grant impulsively followed her. When he told this story to Howard Hawks, Hawks loved it and put it into the film."
iMDb trivia
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THE JOYS OF FILM-MAKING FOR ELEANOR COPPOLA

" The down draught of the helicopter's rotor blades, as it landed blew her and her tripod off the ground. Smoke from earth-shaking explosions shut down her view entirely. A trek through a rice paddy ended with the camera almost being sucked under. The firing of four thatched huts by the special-effects department destroyed the prop store where she kept her gear; her camera cases lay in the doorway, melted. Yet Eleanor Coppola took it all in stride. She was so elated to be usefully working, recording the disaster-every-minute makiing of her husband Francis's 'Apocaypse Now', that this was a small price to pay."

Unsigned obituary for Eleanor Coppola. The Economist (May 4, 2024). 
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CENSORSHIP & THE MOVIE CASABLANCA

"There was more substantial trouble with the second and third sections of the script. Breen* was  particularly disturbed by the character. 'Specifically, we cannot approve the present suggestion that Capt. Renault makes a practice of seducing the women to whom he grants visas,' Breen wrote to Warner on May 21. He also found it unacceptable that Ilsa was married when she fell in love with Rick in Paris. A month later Breen waa warning Warner that script made it appear that Rick and Ilsa slept together when she came to his apartment to get the Letters of Transit."Joseph Ignatius Breen was the major voice in enforcing the Production Code Administration. The Production Code was also reinforced the Catholic Legion of Decency.Aljean Harmetz. The Making of  Casablanca (New York: Hyperion, 2002)**

THE DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR  & NORTH BY NORTHWEST & MOUNT RUSHMORE"

"This was the McCarthy tinged '50s and egged on by upstanding, red-blooded Americans , the Department of the Interior and National Park Service took exception to this national shrine being desecrated by enemy agents, mayhem, killing, and --perhaps worst of all -- foreign actors. 'Just who does the English director Alfred Hitchcock think he is that he can send another Englishman running  up and down Lincoln's face?' one letter to the Park Service inveighed."

Jon Krampner. Ernest Lehman: The Sweet Smell of Success (Lexington, Kentucky:UniversityPress of Kentucky, 2022)  
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HOW MANY SONS PORTRAYED THEIR FATHERS INMOVIES?

In The Day of the Locust (1975),  film star Dick Powell was portrayed by his son Richard Powell.
Will Rogers,Jr. played his father in the 1952 movie THE STORY OF WILL ROGERS.
Mario Van Peebles, portrayed his own father Melvin Van Peebles in in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971).
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   JOHN WAYNE ON THE MOVIE HIGH NOON
 
"It's the most most unAmerican thing I've ever seen in my whole life. The last thing in the picture is old Coop putting the United States marshal's badge under his foot and stepping on it."
Playboy interview, May, 1971. 
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from This was Hollywood by Carla Valderrama. How Hollywood became Hollywood:

“Hollywood became the film capital of the world through the flip of a coin. In 1911, director Al Christie was making Westerns in New Jersey and had grown tired of the inappropriate landscape there. He wanted to try filming in California. His producer, David Horsley, favored Florida, thinking it would be cheaper. Christie had a silver dollar. ‘Heads for California and tails for Florida,’ he declared. It was heads. On the train west, the two met a theatrical producer who told them Hollywood was a pretty place. ‘None of us had heard of Hollywood before,’ Christie recalled. '"

DELANCY PLACE (July 26, 2024)

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ON FILMING AN EARLY DISASTER SCENE

"D.W, Griffith's 1920 mdlodrama 'Way Down East,' featuring the climactic rescue of a woman being carried off on an ice floe in raging currents , was filmed in a real river after a real blizzard. The movie's star , Lillian Gish, suffered frostbite that afflicted her for the rest of her life..."
Richard Brody. "Heavy Weather" in The New Yorker  (July 29,2024)
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HOW MANY SCRIPTWRITERS DOES IT TAKE TO WRITE A  FILM?

A YANK IN OXFORD (1938)
"Although only 8 scriptwriters are credited in the movie, at least 31 are known to have been employed to work on the screenplay. Among those were Herman J. Mankiewicz, John Paddy Carstairs, Hugh Walpole and F. Scott Fitzgerald."

iMBd trivia
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AFTER THE MOVIES 

The cowboy rides off
Into the sunset,
Or Abbot & Costello
Blast off to Mars,
But end up on Venus.

I am 11 years old. 
After the movie is over,
I return to Earth,
Riding in the back seat
Of my parents' green Plymouth.
The radio is on:
Somebody is always President
Edmund Hilary & Tenzing Norgay 
Climb Mt. Everest. 
A war in Korea goes on.

My parents too are climbing
Their own Everest:
Grocery shopping on the way home,
3 chidren to be fed, 
Bills to be paid. 

Every Saturday,
My day off from school,
Movie-going time,
They work 9 to 9
Selling clothes to strangers. 
No stranger rides into town
To protect them
From their lives,
From the need to protect
Myself, my 2 younger sisters
& my grandmother
Who lives with us.

 'Shane...come back.' 

Louis Phillips