BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: FILM #31

ROBERT MITCHUM'S OPENING REMARKS TO THE YALE LAW SCHOOL FILM SOCIETY

"I have been asked what it is like to be a personage of the cinema. [long pause]
 It's like being trampled to death by geese."

 Reported by Brad Darrach in Penthouse, 1972
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WHEN BRADFORD CRAWFORD DRANK FRANK SINATRA'S WIG

"He drank Sinatra's piece. We were trying to pull it away from him. He's got this hairpiece halfway down, and he takes a glass  of vodka and downs the goddamn thing. So, I called Frank -- Frank was in Palm Springs -- I said , 'Guess, what? The Crawford just drank your wig.' He said, 'Good, I  don't have to show up Mondays.'"

Jerry Roberts. Mitchum In His Own Words (New York: Limelight Editions, 2000)
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AL PACINO AT A VERY YOUNG AGE

"My mother used to take me to the movies when I was as young as three or four. She did menial work and factory jobs during the day, and when she came home, the only company she had was her son. So she'd bring me with her to the movies. She didn't know she was supplying me with a future. I was immediately
attached to watching actors on the screen. Since I never had playmates in our apartment and we didn't have television yet,
I  would have nothing but time to thing about the movie I had last seen. I'd go through the characters in my head, and I would bring them to life, one by one, in the apartment. I learned at an early age to make friends with my imagination."

Al Pacino. Sonny Boy: a memoir (New York: Penguin Press, 2024)
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THE CAR CHASE in THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

The car chase was filmed without obtaining the proper permits from the city. Members of the NYPD's tactical force helped control traffic. But most of the control was achieved by the assistant directors with the help of off-duty NYPD officers, many of whom had been involved in the actual case. The assistant directors, under the supervision of Terence A. Donnelly, cleared traffic for approximately five blocks in each direction. Permission was given to literally control the traffic signals on those streets where they ran the chase car. Even so, in many instances, they illegally continued the chase into sections with no traffic control, where they actually had to evade real traffic and pedestrians. Many of the (near) collisions in the movie were therefore real and not planned (with the exception of the near-miss of the lady with the baby carriage, which was carefully rehearsed). A flashing police light was placed on top of the car to warn bystanders. A camera was mounted on the car's bumper for the shots from the car's point-of-view. Hackman did some of the driving but the extremely dangerous stunts were performed by Bill Hickman, with Friedkin filming from the backseat. Friedkin operated the camera himself because the other camera operators were married with children and he was not.

iMBd Trivia 
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HOWARD HAWKS & CAROLE LOMBARD

Howard Hawks allowed John Barrymore and Carole Lombard to improvise freely during filming. "When people are as good as those two, the idea of just sticking to lines is rather ridiculous," he told Peter Bogdanovich in an interview. "Because if Barrymore gets going, and he had the ability to do it, I'd just say, 'Go do it.' And Lombard would answer him; she was such a character, just marvelous." Hawks then told a story about Lombard coming to him one day to complain about studio head Harry Cohn making passes at her. Between them, the director and star worked out a plan to embarrass their boss. Hawks was in Cohn's office, having a serious discussion with him, when Lombard burst in to exclaim, "I've decided to say yes!" As Cohn watched in shock, she made as if to begin removing her clothes. Hawks said self-righteously, "I'd better get out of here if this is the kind of studio you run." A shaken Cohn asked Lombard to leave, and she never had any further problems with him.

iMDb Trivia for TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934)
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The Uncredited Cat in “The Godfather”

"The opening scene of The Godfather, in which Vito Corleone opines on the meaning of friendship to a justice-seeking Amerigo Bonasera, was part of the script. The friendly cat nestled into star Marlon Brando’s lap? Not so much. Director Francis Ford Coppola recalled he “saw the cat running around the studio, and took it and put it in [Brando’s] hands without a word.” But while the feline’s presence helped magnify the tension of the scene, its incessant purring reportedly drowned out much of Brando’s distinct mumbling, forcing sound editors to redub the dialogue."

INTERESTING FACTS website (February 13, 2025)
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AVA GARDNER FLUFFS A LINE DURING THE FILMING OF
THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA

" He (JOHN HOUSTON) was certainly capable of being displeased, and his sarcasm and cold shoulder could be withering, but with Ava he never showed impatience or disappoinytment (not even when for more than a dozen takes she persisted in blowing the same line, saying "My husband Frank" instead of "My husband Fred").

Lee Server. Ava Gardner: 'Love is Nothing' ( New York:  St. Martin's Griffin, 2006)
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Martin Luther King Jr. paid for Julia Roberts' birth

Julia Roberts, the actress best known for her roles in Pretty Woman, Erin Brockovich, and Steel Magnolias, was born in Smyrna, Georgia, in 1967. But when it came time for her parents, Betty and Walter Roberts, to take home their new bundle of joy, there was one hiccup: They couldn’t afford the hospital bill. That’s when Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King — friends of the Roberts’ — stepped in to help, covering the cost of the future actress’s birth. 

INTERESTING FACTS (February 12, 2025)
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQZTCqZGbRwTMPjPbdqdHkQpkTh
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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

If you believe that truth is stranger than fiction, you won’t be surprised to learn that Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’s inventive premise was borne of more than writer-director Martin McDonagh’s imagination. The Oscar-winning drama stars Frances McDormand as a grieving mother who, months after the rape and murder of her daughter, takes matters into her own hands by calling out law enforcement’s lack of progress on the case with a series of accusatory billboards.
McDonagh revealed how the idea came to him in an interview conducted shortly after the film’s release: “Twenty years ago I was on a bus going through the southern states of America, and somewhere along the line, I saw a couple of billboards in a field that were very similar to the billboards that we see in the start of our story,” he told Deadline in 2018. “They were raging and painful and tragic, and calling out the cops.” McDonagh received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay, and a number of protest groups have since used similar billboards to make their voices heard."

INTERESTING FACTS website (April 7, 2025)
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Isle of the Dead: Third version, 1883

  Credit: Azoor Collection/ Alamy Stock Photo
Isle of the Dead: “Die Toteninsel” 
Between 1880 and 1886, the Swiss Symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin produced a series of moody paintings called “Die Toteninsel (Isle of the Dead),” all depicting a similar scene featuring a small and rather ominous Mediterranean island with tombs and a stand of cypress trees. The series was widely reproduced and highly influential, inspiring a piece of music by Sergei Rachmaninoff and interpretations by the artists H.R. Giger and Salvador Dalí.
Later, the painting became the inspiration for the 1945 horror movie Isle of the Dead starring Boris Karloff, about a plague that breaks out on a small Grecian island. The movie’s producer, Val Lewton, borrowed not only the painting’s title and island setting but also much of the imagery and overall mood of Böcklin’s work.
INTERESTING FACTS - March 2, 2025
https://interestingfacts.com/movies-inspired-by-paintings/
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THE FIRST DRIVE-IN MOVIE

Did you know that the first film ever screened at a drive-in movie theater was British?

 On June 6, 1933, just outside Camden, New Jersey drivers paid 25 cents per car, plus an additional 25 cents per person to watch the English comedy Wives Beware at this quintessentially American institution in the open air. The local Courier-Post newspaper had touted the setting as “the first automobile movie theater in the world.” Parked in their Ford Model B's and Buick Series 40s that Tuesday night, the attendees knew they were participating in a novel experiment—but they could not have known the extent to which the phenomenon they experienced would spread throughout the country in the next few decades.

The innovator behind this motor-age phenomenon, Richard Milton Hollingshead, Jr., got his start at the Whiz Auto Products Company, founded by his father in the early years of the 20th century to sell automobile accessories such as greases, oils and polishes. In an inspired extension of the family business in the early 1930s, Hollingshead did the first test run (or perhaps, more accurately, a test park) of his concept using a Kodak projector and a screen nailed to a tree in his backyard.

films@americanexperience.wgbh.org. (June 7, 2025)
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..., February 1, in celebration of Black History Month, Museum of the Moving Image kicks off Pioneers of African American Cinema, featuring digitally restored versions of films from the early 20th century that were categorized as “race films.” Financed, produced, created, and distributed by Black Americans, these movies were an essential part of the film landscape from the silent era through to the 1940s, now providing insight into a too-often unstudied and misunderstood chapter of American history. These truly innovative works had for years only been available in scarce, low-quality 16mm prints, until this revelatory collection from Kino Lorber.
The first selection is 1920’s groundbreaking Within Our Gates, the earliest extant feature from Oscar Micheaux and one of the most historically important silent films ever made. Evelyn Preer plays a young woman who moves up north during the Great Migration in the hopes of opening a school for Black children. Structured with flashbacks, Micheaux’s film, despite suffering severe cuts due to censorship laws, remains a gripping melodrama about the horrors and legacies of racism in the United States. According to scholar Anna Siomopoulos in the journal The Moving Image, Without Our Gates is “an important African American response to D. W. Griffith's notoriously racist film The Birth of a Nation. Oscar Micheaux's landmark film provided a rebuttal to Griffith's depiction of black violence and corruption with a story of the injustices faced by African Americans in a racist society.
MOMI Film <info@movingimage.org. (January 31, 2025)
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HOW DO THE MOVIES DO IT?

7:43 A.M.
I do not wish to be entertained
By lovers unknotting
Picture-perfect bodies 
Under blue gels.
Nobody, not even my doctor
Wants to see me naked.

How do the movies do it?
With music over
& under all, violins, harps,
Pianos & kazoos,
Men, women, & others
Backlit & keylit,
In frame after frame,
 
Tumble over each other,
Yet there is 
No more love in the world
Than there was before.
When properly lit,
How seductive is 
The three-walled room

With the bed unmade.
Time to go to work.
How about some lipstick
On my cheek or collar?
Have I learned nothing
From silver-screen romance
Except that there is
More of it than I shall ever need.

Louis Phillips