by A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life;Films of Vincente Minnelli
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Richard Whorf directed the narrative sequences in Till the Clouds Roll By. The musical numbers—except for those featuring Judy Garland—were helmed by Robert Alton.
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Ironically, it was Father’s Little Dividend—one of Minnelli’s least inspired efforts—that won him some long-overdue industry recognition. Minnelli received the Director’s Guild of America Award for helming the comedy, which was also named the Best-Written American Comedy of 1951 by the Writers Guild of America.
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In February 1953, Louella Parsons reported that a 3-D version of Huckleberry Finn (!) was going into production with Minnelli at the helm and Danny Kaye on board once again, but this version of the project never materialized either. In 1974, Hollywood finally got around to a musical version of Huckleberry Finn—this one directed by J. Lee Thompson with a score by Richard and Robert Sherman of Mary Poppins fame. “It transforms a great work of fiction into something bland, boring and tasteless,” said the Illustrated London News.
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R. Monta of MGM’s legal department expressed concern that some of the thinly veiled characters weren’t cloaked quite enough. In an interoffice memo, Monta wondered if the character of George Lorrison—glimpsed only in photographs—resembled John Barrymore too closely. Monta cautioned: “The actor should wear the type of hat entirely unlike any kind of hats Barrymore was known to wear.” (MGM memo, n.d.)
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In July 1949, MGM had announced that Minnelli would direct Lana Turner in A Life of Her Own. However, by the time the sudsy melodrama went before the cameras, George Cukor was at the helm.
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Written for the 1932 musical revue Clowns in Clover, “Don’t Blame Me” was apparently a Minnelli favorite. After Peggy King’s performance in The Bad and the Beautiful, Minnelli had Leslie Uggams reprise the song in Two Weeks in Another Town. Minnelli also requested that Jack Nicholson croon the Dorothy Fields-Jimmy McHugh standard during his audition for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.
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In June 1952, Hedda Hopper reported that Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, and Nanette Fabray were set to star in Vincente Minnelli’s Strategy of Love, which, along with I Love Louisa, temporarily served as the title of Comden and Green’s script before it reverted back to The Band Wagon.
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By the time The Band Wagon was in production, Minnelli and Garland were already divorced. (Nanette Fabray, interview with author.)
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In their book Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (New York: Random House, 1984), authors Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward wrote, “Minnelli asserted himself in an unexpected musical context with ‘The Girl Hunt Ballet,’ which says more about film noir in ten minutes than Undercurrent does in two hours.”
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To make matters worse, the original one-sheet poster for The Band Wagon contained a legendary mix-up. Arthur Freed is credited as the director of the film while Minnelli is listed as the producer.
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Regarding authorship, the final screen credit on The Cobweb reads: “Screenplay by John Paxton. Additional dialogue by William Gibson, based on the novel by Gibson.”
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Letter from Joseph I. Breen to Columbia Pictures Chief Harry Cohn, October 20, 1953. Production Code representative Jack Vizzard met with Tea and Sympathy’s stage director, Elia Kazan, and author Robert Anderson to discuss the obstacles involved in transferring the play to film. As Vizzard reported, “We secured from Mr. Kazan a statement that, in his opinion, this play should never be made into a motion picture, and as far as he was concerned it would not be.” (Production Code memo by Jack Vizzard, October 29, 1953 [the meeting with Elia Kazan and Robert Anderson took place on October 28 at the Waldorf-Astoria], from “Hollywood and the Production Code—Primary Source Microfilm Series: Selected Files from the Motion Pictures Association of America Production Code Administration Collection.”)
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Letter from Robert Anderson to Vincente Minnelli, June 24, 1956, archived in the Minnelli collection at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. Robert Anderson revealed to Mike Wood, “I get letters all of the time from people saying, ‘Wasn’t [Tom Lee] at least bisexual?’ I say, ‘The whole point of the play was a false charge.’ It was the McCarthy period, you know.” (Robert Anderson, interview with Mike Wood, February 22, 1994, William Inge Center for the Arts, available at http://www.ingecenter.org/interviews/robertandersontext.htm.)
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In 1963, Minnelli was approached about directing a film version of Colette’s Cheri, which would have starred Alain Delon and Simone Signoret. The project never got beyond the preliminary discussion stage. In 2009, Michelle Pfeiffer starred in a cooly received widescreen adaptation of Cheri. (Richard Schickel, The Men Who Made the Movies [New York: Atheneum, 1975].)
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Minnelli was a great admirer of Chevalier’s 1932 musical Love Me Tonight, directed by Rouben Mamoulian: “I’m only interested in musical stories in which one can achieve a complete integration of dancing, singing, sound and vision,” he wrote. “I would often look at Love Me Tonight as it was such a perfect example of how to make a musical.” (John Kobal, Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance: A History of Movie Musicals [New York: Exeter Books, 1983].)
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Lerner, The Street Where I Live. In this memoir, Lerner erroneously credits Marni Nixon as Caron’s voice double. Nixon provided the singing voice for Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza Doolittle in the 1964 film version of My Fair Lady, which may account for the confusion. Wand did Caron’s singing in Gigi (though that’s Caron herself handling the verse on “The Night They Invented Champagne”). Wand would later dub some of Rita Moreno’s Anita in the 1961 film of West Side Story.
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Passport records reveal that Denise traveled under various names in the early 1950s, including “Danica Gay” and “Danica D. Guilianelli.”
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As earlier with The Bad and the Beautiful, MGM’s initial choice for the role ultimately played by Kirk Douglas was Clark Gable.
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An addendum to a 20th Century Fox Legal Department document dated May 25, 1961, notes that “20th will not require Miss Monroe to render services in a picture based on Goodbye, Charlie.”
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Minnelli would marry fourth wife Lee Anderson on April 2, 1980. He was still married to Denise Giganti during the filming of Goodbye, Charlie.
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Critics reviewing the Broadway version of On a Clear Day noted its vague resemblance to John L. Balderston’s Berkeley Square, a three-acter from 1929 that concerned a male protagonist time traveling from 1928 to 1784 to find his one true love.
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Even among die-hard Clear Day fans, this missing number is something of a mystery. It’s often referred to as “E.S.P.,” which may have been the song’s title at one point. Stills of Streisand in a wild, futuristic outfit at the Central Park Zoo have surfaced, offering what appears to be a tantalizing glimpse of this deleted sequence. In Lerner’s script dated April 18, 1969, Montand’s character croons “People Like Me,” which features the lyrics, “To a sober-minded man of reason, E.S.P. is worse than treason.” It’s been suggested that throughout the song, there would have been cutaways to Streisand in her various incarnations—past, present, and future.
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The novel was originally published as La Volupté d’Etrê in 1954.
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The character was eventually renamed Nina, which served as the film’s title before it was changed to A Matter of Time.
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When Vestron Video released A Matter of Time to the home video market in the early 1980s, Liza’s rendition of the Gershwin’s “Do It Again” was deleted, apparently because of music clearance issues. With one of the film’s few unanimously praised sequences excised, the video incarnation of the film achieved the dubious distinction of mutilating an alrea
dy mutilated work.
Copyright © 2010 by Mark Griffin
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Griffin, Mark.
A hundred or more hidden things : the life and films of Vincente Minnelli / by Mark Griffin.—1st Da Capo Press ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-0-306-81893-6
1. Minnelli, Vincente. 2. Motion picture producers and directors—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN1998.3.M56G75 2010
791.4302’33092—dc22
[B]
2009042445
First Da Capo Press edition 2010
Published by Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
www.dacapopress.com
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