Especially funny and/or audacious ones…
I find it hilarious that Coppola faked a seizure in front of Paramount executives when they said “Marlon Brando will never be in this picture”. I think it helped because Coppola actually has epilepsy and used it in his favor… Just imagine if someone else played Don Vito Corleone in “The Godfather”
The tale of Mr. Belvedere’s balls.
Harpo Marx was staying in a bungalow at the Garden of Allah hotel in Los Angeles. He liked the peace and quiet so he could practice playing his harp. Unfortunately, he started hearing a neighbor in the next bungalow loudly playing a piano. Harpo went to the management and asked them to move the pianist to another bungalow farther away. They declined. The piano player was Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Harpo took matters into his own hands. He opened the door and all the windows and began playing as loud as he could. The piece he chose was Rachmaninoff’s own Prelude in C-Sharp Minor. After two hours of the two of them dueling, Harpo heard a loud crash from the piano. Rachmaninoff went to the hotel staff and demanded to be moved.
As it turned out, Harpo’s intuition was dead on. Rachmaninoff had been pestered by people playing that piece for years, and had grown to hate it.
An anecdote that Vincent Price told.
When making the Ten Commandments, Cecil B DeMille would use a crane and fly over the set on it with a megaphone in hand.
One day, when they were filming a scene with some brick-making extras in the sun, a couple of women were talking and DeMille saw it and swooped down with his crane and demanded they tell everyone what they were talking about that was so important as to disturb everyone’s concentration.
And he had the woman speak into the megaphone and she said “I was just saying to her–‘I wonder when the bastard was going to call a break for lunch.’”
and DeMille immediately took the megaphone back and shouted “lunch!”
Then there was the time Harpo Marx and George Burns were playing golf on a hot day and decided to cool down by taking off their shirts. Another group reported them to the club manager, who told them the club rules required shirts to be worn on the course at all times. A little while later, the manager saw that they had put their shirts back on, but were now playing without pants. When he confronted them again, Burns and Marx challenged him to show them a club rule requiring them to wear pants - and sure enough, he could not.
“I found [director Carol] Reed in his suite at the Georges Cinq, staring gloomily across the rainswept Champs-Élysées at a gigantic billboard atop an office building. It was an advertisement for Dr. Folamour (Dr. Strangelove) and featured the recumbent figure, at least fifty feet long, of a spectacularly beautiful and unclad young woman. I asked Reed if this display offended his sensibilities. He answered, “Not at all, but that happens to be my daughter.”
----Take Two: A Life in Movies and Politics by Philip Dunne (1992).
Tracy Reed, who has the only female role in Dr. Strangelove, was actually Carol Reed’s step-daughter.
Kevin Smith meeting with Warner Bros and Jon Peters about writing a script for a new Superman film.
I suspect a lot of you know this story already, but just in case I’ll tell it again. Hedy Lamarr was one of the top Hollywood actresses from about 1939 to 1951. She was born in Austria and emigrated to the U.S. At one point she worked with the composer George Antheil. Together they invented a system to send a radio signal while avoiding it being jammed. They patented this system in 1942. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be used at that time because it would have required too much space in the object sending the signal. When transistors became common much later it became useful. The system is called frequency hopping and a more generalized version of it is called spread spectrum. It’s now very important in many current electronic systems. Unfortunately the patent expired before it really became common.
I read once that she was considered during her acting career to be stunningly beautiful, very smart, but not really that great an actress.
Charles Bronson was a miner’s son with many siblings and grew up very poor. He would go on to become a successful actor and starred in The Travels Of Jaimie McPheeters with a 12 year old Kurt Russell. During filming Kurt found out it was Charles’ birthday so tried to hand him a wrapped present. Charles looked down at it and then walked away. Later Charles came back to Kurt’s dressing room and explained that no one had ever given him a birthday gift in his life and he was honored.
He later gave Kurt a skateboard to use in the filming lot between takes and some employee told him to stop. When Charles learned of this they both went to to the head office and Charles laid it out for the producer, “Kurt can ride his skateboard wherever he likes.” and they left. Kurt was never hassled again.
-2 minute video of Kurt telling the story on Kimmel-
I don’t have a story but can strongly recommend two older books full of them. Bring On The Empty Horses and The Moon’s A Balloon, both by actor David Niven.
Very funny stuff.
Thanks for the recommendations. Does it focus more on certain decades, or certain people (stars, etc) or the greatest story (as opposed to just those in his circle).
The Kevin Smith story I like better is when he heard there was going to be a protest of his film Dogma at a theater near his parents house. He made a sign and joined in. A local news crew was there and filmed it.
Here he is telling the story.
There’s another old story that an extra in one of his epics, irritable, bored and tired after a very long shooting day, said very loudly, “Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?”
One of the Roman soldiers in Spartacus can be seen wearing a wristwatch.
The cast of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock serenaded Dame Judith Anderson with the Broadway tune “There’s Nothing Like a Dame” when she first came on-set.
Director John Ford told Maureen O’Hara to whisper something naughty to John Wayne in the last scene of The Quiet Man, to get a good reaction from him. She did, and he did, and none of them ever revealed what she said to him.
Some good stories here, I hope:
Seconded.
j
I heard that attributed to Billy Wilder during “The Misfits” when Marilyn Monroe was constantly late
Everyone in Hollywood in the 30’s and on. The ‘British colony’ and their parties, mating habits, and stories of things happening on the set. Also a short chapter about an actress having a nervous breakdown at his home, and watching her for days until her husband came from overseas to put her into a mental hospital. VERY entertaining books.
Shelley Winters wrote two volumes of memoirs, chock full of juicy stuff from her early beginning in movies and her further adventures. (She and Marilyn Monroe were roommates, and they and their friend Yvonne DeCarlo were quite the trio of ‘party girls’ with Errol Flynn and his drinking buddies.) Also very entertaining to read!
There a bunch of Hollywood stories on my list. William Frawley who played Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy is the basis of several. As a young vaudeville performed he popularized the tune ‘My Melancholy Baby’. In one performance a drunk Damon Runyan in the audience allegedly kept shouting “Play Melancholy Baby”. This line is used in the movie ‘A Star is Born’ with Judy Garland’s character being harassed on stage with that request. As a child I remember the line being used in cartoons without knowing anything else about it.
Runyan was a heavy drinker, though reportedly he abstained later in life. William Frawley at some point became a heavy drinker also, which stained his career. He was having a hard time finding parts until Desi Arnaz considered him for the role of Fred Mertz. Desi related that Frawley promised he’d always show up on time and sober. Reports are he kept that promise. Still a heavy drinker, Frawley collapsed from a heart attack on Hollywood Blvd., supposedly just after leaving a bar.
You know what they say about pictures and words. Here’s Charlie Chaplin clowning around while visiting William Randolph Hearst.
^Screen grab from Smithsonian Channel’s “America in Color”, season 2 episode 5.