Well, it was germinating - Gardener started writing on the topic in the 1950’s and it started attracting followers in 1960’s Britain. That said, I agree that it’s almost cerainly true there was no or only the most minimal concept of Wicca in the U.S. in the early 1970’s. It’s pretty likely Ira Levin had never even heard of them - I don’t think Wiccans entered the general public consciousness until the 1990’s at the earliest.
I always thought that was a wise man from the east.
I’d say 1970s. I remember it was popular to have Wiccans on radio and television talk shows as novelty items, although back then they were more likely to call themselves “witches” until the PR thing hit them.
My favorite part of the last scene is Hope Summers, a character actress perhaps best known as Aunt Bee’s friend Clara on The Andy Griffith Show as a witch. I chuckled when I saw it originally, but when “Clara” hoists her glass and calls out “HAIL SATAN!” I nearly lost it. (Now we know why she always won the pickle ribbon at the county fair.)
A question about the book/movie: When Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin’s character) tells Rosemary to lie down, and she awakes to find Dr. Saperstein (Ralph Bellamy) over her who takes her back to the coven, is it because Dr. Hill is a member of the coven or because he thinks Rosemary is nuts? Until she says the name Saperstein he seems to be sympathetic to her.
Trivia: Tony Curtis played Guy’s friend who was blinded by the spell. (He wasn’t seen, just heard on the phone.)
More trivia: Before the awful sequel by Ira Levin there was an awful made for TV sequel. It starred Patty Duke as Rosemary (though she disappears in a bewitched schoolbus- no, really- halfway through, and Ruth Gordon reprised her role as Minnie. Stephen McHattie (who at that time looked a lot like Christopher Lloyd) played the adult Adrian.
For those who haven’t read the sequel incidentally, it has an almost identical ending to Devil’s Advocate which came out around the same time:
[spoiler]After all manner of disaster is unleashed by Adrian/Andy there’s chaos, then… boom! Rosemary is looking at the apartment [I can’t remember it’s name, but based on the Dakota in both movie and book obviously] with Guy in the late 1960s and it was allllll a dream. Or was it?
(Then she realizes that the chicken she killed was really a baby when Patrick Duffy comes out of her shower and shows her that they’re being imagined by an autistic kid with a snowglobe who in turn was written by Roseanne Connor in the basement of her house after her husband died.
But the “just a dream or was it?” part is true.[/spoiler]
I don’t think Dr. Hill was ever part of the coven. I just figured it was because he thought she was insane–I mean, a well respected doctor being part of a coven of witches? It’s nutty sounding. I guess most doctors would have just figured, “Hysterical woman,” and phoned the husband.
Grodin was asked about that, and he said that his character the doctor just thought Rosemary was nuts. But that could be only his interpretation, and not Ira Levin’s.
I thought Hill wasn’t in on it because Rosemary originally wanted to see him but the others were deadset on her seeing Sapirstein instead.
The most unbelievable part of the book is that Dr Sapirstein would let Rosemary walk the streets when she is due to deliver Satan’s baby! I mean, what if she went into labor on the street and they took her to the hospital and checked the baby?
Yes, she has to run into Guy’s voice coach and thank him for the tickets to get her questioning everything and set the whole ending in progress. But the real witch doctor would have ordered her into complete bed rest for the last month of the pregnancy.
Yeah…very true. I can’t help questioning a lot of it. How exactly did Roman and Minnie convince Guy that they were truly supernatural/could contact Satan? what if Rosemary had gone to Dr. Hill secretly when she was in pain? Still, love it.
Did you ever publish your annotated Rosemary? I would so want to read it.
So is **Dogzilla **ever coming back to substatiate those claims about Levin’s misogyny?
Doubtful. I can see why someone might come away from Rosemary’s Baby thinking Ira Levin doesn’t think well of women. But Stepford Wives? Even though his books were more plot driven than character, the female characters in that book are still pretty sympathetic. And not like insanely pro feminazi types. More like just normal women who do believe in feminism/have personalities/interests outside the home.
Makes me wonder if Dogzilla thinks that Boys from Brazil is anti aging civil servant.
But remember that Rosemary was throwing away those herbs or drugs or whatever the hell they were that Ruth Gordon (can’t think of the character’s name!) was trying to push on her; maybe Saperstein intended to keep her in a drugged haze and never figured she’d go wandering off on her own.
Also, I too would love to read your annotated book! Is it available anywhere?
I’d also like to join others in this thread and just say that Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying is an absolute classic thriller. Easily in my top 10. It can only be read once, though! If you know the big, big plot twist in advance…well, I envy anyone who can still read it for the very first time.
I feel the same way about…well, all of Levin.
Actually I own a copy of it and have not read it in about ten years. I think I’ve forgotten the main twist, so I may go back tonight and read it. Yay!
Well, as I recall, Ted Turner hired a Wiccan to do a spell to help the floundering Braves some time back in the early 70s. I was already involved in ceremonial magick in '74 or '75, and two of the people I regularly worked with were Wiccans, one of whom had a rather nasty run-in with the Ravenwood coven in Atlanta. My impression was and still is that a lot of counterculture folks from the late 60s and early 70s dabbled in witchcraft as a kind of folk religion, which attracted attention from fundamentalist Christians. IIRC, Hal Lindsey talks about specifically about Wicca in The Late, Great Planet Earth. When I was barely out of high school, I was already running into people who claimed to be descended from a long line of witches and/or whose coven had existed underground for centuries. I think it would have been rather hard for Levin not to have come across some kind of information about Wicca if he did any research at all for *Rosemary’s Baby *.
Correction: Turner didn’t acquire the Braves until 76. I do recall that somebody pulled this stunt at one time.
I think it was by helping his career- having him get the other actor’s tie and then suddenly the guy goes blind, and Guy gets the role- a sort of slow roasted proof as he sees his career rise through what looks like coincidences to other people.
Evidently the coven was only capable of some general good luck/bad luck spells. Nothing implied they were able to levitate or do Harry Potter kind of magic.
While Ruth Gordon was great as an annoying classless slightly-over-the-top Minnie, my favorite performance was Sidney Blackmer as Roman (or Steven [I wonder if SCRABBLE sales increased after that movie?]). He was so understated and seemed like an eccentric benevolent old character you’d love to have as a neighbor, even at the end when you know good and well he’s a Satanic priest. However, at the same time the little glance that he gives Laura-Louise when he tells her to let Rosemary rock the baby (followed by the way she backs the hell down without question), or the staredown he has with Hutch (Maurice Evans), or his passion during the “The Year is One!” scene all lets you know that Old Roman can get dirty if he feels it’s required, yet at the same time really is a kindly old charmer in an “also an amoral murderer when convenient” sort of way.
The dream sequence during the conception scene was brilliant because it was one of the most believable dream sequences ever filmed- the ordered chaos of a dream so perfectly. (Of course Hutch is being caught in a tidal wave, why wouldn’t he be? And the Pope’s visit to Rosemary where he does a callback to the ‘chocolate mouse’- “I heard that you were bitten by a mouse my child.” And did you notice Adrian Markato (Roman’s father seen in the photograph) standing in the background during the conception scene? He’s the only one clothed as memory serves. (There was a rumor that went around for years that Anton Lavey played the devil in the conception scene, but like most stories about Lavey it was total balderdash.)
But he agrees to work with them that very night, right? that is, the night Rosemary and Guy go over to have dinner. Then I think he goes back to talk to Roman and I assume that’s when Roman talks him into it. Or are you saying that Roman proposed that he had Satanic powers and that if he got Guy the role in that play, Guy would have to in turn let them have Rosemary’s uterus?
Stephen King mentions it in his book On Writing. He said it was the perfect foil to those people who flip to the back of the book and read the ending, since the plot twist was smack in the middle, and reading the end wouldn’t mean much. It intrigued me enough that I borrowed the book from the library and read it. I remember thinking, “Have I come to the twist? Oh, that must be it. No, wait, that’s it. Oh, holy shit!”
Good book. I wish the movies had done it justice.
Well, without giving anything away, I think the nature of the main twist is such that no filmed version could really do the story justice.
Does anyone know how it was done in the movie? From wiki it seems they just do it straightforwardly…like, you know that it’s Bud the whole time? But that takes away from the huge twist, not knowing who it is till he walks downstairs and she’s all, “Thank god it’s you Bud.” And yup, I just reread it last night, so good.
ETA: I guess that kind of answers my question…you can’t really do a filmed version of this twist, can you?