MAYHEM behind the Movies
It has just been revealed that The Third Man is one of many film masterpieces that was born out of chaos. What other classics nearly never got made?
LAST WEEK it was revealed that the 1949 movie The Third Man might never have been made but for a secretary from Monmouth who was temping for the film’s director Carol Reed.
With Orson Welles in the lead role, the British Film Institute has hailed it as ‘the greatest British film ever’, but it seems the late Joyce Bowden may have been the real star.
After she died last year aged 93, her son, Guy, discovered a working script for The Third Man along with detailed letters his mother kept describing her life on set.
“The story she told – and she was a very truthful lady – is that someone came in one day with the Graham Green novella and suggested to Reed that it would make a really good film,” Guy has said. “In his normal way he said he, ‘didn’t have time to read this kind of thing’, so he tossed it to her and said, ‘Can you summarise this for me?’ ”
What she wrote convinced Reed to take it on. Still, there was famously conflict while filming, and in her notes Joyce revealed that Welles was “loathed” by cast and crew. Guy added: “You could say it wouldn’t have been made without her input.”
Here, we take a look at some of the other box office hits to triumph from turmoil off screen.
THE WIZARD OF OZ, 1939
It has become a TV Christmas classic and more than 100million people in Britain alone are said to have watched it but filming of The Wizard of Oz was in constant disarray.
The film propelled the then 17-year-old Judy Garland to stardom and an Oscar for Best Juvenile Performer. But a succession of five directors and 14 writers caused huge delays in filming and there were countless medical dramas on set.
Buddy Ebsen, cast as the Tin Man, was replaced after being hospitalised with respiratory problems caused by an allergic reaction to the silver powder in his make-up.
The Wicked Witch of the West, Margaret Hamilton, was almost burned to death when a stunt went wrong, and the actors who played the flying monkeys were badly injured when the wire used to hold them aloft snapped.
Meanwhile, the antics of the Munchkins became the stuff of legend. Garland used to tell interviewers that they got drunk every night and had to be carried to their beds in butterfly nets.
Producer Mervyn LeRoy, who claimed filming was “one gigantic headache”, said of them in his memoirs: “There were fights and orgies. The police had to rush over to the hotel to keep them from killing each other.”
Still, The Wizard of Oz was the third biggest hit of the decade, behind Gone With The Wind and Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs.
CASABLANCA, 1942
When filming of Casablanca started in May 1942 only the first half of the script had been written and it took four different screenwriters to finish the screenplay.
Even the stars of the film, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, had no idea how the story would end, something to which many critics attribute the authentic tension in the film.
Frantic to the end, Casablanca’s famous last line, spoken by Bogart, was written and recorded after filming had finished: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Despite its A-list cast, no one expected Casablanca to be anything more than another of the hundreds of pictures churned out by Hollywood.
But after its world premiere in New York in November 1942, it scooped three Oscars, including Best Screenplay for that hastily penned script.
JAWS, 1975
Although Jaws became a blockbuster and a defining moment in Steven Spielberg’s career, filming was plagued with problems.
Spielberg insisted shooting take place in open water and not in a tank in a studio but the stuntman hired to do the underwater scenes had no diving experience and the salt water caused the mechanical shark to malfunction repeatedly.
There wasn’t even a finished script when filming began. The scheduled 55-day shoot turned into 159 days and the budget rocketed from $3.5million (£2.7million) to $8million.
“We started the film without a script, without a cast and without a shark,” was how one of the film’s stars, actor Richard Dreyfuss, summed it up.
But the movie was a phenomenal success selling 25 million tickets in the first 38 days of its release, and with total worldwide box office sales now estimated at close to $2billion (£1.5billion).
STAR WARS, 1977
Not even Star Wars creator George Lucas believed his original film would be a success. In a recent interview, he recalled: “I showed it to all of my friends early on but it was mostly [filled with] stock footage of old war movies and all kinds of stuff,” he said. “They saw it and [said] ‘Poor George. What were you thinking?’ ”
The exception was his pal Steven Spielberg who declared that it would be “the biggest movie of all time”.
Still, Lucas was unconvinced and escaped to Hawaii when the film was released to avoid the reviews. So he was stunned to get a call from Alan Ladd Jr, the then president of 20th Century Fox, who told him: “It’s a fantastic hit! There are lines [queues] around the block!” Harrison Ford, then a little-known actor, had been cast as Han Solo and had confronted Lucas during filming over the dialogue in the script: “You can type this s*** but you sure as hell can’t say it.”
But after watching the finished film even he admitted: “I was wrong, it worked.”
To date the film, later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, has earned more than $775million (£590million).
APOCALYPSE NOW, 1979
The epic set during the Vietnam War was as tumultuous off-camera as it was on-screen.
Director Francis Ford Coppola described Marlon Brando as “like a kid, very irresponsible” and was furious that one of the other stars, Dennis Hopper, was so spaced-out on marijuana and cocaine that he couldn’t remember his lines.
Hundreds of the 900-strong cast and crew were also reportedly high on drugs and, with the film’s script torn up soon after shooting began, much of the dialogue was made up as they went along.
“Chaos” was the word used by actor Martin Sheen to describe what greeted him when he arrived on set in the role as Captain Willard, only to add to it with his own heavy drinking. After one 24-hour booze binge he arrived for filming barely able to stand up.
Sheen subsequently had a heart attack and when Coppola heard the news he had an epileptic fit – he had invested millions of his own money and faced financial ruin if filming wasn’t completed.
“Even if he dies, he’s not dead until I say so,” he said of Sheen at the time. The epic has since been called by critics “the finest film of modern times”.