Oklahoma -on the cheap
QUESTION Why was the Hollywood musical Oklahoma! filmed in Arizona? THE simple answer is the cost — it was much cheaper to film in Arizona than in Oklahoma.
The 1,200-mile journey from the studios in California to Oklahoma, through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and back, would have been unnecessarily expensive and a huge waste of filming time.
There were actors, horses, lorries, technicians and a steam train to transport, not to mention corn stalks to create ten acres of a cornfield as ‘high as an elephant’s eye’ — a lyric from the classic song Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’.
Arizona and the San Raphael Valley were easily accessible from Hollywood. Thanks to the vast desert landscapes, the valley had a long history as a film location for cowboy movies.
There is no truth in the story that Arizona was chosen because alcohol was banned in most of Oklahoma and the film’s lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II liked a drink!
Oklahoma! was the first collaboration between Richard Rodgers, who wrote the music, and Hammerstein, and was a hit on stage in 1943 and as a film in 1955.
Set in 1906, it tells the story of farm girl Laurey Williams and her courtship by rival suitors, cowboy Curly McLain and the sinister Jud Fry.
Oklahoma! gave 18-year-old Shirley Jones her big break. She secured the stage role of Laurey in 1954 and was given the film role the next year.
Ironically, considering the change in location, in 2007, Oklahoma! was chosen by the U.S. National Film Registry of the Library of Congress to be preserved for all time as a culturally and historically accurate recreation of the period.
Danny Darcy, Reading, Berks. QUESTION Are there any comic sci-fi novels to rival the works of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy? DON’T panic! Earth has been demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, leaving 6ft ape descendant Arthur Dent to hitchhike around the galaxy with his guidebook, towel and outlandish alien companions. This is the basis of The Hitchhiker’s Guide series, which is justifiably thought of as the greatest work of comedy sci-fi.
Adams tapped into an existing genre, albeit a niche one. An early example was The Pete Manx Adventures by Henry Kuttner and Arthur K. Barnes, under the pen-name of Kelvin Kent.
Published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in the late Thirties and early Forties, the series dealt with the temporal romps of carnival barker, conman and small-time crook Pete Manx.
He always ends up in the laboratory of Dr Mayhem, whose unreliable time machine launches Pete into the past where he finds himself in hotter water than before.
Another popular work is Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat, created in 1961, featuring James ‘Slippery Jim’ Bolivar diGriz as a rogue smuggler, similar to Han Solo in Star Wars.
Harrison also wrote the satirical sci-fi novel Bill, The Galactic Hero (1965), a clever send-up of the Vietnam War, about a simple farm boy who is lured into the Empire Space Corps.
Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers by Grant Naylor might be based on the popular TV show, but it is a great read, giving an in-depth look into the lives of some of sci-fi’s favourite characters: Dave Lister, janitor and last human in the universe; Arnold Rimmer, uptight and deceased hologram; and The Cat, a highly evolved moggy.
Naylor’s writing partner Rob Grant has also come up with sci-fi comedies, including Colony (2001), the story of the inhabitants of the Willflower, a spaceship populated by the hopeless descendants of humanity’s finest, who were on a mission to colonise the stars.
John Scalzi’s Redshirts has taken the Star Trek subplot that when the crew beams down to a planet, the unnamed guys in red always get killed — this book offers them the chance to survive.
Liam Alcott, Haverhill, Suffolk. QUESTION What became of Yasser Arafat’s Christian wife, Suha? SUHA was born in Jerusalem on July 17, 1963, into an affluent Roman Catholic family. Her father, Daoud Tawil, was an Oxford-educated banker, and her mother, Raymonda Hawa Tawil, was a poet, writer and Palestinian militant who was arrested several times by the Israelis.
Suha met Arafat in 1985 and acted as his interpreter when he visited France in 1989. They secretly married on July 17, 1990, when she was 27 and he was 61. Suha converted to Sunni Islam at the time of her marriage.
Their daughter Zahwa was born on July 24, 1995, in France. When the authorities revoked Suha’s citizenship, she moved to Malta, where she still lives.
J. Alia, Leicester.