A) A real live hillbilly—but she was illiterate and couldn’t read the script.
From 1950 to 1971, buying or displaying a Chinese stamp was considered “trading with the enemy.”
B) Actress Bea Benaderet—but her boobs were too big for the part. She went on to play Cousin Pearl in The Beverly Hillbillies and later had her own show, Petticoat Junction.
C) Both of the above.
D) None of the above—There was no “Granny” character called for in the original story, but Irene Ryan, wife of Filmways chairman Jack Ryan, had just completed an acting class and was itching to try out her training. She badgered her husband for a full nine months for a part in one of his shows, but he refused to give her one...until she threatened him with divorce, that is. He finally gave in and ordered that the character be created for The Beverly Hillbillies. Why that show? He was convinced the series would bomb.
4. Why was Raymond Bailey so believable in his role as Milburn Drysdale, the Clampett’s banker (and a complete jerk) who lives next door to them and manages their family fortune?
A) He really was a banker.
B) He really was a jerk.
C) Trained as a classical Shakespearean performer by Lawrence Olivier, Bailey was one of the greatest actors of his time. The other members of the Hillbillies called him “the human chameleon” and boasted that he could have played Granny if he had wanted to.
5. Donna Douglas, who played Elly May, was as friendly in real life as she was on the show, but she was downcast and moody when she returned from vacation to film the 1966 season. Why?
A) She was bitten by a wild racoon during a camping trip and had to endure more than a dozen painful rabies shots into her abdomen. The experience traumatized her so much so that she didn’t want to work with animals anymore. But studio officials insisted...and for a while she was depressed because she had to work with them.
B) She fell in love with Elvis Presley while filming a movie with him in the off-season...but he didn’t return her feelings.
C) Eager to cash in on her affinity with “critters,” Douglas wanted to form her own “Elly May” pet food company...but studio officials vetoed the idea and she spent the entire 1966 season in a funk.
Playing football was outlawed at Yale University in 1822. Maximum fine: 50¢.
6. How well did the show fare with critics and the public?
A) The critics loved the show’s traditional family values (Jed took care of Granny, and Elly May and Jethro lived at home until they married)...but the public hated it.
B) The critics hated it—even so, the public loved it.
C) The critics and the public loved it, especially Ryan’s portrayal of Grannie—she became known as “the backwoods Bette Davis.”
7. At first, Buddy Ebsen didn’t want the part of Jed. Why?
A) He’d already played too many hillbillies and was afraid of being typecast as a hayseed.
B) He hated hats, especially the ratty old one he wore on the show.
C) He’d lost the part of the Tin Woodsman in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz (and almost lost his life after the poisonous silver makeup infected his eyes and lungs and forced him to drop out of the film), and never got over it. He was trying to drum up support for a sequel. He took the part of Jed after the Oz project collapsed.
8. What did the owners of the Bel-Air mansion used in the series think of the show?
A) They loved it—after the show became popular they sold the estate for 10 times what they had paid for it.
B) They hated it—the house became a sort of West Coast Grace-land, with fans of the show hounding them day and night.
C) They never saw it—the house was owned by Ravi Shankar, the famous guru and mentor to the Beatles. He didn’t own a TV.
9. What ill-fated celebrity had a part in the show as a typist in the Commerce Bank’s secretarial pool?
A) Janis Joplin
B) Sharon Tate
C) Christine Jorgenson
10. What was Granny Clampett’s real name on the show?
A) Elvira Clampett
B) Daisy May Moses
C) Nadene Peckinpah
Brazilian fans are so rowdy that many of the country’s sports fields are surrounded by moats.
I WAS A TEENAGE MONSTER MOVIE
In the late 1950s, teenage culture was big business—Elvis, James Dean, and rock ’n’ roll were bringing in the bucks. That’s when (not so coincidentally) a brand new kind of exploitation film appeared—the teenage monster movie. Today it’s just a cliche, but “I Was a Teenage...(fill in the blank)” was hot stuff for awhile. Here’s Uncle John’s salute to the best (and worst) of them.
IWAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF (1957)
Starring: Michael Landon, Whit Bissell, Yvonne Lime, Barney Phillips, Joseph Mell. Director: Gene Fowler Jr.
The Plot: Tony Rivers—played by Michael Landon in his first feature film—is a hot-tempered teenager who’s always getting into fights. (In fact, the first scene is a fist thrown right at the audience.) But when he accidentally hits his girlfriend, Arlene, he realizes things are out of control. So he decides to see Dr. Brandon, a local psychiatrist.
Bad move. Brandon doesn’t want to cure Tony...he wants to experiment on him. Using “retrogression therapy,” he injects Tony with a serum and hypnotizes the teenager to bring out his “primitive” side. Now whenever Tony gets startled, he grows body hair and fangs and suddenly gets the urge to kill. After killing at least one person and scaring the hell out of everyone in town, the creature is gunned down by the cops. Of course, he kills the crazy shrink just before he dies. Inevitable final line (delivered by the cop): “It is not for man to interfere in the ways of God.”
Commentary: Not a bad film, as ’50s schlock goes. Legend has it that after seeing the poster, American International Pictures’ (AIP) head Samuel Z. Arkoff declared it “A million dollar title in a hundred thousand dollar movie.” AIP knew how to exploit teenagers, but by today’s standards, they kept it pretty tame. In her website, “And You Call Yourself a Scientist!,” Liz writes:
Astonishingly, I Was A Teenage Werewolf provoked the ire of politicians and moral crusaders alike, who accused the film of “promoting juvenile delinquency.” One can only assume that—as is often the case with politicians and moral crusaders—they hadn’t actually seen the film they were attacking.
Legal logic: In 19th-century England, attempting suicide was a crime punishable by death.
It is quite clear that at first AIP underestimated the cash crop their adolescent audiences represented. Later, when the money began pouring in, the executives pitched their films more and more to the teenagers, and cared less and less about upsetting the adults; but this early effort is not only a moral little film, it is populated with some of the best behaved teenagers and the most caring adults ever put on screen. Cops, teachers, parents—they only want what’s best for the kids. There’s even a subplot about the perils of parental neglect. As for the kids themselves, well, you should see what constitutes their idea of a hot party. Warning: before you get to the good part of this film, you have to sit through some of the most painfully embarrassing teenage party scenes ever committed to film, which cause Tony’s girlfriend to announce that “I’ve never had so much fun!”—sad, but probably true.
IMMORTAL LINES
They don’t write ’em like this anymore:
Dr. Brandon (the Mad psychiatrist): “At last, after years of searching, I’ve found a suitable person for my experiment! His record at school, what the principal told me, and what I learned through Dt-Sgt Donovan gives him the proper disturbed emotional background. And with what I found out from the physical examination, this boy’s my perfect subject! There were certain tell-tale marks on his body only I would recognize...”
Assistant: “But you know what might happen!”
Brandon: “‘Might’? In science, one must be sure!”
Brandon: “Mankind is on the brink of destroying itself! The only hope for the human race is to hurl
it back to its primitive dawn, to start all over again. What’s one life compared to such a triumph?”
Brandon: “Through hypnosis, I’m going to regress this boy back...back into the primitive past that lurks within him! I’m going to transform him, and unleash the savage instincts that lie hidden within!”
Janitor: “I know what killed him. He was killed by...by a werewolf!”
Policeman: “A what?”
Janitor: “In the old country, in my little village in the Carpathian mountains, there was a story....”
Japan has only half the population of the U.S., but buys 10 times as many comic books.
Assistant: “Alfred, you read the paper! You know what happened!”
Brandon: “There’s a difference between a newspaper story and a scientific report!”
Assistant: “Aren’t you wasting your time? Or do you have a second victim in view?”
Brandon: “I’m not wasting my time, and I don’t like to hear the subject of a world-shaking experiment referred to as a ‘Victim’!”
Brandon: “We’ll have it all on film, from the time I give him the injection through the transformation! And then no one will doubt my word! Even the most exacting, the most sceptical of scientists will be convinced that I have penetrated the deepest secrets of creation!”
MORE TEENAGE MONSTER-MANIA
I Was A Teenage Frankenstein (1957) “Herman Cohen’s sequel to I Was a Teenage Werewolf, with Whit Bissell reappearing as a mad doctor—a relative of the infamous Baron. Ludicrous as its title, with severed limbs graphically offered up for their shock value (and severed limbs in 1957 were an onscreen rarity)....You, too, will be a teenage zombie if you sit through this.”
—Creature Features, John Stanley
Teenage Caveman (1958) “After...I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, American International Pictures further mined the youth market with-what else—Teenage Caveman. Robert Vaughn stars as the boy (he would later become the man...From U.N.C.L.E., that is), who defies his elders by venturing...into the forbidden land...where he finds ‘the monster who kills with a touch.’ Directed by Roger Corman in ten days on a $70,000 budget.”
—Cult Flicks and Trash Pics
Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) ‘“They blast the Flesh off humans!’ claimed the ads. A young alien falls for a teenage earth girl and ruins the plans of his invading cohorts by blowing them up. The invaders, who arrived in a flying saucer, carry deadly ray guns and breed giant lobster monsters for food. Only the shadow of one of the creatures is shown in this extremely low-budget feature.”
—The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Michael Weldon
That white half-moon under your fingernail is an air pocket. No one knows why it’s there.
DISASTER FILMS
Some films, like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, are about disasters. Other films are disasters. Take these losers, for example:
ISHTAR (1987)
Description: Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty starred as inept singer-songwriters who travel to the Middle East looking for work.
Dollars and Sense: Budgeted at $27.5 million, Ishtar wound up costing $45 million...and losing $37.3 million.
Wretched Excess: Director Elaine May decided the desert’s natural sand dunes didn’t look authentic—so workers spent nearly 10 days scraping away the dunes to make the desert flat. Ishtar’s crew spent days looking for a suitable animal to play a blind camel. They found the perfect camel, but when they came back to pick it up, the owner had eaten it. Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty each received $6 million—roughly the cost for filming the entire film Platoon.
The Critics Speak: “It’s interesting only in the way that a traffic accident is interesting.”—Roger Ebert
INCHON (1982)
Description: A 140-minute epic about General Douglas MacArthur’s military excursion into Korea. Bankrolled by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who shipped the entire cast and crew to South Korea to film on location.
Dollars and Sense: “They wasted tremendous amounts of money in every way imaginable,” said one crew member. “Always in cash. I got the feeling they were trying to make the film cost as much as possible.” The film ultimately cost $48 million...and lost $48 million, making it the biggest bomb of the 1980s.
Wretched Excess: At first Inchon was dismissed as just another weirdo cult project, but then Moon began to sign big names to the project, including Jacqueline Bisset, Ben Gazzara...and Sir Laurence Olivier as General Douglas MacArthur. “People ask me why I’m playing in this picture,” Olivier told a critic. “The answer is simple: Money, dear boy.” He was paid $1.25 million for the part...and later sued for an additional $1 million in overtime when the film ran months behind schedule. Terence Young received $1.8 million to direct.
From the age of 20 to his death, Winston Churchill smoked an estimated 300,000 cigars.
Cast and crew waited for two months for their equipment to clear customs—at a cost of $200,000 a day!
A typical day of shooting featured a fleet of ships, six fighter bombers, and a bagpipe marching band. The film’s opening was hyped with “The Inchon Million Dollar Sweepstakes.” Prizes included a Rolls Royce, paid vacations to Korea, MacArthur-style sunglasses and “50,000 beautifully illustrated Inchon souvenir books.”
The Critics Speak: “Quite possibly the worst movie ever made... stupefyingly incompetent.”—Peter Rainer, L.A. Herald Examiner “A larger bomb than any dropped during the Korean police action.”—Variety
HEAVEN’S GATE(1981)
Description: Written and directed by Michael Cimino, whose Deer Hunter had won Oscars for best director and best film the previous year. Kris Kristofferson starred as an idealistic Harvard graduate who became a U.S. marshall in the Wyoming territory.
Dollars and Sense: Studio executives put Cimino’s girlfriend in charge of controlling expenses; he wound up spending nearly $200,000 a day. Originally budgeted at $7.8 million, the film cost $44 million to make. It lost over $34.5 million.
Wretched Excess: Harvard refused to let Cimino shoot the film’s prologue on their campus, so for an additional $4 million, the director took his crew and cast to England and shot the scene at Oxford. In the final version, it was less than 10 minutes of the film.
They picked Glacier National Park as their ideal location, then painted acres of unspoiled grassland there with green and yellow paint to make it look more “natural.” Two hundred extras were hired for a roller skating scene, given a cassette with their skating music, and sent home for six months to practice.
The Critics Speak: “Heaven’s Gate fails so completely,” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times, “that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect.”
In case you were wondering: The average rhino’s horn grows at a rate of three inches per year.
MYTH AMERICA
More of the stories we now recognize as American myth, but were taught as history for many years. These might surprise you.
MANHATTAN ISLAND
The Myth: In 1626, Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from the Canarsee Indians for $24 worth of beads and other trinkets.
The Truth: Minuit did give 60 guilders (roughly $24) worth of beads, knives, axes, clothes, and rum to Chief Seyseys of the Canarsee tribe “to let us live amongst them” on Manhattan Island—but the Canarsee actually got the best of the deal...because they didn’t own the island in the first place. They lived on the other side of the East River, in Brooklyn, and only visited the southern tip of Manhattan to fish and hunt. The Weckquaesgeeks tribe, which lived on the upper three-fourths of the island, had a much stronger claim to the island, and were furious when they learned they’d been left out of the deal. They fought with the Dutch settlers for years until the Dutch finally paid them, too.
THE LIBERTY BELL
The Myth: The Liberty Bell, which rang at the first public reading of the Declaration of Independen
ce, has always been a precious symbol of our nation’s heritage.
The Truth: The bell, installed in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia in 1753, was almost bartered off as scrap metal in 1828 when the building was being refurbished. According to one account, “The Philadelphia city fathers...contracted John Wilbank, a bell maker from Germantown, Pennsylvania, to cast a replacement for the Liberty Bell. He agreed to knock $400 off his bill in exchange for the 2,000-pound relic. When Wilbank went to collect it, however, he decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. ‘Drayage costs more than the bell’s worth,’ he said.” The city of Philadelphia actually sued to force him to take it. But Wilbank just gave it back to them as a gift, “unaware that he’d just bartered away what would become the most venerated symbol of American independence.”
Boris Karloff’s real name was William Henry Pratt.
WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE
The Myth: Emanuel Leutze’s famous painting is a dramatically accurate portrayal of General Washington’s famous crossing.
The Truth: According to Scott Morris, there are inaccuracies.
• “The crossing was in 1776, but the Stars and Stripes flag shown wasn’t adopted until the next year.”
• “The real boats were forty to sixty feet long, larger than the rather insubstantial ones shown.”
• The soldiers wouldn’t have pointed their guns in the air, because it was snowing.
• “Washington certainly knew not to stand—a pose that would have made the boat unstable, and put him in danger of falling overboard.”
• The river in the painting isn’t the Delaware. Leutze worked in Düsseldorf, Germany, and used the Rhine River as his model.
HAMILTON WAS AN INNOCENT VICTIM
The Myth: Alexander Hamilton, who was killed in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr in 1804, was too decent a man to shoot his rival. So he shot in the air instead...and died when Burr paid him back by shooting to kill.
The Truth: “For nearly two centuries,” Steve Talley writes in Bland Ambition, “history saw Hamilton as something of a martyr who...never meant to harm Burr. But it now appears that he lost the duel...because he tried to use an unfair advantage to kill the vice president.” Talley continues:
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