What were the “Scarlett Letters”?
The Scarlett Letters were letters written to David O.
Selznick by hopeful unknown actresses desiring to play Scarlett O’Hara.
The first movie based on a TV series was Dragnet (1954). It was based on the NBC series of the same name (NBC, 1952-59, 1967-70).
Alfred Hitchcock wrote the foreword to the first edition of Hall-well’s Filmgoer’s Companion (1965). Leslie Halliwell, pioneer film encyclopedist, died in January, 1989.
Groucho Marx was suggested to MGM to play Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, but only in jest.
Marni Nixon’s only film appearance was as a nun in The Sound of Music (1965). Nixon is better known for dubbing other people’s singing, such as Deborah Kerr’s in The King and I (1956), Natalie Wood’s in West Side Story (1961), and Audrey Hepburn’s in My Fair Lady (1964).
In 1940, when producer Sam Katzman brought some of the kids to Monogram Pictures. The kids (who eventually included Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, Billy Halop, and others) had started out as the “Dead End Kids” in Dead End (1937, Samuel Goldwyn). They had gone on to work for Warner Brothers and Universal. Their…
Marion Davies, an actress for whom Hearst founded a movie production company, Cosmopolitan Pictures (which was absorbed by MGM in 1925), was William Randolph Hearst’s extramarital love interest and the model for Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane (1941).