The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
This past Sunday, the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League celebrated the 75th Annual Tony Awards. Considering past intersections of Tony gold and Oscar success, it's fun to speculate which honorees might one day reprise their roles on the big screen and play a part in a different sort of awards season. Not that repeating an acclaimed stage performance for film leads to a surefire triumph with the Academy. For every Yul Brynner in The King and I and Viola Davis in Fences, there's a Robert Preston in The Music Man and Bea Arthur in Mame. That latter film saw 2022's Lifetime Achievement Tony Award winner Angela Lansbury ditched by Warner Bros. in favor of Lucille Ball, despite having originated the role to great acclaim on stage and already being a film star. It was a move everyone involved grew to regret.
Thankfully, the studios didn't replace Arthur from the original Broadway cast, so there's still something to love about the misbegotten Mame…
5 random things that happened on this day, January 3rd, in showbiz history
1897 Marion Davies born in Brooklyn. The 1930s film star is best remembered in history as the mistress of tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Multiple films have featured their relationship including current Oscar hopeful Mank (2020).
1952Dragnet begins airing in its regular time slot Thursdays at 9:00 PM on NBC (a couple of weeks after the pilot airs). The influential series -- which basically created the #1 tv genre, the procedural, will run for eight seasons, be relaunched in the late 1960s for another four seasons and spawn three movies. The last of those was a comedy in 1987 starring Tom Hanks just before Big served as the bridge between popular comic actor and serious actor, netting Hanks his first Oscar nod. Two short-lived one season attempts to revive Dragnet were attempted in 1989 and 2003 respectively...
Today is the centennial of one Lucille Ball, born 100 years ago on this very day in New York. Her most famous incarnation was obviously "Lucy Ricardo" on television's beloved sitcom I Love Lucy. But until I Love Lucy and intermittently afterwards, she graced the silver screen, too.
The earliest entry in her filmography I've personally seen is the wonderful ensemble comedy Stage Door (1937) which is an absolute must-see for all actressexuals. No matter where you look on the screen in that film aboard a boarding house for Broadway dreamers, there's a screen goddess for your eyeballs: Hepburn, Ball, Rogers, Miller, Arden. Ball's last film was the ill fated musical Mame (1974) which is often ridiculed for its liberal use of ye olde 'smear the screen with vaseline' de-aging technique and for the quality -- or lack thereof -- in the singing. But even if Mame isn't anything like a classic, if you erase it from film history you lose that awesome scene of her and Bea Arthur crooning frenemy classic "Bosom Buddies" and we can't have that!
[Editor's note: Ugh, what is up with that clip. It's in widescreen but it looks like pan & scan. Is the aspect ratio off on all the vhs/dvd copies available?]
But the Lucy movie my mind always drifts to is Douglas Sirk's Lured (1947). It's worth a look for the curio factor alone, it being an early Sirk, a thriller which predates and predicts Hollywood's serial killer craze by a good 50 years, and an odd snapshot of a moment in time where it looked like she might become a dramatic screen star instead of the loveable goofball TV comic she was clearly meant to be.
If you're interested in Lucy, there's a new book out called Lucille Ball FAQ which is a treasure trove of weird trivia. For example, did you know that she actually auditioned for the part of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind (then again, who didn't?) or that she really wanted but just barely missed out on being Sugarpuss O'Shea in screwball classic Ball of Fire or that that she turned down the fabulous "Alexandra" in Sweet Bird of Youth?(Geraldine Page earned a well deserved Oscar nomination and got to fondle Paul Newman. What was Lucy thinking?)
A new book and a still from Stage Door (1937) with Hepburn, Ball and Ginger Rogers
Did you know that the first celebrity name-checked on I Love Lucy was the movie star Gregory Peck? Or that in one episode Ball mimics her Stage Door castmate Katharine Hepburn's most famous line-reading from that movie "the calla lilies are in bloom again"?
The subtitle of the book is "Everything Left To Know About America's Favorite Redhead". I 'm not well versed enough in Ball's lore to know if that's accurate but the book certainly offers 'A Lot to Know About America's Favorite Redhead.'
Wednesday, June 15, 2022 at 11:02AM 
