6 ERROL FLYNN He was discovered by Cinesound Studios casting director John Warwick in Sydney, Australia, in 1932. Warwick found some amateur footage of Flynn taken in 1930 by Dr Herman F. Erben, a filmmaker and tropical-disease specialist who had chartered navigator Flynn’s schooner for a tour of New Guinea headhunter territory.
7 ROCK HUDSON Hudson, whose original name was Roy Fitzgerald, was working as a truck driver for the Budget Pack Company in 1954 when another driver offered to arrange a meeting between Fitzgerald and agent Henry Willson. In spite of Fitzgerald’s professed lack of faith in his acting abilities, Willson took the aspiring actor under his wing, changed his name to Rock Hudson, and launched his career.
8 JANET LEIGH She was a psychology student when MGM star Norma Shearer happened to see a photo of her at a ski lodge in northern California where her parents were employed. Shearer took it to the studio with the result that Leigh was given a role in The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1947).
9 GINA LOLLOBRIGIDA An art student in Rome, she was stopped on the street by director Mario Costa. She let loose a torrent of abuse about men who accost defenceless girls and only when she paused for breath was he able to explain that he wanted to screen-test her for Elisir d’Amore (1946). She won the part.
10 CAROLE LOMBARD She met director Allan Dwan in Los Angeles in the spring of 1921. Dwan watched 12-year-old Carole – then tomboy Jane Alice Peters – playing baseball outside the home of his friends Al and Rita Kaufman.
11 IDA LUPINO She was introduced to director Allan Dwan in England in 1933, while Dwan was casting a film, Her First Affair. Forty-one-year-old Connie Emerald was trying out for a part, but Dwan found Connie’s 15-year-old daughter Ida better suited for the role.
12 MAE MARSH One of the first actresses to achieve screen stardom without previous stage experience, Marsh was a 17-year-old salesgirl when she stopped by the Biograph Studios to see her sister, Marguerite Loveridge. She was spotted by director D.W. Griffith, who was having problems because none of his contract players was willing to play the lead in Man’s Genesis (1912) with bared legs. Marsh had no such inhibitions when Griffith offered her the part.
13 RYAN O’NEAL He was befriended by actor Richard Egan in 1962 at the gymnasium where both Egan and O’Neal worked out. ‘It was just a matter of Ryan himself being so impressive,’ said Egan.
14 TELLY SAVALAS He was teaching adult-education classes in Garden City, New Jersey, when an agent asked him if he knew an actor who could speak with a European accent. He tried out himself and landed a part in Armstrong Circle Theater on television.
15 CHARLIZE THERON The South African-born actress studied dance and modelled in Milan and New York before heading to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of acting. After several difficult months in LA, Theron’s discovery came in a Hollywood Boulevard bank. When a teller refused to cash an out-of-town check for her, she threw an enormous tantrum which caught the attention of veteran talent manager John Crosby, who happened to be standing nearby. Crosby handed her his business card as she was being thrown out of the bank. After signing with Crosby, Theron landed a star-making role as a sexy assassin in 1996’s 2 Days in the Valley. She ended her association with Crosby in 1997, and has starred in such films as The Cider House Rules, The Italian Job and Monster, which won Theron the Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar in 2004 for her portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos.
16 LANA TURNER She was observed in Currie’s Ice Cream Parlor across the street from Hollywood High School in January 1936. Billy Wilkerson, editor of the Hollywood Reporter, approached her while she was drinking a Coke.
17 JOHN WAYNE He was spotted by director Raoul Walsh at Hollywood’s Fox lot in 1928. Walsh was on his way to the administration building when he noticed Wayne – then Marion Morrison, a studio prop man – loading furniture from a warehouse onto a truck.
– D.B. & C.F.
Patrick Robertson’s 10 Tales of the Movies
Patrick Robertson’s earlier selections of movie lore appeared in The Book of Lists #3 and The Book of Lists ’90s Edition. He is the author of The Book of Firsts and the continuously updated Guinness Movie Facts and Feats, both of which have appeared in many languages, and is currently engaged on The Book of American Firsts.
1. DISNEY’S HOLY GRAIL
The rarest and most sought-after cartoon film of all time was rediscovered in 1998 when a 16mm print, bought in London for £2 from the disposal of the Wallace Heaton Film Library in the late 1970s, was identified as the only known copy of Walt Disney’s first-ever production, the seven-minute-long Little Red Riding Hood. It was made in 1922 at Disney’s Laugh-O-Gram Films, a small animation studio he established in Kansas City and which went bankrupt within a year. Little Red Riding Hood is particularly notable to Disney buffs because, unlike the later Hollywood cartoons such as Mickey Mouse, it was drawn by the 21-year-old fledgling film-maker himself. The reason that the unique print remained unidentified for so long was that the pirated copy bought by silent-movie collector David Wyatt had been retitled Grandma Steps Out. Only when he took it to the Disney company 20 years later was it finally revealed that the holy grail of animated films had been found at last.
2. FATHER OF THE FEATURE
Every movie buff knows that in the early days of cinema all films were one-reelers until D. W. Griffith came along and invented the full-length feature film with epics like Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Right? Wrong. The first full-length feature film was called The Story of the Kelly Gang, about desperado Ned Kelly, and it was made in Australia in 1906. And nor was this just a one-off. Other Australian features followed, with no fewer than 16 in 1911, the first year in which other countries began to make full-length movies, with France, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Serbia and Spain in the vanguard. In 1912 Hungary made more features than any other country and in 1913 it was Germany. With imports flooding in from France, Germany, Italy and Denmark, American producers were finally forced to accept what they had steadfastly refused to believe: that the kind of unsophisticated people who frequented movie houses were able to concentrate on a story lasting as much as an hour and a half. There was an explosion of production in 1914 with the US releasing no fewer than 212 features, of which one, Judith of Bethulia, was indeed by D. W. Griffith. But it is the long-forgotten name of Melbourne theatrical impresario Charles Tait, producer and director of The Story of the Kelly Gang, which should be honoured as that of the true father of the feature-length movie.
3. THE CRYING GAME
Not all actresses can cry to order and some directors have been known to resort to less than gentle measures to coax tears from the dry-eyed. Maureen O’Sullivan’s tear ducts failed to respond in her deathbed scene as Dora in David Copperfield (1935) until director George Cukor positioned himself out of camera range of the bed and twisted her feet sharply and painfully. Victor Fleming achieved the same effect with Lana Turner, never noted as one of Hollywood’s most accomplished thespians, by jerking her arm behind her back and giving it a vicious twist. Kim Novak, unable to produce tears on demand in the waterfall scene with William Holden in Picnic (1955), asked director Joshua Logan to pinch her arms hard enough to make her cry. The scene took seven takes and after each one a make-up artist swabbed Novak’s arms to cover up the marks. Logan was so distressed by the need to inflict physical hurt on his star that he threw up afterwards. Later Ms Novak was to accuse him of unprompted physical abuse when she recalled the episode. Gregory La Cava was able to obtain convincing tears from Ginger Rogers in response to Katharine Hepburn’s calla lilies speech in Stage Door (1937) only when he announced to her that a message had just come through to say that her home had been burned to the ground. Norman Tourog directed his own nephew, Jackie Cooper, in Skippy (1931). When he was unable to get the 10-year-old to cry on cue, he told him that he would have his dog shot. The ensuing waterworks helped young Cooper on his way to what would be the youngest Oscar nomination for the next 40 years. Otto Preminger stooped even lower when he needed spontaneous tears from a dozen small Israeli children in a scene in Exodus (US 1960) to show fear at an imminent