![]() ![]() While producer Berman did not want the movie business criticized in his picture, he had no problem with portraying the similar commercial demands and compromises in live theatre. Many of Kaufman’s plays had been adapted to the screen but, seeing the finished film with almost all of his dialogue missing, he called it “Screen Door.” He was also reacting to the movie’s elimination of a subplot in the play that chastised Hollywood for luring actors away and compromising their art, as well as losing a leftist writer character, based on Clifford Odets. With characters fuller than their stage originals, the movie Stage Door shines as a comedy/drama of women as individuals defining themselves in an art that is also a business. In doing so, the director, writers and cast created a movie every bit as fresh, funny and deeply moving today as it was in 1937 - and far more engaging than its now-dated source. But, building on the ensemble representing a spectrum of social backgrounds and attitudes, the movie tied the women’s separate situations in the play into involving, interwoven plots to depict them developing emotional bonds and conflicts with one another. Like Ferber and Kaufman’s play, the movie was set in the fictional Footlights Club, based on the actual Rehearsal Club, founded in 1913 as a “residence for professional women of the theatre” on West 53rd Street, just off Broadway. Stage Door.įor RKO, along with five writers (three uncredited) and the cast itself, La Cava reshaped his source material extensively. When sound came in, he made more than 20 fast-paced comedies and dramas for seven of the eight major studios. Moving from animated films into live-action shorts in 1921, La Cava started directing features in 1924. ![]() Teaming stars Katherine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers with a distinctive ensemble including Lucille Ball, Eve Arden and Ann Miller in their first major supporting roles, Berman gave the project to the improvisational firecracker La Cava, fresh from his screwball comedy hit My Man Godfrey (1936), shot at Universal. Berman as an ideal property for the studio’s great range of contracted woman players, and he bought the rights for $125,000. Kaufman, had opened at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre with Margaret Sullavan in the lead, and was hailed by New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson as “a three-act panel of brilliant details.” Running for 22 weeks, the moderate stage success was seen by RKO Radio Pictures producer Pandro S. Less than a year earlier, on October 22, 1936, the original play, written by Edna Ferber and George S. The next day, its New York opening grossed over $13,000 at the Radio City Music Hall, earning almost $300,000 there in the next three weeks. Director Gregory La Cava introduced moviegoers to a host of energetic young women living together in a theatrical boarding house, struggling for survival and stardom on the New York stage, when his Stage Door premiered in San Francisco 80 years ago, on October 6, 1937.
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