← Fade to Chat: Golden Age Cinema17 Jun · 52 min

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)17 Jun52 min

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Cindy and Marty settle on a favorite large cast comedy, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) Film Overview• Title: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) | Director: Stanley Kramer | Screenplay: William & Tania Rose• Stars: Spencer Tracy, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Jonathan Winters• Supporting: Jimmy Durante, Peter Falk, Buster Keaton, Don Knotts, Jack Benny, The Three Stooges, Edie Adams, Carl Reiner, ZaSu Pitts, and more• Budget: $9.4M | Box Office: $60M | Format: Technicolor / Ultra Panavision 70• Runtime: 192 min (premiere) / 163 min (release) / 197 min (2014 Criterion restoration)• Opened November 7, 1963 at the Cinerama Dome — the very first film shown there Production & Behind the Scenes• Working titles: "Where, But In America?" then "One Damn Thing After Another." Kramer briefly considered a fifth "Mad."• His first comedy as director — and the hardest, he said, he ever made.• Shot summer 1962 during TV hiatus. Desert scenes in Palm Desert, CA — now mostly country clubs and golf courses.• Kramer let Silvers run crap games to keep actors nearby. Jerry Lewis, uncredited, reportedly lost $500.• ~80 of ~100 working U.S. stunt people appeared — 39 performers, $252,000.• Title animation by Saul Bass, executed by Bill Melendez, who hid his crew's names in the letters for three frames. Schulz saw it, called Melendez, and the Peanuts specials followed.• The NY premiere was attended by Robert and Ted Kennedy. President Kennedy was assassinated five days later.• UA cut the film from 192 to 163 minutes against Kramer's wishes; the 2014 Criterion restoration (197 min) is closest to his 202-minute original. The Cast• Spencer Tracy received top billing; co-stars listed alphabetically. He worked nine days at three to four hours daily, sharing no screen time with any co-star until two hours in.• Ethel Merman's role was written for Groucho Marx as a doctor. When that fell through, Kramer swapped the gender — Groucho later joked he was to have played Mrs. Marcus.• Terry-Thomas got the role after Peter Sellers asked too much. His stunt double painted a tooth black to match Thomas's famous dental gap.• Jack Benny's cameo went first to Stan Laurel, who pledged never to perform again after Hardy's death. The bowler hat was already in the scene — shot for a stand-in before the offer was made.• The Three Stooges, as firemen with no dialogue, drew the biggest audience reaction in the film. Their 1930 debut Soup to Nuts also had them as firemen.• ZaSu Pitts and Willis H. O'Brien both died before release — the final film for each.• Arnold Stang broke his forearm days before filming and wears mechanic's gloves throughout to hide the cast. Stunts, Effects & Locations• Frank Tallman flew the plane-through-the-billboard stunt. A miss meant a sheared wing; impact stopped one engine and the plane barely made it back.• The water tower fell before the truck hit it; Linwood Dunn used optical split-screen to sync them in post.• The blowtorch-into-stairs gag took 86 takes.• The fire escape finale used miniatures, reuniting King Kong (1933) pair O'Brien and Marcel Delgado — O'Brien's last film. Script & Story Notes• Durante's dying closeup is Ultra Panavision — the largest-format shot in the film and his final theatrical feature.• Allen Jenkins, Arnold Stang, and Marvin Kaplan had all starred in Top Cat (1961), inspired by The Phil Silvers Show. Silvers is also in this film.• Jim Backus as the drunken pilot says "It's the only way to fly" — the slogan of Western Airlines, whose animated mascot