Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/855478
28 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2017 THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY her life story, Love, Lucy, not published until 1997. Also, Ball had seen the 14-year-old dancer Miller on stage and urged a screen test for her as the dance routine partner for Rogers' Jean Maitland. Miller got around the child labor laws by providing the studio with fake documents saying she was 18. For the crucial role of the one-play success unable to find another part, Andrea Leeds was cast on the strength of her performance in Howard Hawks' Come and Get It (1936), based on a Ferber novel. Of Stage Door, she later recalled, "Gregory La Cava had all of us girls come to the studio for two weeks before the shooting started and live as though we were in the lodging house itself. He had a script girl take down our conversations and he would adapt these into the dialogue." During the shoot, the director had the actors wear their own clothing rather than studio wardrobe. In a letter to Berman dated May 28, 1937, while the cast was still rehearsing, Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration (PCA), objected to details in the script. The key snag was that Menjou's Powell and Linda Shaw (played by Gail Patrick, who was Carole Lombard's mean sister in My Man Godfrey) "maintain an illicit, immoral, adulterous relationship…not shown with proper compensating moral values." Beyond that, the letter said, "The entire script is replete with loose and suggestive dialogue and with detailed discussions of sex subjects for purposes of comedy." After a conference with La Cava and Veiller, Breen followed up with a letter on June 2 confirming that "Linda will be a 'gold digger' rather than a 'kept woman,'" and three pages of dialogue would be deleted or changed, including such phrases as "on the make." Production started a few days later, on Monday, June 7, the same morning that "Blonde Bombshell" Jean Harlow died at the age of 26. The news spread quickly through Hollywood and was said to have created an even stronger sympathetic cohesion among the women gathered to make a film about their profession. The Director of Photography was Robert De Grasse, ASC, who was later nominated for an Oscar for his work on Vivacious Lady (1938), also starring Rogers. He ended his career in 1950s and '60s television, including stints on I Love Lucy (1951-57), Arden's Our Miss Brooks (1952- 56) and The Eve Arden Show (1956-57). In the film, Menjou's Powell attempts to seduce both Hepburn's and Rogers' characters and, in his 1948 autobiography, It Took Nine Tailors, Menjou recalls that in his first scene with Hepburn, the director kept telling De Grasse to take the light "off Menjou and put it on Hepburn." As a star for almost 20 years, with third billing in the movie, the actor complained to La Cava. The director told him, "Next to all the kids in this picture, your face looks like an aerial shot of the Rocky Mountains." Sound recordist John L. Cass spent most of his 20- year career with RKO, working on such films requiring evocative sound as Leo McCarey's Love Affair (1939) and Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942). In Stage Door, his meticulous use of mic and boom consistently covers the group scenes in the boarding house sitting room to pick out and focus attention on key lines and phrases among Stage Door. RKO/Photofest