- Rock Hudson, The Golden Blade, 1952. Universal called it an Eastern. ‘Twas set in ancient Basra. With Anita Ekberg as a hand-maiden and Hudson (rather than Curtis or Farley Granger) as Harun Al-Rashid (or, if you will, Hamlet) out to avenge his father’s murder. With the magic sword of Damascus instead of pensive soliloquies. Much more fun than expected. In earlier years, Hudson and the then Anthony Curtis had support roles in I Was a Shoplifter, 1949. Next time they filmed together was the starry casting for Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d… 31 years later!
- Robert Wagner, Prince Valiant, 1954. One famous hair-style should not be hidden inside another!
- John Derek, The Ten Commandments, 1954.
- Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back, 1955. The WWII hero backed off, worried people would think he was “cashing in” on his fame as America’s most decorated soldier. “I don’t think I’m the type. Maybe Tony Curtis would do.” No, because Curtis looked like a hero, while it was difficult to imagine the skinny, shy Murphy killing 240 German soldiers, wounding and capturing heaps more and winning the Congressional Medal of Honor, highest bravery award that a USoldier can receive. No, said Universal we want you and it took 20 years and Jaws to finally score better at the box-office.
- Farley Granger, The Naked Street, 1955. n Independent producer Edward Small was thinking big. He wanted Bogie and Tony Curtis as the racketeer and his son-in-law. He got Quinn and Farley Granger. And lousy reviews.
- Elvis Presley, King Creole, 1957. . Before Elvis there was… everybody! Marlon Brando, John Cassavetes, Tony Curtis, James Dean, Ben Gazzara, Paul Newman. No wonder Elvis was so keen on the role – Danny Fisher, created in the book, A Stone for Danny Fisher, by Harold Robbins – a young Jewish boxer who had to become a singer in the Presley picture. Both Dean and Newman passed as the tale (when still about a boxer) was much the same as the biopic of boxer Rocky Graziano, Somebody Up There Likes Me, that Jimmy was preparing for and that Newman inherited after Dean’s shock death. It was Presley’s fourth movie and it showed, but he gave it his best shot kept and Danny showed what might – should – have been if his manager, Tom Parker, had allowed him to similarly stretch in other movies before they became a succession of extremely bad jokes.
- Montgomery Clift, The Yong Lions, 1957. Fox won rights to Irwin Shaw’s WWII novel in 1951 and ran through three directors before letting the project be totally ruled by the MCA talent agency. Second director Mark Robson suggested Curtis as the Jewish GI, Noah Ackerman. No, said MCA, reserving the other German and American lions for its clients, Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. Tony Randall was offered the third lion, Michael; Whiteacre. No, said MCA again, it must be Dean Martin – or we remove Brando and Clift. Fox gave in as easily as it did about the white-washing of the s originally unrepentant Nazi played Brando – using only about one third of his talent, complained Clift. And that is how MCA saved Martin’s career after his split with comedy partner Jerry Lewis.
- Dean Martin, Rio Bravo, 1958.
- Ricky Nelson, Rio Bravo, 1958.
- Charlton Heston, Ben-Hur, 1958.
Sword and sandal epics were in. And producer Sam Zimbalist, who’d made one of the biggest – Quo Vadis, 1950 – was back in Rome in charge of the better (well, William Wyler was directing) re-make of the 1923 silent Ben-Hur, racing chariots and all. Sam even considered retaining his Vadis trio: Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Stewart Granger. Friendly rivals Marlon Brando and Paul Newman were up for the titular Judah. Still smarting from his 1954 debut, The Silver Chalice, Newman hated ancient Rome costumes, or cocktail dresses as he termed them. Sam also short-listed Richard Burton (from The Robe, 1953), , Montgomery Clift, Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson (furious with Universal refusing to loan him out), Van Johnson (no, really!), Burt Lancaster (an atheist with no interest in Christianitycommercials, although he had earlier tried to mount his own version), true Brit Edmond Purdom… plus Italians, known and unknown: Vittorio Gassman and Cesare Danova. MGM voted Heston, CB De Mille’s Moses in The Ten Commandments, 1954. According to “contributing writer” Gore Vidal, Willie Wyler called Heston wooden. Brando, for one, would not disagree. Yet, Judah Ben-Heston won his Oscar on April 4 1960. - Jack Lemmon, Some Like It Hot, 1958. For some time it was Curtis and Frank Sinatra as the two jazzmen on the lam from gansgters… hiding out in an girls’ band. Not a great idea as they’d just finished Kings Go Forth – so first shots of them in drag would bpund to be headlined: Queens Go Forth. Once Wilder landed Jack Lemmon, the director immediately switched his stars. Lemmon was no longer Joe the randy sax player nor would Curtis be Jerry the earnest, adaptable and wacky bassist. And a 100% perfect comedy was born.
- Audie Murphy, The Unforgiven, 1959. Burt Lancaster suggested Tony (after making Trapeze and Sweet Smell of Success with him). “But I’d just been a racist in The Defiant Ones.” John Huston called his Red Badge of Courage star for his third major film only in a 21-year career, ending as it began as a B-movie Jesse James. Whatever turned on Huston about the Ben Meddow scenario did not transfer to the screen.
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Larry Blyden, What Makes Sammy Run?, TV, 1959.
It was 1955 and the the mighty agent Lew Wasserman, warned off clients Curtis and Eddie Fisher, from Budd Schulberg’s 1941 roman-a-clef about hack reporter Sammy Glick lying, cheating, backstabbing his way to the top of Hollywood’s power game. What Fisher called the ultimate Jewish hustler was a classic negative Jewish stereotype that pissed off Wasserman (and Sam Goldwyn who’d tried go stop publication). It was too close for their comfort. So they even implied anti-Semitisim, which the Jewish author Budd Schulberg scoffed at – “Sammy’s victims were also Jewish.” (It’s like calling any Robert Madoff project, anti-Semitic). Budd (and Stuart) Schubert’s script was divided into two halves for Breck’s Sunday Showcase on NBC in 1959, Delbert Mann directing Larry Blyden (who?) as Sammy. First dramatised on TV in 1949, with José Ferrer, the book became a Steve Lawrence musical on Broadway in 1964. But as for the cinema? Nada! “Sinatra nearly happened once,” Budd told me at a Deauville festival, when he could see only Tom Cruise as Glick. “Steven Spielberg said it was anti-Hollywood and should never be filmed,” laughed Budd. Yet, Spielberg’s DreamWorks bought the rights for Ben Stiller to actor-direct. Or, to block it, for ever more. Which is exactly what happened between 1992-2009 – and ever since! : Curtis made it anyway, only his version was Ernest Lehman’s Sweet Smell of Success, 1956 ,when his memorable role of Sidney Falco was Sammy making a comeback under another name. - Geoffrey Horne, Giuseppe venduto dai fratelli/The Story of Joseph and His Brethern, (UK: Sold Into Egypt), Italy-Yugoslavia, 1960. Planned for Curtis (and Rita Hayworth) in the 50s. Clifford Odets first wrote it for Cary Grant. Frank Capra was working on another version when Columbia’s chief died and “it was cancelled before Harry Cohn’s body was cold.” Finally made in Italy with the young Columbia find who’d saved David Lean from drowning during The Bridge on the River Kwai. (Omar Sharif said he was signed to double the star on Egyptian locations … before any star had been signed).
- Paul Newman, The Hustler, 1961. “Couldn’t do it because of another movie.”
- Montgomery Clift, Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961. Greatly impressed by Curtis during The Defiant Ones, 1957, producer-director Stanley Kramer wanted Curtis for a surviving Nazi victim giving evidence in one of the various post-WWII Nuremberg trials. Schedules, however , got in the way. In bad shape at the time, Clift took four days to complete the seven-minute scene!
- George Peppard, Breakast At Tiffany’s, 1961. When director John Frankenheimer was prepping it for Marilyn – before Blake Edwards took over because fional, choice Audrey Hepburn had never heard of Frankenheimer. Blake called Curtis back for The Great Race, 1965 – their fourth partnership after Mister Cory, 1957, The Perfect Furlough (UK: Strictly For Pleasure), 1958, and Operation Petticoat, 1959.
- Rock Hudson, Lover Come Back, 1961. The suavies – Tony Curtis and his idol Cary Grant – were being called for Doris Day’s new screen lover. Until co-producer Stanley Shapiro (on of the writers of this and the previous Pillow Talk, 1959) said: “Wait a minute it’s for Doris and Rock.” Of course it was. It became the second of their three rom-coms (all rjffs on the Doris-Clark Gable Teacher’s Pet) enabling Doris to change image she said, to “a new kind of sex symbol – the woman men wanted to go to bed with, but not until they married her.”
- Dean Martin, What A Way To Go! 1963. A certain Louisa May Foster takes her shrink through her five late husbands – every one a laugh. (If only). Prepared for Marilyn Monroe before her tragic death, I Love Louisa was given to Elizabeth Taylor and, finally, Shirley MacLaine. In the Liz line-up, Curtis was booked for Hubby #1, a department store mogul called Lennie Crawley, no less. Normally this is where I add: You can never go wrong with a Crawley. Not this (terrible) time!
- Marlon Brando, Bedtime Story, 1963. Or, King of the Mountain, when the comedy’s con-men went from Cary Grant-Rock Hudson to Cary Gant-Tony Curtis to Rock Hudson-Warren Beatty to finally – incredibly! – David Niven-Marlon Brando. For the 1988 re-hash, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, they became Michael Caine-Steve Martin.
- George Segal, King Rat, 1964. . “Just wasn’t available,” he told me in London. ..Blacklisted Hollywood writer Carl Foreman (High Noon) decided to film James Cavell’s tough book about his three years as a WWII prisoner of the Japanese. With the finest UK actors: new guys Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, veterans Trevor Howard, John Mills. He then felt he had no more to say about war after The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Guns of Navarone and The Victors. UK writer-director Bryan Forbes made it his Hollywood debut, bravely side-stepping Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra for the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf find, George Segal – as the titular wheeler-dealer-fixer-conniver who all but ends up running the jungle camp.
- Paul Newman, What a Way to Go!, 1964. A certain Louisa May Foster takes her shrink through her five late husbands – every one a laugh. (If only). Prepared for Marilyn Monroe before her tragic death, I Love Louisawas given to Elizabeth Taylor with Marilyn’s Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Marcello Mastroianni, David Niven. Finally, Shirley MacLaine wed to Robert Mitchum, Paul Newman, Dick Van Dyke… but not Frank Sinatra who wanted $500,000 or no show. Oh and Dean Martin as a department store mogul called Lennie Crawley, no less. This is where I usually say: And you can never go wrong with a Crawley. Not this (terrible) time! Steve McQueen and Charlton Heston were up for Hubby #2, Paul Newman’s American in Paris artist. Sounded like a reprise for Gene Kelly. Except he was Hubby #4, described as a song and dance man about to break into Hollywood – what at age 51! Yes, the movie was that bad. “An abomination,” said The New Leader critic John Simon.
- Paul Newman, Lady L, 1965. An exit of Houdinian skill. “I bought one share in MGM stock and threatened to sue as a minority stockholder for mismanagement of the studio unless they released me from the contract. They did…. Terrible script! I just couldn’t do it… even though they’d paid me $400,000 while hanging about, waiting for it to start.’ Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida became, once producer Carlo Ponti heard about it, Newman and Sophia Loren.
- Doug McClure, Beau Geste, 1966. With beau Dean Martin, Tony as brother John and Charlton Heston as the brutal sergeant Dagineau. Then, Universal went cheaper.
- Marcello Mastroianni, Lo straniero/The Stranger, Algeria-France-Italy, 1966. French superstar Alain Delon and maestro Luchino Visconti had already worked together on stage on stage and screen.So now surprise when they announced plans to film Albert Camus’ ennui-filled novel (L’Étranger, 1942). Visconti planned to ” really film the book.” Producer Alfredo De Laurentiis wanted more drama – “accentuate the colours” – and told Delon to choose: “Him or me.” Delon chose home.”The biggest regret of my life – of my career!”Visconti was considering two Hollywoodians, Tony Curtis and George Chakiris, when De Laurentiis said: “Why not Marcello?” Bingo!
- Albert Finney, Two For The Road, 1967. Originally, Audrey Hepburn’s husband was American and rejected bv Paul Newman and (so he claimed in his 12008 auto-bio) Tony Curtis. Then, he was nearly Michael Caine before Albie rushed to work with the glorious Hepburn in Stanley Donen’s delightful take at love and marriage, written by Frederic Raphael.
- Omar Sharif, Funny Girl,1968. Tony was all set for Nicky Arnstein – until understanding that the on-screen emphasis would be 99.9% on Barbra Streisand.
- Elliott Gould, The Day They Raided Minsky’s, 1967. Not fully in love with “the major musical comedy about the last days of burlesque.” Curtis was keen but “you gotta tell Norman [Lear, co-producer and scenarist] to put some meat on the bones.” Curtis didn’t wait. He became The Boston Strangler, giving up on April 19, 1925… the day they (say they) invented strip-tease in New York.
- Richard Chamberlain, The Count of Monte Cristo, TV, 1975. The cousins from Hell, Golan & Globus (not yet Cannon), planned it in ’74 after making Lepke with Curtis. When the project moved, he stayed on as the villainous Count Mondego. “Anybody in this business should take any job he can get.”
- Roger Moore, Gli esecutor (US: Street People; UK: The Sicilian Cross), Italy, 1975. Director Maurizio Lucidi seemed to like The Persuaders, TV, 1971. And if he couldn’t get Danny Wilde, he’d make do with Lord Brett Sinclair – who also happened to be a certain Commander Bond.
- Richard Chamberlain, The Man in the Iron Mask, TV, 1977. Also announced in ’74. “I’d decided to make a few pictures for young people before I get too old.”
- Oliver Tobais, The Stud, 1977. Earlier in the 70s, Tony Curtis agreed to play the titular louse opposite Joan Collins in the movie of her sister Jackie’s soft-porn book. The project never flew. (Well, Curtis was 46 at the time, bit old for a stud). Next choice was Paul-Michael Glaser. He was still stuck in Starsky and Hutch (Joanie had guest-starred in the 1977 Voodoo Island episode). Finally, Tobias, a Swiss-born and cheap Brit, was put to stud. “He thought he was the Second Coming,” said Joanie. “It ruined my career,” he complained. Big hit though. As Collins rescued her career by giving her fans what they’d been hoping to see for 23 years – Joanie swinging naked on a trapeze… as she had been forbidden to do in the stuffy ‘54-Hollywood version of The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing.
- Warren, Beatty, Bugsy, 1991. The film that started Curtis’ decade-long cocaine battle… This was not the Beatty script, of course. But the same Jewish gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, credited with creating Las Vegas. Curtis was due to play him in 1967. Instead, six years later, he tackled another Jewish hood, the infamous Murder Inc chief, Louis Buchalter, in Lepke – which featured a Bugsy played by (wait for it) Clement von Frankenstein. In vogue in ’91, Bugsy Siegel was also played by Armand Assante in The Marrying Man and Richard Grieco in Mobsters.
- Terence Stamp, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Australia, 1994. An even more obvious idea than Tim Curry, leggy Dr. Frank-N-Furter as Mitzi – greatly improved upon by Stamp.
- Colin Farrell, Phone Booth, 2001.
After about 30 years of B-pix, directing 18 of them, Larry Cohen moved from B to A List scripter at 58. “I wrote the character of a small-time hustling publicist. I patterned him on Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success and even had Tony ready to star but…” It took 40 years to get his suspenser made. Alfred Hitchcock wanted it in the ’60s, but neither man could work out why the hero stayed trapped in the titular box. By the ’90s, Cohen found the (all-American) idea of a sniper – threatening to shoot the hero if he left the booth. Director Joel Schumacher talked to Jim Carrey when they made Batman Forever, 1994, then Mel Gibson, Will Smith, Mark Wahlberg and, finally, the young Irish lad he’d made into a sudden star with Tigerland, 1999. But young film fans with their cell phones, didn’t know from … whaddyer call ’em again… phone booths? Cohen heard them and brought his tale up to date as Cellular for Kim Basinger and Chris Evans in 2003. - Earl Schuman, Stacy’s Mom, 2009. Californian auteurPatrick Sayre said one of his pre-production highlights was when Tony Curtis, impressed by what he’d been hearing about the script, offered to play the cameo of a history teacher. Some reports add “allegedly” to this nugget. Others suggest Curtis couldn’t have been that smitten or he would have cut his fee to make it happen. The low budget coudn’t afford him, even for a day, in the tale of four prepubescent lads falling in lust with a pal’s mother: Brittney Powell. Curtis died, at 85, two months after the film opened in 2010.
- Jack O’Connell, Unbroken, 2014. Laura Hillenbrand’s book was sub-titled: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. The hero, Louis Zamperini, required such attributes again during a 54-year wait for his incredible story to be filmed. Universal bought rights in the 50s for Curtis to make after Spartacus. Who better for the Depression Era trouble-maker becoming the youngest American competing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, crash-landing in the Pacific during WWII, drifting for 47 days in a crowded boat, then enduring unimaginable torture from brutal Japanese guards as a POW (they never broke him). More recently Nic Cage was keen. Then, Angelina Jolie took over the project as director and turned the rising UK Skins find, O’Connell, into Zamperini… who saw a rough-cut on Jolie’s laptop weeks before he died in hospital from pneumonia at age 97 on Juy 2, 2014 The film opened four months later.
Birth year: 1925Death year: 2010Other name: Casting Calls: 37