Mickey Rooney

Posted on by Tony CrawleyCategories:Actors

  1. Jackie Kelk, Born to be Bad, 1933.  After 65 of his Mickey McGuire shorts, the offer for The Mck to join the third-time teaming of Cary Grant-Loretta Young was, according to Hollywood Reporter, a “crack at the big time.”  Then again, not.

  2. Jackie Cooper, O’Shaughnessy’s Boy, 1935.      One MGM kid for another… The project was set up in 1932 for Cooper and Wallace Beery. When it seemed they be unavailable in ’35, Rooney got the gig.. Not for long. Cooper became free; Beery, too.

  3. Leo Gorcey, Mannequin, 1936.   The Mick was to join Spencer Tracy and Joan Crawford’s sole film together  but was delayed on Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.   Enter Gorcey, sans his fellow Bowery Boys.
  4. Donald O’Connor, Sing You Singers, 1938.     The role of Mike Beebe, played by  O’Connor, at 12, was originally meant for The Mick…  at 18, But Rooney was scheduled to make another picture at the same time. O’Connor was later Universal’s Rooney.  “I was,” said The Mick, “a 14-year-old boy for 30 years.”
  5. Richard Carlson, No No Nanette, 1939.     MGM had been keen on securing the rights for Rooney and Judy Garland. Instead UK producer-director Herbert Wilcox provided a lesson in how not to make a musical. First, star your future wife, Neagle, not known as a singer. Then, sign a bunch of LA characters (Eve Arden, Helen Broderick, even Zasu Pitts) and give them precisely nothing to do. Oh and slash the 15 musical numbers to… two!
  6. Robert Walker, See Here, Private Hargrove, 1943.         MGM first wanted The Mick as the journo Marion Hargrove supplementing his pay by writing about his Fort Bragg basic training. The Army banned the real Hargrove working on the movie.   Military revenge!
  7. Robert Walker, Her Highness and the Bellboy, 1944.      All set to be the bellboy when Uncle Sam called – hey, there’s a war on, buddy!  Walker took over opposite Hedy Lamarr in her final MGMovie.
  8. Peter Lawford, Good News, 1947.     Mickey director Busby Berkeleyr and producer Arthur Freed rplanned this remake as a sequel to their Babe in Arms,  1939. Then, LB Mayer decided to use the swing music craze – and it became Strike up the Band,1940.  Charles Walters directed the MGMusical re-make with June and Peter Lawford.  . (They  were  reunited 25 years later for They Only Kill Their Masters, 1972, the last movie shot on the old MGM backlot).
  9. Van Johnson, Battleground, 1949.      Bumptious and big-headed Rooney (his words) was so livid about being left out of the WWII drama that he quit MGM after 15 amazing years and his movie career hit the skids without such lavish support.   By 1970, he offered to take over the ailing studio with a schedule of 20 movies for $1m apiece.
  10. Gene Kelly, Summer Stock, 1949.      End of an era… The Mick was in, but The Mick was down, way down, no longer MGM’s big cheese.  Kelly subbed as a favour to Judy Garland, whose career and life were in meltdown.  This was her first gig since being fired from Annie Get Your Gun, She was down, her weight was up,  and her delays many.  Allyson was drafted into her place, but LB Mayer decided to give Judy a second  chance. Her last chance… This proved her last Metro movie and MGM ended her contract during  her next job, Royal  Wedding, and called up Jane Powell.  A victim of MGM, itself, as much as drugs and booze, Judy never made another film until A Star Is Born in 1953.
  11. Dan Dailey, A Ticket To Tomahawk, 1949.        The Mick had various issues with his contracted B-thriller Quicksand. First, Friztz Lang decided against directing (thereby changing the thriller’s staus from A to B, even B-), then the ex-Mrs Rooney, Ava Gardner, refused to to play house… and anyway, all Rooney wanted to do was romance Anne Baxter on the 1876 the Tomahawk and Western Railroad.
  12. Donald O’Connor, Francis, 1950.    The Mick usually did anything offered – good, bad, terrible – and the only way the William Morris merry men could free him of his Rooney Inc. partnership with Sam Stiefel, was to let Rooney make three Stiefel  films at about $25,000 each. However, Stiefel had no faith in the third – sold it to Universal and the mule made more money than other two. When Rooney succeeded O’Connor for Francis in the Haunted House, 1956, the gloss was off the roast.

  13. Dean Stockwell, Kim, 1950.    
    Fourth time lucky for MGM’s desire to film the Rudyard Kipling classic 1900 adventure  about Kimball O”Hara, the orphaned  son of a British soldier  in the 1886 India under British rule. Kim posed as a Hindi beggar boy to help the UK Secret Service spy on Russian agitators.  Irving Thalberg won the rights for MGM in 1934 and a year later, the ex-Little Lord Fauntelroy, Freddie Bartholomew was selected opposite  Lionel Barrymore as his Indian mentor, Mahbub Ali the Red Beard, in 1935.  The project was shelved for another Kipling tale, Captains Courageous, with Spencer Tracy and young Freddie – announced as Kim again in 1937, opposite Robert Taylor as Red Beard.  After various delays Mickey Rooney (like who else) was the  1942 hero  in a typically Metro all-stars  line-up…  John Carradine, Laird Cregar, Cedric Hardwicke, Basil Rathbone, George Sanders, Akim Tamiroff andConrad Veidt  WWII killed that as the script was too pro-British Empire and anti-Russia. Finally, MGM’s Boy With Green Hair, Dean Stockwell,  was Kim opposite  (a way too old and hardly Indian)  Errol Flynn. He quit King Solomon’s Mines to be Red Beard, because he didn’t fancy living  in a tent in Africa, while he had a hotel in Lucknow…  where Stockwell was doubled by a local  kid.

  14. Alvy Moore, Susan Slept Here, 1953.     In the mix, with David Wayne, for Virgil, gofer for…  well, it was between Dan  Dailey, Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum  before Dick Powell signed for his 58th and final movie role before TV producing and film directing.  Debbie Reynolds was Susan and the US Catholic Legion of Decency (!) was  aghast by the title… but not by  George Washinhton Slept Here in  1942.  
  15. Glenn Ford, Blackboard Jungle, 1954.     MGM wanted one (anyone!) of their remaining contract guys as the schoolteacher Dadie: Rooney or Robert Taylor (!)  Director Richard Brooks wanted “new faces, unpolished actors” – and Ford looked that way in his new, ex-military buzz-cut. Among others passing muster were Vic Morrow (beating Steve McQueen to his role), Sidney Poitier, future director Paul Mazursky and a certain Jameel Farah –  better known on TV as Jamie Farrin M*A*S*H, 1972-1983.  
  16. Stephen Boyd, Billy Rose’s Jumbo, 1962.   If at first you don’t succeed…  MGM’s  first cast in 1943:  Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland.  In 1947: Frank Sinatra-Judy Garland  – or Gene Kelly-Kathryn Grayson.  1949:  Frank Sinatra-Esther Williams. 1952:  Donald O’Connor-Debbie Reynolds. 1962: Dean Martin-Doris Day. Finally: Stephen Boyd was Day’s (weak) partner in her last musical.  And after all that, it flopped. 
  17. Sid Caesar, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, 1963.  Producer-director Stanley Kramer’s movie was stuffed full with stars – mainly comics. Not all agreed to join  the party, being terrified at the prospect of working with the great Spencer Tracy.  Hardly a problem for Judy and Mickey Rooney, originally booked as Monica and Melville Crump. However, Judy had problems with her TV show, so The Mick settled for “Dingy” Bell as Caesar and Edie Adams played the Crumps. 
  18. Dan Duryea, The Bounty Killer,  1964.       Ex-con turned actor turned scenarist Leo Gordon designed this Western for Mickey – as a timid Easterner becoming the titular killer caught out West  between  two gals.  However, veteran director   Spencer Gordon Bennet and his wife respun it for Duyrea  (and son Peter). Plus, as if Bennet knew it was his final  gig,  a gallery of B heroes: Richard Arlen, Johnny Mack Brown Buster Crabbe and, also in his last hurrah, as The Man in the Cantina – Hollywood’s first cowboy star, GM “Bronco Billy” Anderson. But nothing for Leo.  He wanted Rod Cameron’s role, but Rod was bait for the foreign co-financing and Bennet preferred to go against type and use Buster Crabbe as the villain. “He understood. Leo was a nice guy but slightly intimidating in size and appearance.”  The reason why he was such a fierce villain. “What else? I look like a heavy. I’m 6′ 2″, 200 pounds, craggy-ass face.”
  19. Liberace, The Loved One, 1964.  “The motion picture with something to offend everyone…”  It would have been more so if Spanish legend Luis Buñuel had managed to  make it with Alec Guinness in  the mid-1950s. Instead, the newly Oscared UK director Tony Richardson made a mess of  Evelyn Waugh’s 1948 satire of the American funeral home business.  With a wide range of bizarre cameos , included Liberace beatjng The Mick to Mr Straker, a smoothie coffin salesman. It was his last film and first role far removed from any piano.
  20. Burgess Meredith, Batman, TV, 1966-1968.  Spencer Tracy was actually offered The Penguin.  Honestlyl  The Mick likewise refused..  Enter: Meredith. And anytime he was back in LA from New York or foreign  gigs, there would be an episode awaiting  him. 
  21. John Huston, Myra Breckinridge, 1969.    In Hollywood, the in-Brit  director Mike Sarne, was hoping to just “write the script  and get the fuck out of here” – back home to delight his bank manager with 75,000 clams! Sarne saw Myra’s antagonist, old cowboy star Buck Loner, as a great comic role for Rooney. Huston thought different and chatted up the Fox folk.  “I can’t even describe how  threatened  I felt,” said the pop singer turned film-maker (Joanna). “He’s  fuckin’ John Huston, for Chrissakes!”  So he attacked him… as  “a decrepit old hack.” A term also suitable for his other ideas:  Rooney and Jack Oakie. The Mick called the movie  a disgrace to the motion picture industry.
  22. Jack Klugman, The Odd Couple, TV, 1970-1975.     Close… but Klugman just beat The Mick to being Tony Randall’s  room-mate, Oscar Madison for six years  and… Tony and Jack  were still Felix and Oscar on-stage 20 years later.

  23. Carroll O’Connor, All In The Family, TV, 1971-1979.    The ground-breaking producer Norman Lear’s original choice for Archie Bunker, lightly based on the abrasive BBC series, Till Death Us Do Part.  The Mick passed.  So didTom Bosley, Scott Brady, Jackie Gleason and Jack Warden. When Lear called up O’Connor, the actor-producer-director and Actors Studio life member was living in Italy. He’d read all about the BBC show and told his wife it couldn’t work in the US.  He insisted, therefore, on a return plane ticket go Rome!  He lasted the first 1968 pilot, Justice For All  (Bunker was then Archie Justice) and the second, Those Were the Days, 1969, and played Bunker 305 times (counting spin-offs) – an extremely lite version of Warren Mitchell’s iconic BBCharacter, Alf Garnett. O’Connor still won four Emmy awards from eight nominations.
  24. James Coburn, Hard Times, 1975,   Director Walter Hill’s first thought. was Warren Oates.  His second was… The Mick. Whose career covered everything  from … Andy Hardy Finds Love to Internet Love…!    He was aming  my most memorable interviews – at Pinewood Studios, circa, 1978,  as he played Daad El Shur (!) in Kevin Connor’s Arabian Adventure.  When he died, at 93, in 2014, he had scored 338 screen roles during an astonishing 88 years … with two more films waiting for him. 
  25. Will Arnett, Ice Age: The Meltdown, 2004.   Both The Mick and Mark Hamill were earlly Blue Sky thoughts for voicing the Lone Gunslinger Vulture. That became Arnett’s first animation gig. He would voice another vulture, Vlad the Bird, in Horton Hears a Who, 2007, and win many more toons including: Horst in Ratatouille, Despicable Me’s Mr Perkins, Surly Squirrel in the The Nut Job movies and… the Lego Batman.

 Birth year: 1910Death year: 2014Other name: Casting Calls:  24