"My name is Sam Staggs." "I'm the author of All About Eve:" "The Complete Behind-the-Scenes Story of the Bitchiest Film Ever Made." "It was published in 2000 by St. Martin's Press, and it's still readily available." "I wrote it because it's the book I wanted to read." "No one really had told the entire story of All About Eve and the people who made it and who turned it into a Hollywood classic." "And so, when I set out," "I was rather sceptical as to how much information I would find because most of the people connected with the film were already dead." "Bette Davis was dead, Joe Mankiewicz, all of the stars except for Celeste Holm." "As it turned out, I found an incredible amount of information by talking to the survivors of the people who were in the film, and by doing a great deal of research, both the printed word and interviewing all kinds of people in Hollywood" "and scattered around the country." "The Sarah Siddons Award, which you see on screen right now, did not exist in 1950 when this film was made." "It was dreamed up by the writer/director Joseph Mankiewicz." "He did it rather as a sarcastic jab at theatrical awards, as well as a rather slight joke about the Academy Awards, which people put so much store by, then as now." "However, ironically, two years later in 1952, after All About Eve had become a very famous movie, a group of ladies in Chicago started giving Sarah Siddons Awards to the best actor or actress in a play which had appeared in Chicago" "during the preceding year." "Those awards, the Sarah Siddons Awards, are still being given in Chicago." "Various people over the years have won, famous people:" "Helen Hayes, Lauren Bacall." "And in the 1970s Bette Davis was given an honorary Sarah Siddons Award." "She had never appeared in a play in Chicago, but because of her immortal portrayal of Margo Channing, she received the Sarah Siddons Award." "The title All About Eve was not the original title for the film." "Originally, it was to be called Best Performance." "In the script, early on, in the voice-over by George Sanders, you'll hear "all about Eve,"" "In the script, when the producer Darryl Zanuck saw that phrase "all about Eve,"" "he underlined it very heavily with a lead pencil and made a note to Joseph Mankiewicz that he thought that would serve as a much better title than Best Performance." "And one can only wonder, half a century later, whether it would have indeed become the beloved classic that it is had it been called Best Performance rather than All About Eve." "Nowadays, if you say the phrase "all about Eve,"" "people are likely to light up and start quoting their favourite lines from the film because it has thousands, perhaps even millions, of devotees around the world." "Notice this look that Bette Davis is about to give to a waiter." "It says so much without saying anything, when he offers to pour her more champagne and she gives him a look and a brushoff." "It rather defines Bette Davis as Margo Channing." "The slightly scornful, downturned mouth, the world-weary eyes, the heaviness of it all, the been-there-done-that quality." "And yet, you always love her, no matter how jaded she comes across as Margo." "This man is Walter Hampden." "He was a distinguished actor in New York and in London." "He had played Shakespeare and all of the classic roles and he had appeared in silent films." "He is absolutely perfect as the master of ceremonies because he's just distinguished enough and also just long-winded enough to give the impression of a veteran actor at one of these events." "Walter Hampden once fired Bette Davis from a play when she was a very, very, very young girl in Boston, just trying to get a toehold in the profession." "She auditioned for a play and he turned her down." "While they were filming All About Eve, she reminded him of that." "And they were both very gracious about it because, after all, she had become a superstar by that time, and no hard feelings." "George Sanders, at the time, was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was not at all known then." "Her sister Eva was becoming very well-known." "Later, of course, they would become the fantastic and famous and much-married Gabor sisters:" "Magda, Zsa Zsa and Eva." "But at this time, Eva had the career, Zsa Zsa had none, and she was very unhappy about it." "She tried to persuade her husband, George Sanders, to speak to Darryl Zanuck about giving her a part in the picture." "According to some accounts, she wanted the Marilyn Monroe role, Miss Caswell, or even the young high school girl at the end of the film, Phoebe." "George Sanders told her at one point," ""Don't you think you're a bit old for Phoebe?"" "It's very, very unclear exactly how old Zsa Zsa Gabor was at the time." "She might have been a mere 15 or she might have been approaching middle age." "Her exact date of birth has always been a very, very, very well-kept secret." "In fact, probably even she has forgotten it by this point." "Notice the freeze-frame." "The action of the moving picture stops and it turns into a still picture." "This was one of the first uses of a freeze-frame in a big Hollywood picture." "It had been done before, but one could make a good case for Joseph Mankiewicz as the inventor of the freeze-frame." "Or, rather, the populariser." "Going back to the early 20th century," "DW Griffith had used a device similar to a freeze-frame." "Then Joseph Mankiewicz, in the 1930s, produced the Fritz Lang film called Fury, in which there's a freeze-frame." "And it was used again in The Philadelphia Story, also produced by Mankiewicz." "Now, it has become such a cliché that we don't pay much attention to it." "It really has lost its effectiveness." "Suddenly, if you don't know what to do with a film, you stop the action, or you end a film like that." "But here it was rather unusual, first of all, simply for being included in the film and also for the fact that it came early on." "It is taken up again near the end of the film, we go back to the freeze-frame and resume the story from there." "This alley is still very much where it always was in San Francisco." "It's the alley beside the Curran Theatre." "Joseph Mankiewicz, the director, and his cast flew up to San Francisco and filmed for several weeks in the spring of 1950." "They used the Curran Theatre because it was closer to Los Angeles and therefore less expensive to get to than a Broadway theatre would've been." "Also because it was a lovely place." "It was just the right size." "It gives the impression of a Broadway theatre, the right atmosphere and all that." "You can go in San Francisco to the Curran" "Theatre, which I believe is on Geary Street, you can go to the Curran Theatre and walk down this very alley and almost imagine that Eve Harrington is waiting there in the shadows." "Especially if you go in the evening." "It's an unusual and quite a nice feeling to capture." "Many people have debated over the years whether Margo Channing and her friends, her very sophisticated crowd, would have been taken in by the deceit and the machinations of a young woman such as Eve Harrington." "Wouldn't they have seen through her?" "And certainly you could argue the case this way or that." "But many people in the theatre are not immune to flattery, and a few well-chosen words of praise, such as Eve Harrington gives to Margo, will often do wonders." "Margo was a woman at a difficult time in her life anyway." "She was just turning 40, she was very insecure about herself, her looks, her career and the man she loved." "For that reason she was particularly susceptible to flattery, to the attention that Eve Harrington so readily gave her." "So from that point of view, it's not so hard to understand how a very worldly, sophisticated woman might fall victim to a predator such as Eve." "Bette Davis was not everybody's first choice to play Margo Channing." "Various other actresses were named and seriously considered, including Tallulah Bankhead, Susan Hayward, even Marlene Dietrich, and the Broadway star Gertrude Lawrence." "Bette was sort of a compromise in many ways because the other actresses, for various reasons, were not available or were not interested." "Joseph Mankiewicz and Darryl Zanuck could not agree for a long time on who would be better to play Margo Channing." "Zanuck would think of Dietrich and Mankiewicz would say no." "And Zanuck would maybe come up with Gertrude Lawrence and Mankiewicz would say no." "Finally, Joseph Mankiewicz thought of Bette Davis." "And she later said that this picture saved her from oblivion, that it was her resurrection." "Her career was in great trouble at the time." "She'd had a series of unsuccessful movies." "And several of the ones just before this had not made any money." "She had made the notorious Beyond the Forest which was a flop, really, at the box office." "No one had an inkling that 30 or 40 years later it would become a camp classic in its own right." "Bette Davis was considered over the hill." "She had left Warner Bros after 18 very tempestuous years." "She was not quite box-office poison, but she was only a few steps away from it when she got the role of All About Eve." "Casting decisions are always fascinating and, certainly in hindsight, we're often glad that certain people got a role or did not get a role." "Darryl Zanuck, the head of 20th Century Fox and the producer of All About Eve, wanted Jeanne Crain to play Eve Harrington." "She was his first choice." "She was under contract there at the studio, readily available." "The only thing, she wasn't a terrific actress, at least not in the opinion of Mankiewicz." "He later said he thought she lacked the "bitch virtuosity"" "necessary to play Eve Harrington." "Various other people were mentioned for the role, some of them quite startling choices." "One of the most unusual, perhaps, is Nancy Reagan, whose name was briefly on a casting director's list." "She was never really seriously considered for the role of Eve Harrington." "When I asked her about this during the writing of the book, she wrote to me saying that she was never aware that her name had appeared." "Ironically, Ronald Reagan's name also was on a list as a possibility for Bill Sampson." "According to Mrs. Reagan, her husband also was never aware that he had been mentioned very, very briefly for that role." "One can only wonder how the history of the United States and of the world might have been quite different had All About Eve starred Bette Davis," "Gary Merrill, Nancy Davis and Ronald Reagan." "Think about it." "Notice Eve Harrington's very silky voice throughout the picture." "Anne Baxter had a smooth silky voice, but she was directed by Joe Mankiewicz, here, to make it even smoother and silkier." "That is, when she was talking to her new friends, when she was speaking to Margo Channing, to Karen Richards." "In the few scenes where you see her alone, away from her circle of friends who can do great things for her, notice how the voice gets very tough, very hard-bitten." "At the end of the film when the high school student says to her," ""Hollywood." "You must be planning to stay a long time,"" "her reply is almost a growl: "I might."" "I was told by one of Joseph Mankiewicz's sons that Anne Baxter told him, before her death, that, indeed, this was all very, very carefully planned out and very intentional." "That when she was alone, off-camera, so to speak, in the privacy of her apartment or her room, speaking to people who were her inferiors, she could use her natural voice." "Any time she was "on," let's say, she was to use that very silky, trained, actressy voice." "Anne Baxter in other film roles did not really sound like this." "Of course there was a similarity, but she was much silkier here than in any other role." "Celeste Holm had had an enormous success on Broadway a few years before All About Eve." "She had played Ado Annie in Oklahoma." "She had gotten rave reviews for it." "Wasn't sure she wanted to go to Hollywood." "She had a couple of offers from Darryl Zanuck and perhaps from others." "Finally she went to 20th Century Fox in the mid '40s, signed a contract and they didn't know quite how to use her." "She was in Gentleman's Agreement for which she won best supporting Oscar." "After that she made a series of somewhat undistinguished pictures." "She was Joseph Mankiewicz's first choice to play Karen Richards, and it was perfect casting, as indeed all of his casting choices were for this picture." "She is perhaps the least deluded, of all the characters, by Eve Harrington." "At first she likes Eve, she has great sympathy for Eve, but Karen Richards is the first one really to catch on to Eve's plan." "That is, if you don't count Thelma Ritter." "She was wise from the very get-go." "Nobody could ever fool Thelma Ritter on screen, nor in real life." "Notice her first encounter with Eve Harrington." "She senses a fake, she senses a shark swimming in her territorial waters, and she doesn't like it at all." "All the others are so taken in by Eve's tale of woe." "The young husband killed in the war, serving his country, the fanatical devotion to Margo Channing, blowing the last of her money to see Margo Channing in San Francisco." "And then Thelma Ritter sticks a pin in that lovely balloon." "Notice the way this scene is filmed." "It's almost as though we and the characters there in Margo's dressing room, it's almost as though all of us form an audience for Eve, who is on stage." "This is her great moment." "This is make or break for her." "She went out there an unknown and she'll come off a star." "That is, if we swallow her story." "Notice how the characters in the dressing room are placed audiencelike, half-surrounding her as though she's on a tiny little stage right there and they have come in and taken their seats." "You didn't hurt my feelings, Miss Coonan." "Call me Birdie." "Although she says, "Call me Birdie,"" "notice throughout the picture that Eve Harrington never does call her Birdie." "They never get on a first-name basis." "There is a very good reason for that." "They're archenemies from the very start." "Gary Merrill, playing Bill Sampson, is perhaps at his finest hour." "He had been in movies for a few years, he was not really going anywhere," "and suddenly the magical role of Bill Sampson came along." "It was offered to him because he was under contract to 20th Century Fox." "He took it and had quite a success, off-screen as well as on, because, practically the first day on the set, he and Bette Davis fell for each other." "And a couple of months after the film wrapped, they married." "This was Bette's fourth marriage." "She had been divorced twice and widowed once." "When All About Eve started filming, she was in the midst of a very nasty battle with William Sherry, her third husband." "In fact, she had accused him of physical violence and that sort of thing and she had a bodyguard with her during the filming in San Francisco." "These matters were soon taken care of, however." "Divorces all around." "Gary Merrill divorced his wife." "And the two married and lived happily for a few weeks." "The trouble started almost immediately, but the marriage actually dragged out for the next ten years." "Only in 1960 did they finally divorce." "Neither remarried and both died in the late '80s within less than a year of each other." "Darryl Zanuck, the producer of the picture, was the head of 20th Century Fox." "That is, he was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, along with Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and the legendary studio heads." "The final decisions were made in New York at 20th Century Fox corporate headquarters." "But the day-to-day running of the studio was left almost entirely in the hands of Zanuck, casting choices and so on." "And he was one of the more literate studio heads at the time." "The moguls of that era often have a reputation as being simply illiterate merchants." "This is both true and untrue, because they often had an uncanny sense of story, of what the public wanted, of what made a good story, what didn't, what dragged, what was exciting." "Many, for reasons personal and professional, wanted the movies always to have happy endings and moral uplift of some kind." "Darryl Zanuck was rather more progressive than the others in this regard too." "He was one of the first to tackle such unheard of topics for the movies as anti-Semitism and racism." "He produced Gentleman's Agreement, which was certainly a strong statement against anti-Semitism." "He also was a pioneer in racial dramas." "He produced Pinky, starring Jeanne Crain and directed by Elia Kazan, in the late '40s." "And also a very tense racial drama called No Way Out in 1950, starring Linda Darnell, Richard Widmark and it marked the debut of Sidney Poitier for the movies." "Joseph Mankiewicz was a New Yorker, who had come to Hollywood in the '30s to join his brother, Herman J. Mankiewicz, the well-known screenwriter who collaborated with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane, one of the most highly-regarded scripts ever produced." "Young Joe Mankiewicz came out in the '30s and worked at MGM for a number of years." "He was always frustrated because he was kept in the role of producer." "He was kept in the role of producer, but he wanted to direct." "Finally, in the mid '40s, he left MGM and went to 20th Century Fox." "And he and Darryl Zanuck had an uneasy relationship, but, ultimately, a very profitable one for both, both artistically and financially." "Darryl Zanuck was liberal and progressive and fearless enough to let Joseph Mankiewicz get away with some rather daring kinds of films, including All About Eve, which doesn't seem particularly daring today but it went rather far in certain ways." "It was a picture for adults rather than the entire family." "Children wouldn't find much to enjoy in this film." "Mankiewicz had previously directed A Letter to Three Wives, and he had been given his artistic freedom more or less at 20th Century Fox." "He always complained that Zanuck chopped up his scripts and chopped up his pictures, but Mankiewicz had a tendency to be a bit long-winded, both in his writing and his direction, and one can only think, 50 years down the road," "that perhaps Zanuck's chopping, if chopping it was, benefited them both and served them both well." "The big break finally came in 1963 when Mankiewicz directed the ill-fated Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and Zanuck was the producer." "Finally, Zanuck took over the editing and cut out a couple of hours of the picture and Mankiewicz, exhausted by the terrible ordeal of two or three years on Cleopatra, never quite forgave Zanuck for that." "Mankiewicz was considered something of a misfit in LA, because he was an intellectual." "He had studied at Columbia University, he read, he was a great lover of the theatre, and he tended to denigrate movies somewhat." "He thought that the real artistry of acting, of writing, was for the stage, not for the movies." "In a sense, he was right, because there's virtually no censorship on stage, nor was there at that time, whereas the movies were very much under the control of the censors and of pressure groups around the country." "You see the airplane in the background?" "This is presumably Idlewild Airport, the name of Kennedy Airport before it was renamed for the assassinated president." "Plane travel in 1950 was considered, still, rather a risky business and it took quite a few hours and many stopovers to go from New York to Los Angeles." "In real life, Bette Davis did not fly to San Francisco from Los Angeles to film All About Eve, to film the location part in San Francisco." "The others did fly up." "All the rest of the cast, two or three in Darryl Zanuck's private seaplane, and the others flew in from around the country." "Bette Davis, however, was given the real star treatment." "She took the train." "Notice the tension between Thelma Ritter and Anne Baxter right here." "Birdie and Eve." "Eve has wasted no time in taking over." "She's becoming indispensable to Margo Channing and poor Birdie feels like a leftover." "Thelma Ritter and Bette Davis were great friends during the filming of this." "Never had a cross word, according to Thelma Ritter." "You can imagine how they would like each other, both rather gritty." "Bette Davis, perhaps, found in Thelma Ritter the security that she didn't find from other colleagues." "They were not in competition." "Thelma Ritter knew she was not a great beauty, nor had ever been." "She was an actress who was earning her money, and when it was over she didn't stick around, she flew back to New York to her husband and children." "The author David Shipman once commented that all bad plays seen on stage in movies are set in the South." "Perhaps Aged in Wood is a prime example of that." "It's very hard to imagine how the play, as presented here, would be very moving." "One wonders if Eve really is so overcome, if she really could watch that scene a thousand times, or if it's simply part of her plan to flatter Margo." "The play Aged in Wood seems to be a bit of Gone with the Wind, a bit of Jezebel, any number of old Bette Davis pictures at Warner Bros, and perhaps all kinds of other Southern epics and exploits." "Notice the evolution of Eve Harrington's wardrobe too." "We first see her in that drab little raincoat and the "funny hat," as Margo puts it." "Looking rather like a waif." "Now she has worked her way into Margo's life, she's looking much more chic, she has rather a well-tailored look." "As the film goes on, she becomes more and more chic." "She's given a dress that's a bit too "seventeenish" for Margo Channing, and she does a bit of alteration on it and turns it into something quite lovely." "Later on we see her in a cocktail dress, which is no match for Margo's own dress, however." "By the end of the picture, Eve Harrington has become a star with a star's wardrobe, and she knows how to wear it." "This is a great fright scene." "It's right up there with something out of Psycho." "Eve realises that she's been caught red-handed and she's not actress enough yet to cover it." "But Margo is very unsuspecting." "She still thinks that this naive kid is there only to do good for her." "Letters of complaint were sent to 20th Century Fox because of something that happens in the telephone scene after Margo hangs up from her conversation with Bill." "She lights a cigarette." "Several members of firemen's benevolent unions and other concerned citizens wrote letters complaining about this." "They said, "We have urged the studios not to include scenes of people smoking in bed" ""because it's very dangerous and hundreds of people die per year" ""in fires started by a cigarette that sets their bed on fire."" "Nothing was ever done." "Of course, the scene was not cut." "Had these groups known what was about to happen, they might have influenced this scene before the release of the picture." "As it turned out, we still see Bette Davis smoking in bed, and it's just as bad an idea now as it was then." "Bette Davis, of course, was noted as a cigarette smoker." "The total number that she smokes in this film is less than a dozen, however, although you might guess that she goes through a carton." "Everybody in the picture, every character, smokes, except Karen Richards." "Addison DeWitt, played by George Sanders," "Bill Sampson, played by Gary Merrill, and all the others." "Bette, of course, is the prima donna of smoking." "How many imitators have done Bette Davis with a cigarette in her hand?" "Eve is a little bit too officious in her attentions to Margo, and more specifically, to Margo's man." "It's crossing a boundary to write him letters and send telegrams without telling the boss, who, of course, in this case, is Margo Channing." "This is when the plot really kicks in, when Margo first has that stab of suspicion deep in her heart." "Birdie Coonan, played by Thelma Ritter, and Margo Channing, played by Bette Davis, seem to be made for each other in the film." "That is, they're the perfect companions." "Birdie is much more than a servant, much more than a maid, although she is a servant in a way, she's just brought in breakfast, she wears more or less maid uniforms, and yet she's really more like mother/sister/best friend" "to the very insecure Margo Channing." "She's the one person in the picture who has a great deal of common sense and who can smell a bad odour miles away, long before anyone else can." "And she's not manipulative." "She doesn't try to manipulate Margo Channing into dumping Eve." "She doesn't necessarily try to plant suspicions." "She calls it the way she sees it, and she sees something very, very dangerous approaching." "But Margo is not entirely convinced, even then." "Come now, as though you were an old lady." "Eve makes another mistake when she uses that phrase," ""as if you were a old lady."" "Even though it's a very conditional kind of thing and she means, "you're certainly not old,"" "it's the wrong phrase around someone who feels she's getting old and can't do anything about it." "Women in 1950, whether on screen playing actresses or in real life, felt oftentimes that 40 was the last hurrah for them." "If they hadn't married or made their career by then, it was too late." "Fortunately things have changed drastically over the years." "There's a very good reason why, in the 1970s, a song called "Bette Davis Eyes" became a hit nationwide." "It tells it all." "You don't need to say anything else if you say, "she's got Bette Davis eyes."" "If Bette Davis never said a word, she'd convey a great deal just with those looks, looks from her eyes." "This cocktail dress has an interesting story." "It was designed by Edith Head, who was perhaps one of the most famous costume designers in Hollywood at the time." "When it was time to put it on," "Bette Davis did so and she was ready to go on the set and shoot the scene, and she discovered it didn't fit around the shoulders, because it was not originally intended as an off-the-shoulder dress." "And then Edith Head was quite dismayed, she didn't know what she would do." "She didn't have time to get another one or make another one because an hour later Bette Davis was to be on the set." "So Bette Davis came to her rescue and solved the crisis." "She simply pulled the dress down a little bit over her shoulders and it was a perfect fit." "And it's one of the most famous dresses in cinema history." "Bette Davis in real life was fond of martinis, as well as on screen in the role of Margo Channing." "Bette Davis spent half of her career almost coming down staircases." "This is, perhaps, one of the great staircase scenes." "She swoops down like an imperious bat about to descend on its prey." "Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke." "No one knows exactly what is meant by:" ""Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke."" "It always gets great laughter from an audience." "It sounds absolutely perfect under the circumstances." "During the filming of this scene, the candy dish was filled with chocolates and the scene was shot early in the morning, nine or ten o'clock." "Bette Davis picked up a piece of chocolate and put it in her mouth and made rather a grimace, and actually the scene stopped." "Joe Mankiewicz cut and said, "What's wrong, Bette?"" "She said, "I don't like chocolates this early in the morning." ""It's very hard for me to take."" "So he had somebody go and get something else instead of chocolate." "Tiny squares of gingerbread which Bette found more palatable." "And it turned out to be a terrific scene, a scene of conflict." "One of the most famous Bette Davis gestures." "She swirls around with her long hair flying, puts her hands on her hip and delivers her lines, spits them out." "More gingerbread for Bette early in the morning." "Eve is coming up in the world, fashionwise at least." "Notice how this dress is much more elegant than anything we've seen so far." "And yet it still is no match for Margo's dress." "It looks just a little bit mousy, perhaps, round the edges." "Gregory Ratoff played Max Fabian." "He was born in Russia." "He was a great friend of Darryl Zanuck's." "He came to Hollywood and directed pictures and appeared in quite a few." "He was rather a big shaggy dog of a man." "Apparently great fun, always getting into a little bit of trouble, always being scolded by his dear friend Darryl Zanuck for something he did or didn't do." "But always coming out on top." "This is the most famous line in the film." "Just coming up." "Bette had the technique not to spit it out immediately." "She stretched it out by crossing the room, pausing and then delivering that venomous line." "Fasten your seat belts." "It's going to be a bumpy night." "Does Margo speak French?" "We don't know." "He says, "Thank you so much for inviting me to the party"" "and she gives a very sarcastic, flippant answer, "Enchantée to you too."" "Who knows?" "Marilyn Monroe had appeared in various other films before All About Eve." "Usually in small roles, but in Ladies of the Chorus she had top billing and she more or less carried the picture." "It was not a great picture to carry, unfortunately." "This was the picture that really got her noticed around town because she appears really for the first time as "Marilyn Monroe,"" "the Marilyn Monroe who became world-famous and who still is one of the great icons of Hollywood." "She's quite young and fresh-looking here." "She's incandescent and intoxicating." "When she is on screen in her few, brief scenes, it's impossible to watch anyone else." "Marilyn ate up the camera here, and throughout her life." "Marilyn's boyfriend was an agent at the William Morris Agency, named Johnny Hyde." "He wanted her to have this role in All About Eve because he knew that it could do good things for her." "He badgered Darryl Zanuck, went to Zanuck's office and kept on and on and on until finally Zanuck hired Marilyn Monroe, against his better judgment." "And she was under contract to 20th Century Fox throughout her career." "She and Zanuck never got along very well, never liked each other." "She thought that he was not giving her the roles that she could play." "He always thought she was incapable of being anything more than a dumb blonde." "Perhaps they were both a little bit right, and both terribly wrong, ultimately." "Johnny Hyde, Marilyn's boyfriend, died a few months after All About Eve was released." "Claude Stroud, the pianist in this scene, was a twin." "He had a brother with whom he appeared in vaudeville." "Claude Stroud appeared in a few movies, but never went very far." "This is perhaps his most distinguished role." "He had the honour of sitting beside Bette Davis on the piano bench at her famous cocktail party." "Bette Davis plays a very good drunk." "She never completely loses control, she never becomes obnoxious and yet she's definitely in her cups, and with good reason." "She's fearful of losing her man, her new friend, her young companion and perhaps even much worse." "The scene where Max Fabian burps after taking the bicarbonate caused censorship problems." "It appeared in the script and the Hollywood censors, headed by Joseph Breen, a very, very rigid puritanical man, the Hollywood censors thought it was somehow in bad taste and they wanted the director, Mankiewicz, to take it out." "But he didn't, for whatever reasons." "He left it in." "And it's a comic grace note in the film." "Oddly, this is the second burp in the film." "At the beginning, when they're sitting around the table," "Max Fabian burps very discreetly." "But apparently that passed the censors unnoticed and nobody commented on this." "So we have a two-burp movie." "Many people have complained that this film is not cinematic." "That is, it's more like a filmed play." "It's talky, in other words." "But, really, when you come right down to it, who cares?" "It's true that the cinematography here is conservative." "The camera doesn't do a great deal of moving around." "It more or less stops and parks and looks at the actors." "It doesn't try to upstage the actors." "Compared to another famous film of 1950, Sunset Boulevard, it's not, perhaps, cinematic." "Certainly not in the way Sunset Boulevard is, where the camera is always moving and peering into corners and almost dancing around the actors." "But the two movies, while they have a great deal in common, are quite different." "This movie, All About Eve, is certainly not static." "It does what a moving picture needs to do, and this was Joseph Mankiewicz's intention." "He did not much care for fancy camerawork, fancy editing." "He wanted the dialogue to be the main feature." "Dialogue and good acting, to him, were the hallmarks of a good picture." "One indication of Bette Davis' great skill as an actress is her ability to seem very vulnerable, as she does right here." "She feels as though she has taken all her clothes off." "It's a very vulnerable feeling." "And yet, on the other hand, she's as hard as nails." "It's not every actor or actress who can convey both vulnerability and toughness almost simultaneously, certainly in the same picture." "It's never made clear in the film at what point Eve Harrington moves out of Margo Channing's house and into her own place." "Presumably not long after this night, this "Macbethish" evening and the cocktail party where so many hard feelings are let out into the open." "Unfortunately, Thelma Ritter disappears from the film at this point, after the cocktail party." "One of the only faults with All About Eve, perhaps, is that Thelma Ritter should've stuck around longer." "No one ever sees quite enough of her in any picture." "And in Hollywood itself." "Although, ironically, she has just said, "Oh, Hollywood" very dismissively, and later on she says something about, "They're only movie stars"" "and yet the first offer she gets to go to Hollywood, she's on the next plane out." "Now there's something a girl could make sacrifices for." "Marilyn's line about the sable coat:" ""Now there's something a girl could make sacrifices for"" "was not liked at the censorship office." "It implies a bit of naughtiness that was rather taboo at the time." "However, Mankiewicz had the clout to keep it in the picture." "A few scenes were cut from the script and never filmed, including one scene that took place in a taxicab after this party." "Karen Richards, Lloyd Richards and Max Fabian were sitting in the cab and heading back to their various apartments in New York, and it was endless talk, talk, talk, talk, a rehash of everything that had happened during this evening," "and Darryl Zanuck, when he read the script, marked it all out." "He said, "We don't need this." ""You've conveyed all this information in other ways."" "And he was exactly right." "It would have stopped the action in its tracks." "It would not have added anything, it would merely have slowed the movie down." "Notice the portrait hanging on the wall, right between Bette Davis and Hugh Marlowe." "It's a portrait of the 18th century English actress Sarah Siddons." "One of the most famous theatrical portraits ever painted." "And, of course, the Sarah Siddons Award, which we saw at the beginning of the film, was named for the great Sarah Siddons whose portrayal of Lady Macbeth was legendary." "People lined up in 18th century London just to see a performance of this." "She was, perhaps, the Bette Davis of her day." "This portrait of Sarah Siddons was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds and it hangs in the Huntington museum in San Marino, California, which is not very far from Los Angeles, adjacent to Pasadena." "This is an actual shot of a New York street in the Theater District, somewhere around Times Square." "That's not Bette Davis going in the door." "It was a double, somebody who was hired in New York to wear a fur coat and enter a theatre." "These location shots were done without the participation of any members of the cast." "A cameraman and technical crew from 20th Century Fox shot these in New York City and then shot some others in upstate New York." "We'll see those later." "The snowy countryside was filmed up near the Canadian border." "Tallulah Bankhead always claimed that the character of Margo Channing was based on her." "And she further claimed that Bette Davis was doing a rather unflattering imitation of her throughout the performance in All About Eve." "You could argue one way or another, no doubt." "However, when Bette delivers a particular line right here, it's almost like an impersonator doing Tallulah Bankhead." "The line is, "Of course I knew."" "She drops her voice, she slurs her words." "It could be Tallulah Bankhead." "Tallulah Bankhead actually threatened to sue Zanuck because the characterisation of Margo Channing was uncomfortably close to her," "and to her mannerisms, which she probably would've copyrighted if she had have been able to do so." "Notice the look on Bette Davis' face." "Her face has changed." "She looks desperate." "She looks like she's just been kicked in the belly, which, indeed, she has." "She's just learned that this usurper is, indeed, about to take over her role, or trying to take over her role by becoming her understudy." "She's moving closer and closer all the time to everything Margo Channing holds dear, career, man, friends et cetera." "No wonder Margo Channing has a desperate look on her face." "But she recovers herself." "When she walks into the theatre, sweeps into the theatre, she's very much in possession of herself." "You don't see the hurt, the vulnerability." "She's a great star, ready to do battle, to keep what is hers and to take no prisoners." "There's a great deal of fire imagery in the screenplay of All About Eve." "At one point Margo says about Miss Caswell," ""She looks like somebody who could burn a plantation."" "The endless talk about fire and music there in the lobby at the theatre." "Any number of references to fire." "Interestingly, Joseph Mankiewicz lost many of his diaries and papers and manuscripts pertaining to All About Eve a year after the film was done." "He was moving with his family from Los Angeles back to New York and two moving vans were filled with furniture and clothes and personal possessions and many of his theatrical and cinematic memorabilia." "One of the vans had a wreck somewhere between Los Angeles and New York and the entire van burned, and the contents of it." "He was always very sad in later years that he had lost so much, so many very personal memories and manuscripts, notes he had made, observations." "Ironically, he had included the fire imagery long before he actually experienced the dreadful loss of the moving-van fire." "If you go into the history of almost any production of any play, on Broadway or elsewhere, you find a story not unlike this one." "Loud quarrels, screaming, throwing things, the star walking out, or else the director or the playwright walking out." "Many hard feelings." "But no one is about to cede even an inch of turf." "That's what the theatre is all about." "One can only think that's what the theatre is all about, judged by some of the quarrels." "Yet, by opening night, usually everything has come together, and the play goes on." "It's either a success or it's not a success." "In later years, everyone says, "It was wonderful." "I wouldn't take anything for it."" "No doubt, if a follow-up movie had been made to All About Eve," "Margo Channing would have said about Eve Harrington," ""She was a lovely young lady." "I spotted her talent from the beginning."" ""I knew that she would be a big star."" "It's a very interesting experience to go into the Curran Theatre in San Francisco today." "It looks just about the same as what you see here on the screen." "It's a magical place, made all the more magical by the fact that Bette Davis' Margo Channing was on that stage, along with Anne Baxter and others in the cast." "At the Curran Theatre, a platform was built out from the stage, that is, the stage was extended by way of a wooden platform." "On that wooden platform, which extended out over the orchestra, although, of course, we don't see that in any frame, on that platform were the cameraman, his assistants, and all the camera equipment," "so that it looks as though we're seeing the entire stage, and the actors on it." "A great deal of confusion took place in the Curran Theatre, things being built, being rearranged, nails being hammered in, right up until the very first day of shooting these location scenes." "20th Century Fox trucked quite a bit of equipment and personnel to San Francisco." "Several trucks full of camera equipment, costumes, scenery, all that sort of thing, travelled to San Francisco during the two-week shooting of All About Eve, in April of 1950." "The play that Margo and the others are rehearsing for is called Aged in Wood, and on the stage of the Curran Theatre, an actual set was built for Aged in Wood." "We see bits and pieces of it here." "We see the bed, the antebellum Southern bed." "We see the harp." "All sorts of fancy coverings and hangings, and that sort of thing." "And, of course, earlier in the picture we have seen Margo Channing taking a bow at the end of Aged in Wood." "Still pictures taken at the Curran Theatre at the time show a huge set." "It's something really quite spectacular, almost Wagnerian and operatic in its scope." "But all of that, if it was filmed, was cut from the release print of All About Eve, probably thought unnecessary by either Darryl Zanuck or Joseph Mankiewicz, or perhaps by the editor, Barbara McLean," "who was one of the top editors of films during the studio era, in the '30s, '40s, on into the '50s." "She was a bit unusual in that she was a woman, and it was thought to be a man's profession." "But Bobbie McLean, Bobbie, as she was called, her nickname, although she was actually Barbara, she was Darryl Zanuck's right-hand woman." "He didn't like any film to be completed unless Bobbie had her say." "Even if she wasn't the official editor on it, he always consulted her." "She never hesitated to speak very frankly to him." "She'd say, "I don't think this works." If he argued, she'd say," ""If you didn't want my opinion, why did you ask?"" "She never hesitated to speak up to the boss and he respected her for it." "They worked together quite well for many, many years." "Often, after a long day of shooting and doing everything that had to be done at a studio, he and Barbara McLean and various others connected with a picture would gather in his own private screening room there at the studio," "and watch rushes or scenes or, indeed, a completed picture, often till late at night." "Margo Channing, in this scene, is rather devastated." "She realises that she's gone too far." "She risks, for the first time, losing Bill Sampson, the thing she has feared all along, from early in the picture." "After all, she's eight years older than he is." "She fears that she's losing her looks." "And, of course, she has quite a few odds stacked against her, as we will soon see." "She's lost her new friend and protégée, Eve Harrington, she's just lost her boyfriend, she's alienated Birdie, although it's certainly not a permanent rupture, by any means, and soon, her best friend, Karen Richards, is about to betray her." "Talk about conflict." "One slightly unbelievable aspect of the plot of All About Eve is that we're asked to believe that Karen Richards knows how to drain gasoline out of the gas tank of a car." "She just doesn't seem the type, and yet the entire story hinges upon that fact that, yes, she does it." "You can't help wondering if she took off her gloves, though, to do that." "And who taught her so much about automobiles?" "Celeste Holm, in real life, is a Sunday painter." "It's fitting for her character in the picture that she's painting a still life, fruit on a table." "We never see the portrait, so we don't know how good or how bad she really is." "Celeste Holm is officially Dame Celeste Holm." "She was knighted by the king of Norway, some years ago, because she's of Norwegian descent and the king and his government wanted to recognise her for her achievement in the theatre." "These scenes were shot up near the Canadian border by a crew sent out by 20th Century Fox." "Of course, none of the cast in the film ever saw this landscape at all." "It's projected on the background here, and the three people that we see on screen," "Hugh Marlowe, Bette Davis, Celeste Holm, were sitting on a sound stage at 20th Century Fox." "It was a very hot day." "The two women had to wear mink coats, and, of course, the man had to wear an overcoat and a scarf around his neck." "It was sweltering." "Hugh Marlowe, fortunately, escaped very soon from that because this scene is only marginally about him." "It's really a scene for the two women." "Their makeup ran, and they were very thirsty, and so the makeup people were constantly dabbing their faces to get off the perspiration, and reapplying makeup and touching it up." "It was around a 100 degrees and, of course, no air conditioning in the studio at that time." "The scene lasts for quite a while." "And they did it perfectly the first time, Bette Davis and Celeste Holm." "Then it was discovered that there had been a jiggle in the camera movement and they had to do the whole thing again." "So they were quite drained, literally and figuratively, by the time the scene was finally completed." "This car scene is one of the best scenes in the movie, really." "It's the opportunity for Margo Channing and Karen Richards to come very close." "They've been friends for many years." "Karen feels guilty because she made Margo miss the performance, and yet she feels that Margo needed that sort of lesson in humility." "And then she feels quite bad when Margo suddenly becomes more humble and steps down off her high horse." "You would think, of course, that in real life, these two women might be very good friends." "That's not the case at all." "They hated each other." "The first day on the set, Celeste Holm swept in." "Bette Davis was not in such a great mood." "She looked up at Celeste, and Celeste very cheerily said," ""Oh, good morning, Bette."" "And then she said good morning to everybody else in the cast, whereupon Bette said to her, "Oh, shit." "Good manners."" "And they never spoke again, except when they had a scene together." "50 years later, Celeste Holm still seems to hold that against Bette Davis." "Later, Bette Davis told an interviewer that filming All About Eve was a very happy experience." "And then she paused and added, "The only bitch in the cast was Celeste Holm."" "However, if Marilyn Monroe had recorded her memories of All About Eve, she might have told it differently." "She did tell Joan Collins in the mid-50s that Bette Davis was a mean old broad, and it does seem from other accounts that Bette Davis rather picked on beautiful, inexperienced, young Marilyn Monroe." "Marilyn couldn't always remember her lines perfectly, and there was one of the scenes where she blew it two or three times." "And Bette said very loudly, just out of earshot, or actually not out of earshot," ""Oh, that dumb thing couldn't act her way out of a paper bag,"" "whereupon Marilyn ran off the set and ran to the nearest ladies' room to throw up." "Marilyn might have changed Bette's phrase to," ""The only bitch in the cast was Bette Davis."" "This is rather a voyeuristic scene." "It's all very understated." "Had it been more overt, it couldn't have gotten past the censors." "But in effect, George Sanders seems to be standing outside not only for purposes of overhearing, but also for purposes of watching this couple and what may take place between them." "If Eve Harrington had her way, it would go quite far." "Indeed, it would go all the way." "Notice the sign on the packing case." "It says "Handle with care."" "This was intentionally put within camera range as an ironic comment, certainly unheeded by all the characters." ""Handle with care," and that's exactly what they don't do in the case of Eve Harrington." "Hollywood movies of this period had to pass so many restrictions, as far as the Hollywood censors and the very puritanical mass audience who attended movies at the time." "The only way for a number of suggestions and even meanings to be put in was through codes." "For example, the fact that Eve Harrington cannot swear." "She can't say any of the words that are so common today on screen." "So she has to express her anger and her fury in other ways." "This is a good way to do it." "You can almost see the four-letter words pouring out of her mouth, and yet you never hear one of them." "When she steps into the shower, all sorts of things are implied, and yet it's all very ladylike." "However, she does leave the door slightly ajar, implying that Addison DeWitt is free to come in and look or join her, if he is so inclined." "The scene would be shot differently today." "We would probably see her in the shower, we'd see her disrobing, getting out..." "Disrobing, getting in, getting out, towelling off." "That would be the sex scene but a lot of the drama might be lost." "George Sanders, despite his accent, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia." "His ancestors had come to Russia from Scotland a couple of hundred years earlier." "He was thought to be the perfect Englishman, with his accent and demeanour, but he was indeed a Russian." "He had a long Hollywood career playing, more or less, British characters." "George Sanders died in the early 1970s, a suicide." "He left a note saying that he was bored by the world." "Although he was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor at the time of All About Eve, 20 years later, long after they had divorced, he married her older sister Magda." "The marriage lasted only a couple of months, but they all remained friends throughout their lives." "Another New York location shot, the exterior of 21, a restaurant that's still well-known and well-patronised." "That's not Celeste Holm walking in, though it could be." "It's her double." "When Celeste Holm walks through the door, we're at 20th Century Fox in Los Angeles, a set that has been built to replicate 21." "Notice Bette Davis' movements in this scene, as well, of course, as in other scenes." "Bette Davis studied for a time with Martha Graham when she was a very young woman, when Bette Davis was a very young woman, that is." "And she picked up a lot of dance movements from studying with Martha Graham." "She incorporated these dance movements into her acting." "In a moment we will see how Bette Davis could play a scene without words, using her body to convey all the emotion that she wanted us to feel, when Bill Sampson walks in the door, and she turns her back and dissolves into tears." "Certain movements, the kind that Bette Davis does here, and the kind of movements done by all actors in all pictures, come from the actors themselves." "The director doesn't say," ""I want you to move your shoulders, I want you to walk here."" "It's expected that the actor will know how to do that, and, certainly, Joe Mankiewicz expected that Bette Davis would know how to do it, too." "The movements that Bette Davis makes in this sequence, they're rather dancelike." "She's never still for a moment." "She's agitated, and yet it's not random agitation." "It's almost as though it were choreographed, once again a reflection of her training, perhaps, with Martha Graham, and simply, beyond that, her instincts as an actress." "She knew how to move, how to keep a scene from being static." "Joe Mankiewicz was the perfect director to let her do this, to give her the freedom to express herself as an actress while reading the lines he had written." "Speaking of how risqué meanings were often conveyed through codes or through saying certain things when other things were meant, coming up right here is a very good example of that, when Karen Richards, after the quarrel with her husband, says..." "He says, "She apologised, didn't she?" And Karen says, "On her knees, no doubt."" "Think about it." " She apologized, didn't she?" " On her knees, I've no doubt." "Very touching." "Very Academy of Dramatic Arts." "That bitter cynicism is something you've acquired since you left Radcliffe." "That cynicism I acquired the day I discovered I was different from little boys." "The censors did not want this line left in the film," ""The day I discovered I was different from little boys," spoken by Karen Richards." "Oddly enough, they thought it referred to menstruation." "However, Mankiewicz had the clout to keep it in." "It was important to his story, to his script, and so it stayed in the picture." "When this scene was filmed, there were the usual number of interruptions, long delays, while cameras and lights and all that sort of technical equipment were adjusted." "The four actors at the table were left sitting for a very long time." "Celeste Holm, being her usual, cheery self, tried to make conversation to put everyone at ease, or so she thought, and she said," ""I recently heard that the man who invented the glass coffee percolator," ""he was very upset when he learned that people were using it to make martinis."" "Gary Merrill and Hugh Marlowe smiled and said something like, "How interesting."" "Bette Davis, however, not liking Celeste Holm one little bit, looked at her and said, "Oh, I wonder how I ever lived so long without knowing that."" "And poor Celeste was once again insulted." "Notice the expression on Bette Davis' face." "Gone is the vulnerability." "She has what she wanted, more or less." "She has her man, they're going to get married." "It's often said by people who write about the movie that she gives up her career." "This is not the case at all, not if you pay attention to the dialogue." "A bit later, she says to Lloyd Richards, the playwright," ""I'll tour in your play for a year, if you want me to."" "So she's only giving up her role in his new production." "She's staying with Aged in Wood, she's taking it on the road." "No actress who goes on tour with a play is about to give up her career, not by any stretch of the imagination." "People sometimes just don't listen to the script closely enough." "Bette Davis' wardrobe was designed by Edith Head." "The other costumes in the picture were not designed by Edith Head." "It was stipulated by Bette Davis in her contract that Edith design her wardrobe, everything she wore in the picture." "The other costumes were by Charles LeMaire, head of the Fox costume department." "Edith Head was at Paramount, and she was borrowed from Paramount just for purposes of Bette Davis' dresses in the picture." "Bette Davis and Edith Head were friends." "They'd worked together before." "They were friends for the rest of their lives, in fact." "Got along beautifully together." "When Bette Davis raises that onion to DeWitt, who's on the other side of the room, it's another example of how you could say something without saying it." "In this case, instead of giving him a finger, as would probably be done in a picture today, she raises the onion." "It says it all." "Very wittily, of course." "The Academy Awards for the best picture and best acting of 1950 are among the most interesting and perplexing in all of the Academy history." "Bette Davis and Anne Baxter were both nominated in the best actress category." "This caused them, in effect, to cancel one another out." "Anne Baxter insisted on running in the best actress category, because she said later that she knew if she ran in the supporting actress category, she would never have a chance for the best actress Oscar again." "It was a miscalculation." "If she had run as best supporting actress, she probably would have won, and Bette Davis might well have won the Oscar as best actress of that year." "However, the competition was extremely stiff." "Gloria Swanson was also nominated that year for Sunset Boulevard, so even if Anne Baxter had run as best supporting actress," "Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson might still have cancelled one another out, or Gloria Swanson might have won." "If that had been the case, Bette Davis would have been happy, because she greatly admired" "Gloria Swanson's performance as Norma Desmond." "As it turned out, Judy Holliday was the winner that year, for Born Yesterday." "Not as big a star, certainly, as Bette Davis, nor Gloria Swanson." "The other nominee was Eleanor Parker for Caged." "Speaking of Gloria Swanson and the 1950 Oscars," "I'd like to point out that I have written a book on the making of Sunset Boulevard." "It's called Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard," "Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream, also published by St. Martin's Press, and published in 2002." "The story upon which All About Eve is based was written by Mary Orr, and published in the 1940s in Cosmopolitan magazine." "The title of that story is The Wisdom of Eve." "It's quite different in most particulars from the script, and yet the basic story is the same, a young woman who befriends an older actress, and tries to steal her career and her husband." "Not a line of dialogue, however, in the script, is taken from that story." "Mary Orr, the author, spoke to me in 1996, very much at length about writing the story." "She was paid, certainly, a nominal fee by Cosmopolitan magazine, and it was several years later when 20th Century Fox called her agent, and wanted to option the story." "Mary Orr was paid $5,000 for all rights to the story." "20th Century Fox acquired, indeed, every right to the story, and so Mary Orr never received any residuals from the film or from the subsequent Broadway play based on the film, the 1970 musical, Applause," "starring Lauren Bacall as Margo Channing." "Although Margo Channing does not give up her career, she says, of course, "I'll tour in your play for a year,"" "the film has been read by feminist critics over the years as a very retrograde treatment of professional women in the 1950s." "Justifiably so, in many ways." "She's willing to sacrifice a great deal for her new husband." "She's willing to give up a portion of her career, let's say." "And yet, it's..." "The typical Hollywood movie at the time had the woman giving up everything." "Her main object was to find or keep a husband." "Margo Channing is considerably more advanced than that, because she marries very late in life." "She marries at 40." "She has presumably been living with Bill, although that could not be brought out in a picture." "It would have scandalised everybody in the country, or so it was thought." "So I think we could say that Margo Channing is, like all women during that era, certainly a victim of sexism, of a patriarchal society, a patriarchal system." "Still, she's rather more progressive than many of the female characters in movies during the studio era." "One of the rules of the Hollywood censorship machine at the time was that husband and wife could not be seen in a double bed." "They were in twin beds, as Karen and Lloyd Richards are in this scene." "Many commentators over the years have found rather more than hints of lesbianism in the portrayal of Eve Harrington." "Certainly, the way she's photographed here, she and her friend, obviously, it says a great deal." "But apart from the literal fact that they embrace and walk up the stairs, perhaps going to bed or going back to bed with one another, the lighting is quite harsh and, shall we say, unfeminine," "certainly by the standards of the time." "Their costumes are rather rough and high-neck." "Contrast the costumes of Eve Harrington and her companion at the boarding house with the frilly nightgown, negligee, sleeping apparel that we've just seen on Karen Richards, when she answered the telephone." "Certainly according to Hollywood code of the time," "Karen Richards is the feminine one, and the other two are less feminine, verging on mannishness, even, in the way they are dressed and photographed." "And the lighting is also much harsher on them than it is on Celeste Holm." "All of the room sets in this movie look rather impersonal." "Here we're in Eve's hotel suite, and it's not appreciably different from Margo Channing's home." "Here, we also have lamps and tables, and pictures on the wall, and candles in sconces, and ashtrays, and that sort of thing, basically, what we've seen already in Margo's home." "This may be a subtle implication that for actors of such great dedication, their real lives take place on the stage." "It's on the stage, the set of Aged in Wood, that we've seen the more personal decor." "The much more comfortable-looking bed, the bric-a-brac, the more lived-in look, even though it's set in the antebellum South." "There are also no photographs of family, anything like that." "No pets, nothing very personal in any of these rooms." "The art director was Lyle Wheeler, who was one of the famous art directors of Hollywood." "He worked on Gone with the Wind and practically any other major picture that you might care to mention." "Joseph Mankiewicz, the director, always felt somewhat slighted by Hollywood." "He never felt that he received his due, although he received, for this picture, an Oscar." "He got best director and best screenplay." "Mankiewicz always felt he was a misfit in Hollywood, that he never quite fitted in the way that certain other directors did, that he was never applauded quite loudly enough." "It's really hard to see how he ended up feeling that way because he had a very distinguished career." "He was greatly respected while his films were coming out and during his lifetime." "Of course, he didn't make any films during the last 22 or 23 years of his life." "He died in 1993 and his last picture was in 1972." "Certainly today he is considered an outstanding director." "He's respected around the world." "Here we are back at the freeze-frame." "This is an unusual structure because, remember, we saw about 15 minutes of the story, then we stopped and we had a long flashback, which occupies most of the two hours and 30 minutes of the film." "Here we are, we've taken up at the freeze-frame again and we're proceeding on that track of time." "It's a very self-serving speech that Eve makes, but aimed at the audience, aimed at pleasing the audience and making them like her." "It's not unlike certain Academy Award acceptance speeches of the era, when people in Hollywood were more controlled in their speaking." "That is, they knew how to get up and make a speech." "They didn't thank everybody under the sun, including their dog groomers and their garbage collectors." "They got to the point, said something gracious, thanked their colleagues, then walked off the stage." "Nowadays it's quite different and it's uncontrolled." "Many of the people seem not to ever have had the occasion to speak, except reading a script." "It was intentionally written by Joseph Mankiewicz to recall Academy Award speeches, especially the more self-serving and the self-congratulatory kind." "It's a very rousing speech though." "If you didn't know what a snake Eve Harrington is, you'd almost be won over." "You really want her to be the way she seems to be, but of course she's anything but." "All About Eve came out in 1950 when Hollywood and, indeed, all of America, was beset by the witch-hunt of McCarthyism." "Communists were suspected under every bed." "The most innocuous actions on the part of anyone, whether a Hollywood celebrity or an ordinary person in an ordinary town, the most ordinary actions could land a person in very, very difficult circumstances, lots of trouble." "Signing a petition in favour of civil rights, for example, landed one well-known Hollywood actress on the blacklist." "Having written a script in the 1930s or 1940s which might vaguely, vaguely seem somehow to be favourable towards socialism or communism could also land you on the blacklist." "Being on the blacklist meant you were not allowed to work in pictures, certainly under your own name." "Nor in television." "The Broadway theatre was a different matter." "If you had stage training, stage experience, you were permitted to work in theatres, unless you had a right-wing producer." "But most of the producers were considerably more fair-minded, more liberal than that." "However, Hollywood was another matter and many people connected with some of the best-known films of the era, late '40s on through the '50s, were blacklisted." "Directors, actors, primarily." "Some producers." "It was an incredible time and it's hard to think of anything today that's even comparable because although freedom of speech has always been one of the cornerstones of American life and politics, it was, in effect, stifled during those years." "Fortunately, the cast and the director, everybody connected with All About Eve was spared." "Joseph Mankiewicz had one brush with Cecil B. De Mille." "Cecil B. De Mille wanted to imply that Joseph Mankiewicz was somehow not such a good American because Mankiewicz, refused to sign a loyalty oath, which De Mille and other right-wing people in Hollywood wanted to make a requirement." "In other words, in order to work in pictures at all, you would have to sign a loyalty oath." "Joseph Mankiewicz objected and there was a rather stormy period, but he was never blacklisted." "Certainly, there was no reason to." "Bette Davis was a very liberal Democrat who was active in civil rights causes." "She might well have been blacklisted for those reasons but she wasn't." "The others were more or less apolitical." "They didn't have strong records of activity in one political area or another." "Marilyn Monroe was always rather a liberal-minded person." "She had come up from the working classes, considered herself something of an underdog, and she was always very much in favour of fair treatment for oppressed peoples." "At the time of All About Eve she was reading the memoirs of Lincoln Steffens, who was an early muckraker and perhaps a socialist." "She was warned by various people on the set that she should not be seen reading such a book, that it could get her in trouble." "Whether this was actually the case is another matter." "She was pretty unimportant at the time." "She was a starlet and her talents were far removed from anything political, unless you consider sexual politics in the equation." "But at any rate, she later married Arthur Miller." "Six years after All About Eve she married Arthur Miller, who was, indeed, in a lot of trouble." "His passport was lifted by the State Department because he was thought to have some sort of communist ties." "In the thinking of that era, by letting him go abroad, he would somehow endanger the United States which, certainly, seems most unlikely." "The high school girl was more than a girl." "She was certainly long past 18 or 17, the age of a high school senior." "She was in her 20s." "Her name is Barbara Bates." "She had a career of sorts but, once again, anyone who happens to remember her probably remembers her for this picture." "She never went very far." "She suffered from bouts of depression." "And in 1968 she committed suicide by putting her head into an oven and turning on the gas." "Again, notice how Anne Baxter's voice has dropped." "It's become much rougher and tougher when she's in the privacy of her apartment and this teenage girl can't really do anything to help her." "No longer is it silky and smooth, the way it has been up until now." "Contrast this dialogue with her speech at the Sarah Siddons Awards." "Who was it?" "Just a taxi driver, Miss Harrington." "The lies have already started." "Phoebe is going to usurp Eve Harrington's place, in the theatre and in real life, just as Eve Harrington has tried to usurp Margo Channing's." "The first lie was, "Just a taxi driver."" "So the victim is caught in her own trap." "Mankiewicz wanted us to get the moral of his picture." "It wasn't necessary, maybe, but he seemed to want to underscore the irony and the terrible price that one pays for this kind of dedication to a career, of any kind, whether in the theatre or out of the theatre." "And we see not only one replacement for Eve Harrington, but as she bows into the mirrors, dozens." "Hundreds and hundreds of these deceivers." "These deceivers stretching to infinity." "My name is Sam Staggs." "I'm the author of All About "All About Eve."" "I hope you've enjoyed my commentary as much as I've enjoyed my years researching and writing about this wonderful picture." "It's perhaps my favourite of all Hollywood pictures, an opinion shared by millions around the world, perhaps even by you." "ENGLISH" " US" " COMMENTARY"