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Behind the Scenes

You may want to spice up your Masterpiece Theatre Book & Film Club by sharing some "behind-the-scenes" tidbits. For more production information about the films, visit the Masterpiece Theatre Web site at http://www.pbs.org/masterpiece

Our Town

When Our Town was made into a film in 1940, the studio, United Artists, requested that the ending be changed and Emily be allowed to live. Thornton Wilder agreed to the change.
Paul Newman's first appearance in Our Town was in 1955, when he starred as George in a musical version for television, along with Eva Marie Saint as Emily and Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager (warbling the song "Love and Marriage," later the theme song for the Married with Children television series).
Eric Stoltz starred as George in the 1989 version, produced at Lincoln Center, with Spalding Gray as the Stage Manager and Penelope Ann Miller as Emily. Helen Hunt appeared as Emily after Penelope Ann Miller left the production.
At the Williamstown (Massachusetts) Theatre Festival in 1976, Geraldine Fitzgerald became the first woman to play the Stage Manager.
The first time Williamstown presented the play, Thornton Wilder played the Stage Manager. He said that learning the lines he had written was one of the hardest things he'd ever had to do.
Thornton Wilder was a good friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. You can read their correspondence in The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, edited by Edward Burns and Ulla E. Dydo.
Legend has it that Our Town is performed somewhere in the world every night.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips

Goodbye, Mr. Chips was written in just one week. As James Hilton recalls, "Goodbye, Mr. Chips was written in London during a foggy week of November 1933. [It] was written more quickly, more easily, and with fewer subsequent alterations than anything I have ever written before, or have ever written since." The book is based in part on his father's life.
Hilton's other bestseller, Lost Horizon, tells the story of a group of Western travelers whose plane crashes in the Himalayas in an idyllic kingdom Hilton named "Shangri-La" -- a term that subsequently entered the English language to describe a paradise on earth.
Goodbye, Mr. Chips was first made into a feature-length film in 1939. The movie was directed by Sam Wood and starred Robert Donat as Mr. Chips and Greer Garson as Kathie. Robert Donat won the Academy Award for his performance. It was Greer Garson's first American film.
A 1969 musical version of the film starred Peter O'Toole as Chips and Petula Clark as Kathie.

Doctor Zhivago

The name Pasternak means "parsnip" in Russian. The name Zhivago plays on the Russian word for "life," zhizn.
You may recognize Keira Knightley from her work in Bend It Like Beckham and Pirates of the Caribbean. When she made Doctor Zhivago, she was 16, just like her character Lara.
Previous adaptations by Andrew Davies, the screenwriter for this production of Doctor Zhivago, include Pride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones' Diary, and the recent Masterpiece Theatre productions of Daniel Deronda and Othello.
One of the biggest challenges for the cast and crew of Doctor Zhivago was the quest for snow. Director Giacomo Campiotti felt it essential to use real locations. Filming in Russia, Norway, or Finland was too expensive, and Canada was ruled out because Alberta had had only one inch of snowfall the previous year. The production chose Slovakia because weather maps predicted a 95 percent chance of snow. There was a blizzard two days before shooting started. Unfortunately, the weather turned sunny and mild. As a result, the production used:
- 1000 bags of artificial snow
- 570 bags of paper snow
- 284 bags of cellulose dust
- 60 cans of frost crystal aerosol spray
- ten bags of "snow down potato starch snow"
- ten 25 liter drums of "snowboy solution"
- two snow blankets

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