Production
The producer of the film, Ray Stark, wanted both John Huston and Joe Layton while working as the director and choreographer respectively, to also be executive producer on the film, because it was too large an enterprise for one person. Regarding Huston being given the job of directing the first (and what would be the only) musical in his 40-year directing career, screenwriter Carol Sobieski said: "Hiring John is an outsider risk, and Ray's a major gambler. He loves this kind of high risk situation."
For reasons yet explained, it was planned that the staging for the intimate, secretive song "Easy Street" would be the biggest number in the film. A special outdoor street set, costing $1 million, was built, and it took over one week to shoot the scene. However, the final number was thought to be "overstuffed" and "sour." Nearly two months after the film had finished shooting, an indoor, more intimate number was shot that mimicked the ambience portrayed in the original 1977 musical.
The production filmed for six weeks at Monmouth University in New Jersey, which has two mansions that were used in the film, one of which is the Shadow Lawn Mansion (now known as Woodrow Wilson Hall). An abandoned railroad bridge over the Passaic River in Newark was used for location shooting of one of the climatic scenes
Read more about this topic: Annie (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“It is part of the educator’s responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas. The new facts and new ideas thus obtained become the ground for further experiences in which new problems are presented.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)