Production
Peter Bogdanovich wanted to shoot The Cat's Meow in black-and-white to capture the feel of the silent movie era, but studio heads objected. (Black-and-white scenes of Ince's funeral, resembling old newsreel footage, bookend the film.) To compensate, the director ordered costume designer Caroline de Vivaise to dress the cast in only black and white. With only a few weeks to prepare prior to the start of filming, she resorted to shopping in secondhand stores for vintage clothing. Bogdanovich agreed to her request to have some silver and gold on the costumes when many of the pieces she found were trimmed with those colors.
Composer Ian Whitcomb's score was augmented by original recordings that were popular during the period in which the film takes place. These included "Avalon," "Toot Toot Tootsie," and "California, Here I Come" by Al Jolson; "Everybody Loves My Baby" and "Wild Cat Blues" by Clarence Williams; "Stumbling," "Say It With Music," "Somebody Loves Me," and "Linger Awhile" by Paul Whiteman; and "Wabash Blues" by Fletcher Henderson. In addition, Ian Whitcomb & His Bungalow Boys performed many tunes from the era, among them "Ain't We Got Fun," "I'm Just Wild About Harry," "St. Louis Blues," "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody," "I'm Nobody's Baby," "Rose of Washington Square," "If You Were the Only Girl in the World," "Margie," "How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?," and "Alice Blue Gown."
After the film had been completed, music supervisor Joel C. High realised the version of "Charleston" heard in the birthday party scene was a jazz-tinged arrangement from the 1950s and had Ian Whitcomb & His Bungalow Boys record an authentic 1920s rendition to replace it. Bogdanovich preferred the livelier, more contemporary sound of the 1950s version but finally was convinced by High to use the more accurate recording.
The film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2001. It was shown at the 2001 Flanders International Film Festival in Belgium, the 2001 MIFED Film Market in Italy, the 2002 International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the 2002 Mar del Plata Film Festival in Argentina before going into limited release in the US in April 2002.
The film grossed $3,176,936 in the US.
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“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)