Production
Screenwriter Frances Marion wrote the title role specifically for Wallace Beery, who by 1931 was no star but merely an aging character actor. Despite the melodramatic script, director King Vidor eagerly took on the film since it emphasized the traditional family values and strong belief in hope—qualities he felt were essential to a good motion picture. Wallace Beery claimed to have turned down a $500,000 offer from a syndicate of Indian studios to play Buddha in order to take the role in The Champ. Cooper was paid $1,500 a week while working on the film. A special outdoor set, rather than location shooting, was built to accommodate the Tijuana horse racing track scenes. Shooting began in mid-August 1931. Shooting ended eight weeks later, at which time Jackie Cooper's contract with Paramount Pictures was transferred to MGM.
The Champ debuted on November 9, 1931, at the Astor Theatre in New York City. Wallace Beery flew his own plane from Los Angeles, California, cross-country to attend the premiere. After the film's debut, Beery declared Cooper was a "great kid" but that he would not work with the child actor again, a promise he broke within the year.
Read more about this topic: The Champ
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)
“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)
“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)