Production/Background
After concluding its successful engagement on Broadway in 1952, Top Banana went on tour for a year playing in major cities across the country. Phil Silvers and the cast finished their successful run at the Biltmore Theater in downtown Los Angeles, California. During that engagement, Harry Popkin negotiated with producers Albert Zugsmith (Touch of Evil, The Incredible Shrinking Man) and Ben Peskay to film the show exactly as it had been presented on stage in sold out performances across the country.
The company packed up the sets and costumes and moved the entire company over to the Motion Picture Center Studios in Hollywood, where a mock theater "stage" set was built.
Zugsmith and Peskey decided to film it in 3-D, the popular trend at the time, with the idea in mind that this approach would give the entire audience a choice seat at a top Broadway show, for merely the price of a movie ticket. Zugsmith envisioned this format as a new way to inexpensively film stage shows, and present them in theaters across the country.
The crew even developed a rather complicated tracking shot for the opening of the film. The camera would be the person approaching the theater. It would go to the box office and buy tickets, enter the lobby and proceed down to a seat in the third row, center stage. The lights would dim, the overture would play and the show would begin. This elaborate opening was abandoned in favor of a static shot of the theater marquee, which then dissolves directly into the stage show.
Top Banana was photographed with Natural Vision cameras in July 1953, the same rigs that filmed the trend-setting Bwana Devil, as well as other popular 3-D pictures such as House of Wax, Fort Ti, Charge at Feather River, Devil's Canyon, The Moonlighter, Southwest Passage and Gog. Unfortunately for the producers, the film was in post-production in September 1953 just as The Robe and CinemaScope hit theaters, and 3-D was starting to decline at the box office.
While shopping the property around for a distributor, the producers announced they would release the film in a flat version only, citing the public's declining interest in stereoscopic films. In early December, they signed a distribution deal with United Artists. Later that month, the success of some new 3-D releases prompted UA to announce in the trades that a 3-D version would, in fact, be available for exhibitors. This is the only reference to any release of the stereoscopic version of the film.
When it was sneak previewed, shown to the trade publications, and released in February 1954, it was shown in the "flat" version only.
Read more about this topic: Top Banana (film)
Famous quotes containing the words production and/or background:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)