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:
“I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity; and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views; for lies are always detected, sooner or later.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“[T]he asphaltum contains an exactly requisite amount of sulphides for production of rubber tires. This brown material also contains “ichthyol,” a medicinal preparation used externally, in Webster’s clarifying phrase, “as an alterant and discutient.””
—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“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)