Production
Williams had been on maternity leave for three months while pregnant with daughter Susan, and had assumed that she would get straight to work on the film Athena. She, along with writers Leo Pogostin and Chuck Walters created the premise for Athena while making Easy to Love, and Walters finished the script while Williams was on maternity leave. However, Athena had already begun shooting when Williams arrived back from leave, and the studio had changed the swimming sequences to dancing sequences and replaced Williams with Jane Powell. Williams was then assigned Jupiter's Darling. Jo Ann Greer, who sang for Williams, also dubbed June Allyson in MGM's The Opposite Sex and Rita Hayworth in three films, including Pal Joey (film).
During shooting, Williams broke her left eardrum, which had already been broken in five other films. She was fitted with a prosthesis from latex that covered her nose and ears that prevented water from rushing in. As a result, she could barely hear, taste or smell while wearing it.
In one of the film's scenes, Amytis, while fleeing from Hannibal and his soldiers, rides a horse over the edges of a cliff on the Tiber River. Williams refused to do the scene, and when the studio refused to cut it, the director called in a platform diver that Williams knew, Al Lewin. The stunt took place one time; the studio got its shot, and Lewin broke his back.
Read more about this topic: Jupiter's Darling (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)
“The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.”
—Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)