Production
The film's producer, Mike Kaplan, saw the play performed by the Trinity Repertory Company while he was visiting Rhode Island on family business. Kaplan, who had met Lillian Gish many years earlier when he was a publicist involved in The Comedians (1967), decided immediately that the role of Sarah Webber was a role that would introduce new generations of filmgoers to the great talent of the "First Lady of American Film", who had begun her film career in 1912.
As opposed to the original stage production, the movie made it possible to showcase stars who were the age peers of the characters. Actors and actresses of a certain age and stature were contacted to see whether they were both interested in and physically capable of playing the roles. Many screen greats were approached to play a role but demurred because they suffered from various infirmities, e.g., Shirley Booth, Barbara Stanwyck, Fred Astaire, Paul Henreid. Other greats turned down the producers' overtures for other reasons, e.g., Joel McCrea, Frances Dee, Katharine Hepburn, John Gielgud. Even Davis and Gish turned down the parts more than once before being persuaded to star in the film.
This film marks a reunion between Bette Davis and Vincent Price, after 48 years, having last appeared on screen together in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939).
Berry, Lindsay Anderson (the director), the cinematographer, a location scout, and Kaplan traveled by water taxi to several islands in Casco Bay searching for a location that would provide the necessary ambiance and ocean vistas for the film. In the end, the film was shot on Cliff Island a few miles down the Bay from the site of Berry's family cottage on Peaks Island from where, in fact, the characters and story were drawn. The film's premiere in New York City on October 14, 1987, was followed a few weeks later by a State of Maine premiere in Portland, Maine, which was attended by both Berry and Kaplan.
The film proved immensely popular in Tokyo, running for a full year there. David Berry authorized several stage productions in Japan after the film premiered in Tokyo in 1987, the most recent being in 2005. Authorized stage productions have been presented overseas in several countries including Russia, Greece and Great Britain.
Read more about this topic: The Whales Of August
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“[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)
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)