Film
918: Bringing Up Baby
Trivia: This
movie fared so badly at the box office that Howard Hawks was fired from his next production at RKO and
Katharine Hepburn bought out her contract to avoid being
cast in the film Mother Carey's Chickens.
Coincidentally, Hepburn was labeled "box office poison" on the same
day her contract was dissolved.
David
makes reference to the notorious characters "Mickey the Mouse" and
"Donald the Duck". RKO was Walt Disney's distributor at the time.
Was
voted the 24th Greatest Film of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
The
scene in which Susan's dress is ripped was inspired by something that happened
to Cary Grant. He was at the Roxy Theater one night and his
pants zipper was down when it caught on the back of a woman's dress. Grant
impulsively followed her. When he told this story to Howard Hawks, Hawks loved it and put it into the film.
Screenwriters
Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde fell in love as they were writing the
screenplay.
David's
response to Aunt Elizabeth asking him why he is wearing a woman's dressing gown
("Because I just went gay all of a sudden!") is considered by many
film historians to be the first use of the word "gay" in its roughly
modern sense (as opposed to its archaic meaning of "happy, carefree")
in an American studio film. Among homosexuals, the word first came into its
current use during the 1920s or possibly even earlier, though it was not widely
known by heterosexuals as a slang term for homosexuals until the late 1960s.
The line was not in the original shooting script for the film; it was an ad lib
from Cary Grant himself.


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