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Show biz bookshelf: Behind the scenes of ‘Some Like It Hot’
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Some like it hot. Just ask Tony Curtis. During production of the Billy Wilder movie of the same name, Tony was making whoopee with co-star Marilyn Monroe. His wife, Janet Leigh, was pregnant with daughter Jamie Lee Curtis at the time; her husband, playwright Arthur Miller, threatened to beat him up. Both marriages were doomed. Marilyn was such a screwed up mess, it’s a miracle the movie itself ever got finished. A shot that called for her to walk into a room and say, “Where’s that bourbon?,” required a mere 81 takes.
Some Like It Hot: The Official 50th Anniversary Companion by Laurence Maslon is every inch the gorgeous coffee table tome you’d expect to see in celebration of the 1959 film which co-starred Jack Lemmon, and was selected by the American Film Institute as the funniest comedy ever made. The book is crammed with dozens of previously unpublished black-and-white and color photos, posters, sheet music, costume designs, studio documents and script pages; it also features a carefully researched text, rarely found in this type of glossy souvenir volume. (Available from Collins Design in hardcover).
If you want to know “what really happened behind the scenes,” though, as Maslon’s dust jacket promises, you’ll have to read Curtis’ new book, The Making of Some Like It Hot: My Memories of Marilyn Monroe and the Classic American Movie. The actor—or more likely his co-author, Mark A. Vieira—used much of the same source material as Maslon, so you’ll read a lot of the same quotes. But the core of this book is a very intimate and sympathetic one, recalling Curtis’ relationship with an unknown Monroe circa 1950 when they were two young actors “hellbent on stardom… trying to figure it out together” as well as the details of their Hot tryst, how she lost her sense of self during the production of the Wilder film, and much more. (Available from John Wiley & Sons in hardcover and paperback).
Hot tip: Got a secret stash of dead presidents, say an extra 700 bucks laying around? You too can own a copy of Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made—a limited edition tome based on two years of obsessive preproduction research—to be published by Taschen in November.
More from Jordan:
Disney’s ‘Pinocchio’ sparkles on Blu-ray; new format still subject of debate
Charley Chase’s silent comedies jump back to life on DVD
Irving Brecher’s memoir of Hollywood’s golden age
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