Production
During pre-production, MGM had announced that Jean Harlow, who was under contract to that studio, would be loaned to 20th Century Fox to star in the role Belle Fawcett. However, due to Harlow's untimely death, the part went to Alice Faye. Faye's popularity skyrocketed as a result of the picture, and she was reunited with Power and Ameche that same year for Alexander's Ragtime Band, which proved to be even more successful.
Some sources claim that MGM offered to loan both Harlow and Clark Gable to Fox for In Old Chicago if they reciprocated by loaning Shirley Temple to MGM for their upcoming production of The Wizard of Oz. However, this is merely a rumor, as Harlow died in June 1937, several months before MGM had even purchased the rights to Oz.
Read more about this topic: In Old Chicago
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“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)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)