Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (play)

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (play)

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is an original stage comedy in three acts and four scenes by George Axelrod. After a try-out run at the Plymouth Theatre in Boston from 26 September 1955, it opened at the Belasco Theatre on Broadway on 13 October, starring Jayne Mansfield, Walter Matthau and Orson Bean. Directed by the author and produced by Jule Styne, it closed on 3 November 1956 after 444 performances.

The play is a Faustian comedy about a fan magazine writer who sells his soul to the Devil (in the guise of a literary agent) to become a successful screenwriter. The character of Rita Marlowe (played by Jayne Mansfield) is a vapid blonde sex symbol, an exaggerated lampoon of Marilyn Monroe (who had starred the previous year in the film version of Axelrod's play The Seven Year Itch). The surname Marlowe is an homage to 16th century playwright Christopher Marlowe, who wrote the 1604 drama The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, the plot of which served as the inspiration for Axelrod's play.

The 1957 film Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? utilised the title of the play and the character of Rita Marlowe (with Mansfield repeating her stage role) but little else. The story was changed to a satire on television advertising and Tony Randall starred as Rockwell P Hunter, a character who never appears in the play.

Read more about Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (play):  Production, Synopsis, Film Version, Script Variations, Original Broadway Cast, References

Famous quotes containing the words success, spoil, rock and/or hunter:

    We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me
    why American men think that success is everything
    when they know that eighty percent of them are not
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    interested in the things that interested them when
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    Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

    You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it—low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion—and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)

    The acorn’s not yet
    Fallen from the tree
    That’s to grow the wood,
    That’s to make the cradle,
    That’s to rock the bairn,
    That’s to grow a man,
    That’s to lay me.
    —Unknown. The Cauld Lad of Hilton or, The Wandering Spectre (l. 2–8)

    Every one finds by his own experience, as well as in history, that the era in which men cultivate the apple, and the amenities of the garden, is essentially different from that of the hunter and forest life, and neither can displace the other without loss.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)