Trivia

Mother Nature pays homage to Dorothy

The big scary twister in THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) was actually a 35-foot long muslin stocking, photographed with miniatures of a Kansas farm and fields. Amazingly, on the day Judy Garland died - June 22, 1969 - a real tornado struck in Kansas.

Song plug

In a bar scene in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946), young WWII vet Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) asks his uncle Butch to play 'Lazy River' on the piano. It's a song the actor/songwriter portraying Butch, Hoagy Carmichael, knew well - he composed it 14 years earlier.

A rose(bud) by any other name

CITIZEN KANE (1941) was based partially on the life of media magnate William Randolph Hearst, who despised what he called the blasphemous depiction and wouldn't let the movie be advertised in any of his newspapers. One reason for the publisher's pique: Kane's dying word, "Rosebud," is widely reputed to have been Hearst's private name for mistress Marion Davies' private parts.