The title song, Ten Girls Ago, was crooned on the radio by pop music idol Dion, but the Toronto-shot movie from which the Sammy Fain tune sprang never made it to a theatre screen. It died in 1962 of strangulated financing just before completion of principal photography, leaving Dion DiMucci without a movie career and jilting old-time comic stars Buster Keaton, Bert Lahr and Eddie Foy Jr. Buster Keaton MAKE A WISH, BUSTER: Buster Keaton, perhaps wishing for a paycheque, blows out the candles on his birthday cake at a party on the set of Ten Girls Ago. That’s Bert Lahr at the right of the table, and pop singer Dion is standing behind Keaton. Sammy Jackson-Samuels csc is peeking over the top of Lahr’s head. Photo courtesy of Sammy Jackson-Samuels csc Harry Lake csc, who was the gaffer on the would-be musical comedy, dug out the photo of sad-faced Keaton holding a prank slate, and camera operator Sammy Jackson-Samuels csc produced the shot of Keaton’s 67th birthday party. The legend of silent films died less than four years later. Ten Girls Ago was a project of Am-Can Productions, and the ill-fated feature also starred Canadian actor Austin Willis and, Harry remembered, the lady (Jan Miner) who played Madge, the wisecracking manicurist (“You’re soaking in it.”), for Palmolive’s dish detergent TV advertising for almost 20 years. It was directed by Harold Daniels, a veteran of Hollywood B-movies in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. Buster Keaton TAKE WHAT . . . ? Comedy legend Buster Keaton holds a prank slate on the set of Ten Girls Ago, a 1962 Canadian movie that was never released. Photo courtesy of Harry Lake csc “A very well-known cinematographer from Los Angeles, the late Lee Garmes asc, was DOP,” Harry recalled. “He had a long list of credits totalling over a hundred well-known movies.” Garmes won the 1932 Academy Award for Shanghai Express, and received Oscar nominations for Morocco in 1931, Since You Went Away in 1945 and The Big Fisherman in 1960. “I was the gaffer, and not having done anything of this scale I almost (laid) a brick when Garmes handed me his light meter and said, ‘OK, give me 1,200 foot candles on this scene.’ The ASA was much slower at that time. We had a park set in the studio at Kleinburg that used the power from both stages plus a huge generator parked outside.” Power was the culprit behind camera problems that mysteriously plagued production for weeks. “There was a metal fabrication shop on the same line as the studio,” Sammy explained, “and every now and again when they’d turn on their big welder the camera would go out of sync. We could actually hear the (220-volt) three-phase motors jiggle. The entire company stood down while they sent us another camera from New York, but it did the same thing. And then somebody discovered what the problem was.” Sammy said he thought it was Ken Post csc, the first and second assistant on the project, who made up the clapper Keaton is holding in the photo, “because the director kept saying, ‘Let’s do an A on that; we’ll change it a bit but call it A.’ We’d then do several takes on A and he’d say, ‘Well I don’t like that; call the next one B and we’ll do it again.’ So now we had Take 1A, Take 2A, Take 1B, Take 3C, and he kept adding letters — ‘Put a C on that’ — instead of changing the scene, and Ken was getting very frustrated and it was making the actors upset.” Ken acknowledged the aggravation of adding letters to multiple takes, and he had to come up with a somewhat bigger slate to accommodate the extra information. However, he said it was probably someone in the carpentry shop who built the oversized board for Keaton. Keaton was constantly playing practical jokes, Sammy recalled. “One day he came in completely disguised, without his trademark pork-pie hat, and then he proceeded to sweep the floor with a big broom. ‘I haven’t been paid for three weeks,’ he said, ‘so I might as well just join the cleanup crew.’” At one point, Sammy said, Keaton threatened to walk off the picture unless he got paid, “and they came up with a cheque for him.” DOP Garmes, on the other hand, was quite generous with the production’s money. “He ordered six light meters at $120 apiece — that was a lot of money in those days, more than a week’s salary — and when he liked somebody on the set he would present them with a light meter. I’ve still got mine.” For Harry, one of his memories was of the songs in Ten Girls Ago — “a lot of good songs written, I think, by Sammy Fain.” Fain, a two-time Oscar winner, certainly was the composer of the title song, in association with Diane Lampert. In 1953, in collaboration with Paul Francis Webster, Fain won his first Academy Award for the song Secret Love from the film Calamity Jane. His second Oscar was for the title song for the 1955 film Love Is a Many Splendored Thing. “It’s sad that the whole thing fell apart,” Sammy said of Ten Girls Ago, “because it was a great film.” csc.ca/news/default.asp?aID=863
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 21:07:49 +0000
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