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Boston Globe (28/Jan/1981) - Awful truth behind scenes

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Awful truth behind scenes

LOS ANGELES — Remember the courthouse with the gleaming white steps and the tall Corinthian columns where Gregory Peck, the lawyer, was reviled by his friends and neighbors for defending a rapist in "To Kill a Mockingbird"?

Well, it's a fake front. There's no courthouse at all.

And the weird monster that terrified us in "Creature from the Black Lagoon"? It was made of plastic and the lagoon is about as terrifying as Boston's Frog Pond.

The scary house where Tony Perkins stabbed Janet Leigh in the shower in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" isn't nearly as desolate as we thought. It's right next to a Western town where there are no cowboys and a Mexican town where there are no Mexicans.

Out the back window of Tony Perkins' "Psycho" house, you can see Amity, the little Martha's Vineyard town where the shark from "Jaws" scared the wits out of everybody.

Welcome to the Universal Studios, the land of fantasy and make-believe, v/here they make movies and television films and where they give you a two-hour tour that can destroy the cinematic illusions of a lifetime.

Welcome to the place where Joe Tynan was seduced, where Barbara Men makes a fool out of herself every week in "Harper Valley PTA" and where Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner worked out their kinky relationship in "The Last Married Couple in America."

There are some things we don't want to know, though.

When we stand in the Bionic Woman's living room, we don't want to watch a technician throw a switch that changes the time of day and -the weather outside the window from sunny and bright to nighttime and rain. Do it, but don't tell us.

We don't want to know that in the famous snowfall scene in "White Christmas," Bir.g Crosby was standing indoors and that what we thought was a snowfall In the woods was actually white sheets spread on the floor and the sprinkling of several tons of white plastic chips.

This spring, ABC will show an eight-hour movie entitled "Masada," in which Peter O'Toole arrives in ancient Rome and climbs the steps of the Roman senate. In the film laboratory at the studio, though, an ancient Roman skyline is projected behind the scene, and the truth is that O'Toole, dressed in a toga, is actually walking up the front steps of a Holiday Inn in Los Angeles.

We don't want to know that Sherman never burned Atlanta in "Gone With the Wind." And why did they tell us King Kong was only three inches tall? Don't we have a right not to know that?

And they shouldn't have told us that Marcus Welby, MD, was practicing medicine next door to the sorority house used in the National Lampoon's "Animal House" and in the same house where the Cleaver family grew up in "Leave It to Beaver."

They shouldn't have told us that the Hardy boys lived in a house of plaster and foam next to the house where Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery were cavorting in Hitchcock's "Marnie."

And Doris Day, that little rascal. When she finished "Send Me No Flowers," she moved out of one house with Rock Hudson and into a house right next door with James Garner for "The Thrill of It All." Damn it, we didn't want to know that.

So Paul Newman and Robert Redford operated their sting on the same street where Columbo drove his rattletrap car in pursuit of cold-blooded murderers and where W. C. Fields was drinking gin and seducing girls in "My Little Chickadee."

Why did they spoil things by telling us that the doughboys from "All Quiet on the Western Front" spent their liberty on the same street where Kirk Douglas marched with several hundred UCLA students when the slaves attacked Rome in "Spartacus"?

We don't want to know that they make rainstorms by turning on garden hoses attached to trees, that they release a flood of water down a rivulet so that it uproots a tree.

They should have kept their secrets. It makes a boy feel cheated, like the day he learned there was no Santa Claus.

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