Movie Urban Legends Revealed #24
This is the twenty-fourth in a series of examinations of legends from movies and the people who make them and whether they are true or false.
Click here to view an archive of the previous movie urban legends.
Let’s begin!
MOVIE LEGEND: Jamie Foxx took the name “Jamie” because it sounded like a woman’s name.
STATUS: True
Jamie Foxx’s career has come a long way.
From his days on the sketch comedy series, In Living Color (where Foxx first started out as the DJ for the series!)…
To his own sitcom, The Jamie Foxx Show…
To winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Ray…
Jamie Foxx’s career has gone far (and this is not even getting into his successful music career).
It’s interesting to note, though, just how calculated Foxx’s career has been. He has planned on being a star for many years.
Born Eric Marlon Bishop, Foxx had his first taste of fame when he was in high school. He was a notable football player, and was actually featured in national stories about high school football (growing up in Texas, he knew firsthand how important football is).
His dream, though, was to be a musician.
When he graduated high school, he attended the United States International University. While there, he studied classical music and composition.
However, after a couple of years there, he felt that he was better served trying to make it in the entertainment industry NOW rather than wait until he graduated.
So he dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in show business.
Making it as a musician was hard work, and Foxx made a living working in a shoe store.
One night, while out with his girlfriend, she dared him to go on stage on an open-mic comedy night. He liked it so much that he decided to pursue a career in comedy.
He would continue attending open mic comedy nights in his attempts to become a professional comedian.
While doing so, he noticed an interesting trend.
He told Jet magazine:
Three girls would show up and 22 guys would show up. They had to put all the girls on who were on the list to break up the monotony.
So he decided to make up a name that sounded like a female name, so that when he wrote it down at open-mics, it would be called since it was presumed to be a woman comic.
So Eric Bishop became Jamie Foxx (the Foxx came from comedian Redd Foxx, naturally).
And his plan worked, as he would get called to the stage more frequently, and began to make a name for himself.
Pretty soon, he was picked up by In Living Color and the rest, well, I suppose it was history.
Thanks to Jet magazine and Jamie Foxx for the information!
MOVIE LEGEND: The assistant in Frankenstein was named Igor.
STATUS: False
An interesting situation that pops up frequently is the case of almost intellectual consolidation. Take a bunch of similar movies and whoever is the most memorable from that group will be what people remember.
That is most likely the situation when you see people refer to Doctor Frankenstein’s hunchback assistant, Igor.
In 1931′s Frankenstein, Doctor Henry Frankenstein does NOT have an assistant named Igor.
He DOES, however, have a weird assistant named Fritz, played by Dwight Frye.
The assistant character does not appear in Mary Shelley’s original novel, but first popped up in a stage adaptation a decade or so after the novel, Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinsley Peake.
In the sequel to the film, 1935′s Bride of Frankenstein, once again, there is no character named Igor.
However, once again, Frye plays a similar character, this time named Karl (unlike Fritz, Karl is a crony who does not actually work for Henry Frankenstein, but for a doctor who is blackmailing Frankenstein into creating a bride for the Monster).
It is the SECOND sequel, 1939′s Son of Frankenstein, that finally introduces an Igor into the series.
Well, basically.
In the film, with Basil Rathbone as the titular son of Frankenstein, the great Bela Lugosi plays the assistant, Ygor, who is deformed as a result of a hanging gone wrong.
Ygor is actually the driving figure in the film, as he uses the Monster to get revenge against the jury who convicted him.
Lugosi was such a prominent character that he was brought back for the next sequel, Ghost of Frankenstein, where Ygor’s brain is transplanted into the Monster.
So anyhow, over the years, Lugosi’s Ygor has been transposed in people’s minds as having been the assistant in the original film. Heck, most folks probably think Igor was ALWAYS a part of the Frankenstein mythos, as that is basically how he is treated in the years since.
And he didn’t even show up until the third film!
Poor Fritz, no respect. No respect at all.
He could have been a contender!!
MOVIE LEGEND: Frank Capra had a Machiavellian way to get Claudette Colbert to show her legs in It Happened One Night.
STATUS: True
It Happened One Night was a great success when it was released in 1934, becoming a box office smash.
Not only that, but it was the first film (and only film for nearly four decades – and still only one of three films) to sweep the “major” categories, Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress, at the Academy Awards.
However, at the time of the filming, the movie was not thought to be much of a big deal by the particulars of the film.
The lead actor, Clark Gable, had a lot of problems with the film’s script.
And Gable was the HAPPY one on set!
Lead actress Claudette Colbert was not the first choice for the picture (nor was Gable, actually), and when offered the part, she initially refused. She had worked on an unsuccessful picture with Capra a number of years earlier, and she wanted nothing more to do with the director.
She finally was coerced into doing the film when her salary was doubled and she was promised that she would be finished in four weeks, so as to not conflict with a planned vacation she had coming up.
Still, once on set, she was not particularly happy, and Capra resorted to all sorts of tricks to keep her interested, including enlisting Gable to play a few little pranks on her to make her feel more at home, and supposedly, it worked, as Colbert later recalled having fun filming the picture, although she still told friends that it was the worst picture she had ever been in (she was more graceful when she won her Oscar, though, stating that her Oscar was all due to Capra).
She would still have a few outbursts during the film, primarily some objections over overly salacious (in her view, at least) aspects of the script.
One such objection was for the now-famous scene where the two characters are hitchhiking.
After Gable’s character gives a speech about the proper way to hitch hike, he promptly fails to get any cars to stop for them.
This leads to Colbert’s character taking a crack at it (while Gable is amused at the notion that she could possibly be better than him at hitch hiking) and succeeding when she shows a little leg…
Originally, though, Colbert refused to do the scene, not wanting to show her legs like that.
So Capra devised a little scheme to get her to do it.
He agreed to not have her do the scene, and just found a particularly shapely extra and had her do the scene, doubling for Colbert.
This promptly led Colbert to decree:
Get her out of here. I’ll do it. That’s not my leg!
And she did, and it was a great scene!
Thanks to Frank Capra’s great auto-biography, The Name Above The Title
Okay, that’s it for this week!
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com
It’s no surprise that it’s Lugosi’s version everyone remembers. He’s fantastic! Too bad they carried the idea of Ygor’s brain in the monster one step too far and had Lugosi play the monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. They originally did it because the monster was meant to speak (as I believe he does at the end of “Ghost…”) and they wanted Lugosi for continuity. But they ended up having the monster be mute anyway and Lugosi had no room for the character stuff that he usually did.
Missed opportunity.
The Claudette Colbert story reminds me of the way that Robert Altman got Sally Kellerman’s reaction during the infamous shower scene in M*A*S*H. The story goes, Kellerman kept reacting too quickly, and had often been on the floor of the shower long before the shower flap went up. So for one take, when she was out of sight, he and Gary Burghoff dropped trou. Kellerman saw them when the flap went up, and paused for a seccon, startled, before dropping to the floor. That was the shot they finally used in the film.
You should listen to the commentary track on the M*A*S*H DVD. Lots of great tidbits there. (Like how Donald Sutherland and Eliot Gould tried to get Altman fired from the set.) You could probably even do a whole entry just on stories from that movie.
In Discworld terms, ‘Fritz’, ‘Karl’ and ‘Ygor’ were all Igors.
On a separate note, I caught myself reading ‘Claudette Colbert’ as ‘Claudette ColBEAR’ each time the name came up. Am I alone in this?
“On a separate note, I caught myself reading ‘Claudette Colbert’ as ‘Claudette ColBEAR’ each time the name came up. Am I alone in this?”
How else would you pronounce it?
Col-BERT pronouncing the “T”. Stephen Colbert has made me think of the T as silent, even though it is much more often pronounced.
I have watched at least 100 documentaries about Hollywood history and have never once heard Claudette’s name pronounced Col-Bert.
I’ve always heard her called ‘Col-bear’.
When Ygor’s brain was transplanted into the monster, he went blind because of a blood-type miss-match. Because of this, I’ve been told that Lugosi played the monster as blind in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, and that is why he staggers around with his hands out in front. But they left out all references to blindness in the script, so if you’re not aware of it it’s never clear why he moves that way. But ever since, a lot of people have imitated the monster by stumbling around with their arms outstretched.
I thought it was Shawn Wayans who was the DJ on Living Color for the first few seasons, and that he switched to being a cast member about the same time Jamie Foxx joined the cast.
Stephen’s name is pronounced with a pronounced T when he’s out of character.
Claudette’s name is not.
Neither Claudette nor Stephen pronounce the “t”. Stephen calling himself
“Col-bert” when he lapses out of character is just a joke.
I think the main reason that people mis-remember Fritz as Ygor is that people assume that “Young Frankenstein” is a parody of “Frankenstein”, but it’s actually based, almost scene-for-scene, on “Son of Frankenstein”, the movie that introduced Ygor. (There are, in fact, a lot of very specific jokes in YF that you can’t get unless you’ve seen SoF) That’s why YF has Ygor, not Fritz. Most of our generation have only seen YF, and assume that the name is taken from the original.
Actually Young Frankenstein is based on Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein AND Son of Frankenstein. There’s several scenes from the original Frankenstein parodied (getting the brain, the scene with the little girl, the actual giving life scene, etc), a few scenes and characters taken from Bride of Frankenstein (most notably the Blind Hermit) and several bits taken from Son of Frankenstein (Inspector Klemp is directly lifted from Inspector Krogh, Fredrick Frankenstein greatly resembles Wolf Frankenstein, etc). Marty Feldman’s Igor character, while being named closer to Ygor is closer in role to Fritz (and a little bit the hunchback character in House of Frankenstein)
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And her name is Claudette… Col-bear made more sense in that context to me, and this is the first time i heard about her (did see a gazillion parodies of that scene though, now i know where it’s from).
Despite what Matt Bird said, Stephen Colbert always pronounced the ‘T’ until he got into show business and everybody else kept pronouncing his name like Claudette’s. This is according to a Rolling Stone article about him from a couple of years ago.