Trivia for
Singin' in the Rain (1952)

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• The role of Cosmo was written with Oscar Levant in mind but instead was immortalized by Donald O'Connor.
  
  
• The script was written after the songs, and so the writers had to generate a plot into which the songs would fit.
  
  
• Gene Kelly had a 103-degree fever when he danced to the title song.
  
  

• The rain consisted of a mixture of water and milk so it would show up better on film but it caused Gene Kelly's wool suit to shrink.
  
  
• While the film makes a central point of the idea that Kathy's voice is dubbed over Lina Lamont's, what is not told is that, ironically, in some of these songs - notably "Would You" and "You Are My Lucky Star" - Debbie Reynolds, the actress who plays Kathy, is actually dubbed by Betty Noyes. However, Reynolds' own singing voice can be heard on the outtake footage of "Lucky Star" as performed next to the giant billboard of Gene Kelly.
  
  
• Originally, Kathy was to sing "You Are My Lucky Star" to a billboard of Don Lockwood after he sang to her in the studio, by way of dramatizing that she was the president of the Don Lockwood Fan Club. The number, sung by Debbie Reynolds and chorus, is restored as an extra on the DVD issued by Warner Home Video. The prerecording can be heard on Rhino's soundtrack CD. Closing the movie is the "billboard duet" of this song by Miss Reynolds and Gene Kelly with a chorus.
  
  
• In the "Would You" number, Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) is dubbing the voice of Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) because Lina's voice is shrill and screechy. However, it's not Reynolds who's really speaking, it's Jean Hagen herself, who actually had a beautiful deep, rich voice. So you have Jean Hagen dubbing Debbie Reynolds dubbing Jean Hagen. And when Debbie is supposedly dubbing Jean's singing of "Would You", the voice you hear singing actually belongs to Betty Noyes, who had a much richer singing voice than Debbie.
  
  
• Many of the costumes and sets were parodies of former Gene Kelly movies:
  • Don's musketeer movie at the beginning is taken directly from Kelly's version of The Three Musketeers (1948).
  • The "Gotta Dance" number contains hundreds of MGM flashbacks from Summer Stock (1950), The Pirate (1948), An American in Paris (1951), Words and Music (1948).
  • When Don takes Kathy onto the stage and turns on the lights, it's identical to Kelly's Summer Stock (1950).
  • Cyd Charisse's brief number is similar to the dance Kelly did with Vera-Ellen in Words and Music (1948).
  
  
  
• Some costumes from this movie were later used in the movie Deep in My Heart (1954).
  
  
• Gene Kelly insulted Debbie Reynolds for not being able to dance. Fred Astaire, who was hanging around the studio, found her crying under a piano and helped her with her dancing.
  
  
• Although uncredited, Gene Kelly had two incredibly talented choreography assistants. These ladies were none other than Carol Haney ("The Pajama Game") and Gwen Verdon (Broadway star of "Can-Can", "New Girl In Town", "Damn Yankees", "Redhead", "Sweet Charity" and "Chicago"). In fact, Kelly's taps during the "Singin' In The Rain" number were post-dubbed by Verdon and Haney. The ladies had to stand ankle-deep in a drum full of water to match the soggy on-screen action. Gene Kelly had also recommended Carol Haney for the role of Kathy Seldon.
  
  
• The studio originally wanted Howard Keel in the lead.
  
  
• Working days sometimes stretched to 19 hours.
  
  
• Only 19 when cast to play the film, Debbie Reynolds lived with her parents and commuted to the set. She had to wake up at 4:00 a.m. and ride three different buses to the studio; sometimes, to avoid the commute, she would just sleep on the set.
  
  
• Like Lina Lamont, several actors lost their careers because their voices didn't match their silent-screen personality and they lost appeal. The most famous example is the silent star John Gilbert. However, it wasn't the sound of his voice that killed his career, it was back-office backstabbing and the ridiculously florid lines he had to say. The lines that Gene Kelly's character speaks in the "Duelling Cavalier" sequences are based on the sort of lines that killed John Gilbert's career.
  
  
• The screenwriters bought a house in Hollywood from a former silent film star who lost his wealth when the innovation of sound film killed his career. This was part of the inspiration for the film
  
  
• Cyd Charisse had to be taught how to smoke for her vampy dance sequence.
  
  
• The original negative of this film was destroyed in a fire.
  
  
• Originally conceived as a remake of Excess Baggage (1928). The opening credits were inspired by the first filmed performance of the title song in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929).
  
  
• Costume designer Walter Plunkett had worked in films since 1929, and some of his recollections were the source for gags about the perils of early sound shooting. Jean Hagen loudly "tapping" Gene Kelly with her fan in "The Dueling Cavalier" is based on a similar incident with Bebe Daniels and John Boles in Rio Rita (1929).
  
  
• The curtain behind Don and Cosmo in "Fit as a fiddle" scene is the same used in Strike Up the Band (1940) in the "The Gay Nineties" sequence.
  
  
• Many real-life silent-film personalities are parodied, especially in the opening sequence. Zelda Zanders - the "Zip Girl" - is Clara Bow, the "It Girl". Olga Mara is Pola Negri, and her husband, Baron de la Ma de la Toulon, is a reference to Gloria Swanson's husband, the Marquis Henri de la Falaise de Coudray.
  
  
• Donald O'Connor admitted that he did not enjoy working with Gene Kelly, since Kelly was somewhat of a tyrant. O'Connor said that for the first several weeks he was terrified of making a mistake and being yelled at by Kelly.
  
  
• Filming of the Cyd Charisse dance number had to be stopped for several hours after it was discovered that her pubic hair was visible through her costume. When the problem was finally fixed, the director said, "It's OK, guys, we've finally got Cyd's crotch licked."
  
  
• A microphone was hidden in Debbie Reynolds' blouse so her lines could be heard more clearly. During one of the dance numbers, her heartbeat can be heard, mirroring what happens to Lina Lamont in the movie itself.
  
  
• In the scene where Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) comes out of his trailer to begin filming "The Dueling Cavalier," he emerges from what was once the dressing room of 1930s MGM leading lady Norma Shearer. A few seconds later, Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) comes out of another dressing room nearby, and she is wearing a huge wig ("Gee, this wig weighs a ton. What dope would wear a thing like this?") that Shearer wore in Marie Antoinette (1938).
  
  
• Was voted the 10th Greatest Film of all time by Entertainment Weekly, being the highest ranked musical.
  
  
• In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #5 Greatest Movie of All Time.
  
  
• The studio technicians had to pipe two city blocks on the backlot with overhead sprays for the title sequence. Their efforts are all the more remarkable since there was a severe water shortage in Culver City, California, the day the sequence was shot.
  
  
• The film rang up a final price tag of $2,540,800, $157,000 of which went to Walter Plunkett's costumes alone. Although the final price overshot MGM's budget by $665,000, the studio quickly realized the wisdom of its investment when the film returned a $7.7-million profit upon its initial release.
  
  
• The role of the ditzy movie diva Lina Lamont was written with Judy Holliday in mind. Holliday was a close friend of Betty Comden and Adolph Green and they even modeled the character on routines they had worked up with Holliday back when they were part of a satirical group called The Revuers in New York. Timing was everything, however, and the idea of casting Holliday was vetoed after she hit it big in Born Yesterday (1950). Everyone figured she'd be uninterested in the supporting part but, as it turned out, the lovely Jean Hagen, Holliday's understudy on Broadway for Born Yesterday, got the part.
  
  
• In the first draft, Zelda Zanders Rita Moreno was going to sing the song, "I Got A Feeling You're Fooling", but later was cut out and was used in the montage before the number, "Beautiful Girl", along with "The Wedding Of The Painted Doll" and "Should I".
  
  
• When deciding to give Donald O'Connor a song, originally it was "The Wedding of the Painted Doll". However, learning that O'Connor had a bag of tricks that he used in vaudeville, they decided to use a song for O'Connor's comical background: Make 'Em Laugh (Which the melody is supposedly from "Be A Clown" from The Pirate (1948)).
  
  
• Just as Gene Kelly and co-director Stanley Donen reused a huge repertoire of popular songs from earlier musicals, the duo also looted the MGM warehouses for props and vehicles. The car Debbie Reynolds drives at the beginning of the film was actually Andy Hardy's old jalopy. The mansion in which Kelly lives was decorated with tables, chairs, carpets and other items that were used for John Gilbert and Greta Garbo's passionate romantic drama, Flesh and the Devil (1926).
  
  
• Like the character of Cosmo Brown, producer Arthur Freed was once employed as a mood-music pianist who played on movie sets during the silent film era.
  
  
• After they finished the "Good Morning" number, Debbie Reynolds had to be carried to her dressing room because she had burst some blood vessels in her feet. Despite her hard work on the "Good Morning" number, Gene Kelly decided that someone should dub her tap sounds, so he went into a dubbing room to dub the sound of her feet as well as his own.
  
  
• Debbie Reynolds remarked many years later that making this movie and surviving childbirth were the two hardest things she's ever had to do.
  
  
• Only two songs were written especially for the film: "Moses Supposes" was written by Roger Edens, Betty Comden and Adolph Green; "Make Em Laugh" was written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown especially for Donald O'Connor. It's generally agreed that they stole the melody almost exactly from Cole Porter's "Be a Clown". Irving Berlin was visiting the set one day when he heard a playback of "Make 'Em Laugh". When Berlin asked whose song that was, Freed quickly changed the subject.
  
  
• For the "Make Em Laugh" number, Gene Kelly asked 'Donald O'Connor' to revive a trick he had done as a young dancer, running up a wall and completing a somersault. The number was so physically taxing that O'Connor, who was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day at the time, went to bed (or may have been hospitalized, depending on the source) for a week after its completion, suffering from exhaustion and painful carpet burns. Unfortunately, an accident ruined all of the initial footage, so after a brief rest, O'Connor, ever the professional, agreed to do the difficult number all over again.
  
  
• Very early on in the pre-production stage, Judy Garland, June Allyson, and Jane Powell were all considered for the role of Kathy Selden, but all were considered "too old" so Debbie Reynolds (then a newcomer) was cast.
  
  
• It was voted the #1 movie musical in American film history by the American Film Institute in 2006. The song "Singin' In The Rain" ranks #3 in their top songs. It also is in the Top 100 list of AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (#10) and AFI's 100 Years... 100 Passions (#16).
  
  
• The film's title song, "Singin' In The Rain" is number 3 on the American Film Institute's (AFI) 100 Years... 100 Songs list.
  
  
• Debbie Reynolds had to rub her eyes with onions to make herself cry for the penultimate scene in the movie, when Kelly tells the audience that she, and not Lina, is the real star of "The Dancing Cavalier."
  
  
• In an early version of the script, the musical number "Singin' in the Rain" was to be sung by Debbie Reynolds, Donald O'Connor and Gene Kelly on the way back from the flop of a talkie movie. Also, the song "You Were Meant For Me" was not included in that draft. Instead, the love song was supposed to be Gene Kelly's version of "All I Do Is Dream Of You," which would take place after the party at R.F. Simpson's house, when Kelly chases after Reynolds. The song would have ended up at Kelly's house. The footage of this scene has been lost, but the prerecording is featured on the soundtrack from Rhino. Remaining in the release print is the party sequence where Debbie Reynolds and chorus sing and dance a Charleston to "All I Do Is Dream of You."
  
  
• The initials of the fictional Monumental Pictures' owner, R.F. Simpson, are a reference to Arthur Freed. R.F. Simpson also uses one of Freed's frequent expressions when he says that he "cannot quite visualize it" and has to see it on film first, referring to the Broadway ballet sequence. (this is an obvious cinematic joke, since the audience has just seen it on film.)
  
  
• Before this film, dancer Cyd Charisse had only been in films as a 'dance specialty' or as a co-co star since 1944. Her torrid performance as the Louise Brooks-like vamp in the 'Broadway Melody' fantasy number was so successful that it gave MGM the impetus to finally star her in pictures. Her next film was _The Band Wagon (1953)_ , opposite Fred Astaire.
  
  
• Howard Keel was the original choice to play Don Lockwood; however, he was replaced by Gene Kelly as the screenwriters evolved the character from a "Western actor" background to a "song-and-dance vaudeville" background.
  
  
• Dora Bailey, the gushy gossip columnist, was an uncredited role played by Madge Blake, who was later famous for her role as Aunt Harriet on Batman. Kathleen Freeman, who plays voice coach Phoebe Dinsmore, also appeared on Batman at one point as a guest star.
  
  

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