Trivia for
Moby Dick (1956)

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• The character of Peter Coffin, the innkeeper, played by Joseph Tomelty, was dubbed by director John Huston.
  
  
• The fake white whale used in the film kept sinking, breaking, etc., which meant that it had to be continuously rebuilt, leading to budget overruns and schedule delays.
  
  
• John Huston shopped the film around Hollywood for three years before Warner Bros. agreed to produce it. It was a dark, depressing story, without any female parts or love interest, so Hollywood shunned the screenplay. Warners only agreed on the condition that a big-name actor take the role of Ahab. Many thought Gregory Peck was miscast, and Peck himself actually thought Huston himself would have been the best choice for the role.
  
  

• Over the years, 'John Huston (I)' and 'Gregory Peck' , among other, have talked about how during filming on the Irish Sea, the company lost one - some say as many as three - rubber white whales; the assumption being that the special effects people built complete 60-foot leviathans from head to fin. However, cinematographer Oswald Morris, in his autobiography, "Huston, We Have a Problem," said that no full-length model whale was ever built. He claims the film company trolled the sea on the Pequod with a props barge nearby. The barge carried various parts of the whale's body (tailfins, hump, etc.), which were used as needed. The only complete whale bodies were various size miniatures which were filmed in a special tank designed by Augie Lohman at Shepperton Studios. Likewise, all the shots of the whale's head were filmed indoors (as they couldn't make the jaws, eyes and other components work on the open sea). According to Morris, the "lost" whale was a 20-foot-high cylinder of the middle section which broke away from its tow line and floated away (he doesn't say if Peck was on board when the prop was lost), but he implies that that was the only whale casualty in the entire production.
  
  
• John Huston once considered casting Orson Welles as Captain Ahab.
  
  
• Orson Welles wrote his own scenes.
  
  
• Orson Welles suffered from stage fright while filming Father Mapple's sermon. To quell the actor's nerves, John Huston hid a bottle of brandy on the set so Welles could visit it as needed.
  
  
• Ray Bradbury's "Green Shadows, White Whale" is a semi-fictional account of his writing of the screenplay.
  
  
• When John Huston first met Ray Bradbury to discuss writing the screenplay, Bradbury admitted, "I've never been able to read the damned thing." Huston simply asked Bradbury to come back the next day to start working and, handing him a copy of the book, said, "Just go home and read what you can."
  
  
• One of the myths circulating about this film is that it was "filmed on location". While there is plenty of location work on it (Canary Islands, Irish Seas, Youghal, Ireland), over 2/3 the film was shot at Shepperton and Elstree Studios in England. These include the Spouter's Inn tavern scenes, Father Mapple's sermon, Ahab's first speech on the deck of the Pequod (note the painted sky background), the typhoon; Ahab's dialog on the whale's back. While there are a few shots of the sixty foot Moby Dick on the open sea, most of the whale appearing in the finished film are various sized miniatures and selected body parts (jaws, body cylinders, eyes) which were co-ordinated by art director Stephen B. Grimes.
  
  
• To create the desaturated pastel effect image of the movie, director of photography Oswald Morris used a unique dye transfer technique that uses broad-cut black and white matrices. This causes the separation, and contains the other two colors before recombining to create the desire effect. A silver layer was later added in the 4th pass.
  
  
• John Huston also dubbed the voice of the lookout who plunges into the sea.
  
  
• Starbuck's Coffee franchise takes it's name from the character Starbuck of the Pequod crew.
  
  
• John Huston originally wanted to cast his father Walter Huston as Captain Ahab but, by the time he came round to making the film, his father had been dead for four years.
  
  
• Captain Ahab forecasts the whereabouts of Moby Dick at Bikini Atoll, which he points out on a chart. This place is not mentioned in the book by Herman Melville. Many viewers in 1956 made the connection between the location of the atom bomb testing site and the theme of the film.
  
  
• Filmed in 1954, not released until 1956.
  
  
• Orson Welles' one-scene cameo helped to fund his stage production of the very same story.
  
  
• Gregory Peck initially blamed the poor reviews for his performance on the script, which he felt contained "too much prose from the novel". However, he later acknowledged that he had been too young for the part at 38, since Captain Ahab was supposed to be an old man at the end of his career. He added, "The film required more. At the time, I didn't have more in me."
  
  

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