This ep of "Hollywood Backstory" from the AMC channel was about the film version of the stage comedy The Seven Year Itch and the challenges of making it under the then-censorship rules of the time as well as the effects on star Marilyn Monroe's off-screen life and marriage to baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. The play had been a hit on Broadway for quite a few years when Hollywood was interested to make it into a movie but the Production Code was clear that a movie about adultery was not an acceptable subject matter. So playwright George Axelrod worked with screenwriter Billy Wilder to try to clean certain scenes and lines to make it more acceptable for general audiences. In trying to cast a male lead, among the contenders was Walter Matthau who Axelrod had seen in a small role on Broadway. The screen test this program showed of Matthau was quite amusing but since he had yet to make his motion picture debut, 20th Century-Fox rejected him. Instead screen veteran and originator of the role on Broadway Tom Ewell got the part. Marilyn Monroe already had several hit movies under her belt for Fox and automatically got the role but her participation in this movie-especially concerning a certain scene-caused her already-troubled marriage to Joe DiMaggio to decline further with them eventually divorcing not long after. As someone who will soon watch the entire thing, this was a pretty entertaining look back at The Seven Year Itch.
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