Not your regular movie review
Frankie and Eddie G celebrate their birthdays during the filming of "A Hole in the Head" on December 12, 1958.
The script had quite a tortuous ten-year history (writers, don't give up!): Arnold Schulman wrote a one-act play in the late 1940s which he later expanded into a longer piece which tried out in Westport, CT. But it never went anywhere. Another stage version followed and went un-produced. Schulman revised it again and it was finally performed on NBC's Playwrights '56 as "The Heart's a Forgotten Hotel," with Edmond O' Brien and Sylvia Sidney, and directed by Arthur Penn.
Schulman again revised the play when Garson Kanin said he'd direct it for Broadway; it opened as "A Hole in the Head" in February 1957 with Paul Douglas, Lee Grant, Joyce Van Patten and Kay Medford in the cast; it ran for five months. Sinatra saw it and bought the film rights in partnership with Frank Capra, whose penultimate film this was. The characters were now mysteriously no longer Jewish and now Italian.
("Sidney" was now "Tony.") Schulman, whose only other film credit at that point was "Wild is the Wind," adapted his play with the changes as required by the two Franks. (The working title was "All My Tomorrows" which became the lovely opening credits song.) One was the addition of the crucial Keenan Wynn character. (Schulman's script was rather prescient about a Florida Disneyland even though it's just Tony's over-ambitious pipe dream.)
The film was Eddie Hodges' movie debut (he was in "The Music Man" at the time with Robert Preston and Barbara Cook) and he remembered Sinatra being very concerned about hurting him in one emotional father-son scene.
The story goes that after Schulman saw a preview of the film in 1959, he revised the work yet again, this time as a paperback novelization, one of the rare times a screenwriter adapted a finished film of his own into book form and included scenes not in the film. (Copies of the 25-cent Gold Medal paperback are available for sale online if you're curious.) Shot on location in Florida and at Samuel Goldwyn Studios; released July 1959.
As you have already seen through, it is not a movie review :)
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