Something's Got to Give
Encyclopedia
Something's Got to Give is an unfinished
Unfinished work
An unfinished work is creative work that has not been finished. Its creator may have chosen never to finish it or may have been prevented from doing so by circumstances outside of their control such as death. Such pieces are often the subject of speculation as to what the finished piece would have...

 1962 American feature film, directed by George Cukor
George Cukor
George Dewey Cukor was an American film director. He mainly concentrated on comedies and literary adaptations. His career flourished at RKO and later MGM, where he directed What Price Hollywood? , A Bill of Divorcement , Dinner at Eight , Little Women , David Copperfield , Romeo and Juliet and...

 and starring Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s....

, Dean Martin
Dean Martin
Dean Martin was an American singer, film actor, television star and comedian. Martin's hit singles included "Memories Are Made of This", "That's Amore", "Everybody Loves Somebody", "You're Nobody till Somebody Loves You", "Sway", "Volare" and "Ain't That a Kick in the Head?"...

 and Cyd Charisse
Cyd Charisse
Cyd Charisse was an American actress and dancer.After recovering from polio as a child, and studying ballet, Charisse entered films in the 1940s...

. A remake of My Favorite Wife
My Favorite Wife
My Favorite Wife is a 1940 screwball comedy produced and co-written by Leo McCarey and directed by Garson Kanin. The movie stars Irene Dunne as a woman who returns to her husband and children after being shipwrecked on a tropical island for several years, and Cary Grant as her husband...

 (1940), a screwball comedy
Screwball Comedy
Screwball Comedy is an album by the Japanese band Soul Flower Union. The album found the band going into a simpler, harder-rocking direction, after several heavily world-music influenced albums.-Track listing:...

 starring Cary Grant
Cary Grant
Archibald Alexander Leach , better known by his stage name Cary Grant, was an English actor who later took U.S. citizenship...

 and Irene Dunne
Irene Dunne
Irene Dunne was an American film actress and singer of the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s. Dunne was nominated five times for the Academy Award for Best Actress, for her performances in Cimarron , Theodora Goes Wild , The Awful Truth , Love Affair and I Remember Mama...

, it was Monroe's last work; from the beginning its production was disrupted by her personal troubles, and after her death
Death of Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was found dead in the bedroom of her Brentwood home by her psychoanalyst Ralph S Florence after he was called by Monroe's housekeeper Eunice Murray on August 5, 1962. She was 36 years old at the time of her death. Her death was ruled to be "acute barbiturate poisoning" by Dr. Thomas...

 on August 5, 1962 the film was abandoned. Most of its completed footage remained unseen for many years.

Plot

Ellen Arden (Monroe), a photographer and mother of two small children, has been declared legally dead, having been lost at sea in the Pacific. Her husband Nick (Dean Martin) has remarried; he and his new wife, Bianca (Cyd Charisse), are on their honeymoon when Ellen, rescued from an island where she has been stranded for five years, returns home. The family dog remembers her, but the children do not. However, they take a liking to her, and invite her to stay. Ellen assumes a foreign accent and pretends to be a woman named Ingrid Tic. Nick, flustered by the revelation that he's now married to two women, makes great effort to keep the truth from his new wife all the while trying to quash her amorous advances. Upon learning that she was marooned on the island with a man, Stephen Burkett (Tom Tryon
Tom Tryon
Tom Tryon was an American film and television actor, best known for playing the title role in the film The Cardinal and the Walt Disney television character Texas John Slaughter...

) — whom she knew as "Adam" to her "Eve" — he becomes jealous and suspicious of her fidelity. To calm his fears, Ellen enlists a meek shoe salesman (Wally Cox
Wally Cox
Wallace Maynard Cox was an American comedian and actor, particularly associated with the early years of television in the United States. He appeared in the U.S. TV series Mr. Peepers , plus several other popular shows, and as a character actor in over 20 films...

) to impersonate her island companion.

Pre-production

Several weeks before principal photography began, the cast and crew gathered for wardrobe tests on a set that was a fully lit recreation of George Cukor
George Cukor
George Dewey Cukor was an American film director. He mainly concentrated on comedies and literary adaptations. His career flourished at RKO and later MGM, where he directed What Price Hollywood? , A Bill of Divorcement , Dinner at Eight , Little Women , David Copperfield , Romeo and Juliet and...

's Beverly Hills home. Production designer Gene Allen
Gene Allen
Eugene Allen is an American art director.He followed his father, and became a Los Angeles Police officer after he was laid off from his first job as a sketch artist. After serving in the United States Navy during World War II, Allen went to art school to pursue his career...

 had sent a crew of men to Cukor's home to photograph the entire estate. According to Allen, Cukor was photographed in the set's courtyard with the intent of using the photo as his 1962 Christmas card.

Marilyn Monroe had been absent from the screen for over a year. She had recently undergone gallbladder
Gallbladder
In vertebrates the gallbladder is a small organ that aids mainly in fat digestion and concentrates bile produced by the liver. In humans the loss of the gallbladder is usually easily tolerated....

 surgery, and had lost more than 25 pounds, reaching the lowest weight of her adult life. In six hours of testing, Monroe wore some of her own clothes and some of those commissioned by Fox for the film. Her costumes included a long blonde wig meant for the beginning of the film, a two-piece black wool suit (also worn in Let's Make Love), a black and white spaghetti strap
Spaghetti strap
A spaghetti strap is a very thin shoulder strap used in clothing, such as camisoles, crop tops, cocktail dresses, and evening gowns, so-named for its resemblance to the thin pasta strings called spaghetti....

 silk dress, and a lime green two-piece bathing suit with a bottom designed to cover her navel.

Before shooting had begun, Monroe had let producer Henry Weinstein know that she had been asked by the White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...

 to perform for President John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....

 at Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden, often abbreviated as MSG and known colloquially as The Garden, is a multi-purpose indoor arena in the New York City borough of Manhattan and located at 8th Avenue, between 31st and 33rd Streets, situated on top of Pennsylvania Station.Opened on February 11, 1968, it is the...

 in honor of his birthday on May 19, 1962. The producer granted her permission to attend the gala, believing there would be no problems on the set.

Production

On the first day of production, April 23, 1962, Monroe telephoned Weinstein to tell him that she had a severe sinus infection
Sinusitis
Sinusitis is inflammation of the paranasal sinuses, which may be due to infection, allergy, or autoimmune issues. Most cases are due to a viral infection and resolve over the course of 10 days...

 and would not be on the set that morning. Apparently she had caught the infection after a trip to New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 during which she had visited her acting coach, Lee Strasberg
Lee Strasberg
Lee Strasberg was an American actor, director and acting teacher. He cofounded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective"...

 of The Actors Studio, to go over her role. The studio sent staff doctor Lee Siegel to examine the star at her home. His diagnosis would have postponed the movie for a month, but George Cukor refused to wait. Instead he reorganized the shooting schedule to film scenes around his leading lady. At 7:30 am, Cyd Charisse was telephoned and summoned to the Fox lot. Later that morning the first scene filmed involved Martin's character and Charisse, in an encounter with children building a tree house.

Over the next month filming continued mostly without Monroe, who showed up only occasionally due to fever, headaches, chronic sinusitis and bronchitis. The production fell 10 days behind schedule. As Kennedy's birthday approached, no one on the production thought Monroe would keep her commitment to the White House although she had gotten clearance to appear at the event on April 9. Studio documents released after Monroe's death confirm that her appearance at the political fundraising event was approved by Fox executives.

By this time the production was over budget, and the script was still not completely finalised despite writer Walter Bernstein
Walter Bernstein
Walter Bernstein is an American screenwriter and film producer who was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios in the 1950s.-Early life:...

's efforts. The script was rewritten nightly, with Monroe growing increasingly frustrated at having to memorize new scenes every day. When not before the camera, she spent much of her time on the set in her dressing room with Lee Strasberg's wife, Paula
Paula Strasberg
Paula Miller Strasberg was a former stage actress who became actor and teacher Lee Strasberg's second wife, mother of actors John and Susan Strasberg as well as Marilyn Monroe's acting coach and confidante....

.

Pool scene

Upon her return from New York, Monroe decided to give the film a publicity boost by doing something no major Hollywood actress had done before. In the scene where Ellen is swimming at night, she calls playfully up to Nick's bedroom window and invites him to join her. Nick tells her to get out of the pool and then realizes she is nude. A body stocking was made for her, but Monroe took it off and swam around in only a flesh-colored bikini bottom. The set was closed to all but necessary crew. However, Monroe had asked photographers to come in, including William Woodfield, and after filming was completed, Monroe was photographed in the bikini bottom, and without it.

Had Something's Got To Give been completed and released as planned, it would have been the first Hollywood motion picture release of the sound era to feature a mainstream
Mainstream
Mainstream is, generally, the common current thought of the majority. However, the mainstream is far from cohesive; rather the concept is often considered a cultural construct....

 star in the nude. Instead, that distinction goes to actress Jayne Mansfield
Jayne Mansfield
Jayne Mansfield was an American actress working both in Hollywood and on the Broadway theatre...

 in the 1963 movie Promises! Promises!
Promises! Promises!
Promises! Promises! is a 1963 unrated sex comedy film, released after the demise of the Hays code and before the MPAA film rating system became effective, produced by Tommy Noonan . It was the first Hollywood motion picture release of the sound era to feature a mainstream star—Jayne Mansfield—in...

.

Monroe's last day on the set

On June 1, 1962, Monroe's 36th birthday, she, Martin and Wally Cox
Wally Cox
Wallace Maynard Cox was an American comedian and actor, particularly associated with the early years of television in the United States. He appeared in the U.S. TV series Mr. Peepers , plus several other popular shows, and as a character actor in over 20 films...

 shot a scene in the courtyard set. Monroe's stand-in, Evelyn Moriarty, bought a seven-dollar sheet cake
Sheet cake
A sheet cake is a cake baked in a large, flat rectangular pan such as a sheet pan or a jelly roll pan. These single-layer cakes are almost always frosted, and may be decorated on the flat surface on the top...

 at the Los Angeles Farmer's Market. A studio illustrator drew a cartoon of a nude Monroe holding a towel which read "Happy Birthday Suit". This was to be used as a birthday card, and was signed by the cast and crew. The cast attempted to celebrate when Marilyn arrived; however Cukor insisted they wait until 6 pm, the end of the working day because he wanted to get a 'full day's work out of her'. It would be Monroe's last day on the set. She left the party with Wally Cox. She borrowed the fur trimmed suit she had worn while filming that day because she was to attend a Muscular Dystrophy
Muscular dystrophy
Muscular dystrophy is a group of muscle diseases that weaken the musculoskeletal system and hamper locomotion. Muscular dystrophies are characterized by progressive skeletal muscle weakness, defects in muscle proteins, and the death of muscle cells and tissue.In the 1860s, descriptions of boys who...

 fund raiser at Dodger Stadium
Dodger Stadium
Dodger Stadium, also sometimes called Chavez Ravine, is a stadium in Los Angeles. Located adjacent to Downtown Los Angeles, Dodger Stadium has been the home ballpark of Major League Baseball's Los Angeles Dodgers team since 1962...

 that evening with her former husband Joe DiMaggio
Joe DiMaggio
Joseph Paul "Joe" DiMaggio , nicknamed "Joltin' Joe" and "The Yankee Clipper," was an American Major League Baseball center fielder who played his entire 13-year career for the New York Yankees. He is perhaps best known for his 56-game hitting streak , a record that still stands...

 and co-star Dean Martin's young son.

Monroe is fired

On Monday morning, Henry Weinstein got a call from Monroe to tell him that she would not be there again that day. The cold night air of the Dodgers game had caused a flare-up of the sinusitis, and her temperature had reached 100°F. At a studio meeting, Cukor strongly endorsed her dismissal, and she was released from the project on Friday, June 8, 1962. Life
Life (magazine)
Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....

 featured Marilyn, wrapped in a blue terrycloth robe, on its June 22, 1962 cover with the headline, "The skinny dip you'll never see."

The decision to fire Monroe was influenced by the progress of Fox's epic film Cleopatra
Cleopatra (1963 film)
Cleopatra is a 1963 British-American-Swiss epic drama film directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The screenplay was adapted by Sidney Buchman, Ben Hecht, Ranald MacDougall, and Mankiewicz from a book by Carlo Maria Franzero. The film starred Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison, Roddy...

, also in production that summer and far over its budget. Executives had planned for a Christmas holiday release for Something's Got To Give, as a source of revenue to offset Cleopatras increasing cost.

Monroe quickly gave interviews and photo essays for Life, Cosmopolitan
Cosmopolitan (magazine)
Cosmopolitan is an international magazine for women. It was first published in 1886 in the United States as a family magazine, was later transformed into a literary magazine and eventually became a women's magazine in the late 1960s...

, and Vogue
Vogue (magazine)
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast.-History:In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States. When he died in 1909, Condé Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began...

 magazines. The Life interview with Richard Meryman, published on August 3, 1962 — just two days before her death — included her reflections on the positive and negative aspects of fame. "Fame is fickle," she said. "I now live in my work and in a few relationships with the few people I can really count on. Fame will go by, and so long, I've had you, fame. If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle. So, at least it's something I experienced, but that's not where I live."

Subsequent events

Monroe was to be replaced with actress Lee Remick
Lee Remick
Lee Ann Remick was an American film and television actress. Among her best-known films are Anatomy of a Murder , Days of Wine and Roses , and The Omen .-Early life:...

, who was fitted into Monroe's costumes and photographed with Cukor. However, Dean Martin had final approval of his leading lady, and refused to continue without Monroe. Fox relented and re-hired her, even agreeing to pay her more than her previous salary of $100,000; however she had to agree to make two more films for Fox. She accepted the offer on the condition that Cukor be replaced with Jean Negulesco
Jean Negulesco
Jean Negulesco was a Romanian-born American film director and screenwriter....

, who had directed her in How to Marry a Millionaire
How to Marry a Millionaire
How to Marry a Millionaire is a 1953 romantic comedy film made by 20th Century Fox, directed by Jean Negulesco and produced and written by Nunnally Johnson. The screenplay was based on the plays The Greeks Had a Word for It by Zoe Akins and Loco by Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert. The music score...

. Filming was set to resume in October, but no more work was done after Monroe's death.

In April 1963, Fox released the 83-minute documentary Marilyn which included brief clips from the screen-tests and unfinished film showing Monroe. This was the only footage from the film seen by the public until the hour-long 1990 documentary Marilyn: Something's Got To Give, which used extensive excerpts from the footage.

Fox later produced another version of the script, more closely resembling the original 1940 film, but it utilized some of the sets from the abandoned version, as well as costumes (with variations) and hair styles designed for Monroe. Retitled Move Over, Darling
Move Over, Darling
Move Over, Darling is a 1963 remake of the 1940 screwball comedy My Favorite Wife that starred Irene Dunne, Cary Grant and Gail Patrick. The remake stars Doris Day, James Garner, and Polly Bergen.-Plot:...

 and starring Doris Day
Doris Day
Doris Day is an American actress, singer and, since her retirement from show business, an animal rights activist. With an entertainment career that spanned through almost 50 years, Day started her career as a big band singer in 1939, but only began to be noticed after her first hit recording,...

, James Garner
James Garner
James Garner is an American film and television actor, one of the first Hollywood actors to excel in both media. He has starred in several television series spanning a career of more than five decades...

, and Polly Bergen
Polly Bergen
Polly Bergen is an American actress, singer, and entrepreneur.-Career:Bergen appeared in many film roles, most notably in the original Cape Fear opposite Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum...

, it was released by Twentieth Century Fox in December 1963.

Reconstruction

Nine hours of largely unseen footage from the film remained in the vaults at 20th Century Fox until 1999, when it was digitally restored by Prometheus Entertainment
Prometheus Entertainment
Prometheus Entertainment is an American production company, created by Kevin Burns in 1999, specializing in documentary, reality, and non-fiction television programming and specials.-Series:* Ancient Aliens, 2010* Bridget's Sexiest Beaches...

 and assembled into a 37-minute segment for the two-hour documentary, Marilyn: The Final Days. It first aired on American Movie Classics
AMC (TV network)
AMC is a cable television specialty channel that primarily airs movies, along with a limited amount of original programming. The letters originally stood for American Movie Classics; however since 2002, the full name has been deemphasized as a result of a major shift in programming...

 on June 1, 2001, which would have been Monroe's 75th birthday. It is available on DVD.

Cast

  • Marilyn Monroe
    Marilyn Monroe
    Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s....

     as Ellen Wagstaff Arden
  • Dean Martin
    Dean Martin
    Dean Martin was an American singer, film actor, television star and comedian. Martin's hit singles included "Memories Are Made of This", "That's Amore", "Everybody Loves Somebody", "You're Nobody till Somebody Loves You", "Sway", "Volare" and "Ain't That a Kick in the Head?"...

     as Nicholas Arden
  • Cyd Charisse
    Cyd Charisse
    Cyd Charisse was an American actress and dancer.After recovering from polio as a child, and studying ballet, Charisse entered films in the 1940s...

     as Bianca Russell Arden
  • Tom Tryon
    Tom Tryon
    Tom Tryon was an American film and television actor, best known for playing the title role in the film The Cardinal and the Walt Disney television character Texas John Slaughter...

     as Stephen Burkett
  • Alexandria Heilweil as Lia Arden
  • Robert Christopher Morley as Tommy Arden
  • Wally Cox
    Wally Cox
    Wallace Maynard Cox was an American comedian and actor, particularly associated with the early years of television in the United States. He appeared in the U.S. TV series Mr. Peepers , plus several other popular shows, and as a character actor in over 20 films...

     as Shoe Salesman
  • Phil Silvers
    Phil Silvers
    Phil Silvers was an American entertainer and comedy actor, known as "The King of Chutzpah." He is best known for starring in The Phil Silvers Show, a 1950s sitcom set on a U.S...

     as Insurance Salesman
  • Steve Allen
    Steve Allen
    Steve Allen may refer to:*Steve Allen , American musician, comedian, and writer*Steve Allen , presenter on the London-based talk radio station LBC 97.3...

    as Psychiatrist
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