When famous 1980s film-star, Steve Guttenburg invented the printing press, little did he know the impact that it would have. Put simply: it revolutionised the film industry. Whereas for ‘Three Men and a Baby’ the script was cobbled together on scraps of handwritten notes that were hastily passed between cast members (famously an entire lion-taming scene had to be scrapped when Tom Selleck accidentally ate the note whilst eating a cob salad), by ‘Three Men and a Little Lady’, thanks to Guttenburg’s press, they had as many as 23 copies of the script to be shared amongst cast and crew.
In the silent days of cinema, the lack of ways of mass-producing scripts was not a serious issue. Chaplin, for example, famously made it up as he went along and Mary Pickford’s gratuitous swearing couldn’t be curtailed by any form of script anyway – the advent of talkies ruined her career. Her chorus girl monologue in 1931’s ‘Kiki’ was something more akin to the works of Quentin Tarantino than a whimsical romantic-comedy.
When, however, the talkies came into full swing, film studios took to shaving words into the sides of donkeys that they’d then parade the other side of the cameras for performers. Occasionally, you can hear the braying during more tender moments. After the sixteenth take ruined by donkeys of a scene between Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont in ‘Duck Soup’, the producers decided to cut their losses and just include the scene as it was. Only the most keen-eared of movie-goers can tell which lines are Dumont and which are the donkey’s.
Still there exists today in Hollywood’s parlance for a terrible screenplay the phrase ‘I wouldn’t carve that crap into a donkey’s ass’.
For the epic ‘Gone with the Wind’ there weren’t enough donkeys on the west coast and several herds had to be shipped in from Guatemala, seriously inflating production costs. It was this famous incident – later referred to as the ‘Guatemalan Folly’ in show business circles, that led to Hollywood finally waking up and resorting to alternate methods.
Initially, chalk and blackboards were used. The title song of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ took seven days to film as the rain kept washing off the chalk and Gene Kelly’s words would disappear and he’d start to just go ‘la-la-la tiddly pom’ way before he even reached the lamp-post. After this debacle, Kelly refused to act in anything moist again.
Hollywood once again adapted, and took to writing lines on scraps of paper and attaching them to inanimate objects within a scene – the exception being in Ben Hur where during the chariot scene, all the lines were nostalgically shaved into the rump hair of the horses. It’s why Charlton Heston squints so much in the scene, as it turns out, reading the gyrating buttocks of a horse as it gallops at thirty miles an hour is a lot harder than it seems.
In the ‘I’m flying’ scene of ‘Titanic’, Leonardo DiCaprio’s lines were tattooed onto the nape of Kate Winslet’s neck. Whereas, in ‘The Revenant’ his lines were shaved into the downy underbelly hair of the grizzly bear. It seems, it doesn’t matter how modern Hollywood becomes there will always be work for stooges (a stooge is someone who professionally shaves scripts into animal fur – incidentally that is how Curly, Larry and Mo met – they were stooges for United Artists, working on films such as ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ – although it wasn’t Curly’s famous dyslexia that led to the missing ‘g’ but his tiny ass. It simply wouldn’t fit).
Guttenburg stumbled upon his invention essentially by accident. An experienced scrabble player, he’d been trying to hustle Bea Arthur out of $50 dollars by holding back a ‘Q’ in his back pocket to play at an opportune moment. He’d absent-mindedly left the scrabble tile in the back pocket of his chinos and whilst using the trouser press the next day was astounded when the letter was imprinted upon the lining.In a fitting tribute to both Hollywood’s script donkeys and the location of the first imprint, the machine predominantly used by the film industry is dubbed ‘Guttenburg’s Ass’. It is upon his personal ass that Guttenburg printed his script for ‘P.S. Your Cat is Dead’. Which seems appropriate.
Treatises of Gloria 