Birds Do It

Birds Do It (1966)

Soupy Sales is Flying High...and the race for space - is up in the air!

Melvin Byrd, who dreams of being a scientist, is a Cape Kennedy "miniscule molecular particle surveillance monitor" - in short, a janitor. His job is to keep a major rocket project completely dust-free, and this he does with his own hilariously fantastic inventions - including a literal attack on dirt by a "knight on a white horse". In his work, he meets Judy, a chimp involved in a top-secret project, which leads Melvin into the one room strictly off-limits to him. Not until he has entered the project room does Melvin learn that any man entering it will be negatively ionized - making him fly like a bird.

Date of release
1966-08-13
TMDB
5.5 / 10 (6)
Runtime
1h 28m
Genres
Comedy, Action
Director
Andrew Marton

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Florida

Birds Do It is a 1966 American comedy film directed by Andrew Marton and starring Soupy Sales, Tab Hunter, Arthur O'Connell, Edward Andrews and Beverly Adams. It was made by Columbia Pictures and filmed at the Ivan Tors Studios in Miami.

Production

Producer Ivan Tors filmed Birds Do It at his Miami studios with cameos provided by Dean Martin (Columbia's Matt Helm), Flipper, director Andrew Marton as himself, and a Cary Grant impersonator played by Ray Anthony.

Sales was vocal in his dislike for the film, his only starring role. It was also the next-to-last film in Marton's long directing career.

In his memoirs Sales said the film "is now shown in six states as capital punishment." He claimed to have rejected the script at first "and I rejected it at first, because God knows you have to protect yourself in this business — people only blame who they see on screen, not the writers or directors." Then he added "once it was rewritten, Birds Do It wasn’t such a terrible picture."

The special effects of Byrd flying are in the style of the Hertz Rent-A-Car commercials of the time. One sequence featured Byrd being attacked by skydivers in a sequence reminiscent of the pre-credits sequence of Moonraker with Byrd's stunt double wearing a parachute under his sport coat.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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