Lucky Lady

Lucky Lady (1975)

When an American booze smuggler gets murdered in Prohibition-era Mexico, his widow, a nightclub singer, joins forces with her lover and a desperate loner to become rum-runners to the U.S.

Date of release
1975-12-25
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (18)
Runtime
1h 58m
Genres
Crime, Comedy
Director
Stanley Donen

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $24.4M
  • Budget: $12.1M
  • Earned 2× its budget

Lucky Lady is a 1975 American comedy-drama film directed by Stanley Donen and starring Liza Minnelli, Gene Hackman, Burt Reynolds and Robby Benson. Its story takes place in 1930 during Prohibition in the United States.

Production

Katz and Huyck at the time were best known for writing American Graffiti. Before that film came out they were struggling writers, looking for an original project. While Huyck was in the Army reserves, Katz would go to the UCLA library "looking for anything for an idea." She came across an article in American Mercury magazine about rumrunners operating off Ensenada during Prohibition and, feeling that this background had never been used for a film…

They worked on the script for six months. "It took us a long time to get our characters down," said Katz. "We tried it a lot of different ways. And we did a lot of research into the period and the language."

When they handed the script in, Gruskoff sold the film within eighteen hours to 20th Century Fox for $450,000, which was then a record amount for an original screenplay. This sale was helped by the fact that American Graffiti had since come out and been a huge success. "Mike Gruskoff was incredible, just incredible at selling a script," said Katz.

The writers wanted Steven Spielberg to direct and he was interested but had made a commitment to do Jaws. Eventually Stanley Donen signed. Donen's fee was $600,000, Grusskoff's was $400,000. Katz said, "our reaction was, Stanley Donen seems so bizarre for this kind of film! Then we realized he's the ideal director because he is really a romantic director, and he can do this kind of character stuff and the kind of humor that the film has."

Once Donen came on board, some changes to the script were made. "Stanley wanted very much to play up the relationships, the menage-à-trois," said Huyck. "Which was fine with us. The script was probably overloaded with action since we wanted to sell it. Actually, action is boring to write. We have much more fun with dialogue." "Stanley's big emphasis to us is that you must love the characters," said Katz.

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

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