Tall Story (1960)

Interesting facts

Tall Story is a 1960 American romantic comedy film made by Warner Bros. Pictures, directed by Joshua Logan, and starring Anthony Perkins and Jane Fonda in her film debut. It is based on the 1957 novel The Homecoming Game by Howard Nemerov, which was the basis of a successful 1959 Broadway play titled Tall Story, by the writing team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. The film was a considerable departure from Logan's previous two projects, the drama Sayonara, which won multiple Academy Awards, and the blockbuster South Pacific. It was Robert Redford's first film — he played a basketball player in an uncredited role.

Production

The film's working title was "The Way the Ball Bounces". Producer/director Joshua Logan originally intended the film to be a vehicle for both Jane Fonda and Warren Beatty to make their screen debuts, but Warner Bros. would not approve the unknown Beatty for the part, and Logan had to settle for his second choice, Anthony Perkins.

Fonda had hated the Broadway play, but was pleased that her part in the film script had been expanded. Logan was a good friend of her father Henry Fonda and saw Jane as a potential major star. He wanted to guide her through her first film experience – she had been modelling for several years – but Fonda found it a "Kafkaesque nightmare," explaining in her autobiography My Life So Far that during the making of Tall Story she suffered from bulimia,…

A wire-service story shared Fonda's perspective about her good fortune: “Jane frankly admits how she got the role. The producer-director is Josh Logan, her godfather. ‘Of course I’m very grateful to Mr. Logan’ she said as she was getting her hair styled at Warner's. ‘Because of my name, I’m getting the kind of role it would ordinarily take years to earn’.”

Campus scenes were filmed at Occidental College in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles.

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