WHAT WENT WRONG - Breakfast at Tiffany's

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

When Hollywood producers got their hands on Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, they thought they’d found the perfect RomCom. There was just one problem: there was no rom in that com because the narrator was gay. In this episode, Chris and Lizzie break down the Audrey Hepburn classic and discover why she was reluctant to take the part, which actor caused the most trouble on set, and how the cinematographer got electrocuted… at Tiffany’s! Plus we discuss the lasting impact of Mickey Rooney’s troubled performance, and discover why Truman Capote himself wanted to spit on the director. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's going down. I'm yelling Timber. You better move. You better dance. That's right. We're back. It's what went wrong. Your favorite podcast, full stuff that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly

impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a tragic party girl story that I didn't understand as a child. And we are so excited to get into it. Holly Golightly who ran so Kesha could stumble. Lizzie Bassett is here with me. No, I love Kesha. Yeah, you better not the smirch Kesha. No, Kesha's great.

I was thinking about Chandelier. I was thinking about timber. I was thinking about all my party girl anthems. I'm Chris Winterbauer, joined as always by my co-host. Lizzie Bassett, Lizzie, what have you picked for us today? Let's get into it. Well, I've chosen breakfast at Tiffany's for us today. And I picked this because, you know, I knew we were kind of going into a bit of a Truman Capote hole here on what went wrong for a minute.

A dark place. But I was not expecting this to be as interesting an episode as I think it is. Well, let's hear from you first, Christopher. Had you seen this movie before, and what did you think about it upon watching it for the podcast? I had seen it before. I don't remember when, sometime in adolescence. And at an age when I did not appreciate this type of story in particular, I was more into action movies, nor movies of this era. I was more into modern movies. And I have to say, with one element accepting, I actually really liked this movie. And I really enjoyed it. I thought the technicolor aspects of it actually looked really beautiful. I think it's interesting. I think it's a little messy. I think the first

two-thirds works better than the last third. I really love the relationship between Holly and Fred, as it were, until it becomes romantic and then I become less engaged in the story. There's probably a reason for that, yes. Just my personal instincts. And I also love Patricia Neal in this movie. Yeah, she's great. And I think she's the best actor of the three of them, in my opinion. And I like George Pepper in this movie.

And Audrey Hepburn's look is unparalleled in many ways. it's so iconic, but Patricia Neal is like, watch out, darling, I'll show you how to really do it here. She comes into the room. She's so good. And I really actually feel that way about a number of the peripheral actors. Martin Balsam as well. Martin Balsam as well.

And so as the movie whittles away at the peripheral elements and just focuses on our two heroes, and then their relationship becomes, I think, less interesting as it moves from an unexpected friendship into a very expected romance. And so I do still really like this movie, but for me, the first hour in 20 minutes really sings. And then we just kind of get into a territory where I feel like,

okay, you know, I've kind of seen this or it's not as interesting. It doesn't feel as Capote-esque. I haven't read the book. I don't know. And the last thing I'll present to you as a theory is at first I was thinking, oh, is George Pepperd is Paul, Fred, Harper Lee, and is Holly Golightly Truman Capote? And I was like, no, no, no, no, no.

And then I just really felt like these are both Truman Capote. I really felt like he was just writing two angles of himself interacting. with each other in like the first half of the film very much. And you can tell me what's right or what's wrong, but that was my interpretation. Anyway, all to say, really love the first hour and 20 minutes, really like this movie overall. And the Mr. Yunioshi Mickey Rooney section should be excised from the movie, lit on fire and buried in the ground. It's so rough. It is. We'll talk about it. And is there a weird meta element too where they make reference to Andy Hardy, which is the character he played? I believe she says like, did you fall in love Andy Hardy? Patricia Neal's, I swear I heard her say

that. Yeah, you're right. And that's the Mickey, I believe that's who Mickey Rooney became famous for playing Andy Hardy in the Andy Hardy movies. And so it was like a weird meta quality to this movie. I said, get out of here, Ryan Reynolds. All right, go ahead. Lizzie. Well, we had a very different experience of this movie. I had never seen it. Really? You never seen breakfast? No. Interesting. That's so cool. I've seen a lot of movies from this time period. So I was kind of surprised that I hadn't seen it. And now, I think I know why. So most of the movies I saw from this time period growing up I was exposed to because of my mom. And when I was thinking about this, I was like, why haven't I seen this? Because she

loved Truman Capote. And this is obviously based on a Truman Capote novel or novella. So I decided to read the novella first. And that was my mistake, I think. I loved it. I highly recommend everyone read it. It is really good. It's very complex. We're going to get into a lot of the differences because, boy, are there a lot. And then when I watched the movie, you know, I knew of it. about the Mickey Rooney stuff. And obviously, I've seen pictures of this movie. I'm very familiar with what it looks like and everything. And I was expecting the Mickey Rooney stuff to be, you know, offensive. So that didn't surprise me. What did surprise me is that they turned a really complex, fascinating character study and really a study of a friendship into something so saccharine and to me

just unbelievably shallow that I was left with such a bad taste in my mouth from this movie. and we'll get into the reasons why and what they changed and everything. But I just felt like it was fluff in the worst way. And, you know, Martin Balsam asks, is she or isn't she? Is she a phony? And that is a line from the novel. But it plays so differently here because it's like, yeah, 100% she's a phony in the movie. Everyone is.

And that's not the case in the book. And I think I was just so, like, deeply disappointed that this had become a classic. I guess. And I'm sure that that has to do with the fact that I read the novel first, because I totally understand why people love this. I think in terms of the good, it looks incredible. The costumes, which we'll get into, two people are responsible for them, although one for the most famous ones. The way that it's shot, I love the color. There's so much about it that I really do enjoy. However, it's not the story. So let's get into it and let's talk about everything. And by the way, we've had this discussion many times. I'm sure people are going to chime in saying that, oh, you know,

Mickey Rooney playing a Japanese character. That's just like, that's just how it was done back then. And you guys don't need to look at it through, you know, a modern lens. First of all, that's not true. That's not how it was done. I mean, yes, there were actors performing in yellowface, but this was, if anything, hearkening back by like 20 plus years to what people had been doing prior to World War II. My understanding is that, I mean, this is 15 years after. the internment camps that happened during World War II. Well, it's important to draw a distinction between, you know, Alec Guinness in Lawrence of Arabia, which is very different than this.

Very different. We have to be able to distinguish between the two. Yes. Alec Guinness, again, you can still say, okay, now we know we wouldn't do that anymore. Okay, fine. But at the time, he's clearly attempting to bring a real person to life in the most dignified way possible. Yes. Everyone in Lawrence of Arabia is.

Mickey Rooney is doing the opposite in this movie. My God. Also, the writer, the director. It's not just Mickey Roe. Rooney, is everybody involved? We'll get to that. Okay, well, you tell me where I'm wrong. He's more responsible for it than you might think.

But I guess my point is that they're making a very distinct choice here. And it did not go unnoticed. And people did find this offensive when it came out. Not everyone and not to the level that we do today. But it was like, this was a big, weird swing to put in this movie. And my understanding is that a lot of this caricature of Asians was pretty prevalent in, like, silent films and leading up through the 30s. But then when World War II happened, you've got the internment camps, you have actual photographs of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That put a bit of a damper on this kind of caricature.

And you started to see a little bit of difference happening over the course of the 50s. Now, I'm not saying there weren't still white actors playing Asian characters. There absolutely were, but it was not this kind of caricature. So it's very interesting to me that they chose to put that in this movie, especially because it ain't present in the novel at all. So let's get into it. All right. Breakfast at Tiffany's is directed by Blake Edwards. It has a screenplay by George Axelrod based on the novella by Truman Capote.

It's produced by Martin Jureau and Richard Shepard. It was released by Paramount. It had a budget of just over $2 million, a lot. And it was released in October of 1961. It stars Audrey Hepburn, George Pepard, Patricia Neal, Buddy Ebson, Martin Balsam, Mickey Rooney, and more. Now, our main sources for today, among many, many others, are Fifth Avenue, A.m. Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's and the Dawn of the Modern Woman by Sam Watson, and the Many Lives of Mr. Unioshi, Yellowface and the Queer Buzz of Breakfast at Tiffany's by Melissa

Pruxa Schart, which is a really, really interesting academic paper that I highly recommend people go read. So, around the spring of 1955, Truman Capote, who was at this point a successful novelist, screenwriter, and playwright, could not get Holly go lightly off his mind. He later told Playboy magazine, quote, the reason I wrote about Holly outside of the fact that I liked her so much, was that she was such a symbol of all these girls who come to New York and spin in the sun for a moment like Mayflies and then disappear. I wanted to rescue one girl from that anonymity and preserve her for posterity. Now, despite many, many women coming forward to claim that they had been the inspiration for the character of Holly, she didn't really belong to any one of them,

though Capote did pull elements of the character from real life. He was a fixture on the New York social scene. He really surrounded himself with wealthy, brilliant, beautiful female friends, better known, and immortalized by Ryan Murphy, I guess, as the Swans. I don't know if you saw feud Capote v. The Swans. I haven't seen it, but I'm aware. It's good. It's interesting. There was Carol Marcus, Doris Lily, Phoebe Pierce, Una Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin's wife, Gloria Vanderbilt, of course, Anderson Cooper's mummy,

and Babe Paley, wife of CBS founder Bill Paley, played by Naomi Watts and Capote versus the Swans, and she apparently had six closets just for her nightgowns. Now, some theorized that Capote wrote Go Lightly as sort of a fantasy of who Babe Paley could have been had she not been in a controlling loveless and sexless marriage, which she was, unfortunately. And this is one that apparently Truman Capote told her to treat like a job. He was like, clock in, babe, you know. And then there was Capote's own mother, born Lily Mae Falk in Monroeville, Alabama. Capote's mother had for a long period abandoned him to be raised by her extended family

when she ran off to New York to be with a married lover. He would later join her in Manhattan, but it was during this time in Alabama that he met Nell Harper Lee. Her father was a lawyer, the two would watch his trials like they were at the movies. What does this sound like, Chris? To kill a mockingbird. To kill a mockingbird, of course. She would eventually write the classic novel and base the character of Dill, at least loosely, on Capote. If you want a little bit more detail on their relationship, go back and listen to Friday's episode

on In Cold Blood. And by the way, that also may have been what colored this for me. So, poorly is that, you know, we got to read In Cold Blood and focus on that story and that adaptation and it's so remarkable and I think the movie is really remarkable. And I kept wondering, like, Breakfast at Tiffany's just doesn't sound like a Truman Capote story. It's because this movie is not. But also, in Cold Blood wasn't exactly, it was a little bit of a departure too. It was, but if you read Breakfast at Tiffany's, I guess that's what I mean. Well, because his writing still feels like his writing. Yes, exactly. The way that he writes about people is the same. Yes. So Lily May also

changed her name to Nina to try and sound more sophisticated. Is this ringing any bells? Lula Mae to Holly? That's correct. Lulamay Barnes is what Holly Golightly's birth name was. She, of course, ran off on her family, though in this case they were stepchildren and she was a child bride. Yeah, softened to that one effectively, meaning easier to understand. That she had a reason to leave. Yeah. That she had a reason to leave. Pretty understandable, yes. Now, the novella is told from the perspective of Holly's upstairs neighbor, a nameless narrator who she chooses to call Fred because he reminds her of her brother. He very pointedly shares the same birthday as Truman Capote, and though it's never explicitly spelled out that he's gay, it seems pretty heavily implied. Also, there is no romantic

relationship between him and Hollygo lightly, because again, he is gay. You could definitely say he is in love with her, though. He says so himself, but it's neither romantic nor sexual. In fact, he describes it as a kind of jealousy, which I think, given how Capote would later interact with and sort of betray his swans feels very on brand for him. Now, he had one full-length novel, Other Voices, other rooms under his belt, before shopping around Breakfast at Tiffany's and many short stories, articles, a couple of screenwriting gigs. He was quite well known, especially among literary circles, but I don't know that he qualified as like, famous, famous yet in terms of across the country. In 1958, Harper's Bazaar purchased the manuscript for $2,000 and planned to publish it in their July

issue, but the editor who had originally greenlit the purchase was fired and replaced by a new editor who was clutching her pearls at the language Capote used in the novella. And it's pretty, it is pretty shocking. Like some of the words that are used in this, the way that she discusses what she's doing, I mean, she's a call girl, like, for sure. She has a form of escort, maybe more of like the girlfriend experience than, you know, something else. But it's pretty explicitly laid out.

She refers to lesbians with a word that starts with D. There's a lot of commentary around race, although it's very complicated. and certainly not where it lands with Mr. Yunioshi. It's also nothing to do with that character at all. So Harper's backed out of the deal, and Capote was pretty furious. But lucky for him, Esquire swooped in and offered to match the $2,000 plus a thousand more, and this would be about $45,000 today. So given what we know he was paid for in cold blood, he's obviously not at the level that he will get to for that. In November of 1958, Esquire published the full novella and Random House published it as a book, and it sold out immediately. So suck on that, Harper's Bazaar. Capote referred to all the women coming out of the woodwork to take credit as the Holly go lightly sweepstakes.

But there was a major difference between Holly and the women in Truman's life. And that's that she was completely independent and she did whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. In fact, the most independent woman he knew was probably the least like Holly. It was tomboy Harper Lee. Back in July of that same year, the reader report for the then unpublished Breakfast of Tiffany's had landed on the desk of Marty Jereau, entertainment lawyer turned movie producer who had just inked a massive 12-picture deal with Paramount alongside his business partner Richard Shepard.

And here's what the report said. Well written, offbeat, amusing, but it is unfortunately too similar to Isherwood's work goodbye to Berlin, dramatized as I Am a Camera. The type of character is the same, only the incidents and chronology are different. And in any event, this is more of a character sketch than a story. Not recommended.

It's in all caps at the end, in case you can't tell. Sprawling New Yorker shit. Man, I was saving that for later for you. you to chime in with, so save it. Now, it's absolutely true that Holly Go Lightly owes quite a bit to Sally Bowles. They are kind of the first two rungs on the manic pixie dream girl ladder, but I don't agree that the work as a whole is too similar. But Capote's name was enough to peak Jereau's interest, and he decided that against his reader's judgment, they should go after breakfast at Tiffany's. So his production company, Jeroose Shepard, was very small, and they did not have a lot of money,

but they did have a reputation for protecting their writers. They had recently gotten into it with what went wrong favorite, Sam Spiegel, over some casting in their adaptation of Tennessee Williams Orpheus Descending, which would become the fugitive kind, and they had backed Tennessee Williams and won. Now, Jerome knew that Capote's greatest wish was for the film adaptation to stay faithful to the book. And Capote actually had written at least one screenplay at this point. He had written, Beat the Devil, co-written with John Houston, but he hadn't adapted any of his own work. And I think it's interesting that it seems like the assumption from the beginning was that he wouldn't adapt this. Now, I don't know why he didn't fight harder to do that. I have a very good

idea why Marty Jereau didn't want him to do it, which we'll get to. So Jereau flew to New York to have lunch with Capote, and it turned out Capote had two very specific people in mind to star in the film already. Chris, any guesses as to who he wanted for Holly go lightly? She was a huge star at the time. She's blonde. Marilyn? Marilyn. Really? He kind of wrote it for her. I mean, she's so physically different than Audrey Hepburn that it's hard to see now, but yeah, I can totally. That's interesting. There's such a sweet sadness to Marilyn Monroe that I think is much closer to what's in the book. Certainly. She was obviously not a call girl, but the way in which she was treated as a piece of

commercial property by, you know, studios, etc. Definitely. Any guesses for the mail lead? Holly's upstairs neighbor who shared Truman Capote's own birthday. Brock Hudson? German Capote Oh Oh interesting What's funny is George Pappar looks If you squint he looks a little like Truman Capote

How hard are you squinting? Squinting pretty hard Give him some glasses But he's like blonde at least You know he's a little like thicker But the difference is the voice You need the voice Like that's you know

And it's funny Carmela had never heard Truman Capote speak It's a treat Yeah I was like That's why I was saying it feels like These are the two sides of Capote to me Obviously it's not It's his mother

and these other women he knows. No, I think you're right. I think he's part of both of them. And then she was saying, you know, well, she really associated him with true crime. You know what I mean? And so she was thinking like, he was this brooding, you know, guy.

And I was like, no, no, no, you got to see him on a talk show. He's so funny. He's amazing. He's the funniest person. He's so funny. Actually, yeah, you mentioned a talk show. I want to play just a little clip of him on Dick Cavett talking about just how smart he was and the fact that he was actually tested as part of like a nationwide IQ test when he was a child.

Please play this. So, I, my family were only too glad to see me go north. And I went up to Columbia to something called a Horace Mann School. And I spent about a year being a guinea pig, doing nothing but being given the most complicated, extreme, extraordinary intelligence tests. and people used to come from all over from California, from London, from everywhere to give me this test.

Didn't you resent being tested and probed that? I was so happy to be out of Alabama. I didn't care. I love that. So inside Marty Giroux is like, oh no, oh no, no, no, no, no. But he smartly told Capote, quote, the role just isn't good enough for you. The male lead is just a pair of shoulders for her to lean on.

You deserve something more dynamic. Though, I have to say, a Truman Capote, Marilyn Monroe, two-hander, would have been incredible. But Capote agreed, and they closed the deal for $65,000 or about $740,000 today. And great news for Capote, Marilyn Monroe had already heard about Breakfast at Tiffany's, and she was interested. Now, they actually were good friends. And, Chris, if you would like to see what this movie could have been, take a look at this picture of the two of them dancing at the Club Morocco in 1955. Yeah, it would have been great. He's so small.

I know she's wearing heels and he's close to her height, but he seems much shorter than her. And he also seems exhausted, sweaty, barely keeping up. And Marilyn Monroe is just like effortlessly looking at the camera. I know. She looks incredible. He's also holding her wrist. Was that a thing? I don't know.

I guess the guy in the background's kind of doing it too. I don't know. I love it. It's so like weird and awkward and it's such a dichotomy between the two of them. It's very funny. But it turns out Marty Jeroe had not been entirely honest with Truman Capote in that lunch meeting because he had absolutely zero interest in casting Marilyn and Roe and breakfast at Tiffany's. And there are two reasons. The first, he just straight up thought

she was wrong for the part. And I can kind of see his reasoning here. He thought Holly had like a toughness to her and a spunk and he really couldn't picture Marilyn making it on her own in New York City. I think that's unfair to Marilyn's talents. Apparently this man's never seen all about Eve, but, you know, whatever. Now, she was also known to be an absolute nightmare on set by this point. That's what I was wondering if that's where he's coming from. Yeah. She had just made the seven-year itch with Billy Wilder, and Wilder had not been shy talking about what a problem she had been. They'd run behind because she required so many takes, and according to Wilder, quote, it's not that she was mean. It's just that she had no sense of time nor conscience that 300 people had been waiting hours for her.

Something they'd repeat on something like it hot. Yes. But still, Billy Wilder thought that Marilyn might be worth the gamble for Giroux because she sold tickets. So, Dereau decided to think on it. Yeah, she's a huge star. She's huge. As big a name as you could hope to get for this movie, really. Yes. But just a few days later, he received a call from our friend the bat, Marilyn Monroe's acting coach, Paula Strasbourg.

Oh, yeah. Saying, Marilyn will not play a lady of the evening. Yeah. And that was the end of that. By January of 1959, Jereau and Shepard realized that Marilyn might not be the only actress who would pass for this reason. So they needed a screenplay that could sanitize the. raciness that is present in Capote's novel. Right. $50 for the powder room. Yeah. Instead of, yeah.

Oh, no, that's in the novel, too. It's just very implied that she might be doing something in the powder room for those $50. I know. In this instance, it's like $50 and they're not going in there. I know. And you're like, how do I get this job? Yeah. And they figured it was going to be a hard book to adapt because, Chris, what is it? Sprawling New Yorkership! There we go. Thank you. Very good. There's no real three-act structure. You know, we should get a soundboard and just program a couple quotes on it, and one of them should be Nick Cage shodding New Yorker shit. David, please, can we get it?

It's that sprawling New Yorker shit. Oh, man. I think it's interesting that they keep harping on the novella having no plot. That's what they keep saying. I don't agree at all. In many ways, I actually think it has more of a driving plot than the film does. There's a lot more made of Holly's sort of accidental illegal courier activities with Sally Tomato and then her eventual downfall.

plus she does get on a plane to Brazil at the end and eventually makes her way maybe all the way to Africa. I wonder of what they mean, though, is that there's no central driving plot from a movie perspective, which is most movies focus on one binary, like, pass-fail question. And in this instance, they're going to frame it as will they or will they not get together, right? Which I agree with you. I'm not interested in. I'm just saying... But it does have that. Okay.

It's just not that relationship. It's focused on Holly. So if you had to define it, what is it? it with Holly? It's will Holly settle down or won't she? Or like, will Holly sort of get, I mean, yeah, I understand what you're saying. I'm not saying you're wrong. I trust you. I guarantee you it's better and more interesting. And it probably, even as a direct adaptation would have made a better movie, I'm just saying, having been in meetings like these, you know, to discuss adapting things, etc. If you can't boil it down to that one sentence, it gets hard, I think, for studio executives,

etc., to compute and say, we're going to give you a bunch of money to go make this thing. Yes. But also, he's gay. That's it. I think that's it. I think that's it. Because, like, having read the novel, you know, something like The Devil Wars Prada, which really was that sprawling New Yorker bullshit. We about to talk about number two. Yes, we are. This was not really that. Like, I really do think that this has a lot more forward momentum than something like that does. Yeah.

I think it's just that he's gay and there's no risk of them having sex. So, Incept George Axelrod. Now, in 1952, Axelrod had become a household name thanks to his Broadway play, the seven-year itch. It had become the longest running non-musical of the decade with over 1,100 performances. Axelrod had, by his own estimation, written over 400 scripts for radio and TV prior to the 7-year itch. So, while it was his big break, he was not inexperienced. And his big break got even bigger when director Billy Wilder called him up and said he wanted to turn it into a film. But they had a problem.

The 7-year-ich is about a married man who has an affair while his family is on vacation. Chris, any guesses what might have been a problem for them at this time in the mid-50s? I mean, Hayes Code. Yes, the Hays Code, also known as the MPAA Production Code. Now, we've talked about this a bunch and other episodes. It was established in the 1930s. It was a set of censorship guidelines, which were self-imposed, which I actually didn't know, and agreed upon by the major studios. Among them, adultery was a pretty big no-no. We will get to why it was self-imposed. Okay. I don't know if you knew this. I did not know this. It was actually established following a series of unsavory events that had

happened in Hollywood, the most scandalous of which was the death of Virginia Rap, possibly due to some sort of sexual encounter or assault by Fatty Arbuckle. We still don't really know what the hell happened there. There's a great, you must remember this on this case. Arbuckle was eventually acquitted because there was not enough evidence to convict him, but it's very ambiguous as to what went down. Yeah, and there were a lot of potential protests of certain films by Catholic groups, especially in Pennsylvania, and I can't remember which theater. I can't remember if it was Lemley. I'm going to get this wrong, and it might have been Warner's, but one of the major studios had a huge hub of distribution based out of Pennsylvania at the time.

Huh. And they just thought, we're going to get creamed. That's it. You know, if we don't do something about this. Also, the government. Yeah. Hollywood was basically like,

we got to check ourselves before we wreck ourselves because they know the government's going to impose a stricter code than they might be able to impose on themselves. Yeah, it's better for us to do it to ourselves than somebody else to come in and mess with our thing. That's exactly right.

So Wilder and Axelrod had to figure out what to do because their main character could not consummate an affair in the movie. So they turned any actual transgressions or sort of like insinuated transgressions into fantasies. They are in the main character's imagination. American Beauty. Right. They American Beauty did American Beauty it. They did American Beauty it.

So Axelrod was deeply unhappy with the finished product because of this. And he decided to move to Los Angeles so he could keep a closer eye on any future screenplays of his. He also developed a habit of submitting a deliberately racy early draft that was designed to direct attention towards a character or plot line that he was actually totally fine with cutting. It was a little bit of look over here so that the studio execs wouldn't look too. closely at the parts that he wanted to keep. I love this. We used to do this in a particularly difficult writer's room that I worked in where we had to submit episode ideas and we would always put an unbelievably bad one in the mix on purpose so that the higher-ups would have something to cut right away. It's risky, though. Made him feel smarter, Chris. Bless their hearts. But it's risky because

every once in a while. Why? Because they choose it? They choose the bad one. That's true. That's true. I'm just saying it's a double-edged sword. Make it really bad. So when Axelrod heard about breakfast at Tiffany's, he in some ways saw a chance to write the wrongs done in the seven-year itch. And he went to Paramount, pitched himself, and they said, no thank you, because he was considered a massive red flag with the production code thanks to the seven-year itch. Plus, according to Axelrod, Marty Jeroe, apparently didn't think he was uptown enough. I don't know what that means. He's like a low-class writer. Oh, a dirty poor. Yeah, well, you said, you know, radio, television, he's not an A-list features writer. It doesn't sound like at this point. He's not. Yeah.

So in January of 1959, they hired Australian novelist, playwright, and television writer Sumner Lach Elliott. Elliot, who was not out at the time, was gay and was New York-based. So maybe they thought he could bring some of the Truman Capote flair that they needed, to which I say, again, why not hire Truman Capote? I mean, I know why they wanted to change his entire novel. And by April, Elliot turned in his draft, and Richard Shepard wrote the following memo to Paramount. Suffice to say, we are all immensely disappointed in Elliot's efforts.

Disregarding its length and its peculiar physical format, we are most disturbed by its episodic, disjointed, fluffy, and even ephemeral tone. Elliot, to our way of thinking has seriously failed to capture the warmth, the zest, the humor, the beauty, and more important, the basic heart and honesty that is Holly go lightly. The young man he has written as petty and unattractive in character, borders on the effeminate, which we all detest. And as is the case with Holly and the whole piece, it is almost totally devoid of the humor and contemporary flavor that is absolutely vital for this picture.

Most important, however, a dramatically sound storyline and point of view is either non-existent or certainly not clear. So it sounds to me like this person actually adapted Jeremy Capote's novel. He adapted the book. Yeah. Why is the man's voice so high? It's ridiculous. He goes on to explain that they are all 100% convinced that it should be a rom-com in which the boy gets the girl in the end and they needed to hire a new writer who would be more capable of jamming Capote's character study into a traditional three-act structure in which his very gay narrator is no longer very gay. and is now a man's man, man, man who falls in love with Holly Golightly.

You know, some light changes. So, Drew O and Shepard drew up a new list of screenwriters, and down at the very bottom was George Axelrod. They asked every writer to pitch their idea on how to solve their problem. And if the pitch was good, they said, well, skip a treatment, you can go straight to the screenplay. And lucky for them, Axelrod had a solve. He figured the whole problem wasn't that Holly was, you know,

afraid of being alone. It's actually that she was afraid of commitment, which was pretty unusual for a female character at the time. Now, this much is present in the novell. But now that they're turning it into a rom-com, he had to figure out why Holly and this guy don't just sleep together and move on. She clearly has no problem hooking up with people, but that would be a code no-no. So his solve was the reason that these two don't just bang it out right away is that he's a jigolo too. Which I got to be honest.

I don't totally get. Like, is it just that, I don't know. What do you make of this update? That's one of the elements I like about the movie quite a bit, actually. I like it too. I just don't know that I like understand. Like, what is it? Is it just that he sees himself in her and then doesn't want to engage with her in the same way that he engages with other women? You're saying, why doesn't he try to hook up with her right away?

Yeah, that's what they're like, why don't these, you know, why don't these two just get together? No, it's just why doesn't she hook up with him? Hmm. The decision making is unidirectional in this. Let's be straight. Good point. The women make the choice. The men, he's like, if Holly in the first scene had been like, can I get in bed and kissed him?

They would have had sex. 100%. Good point. It's like in Tina Faye says in 30 Rock, you can smell like cabbage and you can still find a man to have sex with you. It's completely true. What I liked about it is that it shows that they're both transactional people. They're striving for something else in slightly different ways. I like that it makes it so that it puts him in a nice position where he is not judgmental of her, nor should he be judgmental of her, which I really like. That's also true. Good point. And I like the power dynamic between him and Patricia Neal. I think that's really interesting.

I wish there was more of it, which we'll get to. I agree. Or their friendship, I love all those non-traditional elements much more than what we eventually get. All right. Thank you for clarifying that. I agree with all that. Dero and Shepard also agreed. They loved this and they hired him right away. And Axelrod removed a few major plot points from the novel immediately. So the whole dynamic between Mag's Wildwood, who is barely in the movie and Holly is totally excised. In the book, they have this very funny, competitive, bitchy thing going on. She's a really weird, funny character. Also, Holly has an unplanned pregnancy and a miscarriage. Those are totally removed, as is the entire beginning of the novel. So what happens at the beginning of the novel is that the narrator discovers from his

neighbor, Mr. Yunioshi, who, yes, is a Japanese man and a photographer, but he's a human. He's a normal, important human being, that Holly, who had disappeared at the end of the novel on a plane to Brazil, may have made it to Africa. And they discover this because Yunioshi visited a village and they show him a sculpture of a head that looks exactly like Holly go lightly. And they describe a woman having come into the town. So it's this realization that she has made it, you know, all the way to Africa and may have perhaps found love there. Andy added a lot. In particular, the relationship with 2E, 2E, the older woman bank rolling our narrator, now Paul's life in the building. And remember Axelrod's strategy of really raunching it up in one area to distract from another? He does that here

by making the sexual encounters between 2E and Paul more explicit in order to distract from the character of Holly. And for the most part, this worked. There was a lot of back and forth with the Production Code administration in terms of what could stay and what could go. They didn't completely ignore Holly. But Gerow and Shepard had a very clever way around this. In the book, the narrator, as we said, pretty clearly gay. So if they didn't at least imply that he was sleeping with women in the movie, people might assume he was gay and there was nothing more horrifying than that. And the production code was like, you're right.

But they did draw one major line in the sand. Holly and Paul could not sleep together in the movie. And this concerned Axelrod because he was starting to feel like it was the seven-year-inch all over again. So casting for the lead actress became even more important. She really had to walk the line between being just suggestive enough, but not so suggestive that anyone would think that she's a freak in the sheets. Shirley McLean was considered, but she was booked elsewhere. She would have been good.

So were Jane Fonda, who I would argue is maybe a little too hot. And they also thought too young. Yes, yeah. And Jane Fonda projects older to me than she is. Like, I don't want this to be crass, but she projects more sexually mature than I think she was at her age versus McLean and Hepburn feel very young to me. That's interesting because they're both older. I know, but they feel more bright-eyed and naive is the wrong word, but I don't know. I would argue they feel less sexual, although Shirley McLean, I think, can walk that line a little more than Audrey Hepburn does. Sure. By the way, though, Jane Fonda was closer in age to Holly's age in the book.

Holly's 19 in the book. And Audrey Hepburn's in her 30s in this movie. Yeah, that's what I thought. Maybe she'd been acting since the early 50s, I thought. Yeah. Also considered were Rosemary Clooney. And then they start looking at the biggest box office stars at the time. And it's Doris Day, Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, Sandra D.

Like, none of these work. Yeah, I was wondering about, like, Doris Day and Rock Hudson, they were doing all their, you know, movies. And Elizabeth Taylor, who I think is too old. Elizabeth Taylor would rip your dick off. Yeah, well, you know, Elizabeth Taylor could have played the Patricia Neal part, I think. She could have played 2E. I don't think she was old enough. I think she's like, this is Cleopatra era.

Yeah, but maybe in terms of vibe she could have played 2E. Yeah, Too E does have a dick ripping off vibe. Yeah. I love Patricia Neal in this movie. I do too. And I think she is gorgeous. She is gorgeous. I don't know if I love her hats.

They didn't do her any solids with those hats, but she looks great. Doesn't bother me. So. Keep your hat on Patricia. Hey, calm down. Poor Roald Doll beats you up. She beat Roald Doll up. Let's be honest.

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It can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes, find local new spots, all while being rewarded at more than 45,000 merchant partners. It's like having a personal assistant baked into where you live. It's simple. Being a renter and now owning a home is better with Bilt. Join the membership for where you live at joinbilt.com slash wrong. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash wrong. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. So this led them in a pretty different direction and they thought, why don't we cast totally against type more aggressively and look at Audrey Hepburn. Audrey Hepburn was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1929, to a British father and a Dutch baroness, and beginning at age five, she was obsessed with ballet.

Now, her parents divorced one year later around age six, and she went to live with her mother. Her mother moves them to the Netherlands. Her father kind of exited the picture at this point, and of this Hepburn said, it certainly stayed with me, my father leaving us left me insecure for life, perhaps. While the Netherlands had seemed like a safe bet to Hepburn's mom, Thanks to the Nazis in World War II, it turned out they very much were not. Now, it should be noted that her mother was an early and rather avid Nazi sympathizer. That did change after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands when she saw firsthand what they were capable of, including murdering her brother-in-law, Audrey's uncle. But her mother's early supported the Nazis with something Hepburn was very embarrassed about for her entire life.

And Audrey was not a sympathizer. In fact, she would actually ferry messages to Brits and Americans who had been shot down over hot. Holland, and she delivered the Dutch resistance newspaper to fellow resistance fighters. She was very young, and she was an active part of the Dutch resistance. This was an extremely difficult time, coupled with the Hunger Winter, Famine, or Hunger Winter of 1944 to 1945, which left Audrey severely malnourished. And it actually weakened her to the point where she could no longer keep up with her dream of being a professional ballerina. So after the war, she pivoted to some small acting roles in London's West End, and then eventually some small film roles, where her

relatively unusual features got her noticed pretty quickly. She was cast in the title role of the original Broadway production of Gigi, though she would not star in the film. And then, of course, she broke out big in 1953 with what film opposite Gregory Peck? Roman Holiday. Roman Holiday, which I love is very cute. It's a great movie. And then Sabrina? She actually won the Oscar for Roman Holiday. Yeah, I did not remember that. William Weiler, right? He directed that one? Yes, William Weiler. Yeah, it's a great movie. And then one year later, in 1954, Paramount called up French designer Euber de Givonsci, asking him to dress Miss Hepburn for her upcoming film, Sabrina.

Now, they had a pretty adorable meat cute. He actually thought they had meant Catherine Hepburn. So when little tiny Audrey Hepburn walked in, he was like, but she managed to win him over, and they ended up becoming each other's kind of great loves over the course of their lives. To be clear, Givon she was gay, which I think Audrey Hepburn clocked right away. They continued working together, and by the time breakfast at time, Tiffany's rolled around. It was actually in Audrey's contract that her costumes had to be designed by

Juvenchy, and a little bit more on that later. She was also one of the highest paid actresses in the world, but she was actually looking to step away from Hollywood. She had married Mel Ferrer in 1954, and in June of 1959, while Axelrod was working on the screenplay, Audrey had miscarried, and sadly, it was not the first time. According to Audrey, children were, quote, indispensable for a woman's life and happiness. So this was really quite devastating for her. She was trying to focus on building a family and had actually turned down both Westside Story and Cleopatra and had pulled out of a Hitchcock film, which would never end up getting made because he had added a rape scene last minute and she was like, I'm not doing it. Do you know who in West Side Story would have been? Maria.

Maria. Okay. Yeah. That's what I was wondering. Does Audrey Heprin sing? I don't remember her singing. She did. She sang a little bit in funny face.

And of course, she sings in this movie, which we will talk about. But she's not like... I meant like a big Broadway singer. Not at all. In 1959 she became pregnant again, and later Jereau flew out to the south of France to meet with a very preggers-odry and try to sell her on breakfast at Tiffany's, but she said, quote, you have a wonderful script, but I can't play a hooker. However, Jereau kept at it, and her agent promised her she would not be confused for the wild child up on the screen, and she eventually agreed because, quote, I was nothing like her, but I felt I could act, Holly. That was a revolutionary thought for me after so many movies I no longer felt like an amateur. I knew the part would be a challenge, but I wanted it anyway. And the seven-time $150,000 salary probably didn't hurt. That is $8.5 million today. But she did remain concerned about her image in connection with Holly. She would later tell the director, quote, when you publicize this unusual role, please make it clear that I do not play a trollop. I play a cook. And fun fact, this is

actually why so many of the press materials featured Holly with a cat was because a cat lady couldn't possibly be a trollop. But she went back to focusing on her family and she happily gave birth to her first child, Sean Ferrer in July of 1960. And everyone was thrilled that she had signed on except for, what's the one person who probably wasn't super stoked about this? Truman Capote. Truman Capote! He said, Paramount double-crossed me in every way and cast Audrey. He told Playboy magazine, the book was really rather bitter and Holly Golightly was real, a tough character, not an Audrey Hepburn type at all. The film became a mockish Valentine to New York City and Holly, and as a result, was thin and pretty, whereas it should have been rich and ugly.

It bore as much resemblance to my work as the Rockettes do to Yulanova. The Yulanova there refers to Galina Yulanova, who was considered one of the greatest ballerinas of all times. So he's simultaneously shitting on Breakfast at Tiffany's and the Rockettes. Nice, Truman. He didn't love it. Someone else who probably wasn't too thrilled about Audrey's casting was director John Frankenheimer, who had been attached to direct until Audrey or her agents.

Oh, really? Uh-huh. They said she would not work with him. Interesting. So he got fired. Yeah. We haven't covered, well, I guess we kind of covered a Frankenheimer film a little bit with Island of Dr. Moreau, but he was a combative presence on film sets.

Yes, and that could have been part of it. He also wasn't super well known at this point. Others said it may have been that his existing work was a little too dark for her, whatever it was, she said no. And then Hepburn's agent promptly handed Gerow and Shepard a list of more suitable directors. Every single one was booked. So they had to start calling the ones not on the list, and this included Blake Edwards. Right.

At this point, he was best known for directing Operation. petticoat, which would not stand the test of time, but... But would be remade into a television show. Really? Yeah. Okay. It did make a boatload of money for Universal, though, and it starred Carrie Grant, an actor who was notoriously obsessive and required a strong hand from a director. They figured if he could handle Grant, he could handle Audrey.

So Edwards got the gig at a cut rate, I'm sure. And he came quite late to the party, so he didn't have that much to do with the screenplay, nor did he get his way when it came to casting the male lead. Edward's first choice to play Paul was Tony Curtis. I think Tony Curtis would have been so good in this role. So I think actually, for me, the reason the first hour works well... Is that George Pippard is the blandest of bland toasts? I guess what I mean is that he doesn't read as sexual.

Yeah, true. And so if you're not going to play him as gay, playing him as a sort of more sexless friend character, I think is really interesting. And I like then the dynamic between him and Patricia Neal, where she really commands the scene. She can dominate him, right? in a way that I don't know if she could Tony Curtis. Sure, she could. She's a wonderful actress. Anyway, I'll say is, I think that the love story doesn't work with George Pippard,

and it may have worked better with Tony Curtis, but I think the non-love story actually works pretty well with George Pupart. Okay. Just my take. But it was Mel Ferrear, Audrey's husband, who shut this one down. So Edwards tried Steve McQueen, at least he's hot, if not funny. Too hot. Too hot.

She's like, let me get any bad just for a minute. And it's like, come on. It's like that Mike Nichols story. right? He's casting the graduate. Robert Redford wants the role and he says, well, you know, Rob, it's like when you strike out with a girl and Robert says, what do you mean? Yeah, exactly. But he was actually under contract elsewhere. He was not available. Instead, the producers brought George Papard's name to the table. Now, he was a very serious actor, trained at the actor's studio in New York. He'd spent two seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival,

a wonderful Shakespeare Festival. And he was also the worst. Just ask his ex-wife. Elizabeth Ashley would later say, quote, George was never one of those actors who believed his job is to take the money, hit the mark, and say the lines. He felt that as an above the title star, he had the responsibility to use his muscle and power to try and make it better, and that has never stopped him. He was unrelenting about it to the point where a lot of directors and executives came to feel he was a pain in the ass. I'm sure Blake Edwards had heard some whiffs of this, but he tried to keep an open mind and went to see Pepard in a recent film. And his reaction, quote, after coming out of the film, I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk to the producers and begged them not to cast him. But he did not get his way,

and Pepard got the role. Unfortunately, he did. get his way in the casting of Mr. Yunioshi. He insisted on Mickey Rooney because the two had worked together. And, you know, Rooney was funny. That's so weird. I assumed it was some sort of big name stunt casting thing. No, actually, Mickey Rooney was kind of down and out at this time. I know. Yeah. Similarly, with Pippart, I was just looking at his filmography. He was only in a few. I mean, he was nobody compared to Patricia Neal and compared to Audrey Hepburn. Well, that could be part of it. They were expensive. So if they don't have a ton of money left in the budget. But the Mickey Rooney thing, I I kind of think this was Blake Edwards doing him a solid because Rooney had fallen on hard times. I think he'd struggled with some addictions and I think less than a year later would file for bankruptcy.

But I'm not sure anyone knew what these two had in mind until they got to set, but a little more on that later. Patricia Neal, as we mentioned, then wife of Roald Dahl was cast as Tooie after a three-year break in acting. I agree with you. I think she's great in this. I wish she was in it more. And they had to hold auditions for the cat, Chris. And since cats do whatever the hell they want, they had to have multiple identical cats. each with their own specialties. According to Cat Trainer Frank in, quote, I have a sitting cat, a going cat, a meowing cat, a throwing cat, and so on. Each one a specialist, and all the same color, you'll notice.

A throwing cat? I don't know about that one. Now, as for old Truman, he was pretty much out of the picture for the remainder of production, and he was not happy about it, especially since George Axelrod got paid more for his adaptation than Truman had for selling the rights. According to Axelrod, quote, Truman didn't have much to do with the film. Again, it's such a loose adaptation.

I tried to keep the gene pool of the novella. I couldn't use the structure at all because it's the same story as I am a camera. Just a homosexual or asexual man observing a sexy girl. You can't make a love story out of that and they wanted a love story. It's so interesting to me that they keep saying these are the same story. They are not the same story. It is just a gay man in a friendship with a manic pixie dream girl. I think the dynamics are different. The motivations of the character in Breakfast at Tiffany's are different. He's a lot more active, I think, than in Goodbye to Burr. Berlin, you can have more than one gay man who's friends with a woman, just a thought. Now remember Hepburn's contractual obligation to Givanchi? This had already been causing problems for years for legendary costume designer Edith Head, who was under contract at Paramount. She was pissed that Givanshi would swoop in and design just for Audrey, which he did on Sabrina and Funnyface. Now, Head tried to fight it on Breakfast at Tiffany's making the very good point that Hollywood would have neither the money nor the access to French high fashion, so how would she get these clothes, but it didn't matter. And Head got pushed into the role of costume supervisor,

providing costumes for Pepard and all the minor players while Giovanni took care of Audrey and the gowns, which I think means he was dressing some of the other women as well. I think this is pretty fucked up. Edith Head was a legend. She's one of the greatest costume designers ever to live, and I understand Audrey Hepburn's connection to Giovanni that it was wonderful, and obviously the dresses in this are beautiful. That's one of the most iconic black dresses of all time. But it does suck that like this is Edith's head's job. It's her whole job and she doesn't get to do it. They also needed a song for Holly Go Lightly to sing, but everyone, including Audrey Hepburn, was pretty concerned because she did not have the most amazing voice. In particular, her range was

very limited. According to the Financial Times, Australian critic Clive James once described Hepburn as having, quote, the vocal range of a mouse trapped under a cushion. It's rude. But Henry Mancini, who scored the film, had written Moon River alongside lyricist Johnny Mercer, specifically four Hepburn's limited range. It was actually Blake Edwards who pushed this over the edge and insisted that it had to be Audrey singing, not Marnie Nixon, infamous vocal artist who dubbed both Natalie Wood and West Side Story and later on, Audrey and My Fair Lady. His argument was that she shouldn't really sound that good. It's kind of the Sally Bowles argument. She's just a regular manic pixie dream girl with her guitar and they usually don't sound like Marnie Nixon. And finally

everyone agreed. So cameras rolled in New York City first and things were immediately not off to a great start. Hepburn was away from her 10-week-old baby and not loving that. She was also not loving the Danish she was supposed to be eating as she walked up to the window of Tiffany's because it turns out she hated Danish's. She asked if it could be an ice cream cone and Edwards said absolutely not. To which I say, why not? Give her the damn ice cream cone. She's away from her baby and she hates Danishes. Also, Patricia Neal had just had a baby too. Oh. Patricia Neal had a baby in August of 1960. So around the same time. Yeah. That's interesting. Her third child. Their age difference isn't that big, is it? Patricianneal was born in 1926. It's three years. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Interesting. Her voice, she has that smoky low register. And I think that makes her seem so much older. Well, yeah. And they're dressing her as an older woman, too. Yeah. But Hepburn was not having a great time. She didn't really like the process of acting all that much. She would later say, quote, it gets harder and harder. I really die a million deaths every time. My stomach turns over. My hands get clammy. I do suffer. I really do. I wasn't cut out to do this kind of thing. I really wasn't. The exterior sequence was a paid-in-the-ass to film anyway because they had to clear out by 7.30 a.m. when Nikita Crucef's motorcade was going to come through, and the scene shot inside of Tiffany's was an absolute nightmare. This was the first time a film crew had been allowed inside

of Tiffany's, and it happened because Hepburn agreed to wear the gigantic yellow diamond for the promo photos. It had taken Jero's six months to get Tiffany's to agree to this, but Chris, Tiffany's has a lot of windows. Any thoughts on what might have been a problem? by looking through, changing light, reflections. The light, all of the above. It's a nightmare. Yeah. The DP, Franz Plainer, set up 32 yellow-gilled spotlights all around the store and had to put

filters on the windows because apparently actually Technicolor made natural daylight look blue. So since they were dealing with natural light, as you pointed out, it kept shifting throughout the day, making the constant setup, just a disaster. But finally, once Plainer had everything set up and ready to roll, Audrey delivered her first line in the scene, isn't it wonderful? and she was cut off by a blood-curdling scream. Because, Chris, Plainer was laid out on the floor. He had been electrocuted.

Oh, my God. An untethered cable had given him a 220-volt shock. That's bad. Yeah. Yep. If you have a 220 hookup in your house for, like, you know, an electric stove or your EV or something like that. I do. A lot more charge than your typical outlet.

Great. I will not stick my finger in it. Fortunately, he was okay, but the whole ordeal meant further delays for everyone. Actually, it actually had superpowers, actually. Yeah. In October of 1960, after only one week in New York City, the shoot moved to Paramount Studios in L.A. And despite someone having just been literally electrocuted, the biggest problem on set was not live wires, but George Pippard.

He constantly pushed for script changes that would make his character bigger. According to Patricia Neal, quote, he didn't want my character to make his character look bad. My character was dominant, you know. And before George got to the script, I had a really excellent part, but he didn't want that. So he fought to have my dialogue cut, cut, cut. Much of it, he actually managed to get cut because Blake had no choice but to give in. But luckily, he didn't get away with all of it.

Yeah, this is crazy because, you know, Pruditianil will win her best actress Oscar, I guess, not until 1963, but she'll go on to win. That's two years later, yeah. My point is she's one of the best actresses working. Yes. George Pippard is... Who? Regional theater, George Pippard.

Yeah, sit down. No offense to the Ashland-based Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is wonderful. But yeah, come on, man, this sucks. It does suck. She's great. And also, the scenes are better when she is in the position of power. Correct. It just makes for a more interesting dynamic.

Yeah, he's more interesting. According to Patricia Snell, Blake Edwards, then wife, quote, on one occasion, Blake and George almost had a fist fight. We were trying to block a scene and George wanted to change everything that Blake had planned, and George got so terrible that Blake almost hit him. I got them to stop, but I think George got his way. I hated him from that moment on. Snell basically said George just had like zero social skills and also didn't put in the work. And Roald Dahl hated him to boot and made that known. And Edwards had another problem,

another husband, Audrey's husband, Mel Ferrer. Ferrer showed up and disrupted filming a lot. And Edward started to suspect with good reason that Ferrer may have been directing Audrey at home contradicting what Edwards was asking for. He also had a habit of of openly chastising Audrey in front of the cast and crew. Edwards remembered dinner one night at a Japanese restaurant where Audrey had the audacity to put her elbows on the table, at which point Ferrer jabbed his fork underneath her elbows and said, ladies do not put their elbows on the table,

loud enough for everyone to hear. Despite Audrey maybe not having such a fun time on this shoot, pretty much everyone said she was a genuinely delightful person. Richard Shepard said everything you have read, heard, or wished to be true about Audrey Hepburn doesn't come close to how wonderful she was. There's not a human being on earth that was kinder, more gentle, more caring, more giving, brighter and more modest than Audrey. She was just an extraordinary, extraordinary person. Everyone should know that.

Now, Blake Edwards may not have had a ton of control over the script, or George Pippard, but he did get his way in two parts of the film. Let's talk about the good one first. The party sequence. Oh, yeah. It's really fun. You can see what he'll do, you know, like I always think of him with the Pink Panther movies, right? And you can see the comic energy that he wants to bring. And that's why he, I think that's the misguided idea behind the Unioshi character. He's trying to bring some more slapstick screwball energy to the movie. Yes. It works in the party sequence very well. That's a really fun choreographed sequence.

It's one of my favorite parts of the movie. It might be my favorite part of the whole movie. It took a week to shoot. It was almost entirely improvised. He insisted on hiring professional actors, not just extras. Yeah, they're all really good. Yeah. He wanted to be able to just really throw things at them and have them react in real time.

The actress who's laughing and crying in the mirror is, she's great. That's Faye McKenzie. She's in, like, a lot of westerns with Gene Autry. He actually set fire to a hat behind her to try and make her laugh, and he didn't realize that she's so near-sighted she couldn't see it. So there was, like, no reaction. I'm glowing. Yeah.

Also, when that woman screams, when Pippard puts his drink, I think it's actually because he pinched her. Good times. Thanks, George. And then George, I know. Over the course of a week, Edwards went through a hundred 140 gallons of tea replacing alcohol and 60 cartons of cigarettes.

Yeah, and they didn't replace the cigarettes. You don't need to replace the cigarettes. Real ones, yeah. On the last day, he did replace the tea with actual alcohol, though. They had a pretty good time. That's fun. The end result is really fun, and it does lift the movie up, I would say. Unlike the other thing, Blake Edwards added to this movie,

which is, of course, Mickey Rooney's performance as Mr. Yunioshi. Now, I don't want to entirely blame Edwards, since the studio also really took this casting and ran with it. They actually announced the role, and this is before filming had even started, by saying that the character of Mr. Yunioshi would be played by Japanese comedian, Ohio Arigato, which is, of course, good morning and thank you in Japanese. Press release is detailed his supposed background that he demanded a bigger part and a sword dance sequence, that he required Axelrod to add to the script to make him happy. Oh, he also had leased his geisha home, Chris, in order to go to Hollywood. and they announced that he'd been spotted at the World Series in the bleachers, gambling his salary away.

Then they plant a story that a photographer had recognized Mickey Rooney on the set under all the prosthetics, and then they make an even bigger fuss out of the whole thing, saying that Rooney would be receiving coaching from Manoli Mukeda, wife of the director of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce in L.A., who would be serving as a technical advisor on the film. I cannot figure out if there was any truth to this. She's real, and her husband, Katsuma Mukeda, were definitely real fixtures in L.A. but I don't see her listed anywhere in the film's credits.

I don't know. It's very weird. It's gross. Yeah, it seems like an attempt to backpedal a little bit after maybe you're really weird. I think so. Promotional strategy maybe backfired or didn't seem to work. I agree. Yeah.

Honestly, what it seems to me is like they said, who knows somebody that's Japanese? Right. Oh, totally. Like in a meeting and they said, the Chamber of Commerce guy, like, okay, let's get his why. You know what I mean? You make, I don't know. It's icky. To me, this feels like a really bad marketing department series of decisions.

I also wonder if what happened is that somebody did actually figure out it was Mickey Rooney and then they like get ahead of it and they plant. That's what I'm saying. It's like cascades in a bad way. Yeah. Internally, people were also not super stoked about this performance, especially George Axelrod, who really hated it and had from the beginning. Well, it also breaks the reality of the movie.

It's bizarre. It's really weird. It's like you jump into these like bad minstrel show slapstick components when the movie actually tries to take some more somber turns. when you learn Lou LaMay's history and whatnot. And those don't work in conjunction with Mr. Yunioshi at all. No, it's really weird. It feels so tonally jarring.

It's very, very strange. And again, like, there is no indication in the novel that this either tone should be in the movie or that this character would be like this. It's just gross. And Axelrod pointed out, quote, each time Yunioshi appeared, I said, Jesus, Blake, can't you see that it fucks the movie up? He said, we need comedy in this. And Mickey's character is funny.

But Axelrod did not give up. He actually had an enormous fight with Blake Edwards where he was advocating that they remove all of the character's bits except for the one or two necessary ones where Yunioshi interacts with Holly Go Lightly. By the way, that's a totally different character in the book. It's a woman who has the issues with the noise of Holly. So there's no reason to have had this be Yunioshi. Axelrod actually went so far as to arrange for Audrey Hepburn to come back to set after they were done to reshoot those couple of scenes with a totally different actor so that they could axe Bruni from the film. And Hepburn agreed to do this for $0.00. So I'm guessing she also was not stoked about the Mickey Roody stuff. You know, I wonder if the original sin here in some ways is the Pippard hiring because, you know, he's not funny, right?

I mean, and I like him in portions of this movie quite a bit, but he's not funny. Nope, that's why I'm saying, Tony Curtis. So Hepburn has to generate all the comedy in those interactions. And then does Blake Edwards feel like he needs to, you know what I mean, find some other sources of levity throughout the movie when she's. she then becomes a heavier character again. So, you know, let's just blame Papar for all of it. Sure. I think we can blame Blake Edwards and Mickey Rooney. We'll blame all of them. Also, it should be noted, Blake Edwards did continue doing, you know, there's also, I think there's Peter Sellers dressing as like an Indian character at that point. Yeah. So this is not unfamiliar

territory to him, although it never was as offensive as this, I don't think. But according to Axelrod, quote, Blake violently disagreed. So Mickey Rooney is still in the picture, boy, to the great detriment of the picture. Blake said, I love it. It gives a big lift to the picture. It's the one lapse in taste in the picture. Breakfast at Tiffany's held a preview at Stanford University with Audrey and her lovely husband, Mel Ferrer in attendance. And according to actress Faye McKenzie, when they all walked out of the screening, Ferrer turned to Hepburn and said loud enough for everyone to hear, I liked your hat. Don't worry, they got divorced in 1968 after both had affairs. He seems really fun. By the way, at one of the previews, the head of production at Paramount, decided that he hated Moon River

and said, that fucking song has to go. And then depending on who you ask, either Audrey Hepburn or Richard Shepard screamed back over my dead body. I'm inclined to think it was Richard Shepard, but I love the idea of Audrey Hepburn being held back by Mel Ferrer screaming. The film premiered on October 5th, 1961,

and pretty much everyone loved it except for he's back, Truman Capote. Capote explained to Lawrence Grobel in conversations with Capote, quote, it was the most miscast film I've ever seen. It made me want to throw up. And although I'm very fond of Audrey Hepburn, she's an extremely good friend of mine. I was shocked and terribly annoyed when she was cast in that part. It was high treachery on the part of the producers.

They didn't do a single thing they promised. I had lots of offers for that book from practically everybody, and I sold it to this group at Paramount because they promised things. They made a list of everything, and they didn't keep a single one. The day I signed the contract, they turned around and did exactly the reverse. They got a lousy director like Blake Edwards, who I could spit on. Do it, Truman. George Axelrod was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay,

but he lost to judgment at Nuremberg, but best original score and song did go to Henry Mancini. And critics were generally favorable on the movie, though several pointed out for better and for worse how different it was from the source material. And again, yes, people did find Mickey Rooney's performance. Pretty abhorrent all the way back in 1961. Several critics called it out as being potentially offensive,

and so did Truman Capote, saying, quote, it made me want to throw up. Like Mickey Rooney playing this Japanese photographer. Well, indeed, I had a Japanese photographer in the book, but he certainly wasn't Mickey Rooney. Didn't bother Mickey Rooney, though. According to him, who would later say in 2008, that at the time, quote,

never in all the more than 40 years after we made it. Not one complaint. Every place I've gone in the world, people say, you were so funny. Asians and Chinese come up to me and say, Mickey, you were out of this world. Oh, buddy. In 1993, Bruce Lee's biopic

showed Lee and his wife leaving the theater disturbed by Rooney's performance, and this is kind of the first mainstream critique of the character on this level. And then people really start to revisit the film through a different lens, and the character became harder and harder to stomach. By 2006, Shepard was apologizing in the 45th anniversary DVD commentary, saying, quote, if we could just change Mickey Rooney, I'd be thrilled with the movie. Director Blake Edwards also said, looking back, I wish I had never done it.

I would give anything to be able to recast it, but it's there, and onward and upward. Indeed, Edwards would move onward and upward. As we said, he became best known for directing and writing the Pink Panther series, starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Cluesot, which I do enjoy. Yeah, great series. Although there are some unsavory things in that as well, but as you pointed out, you can really see the kind of bonkers like physical comedy in the party scene that would evolve into the Pink Panther. In 2008, the film was pulled from a free screening in Sacramento and replaced with the obvious choice, Rattatooie. Mickey Rooney responded, I don't know why they replaced it with Rattatooie, but they did. Mickey Rooney responded, quote, it breaks my heart. Blake Edwards, who directed the picture, wanted me to do it because he was a comedy director.

They hired me to do this overboard, and we had fun doing it. I don't think you should pull the movie. I think, well, I don't know the circumstances, but I think it's just talk about all of it. There are so many wonderful things about this movie, like so many movies. And there are so many things I didn't know about from the book that you mentioned that I wish they had done differently, but I understand why they did them the way they did. And there are some things where I just think, why did you put the rake down. You're going to step on it right in front of you, like the Mickey Rudy thing. That's why I like this podcast is like, we can, you know, still watch these movies and talk about these movies, talk about all of it. Well, and that's what happened in 2011. I think there was like a sci-fi screening of it. it that people tried to pull, and instead of doing that, they actually brought in a panelist produced by the Media Action Network for Asian Americans to talk about it and then still screen the movie. I agree. Like, still show it. And talk about it. Don't just erase it. And this has continued.

It's been a real struggle for fans of the film as to whether it's appropriate to show it publicly or not. And pretty much everyone involved has publicly apologized for it. But as Melissa Pruxasch, a scholar of Asian American film and assistant professor at the University of Michigan wrote in her really fascinating paper, quote, this genuflection at the altar of anti-racism has has become the de facto response for recuperating the film, its lauded cast and crew, and its eager viewers. This discourse of aberration suggests that the problem of racism could be solved if the film, or merely Rooney's Unioshi, simply disappeared.

But neither the outright banning of the film, nor the offhand acknowledgement of its racism, has truly mitigated the discomfort of its existence. She goes on to say, the character of Mr. Unioshi is not an exceptional aberration, rather he fits quite nicely into a film preoccupied with masquerade, phoniness, and fakery. I agree. But even though I really did not care for this movie, I would like to end on something positive. Sam Watson points out in his biography that prior to this film, sex, or at least the implication of it, was reserved for the bad girls and they always ended up getting punished for it. He said, quote, but in Breakfast at Tiffany's all of a sudden, because it was Audrey who was doing it, living alone, going out, looking fabulous, and getting a little drunk didn't look so bad anymore. Being single actually seemed shame-free. It seemed fun. So, I guess Carrie Bradshaw and thank Holly GoL

lightly, as can everyone else, but really we should all thank Truman Capote, who had the guts to write a character who was far more true to life than what we got on screen. His Holly was single, fabulous, funny, daring, flighting, insecure, sexy, mean, and he didn't judge her for any of it. And that wraps up Breakfast at Tiffany's. Great job, Lizzie. Thanks for walking us through it. It's been a long time coming on this show. Well, I guess I'll ask you what went right. Oh, Chris, you go first. So I would like to give mine, because I've kind of been obsessed with her since we covered Willie Wonka and Chocolate Factory. I'd like to give mine to Patricia Neal, who I think is an extremely interesting person. I also want to flag her son when he was four months old in December of 1960. So they may

have still been shooting the movie. I don't know if they had wrapped or not. Was hit by a car. What? And yeah, and had intense brain damage. Roald Dahl ended up inventing a form of tube to relieve brain pressure for kids suffering from forms of encephalitis, I think. And Patricia Neal was also dealing with this. Then in 1962, her seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, died. No. From complications from measles. Encephalitis again.

And then Patricia Neal had a cerebral aneurysm while she was pregnant in 1965. She delivered the baby. I believe she lost the ability to speak. Roll Doll, who in many ways was not a good partner, but in this way was, they basically said she will never function the way she did before. And he said, fuck that. And he instituted a draconian rehabilitation schedule. And she got back to nearly full function. And ended up basically returning to acting. They did eventually divorce. I think he was also having affairs. Her life is incredible. You guys should look her up. She is an incredible actress. She also had

such a complicated love history before Roldall. Yeah, Gary Cooper, right? Yes. And then she briefly may have entertained. exploring something with Kirk Douglas after she and Gary Cooper had kind of split, and then Gary Cooper hit her after that, and then she got pregnant with Gary Cooper's child and had an abortion, a very, very, very complicated legacy, complicated person, incredible actress. And I think she's so good in this movie and she makes all of her scenes sing. And now that I know how much of a dullard and a bore, as Audrey would say, George Pippard was, I really appreciate how dynamic Patricia Neal is in those scenes. And I'm bummed that we lost the even more

interesting version of her character. I agree. She's such a unique talent. So I'll get mine to Patricia Neal. Well, we need a movie about Patricia Neal. I think they made a TV movie about her. We need a movie movie years and years ago. Yeah, we need like a real good one. Yes. Somebody. Get on it. All right. Well, you know, I will give mine to Audrey Hepburn because I find the way that the character is written to be so unappealing in this movie. And with anyone else in this part, I think it would have been unwatchable. But she really does manage to walk the line. of being genuinely cute and sweet and funny and, God, she looks great. And I was so happy to find out that she was a genuinely good person that it seemed everyone really loved. And she had a hard time,

and she was dealing with a really, you know, garbage boring husband and a garbage boring co-star. And she still managed to really shine at the middle of this. So was she the Hollygo Lightly that Truman Capote wrote? No. But there's a reason everyone really loves this movie, and I think it's her. So I will give it to Audrey. All right, Chris, if people would like to support this podcast, how can they go about doing that? Few easy ways to do it. Tell a family member or friend, hey, check out what went wrong. You can also leave us a rating and review on whatever podcast you're listening on.

Those help us with visibility. If you are interested in going a step further and you'd like more from us, you can sign up for one of our subscription feeds. For $5 a month on Spotify or Apple, you get one, at least one bonus episode a month. These are typically more reviews of newer release. movies. We just did at the top of this month, Devil Wars Prada 2. We got a couple more coming this way. We got a lot coming this summer. We got Anne Hathaway's summer that were just in the midst of knee-deep in Anne Hathaway's films, as it were. If you are interested in even more, you can head to our Patreon, www. patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast. For $5, you get the bonus

episodes. You also get an ad-free RSS feed and just a bunch of bonus content from us, articles, homework on what you can read and watch ahead of upcoming episodes, etc. And for $50, you can get, I mean, take your pick, a Holly go lightly, or I would prefer a Truman Capotee shoutout. I daren't do a Truman Capote shoutout. Just like one of these. Nate Ashley, you know those days when you get the mean reds, Beatrix Airheart, the cast and crew of Winner Trip to Browntown, Mark Bertha, Mariposa's Humans, Frankenstein, Angeline Renee Cook, you mustn't give your heart to a wild thing.

Evan Downey, Hosea Emilano Sato del Giorgio, Amy Elgeslager McCoy, Jury Hill Piper, Felicia G, Scott Oshita, Karina Canaba. Gracious, do you think she's handsomely paid? James McAvoy, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, Ben Shindleman, the Provost family, the O's sound like O's. Galen and Miguel the Broken Glass Kids. If I had her money, I'd be richer than she is. David Friskolanti. Film it yourself. Chris Zucker.

Kate Elrington. M. Sodea. C. Grace B. Blaise Ambrose. Rojo. Nate the Knife. L.J. Half Grey Hound.

Brittany Morris. Darren and Dale Conkling. Matthew Jacobson. Grace Potter. J.J. Rapido. Lazy Freddy Sadie Just Sadie

Brian Donahue Brian, it's useful being top banana in the shock department Adrian Peng Correa Chris Leal Kathleen Olson Brooke Steve Winterbauer

Don Schibel Rosemary Southward Tom Kristen Jason Frankel Somen Chinani Michael McGrath and Lydia Howes Thank you all

so very much. Thank you so much, guys. Thank you, Lizzie, for those shoutouts. Lizzie, what do we have coming next week? We have... Mixing it up. We are mixing it up. In a way I'm very excited about. I can't wait for you to cover this movie.

I can't wait to watch this movie. It's time for my big fat Greek wedding. Finally. Finally. Everyone's been waiting for it. I have. A movie, yeah, I think I saw it at least twice in theaters with my family. Oh. This was a big.

movie for our family. It came out when we were all on a December vacation in Dallas. It was on its incredible indie film run. Nothing else to do. And there's nothing else to do, but also... Other than go see where JFK got shot and go see my big fat Greek wedding. Which we did. I don't know if it was that year, but those are the two things we've done. Like, here's the grassy knoll and here's my big fat Greek wedding. But we, you know, my mom's family, my mom's from Puerto Rico. And so my dad, you know, and my uncles had my big fat Latin, my big fat Puerto Rican wedding. And so it was very fun to watch this movie with my family. And I'm really excited to talk about it.

It's a special one. Nice. Can't wait. We'll see you then. Thank you guys so much. We'll see you then. Bye. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by Karen Krepsaw.