When his wife, Anne Bancroft, was still in the running to play Joan Crawford, Mel Brooks saw right away the movie would be camp catnip. No one else did.
Anna Maria Italiano from the Bronx traveled almost as far to become Anne Bancroft as Lucille LeSueur did to become Joan Crawford.
Bancroft watched the ceremony on television at home in New York. “I cried and I laughed and I shouted and the doorbell started to ring and the wire services were on the phone,” she remembered. “There were photographers parked across the street. I never thought I’d win. I didn’t think I had a chance.” A few weeks later, Joan flew back to New York and, following a performance ofat the Royale Theatre, presented the award to Anne onstage while photographers snapped the occasion.
“Aren’t you afraid people will hate you for playing Joan Crawford?” her husband, comedy director Mel Brooks, asked her.. “I never dug deeper in my life,” Bancroft recalled, explaining not only how she connected with that part but how she might possibly have connected with the role of Joan Crawford. “It was so educational. I had conceived her as a less calculating woman. But Mike’s theory about it was very clear: all grown-ups were bad and all kids were wonderful.
Frank Yablans often held his business meetings on the 20th Century Fox lot. “Even though it was a Paramount movie, he was working on other films at Fox,” explained Tracie Hotchner. “He said later it was Mel who quote-unquote ‘would not allow’ her to play the part. That’s what Yablans’s feeling was, that the kibosh had been put on this by Mel, that he didn’t think it was good for her. I don’t know, but she was all set to play it, and I think she would have been phenomenal.”
As far as Frank Perry was concerned, Anne Bancroft presented even more problems for the production than Joan Crawford did throughout her career. “Bancroft kept us in limbo for fifteen months and nothing Frank Yablans, my co-producer, and I did would satisfy her,” Perry complained to Rex Reed. “We had no other choice but to get rid of her and hire Faye Dunaway. Faye wasn’t easy, either, but at least we got the movie made.
It was 1980 and makeup artist Lee Harman was working with Faye Dunaway on the two-part television miniseries Evita Peron. One evening while he was driving through Hollywood, he heard on his car radio that Anne Bancroft was slated to play Joan Crawford in the big screen adaptation of. Harman instantly came up with an alternative idea: He thought Dunaway should play the part.
“With due respect to Frank Perry, may he rest in peace, when he and Eleanor Perry separated, I think he actually lost his mojo.”, Dunaway was given the “It Girl” treatment, with magazine layouts introducing her as a shining new star. Then her career stalled, and it looked like she was heading nowhere fast. She was cast in a string of movies failing to showcase her talents.
Talent agent Freddie Fields discovered Dunaway and launched her as a star in the late sixties, but her career stalled in the early seventies. Because Fields was increasingly focused on production matters, superagent Sue Mengers inherited Dunaway by default around 1974. The two women never altogether meshed. Nonetheless, when Jane Fonda wavered on making, Mengers pushed to get Dunaway the role. It remains a bona fide classic and offered what is arguably Faye Dunaway’s greatest critical success.
“So she did. She got her Evita Peron, which was a very prestigious miniseries, a four-hour thing on NBC, and it was a big hit. When Joan moved out here , we took a house together, so I got to hear all the stuff that was going on.
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