Steve McQueen by Marc Eliot

Author:Marc Eliot
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307453235
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-25T10:00:00+00:00

* * *

1 To make the film, Fox agreed to let Solar Productions co-produce. The deal brought Steve’s initial combined fees closer to $650,000.

2 The film is historically inaccurate in both place and time, and its two main incidents of violence, the attempt to rescue the missionaries and the battle on the Yangtze, play fast and loose with the facts. The movie takes place ten years earlier than the novel. McKenna served in the Far East in the thirties and the book version of The Sand Pebbles is set in 1926. The only battle involving the U.S. Navy and Asians was the Yanay incident, which took place in 1937 between the Americans and the Japanese, not the Chinese. The attack on the USS Panay is likely what the attack on the San Pueblo is based on. One possible reason for the change of nationalities by the attackers is that, at the time the film was made, America was at peace with the Japanese but not the mainland Chinese, who actively supported the North Vietnamese. McKenna likely based the killing of the missionaries in the film on the murders of John and Betty Stam, which took place nearly eight years later than it does in the film, in 1934.

3 Interestingly, when Coppola ran into problems filming Apocalypse Now (a film McQueen turned down, not wanting to return to the Far East to make another movie; his part was eventually played by Martin Sheen), Coppola screened The Sand Pebbles for his cast and crew as inspiration for what their film should look like.

4 Stan Kamen brokered the agreement. The William Morris Agency would never allow a deal for a star of McQueen’s magnitude to include any exclusivity, and if they did, the cost would have been prohibitive, even for Warner. The six as-yet-unnamed films were budgeted at six to seven million dollars each when they starred McQueen, three to four million when they didn’t.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.