Splendor in the Grass

Right before shooting was set to begin, Pat Hingle suffered devastating injuries when he accidentally fell 54 feet down an elevator shaft in his apartment building. It would take Hingle over a year to fully recover from the accident. In the meantime, however, he decided to go ahead and do the film - he would simply incorporate his limp into the character. "I broke everything," Hingle said later. "I landed upright, so I broke hips and knees and ankles and ribs, and that sort of thing. That lurching walk that Ace Stamper has - that was as good as I could walk."

Even though they were supposed to be playing teenagers, Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty were approximately 22 and 23, respectively at the time of filming. As a result, Elia Kazan decided that the other actors who were to play teenagers in the film should be in their early to mid-twenties as a way to make it easier for the audience to accept Wood and Beatty as teenagers rather than as adults playing teens.

Elia Kazan did whatever was necessary in order to bring out the best possible performances by his actors - it was one of the reasons he was known as one of the best directors in the business. From the beginning, he wanted to strip away the Hollywood glamour from Natalie Wood and get her to a more natural state for the camera, which was appropriate for the character of Deanie. It meant that Wood had to do without the sophisticated makeup and costumes she was used to, which caused her some anxiety. According her friend Mart Crowley, she was always trying to sneak on a little extra rouge or lipstick when Kazan wasn't looking.

As originally filmed, in the sequence in which Wilma Dean Loomis takes a bath while arguing with her mother, the bickering becomes so intense that Wilma jumps out of the tub and runs nude down a hallway to her bedroom, where the camera cuts to a closeup of her bare legs kicking hysterically on the mattress. Both the Hollywood censors and the Catholic Legion Of Decency objected to the hallway scene, finding the bare backside unsuitable for public display. Consequently, director Elia Kazan dropped the piece, leaving an abrupt jump from tub to bed. Later, in an early 1970s TV interview with Mike Douglas, Natalie Wood claimed that the European cut of the film she eventually saw in France left in the partial nudity scene in the hallway. Interestingly enough, Wood herself appeared (ostensibly) nude, though wrapped in a bedsheet, after spending the night with Robert Redford in This Property Is Condemned (1966). The production code clearly was on the way out by then, just five years later.

The nightclub owner played by Phyllis Diller is Texas Guinan, a who owned the "300 Club", a New York nightclub in the 1920s. "Hello, suckers!" was her standard nightly greeting to her nightclub patrons.