screening of TPP63 in Lexington, KY in July

[Clouseau]

The Pink Panther (1963) will be screened at The Kentucky Theater in Lexington, KY on July 12, as part of the annual "Summer in the City" series...

www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/14680306.htm
www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/14671124.htm

[Clouseau]

as a bit of publicity for this week's showing of TPP63, the Lexington Herald-Leader has come out with a nice little article i thought was worth sharing...
www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/entertainment/movies/14984153.htm

'Panther' paints Hollywood history a little pinker

By Rich Copley
HERALD-LEADER CULTURE WRITER
Sun, Jul. 09, 2006

Hollywood is full of stories about casting that could have been and how things may have changed, but this one has to rank up there with the idea of Basil Rathbone playing Rhett Butler.

Inspector Jacques Clouseau was supposed to be played by Peter Ustinov in director Blake Edwards' first Pink Panther movie in 1963. Ava Gardner was going to play his wife. Clouseau was simply supposed to be an upright French police detective unaware his wife was sleeping with the jewel thief he was determined to capture.

But when producers passed on Gardner's diva demands, Ustinov bowed out.

And Peter Sellers was in.

In the director's commentary on the new DVD edition of The Pink Panther, Edwards says he and Sellers got together over a weekend, found they had a common affection for the silent comedy of Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy and reimagined Clouseau as a bumbling fool whose greatest virtue was to live by the 11th Commandment: Never give up.

Even with the bumbling inspector in place, mainstays of the series still did not emerge until subsequent films, such as Clouseau's tendency to murder English words such as dog and bite -- a trait Steve Martin overplayed in his silly remake of The Pink Panther earlier this year. Sellers introduced that in A Shot in the Dark (1964), the second film in the series, after listening to a French hotel concierge butcher the English language. We also did not see Clouseau's servant Cato (Burt Kwouk) or long-suffering boss Charles Dreyfuss (Herbert Lom) until Shot and subsequent Panther films.

As film history now tells us, The Pink Panther became a wildly successful comic-detective franchise on par with The Thin Man series (the original 1934 Thin Man will show in the Kentucky Theatre series July 25). For all its contributions to feature film history, though, The Pink Panther may have made an even greater contribution to animated shorts. From the beginning, Edwards had the idea of an animated title sequence.

David De Patie and Friz Freleng took that idea and ran with it, creating a character that went on to be featured in more than 100 animated shorts, including two Oscar winners, which were showcased in television series and created a merchandising line that paid off handsomely for all involved.

When Gardner bowed out, the one-named French beauty Capucine signed on to play Clouseau's double-crossing wife. The all-star cast included David Niven, Robert Wagner and Claudia Cardinale. But as we all know now, the real stars of the show were Sellers and that De Patie-Freleng cartoon.


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IF YOU GO

'The Pink Panther'

When: 1:30 and 7:15 p.m. Wednesday.

Where: The Kentucky Theatre, 214 E. Main Street.

Tickets: $3.

Phone: [phone].

Notes: The showings will be preceded by the seventh installment of the serial The Shadow and the classic Oscar-winning Pink Panther cartoon The Pink Phink.

oh, how i wish i was gonna be home in KY this week!