Boom Town
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Gossip Friday: Boom Town Preview Postscripts
From November 1940: Boom Town Preview Postscripts: It required 27 varied location sites and a total of 41 sets to screen this story. Metro buily a boom town of its own for this picture. Clark Gable has been suggesting an oil story for himself for about three years; at the age of 18 he worked as a tool dresser in Bigheart, Oklahoma. Spencer Tracy sets a new record for himself in screen fisticuffs, engaging in five battles; this is the second time he and Gable fight each other in films, although the last time, in “San Francisco,” they wore boxing gloves. Gable is two inches taller in the picture than…
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{Photos} Boom Town (1940)
Here’s some photos from this week’s Movie of the Week, Boom Town (1940). With a cast consisting of Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr, the portraits are of course wonderful. There’s some behind-the-scenes photos I found in a fan magazine of Clark and Spencer filming their first scene together, ending up face first in the mud! Clark Gable with a baby and small child is always worth the price of admission in my book. Saving the best for last, the funniest screenshots from this film are from Clark’s fist fight with Spencer (well Clark and Spencer’s stunt double):
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Movie of the Week: Boom Town (1940)
This week’s movie is Boom Town (1940). Gable is “Big John” McMasters and Tracy is “Square John” Sand, or as Big John calls him right from the beginning, “Shorty”. They are two wildcatters out west trying to strike oil. They pool their money and smarts and soon hit it big. Putting a snag in their festivities is the arrival of Elizabeth or “Betsy” (Claudette Colbert), Shorty’s sweetheart from back home. She arrives to see him but falls in love with Big John instead, and they are married the night they met. A year passes and when Shorty thinks that Big John is not treating Betsy right, the two men come…
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May Movie of the Month: Boom Town (1940)
This month, Clark Gable is a womanizin’ oil chaser, Spencer Tracy is his long-suffering best pal, Claudette Colbert is his best girl, and Hedy Lamarr is his sidedish in Boom Town. Gable is “Big John” McMasters and Tracy is “Square John” Sand, or as Big John calls him right from the beginning, “Shorty”. They are two wildcatters out west trying to strike oil. They pool their money and smarts and soon hit it big. Putting a snag in their festivities is the arrival of Elizabeth or “Betsy” (Colbert), Shorty’s sweetheart from back home. She arrives to see him but falls in love with Big John instead, and they are married…
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Gossip Friday: Always the Business Man
From June 1940: Clark Gable hasn’t enough to do–with his twenty-five costume changes in “Boom Town”–but has even gone in for technical advertising, as well! Gable was an oil field worker himself, way back when, so one day on the set he offered a few tips to the director and was promptly encouraged to give out more. “Not for nothing,” said Gable. “Okay, I’ll buy your lunch,” offered the director. “Lunch and a bottle of beer,” said Gable, always the business man.
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Gossip Friday: Boom Town Pranks
From August 1940: You may have read about Clark Gable getting a split lip in a fight scene for “Boom Town” and how the studio had to give him a few days to let it heal. Here’s the sequel to the story, which contains a typical Hollywood chuckle. Gable was called on for the closeups after the fight some time later, and after a fake blow at close quarters, when the scene was in the can, he grinned and carelessly spit out a tooth! Everyone saw the blank space in his front row of teeth and consternation reigned. When Clark had enjoyed his joke, he revealed that he had painted…
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Gossip Friday: On the set of Boom Town
From September 1940: Here’s mud in your eye! Being a movie star does have its unpleasant moments, too. For example, in “Boom Town”, Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable do a sequence in which they meet in a wooden plank stretched over a mud-hole. Each tries to make the other get out of the way. In the course of this scuffling, someone starts shooting down the street and both, for safety’s sake, dive headlong into the mud. Coming up first, Clark good naturedly tries to shake hands with Spencer, who says, “Aw nuts!” and walks away. Mud-holes are nothing new to Clark. He did a nosedive into one in “Too Hot…