Bus Stop is showing at the American Cinematheque in Los Feliz this Sunday, July 28, at 7:30 pm. The screening is in honour of Marilyn’s leading man Don Murray – who passed away in March – and will be introduced by film historian Foster Hirsch, with Murray’s children Sean and Colleen, his widow Bettie Johnson and sister Lynn as special guests.
“Joshua Logan, my first director, had a huge hit with Picnic, and Bus Stop was his first movie after that … I had been living in Germany for a year, and in Italy for a year and a half. Marilyn was famous over there but not as famous as Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida … So I didn’t know that much about her, and when I was hired for Bus Stop, I was surprised about all the publicity we were getting … I thought she was magnificent in it, although she was always late on the set and she had a hard time remembering her lines … All the actors in the film came from the stage, like Hope Lange and I, Arthur O’Connell, Eileen Heckart—everyone in the film—so we were used to having a continuous performance and we would go to the rushes to see yesterday’s work. We would see all these little pieces, and we thought the film was going to be a disaster. However, the first time we saw it at a preview, all of a sudden we realised what the magic of films was, with the editing and cutting it all together; she was magnificent!”
– Don Murray, Film Talk
The Marilyn Report 