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Lucky Lady
Lucky Lady is a 1975 American comedy-drama film directed by Stanley Donen and starring Liza Minnelli, Gene Hackman, Burt Reynolds and Robby Benson. Its story takes place in 1930 during Prohibition in the United States.
Late in the Prohibition era, Claire is an American living in Tijuana, Mexico. After her husband, who owned a dive bar, dies, she wants to return to the United States. Walker Ellis, a loser with whom she has long been having an affair, agrees to help wind up her business in Tijuana, which includes smuggling a last truckload of illegal Mexican immigrants across the border; this does not go according to plan, as the Border Patrol turn up and start shooting.
Walker is forced to go into business rum running across the border with Kibby Womack, one of those he was trying to smuggle across the border (as Kibby is also in trouble with the U.S. government). Instead of moving the goods overland, Walker hires Billy Mason to captain a sailboat to transport the contraband via water. While Billy is wise to the ways of the sea, he is unwise to the ways of the world. As Walker, Claire, Kibby, and Billy navigate the waters on this venture, they find two inherent risks. The first is the U.S. Coast Guard, led by the irritatingly officious Captain Moseley, who patrols these waters. Moseley and the Coast Guard can do nothing against vessels in international waters unless there is a sign of illegal cargo or a sale of illegal merchandise. Instead, Moseley works to "starve" rum runners, who can only sail up and down the coast, blocked from entering a U.S. port.
The second hazard is other rum runners. While the small players generally leave each other alone, the East Coast mob has sent Christie McTeague to establish a foothold then a stranglehold on the entire West Coast Mexico–U.S. trade. Through it all, Claire has convinced Kibby and an initially reluctant Walker that their three partner business should extend into the bedroom.
Katz and Huyck at the time were best known for writing American Graffiti. Before that film came out they were struggling writers, looking for an original project. While Huyck was in the Army reserves, Katz would go to the UCLA library "looking for anything for an idea." She came across an article in American Mercury magazine about rumrunners operating off Ensenada during Prohibition and, feeling that this background had never been used for a film before, started researching the period. When Huyck got out of the army they brought the idea to Mike Gruskoff, a producer, who liked the similarities to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and agreed to finance the duo writing a screenplay for $75,000
They worked on the script for six months. "It took us a long time to get our characters down," said Katz. "We tried it a lot of different ways. And we did a lot of research into the period and the language."
When they handed the script in, Gruskoff sold the film within eighteen hours to 20th Century Fox for $450,000, which was then a record amount for an original screenplay. This sale was helped by the fact that American Graffiti had since come out and been a huge success. "Mike Gruskoff was incredible, just incredible at selling a script," said Katz. "He got it immediately to the heads of the studios and he sold it very, very fast." The producer paid the writers $100,000 of the $450,000.
The writers wanted Steven Spielberg to direct and he was interested but had made a commitment to do Jaws. Eventually Stanley Donen signed. Donen's fee was $600,000, Grusskoff's was $400,000. Katz said, "our reaction was, Stanley Donen seems so bizarre for this kind of film! Then we realized he's the ideal director because he is really a romantic director, and he can do this kind of character stuff and the kind of humor that the film has."
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Lucky Lady
Lucky Lady is a 1975 American comedy-drama film directed by Stanley Donen and starring Liza Minnelli, Gene Hackman, Burt Reynolds and Robby Benson. Its story takes place in 1930 during Prohibition in the United States.
Late in the Prohibition era, Claire is an American living in Tijuana, Mexico. After her husband, who owned a dive bar, dies, she wants to return to the United States. Walker Ellis, a loser with whom she has long been having an affair, agrees to help wind up her business in Tijuana, which includes smuggling a last truckload of illegal Mexican immigrants across the border; this does not go according to plan, as the Border Patrol turn up and start shooting.
Walker is forced to go into business rum running across the border with Kibby Womack, one of those he was trying to smuggle across the border (as Kibby is also in trouble with the U.S. government). Instead of moving the goods overland, Walker hires Billy Mason to captain a sailboat to transport the contraband via water. While Billy is wise to the ways of the sea, he is unwise to the ways of the world. As Walker, Claire, Kibby, and Billy navigate the waters on this venture, they find two inherent risks. The first is the U.S. Coast Guard, led by the irritatingly officious Captain Moseley, who patrols these waters. Moseley and the Coast Guard can do nothing against vessels in international waters unless there is a sign of illegal cargo or a sale of illegal merchandise. Instead, Moseley works to "starve" rum runners, who can only sail up and down the coast, blocked from entering a U.S. port.
The second hazard is other rum runners. While the small players generally leave each other alone, the East Coast mob has sent Christie McTeague to establish a foothold then a stranglehold on the entire West Coast Mexico–U.S. trade. Through it all, Claire has convinced Kibby and an initially reluctant Walker that their three partner business should extend into the bedroom.
Katz and Huyck at the time were best known for writing American Graffiti. Before that film came out they were struggling writers, looking for an original project. While Huyck was in the Army reserves, Katz would go to the UCLA library "looking for anything for an idea." She came across an article in American Mercury magazine about rumrunners operating off Ensenada during Prohibition and, feeling that this background had never been used for a film before, started researching the period. When Huyck got out of the army they brought the idea to Mike Gruskoff, a producer, who liked the similarities to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and agreed to finance the duo writing a screenplay for $75,000
They worked on the script for six months. "It took us a long time to get our characters down," said Katz. "We tried it a lot of different ways. And we did a lot of research into the period and the language."
When they handed the script in, Gruskoff sold the film within eighteen hours to 20th Century Fox for $450,000, which was then a record amount for an original screenplay. This sale was helped by the fact that American Graffiti had since come out and been a huge success. "Mike Gruskoff was incredible, just incredible at selling a script," said Katz. "He got it immediately to the heads of the studios and he sold it very, very fast." The producer paid the writers $100,000 of the $450,000.
The writers wanted Steven Spielberg to direct and he was interested but had made a commitment to do Jaws. Eventually Stanley Donen signed. Donen's fee was $600,000, Grusskoff's was $400,000. Katz said, "our reaction was, Stanley Donen seems so bizarre for this kind of film! Then we realized he's the ideal director because he is really a romantic director, and he can do this kind of character stuff and the kind of humor that the film has."