A column about curious stories from the worlds of science, technology, and film. Today’s is a movie one, woven from two dates. 1940: a rabbit blurts out a random line instead of the one prepared for him—and makes it immortal. 1972: a film-buff director deliberately resurrects a genre everyone had long since buried—and names his film after that very line. Between those dates: a carrot the voice actor spat into a wastebasket, and a friendly “doc” addressed to a man holding a double-barreled shotgun to your chest.
By the early seventies, screwball comedy was officially dead. The madcap heroine, the tweedy professor, the machine-gun dialogue—all of it belonged to prewar Hollywood and its studio machine, dismantled for parts back in the fifties. New Hollywood spoke a different language: antiheroes, murky morality, slow pacing. And at precisely that moment, Warner production chief John Calley summoned Peter Bogdanovich and asked him: what would you make if you had to make a film with Streisand?
Bogdanovich’s answer survives in his own retelling: “Well, I don’t know... something like a screwball comedy, something like Bringing Up Baby: a crazy girl, a square professor, and it all ends happily.” Calley replied: “Make it.” And so an offhand remark in an office brought an entire genre back from oblivion.
The schedule, meanwhile, was brutal. The conversation took place in May 1971, and Streisand and Ryan O’Neal were only available to shoot in August. The screenplay was assembled in a relay by two teams: first Robert Benton and David Newman—the very men who wrote Bonnie and Clyde—ran through 3 drafts; then Buck Henry added another 3. A production line built in a race against deadline turned out dialogue so pristine that the Writers Guild of America named it the following year’s best comedy written directly for the screen.
San Francisco was chosen not out of love for cable cars, but for the sake of 1 scene: the film was conceived as a parody of the legendary chase in Bullitt—the model New Hollywood action sequence. In place of Steve McQueen’s Mustang: a grocery-delivery bicycle and a Volkswagen Beetle stolen straight from somebody else’s wedding outside Saints Peter and Paul Church. By Bogdanovich’s own estimate, that scene swallowed a quarter of the entire $4 million budget.
The film’s geography is a detective story in itself. The fictional Bristol Hotel, the heart of the plot, was filmed in the new 46-story Hilton tower at Union Square: the lobby, the drugstore-diner, the ballroom, the seventeenth floor, and the unfinished upper level of the newly erected tower all made it into the frame. It is there, amid construction, that Streisand sings “As Time Goes By” accompanied by O’Neal. The ledge from which she hangs is already Westwood in Los Angeles, while the view “from the hotel window” looking down was filmed from the St. Francis Hotel overlooking Geary Street. The famous gag of the bicycle flying through a plate-glass window was shot at the corner of Balboa and 23rd Avenue in the Richmond District; the runaway bicycle sails down Clay Street in Chinatown; and the cars drove down the steps in Alta Plaza Park without city permission at all—the concrete still bears the scars of that shoot. The airport scenes at the beginning and end were filmed in SFO’s south terminal, by the TWA baggage claim area.
The film’s second brazen stunt is silence. As in 1938’s Bringing Up Baby, there is not a second of non-diegetic music here: every sound exists within the frame. Cole Porter in the elevator sounds like a worn-out record because it is a worn-out record in an elevator. Themes from Arbeau’s old dance manual at the musicologists’ banquet are supplied by a Hammond organ paired with a sitar; the Chinese orchestra, for inexplicable reasons, plays the Mexican “La Cucaracha” at the height of the chase—on German glockenspiels. And Streisand, on the unfinished floor, quotes Bogart: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine. Play it, Sam.” In an era when a non-diegetic orchestra was the glue holding any scene together, cutting it out altogether was a gesture as audacious as the plot itself.
The premiere took place on March 9, 1972, at Radio City Music Hall. What followed was pure triumph: $66 million in U.S. and Canadian box office against a $4 million budget, third place for the year after The Godfather and The Poseidon Adventure, and a Golden Globe nomination for newcomer Madeline Kahn. In 1973, the film was reissued, bringing in another $3 million—the ghost genre proved profitable faster than the press could write its obituary.
Yet there is a vendetta hidden inside the film. Critic John Simon, who described Streisand as “a cross between an anteater and an albino rat topped by a platinum horse-tail,” and the picture as a “heavy-handed exercise in nostalgia,” was immortalized right in the script: the professor’s foppish Croatian rival is named Hugh Simon. According to Bogdanovich, the character was based on the critic too.
And then there is the pearl of self-mockery in the finale. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”—the most famous line from Love Story, the great melodrama of 1970 starring Ryan O’Neal. On the final airplane, Judy quotes it in response to the hero’s apology—and O’Neal counters: “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.” The star publicly executes the signature line of 2 years earlier—while the projector hums and the cabin screen plays the 1950 Looney Tunes short of the same name as the film.
Now for the rabbit. In the 1938 short Porky’s Hare Hunt, the future Bugs was not yet Bugs, but Happy Rabbit: an oval head, a jelly-bean nose, wide naïve eyes. The name was changed at Blanc’s own suggestion: reading the script, he objected to the very title and told producer Leon Schlesinger—make it Bugs, after Ben Hardaway, the animator who had drawn the rabbit. Hardaway had carried the nickname Bugs since childhood—no one ever explained why, but it stuck for good. When Schlesinger heard “Bugs Rabbit,” he recoiled as though someone had asked him to sign yet another payroll sheet—Blanc later recalled that exact comparison. Alliteration saved the day: “Bugs Bunny, like Porky Pig,” said Blanc, punching the p, and the producer nodded.
The character took more painful work to build than the name, especially since Hardaway was redesigning the rabbit on the fly. In Hare-Um Scare-Um, the poor creature’s front teeth stuck out so far he was an orthodontist’s dream; Blanc tried lisping to let that feature into the voice—it came out unintelligible. By 1940’s A Wild Hare—the character’s official debut, as it is generally considered—the rabbit had been to the workshop: straightened his posture, lost weight, eased up on the overbite. But the crucial revision was the face: from a good-natured simpleton, he became a crafty bastard. “A tough little stinker, isn’t he?” Hardaway admired the new sketch.
At that moment, Blanc heard the rabbit’s voice: a Brooklyn accent in which jerk became joik. The explosive laugh prepared for the new version was shelved—and several years later leapt to another of Hardaway’s creatures: Woody Woodpecker. So the woodpecker’s trademark laugh is the rabbit’s delayed laugh.
Bugs’s planned signature line was “What’s cookin’?” Blanc reasoned that a hipster with a Brooklyn accent would not say something like that—he needed a more contemporary turn of phrase. And in the scene where Elmer Fudd presses a double-barreled shotgun to the unruffled animal’s chest, the prepared line gave way to “Eh... what’s up, doc?” In his memoir That’s Not All, Folks!, Blanc calls it, with no false modesty, “the most famous ad-lib of my career.”
Doc was nobody he knew. Elmer is a hunter, not a doctor in any sense; doc is a lazy street address for the first guy you meet, alongside mac and buddy. The whole comedy of the scene rests on the caliber: the question “how are you, doc?” is addressed to a man aiming at your chest. What exactly stirred in Blanc’s mind at the moment of recording, nobody knows: to the end of his life, he insisted it was pure improvisation.
Without that very question, the signature carrot would have been unthinkable too. And here the quiet truth of the recording studio comes out: Blanc did not like carrots at all. But the crunch had to sound right, while chewing, swallowing, and getting to the next line in time was physically impossible. The solution was radical: recording would stop, Blanc would spit the carrot into a wastebasket, and continue working. Every Bugs Bunny crunch was recorded through spitting into a trash can. A century of sound cinema has not invented a better metaphor for the artistry of voice acting.
The irony completes the picture: the rabbit Blanc would not allow to say his prepared line topped TV Guide’s list of the 50 greatest cartoon characters of all time in 2002. An improvisation between takes outran every plan the studio had made.
One last thing—a dispute between 2 classics. Director Bob Clampett claimed that the rabbit’s rise during World War II was no accident: the self-assured, brainless Elmer with his rifle read to audiences as a caricature of the Axis, while the cheeky, indestructible Bugs was the quintessence of the Yankee. Blanc disagreed with that theory and explained the popularity in the simplest possible terms: “Everybody loves a winner, and Bugs Bunny always wins.” It is hard to argue with the man who was the winner’s voice.
And the symmetry of those 2 dates is this. In 1940, a hunter so panically unfrightening hears a question that demands no answer—what’s up, doc?—and spends the rest of the century obliged to solve it. In 1972, cinema, having just buried its own past, takes back a voice borrowed from that same rabbit. A 3-word question once addressed to the barrel of a shotgun made its way to an entire industry—and the industry, too, could find nothing to say in reply.
Sources: Wikipedia — What’s Up, Doc? (1972 film): development, filming, diegetic music, box office, WGA award, John Simon review; Mel Blanc, Philip Bashe — That’s Not All, Folks! (Warner Books, 1988), excerpt in the Los Angeles Times of 19.06.1988 (Happy Rabbit, name from Ben Hardaway, “What’s cookin’?” and the ad-lib, carrot and wastebasket, Clampett’s theory and Blanc’s reply); Smithsonian Magazine — on A Wild Hare (1940) as the character’s official debut; AFI Catalog — March 9, 1972 premiere, Radio City Music Hall; Box Office Mojo — box office; CNN, 30.07.2002 — TV Guide’s 50 greatest cartoon characters, with Bugs in first place.