La Bartista and "TDS" wish every Pappy
a fantastic Father's Day! :)
Incidentally, here's the scoop on this amazing Maverick publicity photo. The original ABC network caption reads, "James Garner greets James Garner with Jack Kelly's approval when the Maverick brothers--Bret (Garner) and Bart (Kelly) introduce their 'Pappy' on the first show of the third season of ABC-TV's Warner Bros.-produced Maverick, Sunday, Sept. 13 [1959] (7:30-8:30 PM, EDT). Garner plays the dual role."
The photo is an excellent example of photo editing, but I can't determine how the two images of Garner were merged. His hands fit together perfectly in the handshake, and I can't detect any tell-tale "cut and paste" lines (this was decades before Photoshop) in either image. Oh well, maybe it was just Maverick magic. ;-)
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Wow, what an amazing photo! Never saw that one before anywhere. Evidently, to judge from the picture, old Beau was a bit taller than his lookalike son Bret, which is a nice and probably accidental touch. I don't know how this one was done but it works seamlessly. This makes me think of a shot in "Don Q - Son of Zorro" in which Douglas Fairbanks (Sr.--the real Douglas Fairbanks) plays a father and son and in a shot of both of them, one of the Fairbankses is plainly looking in the wrong direction instead of directly at his "son." Director Allan Dwan admitted in Bogdanovich's book of interviews with directors that it was a technical error. It's a hell of a movie, though: the elder Fairbanks was absolutely fantastic. Too bad Warners never made a movie version of "Maverick" back when the show was still at its height. They didn't realize that people would pay to go to a theatre to watch a technicolor, widescreen movie featuring characters from their favorite television series, or at least this television series. A movie like that, which would've been a smash if Huggins had been in charge, might have cemented the typecasting for Garner, though, and damaged his post-Maverick movie career. He mentions in "The Garner Files" (assuming that he had anything to do with that book) that he doesn't think he could have broken into movies had he stayed with the series much longer, which might be true. Only he, McQueen and Eastwood managed to make the leap from cowboy TV to become movie leading men on a continuous basis.
ReplyDeleteJust looked at the photo again and it's obvious how it was done: look at the big white cuff sticking out of Beau's jacket. That's the perfect way to blend someone else's hand (that Bret was shaking) into the photo.
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