Month: June 2020

Spielberg was one of several directors considered to make Dick Tracy at various points. Other names included John Landis and Walter Hill. Even Martin Scorsese was considered.

Image credit: Getty/Michael Short

Yes, Warren Beatty was the star of Dick Tracy. However, he was also the director and producer of the film. He had wanted to star in a movie about the character since the 1970s. He purchased the rights to the character in 1985 and went to Disney to make the film happen.

The actor who played Kid/Dick Tracy Jr. is Charlie Korsmo. If he looks familiar, it’s because chances are you saw him in a few different movies throughout the ’90s. He also played Peter’s son Jack in Hook, Siggy in What About Bob?, and the nerdy William Lichter in Can’t Hardly Wait.

After leaving acting, Korsmo attended Yale Law School and became a practicing lawyer and law professor.

Big Boy’s preferred method of taking out other mobsters is with what he calls a “bath.” This way of killing someone sees his enemy put in a box that’s then filled with cement before it’s dropped into the water.

This is similar to a common trope in fiction known as “cement shoes,” in which someone’s feet are encased in boxes that are filled with cement. They are then dumped into the water with the cement pulling them to the bottom. There’s only one documented real-life case of someone being given the cement shoes treatment. In 2016, a body washed ashore in Brooklyn. Its feet and shins were encased in concrete inside of a bucket.

Big Boy loves to throw around famous quotes in the film. As it turns out, though, he’s wrong about them. Benjamin Franklin did not, in fact, say, “All’s fair in love and business.” Either Big Boy knows this and doesn’t care or he’s kind of an idiot.

During the filming of the movie, a romance blossomed between Madonna and Beatty, which gained quite a bit of mainstream attention. “She’s a huge personality, diligent and disciplined and a spectacular dancer and performer,” Beatty recalled many years later. “She’s a phenomenon.”

The relationship was so serious that he even appeared in Madonna’s documentary Truth or Dare. At the time, though, he didn’t know if that was a good idea. Speaking to People, he explained, “When we were going [out] and she was making the documentary Truth or Dare, I said, ‘I don’t want to be in it.’ And she said, ‘Why would I want you in it?'” Eventually, he agreed to it, but only if he could approve of the footage used of him.

Before Madonna signed on for the project, Beatty had been considering two other well-known actresses. Both Kathleen Turner and Kim Bassinger were on his personal list for Breathless Mahoney. However, according to Madonna, she asked Beatty for the role. “I called up Warren and told him I really wanted it,” she said at the time of release. “I saw the A list and I was on the Z list. I felt like a jerk.”

During Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour, which happened in 1990, she promoted Dick Tracy onstage, performing songs from the soundtrack and featuring several dancers dressed like Tracy. According to the singer, it was her idea.

“Disney didn’t come to me and ask me to help market the movie,” she said. “Let’s just say I’m killing 12 birds with one stone. It’s a two-way street. I’m not going to overlook the fact that it’s a great opportunity for me, too. Most people don’t associate me with movies. But I know I have a much bigger following than Warren does and a lot of my audience isn’t even aware of who he is.”

While Beatty reportedly made $9 million for the movie, plus a portion of the profits, Madonna was paid much less. The pop star agreed to work for scale pay, which worked out to $1,440 per week back then. She also, naturally, made money from soundtrack rights for her musical performances in the film.

Disney wasn’t entirely convinced that younger audiences would care enough about Dick Tracy or Beatty to ask their parents to take them to see the movie. The solution was to include an all-new Roger Rabbit animated short. That short was Roller Coaster Rabbit, which was re-released in 1995 with the movie Toy Story.

Al Pacino has been nominated for Academy Awards nine times, only winning once for 1993’s Scent of a Woman. In 1991, his portrayal of “Big Boy” Caprice earned him a nod for Best Supporting Actor. Ultimately, Joe Pesci ended up winning the Oscar.

While Stephen Sondheim is best known for his Broadway musicals, including Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, he also contributed to a couple of movies. For Dick Tracy, he wrote “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man),” “Back in Business,” “More,” “Live Alone and Like It,” and “What Can You Lose?” Several of those songs were later used by Sondheim in his Broadway production Putting It Together.

In the 2002 book The Sexiest Man Alive, it’s revealed that Beatty had Sondheim come to set to help teach Madonna to sing the songs he’d written. It worked out, as “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)” went on to win an Oscar for Best Original Song, while Madonna recorded the album I’m Breathless, which was inspired by the movie.

Fresh off of composing the score to 1989’s Batman, Danny Elfman created the music for Dick Tracy, but it wasn’t easy. “Warren [Beatty] was insane,” he said in a 1993 interview. “But, see, what overshadows all the craziness involved in working with Warren is that I wanted to write a big, romantic Gershwinesque melody and that’s what I got to write.”

While Elfman has no regrets about scoring the film, he still recalled Beatty being “a total, unbelievable pain in the ass.”

When Tess throws a baseball into a garbage can, knocking the lid down, it’s easy to see a robotic arm there lowering the top.

One of the most remarkable things about Dick Tracy is the over-the-top makeup and prosthetics used to create the villains. They amounted to a lot of time spent in the makeup chair and even crew members whose sole job was to make sure the actors didn’t mess their looks up between scenes. The Makeup Police were used to make sure actors didn’t eat things that could mess up the prosthetics applied to their face, in what is surely one of the strangest jobs one can have on their resume.

Initially, all of the movie’s characters were going to be created using prosthetics to make actors look as close to the comic strip characters as possible. However, Beatty realized early on that the idea wouldn’t work for the film, and decided only to do it with the villains. Still, before that choice was made he was fitted with a false nose and jaw designed to make him resemble Tracy on the page.

“Tracy was basically drawn from a couple of angles,” he explained to Entertainment Weekly. ”When he turned face forward, you almost didn’t recognize him in the strip. On film, it couldn’t be done. You’d be looking at the structure of appliances and plastic and makeup rather than what’s happening emotionally.”

Beatty dreamed of recreating the comic strip he loved on the big screen, keeping it as close to the source material as possible. That meant big, bright colors, painted backgrounds, and over-the-top character designs. That’s one of the reasons Walter Hill, at one point a potential director, ended up passing on the project. According to Newsweek, Hill wanted a realistic and Gritty film, which didn’t mesh with Beatty’s vision.

Dick Tracy was made with the intention of launching a series of films that would see Beatty playing the character again and again. Unfortunately, poor box office performance led to that never happening. The film ultimately made over $160 million in theaters. However, with a reported budget of $46 million, according to the 2005 book DisneyWar, and a massive advertising campaign, it wasn’t a cheap film to make.

Though it’s been 30 years since Dick Tracy hit theaters, Beatty hasn’t given up on making a sequel. As recently as 2016, he was still discussing the possibility of it. “I’m serious about it, but I am slow about these things,” he teased at CinemaCon.

In 2008, Beatty created The Dick Tracy TV Special, in which he appeared as the character for the first time since 1990. In the special, Tracy is interviewed by movie critic Leonard Maltin. This was reportedly done so Beatty could extend his hold on the rights to Dick Tracy.

How big did Disney think Dick Tracy was going to be? A ride was in the works for Walt Disney World in Florida. Dick Tracy’s Crimestoppers was being designed by the company and would see guests riding in vintage cars and shooting tommy guns at gangsters. Yes, Disney wanted to have a theme park ride where you shot realistic guns at images of people–the ’90s!

Sadly, the ride never became a reality. Still, the technology it was going to employ is still used today. The system that was going to control the cars is used in Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Forbidden Eye, while the gun technology was put to use in Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters, in which you shoot laser beams at targets.