FILM 2190: THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH (1955)

TRIVIA: Billy Wilder preferred shooting in black and white, but Marilyn Monroe's contract with Fox called for all of her movies to be shot in color. Monroe always thought that she looked far more attractive and glamorous in color than in black and white.

The classic shot of Marilyn Monroe's dress blowing up around her legs as she stands over a subway grating was originally shot on Manhattan's Lexington Avenue at 52nd Street on September 15, 1954, at 1:00 a.m. Filming took place in the presence of 5,000 onlookers, who whistled and cheered through take after take as Monroe repeatedly missed her lines. Bill Kobrin, then-20th Century Fox's East Coast correspondent, told the Palm Springs Desert Sun in 2006 that it was Billy Wilder's idea to turn the shoot into a media circus, and he even had bleachers set up. This all occurred in the presence of an embarrassed and angry Joe DiMaggio, Monroe's husband at the time. This event reportedly hastened the end of Monroe's and DiMaggio's marriage. The original footage never made it to the screen; the noise of the crowd had made it unusable. Wilder re-staged the scene on a Fox set replicating Lexington Avenue, and got a more satisfactory result. However, it took another 40 takes for Marilyn to achieve the famous scene.

According to George Axelrod, the reason The Girl has no name is because neither he nor Billy Wilder could think of one.

Marilyn Monroe's iconic white dress set a record when it was auctioned for $4.6 million in June 2011 (rising to $5.5 million after taxes and fees were included), quintupling the previous record for a movie costume ($923,000 for Audrey Hepburn's "little black dress" from Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)).

The movie's poster was at # 22 of "The 25 Best Movie Posters Ever" by Premiere.

In the early 1980s, 20th Century-Fox (which owns the film rights) planned to do a remake of The Seven Year Itch. Al Pacino was rumored to play Richard Sherman and Melanie Griffith was rumored to play The Girl. However, the project never came to fruition and, to date, no remake has ever been made.

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