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Welcome to another Movie Monday, when I feature the sets from our favorite films. When I was in the 2nd grade, we watched the Disney movie “Pollyanna” on a giant screen in the gymnasium at school, and I will never forget it. I loved the house so much that for years I fantasized about growing up to live in one just like it someday.
I also liked the positive, feel-good message of the movie, and how Pollyanna changed so many lives in the small town. I hadn’t seen the movie in years until my blogging friend Derek recently sent me a photo of the real house used in it. It led me to watch it again, and the sets did not disappoint. They were just as wonderful as I remembered.
After 11-year old Pollyanna is orphaned, she goes to live with her stern and humorless Aunt Polly (Jane Wyman), who lives in this three-story mansion.
The movie was based on the classic 1913 novel by Eleanor H. Porter and takes place in 1910, so the filmmakers faced the challenge of recreating the era. They decided to film in Santa Rosa, California, but couldn’t find a three-story house that would work. The solution? A little Hollywood magic.
Believe it or not, here is the actual house they used in the film:
It’s known as the McDonald Mansion and was built in the late 1870s by Col. Mark Lindsay McDonald, owner of Santa Rosa’s water company. According to About.com, the Stick-Eastlake style (a type of Victorian architecture) was meant to evoke the plantations along the Mississippi.
7/11 UPDATE: A reader named Robert Ruiz sent me some beautiful photos of the house that he took today. Here’s how it looks now:
It’s a gorgeous home. (Thanks, Robert!)
The filmmakers decided that the 14,000-square foot mansion could pass for Aunt Polly’s house–with a little help. The top two floors were painted on. That’s right. They were simply a matte painting added in post-production to look like this:
The interior sets were elaborate. Hayley Mills says she had a great time running around and exploring them between scenes, adding that there were several rooms that they never even filmed in.
The screenplay was written by David Swift, who came from an animation background. He painted illustrations of how he envisioned the houses and various sets to look.
The Entry Hall
The illustration above shows how Swift wanted the entry hall to look (from the DVD special features). It’s amazing how closely the sets resembled what he imagined:
Over 300 girls auditioned for the role of Pollyanna. Panic was setting in as they couldn’t find the right actress for the part. Then Hayley Mills was spotted in a British film called “Tiger Bay” and brought in at the last moment, just as another actress was about to be signed. It’s hard to imagine the movie with anyone else in that role.
Pollyanna enters the house for the first time and looks around. She has lived as the daughter of a poor missionary family until now, so this is going to be a whole new kind of life for her.
Aunt Polly opens the front doors:
The Kitchen:
This is one of the illustrations that writer-director David Swift showed to the set designers (above). You can see how the kitchen appeared in the film (below):
A note of trivia about writer-director David Swift: he also wrote the screenplays for both “Parent Trap” movies.
The Conservatory:
The Dining Room:
I love this old photo taken of the dining room during the film’s production because it shows the lighting above the ceiling line:
Aunt Polly’s Bedroom:
You can see the illustration painted of the room (above) and how it appeared in the film (below) with exacting detail:
A wide shot of Aunt Polly’s bedroom (the bed is to the right):
The Parlor:
Sitting Room:
If you’ve seen it, then you know the movie tends to go on and on. It wasn’t just because people had longer attention spans in 1960, however.
Director David Swift says that even he thought it ran too long and wanted to edit a lot of the scenes to pare them down. But Walt Disney loved every minute of it and refused to let Swift cut a thing.
The Side Yard:
Hayley Mills (in the DVD special features) says that she learned life lessons from “Pollyanna” that have stayed with her today about being positive in the face of adversity.
Thanks to Derek of Derek M Design for sending me the house photo that inspired this post!
Disney’s original Parent Trap movie premiered in 1961 with Hayley Mills playing both of the leading roles. If one Hayley Mills had been so good in Pollyanna, then two of her had to be even better, right? The Parent Trap had her playing twin sisters Susan and Sharon. Separated at birth, they rediscovered each other at a summer camp and then plotted to get their parents back together.
After I covered the 1998 remake with Lindsay Lohan, I got a lot of requests to post photos of the original. It was fun to watch it again and see how well it has held up over the years. Yes, some of the effects are cheesy (like when they “walk through a park” while fake-looking footage of the park rolls behind them on a screen), but the story and characters are still a pleasure to watch.
The Boston Townhouse
We don’t spend a lot of time in the Boston townhouse that Sharon lives in with her mother and grandparents. This is the most we see of the exterior–a brief glimpse of the street as Susan pulls up to it for the first time.
The luminous Maureen O’Hara plays their mother Maggie, who inexplicably gave up one of her twin daughters at birth to her ex-husband Mitch (Brian Keith in his first comedy). It’s one of those “suspension of disbelief” things…
Hayley Mills says that at times she would be so confused about which girl she was playing from scene to scene that “I was only saved by the wig.” If she had the short wig on, she knew she was Susan, the “tomboy” twin from California. Her real hair was long like the “proper” twin Sharon’s, but, she points out in the movie commentary, in some scenes it looks as bad as a wig.
After Susan chops Sharon’s hair off at summer camp so they’ll “match,” they both have the short wig on for the rest of the movie. It became even harder for Mills to remember who she was playing from scene to scene.
In the remake, one of the twins lives in London instead of Boston. Natasha Richardson was perfect in Maureen O’Hara’s role.
They struggled to find the right title for the movie. It was originally supposed to be His and Hers, but that was already taken by another studio. They resorted to running a contest and thousands of titles came in. None of them worked, either.
Some of the titles that almost made the cut:
Susan and I
We Belong Together
For Now, For Always
Petticoats and Blue Jeans
Hard to imagine the movie with any of those, isn’t it? It just wouldn’t have been the same. Writer-director David Swift recalls that one day, Walt Disney walked in and announced that they were going with The Parent Trap, and that was that. Discussion over.
The upstairs hallway (look at that red carpet!):
The movie especially struck a chord with children of divorce. Hayley Mills says that she still hears from fans who tell her that watching the girls work to get their parents back together was “empowering” for them because they felt so helpless in their own lives when their parents separated.
The Ranch:
Welcome to Golden Oak Ranch, where Mitch (Brian Keith) and his daughter Susan lived in the Carmel Valley.
This was actually some land owned by Disney south of Carmel on Placerita Canyon Road. They built a shell of a house on the property with nothing but exterior walls and a roof. The interiors were all created on a soundstage.
The Great Room:
Sharon–posing as Susan–explores the ranch for the first time. She’s understandably awestruck by it all.
There was a scene on the golf course in which her real-life father John Mills played Mitch’s caddy, but it ended up on the cutting-room floor.
The fireplace is huge:
One of the great things about the house is how it’s connected to outdoor living spaces. The doors always seem to be open to the courtyard and covered patio:
The Hallway Leading to the Courtyard:
The girls covered the doorway to the courtyard while they planned the private dinner and “show” for their parents. Who can forget the charmingly awful duet, “Let’s Get Together”? (Warning: Once you hear the song, it’ll be stuck in your head all day long!)
The Dining Room:
Susan’s Bedroom:
Master Bath:
June Parker Beck, who edits Maureen O’Hara’s official website, tells me: “I get so many letters from people who want to go to California and see the house where it was filmed. Maureen doesn’t remember much about the structure. Stars are just taken to the shoot for that day–do their thing and go home.”
I read a comment on a message board that questioned why everyone apparently had to share this bathroom. Didn’t a house this size have more than one?
The Kitchen:
I love this kitchen with all the big windows overlooking the courtyard.
How charming was Brian Keith in this role? Swift says Keith was nervous about it because he’d never done comedy before, but he was perfect as Mitch:
In the DVD commentary, director David Swift says he has always regretted that he didn’t have wardrobe give Maureen O’Hara something “sexier” to wear in this scene. He felt it made her look a little plain, and too much like a “housewife.”
I only wish I looked this “homely” while cooking dinner in my kitchen…
O’Hara was 41 when she shot this movie. Joanna Barnes, who played Mitch’s younger girlfriend Vicki, was only 27. But Vicki almost looked older because of the way they styled her hair and clothes:
Joanna Barnes went on to become an accomplished writer. She also appeared in the Parent Trapremake, playing Meredith’s mother Vicki (Meredith is the younger woman in the newer version).
The Courtyard:
The back of the house with the balcony (I would’ve killed to have a balcony like this off my bedroom when I was a girl–heck, I still would!):
The screenplay was written byDavid Swift, who also wrote Pollyanna. Disney had bought the rights to a short story published in Germany called “Lisa and Lottie” by Erich Kästner and asked Swift to adapt it for American audiences.
One of the challenges of making Parent Trap was finding an actress who looked enough like Hayley to play her twin in scenes where she’d only be seen from the back or side.
Susan Henning was cast and had to sign a contract promising to never tell anyone she was in the movie. Years later, Henning was interviewed for the Special Features on the Parent Trap DVD and was allowed to tell her story. She appeared in scenes like this (that’s the back of her head):
Susan had the same dress and shoe size as Hayley, but they gave her a rubber nose to wear. She says they also put a roll of tissue paper under her lip to make it stick out a little and padded her bra. After a few days of filming, however, they decided that the girls looked enough alike that the “extras” weren’t really needed.
Here’s a photo taken on set that shows the girls filming a scene together (Susan is on the left; Hayley on the right):
After filming each scene, they would switch places and do it again–this time with Hayley acting out the other twin’s role. Susan Henning as she looks today (via the Special Features on the DVD):
Henning says that she taught Mills how to talk with American slang, and Mills recalls how close the two of them became both on and off the set.
There is a wonderful commentary on the DVD with Hayley Mills and writer-director David Swift reminiscing about the making of The Parent Trap. Swift died a few years later, so we’re fortunate to have so many of his stories recorded.
Swift said that Disney spoiled him for working with other studios. They gave him free reign on both Pollyanna and The Parent Trap to do what he wanted.
The other thing that comes out in the interviews and commentary is what a lovely and gracious person Mills is.
She says she grew up hanging out on movie sets because her father is the famous British actor Sir John Mills. “Studios were my playground.” Her mother was a successful playwright. Mills says that “Walt Disney loved my mother. She made him laugh.”
“I’ve made I don’t know how many pictures. Forty, I guess. I’ve seen only about a half dozen of them. We made Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) in Rome last spring. I really enjoyed working with Liz and Brando and that great director, John Huston.
“But the kind of picture I enjoy seeing is something like The Parent Trap (1961). That was a charming thing with Hayley Mills playing my twin daughters. I saw that four times. I even took my wife’s parents to see it. I like it so much I forgot I was in it, as a matter of fact.”
The final shot of the movie has the girls as bridesmaids in their parents’ wedding, with the ranch in the background.
I hope you enjoyed this post as much as I enjoyed researching it! If you have any requests for other movies or TV shows, leave them here.
