Word: paramount
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...like Paramount's male perennial, Bing Crosby, she often graced the pop charts: six songs in the top 10. They were mostly novelty tunes: "His Rocking Horse Ran Away," "Stuff Like That There" and the No. 1 "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief." But Hutton could also find the aching heart in plaintive ballads; her versions of "It Had to Be You" and "I Wish I Didn't Love You So" both made the top five. She would have had more hits, except that in 1942, just as she was becoming a break-out star, the musicians' union imposed a two-year...
...scores for Guys and Dolls, A Most Happy Fella and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He's also the subject of a toe-tappingly terrific new bio-doc, Heart & Soul: The Life and Music of Frank Loesser. But in the '40s he was under contract to Paramount, and there he wrote many of Hutton's signature songs...
...found a valuable patron in the Broadway songwriter B.G. (Buddy) De Sylva. When he was named Paramount's production chief, he took Hutton to Hollywood and made her a star. Rather, she did it herself. He just turned the cameras on her. Which was easier said than done. Directors complained that she was too peripatetic to keep in view. According to the TIME cover: "De Sylva had a camera dolly rigged up and told the director to follow her all over the set if necessary." The film frame was a cage she was bound to burst...
...pity that Sturges and Hutton made only this film together. But her mentor, DeSylva, was Sturges' tormentor (on TCM Hutton says that "Buddy didn't like him because he didn't hit schedules") and soon hounded Paramount's prize writer-director off the lot. Partly as a result of the Sturges exile, Hutton's movies thereafter were mostly dreck, occasionally animated by her nutty novelties songs. The films are fairly summarized in these TIME reviews, most of them by Agee, wearing himself out to find new descriptions for Betty-mania...
...talks about her troubles with co-stars, saying that the Paramount contractees gave her a hard time because "they thought I was sleeping with Buddy De Sylva" and saying that the actors in Annie Get Your Gun, for which she recorded all her songs in one day, "were awful to me" because she had replaced the emotionally bereft Judy Garland. "Annie Get Your Gun was the end of me, inside." I'm guessing Howard Keel would have had a different take on that story...