What's Up, Doc? (1972) on Netflix
Howard Bannister brings his fiancée Eunice Burns to San Francisco for a musicology grant, his plaid bag full of igneous rocks. Judy Maxwell pursues him, and the hotel holds four identical bags.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Dr. Howard Bannister teaches musicology at a conservatory in Ames, Iowa, and comes to San Francisco with Eunice Burns, his controlling fiancée, to compete for a grant from Frederick Larrabee. At the Hotel Bristol he meets Judy Maxwell, a woman who never finished college but has collected knowledge at one school after another, each stay ending in expulsion. She takes an interest in him and settles into the hotel without checking in. Howard has packed igneous rocks that he believes have musical properties into a plaid overnight bag, and three other guests on the same floor carry identical bags: the mysterious Mr. Smith, who holds papers stolen from the government, wealthy Mrs. Van Hoskins, whose bag is full of jewels, and Judy, whose bag holds her clothing and a dictionary. Government agent Mr. Jones is after the papers.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about What's Up, Doc? (1972)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film began with a question from John Calley, then head of production, who called Bogdanovich into his office and asked what kind of picture he would make with Barbra Streisand. Bogdanovich answered "kind of a screwball comedy, something like Bringing Up Baby", and Calley said: "Do it."
- The San Francisco setting was chosen to allow an elaborate comic spoof of the car chase in the 1968 hit Bullitt, and Bogdanovich claims the chase sequence accounted for one-fourth of the film's $4 million budget.
- The production did not have permission from the city to drive cars down the concrete steps in Alta Plaza Park in San Francisco; the steps were badly damaged during filming and still show the scars today.
- According to Bogdanovich, the character of Hugh Simon was based on the critic John Simon, who then reviewed the film himself and wrote that Streisand looked "like a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun".
