Trivia / Rosemary's Baby

• Actor-Shared Background: Like Rosemary, Mia Farrow was a Catholic girl, and had even contemplated becoming a nun.
• Career Resurrection: This movie resurrected Ruth Gordon's career and she parlayed her Oscar winning success into a number of "funny old women" roles (kind of like the roles Betty White played later in life) in movies throughout the 70s like Harold and Maude and My Bodyguard. It also revived Mia Farrow's brand new but cut short career, who had been pressured by Frank Sinatra to agree to kill her career as a condition to marry him. Sinatra served her divorce papers with lawyers in tow in front of cast and crew as retaliation for her taking the part and breaking her agreement. After this, she had a very long and successful acting career.
• Cast the Runner-Up: William Castle tried, and failed, to convince Roman Polański to let him play Dr. Sapirstein. He makes a cameo as the man near the phone booth. This led to an in-joke where Rosemary sees him from behind and freaks out initially because she thinks it's Sapirstein.
• Completely Different Title: The film gets comprehensively spoiled in Spain by the title La semilla del diablo ("The devil's seed").
• Creator-Preferred Adaptation: Ira Levin had high praise for Roman Polański's work on the film, calling it "the most faithful film adaptation ever made."
• Deleted Scene: A scene where Rosemary and her friend Elise go to see The Fantasticks and meet Joan Crawford and Van Johnson in the theater lobby was shot but excised from the final cut due to time constraints.
• Disowned Adaptation: Ira Levin's website very tactfully describes Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby as "loosely based on Levin's characters".
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • When Rosemary calls Donald Baumgart, she appears confused and preoccupied throughout the call. Baumgart was played by Mia Farrow's friend Tony Curtis, unbeknownst to her. Farrow's confusion in the scene stems from recognizing the voice on the line but being unable to match it to a person.
  • According to Mia Farrow, the scenes where Rosemary walks in front of traffic were spontaneous and genuine. Roman Polański is reported to have told her that "nobody will hit a pregnant woman."
  • Mia Farrow actually ate raw liver for a scene in the movie despite being a vegetarian at the time.
• Follow the Leader: Its success spawned the boom in Religious Horror in both fiction and film in The '70s. Oddly, the made-for-TV sequel Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby was very obviously made to jump on the bandwagon of one the original's most profitable successors, The Omen (1976).
• Hostility on the Set: Roman Polański said working with John Cassavetes was not his "best experience. John was not very comfortable with the role". According to Mia Farrow, Cassavetes resented Polanski's highly structured method of shooting scenes, saying he preferred to improvise and a more freewheeling approach. Eventually, the tensions grew between the two because of their conflicting approaches to the film. In an interview featured on the Criterion Collection, Polanski said Cassavetes was a "pain in the ass".
• Meaningful Release Date: The first part of the Mini Series remake aired on Mother's Day, 2014.
• Playing Against Type: Roman Polański decided to cast the coven with familiar character actors from The Golden Age of Hollywood, but pointedly chose actors who weren't associated with horror films. Sidney Blackmer (Roman) was a sturdy B-movie leading man, Ruth Gordon (Minnie) usually played supportive wives in dramas, Ralph Bellamy (Dr. Sapirstein) was associated with romantic comedy and light mysteries, and Patsy Kelly (Laura-Louise) specialized in being a wisecracking sidekick in slapstick comedies. Also amusingly, several were connected with White House biopics: Blackmer played Theodore Roosevelt on several occasions, Bellamy had played FDR and Gordon had played Mary Todd Lincoln.
• The Production Curse:
  • Roman Polański's career and personal life nosedived for a while after making this creepy movie about the conception of Satan's child. He only escaped the massacre of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and five others by being in London at the time. (The perpetrators of the Manson Family were alleged to be Satanists themselves)
  • The film's composer died of a brain clot one year after making the film, the same way a character in the film dies.
  • Producer William Castle nearly died of kidney failure shortly after the film was completed; as he lay in a coma, he was heard reciting lines from the movie such as "For God's sake, Rosemary, drop that knife!"
  • The building where the movie was shot, The Dakota, became the residence of John Lennon who was shot outside the building in 1980.
• Shown Their Work: Director Polanski had never adapted a novel before and was unaware that he was allowed—indeed, expected—to make changes from the source material, resulting in the extremely book-accurate adaptation. His insistence on absolute accuracy was such that he allegedly contacted author Ira Levin to inquire about a particular issue of The New Yorker in which Guy sees an ad for a shirt. Polanski had searched through every issue of The New Yorker appropriate to the time period but couldn't find the ad. Levin admitted that he'd made it up.
• Star-Making Role: Mia Farrow was fairly well-known already as the daughter of a famed Hollywood Creator Couple (director John Farrow and actress Maureen O'Sullivan), her role on the TV version of Peyton Place, and her brief marriage to Frank Sinatra, but this film pushed her onto the A-list practically overnight.
• Stunt Casting: Mia Farrow was cast over Tuesday Weld and Sharon Tate because producers weren't sure that the book's title was enough to generate good Box Office (it had yet to reach bestseller status). Although Mia didn't have that many credits, her marriage to Frank Sinatra had made her reasonably famous (she was also starring on the popular TV series Peyton Place).
• Voice-Only Cameo: Tony Curtis is the voice of Donald Baumgart, the actor that Guy replaced in the play. (This is also why Mia Farrow is frowning, because she wasn't told who would play him, and knew the voice but couldn't place it.)
• What Could Have Been:
  • Various other actresses were considered for the part of Rosemary, including Julie Christie, Jane Fonda, Patty Duke, Faye Dunaway, Elizabeth Hartman, Goldie Hawn, Natalie Wood and Polanski's wife Sharon Tate. Tuesday Weld was the first choice. Patty Duke would later play the role of Rosemary in the critically panned sequel Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby.
  • Robert Redford was the first choice for Guy Woodhouse. Jack Nicholson was considered, but Polanski felt he was "too demonic". Robert Wagner was considered, but Paramount refused to accommodate his scheduling conflicts with It Takes a Thief (1968). Warren Beatty, Laurence Harvey and Burt Reynolds were also considered.
  • Mia Farrow nearly left the production as her marriage to Frank Sinatra collapsed while filming - he actually served her divorce papers read by a corporate lawyer in front of the whole set. She was convinced to stay on after being shown a rough cut of the film, and getting told she'd be Oscar nominated for it. She wasn't.
• Word of God: It was a myth for years that Vidal Sassoon had cut Mia Farrow's hair himself especially for the film. The actress set the record straight in 2013; she had cut the hair herself before she was cast, and Vidal Sassoon was only flown out to trim the hair for a publicity stunt.
• Working Title: Levin originally considered several titles that alluded to "Silent Night", like Mother and Child, The Infant and All is Calm, All is Bright.

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