Trivia / What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

• Acting for Two: Minor example. Since Bette Davis struggled to imitate Joan Crawford's voice, Crawford just dubbed over her when Jane is imitating Blanche.
• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • Jane's make-up was Bette Davis' idea. Inspired by the homeless women she saw on Hollywood Boulevard, Davis theorized that Jane would never wash her face, and would just put a new layer of make-up on every day. Reportedly when her daughter saw her in full Jane makeup for the first time, she went "Mother, this time you've gone too far."
  • Joan Crawford was a big fan of Margaret Keane's 'sad eyes' paintings and had them displayed on the walls of Mrs. Bates's house.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Both of the lead actresses loved the project and agreed to it, despite the tight schedule and their mutual antipathy. They even worked at a lower salary out of love for the project, although they did negotiate a share of the profits. In her autobiography, Bette Davis wrote that she loved going to work every day while making the film.
• Career Resurrection:
  • Bette Davis had been experiencing a career downturn in the late 1950s, not helped by also dealing with the breakdown of her marriage to Garry Merrill and her mother's death. Beforehand, she was appearing in a supporting role in The Night of the Iguana on Broadway and receiving mixed reviews. But the sudden success of Baby Jane led to an Oscar nomination, and ensured she was working steadily until her death two decades later.
  • Joan Crawford did get a brief career resurrection out of this as well, but getting dropped from Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte because of her illness that prevented her from playing Miriam.
• Creator-Preferred Adaptation: Henry Farrell, author of the original book, visited the set and reacted to Bette Davis's 'Baby Jane' makeup with "My God, you look exactly as I pictured Baby Jane!"
• Deleted Role: Actor Bill Walker appeared in a deleted scene delivering a package to Jane at the Hudson Mansion. It was filmed in the studio recreation of the house but never made it to the final release. He is uncredited.
• Dueling-Stars Movie: Davis and Crawford had not worked together in eighteen years and never did so again. Their hatred of each other was no secret.
• Fake Brit: California native Victor Buono is an in-universe example as Edwin Flagg, who puts on an English accent whenever he's around Jane to make himself seem more sophisticated.
• Follow the Leader: After the success of the film, several other thriller movies were made featuring mentally unstable older women. The genre was variously referred to as "psycho-biddy" and "hagsploitation", with Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte and What's the Matter with Helen? being the most notable examples.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: If you pause the car driving in the prologue at just the right time you will see it is indeed Blanche driving the car and Jane walking up the gates.
• Genre Popularizer: For the 'psycho-biddy' subgenre in horror films. Both Bette Davis and Joan Crawford would star in a few more such films after this.
• Hey, It's That Place!: The beach at the end is the same one used in Kiss Me Deadly.
• Hostility on the Set: The on-set feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford has passed into legend. Davis once joked that the most fun she ever had with Crawford was when she pushed her down the stairs in the film. And she kicked her in the head. Crawford retaliated by placing weights on herself, so that she'd be harder to lift. That said, none of the hostility was overt, as contemporary reporting lauded the two leads for their on-set professionalism. Years later, Bette Davis praised her co-star's work ethic.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Bette Davis, one of the greatest actresses of her generation, plays a White-Dwarf Starlet who was a terrible actress and only got parts because of nepotism.
• Life Imitates Art: Jane's line "You mean, all this time we could have been friends?" – in Bette Davis's autobiography, she did praise Joan Crawford for her performance in this movie, calling her a pro who always knew her lines and showed up on time.
• The Merch: Actual Baby Jane dolls were produced as merchandise for the film. However the one used in the ad campaign is an entirely different one from the movie. Due to the rushed production, the ad staff had to come up with a design while it was still filming.
• Meta Casting: A twofer. To play two sisters who were bitter rivals, they cast two actresses who had been rivals. Likewise Jane in her youth struggles to make it as an actress and there's a scene where a producer watches a movie of hers and trashes her performance. The footage shown was from one of Bette Davis's old movies — supplied by the actress herself.
• No Budget: It was made on a budget of $1 million, shot in a month and edited a month later. The budget was so limited that the production wasn't able to use the usual process screen shots for Jane's driving scenes. Bette Davis did her own driving around Hollywood with cameraman Ernest Haller perched either in the backseat of the car or over the front fender in order to get the shots he needed. She recalled in 1987:
  To this day, I smile when I remember the first time 'Jane' drove down Beverly Boulevard in an old Hudson. The expressions on the faces of people in other cars when they saw me were hysterical. Lots of mouths dropped.
• Non-Singing Voice: Debbie Burton dubbed the singing for Julie Allred, who played the young Jane. Bette Davis did her own singing as the adult Jane.
• Playing Against Type: Bette Davis as a 'psycho biddy'. With this film's success, it became her new type.
• Playing with Character Type: Joan Crawford's character suffers greatly in this film, as with many of her '40s and '50s pieces. However, placing this in a horror setting has quite a different effect than a drama.
• Prop Recycling: Hilariously, the wig that Bette Davis wears as Jane had been worn by Joan Crawford in an earlier MGM film. Crawford didn't recognize it, as it had been re-groomed.
• Product Placement: In true Joan Crawford tradition, Pepsi makes it into the film. At the beach, a man goes to the refreshment stand and tries to collect a deposit on empty Pepsi bottles. Bette Davis had a Coca-Cola machine installed on set to provoke her.
• Real-Life Relative: Bette Davis' real-life daughter, B.D. Merrill, plays the teenaged daughter of the neighbor Mrs. Bates.
• Reality Subtext: Davis and Crawford had been rivals since the '30s and utterly despised each other in real life; in his Great Movies essay on the film, Roger Ebert speculated that "it's possible that each agreed to do the picture only because she was jealous of the other's starring role." Davis joked that her favourite part of the film was when she got to push Crawford down the stairs.
• Self-Deprecation: The clips showcasing Jane's terrible acting are real clips of a young Bette Davis in some of her earliest films. Bette Davis picked them out herself, feeling they showed her at her worst. The films are Parachute Jumper and Ex-Lady (both from 1933 too).
• Sleeper Hit: Both the leads were experiencing career slumps at the time, and the film was made on the cheap (not to mention in the horror genre). It was a significant hit that grossed $9 million, which was eight times its budget, and enjoyed lots of success as a midnight movie in the UK. Bette Davis even got an Oscar nomination for it.
• Throw It In!: Jane was meant to scream when she saw her reflection in the mirror while singing "I've Written a Letter to Daddy". Bette Davis had laryngitis at the time and all that came out was a hoarse cry. Immediately she and Robert Aldrich knew it was better.
• Wag the Director: Maidie Norman pushed for Elvira's dialogue to be re-written, as the character was originally closer to a Mammy. She recalls telling producers "This is not how we talk. This is old-time slavery talk."
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to Bette Davis's autobiography, the film was going to be shot in color. Davis herself pushed for it to be in black and white, feeling it would help with the gothic image and that color would have "made a sad story look pretty."
  • Bill Walker filmed a scene delivering a package to Jane, but it was deleted from the final film. He was uncredited.
  • Numerous other veteran actresses of the '30s and '40s were considered for the leads, including Ingrid Bergman, Susan Hayward, Rita Hayworth, Katharine Hepburn, Jennifer Jones and Ginger Rogers for Jane and Tallulah Bankhead, Claudette Colbert, Olivia de Havilland and Marlene Dietrich for Blanche.
  • Alfred Hitchcock was approached to direct, but turned it down.
  • Peter Lawford originally accepted the part of Edwin, but backed out two days later; feeling it might reflect badly on him being the brother-in-law of John F Kennedy. Victor Buono replaced him.

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