Plot
The movie starts off at the beginning of Judy Garland's life singing when she was two years old. It jumps to when she was 12 and was signed by MGM and later when her father dies. The movie tells about her early struggles with MGM and with the addiction to barbiturates. It then jumps to the marriage to Vincette Minelli and the struggles with that, and leads into the rest of the movie and her marriages to Sid Luft, Mark Herron, and Mickey Deans and ends when she dies in 1969
Keywords: actor-shares-first-name-with-character, actress, alcoholism, amphetamine, award, based-on-autobiography, camera-shot-of-feet, carnegie-hall-manhattan-new-york-city, character-name-in-title, child-star
Dorothy found the end of the rainbow. Judy spent her life looking for it.
Judy Garland: I've got rainbows coming out my ass.
Judy Garland: I cannot take myself seriously. Because if I did I would have died a long time ago. And I dont want to die, dispite what you might have heard.
Judy Garland: Oh, for God sakes, Liza, can't you see Mama's busy?
Judy Garland: He adores me and I need to be adored.
Judy Garland: Since I was twelve years old they've been taking me out the closet and winding me up to sing and stuffing me back in again. Well maybe I don't feel like singing.
Judy Garland: I'm only *really* at home in the light of the spotlight.
Judy Garland: [on the phone] Yes I've heard how difficult it is to work with Judy Garland. Do you know how difficult it is to BE Judy Garland? I've been trying to be Judy Garland all my life!
Judy Garland: Uninsurable? Uh-huh?... of course I can do eight shows a week, I did eight shows a day in vaudeville... well even the greatest performer in the world can occasionally catch a cold and miss a performance! Let me tell you something: I have been in show business for forty years. That's thirty-five movies, six hundred radio shows, seventeen hundred concerts...! Difficult? Yes, I've heard how difficult it is to work with Judy Garland, do you know how difficult it is to *be* Judy Garland? I've been trying to be Judy Garland all my life!
Narrator: It's hard to be a legend's child. She's everywhere I turn like a shadow. It's remarkable, really, how much of our life begins before we're even born. I wonder sometimes what might have happened to us all if mama had just stayed Baby Frances Gumm... but she wasn't allowed to. She became Judy Garland. She became a legend.
Narrator: It hurts when your mother is too sick to take care of you. My mother was handed her first dose of medication when she was a child. Hard work and pills had robbed her of her childhood, now those pills were beginning to destroy mine. I was beginning to understand the connection between her behaviour and her medication.
Plot
An athlete, a campus militant, a black model, and an American Indian are picked by a computer (shaped like a woman) to form a rock group called the Phynx and go on tour in Albania where American show biz people have been kidnapped by Communists. Some of the stars that the phony band rescues: Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan (the most famous movie Tarzan and Jane), Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall (the Bowery Boys), Ed Sullivan, James Brown, Colonel Sanders, Guy Lombardo, Andy Devine, Ruby Keeler, Edgar Bergen, Butterfly McQueen, Jay Silverheels (Tonto), Rudy Vallee, Xavier Cugat, Trini Lopez, Dick Clark, Richard Pryor, Harold "Oddjob" Sakata, George Jessel, and Rhona Barrett. Warner Bros. Studios thought it was so bad that they decided at the last minute not to release it!
Keywords: albania, castle, communist, computer, copenhagen-denmark, espionage, kidnapping, london-england, orgy, recording
Of all the American heroes who served their country in it's hour of need - only one had a great rock sound...
Busby Berkeley (November 29, 1895 – March 14, 1976) was a highly influential Hollywood movie director and musical choreographer. Berkeley was famous for his elaborate musical production numbers that often involved complex geometric patterns. Berkeley's works used large numbers of showgirls and props as fantasy elements in kaleidoscopic on-screen performances.
Berkeley was born to stage actress Gertrude Berkeley. Among Gertrude's friends were actress Amy Busby and actor William Gillette, then only four years away from playing Sherlock Holmes. Gertrude apparently named her son after both Busby and Gillette after they agreed to be the boy's godparents. The boy was named Busby Berkeley William Enos.
In addition to her stage work, Gertrude played mother roles in silent films while Berkley was still a child. Berkeley made his stage debut at five, acting in the company of his performing family. During World War I, Berkeley served as a field artillery lieutenant. Watching soldiers drill may have inspired his later complex choreography. During the 1920s, Berkeley was a dance director for nearly two dozen Broadway musicals, including such hits as A Connecticut Yankee. As a choreographer, Berkeley was less concerned with the terpsichorean skill of his chorus girls as he was with their ability to form themselves into attractive geometric patterns. His musical numbers were among the largest and best-regimented on Broadway.[citation needed]