“I’ve never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation.” – Mike Todd

Mike Todd was born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Polish immigrants, a rabbi and his wife. Before he was 10, he was pulling in more money than his father, sniffing for quick cash around the streets of Minneapolis. A street vendor who hawked kitchen gadgets hired him at age 8 to attract customers by walking the streets with a potato peeler sticking out of his neck (an optical illusion; the blade was retractable). Avrom went to the manager of a local theatre and told him boys were sneaking in the fire exit and offered to guard it, then charged the boys a nickel apiece to creep in. After the family moved to Chicago, he ran a craps operation inside the Wicker Park Grammar School, taking a cut of every pot (usually a dime), with some additional skimming to pay off the janitor. In his first year of high school, he dropped out. The world was waiting.

At age 17, Todd married Bertha Freshman in Crown Point, Indiana, on Valentine’s Day 1927. He had been interested in Freshman since age 14 but needed to develop confidence before even asking her out. By the age of 18, Avrom Hirsch was running a $2 million homebuilding business that went bust; undaunted, he saw the advent of talkies as an opportunity to start a movie-studio soundproofing system, and staked yet another fortune. Avrom and Bertha had a son — 17 days before the stock market crashed in 1929. He lost everything, again. Avrom decided to call his son Michael and changed his own name to Mike Todd — a variation on his childhood nickname, Toat, which came from his mispronunciation of “coat”.

Mike Todd’s subsequent business career was volatile, and failed ventures left him bankrupt many times. He began writing gags for vaudeville. Then he developed an act he called “The Moth and the Flame.” On stage, a girl with wings would dance near a torch, eventually straying too close. Her costume would catch fire and drop from her body, leaving her seemingly nude as she scurried off stage. (She would actually be wearing a flesh-covered leotard.) The act was a smash at Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair. Todd took it on the road to New York. The act attracted enough attention to bring an offer from the Casino de Paree nightclub in New York City. Todd got his first taste of Broadway with the engagement and was determined to find a way to work there.

Over the next decade, he worked Broadway, eventually becoming what Edward R. Murrow called “the most colourful producer since the late Flo Ziegfeld.” Todd’s Vaudeville-type girlie revues and a string of popular musicals helped him develop an eye for talent. He signed an unknown comedy duo named Abbott and Costello for Streets of Paris. For The Dancing Campus, he hired a fresh young singer named Doris Day. He embarked on a highly successful partnership — business and personal — with burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, and became pals with Damon Runyan and Walter Winchell, ensuring a steady buzz of publicity in the papers. In 1952 Todd made a production of the Johann Strauss II operetta A Night in Venice, complete with floating gondolas at the then-newly constructed Jones Beach Theatre in Long Island, New York. It ran for two seasons.

Scandal-hit Mike Todd who had abandoned his wife for actress Joan Blondell (married to Dick Powell) in 1943. Todd filed for divorce in 1946 and Bertha apparently lunged at him with a carving knife, missed and ended up cutting her own hand. Somehow, while undergoing minor surgery on her hand Bertha, died of a pneumothorax (collapsed lung). The rumours were that somehow Todd had arranged his first wife’s death.

By 1950 Todd was in trouble. He had divorced Bertha, his first wife who had attempted to stab him only to die from injuries sustained in the attack. Prior to the divorce he had an affair with actress Joan Blondel which led to a tempestuous marriage, the squandering of their fortunes and bankruptcy court. He owed more than $1 million to 1,000 creditors. At a humiliating hearing in October, he conceded to betting more than $350,000 on the horses in one year alone. “I went to the track and looked for every form of gambling,” Todd told Irving Galpeer, the attorney representing his creditors. He wasn’t exaggerating: At one point, he had a hot tip on a horse at Del Mar, bet the entire racetrack, which he owned, on it, and lost.

Mike Todd, now divorced from Joan Blondell, became involved in a film process invented some years previously by Fred Waller. Hazard “Buzz ” Reeves and Waller, first with Mike Todd and later Merian C. Cooper, produced a commercially viable demonstration. This is Cinerama opened at the Broadway Theatre, New York on September 30, 1952 and was enthusiastically received. According to producer Merian C, Cooper, after the premiere there were still hundreds of people at the theatre at 4:00 AM talking about the experience.

The process was the outgrowth of many years of development. A forerunner was the triple-screen final sequence in the silent Napoléon (1927) directed by Abel Gance (see Kevin Brownlow). Cinerama used three interlocked 35 mm cameras each filming one-third of the action. The three cameras were mounted as one unit, set at 48 degrees to each other. A single rotating shutter in front of the three lenses assured simultaneous exposure on each of the films. The three angled cameras photographed an image that was not only three times as wide as a standard film but covered 146 degrees of arc, close to the human field of vision, including peripheral vision. n theatres, Cinerama film was projected from three projection booths arranged in the same crisscross pattern as the cameras. They projected onto a deeply curved screen, the outer thirds of which were made of over 1100 strips of material mounted on “louvres” like a vertical venetian blind, to prevent light projected to each end of the screen from reflecting to the opposite end and washing out the image. Several drawbacks of the system limited its use. If one of the films should break, it had to be repaired with a black slug exactly equal to the missing footage. Otherwise, the corresponding frames would have had to be cut from the other three films (the other two picture films plus the soundtrack film) in order to preserve synchronization. The use of zoom lenses was impossible since the three images would no longer match. Perhaps the greatest limitation of the process is that the picture looks natural only from within a rather limited “sweet spot.” Viewed from outside the sweet spot, the picture can look distorted.

Mike Todd left Cinerama before the release of This is Cinerama to join with American Optical to develop an alternative widescreen format. Todd-AO used 65mm film stock to capture a 2.20:1 five perforation image using normal spherical lenses. The release print is 70mm with optical soundtracks, two outside the perforations and one inside. As the film is perforated on both edges there is a total of six soundtracks. Originally the film was shot and projected at 30 frames per second which, compared to the standard 24 fps and t gave the film noticeably less flicker, and made it steadier and smoother than standard processes.

The first film to be produced in the Todd-AO process was Oklahoma! (1955), film based on the 1943 musical of the same name by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Todd-AO involved running at 30 frames per second which made it impossible to produce 35mm (24 fps) reduction prints from the Todd-AO negative. Therefore, it was simultaneously shot in the more established CinemaScope 35 mm format to allow presentation in theatres lacking 70 mm equipment. Hence, there are actually two different versions of the film comprising different takes.[3][9] Director Zinnemann mentioned that shooting the film in both formats was a “precautionary measure”, as the (converted ca. 1930s Fearless Superfilm 65mm) Todd-AO camera was still being tested during production.

Mike Todd then produced the film for which he is most famous, Around the World in 80 Days (1956). The film starred David Niven, Cantinflas, Shirley MacLaine and Robert Newton with fifty stars, including Frank Sinatra, Noel Coward, Buster Keaton, Marlene Dietrich and Peter Lorre making cameo appearances. Around the World in 80 Days was Mike Todd’s first stint as a film producer; the director he hired, Michael Anderson, had directed the highly acclaimed British World War II feature The Dam Busters (1955), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four feature (1956), and other classic films. Todd sold his interest in the Todd-AO format to help finance the film.

Because Todd-AO ran at 30 frames per second, which was incompatible with the 35mm standard of 24 fps, Around the World in 80 Days was filmed twice, like the first feature in Todd-AO, Oklahoma!. Unlike Oklahoma!, however, which was filmed additionally in 35mm CinemaScope, Around the World in 80 Days was filmed simultaneously in Todd-AO at 24 frames per second so that from this negative, 35mm reduction prints could be produced for general release. After these two films, the specification for Todd-AO was altered after the third film in the format, South Pacific, to 24 fps running, making it unnecessary to film subsequent productions twice.

The film was shot over 75 days, using nearly 70,000 extras in the 13 countries visited. Over 100 separate locations were used and almost 10,000 feet of film were shot per day on average. The wardrobe department spent $410,000 to provide 74,685 costumes and 36,092 trinkets.It has been alleged that this is the greatest number of costumes ever required for any Hollywood production ever made. The budget ran to $6 million. In his memoirs David Niven related that Todd completed filming while in considerable debt. The post-production work on the film was an exercise in holding off Mike Todd’s creditors long enough to produce a saleable film, and the footage was worked upon under the supervision of Todd’s creditors and returned to a secure vault each night as if it were in escrow.

Bosley Crowther called the film a “sprawling conglomeration of refined English comedy, giant-screen travel panoramics and slam-bang Keystone burlesque” and said Todd and the film’s crew “commandeered the giant screen and stereophonic sound as though they were Olsen and Johnson turned loose in a cosmic cutting-room, with a pipe organ in one corner and all the movies ever made to toss around”.

Time magazine called it “brassy, extravagant, long-winded and funny” and the “Polyphemus of productions,” saying “as a travelogue, Around the World is at least as spectacular as anything Cinerama has slapped together”. Time highlighted the performance of “the famous Mexican comic, Cantinflas [who in] his first U.S. movie … gives delightful evidence that he may well be, as Charles Chaplin once said he was, “the world’s greatest clown”.

Mike Todd had found time to tempt Elizabeth Taylor away from her husband Michael Wilding (and send his girlfriend Evelyn Keyes to Venezuela). Todd and Taylor were married in a lavish ceremony in Acapulco; a huge fireworks display, a gift from Cantinflas, lit up their names against the night sky. A few weeks later, Around the World in 80 Days was nominated for eight Oscars and went on to win five (for picture, cinematography, editing, music score, and adapted screenplay), besting a formidable Best Picture field: Giant, The Ten Commandments, The King and I, and Friendly Persuasion.

On March 22, 1958 Mike Todd was on his way to New York to accept the New York Friars Club Showman of the Year award. Elizabeth Taylor had wanted to go but she was laid up bronchitis and a 102-degree fever. Todd, his biographer Art Cohn and two pilots were aboard a twin-engine Lockheed Lodestar. The plane, fuelled to capacity and with extra tanks installed was overweight. It ran into icing conditions near Grants, New Mexico and crashed, killing all on board.

At a memorial service at Temple Israel in Hollywood three days after the crash, more than 1,000 mourners, including David Niven, Kirk Douglas, Van Johnson, Danny Kaye, Eva Marie Saint, Esther Williams and David O. Selznick, came to pay their respects. George Jessel, the nation’s self-proclaimed “toastmaster general,” presented portions of the speech he had planned to deliver at the Friars dinner. He talked about Todd’s legendary showmanship, audacity, and resilience. He quoted an old proverb that, he said, lent itself to Todd’s life:

“Napoleon, world in hand, found the world too small for him.”

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