Production design

radio transmitter, and all the ancillary equipment. He said, come over and see me. So I went over to see him. And they were actually producing all the equipment for the new Delhi airport. So I said, well, what do you think? He said, yes, he said, providing you guaranteed to pay for the retesting of the equipment. Apart from a couple of very nice lunches, I don't think he charged us anything for it. Production designer Ken Adam worked on seven James Bond films.

6:13 · jump to transcript →

the French windows at the back of the set with some drapes and obviously all the gambling tables. I tried to create space. I know to reproduce this rather French Louis XV or XVI type of decor would have been impossible.

7:07 · jump to transcript →

I think you would never believe that when this man was on location, away from the set, was a consummate piano player, raconteur, and a person that just took over the room. He was fantastic. Obviously, this side of him never came out in his screen roles. Throwing the gyroscopic controls of a guided missile off balance with a...

11:21 · jump to transcript →

I mean, you know, I tried to explain to her that if we use suntan lotion, she wouldn't die. She wouldn't suffocate. I don't understand. Okay. But the snake pit, which is what I call the makeup department, was telling her, oh, you're going to die. You better have special insurance. Then her agent called me just as I was ready to shoot the scene and said, Steve, I want you to have a doctor and an ambulance on the set. I said, she's not going to die. Don't be stupid.

30:11 · jump to transcript →

uh for that was shot on the set of uh orgy of the dead like tests with that so yeah so that explains that uh you know the other credits of most of these girls you know it's you know they just went oh my god now he's getting now he's getting nasty uh way chriswell looks like he's blasted he does doesn't he was he a drinker

38:25 · jump to transcript →

Okay, I have a little bit about... I can mention something interesting. Yeah. Please, somebody needs to. Well, I have a still of Orgy the Dead on the set. And in this still, you can see most of the people. Right, right. But also, Kathy Wood. Oh, really? And I was always thinking, what is she doing there? And then I just thought about the other day. Well, it's got all these, like,

52:16 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

It hasn't any of her former iconography, but it might be her finest screen performance. She was more or less retired from films at this time, her roles in films like Goliath and the Barbarians long behind her, but she was present on the set as the wife of production supervisor Aldo Pomilia, whom she had met on the set of the Steve Reeves film Morgan the Pirate. She told historian Peter J. Hanley that she didn't want to play this part.

8:17 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

Don't you love how this outlaw, commonly known to lawmen as the Rat, prepares his bath with heavy doses of fragrant bath salts? Tuco will probably leave this room smelling sweet enough to stand under that frilly pink parasol of his. The film's production designer, Carlo Simi, assisted by Carlo Leva, created some wonderfully baroque settings for this film, notably this abandoned, bombed-out hotel, the interior of which was filmed at Elios Studios.

1:46:45 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

As was not unusual in Italian cinema, the production designer was also responsible for the film's costumes. In both capacities, Simi specialized in westerns, ranging from that early Franco and Ciccio spoof to Minnesota Clay, Django, the big gun-down face-to-face, Sabata, and Kiyoma, not to mention Once Upon a Time in the West. Was this the first sideways gunshot in film history? You tell me.

1:47:12 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

While perusing back issues of the El Paso Tribune, Mortimer discovers evidence of a man with no name story that Sergio Leone somehow never told, in which his fellow bounty killer, his shadow self, brought down the Morton brothers. Again, death lurks in that first syllable of the Morton name as it does in the Mortimer name. It might be worth mentioning that Sergio Leone served as an assistant director on the set of Ben-Hur in 1959.

48:17 · jump to transcript →