"You Beast, You Beast!" Grayson Hall does Tennessee Williams

I still have a bottle of rum left over from the holidays and having been wondering what to do with it ... if anyone has the rum cocoa recipe, please by all means post it!   

Vlad,

     I discovered my husband has a Playboy's Bar Guide(circa 1975).  I looked up Rum Coco but all I find listed is Rum and Coconut Cooler and Rum Coconut Fizz.  The recipes are almost identical except one uses lemon juice and the other uses lime juice.  If anyone wants the recipes and its okay with Midnite, I will post it.

If anyone wants the recipes and its okay with Midnite, I will post it.

Off-topic posts of interest on this board are okay with the mods.  Just please add "off topic" or "OT" to your title, and thanks for asking. 

Actually, I think a rum coco is just coconut milk and rum, served in a coconut shell.  I was reading the play, and there was a stage direction referring to Maxine's checking coconuts for milk, and then cutting off the tops.  In the movie, Maxine can be seen holding a coconut with a straw sticking out of it.  Regardless, they do sound good.

Of course, one could always experiment with rum and Coco Lopez.  Invite a few friends over, try different ratios of rum to Coco Lopez, pop on the movie, and have a grand old time! 

As for TNOTI being on the AFI 100 list, it might be on the preliminary list of 400 films, or on one of their more specialized lists.

During my last trip to Mexico (Puerto Vallarta, where NOTI was filmed) there was a street vender selling coconut drinks in the shell. I believe tequilla is the favored additive these days. I didn't stop to imbibe (lol) but I was told that there are several "enhancements" to choose from. There was quite a line of natives stoping to partake (it was HOT!!!). It was funny to see because they do not peel off the outter coconut shell membrane (?) so everyone was holding these huge green monstrosities with these little straws sticking out of them. It was quite a site to behold. It was so "cultural", we loved it.

dom (who's still working his "made in Mexico" tan)

This is a great topic.  Thanks, Vlad, for posting about this.  Maybe you will inspire more folks to see this fabulous film.  I'd love to see it on the big screen some day.

The film version of NOTI has a *cartload* of differences from the original stage version by Tennessee Williams.  The screenplay was adapted by John Huston and another writer.  A copy of the screenplay was auctioned on eBay a while back, and I would have loved to have been able to read it--it would be interesting to know how the finished film differed from the script.  Huston always shot his scenes in the order they were written, I believe he had a theory that this helped sustain the narrative mood for the actors.  (my brain is barely functioning at the moment, so pardon my mangled English).

As for Grayson's stage training, she had been acting all over the Northeast for over twenty years on various stages, and had done two films (both of which she subsequently deleted from her "official" filmography) before her appearance in Iguana.  She'd also done a fair amount of television, much of it now difficult to track down as she did small supporting roles that weren't well documented in published credits of 1950s drama anthology shows.

I've read a lot of the press coverage of the filming of Iguana, and it seems as if Grayson got along very well with nearly everyone.  She managed the remarkable feat of making friends with both Richard Burton *and* Elizabeth Taylor.  Elizabeth's daughter Liza became a friend of Grayson's son Matthew.  One of my favorite anecdotes about her trip to Mexico was that she got this scopion venom antidote kit and insisted upon carrying it all around the country with her.  I remember Matt mentioning at a Festival interview after she had passed over that that scorpion kit was STILL in the medicine cabinet at his parents' house.

Another bit worth mentioning is that Grayson had a bit part (basically a 2 minute scene) in an episode of Route 66 that was aired early in 1964.  That episode was filmed in Florida and I've always wondered whether Grayson did it on her way home from Mexico.

G.