1935 Movie

Our film was called Scandal. It was about an FBI agent, Special Agent Smith (played by Clark Gable) who attempts to bring down a bootlegger in the 1920s. The bootlegger, John, is played by Basil Rathborne with his sister, Carol played by Bette Davis. Carol and John are separated when they are very young. Carol and Smith begin to have a love relationship, however it is very tame in order to comply with the Hay's Code and because we wanted the love interest to be a side story rather than a main point of the plot. The movie would start and tell the two stories of the villain and hero as children to show how they got to the points they are at. The villain had experienced his father passing away and his mother abandoning him. He and his sister got separated and he began to turn to crime in order to gain food. This later led to him starting bootlegging.

We chose Clark Gable because of his experience in playing these roles. He has been in movies and played the lead role so he has a lot of experience. We were able to obtain Clark Gable because we trade Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to MGM.

We chose Basil Rathborne because of his experience in playing villains. In many of his previous films he has played the villain that the audience can sympathize with, which is one of the elements of our story.

We had Mervyn LeRoy as the director. He directed many good films such as I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang and many mob movies. This would allow him to translate well over to cop movies and his experience in mob movies will help a lot with this film.

We chose Warner Bros as the studio because they are known to film mob/cop movies. Also, they are more likely to allow us the experiment with things like the plot. We used 3 strip technicolor because we wanted to be able to separate our movie from the other cop movies that were coming out at this time.

We chose Ray Rennehan as our cinematographer because of his previous work with color films. Since we are doing the film in color, we wanted a cinematograpehr that was experienced in it.