UCLA Film & Television Archive presents “A Tribute to Choreographer Jack Cole,” this Saturday, August 4, 2012 at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood Village. The event features a rare screening of the Jack Cole film, “The I Don’t Care Girl” (1953, Twentieth Century Fox), along with a post-screening conversation with actress Mitzi Gaynor, Los Angeles dance writer Debra Levine and dance historian Larry Billman.
“The I Don’t Care Girl” tells the story of producer George Jessel (Himself), who never saw a camera he couldn’t get in front of, who is holding a story conference to determine the screen treatment for the life of Eva Tanguay (Mitzi Gaynor), and Jessel is unhappy with what the writers present him.He tells them to look up Eddie McCoy (David Wayne), Eva’s one-time partner, for the real inside story on the lusty and vital Eva. Eddie’s version is that he discovered her working as a waitress in an Indianapolis restaurant in 1912, wherein singer Larry Woods (Bob Graham) and his partner Charles Bennett (Oscar Levant) get into a fight over her and both land in the hospital, and McCoy convinces the manager to put Eva on as a single to fill their spot. She flopped, but McCoy arranges for Bennett to be her accompanist, and she went out of his life. The writers look up Bennett, now head of a music publishing company, who says McCoy’s story is phoney, and it was Flo Zigfeld (Wilton Graff) who discovered Eva for his Follies. Then Jessel’s staff comes up with a letter from Larry Woods with another version.
Where: Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum
When: Saturday August 4th, 2012
7:30pm
