Some Like It Hot (1959) sits at the top of the American Film Institute’s list of the funniest American films of all time. Wilder’s Prohibition-era farce follows two Chicago musicians who witness a mob massacre and go into hiding, dressed as women, in an all-girl band bound for Florida, with Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe leading the way. Behind the scenes, the shoot was anything but smooth, with an unfinished script, a star who struggled to remember her lines and a director reaching for sleeping pills to get through it. We’re telling the full story with 50 facts about Some Like It Hot.

1. A brand-new production company took a gamble on the film

When brothers Walter, Harold and Marvin Mirisch walked away from Allied Artists in August 1957, after the smaller studio declined to keep funding prestige pictures, they set up the Mirisch Company with a simple pitch. Name filmmakers would get the money and the freedom, the company would take a share of the profits, and United Artists would handle distribution. They signed a multi-picture deal with UA, commonly cited as 12 films, and set up shop at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios. Walter Mirisch had already worked with Wilder on the romantic comedy Love in the Afternoon (1957), and Wilder brought them his idea for a film about an all-girl band. Made for roughly $2.8 million, it became the company’s first blockbuster, and the Mirisch model went on to become a template for independent production after the studio era.

2. The future Norman Bates nearly played Joe

Anthony Perkins, then being groomed as a teen idol, was offered the role of Joe, the smooth-talking saxophonist who spends most of the film disguised as Josephine. Paramount, which had him under contract, wouldn’t allow it. The studio felt Perkins already had an ambiguous image, and worried that a film spent mostly in women’s clothes would undermine the persona it was building for him. The following year he starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) instead, playing a character whose relationship with women’s clothing is rather less comedic.

3. Two comedy giants were early contenders

Before the casting settled, some very conventional names were in the frame. Bob Hope and Danny Kaye, two of the biggest comedy stars in America at the time, were among the earliest suggestions for Joe and Jerry, the pair of broke musicians forced to go on the run. It would have been a safe, familiar double act, and Wilder was after something less obvious.

4. An escapologist biopic won Curtis the part

Tony Curtis was the first of the leads to sign, and Wilder had his eye on him after seeing Houdini (1953), a biopic of the famous escape artist in which Curtis starred alongside his wife Janet Leigh. For Wilder, the deciding factor was a scene that doesn’t arrive until the film’s second half, when Joe poses as a millionaire to win over Sugar Kane, the all-girl band’s ukulele-playing singer. “I was sure Tony was right for it, because he was quite handsome,” Wilder said, “and when he tells Marilyn Monroe that he is one of the Shell Oil family, she has to be able to believe it.”

5. Josephine was built as a reaction to Daphne

Neither actor had played a woman before, and on the first day in costume Curtis couldn’t bring himself to leave the dressing room. Jack Lemmon had no such problem. In Curtis’s words, he “ran out of his dressing room screaming like the Queen of the May,” all high-pitched chatter and bubbly energy, and Curtis knew the film couldn’t carry two characters like that. So Josephine went the other way. “I had to be a lady, very grand, like my mother or Grace Kelly,” Curtis said, and he folded in some of comic actress Eve Arden too. He later admitted his nerves did some of the work, with his tightly wound body language reading on screen as demure and shy.

6. The disguises faced a nerve-racking test

Once they had their characters, the pair spent hours refining their makeup, and then Wilder all but pushed them into the ladies’ room on the Goldwyn lot to fix it in the mirror in front of real women. “The flop sweat was really flying,” Lemmon recalled. “I was scared to death.” Nobody gave them a second look and Wilder told them not to change a thing, but Curtis suspected they’d only been ignored for being ugly. They went back into makeup, came out more glamorous, returned to the ladies’ room and were rumbled immediately, so the original look stayed. The moment is recreated on the train, where Josephine and Daphne touch up their faces side by side in the mirror.

7. Josephine doesn’t sound entirely like Curtis

Wilder wasn’t happy with Josephine’s voice. Curtis found it hard to hold a high falsetto for the length of a full take, so voice artist Paul Frees, known as the ‘Man of a Thousand Voices’, was brought in to re-record much of the dialogue. Curtis confirmed to film historian Leonard Maltin that what ended up on screen is a blend of the two of them. Frees appears in the film in person too, as the funeral director at Mozzarella’s, the undertakers fronting gangster Spats Colombo’s speakeasy in the opening act.

8. A singing superstar stood Wilder up

Before Lemmon got anywhere near Daphne, Wilder wanted a big name for the role of Jerry, the bass player who witnesses a mob hit alongside Joe and ends up in a dress. He approached Frank Sinatra, and the two arranged to meet over lunch. Sinatra never turned up. Some accounts suggest that between the meeting being set and the day itself, he’d found out the part would involve spending most of the film in women’s clothes.

9. Another comedy star turned it down, and got chocolates for his trouble

Jerry Lewis, famous for his double act with Dean Martin, was offered the role next. It made more sense than it might sound, as Lewis and his wife were best friends with Curtis and Leigh at the time. He turned it down because he didn’t want to do drag. “I’d done bits in drag, but a whole movie? No way,” he later told director Martin Scorsese, and he repeatedly said he regretted it. Lemmon, for his part, sent Lewis a box of chocolates every year at Oscar time after landing a nomination for the role, a tradition confirmed by both Lewis and Lemmon’s son Chris.

10. Lemmon’s casting depended on another star

United Artists wasn’t convinced by Lemmon and pressured Wilder to find a bigger box office name for the second male lead. It took the arrival of another star to settle the argument. Once Marilyn signed on, the film had all the marquee value UA could want, and Wilder was free to cast Lemmon as Jerry.

11. A famous female impersonator coached the leads

To teach the pair how to move and walk as women, Wilder hired ‘Barbette’, the stage name of Vander Clyde Broadway, a trapeze artist and female impersonator Wilder remembered seeing perform in Europe in his younger days. His lessons included crossing one foot in front of the other when walking to emphasise the hips. Curtis took to the coaching, but Lemmon resisted, deliberately playing Daphne as a man trying to walk like a woman rather than a convincing one, and Wilder backed him. By several accounts, including Curtis’s memoir, the friction led Barbette to leave the production early.

12. Sugar was meant for someone else

Mitzi Gaynor, the musical star who had just led South Pacific (1958), was Wilder’s original choice for Sugar. Then Marilyn became available. She had written to Wilder in 1957 hoping they could work together again after The Seven Year Itch (1955), the comedy that gave the world her famous subway grate moment, and he jumped at the chance. One last push was needed, and production executive Harold Mirisch provided it by offering her 10% of the gross on top of a reported $100,000 fee.

13. Marilyn had a go-to excuse

Wilder knew what he was signing up for, having worked with her before. “I knew that I was going to go crazy at moments,” he said. Marilyn would regularly turn up hours late, two to three hours according to Curtis, and occasionally refused to leave her dressing room at all. The excuse was almost always the same: she’d got lost on her way to the studio. Wilder’s coping strategy was simple. “You always tell yourself, ‘I’m not married to her, right?’ And then you come home, you have no dinner, you take a sleeping pill, and you wake up in the morning and you start again.”

14. Every drawer on set came with a note

Sugar slips into Josephine and Daphne’s hotel room looking for a drink, rummages through the chest of drawers and asks, “Where’s the bourbon?” Marilyn couldn’t land it. Across around 40 takes she tried “Where’s the whiskey?”, “Where’s the bottle?” and “Where’s the bonbon?” instead, so Wilder had the line pasted inside a drawer. She opened a different one, so he had it pasted inside every drawer in the room. The scene took 59 takes in total, and when the right words finally came out she had her back to the camera, so the line was dubbed in post-production anyway.

15. An infamous insult came out of the screening room

During a screening of the rushes from the yacht scene, where Joe, posing as a supposedly unkissable millionaire, lets Sugar try to kiss some feeling back into him, someone remarked that Curtis looked like he was enjoying himself. Curtis replied that kissing Marilyn was “like kissing Hitler.” Paula Strasberg, Marilyn’s acting coach, was in the room and, according to Marilyn’s first biographer Maurice Zolotow, cried, “How could you say a terrible thing like that?” Curtis snapped back, “You try acting with her, Paula.” He spent years afterwards insisting it was a joke that people had misunderstood.

16. Green faces kept the film in black and white

Marilyn wanted Some Like It Hot in colour. Her 20th Century Fox contract required her films there to be shot in colour, and she believed she photographed better that way, but the Fox deal didn’t cover an independent Mirisch production for United Artists, so this was a matter of persuasion rather than law. Wilder preferred black and white, feeling it suited the 1920s setting, and he had a trump card. In colour tests, the heavy drag makeup worn by Curtis and Lemmon took on a sickly green tint, leaving the pair looking, as one account put it, “unacceptably grotesque.” Wilder showed Marilyn the footage, and only then did she agree.

17. Three short words proved a big problem

When Sugar knocks on Josephine and Daphne’s hotel room door, all she has to say is, “It’s me, Sugar.” It took Marilyn 47 takes, with “Sugar, it’s me” and “It’s Sugar, me” among the variations, and after take 30 Wilder had the line written on a blackboard. A blackboard came in handy again for the farewell phone call from Junior, the Shell Oil heir Joe invents to woo her, and if you watch Marilyn’s eyes closely you can see them flicking side to side as she reads. For Curtis and Lemmon, the repetition was its own kind of torture. They had to be perfect in every take, because Wilder was always going to use whichever one Marilyn got right.

18. One star was left off the guest list

When shooting finished, Wilder threw a celebration dinner at his home for the cast and friends, and Marilyn wasn’t invited. He was blunt about her in the press, too. Her “chronic tardiness and unpreparedness cost us eighteen shooting days, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and countless heartaches,” he said, and when asked whether he’d work with her again, he replied, “My doctor and my psychiatrist tell me I’m too old and too rich to go through this again.” Marilyn responded by calling his home and asking his wife Audrey to pass on a message: he could go f*** himself.

Time softened things on both sides. A year later, at the premiere of Wilder’s next film, The Apartment (1960), Marilyn threw her arms around him and whispered that she’d like to play the lead in Irma la Douce (1963), a role that eventually went to Shirley MacLaine. And Wilder came to see the performance differently. “It takes a real artist to come on the set and not know her lines and yet give the performance she did,” he said.

19. The publicity photos aren’t quite what they seem

Marilyn was pregnant during filming, and her husband, playwright Arthur Miller, asked Wilder whether her working days could be reduced, which didn’t go down well. Sadly, she suffered a miscarriage in December 1958, a month after production wrapped. Because she looked noticeably heavier during the shoot, most of the publicity photos feature either Sandra Warner, who has an uncredited role as one of the band, or Marilyn’s regular stand-in Evelyn Moriarty, with Marilyn’s head superimposed on top.

20. Sweet Sue became a Wilder regular

Leading the band, and bellowing for her hapless manager Bienstock at every turn, is Sweet Sue, the no-nonsense boss of Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators. She’s played by Joan Shawlee, and Wilder liked her enough to keep calling her back. He cast her again as Sylvia in The Apartment, as ‘Amazon Annie’ in Irma la Douce, and as a receptionist in Buddy Buddy (1981), his final film, a working relationship spanning more than two decades. TV audiences probably know her best as Pickles, wife of comedy writer Buddy Sorrell, in the sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show.

21. Spats takes a dig at his actor’s own past

Wilder filled out his gangster ranks with faces from the classic crime films of the 1930s, and he couldn’t resist a wink at their expense. In the final act, as the mob gathers in Florida, Spats spots young hood Johnny Paradise idly flipping a coin and sneers, “Where did you pick up that cheap trick?” Spats is played by George Raft, and in Howard Hawks’s gangster classic Scarface (1932), Raft’s character Rinaldo flips a coin almost constantly. Adding another layer, Johnny Paradise is played by Edward G. Robinson Jr., son of the star of Little Caesar (1931) and Raft’s chief rival for gangster roles at Warner Bros.

22. The gangster banquet is packed with in-jokes

At the mob’s “Friends of Italian Opera” banquet, Spats menaces one of his henchmen with half a grapefruit, a nod to The Public Enemy (1931), in which gangster star James Cagney mashes one into actress Mae Clarke’s face. The syndicate’s boss, Little Bonaparte, is a riff on Edward G. Robinson’s role in Little Caesar, and Wilder wanted Robinson himself to play him, likely casting his son partly to help court him. Robinson flatly refused because of a grudge with Raft dating back to Manpower (1941). Nehemiah Persoff took the role instead, his bald head and broad gestures clearly channelling Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and a furious Wilder kept Robinson Jr. in the film anyway.

23. A who’s who of screen tough guys were up for Spats

For Spats Colombo, the Chicago mob boss our heroes cross in the opening act, Wilder wanted an actor with real menace. Pat O’Brien, Scarface star Paul Muni, Cagney and Robinson were all names in the mix. Cagney was unavailable, though he’d make One, Two, Three (1961) with Wilder a few years later, and the part went to Raft, whose slick turn in Scarface showed he could play exactly the kind of suave gangster Wilder had in mind. O’Brien didn’t miss out entirely, landing the role of the lawman on Spats’s trail.

24. The opening massacre really happened

Joe and Jerry’s reason for fleeing Chicago is modelled closely on a real event. On 14 February 1929, seven men were lined up and gunned down in a garage on Clark Street, five of them members of Bugs Moran’s gang. The other two were a mechanic working at the garage and an optician, which may explain why the film’s version includes an unlucky garage attendant. Nobody was ever convicted, but the hit is widely believed to have been ordered by Al Capone, and Spats is modelled on him in several ways, right down to the film’s mention of Clark Street.

25. The story started life in 1930s France

Some Like It Hot is a remake of a remake. Its roots lie in Fanfare d’amour (1935), a French comedy directed by Richard Pottier and starring Fernand Gravey and Julien Carette as two out-of-work musicians desperate enough to try anything for a paycheque. Across the film they adopt a series of disguises, and one scheme sees them dress as women to join an all-female orchestra heading for the French Riviera, where both fall for one of the musicians.

26. West Germany got there before Hollywood too

In 1951, the story was remade in West Germany as Fanfaren der Liebe (Fanfares of Love), directed by Kurt Hoffmann. The plot stayed close to the French original, with the two men now infiltrating a women’s band bound for a hotel booking in the Alps, and it was a big enough hit to spawn a sequel, Fanfaren der Ehe (Fanfares of Marriage), in 1953. The follow-up leaves the pair at home with the children while their wives tour with the band, and when the authorities threaten to take the kids away, their solution, inevitably, is to put the dresses back on.

27. A fellow émigré put the idea in front of Wilder

Robert Thoeren, who co-wrote the original story with Michael Logan, was the link between those films and Wilder. Born in Brno in what is now the Czech Republic, Thoeren was an actor turned screenwriter who fled the Nazis in 1933, and Wilder, who had done the same, knew him. Thoeren personally screened Fanfaren der Liebe for him, and that was the version Wilder built on. He never saw the French film, and because the original script couldn’t be traced, Walter Mirisch tracked down and bought the rights to the German one instead, which is why Thoeren and Logan share the Story By credit.

28. The film cemented one of Hollywood’s great writing partnerships

To write it, Wilder turned to I.A.L. Diamond, the Romanian-born writer (real name Itzek Domnici) he had first teamed up with on Love in the Afternoon, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper. Wilder’s earlier writing partnership with Charles Brackett had produced Sunset Boulevard (1950), but the pair had split, and he and Diamond happened to share an agent. After Some Like It Hot, the two made 10 more films together, including the Best Picture winner The Apartment, and for the rest of his career Diamond wrote only one film without Wilder, Cactus Flower (1969).

29. A car journey solved the script’s biggest problem

Wilder and Diamond spent a year on the screenplay, and the biggest problem was motivation. Poverty alone didn’t feel strong enough to explain why two men would put on dresses and, crucially, keep them on. Wilder called it finding “the hammerlock of the story, the ironclad thing in which these two guys trapped in women’s clothing cannot just take off their wigs and say, ‘I’m a guy.’” Diamond suggested a period setting would make the disguises easier to accept, and the answer came to Wilder while he was driving (“Billy got a lot of his ideas driving,” Diamond said): Chicago, 1929, and a front-row seat at the St Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Suddenly the masquerade was a matter of life and death. “That was the important invention that made everything else possible,” Wilder said, and it was the biggest of several changes to the source material. The earlier films’ other disguises, including a blackface sequence, were cut entirely. The lovesick older man became Osgood Fielding III, the much-married millionaire who falls for Daphne, leaving the band’s manager as a toothless Bienstock, and Joe’s second disguise as Junior was invented from scratch.

30. Lemmon was handed a script with pages missing

Cameras rolled in August 1958 before Wilder and Diamond had finished writing, and Lemmon was given just 60 pages. “I fell off the goddamn couch,” he said. “The greatest sixty pages I ever read.” Wilder warned him he wouldn’t get the rest until they were already shooting, and Lemmon later discovered the pair had never finished the script before they started. The final shooting script is dated 12 November 1958, essentially the day filming wrapped, and the last scene was written the week before it was shot.

31. The title has some unlikely origins

Two working titles came and went. The first was Fanfares of Love, carried over from the German film, followed by Not Tonight, Josephine, a phrase popularly attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte that survives as an in-joke line in the finished film. The eventual title comes from the nursery rhyme “Pease Porridge Hot”, which runs “Some like it hot, some like it cold”, repurposed as a nod to hot jazz, and it pays off on the beach when Junior tells Sugar, “I guess some like it hot. I personally prefer classical music.” There was a snag, though. Paramount had released a Bob Hope comedy called Some Like It Hot in 1939, and the rights had to be cleared with Universal, which by then owned them. “We rather sweated out the process of getting it cleared,” Walter Mirisch admitted.

32. A cut scene would have changed the train sequence

Bienstock’s bleary “Are we in Florida?” brings the train sequence to a close in the finished film, but an earlier draft of the script went much further. A conductor storms in demanding to know who pulled the emergency brake, and while Jerry confesses, Joe and Sugar agree in the ladies’ room to swap beds, because Bienstock sleeps below Sugar and makes such strange noises that she never gets any rest. Once everyone settles down, Jerry creeps to Sugar’s berth and tells her he’s crazy about her and that he and Joe are both men, only to discover he’s spilled the beans to Joe.

33. The cinematographer holds a remarkable Oscar record

Behind the camera was Charles Lang, whose career stretched back to an Oscar win for A Farewell to Arms (1932). He had worked with Wilder before, on A Foreign Affair (1948) and Sabrina (1954), and he earned another nomination here, losing to William C. Mellor for The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). By the end of his career Lang had racked up 18 Oscar nominations, tying Leon Shamroy for the most ever by a cinematographer.

34. Marilyn recorded songs that never made the film

Sugar sings three songs in the finished film, “Runnin’ Wild”, “I Wanna Be Loved by You” and “I’m Through with Love”, but Marilyn recorded more than that. She cut a vocal version of the title song, intended to play over the opening credits, only for an instrumental overture to take its place. The track stayed on the shelf until the mid-1970s, when it surfaced on an LP alongside her other songs from the film, and she also recorded a version of the jazz standard “Sweet Georgia Brown”.

35. Sugar’s big number has a cartoon connection

Sung in that famous sheer beaded gown at the Seminole Ritz, the film’s Florida hotel, “I Wanna Be Loved by You” dates back to 1928. It was written by Herbert Stothart, Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar for the Broadway musical Good Boy and introduced by singer Helen Kane, the ‘Boop-Boop-a-Doop girl’, whose baby-talk scat style became the model for Fleischer Studios’ cartoon flapper Betty Boop. Marilyn’s cooing “poo-poo-pee-doop” interjections are a deliberate homage, and it’s no accident that her character shares Kane’s surname. Kane’s style was itself reportedly drawn from African American performers such as ‘Baby Esther’ Jones.

36. A fitting didn’t go to plan

The film’s costume designer was Orry-Kelly, the professional name of Orry George Kelly, born in Kiama, New South Wales, in 1897. His life before Hollywood was colourful: in 1920s Greenwich Village he shared lodgings with a young Archie Leach, better known after a name change as Cary Grant, and when Orry-Kelly died in 1964 his pallbearers included Grant, Curtis and Wilder. Marilyn was a tougher client. While measuring all three stars for their dresses, he told her Curtis “has a better-looking ass than you do.” She unbuttoned her blouse and shot back, “Yeah, but he doesn’t have tits like these!” Orry-Kelly’s verdict on the experience: “I would rather go to Coney Island and open up a hot dog stand than dress that woman again.”

37. The leading men demanded better frocks

Curtis and Lemmon were happy to put up with the heels and the makeup, but they drew the line at off-the-rack dresses from the costume department. “We did put our feet down when we wanted better dresses,” Lemmon said. Curtis was even more specific, determined not to end up in the high-waisted look of 1930s screen star Loretta Young. “I went to Billy, and I told him Jack and I wanted Orry-Kelly dresses, too,” he said. “He said, ‘Okay.’”

38. A famous hotel was chosen with Marilyn in mind

The Florida scenes were filmed at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, California, and Wilder had more than its fairytale looks in mind when he chose it. With Marilyn’s ongoing personal problems, he wanted a location where she could live on site rather than being driven to set every day (not that it stopped her getting lost). The hotel came with plenty of history of its own. Oz author L. Frank Baum is said to have written there, and legend has it that it’s where the future Edward VIII met Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée he would give up the throne to marry.

39. The sets have fooled plenty of fans

Most of the film was actually shot on soundstages at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios, where art director Ted Haworth’s team built everything from Mozzarella’s to the train interiors. The sleeper carriage had to be a set, since there was no fitting a dozen actors and a film crew into a real Pullman berth, though an actual 1920 Pullman sleeper, the Clover Colony, supplied the exterior shots and now sits in the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum. The hotel interiors were built there too, matched to the Coronado down to the placement of the lobby stairs and the design of the panelling. According to the hotel itself, the match is so convincing that fans flatly refuse to believe the interiors weren’t filmed on the premises.

40. A tiny prop caused a big headache

After the massacre, Spats kicks the trademark toothpick out of the mouth of Toothpick Charlie, the informer who has crossed him. Raft was so worried about missing and kicking actor George E. Stone, himself a veteran of Little Caesar, in the head that he played it safe and missed around ten times in a row. A furious Wilder stepped in to show him how it was done and kicked Stone squarely in the head. Raft suggested swapping the toothpick for something easier to hit, so a nail was painted to look like one, and he got the shot first time.

41. Junior borrows his voice from a Hollywood icon

When the band hits the beach in Florida, Joe unveils Junior, and he sounds suspiciously familiar. Curtis had idolised Grant for years and did a well-known impression of him, so on the day of shooting he asked Wilder how he should play the millionaire. “He said, ‘Well, how would you like to play it?’” Curtis recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I do this impression of Cary Grant…’ ‘Well, do it!’” When the film was finished, Wilder showed it to Grant and asked what he thought of the impression. Grant’s reply: “I don’t talk like that!”

42. Osgood was played by a box office giant

Joe E. Brown, who plays Osgood, had been one of the biggest comedy stars in the world in the 1930s. According to film historian James L. Neibaur, his films were bigger moneymakers than those of Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields or the Marx Brothers, and his trademark was an enormous, elastic-mouthed grin. By the 1950s his starring career was effectively over, so he took a supporting part for Wilder, which became the role he’s best remembered for. Osgood’s excitable “Zowie!” was lifted from Brown’s own comic catchphrase of the era.

43. An unlikely dance teacher helped with the tango

For the sequence where Daphne and Osgood tango till dawn, Lemmon and Brown needed lessons, and one of their teachers was the film’s resident gangster. Before he turned to acting, Raft had been a professional dancer, working as a taxi dancer and nightclub hoofer, and dance legend Fred Astaire wrote in his 1959 autobiography that Raft did “the fastest Charleston I ever saw.” According to Lemmon, Raft spent hours teaching him and Brown the steps.

44. The final line nearly didn’t make it

Wilder and Diamond were precise writers, but the closing line had them stumped (spoilers ahead for anyone yet to see the ending). They’d got as far as Jerry ripping off his wig and telling Osgood he can’t marry him because “I’m a man.” Then Diamond suggested Osgood’s reply, “Nobody’s perfect,” and Wilder told him to put it in for now so the pages could go off to be copied, with a week to find something better. “We thought about it all week,” Wilder told literary magazine The Paris Review in 1996. “Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied.” At the preview it “got one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever heard in the theater,” and Wilder clearly came round to it, as his gravestone reads, “I’m a writer but then nobody’s perfect.”

45. The shooting script had a different final beat

In the shooting script, the stage directions have Osgood breaking into a grin after telling Jerry, “Nobody’s perfect,” strongly implying he’d known Daphne was a man all along. Brown plays it without the smile, leaving Osgood simply unbothered by the news. The script then signs off with a note of its own: “But that’s another story, and we’re not quite sure the public is ready for it.”

46. A disastrous preview didn’t rattle the director

The first sneak preview went badly, with Lemmon recalling a poor reaction and plenty of walkouts. Studio personnel and agents lined up to tell Wilder what to reshoot and cut, and when Lemmon asked what he planned to change, the answer was, “Why, nothing. This is a very funny movie and I believe in it just as it is.” Wilder moved the next preview to Westwood in Los Angeles, and the audience stood up and cheered. One scene played almost too well. When Daphne announces her engagement to Osgood, the laughter was so loud that audiences missed the dialogue, so the scene was reshot with pauses built in, filled by Daphne shaking a pair of maracas.

47. The censors had their say

Not everyone was laughing. The National Legion of Decency, a Catholic watchdog for immoral content, rated the film “Morally Objectionable in Part for All,” with Monsignor Thomas F. Little complaining of “gross suggestiveness in costuming, dialogue and situations.” In Kansas, the state Board of Review refused approval unless more than 100 feet of footage was removed, chiefly from the yacht seduction between Sugar and Junior. United Artists refused, and the film’s release there was delayed by around two months. In Memphis, the censor board passed it, but for adults only.

48. The box office loved it, even if the Oscars didn’t

Made for under $3 million, Some Like It Hot was one of the biggest hits of 1959, earning around $7 million in US rentals and finishing third for the year behind Auntie Mame (1958) and The Shaggy Dog (1959). It went on to gross around $25 million domestically over its lifetime. Awards night was a different story. The film received six Oscar nominations, including Best Actor for Lemmon, Best Director for Wilder and Best Adapted Screenplay, but won only once, for Orry-Kelly’s costumes, with most of the rest swept up by Ben-Hur (1959) and its then-record 11 wins.

49. The story found a second life on stage

Sugar, a Broadway musical centred on Marilyn’s character, opened in April 1972 and ran for more than 500 performances. Some 30 years later another production was mounted, this time under the film’s own title and with Curtis cast as Osgood. It was his first time singing and dancing on stage, and he threw himself into it. “We did in a year 273 performances and I never missed one,” he said. A brand-new Broadway musical adaptation, also called Some Like It Hot, followed in 2022.

50. One persistent myth about the film doesn’t stand up

Plenty of sources claim Some Like It Hot was released without the approval of the Production Code, Hollywood’s system of self-censorship, and single-handedly killed it off. That isn’t true, as the film received Production Code Administration certificate No. 19281 in early 1959. What Wilder did do was skip the customary step of submitting his script for line-by-line vetting, reportedly still annoyed that the censors had blocked his attempt to film The Bad Seed, which Warner Bros went on to make in 1956. He waited until he had a finished print, got the seal without any fuss and faced no consequences, which showed just how toothless the system had become.

And that’s the end of our 50 facts about Some Like It Hot, a comedy that has only grown in stature since the Kansas censors took against it. For the full story, listen to our deep-dive episode on the film, and if you’ve enjoyed this, please share it on your social channels and subscribe to our YouTube channel for plenty more behind-the-scenes stories.