The last one of those is called... is Huck Finn, Adventures of Huck Finn, which had been filmed 15 times already, I think. But that's a very nice version and we had Barnard Hughes and Jim Dale from England playing the couple of strolling players, who he runs across. And, we were shooting... that time we were shooting in Maysville, Kentucky. Our base was Maysville, Kentucky, which is an amazing piece of Midwest. If you shoot... If you stay any length of time in a place like Maysville, Kentucky, you realise really that if you only know New York and Los Angeles, you don't know America at all. A lot of America, the bulk of America is more like Maysville, Kentucky. And, there were three... again, the three... there were three opportunities to eat, in the hotel, in a local tavern, and somewhere else a little way away across the river in Ohio, because we were in Kentucky. But we were right on the edge. Maysville is on the border with Kentucky. There's a bridge over the Ohio River. And that time we were using the Ohio River to double for the Mississippi. And we spent a lot of time filming on the river, adjacent to the river, there was some night for night, there was some day for night. There was an extended sequence in a tank, which we had built in a local school, abandoned school. That was quite tricky. It was quite a big tank, and it was... but it was tricky working in there with the night for night. But in the end it was all very successful.
That film was being made on 35 mm. And that was also the occasion, I've already mentioned, where Lillian Gish played a small part. It's wonderful encountering people like that. Like you meet a piece of cinema history. Which also happened to be the first time. I think it was the first time I... yes, during The Wild Party, which I haven't mentioned yet, I was in LA for the first time and I was introduced... I went to the clubhouse of the American Society of Cinematographers, and I met all those people that I knew the names of, having photographed all those famous American movies of the '40s and '50s. And I knew them all by name, and here they all were, but they were all over 80, you know. This little man comes up and he says, 'I'm...' – and he has a nametag – and he says, 'I'm Harry Straddling, how do you do?' That was an extraordinary experience, meeting all these people in the flesh, so to speak. Lovely, really lovely. Quite unique. So it's lovely to meet... Not only was Lillian Gish in that film but also Butterfly McQueen.
Now, Butterfly McQueen is the Negro...
[Q] Prissy.
The black girl who plays Chrissie in...
[Q] Prissy.
No, but what part does she play? One of her...
[Q] Yes, Prissy, in 'Gone With The Wind'.
Oh, Prissy, in Gone with the Wind, yes. She's got this high pitched voice, usually playing comic characters, as black people usually did up to a certain point in time. They were always comic characters. And she'd fallen on hard times and was living in relative poverty and they dug her up somewhere, they found her somewhere, and she played a very nice little part in Huck Finn. So that's always very nice when you can... where you can do something like this. A little bit out of the ordinary. But it was a very long shoot and it was eventually... it was cut in... There were two versions. There was a two-hour theatrical version and a three-hour television version, both of which were shown.
