TomWeaver999 wrote:
>> Tom, WAS this really an "ice house film"? <<
I took its leading lady at her word:
<< Man With Nine Lives was partly filmed in a huge warehouse, an ice house somewhere in L.A. where I guess meat and stuff was frozen and stored. Just the scenes where we were in Karloff's ice room were shot there; everything else was shot on sound stages at Columbia. It really was cold, and so we were told to wear heavy underwear and whatnot. We only filmed for about 15 minutes at a time, then we'd come out to a little warm room. We weren't allowed to get terribly cold-but it WAS cold! You could see your breath in there. The crew, obviously, could dress more warmly than the actors-and they did!
There's a scene in the movie where I'm lying on a gurney in the ice room with ice packed all around me. There was a blanket over me, and then a big heavy rubber sheet, and then piles of ice-the real stuff-on top of me. I was supposed to be almost dead, but my breath was showing, my warm breath in this cold air. So they tucked a little rubber tube in my mouth, the off-camera side of my face, which was my left side, and the tube hung out of the left side of my mouth and I could breathe through that. Then it was perfect, because I could look almost dead. Of course I had to hold whatever breath I had anyway, so that the ice that was piled on top of me wouldn't shift. I had to be very careful about that! There were lots of fun little, interesting things like that.
And you can meet that leading lady (Jo Ann Sayers) at the Monsters from the Vault convention in 2009.
