Travesty on the Bounty

Of the many motion pictures that have been filmed on Catalina in the 100-plus years since Hollywood first discovered the island’s photo-geniality, the filming of the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, stands as perhaps the zenith of that era.

The film, which had already been produced as a silent several years earlier, was based on the classic book of the same name written by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall.

But one thing that normally doesn’t get related when we tell visitors about the production of this Hollywood classic is the fascinating and somewhat turbulent back story involved. In fact, few of us who live here realize that Catalina Island was originally not even supposed to be the location for the filming.  It was only due to some epic mistakes on the part of the production company that we wound up in the final print.

The film, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was one of the most ambitious filming projects ever undertaken on an island that had already seen perhaps 200 movies filmed here on location.

Initially, the film was supposed to be shot entirely on location in Tahiti and MGM sent an expeditionary crew there to build full scale 18^th century villages.  They also hired 2,500 locals to be used as extras and proceeded to film a number of scenes that would be used as background or “filler” shots.

Unfortunately, when the film crew finally returned to Hollywood, they discovered to their horror that 50,000 feet of film was underexposed, unstable or otherwise useless to their endeavor.  A typical two-hour movie consists of about 12,000 feet of film. Whether or not the guilty party was forced into a longboat to face it out alone on the high seas like Captain Bligh is unclear.

As a result of this disaster, a second crew was dispatched at great expense to Tahiti to retake many of the shots while our own Catalina Island was to be used for filling in on other shots.

The Catalina unit consisted of 600 cast and crew members and a half dozen “native villages" were constructed in various coves around the Island with the Isthmus getting the lion’s share of the action. The crew even built a reproduction of England’s Portsmouth Harbor at the Isthmus, which appears in some of the film’s opening sequences.

But bad luck was not quite through with MGM.  One day, while the production crew was working off nearby San Miguel Island, a barge carrying $50,000 worth of camera equipment capsized, killing an assistant cameraman and injuring several others.

But that wasn’t all.  Later, one of the scale models of the Bounty used in the filming broke free from its tow vessel with two men aboard and the film crew quickly lost sight of the wayward prop and her crew of two.  Fearing negative publicity for the studio and the film itself, producer Irving Thalberg initially refused to call the Coast Guard in the hopes that he and his men could find the missing model.

Eventually, however, he relented.  The Coast Guard was called and two days later the two men—no doubt hungry, thirsty and angry—were rescued.

In the end, the film cost nearly $2 million. But the film opened to critical acclaim, won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1935, and remains to this day one of the great Hollywood classics of the sea.