Informative Caption tells us this is “[m]usical duo Sonny Bono And Cher dancing at the party following the premiere of the movie ‘Dr Dolittle’, at the Hollywood Paramount Theatre, CA, December 21st 1967.” When I was a kid in the mid ’80s, the local Mann Theatres had a program during the summer wherein, once a week, one of the matinees was a special kids’ movie — usually old Disney movies. They sold tickets for the entire summer’s worth of movies at school, and your parents would just drop you off at the theatre and figure you probably wouldn’t be kidnapped for like two straight hours. And I never was! I assume someone at the theatre was in charge of keeping an eye on the kids, but FYI, they did a bad job: I saw Goonies MULTIPLE times the summer I was 10 because my friend Cheri and I snuck out of the kiddie movie if we thought it was going to be boring and snuck into Goonies instead. This is also how I saw Karate Kid multiple times. (It is a testament to my youthful Leslie Knopeishness that Cheri and I only snuck into movies that were objectively still pretty age-appropriate and not, like, Commando.) Anyway, this was GREAT fun and I loved it — I can still see (and smell) the inside of that movie theatre. How thrilling to get to sit inside a cool theatre on a hot summer’s day!
This is a very very long and roundabout way of my explaining that I have seen this version of Dr. Dolittle and even at 10, I recognized it was a flawed film. I was not aware of all the drama that went on during the filming because we did not have Wikipedia in 1985. Some highlights there include: Ralph Fiennes’s third cousin EXPLODING A LITERAL DAM in protest; Rex Harrison being A TOTAL ASSHOLE, which is not surprising if you’ve ever read Rex Harrison’s absolutely WILD Wikipedia which includes both, uh, maybe murdering someone or at the very least possibly letting her die AND yacht-related pettiness; major animal issues, including ducks that forgot how to swim (!!); and this: “the final scene with a giant snail was complicated not only by the poor design of the large prop, but because the island’s children had recently been struck by a gastrointestinal epidemic caused by freshwater snails, and mobs of angry locals threw rocks at it.” (I feel like that’s the excuse the locals gave when the movie crew asked but really they just hated everyone who was working on the project.) And yet I still have no explanation for why Sonny and Cher went to this party! Maybe they just felt like everyone should see these cute outfits and this was the only available event. I can’t blame them for that.
