| Bali Film History
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| Bali was the setting for the last silent film ever produced in Hollywood and
the last film to use the two-strip Technicolor process. Released by Paramount
International in 1935, was actress Constance Bennet and her husband Henri de la
Falaise’s Legong: Dance of the Virgins. Legong: the Island of Virgins, featured
a languorous lead actress called Putu.
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These films helped launch Bali as a free loving paradise for a host of Hollywood
trendsetters including, Water Spies, artist-musician and homosexual lover of
director F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu 1924), renowned playwright Noel Coward,
Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton and silent screen star Charlie Chaplin.
In 1938, renowned Hollywood director Busby Berkeley included a Bali-based production number -- "I wanna go back to Bali, they don't have a word for no" -in his Gold Diggers in Paris production. The implication was that the "island of the gods" was awash with lithesome teens in sarongs having hula lessons (this was far from the truth). |
| Long inspired by Bali as a place of sensuality, mystery, romance, and adventure,
Hollywood first filmed Goona Goona on the island in 1932. Shot by Andre
Roosevelt (US President Theodore Roosevelt’s nephew), Goona Goona was originally
released in two-color Technicolor and one of the last films released with
unsynchronized sound track. Things were heating up in the U.S. too: the Javanese expression goona-goona, popular in Bali at that time to describe black magic, was adopted as early as 1938 as New York slang for "nookie" in the night. |
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After Road to Bali -- starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamore in a wet
sarong -- hit the big screen, the world's mammary voyeurs were positively
panting. European travel companies were promoting tours to see the "8th and 9th
wonders of the world", respectively.
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