Taglines: She’s finally met the man of her dreams. He’s not real but you can’t have everything.
The Purple Rose of Cairo movie storyline. Cecelia (Mia Farrow) lives a somewhat drab life in Depression-era New Jersey. She works as a waitress in a diner – she isn’t very good at it and is soon fired – and has a philandering loafer of a husband. She spends much of her time at the local movie theater repeatedly seeing the same movie, The Purple Rose of Cairo.
One day, a minor character in the movie, Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), literally walks off the screen and joins Cecilia in exploring the world on the other side of the screen. Meanwhile, the remaining actors in the film are unable to continue with the story and Hollywood producers panic when others movie characters want to do the same.
The Purple Rose of Cairo is a 1985 American romantic fantasy comedy film written and directed by Woody Allen, and starring Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, and Danny Aiello. Inspired by Sherlock Jr., Hellzapoppin’, and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, it is the tale of a film character named Tom Baxter who leaves a fictional film of the same name and enters the real world.
The film was released on March 1, 1985. It won the BAFTA Award for Best Film, while Allen received several screenwriting nominations, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award and a Writers Guild of America Award. Allen has ranked it among his best films, along with Stardust Memories and Match Point.
The Purple Rose of Cairo opened in North America on March 1, 1985, in 3 theaters, where it grossed a $114,095 in its opening weekend. Subsequently its total US gross was $10,631,333.
About the Production
Several scenes featuring Tom and Cecilia are set at the Bertrand Island Amusement Park, which closed just prior to the film’s production. Many of the outside scenes were filmed in Piermont, New York, a village on the Hudson River about 15 miles north of the George Washington Bridge. Store fronts had false facades reflecting the depression-era setting. It was also filmed at the Raritan Diner in South Amboy, New Jersey. Woody Allen shut down the Kent Theater on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, the neighborhood he grew up in, to film there.
In a rare public appearance at the National Film Theatre in 2001, Woody Allen listed The Purple Rose of Cairo as one of only a few of his films that ended up being “fairly close to what I wanted to do” when he set out to write it. Allen provided more detail about the film’s origins in a comment he made a year earlier, during a press junket for Small Time Crooks:
Purple Rose was a film that I just locked myself in a room [to write]…. I wrote it and halfway through it didn’t go anywhere and I put it aside. I didn’t know what to do. I toyed around with other ideas. Only when the idea hit me, a long time later, that the real actor comes to town and she has to choose between the [screen] actor and the real actor and she chooses the real actor and he dumps her, that was the time it became a real movie. Before that it wasn’t. But the whole thing was manufactured.
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
Directed by: Woody Allen
Starring: Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Danny Aiello, Irving Metzman, Stephanie Farrow, David Kieserman, Elaine Grollman, Wade Barnes, Victoria Zussin, Mark Hammond, Maurice Brenner
Screenplay by: Woody Allen
Production Design by: Stuart Wurtzel
Cinematography by: Gordon Willis
Film Editing by: Susan E. Morse
Costume Design by: Jeffrey Kurland
Set Decoration by: Carol Joffe
Art Direction by: Edward Pisoni
Music by: Dick Hyman
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Orion Pictures
Release Date: March 1, 1985
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