As Crocodile Dundee, Paul Hogan deliberately set out to create an Aussie folk hero. ”The Americans have been creating folk heroes for years,” he says in ”G`Day America: The Paul Hogan Story” (Salem House). ”They made folk heroes out of villains: Billy the Kid was a grotesque, deranged 16-year-old who went around shooting people in the back with a shotgun. (But) when they made the movie, Paul Newman played the part.” Because his country was a little short of folk heroes, he decided to ”make one up, a typical modern-day Outback lad, and set him loose in New York.”
Every man is entitled to dream his own dreams. Woody Allen, for one, has some doozies. In an interview in Omni magazine, he says, ”If I can come back in another life, I want to be Warren Beatty`s fingertips.”
One of the most famous clinches in movie history-the horizontal embrace between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, both in bathing suits, in ”From Here to Eternity”-would have looked a lot different if the Hays Office, Hollywood`s censor for 40 years, had had its way. In ”The Censorship Papers” (Dodd, Mead), Gerald Gardener writes that the censors wanted the couple in beach robes. Other demands: that in the film Kerr be punished for her adulterous affair (with screenwriter Daniel Taradash suggesting she wear a scarlet ”A” throughout the movie), that Donna Reed`s fictive profession be changed (the Hays Production Code did not acknowledge the existence of prostitutes) and that in the film she should be paid for ”chatting” with the lonely soldiers. Gardener writes that this proposal reminds him of ”the man who looked at a camel and declared, `There is no such animal.` ”
