Trivia / The Klansman

• Creator Backlash: Lee Marvin hated the finished film, referring to it as "The Clownsman".
• Fake American: The Welsh Richard Burton plays Breck, and the Italian Luciana Paluzzi plays Trixie.
• Friendship on the Set: Lee Marvin boasted to Richard Burton that he got top billing, to which Burton replied that he was being paid more. The pair often got drunk together to the point where Burton claimed that they met again at a party and couldn't remember making the film.
• Troubled Production: The film's behind-the-scenes turmoil is probably best-known nowadays than the film itself. To quote a comment from Letterboxd's page on the film, "The IMDb Trivia section for this movie is much more entertaining than this film could ever hope to be."
  • The writer of the original draft of the script, Samuel Fuller, walked out of the film after his script was rewritten by Millard Kaufman and Terence Young was brought in to direct at the insistence of the studio's European investors as payback for a prior deal. Fuller would later try to get his name removed from the credits, to no avail. Fuller said he later met Young when both attended a film festival, and they ultimately buried the hatchet after Young insisted that he never read the original script and only accepted the direction of the film to pay debts.
  • Lee Marvin and Richard Burton spent most of the shoot heavily drinking. Such was the extent of their alcoholic state that a story recounts that when they bumped into each other a few years later, both of them acted as if they'd never met, neither having any memory of actually working together. (Though another version of the same story claims that only Burton actually forgot, which given Marvin also had a reputation as a heavy drinker, says a lot.) Burton allegedly drank so much that many of his scenes had to be shot with him seated or lying down, due to his inability to stand, which in some scenes becomes obviously clear, in some scenes also appearing to slur his words or speak incoherently. (Marvin, for his part, appears much better composed in the film in comparison.) Burton would later admit that he drank between two-and-a-half and three bottles of vodka a day during filming.
  • Burton's wife Elizabeth Taylor accompanied him during the shoot, and there were reports of tensions between them. Things came to a head when Burton gave a local 18-year-old girl, Kim Dinucci, a diamond ring and arranged for her to get a small walk-on part in the film, which made national news. This apparently led to a shouting match between Burton and Taylor which led them to throwing objects at the walls of the house they were staying in, which led to near complete destruction of the interior. Making things even more convoluted, there were reports from the crew that Burton's public gestures toward the young woman were actually a cover for his real affair with a local married woman (with children) who was working on the location shoot, and whose husband apparently once stormed a bar the crew used to visit to threaten Burton, who was absent at the time.
  • Burton went to hospital after filming and was treated on influenza and bronchitis. He later claimed doctors told him he would have died within a matter of weeks if he had continued drinking so heavily. While there, Burton and Taylor's (first) divorce would be announced. Burton ended up staying in hospital for six weeks.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Samuel Fuller submitted a screenplay that was almost completely different from what was filmed. Among other things, Lee Marvin's character was not a sheriff, but a KKK leader whose racist viewpoint is changed around during the course of the film. However, the studio got nervous about that premise being too provocative and ordered it rewritten, infuriating Fuller, who left the project because of this.
  • John Cassavetes was originally supposed to play Cates, the villainous Deputy Sheriff, but dropped out after Fuller left the project.
  • Lee Marvin later said his character was meant to be a war hero and have a son who did not want to go to West Point, and that there was a subplot where Burton's character sided with the son. All this was cut from the final film, except for two scenes mentioning the son that make little sense with regards of the rest of the film.

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