Jeanne Carmen's Journal (original) (raw)

jennalynmonroe @ 7:18am: Brandon James Writes Again ~ Hi Jennifer,

Yes, way back in May of 2000, Rob Zombie wrote a featured cameo for my
Mom Jeanne Carmen in his movie House of 1000 Corpses. Rob is a big fan of
old horror movies and Pin Up Girls and he knew of Jeanne through her 50's
creature feature flick THE MONSTER OF PIEDRAS BLANCAS and through her
work as a NY Pin Up Queen.

The film was shot on a ranch up by Magic Mountain. Jeanne's character
was MISS BUNNY - A glamorous movie star from the past who is now a
childrens puppeteer running a playhouse out in the boonies called MISS BUNNY'S
ROADSIDE PLAYHOUSE.

The exterior set of the playhouse was amazing. Painted in psychedelic
colors with huge sunflowers and multi-colored lollipops spinning in the
wind and stuff like that. Miss Bunny wears a sequined red dress. (the
dress in the photo with Rob on my website www.jeannecarmen.com). All I can say
is that it was sort of like a pychedelic cross between Pee Wee's Playhouse
and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

The playhouse is filled with kids and the lights go down and Jeanne
comes out on stage to re-enact the last scene from Casablanca where Humphrey
Bogart and Ingrid Bergman say goodbye to each other. (Remember the
famous scene that went something like, "Bergman: Oh Rick, Rick, I can't leave
you".....Bogie: "listen here, we might not have each other...but we'll
always have Paris") The exact dialogue from the movie was used, not my
paraphrase from memory.

Anyway here's the Rob Zombie twist. When Jeanne pulls out the puppets
to do the scene, the puppets are two real dead animals. A dead cat is Bogie
with rigamortis set in, fangs out and arms straight out. The cat is wearing
a trench coat and Fedora hat. Bergman is a dead squirrel with a skirt
and scarf. When Jeanne starts to act the scene out with the dead animal
puppets, all the kids start screaming and run out of the place leaping
over chairs and running into each other.

So that was the scene and it was quite funny but it got cut out because
it wasn't really necessary to move the storyline of the film along. It
just sort of came in out of nowhere.

I believe the scene was in the original cut shown to Universal but then
Universal dropped the movie and then MGM picked it up and recut it and
then dropped it. Finally Lions Gate picked it up and cut it again down to
like 88 minutes. The film was shot in May of 2000 and released a full 3
years later in April of 2003.

So that's the story of Jeanne's part in House of 1000 Corpses.
Hollywood is a strange town to say the least. But always interesting.

I don't know if you caught it but my Mom was on Larry King Live August
5th talking about her friend Marilyn Monroe. For more on that, check out
the True Confession tab on my website.

Did you ever see the E! True Hollywood Story: Jeanne Carmen: Queen of
the B-Movies? An amazingly well done bio.

Keep in touch. Write back anytime.

Cheers!
BRANDON JAMES

*It was so wonderful for him to reply like he did ~
he's so very nice and helpful.

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