- John Goldfarb, Please Come Home
"John Goldfarb, Please Come Home" is a 1963
novel byWilliam Peter Blatty .The comic spoof of the
Cold War was inspired by a May 1960 incident involving AmericanFrancis Gary Powers , aCIA operative whose U-2 spy plane was shot down over theSoviet Union , sparking an international diplomatic incident. Blatty's tale concerns John "Wrong-Way" Goldfarb, a former college football star who once ran 95 yards for a touchdown in the wrong direction. Now a U-2 pilot, his plane malfunctions and crashes in the mythicalArab kingdom of Fawzia. The country's leader threatens to turn him over to the Soviets unless he agrees to coach a football team. Jenny Ericson, themagazine journalist who made Goldfarb famous, is on an undercover assignment as a member of the King's harem, and when she discovers she was wrong in thinking the King is no longer romantically interested in his wives, she seeks help from Goldfarb. The King blackmails the U.S.Department of State into arranging an exhibition football game between theNotre Dame Fighting Irish and his own team. Jenny becomes acheerleader and then thequarterback who scores the winning touchdown for Fawz University.Blatty's book originally was written as a
screenplay , but when no studios expressed interest in it, he reworked it as a novel, which was published by Doubleday (ISBN 0553142518). Its success ledTwentieth Century-Fox to acquire the film rights, and Blatty submitted his original script for a feature film directed byJ. Lee Thompson . The cast includesShirley Maclaine as Jenny,Richard Crenna as Goldfarb,Peter Ustinov as the King, andJim Backus ,Fred Clark ,Wilfrid Hyde-White ,Harry Morgan , Richard Deacon,Teri Garr ,Jackie Coogan ,Patrick Adiarte , andJerry Orbach in supporting roles.Fox expected the film to be its
Christmas 1964 release, but Notre Dame filed adefamation lawsuit that wasn't settled until the following year, when the studio finally won its case. [ [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059336/trivia Imdb trivia page] ]The film was a critical failure and earned back only $3,880,000 of its $4 million budget. [ [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059336/business Imdb business page] ]
External links
* [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059336/ John Goldfarb, Please Come Home at IMDb]
References
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