Bing Crosby and Bob Hope first met on a street in New York in 1932 and then shared a stage together as part of the live entertainment at the opening engagement of MGM's The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). Seven years later, Crosby invited Hope to join him entertaining the crowds at the Del Mar racetrack near San Diego. They performed a few classic vaudeville routines to the delight of the celebrity-packed house, which included Paramount production head William LeBaron. With both stars signed to the studio, he decided to look for the right vehicle in which to team them on-screen.

Finally he settled on Beach of Dreams, a screenplay originally written for George Burns and Gracie Allen, then re-tooled as Road to Mandalay for Fred MacMurray and Jack Oakie. When the latter stars turned it down, it sat on the shelf for years. In re-shaping it for Hope and Crosby it became Road to Singapore (1940). With the natural choice of Dorothy Lamour, known for exotic roles since becoming a star in The Jungle Princess (1936), the team was born. Although Road to Singapore is the most serious of the Road Pictures, the stars' clowning made it a huge hit.

By the time the duo made Road to Singapore, Hope and Crosby had already begun making frequent guest appearances on each other's radio programs. From the first, their writers had created an imaginary feud between the two, who exchanged comic insults to the audience's delight. Hope poked fun at Crosby's singing, his ears, his four sons and his wealth. Crosby responded with insults about Hope's nose and paunch, his bad luck with women and his bad jokes.

From the first, Hope and Crosby handed the scripts for the Road Pictures over to their radio writers, who then developed a string of gags for each star. They would throw in those off-the-cuff, improvised lines throughout the filming. Lamour was totally lost on her first day of shooting Road to Singapore and yelled, "Hey, boys, will you please let me get my line in!" The ad-libbing didn't please original screenwriters Frank Butler and Don Hartman, but they couldn't do much about it. At one point, Hope said to Butler, "Hey, Frank! If you hear anything that sounds like one of your lines, shout 'Bingo!'" The writers finally complained to the front office, but by then LeBaron had viewed the rushes and knew he had a hit on his hands.

Eventually Lamour learned that the only way to cope with her co-stars' ad-libs was to get a good night's sleep before shooting. Instead of learning her lines, she just studied the script so she'd know what points had to be covered, then slip them in between the stars' laugh lines whenever she could. She also watched all of the rushes so she could get an idea of what the films were really about.

With Road to Singapore, their contrasting character types and comic interplay were set for the rest of the Road pictures. Crosby was the eternal con artist who always gets the girl. Hope was his stooge, an optimistic clown who expects to come out on top and rarely sees how his partner is using him.

With Road to Singapore a box-office hit, the studio ordered another film for the team. This time they turned a shelved screenplay, Find Colonel Fawcett, inspired by the explorations of Stanley and Livingstone, into Road to Zanzibar (1941), a take-off on jungle adventures.

Originally, Paramount wanted to make Road to Moscow as the third Road Picture, but they couldn't get a script together in time. Instead they moved the action to North Africa. Road to Moscow would resurface as the idea for the fourth film in the series, but with anti-Soviet sentiments rising at the end of World War II, the setting was switched to Alaska for Road to Utopia (1946).

Road to Morocco (1942) was the first Road Picture written specifically for Hope, Crosby and Lamour. As with the first two, Butler and Hartman wrote the script (with uncredited assistance from Hope and Crosby's radio writers). The director of the first two Road pictures, Victor Schertzinger, was slated to helm Road to Morocco, but with his sudden death in 1941, David Butler took over. He previously had directed Hope and Lamour in Caught in the Draft (1941)

by Frank Miller

SOURCES:
The One and Only Bing by Bob Thomas