Right before shooting was set to begin on Splendor in the Grass actor Pat Hingle, who was to play the role of Bud's father Ace Stamper, suffered devastating injuries when he accidentally fell 54 feet down an elevator shaft in his apartment building. It would take Hingle over a year to fully recover from the accident. In the meantime, however, he decided to go ahead and do the film -- he would simply incorporate his limp into the character. "I broke everything," Hingle said later. "I landed upright, so I broke hips and knees and ankles and ribs, and that sort of thing. That lurching walk that Ace Stamper has -- that was as good as I could walk."

The cameras began rolling on Splendor in the Spring of 1960. Shot entirely in New York, exteriors were filmed in Staten Island and upstate New York, which doubled as Kansas in the 1920s. Interiors were filmed at Filmways Studios in East Harlem.

Elia Kazan found directing Splendor to be an easy and pleasant experience. He had the benefit of William Inge's strong screenplay and was surrounded by first-rate talent. Film neophyte Warren Beatty looked at Kazan as a teacher and sought to learn as much as possible from him. Kazan taught him how to think about acting, where to put the camera, how to break down a script -- all valuable lessons for Beatty, who later went on to direct and produce himself.

For his part, Kazan wasn't as enamored with Beatty, though he couldn't deny that he was very talented. "Warren was a little 'snotty' -- I don't know a better word for how he behaved and can't find one in my thesaurus," said Kazan in his 1988 autobiography A Life, "but he was able to grow into a formidable man."

According to one of the makeup artists on Splendor in the Grass, the crew found Beatty arrogant and didn't like him. In fact, he was given the nickname "Mental Anguish" or "M.A." for short that crew members called him behind his back.

Even co-star Natalie Wood wasn't particularly fond of Beatty at first. "...she thought he didn't bathe enough," said her then husband Robert Wagner in his 2008 autobiography Pieces of My Heart. "Scruffiness supposedly equaled authenticity, at least according to the Actors Studio." Wood shared the same thought regarding Beatty's hygiene with close friend Mart Crowley, who was working as one of Kazan's assistants at the time. According to Crowley, this "scruffiness" made her apprehensive about doing love scenes with Beatty.

Somewhere along the line, according to Kazan, something changed between Wood and Beatty. The love scenes between them became a temptation for the two, even though both were involved with other people -- Wood was married to Robert Wagner, and Beatty was engaged to English actress Joan Collins at the time. "To be in love with Warren Beatty!" wrote Kazan in his autobiography. "What girl can run that fast? And why use the word 'love?' Warren -- it was obvious the first time I saw him--wanted it all and wanted it his way...Bright as they come, intrepid, and with that thing all women secretly respect: complete confidence in his sexual powers, confidence so great that he never had to advertise himself, even by hints." Kazan claimed that Beatty and Wood fell in love while he "wasn't looking...I wasn't sorry," he said, "it helped their love scenes."

While it was true that Beatty and Wood did eventually become a couple in real life, those closest to her deny that their relationship began while making Splendor . Robert Wagner, who visited the set often, saw no evidence of an affair. "Beatty had nothing to do with our breakup, and Natalie didn't begin to see him until after our split," said Wagner. "...Now, it's within the realm of possibility that the affair began earlier, but I don't think that's what happened for one simple reason: she would have told me...Affairs were not part of our equation."

Wood's close friend at the time, Mart Crowley, agreed. "If they were kissing between the flats, I didn't know anything about it," he said according to Peter Biskind's 2010 book Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America. "It's not true that Warren broke up the marriage between Wagner and her, that they started an affair during the picture. He was still going with Joan, and Natalie was crying her eyes out in the dressing room between takes, chewing her lips, just an emotional wreck. She would go home exhausted, not fit to have an affair with anybody. And she didn't seem like any person that Warren would have gone for. Especially with Joan around. Her career was on the brink of extinction, his was just beginning, they had everything riding on this to be good, they were two very ambitious people, so they didn't have time for each other, romantically." Warren Beatty himself also later denied those allegations, describing his relationship with Natalie Wood during the filming of Splendor as "distant."

The one on-set romance that was definitely going on was that of director Elia Kazan and actress Barbara Loden, who played the wild and self-destructive Ginny Stamper. The two had begun their affair several years earlier and had to keep it under wraps since Kazan was married to someone else at the time.

Kazan did whatever what necessary in order to bring out the best possible performances by his actors -- it was one of the reasons he was known as one of the best directors in the business. From the beginning, he wanted to strip away the Hollywood glamour from Natalie Wood and get her to a more natural state for the camera, which was appropriate for the character of Deanie. It meant that Wood had to do without the sophisticated makeup and costumes she was used to, which caused her some anxiety. According her friend Mart Crowley, she was always trying to sneak on a little extra rouge or lipstick when Kazan wasn't looking.

There were two scenes in Splendor in the Grass that worried Natalie Wood due to the intensity of each: the scene where she has a confrontation with her mother while she is in the bathtub; and the scene in which she tries to drown herself in a lake after Bud rejects her sexual advances. Each time, Kazan found a way to bring out her best, even if his methods left her angry. "The bathtub scene, in which I was to be hysterical," said Wood in a later interview, "always frightened me. And I told Kazan I was very worried about it. His response absolutely threw me for a loop, because he said, 'What you do, I'll let you see the film, and we'll go back and do it again. Or we can play it on Audrey's [Christie] reactions.' And I was so enraged and offended that I became hysterical. That was his way of dealing with me, and it was obviously the correct way, because we only shot it once."

For the scene in which Deanie tries to drown herself in the lake, Wood asked Kazan if she could do it in a controlled studio tank because she had a great fear of water -- particularly dark water. "I assured her it was a very shallow lake and that her feet would always be close to the bottom," said Kazan. "She said that even if her feet were on the bottom, she'd be in a panic of fear about it. So I asked my assistant, Charlie Maguire, to get into the water with her, just out of camera range, while she played the scene of struggling to save herself. This didn't entirely reassure her, but she did the scene and did it well -- then clutched Charlie. 'Cut!' I cried. On dry land she continued to shake with fear, then laughed hysterically, with relief."

by Andrea Passafiume