Laura began shooting during the Spring of 1944 with Rouben Mamoulian directing and Otto Preminger producing.

There was tension immediately between Preminger and Mamoulian. "Mamoulian could read Hollywood politics as astutely as anyone in the business," said Preminger in his 1977 autobiography Preminger, "and was aware that Zanuck was not exactly fond of me. The situation, he felt, gave him unlimited freedom to ignore me. He went ahead changing sets and costumes without consulting me. When he began to make changes in the script, I put my foot down. Mamoulian remembered that Zanuck liked the script and gave in."

Mamoulian asked Preminger not to come to the set while he was shooting because his presence there made him nervous. Preminger agreed, and Mamoulian continued working. Meanwhile, Darryl Zanuck was in New York and not able to keep a close eye on Laura's progress.

When Preminger had a chance to look at the first batch of dailies that came back, he was aghast. "I had chosen a simple dressing gown for Judith Anderson but Mamoulian, influenced perhaps by association the Medea role for which she was famous, had dressed her in something flowing and Grecian," said Preminger. "It was totally wrong for a contemporary story and so were his sets. The performances were appalling. Judith Anderson was overacting, Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney were amateurish, and there was even something wrong with Clifton Webb's performance."

Preminger promptly had the rushes airmailed to Zanuck in New York so that he could see for himself what was happening with Laura. Zanuck agreed that it was a mess and ordered Mamoulian to shoot everything over again. Preminger, he reiterated, was still barred from the set.

When the second set of dailies proved to be just as bad as the first, if not worse, Zanuck decided to remove Mamoulian from the film altogether. Finally the words that Preminger had wanted to hear all along came from Zanuck's mouth when he returned to Los Angeles. "Monday," he told Preminger, "you can start directing Laura. From scratch."

With two weeks worth of work having to be scrapped, Preminger began his directing job on Laura with a purposeful vengeance. He threw out everything Mamoulian had done including the costumes, sets, and cinematographer. Even the original portrait of Laura painted by Mamoulian's wife was tossed out.

Preminger in turn hired a new costume designer, Bonnie Cashin, and new cinematographer, Joe LaShelle. The film was a promotion for LaShelle and his first big opportunity on an A-picture.

For the portrait of Laura that plays an extremely important role in the film's story, Preminger decided to do something of a cheat. Because paintings generally don't photograph well on film, he said, he would use an enhanced photograph. "He sent me instead to pose for Frank Polony, the studio photographer whose pictures of me as a starlet had appeared in so many magazines," explained Gene Tierney in her 1979 memoir Self-Portrait. "Otto had this one enlarged and lightly brushed with paint to create the effect he wanted."

According to Preminger, he had to work to win the respect of the cast, who all seemed "hostile" to him when he took over, with the exception of Clifton Webb. "I learned later," he said, "that Mamoulian had called each of them individually and warned them that I did not like their acting and intended to fire them." It was not true. Judith Anderson decided to confront him on the set. She said that if he wasn't happy with her performance, then he should show her how to make it better.

"To her surprise," said Preminger, "I did. I knew every line in the script and I showed her what I wanted word by word, step by step, gesture by gesture. She's a good actress and although she thought I was wrong she did it exactly as I had shown her. At the end I said, 'Tomorrow come and see the rushes with me and you will see what I mean.' The whole cast watched the rushes the next day and from that moment on they were all on my side."

Somehow, after all the difficulties with Laura getting started, things finally seemed to begin falling into place under Preminger's direction. According to Vincent Price's daughter Victoria, Price once asked Preminger why he thought he was able to do a better job on Laura than Rouben Mamoulian. "Rouben only knows nice people," replied Preminger according to Price's 1999 book Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography. "I understand the characters in Laura. They're all heels, just like my friends."

Throughout the shoot the cast got along famously, and they all respected Preminger's judgment. "I may be one of the few people in the world who likes Otto Preminger, but I do," said Vincent Price. "Otto held us together," said Gene Tierney, "pushed and lifted what might have been a good movie into one that became something special." Co-star Clifton Webb agreed. "I found [Preminger] a most sympathetic director," he said, "having had his own theater in Vienna and having been an actor himself, he knew what a stage person could go through."

Preminger did excellent work, but the demands were high. "I was on the set before the sun came up," recalled Gene Tierney, "and tumbled home at eight or nine in the evening." Preminger could be a taskmaster. "He was simply tireless," she said. "When the rest of the cast seemed ready to drop from exhaustion, Otto would still muster as much vigor as when the day began."

Tierney and the rest of the cast also had to endure hours of delays so that everything would be exactly as Preminger wanted it. "[Cinematographer] Joe [LaShelle] was determined to make a success of his big opportunity," she said. "He would take ages to light a scene. Every time I heard him say, 'No, no, it's not right,' I could feel my teeth clench, and I knew there went another hour or two of waiting for the lights to be set."

Clifton Webb also recalled grueling conditions shooting with Preminger. "Laura took ten weeks to make," he said, "and I was becoming more exhausted with every approaching day. Benzedrine in the daytime to keep me going and sleeping pills at night was not a very happy combination."

Webb also had to deal with the shock of seeing himself on screen after a long absence from Hollywood. Watching the first batch of rushes that included his first scene in the tub when he meets McPherson, Webb nearly had a heart attack. "When I saw myself sitting in the bathtub looking very much like Mahatma Gandhi," he said, "I felt I might vomit. After it was over Dana [Andrews] saved my life with a big swig of bourbon. The first shock of seeing myself had a strange effect on me, psychologically, as it made me realize for the first time that I was no longer a dashing young juvenile, which I must have fancied myself being through the years in the theater."

According to Gene Tierney's husband, famed fashion designer Oleg Cassini, their personal tragedy of dealing with the severe problems of baby daughter Daria just prior to filming helped inform Tierney's performance as the mysterious Laura. "It is ironic that through much of the film she played a girl presumed dead who was actually alive;" said Cassini in his 1987 autobiography In My Own Fashion, "in some ways, Gene was quite the opposite. After Daria's birth, she seemed to die inside. There was a ghostly quality, an evanescence, to both Laura and Gene. Even after Laura is found to be alive, she has a certain mystery, an aura, that permeates the film and gives it much of its magic. And Gene? After Daria, there was a distance I never seemed to be able to bridge."

After shooting wrapped on Laura Preminger assigned composer David Raksin to write the musical score for the film. Preminger was interested in possibly using Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady" as a musical theme to associate with Laura's character, and Darryl Zanuck suggested using George Gershwin's "Summertime." However, Raksin had something else in mind.

"In the case of Gene Tierney," explained Raksin in a 1999 interview, "she was so exquisite that you just looked at her and you knew why Dana Andrews had fallen madly in love with her. When I was working on the score, I kept looking at her all the time. I'd run sequences, and there's this fabulous creature. You come across something marvelous, and it inspires you."

Raksin's beautiful haunting music fit perfectly with the theme of the film and became one of its most famous and memorable elements.

Laura opened in the Fall of 1944. It was an instant smash hit, boosted by the strength of mostly positive reviews. The cast and crew were thrilled with the results. "When we all went to see Laura on opening night," recalled Vincent Price, "we had never heard the score! That was written long after the film was finished. So we sat there and thought, 'Isn't that marvelous.'"

Vincent Price always considered Laura to be one of his personal favorites. He felt it was "one of those few pictures that is perfect. Not pretentious, very simple, just brilliant." According to his daughter Victoria, Price felt that Gene Tierney had as much to do with the film's success as Otto Preminger's direction. "In his opinion, it was Gene Tierney's 'odd beauty' and underrated acting ability that made Laura so popular," she said. "He felt her beauty was both timeless and imperfect."

Tierney, on the other hand, didn't give herself much credit for its success. "I never felt my own performance was much more than adequate," she said. "I am pleased that audiences still identify me with Laura, as opposed to not being identified at all. Their tributes, I believe, are for the character--the dreamlike Laura - rather than any gifts I brought to the role. I do not mean to sound modest. I doubt that any of us connected with the movie thought it had a chance of becoming a kind of mystery classic, or enduring beyond its generation...If it worked, it was because the ingredients turned out to be right."

Laura earned five Academy Award nominations, including one for Preminger as Best Director and one for Clifton Webb as Best Supporting Actor. David Raksin's lush score was inexplicably left out of the nominations. It was cinematographer Joe LaShelle, who had taken the time to light the film so carefully, who received the film's only Oscar® win.

Despite the Oscar® snub of the musical score, Raksin's music proved to be so popular that the studio soon found itself inundated with letters asking if there was a recording available of the main theme. Soon, sheet music and recordings of the instrumental music were released and proved to be a huge hit with the public.

The following year in 1945 Fox asked celebrated songwriter Johnny Mercer to write lyrics to go with Laura's theme, and he happily obliged. It too was a smash hit, becoming an instant standard, recorded over the years by countless artists including Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald.

The success of Laura benefited everyone associated with it. It helped launch Otto Preminger's distinguished career as a director in Hollywood and helped patch up his damaged relationship with Darryl Zanuck. It elevated the careers of its main cast to A-list status, and it put the services of composer David Raksin and Oscar®-winning cinematographer Joe LaShelle in high demand.

Laura has endured through the years as one of the most beloved and talked about film noir classics in cinema history. It may have been created out of a hodgepodge of happy accidents and second choices, but the results are first rate.

by Andrea Passafiume