Oscar Tribute to ‘Some Like it Hot’

Marilyn may never have won an Oscar, but the Academy is paying tribute to her most enduringly popular film, Some Like it Hot, with a dedicated page on their website, including costume sketches, script pages, and this previously unpublished photo of Marilyn on Coronado Beach with director Billy Wilder.

In related news, the inaugural Coronado Island Film Festival will be held in January 2016, with a panel of judges headed by Leonard Maltin, reports the San Diego Union Tribune.

‘Marilyn Lives’ on the Coronado Shore

The memory of Sugar Kane is alive and well on Coronado Island, where scenes from Some Like it Hot were filmed, Jackie Burrell writes in The Reporter.

“Surf surges against this pristine shore, the white sand dotted picturesquely with red-striped cabanas. A paved footpath leads up to the iconic grand hotel. And it doesn’t take much imagination to see Marilyn Monroe on this beach, sun-kissed and wind-swept in her short white beach robe.

In fact, it takes no imagination at all. All over Coronado Island you’ll see photographs taken during the filming of Some Like It Hot, the 1959 comedy starring a ukulele-playing Monroe, and Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as fellow members of her, ahem, girl band bound for Florida.

Much to the consternation of Miami’s then-mayor, the role of Florida beach was played by this stretch of strand, which is crowned by the 19th-century Hotel Del Coronado. Legend has it that Coronado’s mayor told his much-aggrieved Floridian counterpart, ‘Some like it hot, but not as hot as Miami in September.’

Coronado actually is the bulbous end of a skinny peninsula that connects the ‘island’ to the mainland in Imperial Beach, seven miles south. But it’s easy to forget such topographic technicalities as you cross the sweeping bridge or arrive by ferry from San Diego.”