Three Men and a Baby is a 1987 comedy film starring Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, and Ted Danson, and directed by Leonard Nimoy, in his first non-Star Trek movie directorial role. It follows the mishaps and adventures of three bachelors as they attempt to adapt their lives to pseudo-fatherhood with the arrival of one of the men's love child. The script for the film was based on the 1985 French movie Trois hommes et un couffin (Three Men and a Cradle).
Three Men and a Baby was the biggest box office hit of that year, surpassing Fatal Attraction and eventually grossing US$167 million in the United States alone.[1] The movie won the 1988 ASCAP award and the 1988 People's Choice Award for Favorite Comedy Motion Picture. It was followed by the 1990 sequel, Three Men and a Little Lady. A new sequel (titled Three Men and a Bride) supposedly in development would reunite Selleck, Guttenberg and Danson.[2]
Plot
Peter Mitchell (Tom Selleck), Michael Kellam (Steve Guttenberg) and Jack Holden (Ted Danson) are happy living their lives as bachelors in their lofty New York City apartment. They all have girlfriends, jobs and a carefree lifestyle. This is disrupted when a baby arrives on their doorstep one day. A note with the child, Mary, indicates that it is Holden's, the result of an affair with a recent co-star actress. The baby arrives in Holden's absence—he is in Turkey shooting a movie, leaving Peter and Michael to fend for themselves in taking care of the child, something in which their lack of experience befuddles them.
At one point, Peter and Michael are mistakenly led to believe that they are to deliver Mary to two men who arrive at their door asking for "the package". They discover moments before their departure that the men are drug dealers who were actually seeking a package of heroin. They retrieve the infant, leaving the men with a bottle of powdered milk.
What results is a major change to the men's lives as they try to adjust to surrogate fatherhood—balancing the demands of work, a social schedule and the rearing of a child. Soon their paternal instincts take hold, and they grow attached to the child.
The drug dealers, demanding payment, ransack the men's apartment looking for their drugs. The men formulate a plan to trap the dealers when they negotiate a deal to deliver the illicit goods.
At the end of the movie the baby's mother, a British woman named Sylvia (Nancy Travis), arrives, asking for Mary back. Moments before her departure back to England, she realizes she cannot give up her career to raise her daughter alone. The men, having grown attached to the child, invite her to move into their apartment with them.
Cast
Production
The eponymous baby was played by twins Lisa Blair and Michelle Blair.[3]
The soundtrack included the Peter Cetera song "Daddy's Girl", which was used for the movie's big music montage sequence.
Urban legend
Shots from the film showing what some believe are a shotgun and a young boy.
In the final cut of the movie, there is a scene, just over an hour into the film, in which Jack Holden (Ted Danson) and his mother (Celeste Holm) walk through the house with the baby. As they do so, they pass a background window on the lefthand side of the screen, and a black outline that appears to resemble a rifle pointed downward can be seen behind the curtains. As the characters walk back past the window 40 seconds later, a human figure can be seen in that window. A persistent urban legend began circulating August 1990 (shortly before the film's sequel, Three Men and a Little Lady, premiered) that this was the ghost of a boy who had been killed in the house where the movie was filmed. The most common version of this rumor was that a nine-year-old boy committed suicide with a shotgun there, explaining why the house was vacant because the grieving family left. This notion was discussed on the first episode of TV Land: Myths and Legends in January 2007[4] and was referenced on an episode of Family Guy, and in "Hollywood Babylon", a second season episode of the TV series Supernatural. A variation of the legend states that the ghost was Eric Clapton's son Conor, who died of a fall from a 53rd story window in 1991, over three years after the movie was released. The variation states that Clapton allowed the movie to be filmed in his New York City condominium.[5]
Danson's character standing next to a cardboard cutout of himself.
However, according to Snopes.com, a website dedicated to investigating urban legends, the figure is a cardboard cutout "standee" of Jack, wearing a tuxedo and top hat, that was left on the set. This prop was created as part of the storyline, in which Jack, an actor, appears in a dog food commercial, but this portion of the story was cut from the final version of the film. The standee does show up later in the film, however, when Jack stands next to it as the baby's mother comes to reclaim her child. Snopes contends that the figure in the first scene looks smaller from its appearance in the latter scene because of the distance and angle of the shot, and because the curtains obscure its outstretched arms. As for the contention that a boy died in the house, all the indoor scenes in the film were shot on a Toronto soundstage, and no residential dwellings were used for interior filming.[6][7]
Trivia
The characters in which Selleck, Guttenburg and Danson play in the film are actually the English version of the names from the original 1985 French movie Trois hommes et un couffin. i.e. Peter, Michael and Jack are English names derived from the French names, Pierre, Michel and Jacques which were used in the French version of this film.
References
External links
