A never-before-seen footage of late star Marilyn Monroe from her 1955 romantic comedy film “The Seven Year Itch” has been released in which her iconic scene where her white cocktail dress gets buffeted up to her waist, can be seen.
The video, an old home-shot footage of the scene, features the moment and the events surrounding it in a different light.
On September 15, 1954, director Billy Wilder and Monroe were scheduled to shoot the scene on a New York sidewalk. However, the crowd of journalists and onlookers, including Monroe’s then husband Joe DiMaggio who famously hated the dress and rowed with the actress after shooting, grew so great and rowdy that they were forced to re-shoot the actual scene on the 20th Century Fox lot.
Also among the crowd that day was a man named Jules Schulback who followed Monroe and captured the scene on film. Schulback’s illuminating footage has been edited down to a 12-second video by nytimes.com.
The footage was discovered by his granddaughter Bonnie Siegler and her husband Jeff Scher in a plastic bag filled with old films Schulback had made of family trips.
Siegler’s older sister Rayna Dineen revealed that Schulback always told his family stories of the moment he had captured on film, but that they had never truly believed him until they found the footage in 2004.
The original short film lasts three minutes and 17 seconds. It features humourous title cards which Schulback had spliced in, and captures Monroe in a second floor window blow-drying her hair.
