film, she dyed her hair platinum blonde to shed her "nice girl" image and portray the obsessive Marylee Hadley. Her Oscar-winning performance finally gave her cachet in the film industry. Robert Stack felt the primary reason he lost the Oscar to Anthony Quinn (whose winning performance in Lust for Life was no more than 25 minutes long) was that 20th Century Fox, which had lent him to Universal-International, organized block voting against him to prevent one of its contract players from winning an acting award while working at another studio. This was the sixth of eight films Douglas Sirk made with Rock Hudson, and the most successful. The next year, Sirk reunited key cast members Hudson, Stack, and Malone for The Tarnished Angels, a film about early aviators based on William Faulkner's novel Pylon. Filming Principal photography began on November 28, 1955, in Los Angeles on the Universal Studios lot. The sequence set at Manhattan's 21 Club was reconstructed on the Universal lot using photographs and dressed with actual paraphernalia from the restaurant, such as napkins and other items lent by the club owners. The staircase set featured in the film as the Hadleys' home had also been used in Universal's 1925 film version of The Phantom of the Opera, as well as the 1936 film My Man Godfrey. Written on the Wind was one of the very few "flat wide screen" titles to be printed "direct to matrix" by Technicolor. This specially ordered 35-mm printing process was intended to maintain the highest possible print quality, as well as to protect the negative. Another film that was also given this treatment was This Island Earth, which was also a Universal-International film. Music The title song, written by Sammy Cahn and Victor Young, was sung by the Four Aces during the opening credits. The film's score was composed by Frank Skinner. Release Box office Written on the Wind was released theatrically in London on October 5, 1956. It was subsequently released on Christmas Day 1956 in several U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, and Tulsa, before having its New York City premiere on January 11, 1957. The film broke records for having the highest single-day gross of any Universal Pictures film, including at New Orleans's Joy Theatre, where it had box office receipts totaling $3,036 () on its Christmas Day opening. It went on to earn rentals (box-office receipts