13 Seconds of Lost Footage of Marilyn Monroe Has Been Recovered and Digitally Remastered

The Lost Footage of Marilyn Monroe - That film image of Ms. Monroe’s skirt rising high in a gust of air? It’s a reshoot of a discarded and more risqué scene seldom seen until now. It happened one night in the late summer of 1954. Jules Schulback, a New York furrier and taker of home movies, heard that Marilyn Monroe would be on the Upper East Side of Manhattan filming scenes again for her new picture, “The Seven Year Itch.” Two days earlier, Mr. Schulback had taken footage of her with his 16-millimeter Bolex movie camera around the corner from his townhouse apartment. So he grabbed the camera — the one usually used for family picnics and parades and the stuff of everyday life — and headed over to the subway grate in front of Wright’s Food shop, just down the street from the Trans-Lux movie theater on Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street.



Though it was around 1 a.m., a large crowd had already gathered, mostly newspaper photographers and curious men waiting to see Marilyn. The movie studio and the director, Billy Wilder, had counted on this, inviting the press and the public to drum up buzz for the new movie, which starred Ms. Monroe as “the Girl Upstairs,” who entices a middle-aged executive, played by Tom Ewell, while his wife is away with the kids for the summer. In the famous street scene, the two are leaving the movies as Ms. Monroe pauses over a grate to enjoy the breeze from the subway as it blows up her dress on a hot summer night. “Isn’t it delicious?” she purrs. The breeze came from a large fan under the grate operated by the film’s special effects chief. The night — Sept. 15 — was actually quite chilly. But the stunt worked. It became known as “the shot seen around the world.”



But there was a dark subtext to the comedy. Gathered at that late hour were hundreds of gawkers, almost all men, who catcalled and yelled things like, “Higher! Higher!” as Ms. Monroe’s dress blew up over her head. For two hours, the men watched from surrounding buildings and from the street. “Unfortunately, one of them was her husband, Joe DiMaggio,” Mr. Wilder is quoted as saying in his biography, “Nobody’s Perfect.” “And he didn’t like what he saw, or what everyone else was seeing.” Mr. DiMaggio hadn’t planned on visiting the set that night, and was waiting for his wife at the St. Regis Hotel, where the couple were staying. But the columnist Walter Winchell had persuaded him to come along. Ms. Monroe was not happy her husband had shown up. But he was even more unhappy and angrily stormed off. Later that night the couple had a screaming fight in their room. The next morning, her hairdresser covered up Ms. Monroe’s bruises with makeup. Three weeks later, Ms. Monroe filed for divorce.



Mr. Wilder never used the Lexington Avenue footage and reshot the scene on a closed lot in Hollywood, though photographs of that night appeared everywhere. Except for some brief, grainy shots from a newsreel covering the divorce, footage from that night was never screened. “The footage immediately disappeared,” Mr. Wilder said in the biography. “But one day I’m sure some film scholar will dig it up.” The story of the night Marilyn Monroe’s white halter-top dress blew up was well known among Jules Schulback’s children, and even among his grandchildren. His granddaughter Bonnie Siegler said he bragged from time to time about his personal film shoot with Marilyn. “He was a real raconteur,” said Ms. Siegler, a graphic designer who runs her own company, Eight and a Half. “I didn’t know if the story was real.” But even though she had never seen it, she often told people that her grandfather had footage of Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate.