The Money Pit: Tom Hanks & Shelley Long Buy a Fixer Upper

by HOOKEDONHOUSES on NOVEMBER 14, 2010

The 1986 comedy The Money Pit stars Tom Hanks and Shelley Long as a young couple that impulsively buys a grand Federal-style house that they think is a bargain. As you can probably guess from the title, it’s not. But they don’t figure that out until they move in and the house starts falling down around them–literally.

Here’s how the house looks when they drive up to see it for the first time:

Maureen Stapleton plays the homeowner-slash-con artist Estelle, who gives them a tour of the place and tells them that she has to sell right away. There’s no time to think about it–or to get an inspection or anything like that.

Estelle tells them she’s keeping the lights off because she can’t afford the electric bill. They later find out the wiring is faulty.

The upstairs bedroom:

They buy the big bed with the house. When Anna (Shelley Long) stretches out on the mattress on moving day, she slowly sinks through it…

The fireplace in the bedroom:

Walter checks out the powder room:

The kitchen–before the electrical fire destroys it:

It has an old stove and fridge that look original to the house:

Anna practices her violin in the parlor soon after moving in (before the renovation starts):

When she turns the water on in the master bathroom, a brown sludge oozes out:

Without running water, they’re reduced to filling the tub the old-fashioned way:

But after pouring only two buckets of water go into it, the entire tub falls through the floor and into the room below:

Walter says, “You hear about that guy up in the Bronx, went crazy, thought he was a pigeon? They found him in the park, throwing bread crumbs at himself. And he was only putting in a guest bathroom!”

The staircase fiasco starts with one loose floorboard that Walter innocently tries to fix.

Next thing he knows, the entire thing is falling apart.

A close-up of the front of the house with the old car that came with the house:

When Walter realizes he has locked himself out of the house, he knocks on the door…and the entire thing falls down:

The workers arrive, and they look like a pretty scary bunch, but they’re the only ones who would work for an amount of money Walter could afford.

Anna: “Who are they?”

Walter: “The plumbers.”

Anna: “Are you sure?”

Walter: “Not really, but I don’t care. I’m just thrilled to see somebody actually working!”

~

When Walter returns home from work at the end of the day, the workers are gone and this is what’s left of his house:

In the DVD Special Features, Director Richard Benjamin shows the model of the house that they used when planning stunts. This is the back of the house on the model:

And the back of the actual house:

Working on the entry hall:

And finally, it’s finished:

We get to see the new staircase. The entry hall. A peek into the parlor where Shelley Long is standing:

A peek inside the living room, where Tom Hanks is standing:

And that’s it. We don’t get to see how the kitchen, the bedroom, or the bathroom turned out. Nope. Just a quick view of the main rooms in front, and then it’s over. It makes me mad every time I watch it.

Does that drive anyone else nuts, too, or is it just me? In fact, I found it so irritating that we don’t get to see how all of the rooms turned out, that for a long time I refused to do a post about this movie at all. So many of you requested it, though, that you eventually wore me down. Ha.

The movie ends with Walter and Anna getting married in front of their finally-finished dream house:

The “after” of the house looks identical to the “before” shot at the beginning of the movie. The only change I can see is that window boxes have been added:

Here’s how the house looks today. More windows have been added so that there are three over three on each side of the front door (thanks to Garrison for these photos from the listing!):

I read that it was built in 1898 . . . and that it was built in 1906. Not sure which is correct, but let’s say it was built sometime between the two. It’s known as “Northway House.”

It was on the market last year for $7.9 million. In the movie, Walter and Anna get the house for a steal–$200,000. Here’s a photo of the real staircase, which was shown in the listing:

The Money Pit was a (loose) remake of the Cary Grant-Myrna Loy classic Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, one of my all-time favorites (you can see that house here).

Have you seen both movies? Which is your favorite?

P.S. Coming up on the next Movie Monday: a look at the gorgeous Craftsman from “Zathura.”

Click Here to See More Famous Houses from the Movies!

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Mary Richards’ Apartment on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”

by HOOKEDONHOUSES on JULY 5, 2009

Igrew up watching “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” reruns after school and wishing I could have an apartment like hers. And of course I’d have to have a best friend/neighbor like Rhoda Morganstern (Valerie Harper) to go with it. Mary Richards lived on the third floor of an old Queen Anne Victorian in Minneapolis, Minnesota, behind those signature Palladian windows with the iron balcony. We get a glimpse of the house here as she drives her white Ford Mustang up to it during the first season:

In real life, those Palladian windows at the top of the house led to nothing but an unfinished attic space. Later owners reportedly finished it and turned it into a media room.

The owners of the house got so tired of drive-by gawkers when the show was in its heyday that they hung an “IMPEACH NIXON” sign across the front of the house so the show couldn’t shoot new exterior shots to use in later seasons. That’s why producers had Mary move to a high-rise apartment in 1975.

Mary walks outside and you can see the ugly fence that surrounded the old house. It has since been removed, thank goodness, as you’ll see tomorrow in my post about the house as it looks today:

In the first script, there was a description of what the writers had in mind for Mary’s apartment, including “ten-foot ceilings” and “a wood-burning fireplace,” which the set designers brought to life:

In the first episode of the series, Mary Richards has just arrived in Minneapolis and her friend Phyllis shows her the apartment she’s going to rent to her on the third floor:

It was fun to see it as an empty space, before Mary moves in. Note that they even put ugly drapes up for the scene, which are never seen again:

When they open the drapes, it reveals Rhoda Morganstern, who is washing the windows of hernew apartment (so she thinks):

After Mary moves in, we see where she plans to sleep in this one-room apartment–on a sleeper sofa in the middle of the room. This always made the idea of sleeper sofas seem so glamorous to me. That is, until I had to sleep on one and realized how uncomfortable they are!

This shot shows the wall next to the door, with her famous “M” on the wall.

A view of the wall with the tiny kitchen to the left, the wood-burning fireplace, and the door to the walk-in closet and bathroom to the right:

I love this shot because you can see that the ceilings are vaulted and beamed:

In this shot you can see that there are hardwood floors in the apartment, and that the shag carpeting is an area rug, not wall-to-wall as it sometimes appeared (at least on the “lower level” of the room). The furniture moves around a lot from scene to scene. Sometimes the sofa has its back to the window. Other times it is off to the right, like it is in this scene with Phyllis (the hilariousCloris Leachman):

I was always kind of fascinated by this cute little kitchen:

It could be open to the main room, or Mary could pull down this window to close it off:

Here’s a look inside the teeny kitchen, with the window closed. Mary and Rhoda are looking in the mini fridge, hoping to find something to feed their guests who came expecting dinner. They find a carrot.

Here’s another view into the kitchen from the dining area, with the window up. There’s a pot rack that wasn’t there during the earlier kitchen scenes (the little girl is Bess, Phyllis’s daughter):

Can someone explain to me how Rhoda managed to live upstairs from Mary, even though Mary’s on the third floor? Never figured that one out. Another head-scratcher: where is that octagonal window, which you can see in this shot, on the front of the house?

Here’s a cast photo from a later season that shows bookshelves on another wall (the door to the hall is to the left of Gavin MacLeod and Betty White):

Mary Tyler Moore Show Trivia:

1. Test audiences hated the show. Rhoda was “too New York.” Mary was “a loser.” And Phyllis was “too abrasive.”
2. CBS originally gave “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” a terrible time slot on Tuesday nights against “Mod Squad,” which was the #1 show on TV at the time. It was later “rescued” and moved to Saturday nights, where it thrived, but it wasn’t a big hit right away.
3. The writers intended for Mary Richards to be divorced and leaving a bad marriage behind. In 1970, this was deemed too controversial, so CBS made them change it. Instead, she comes to Minneapolis after her boyfriend of 2 years refuses to marry her.
4. Gavin MacLeod was originally considered for the role of Lou Grant, but he asked to read for the part of Murray Slaughter instead. Murray was going to be Mary’s nemesis at the news room, but after Gavin was cast and the writers could see the friendly chemistry between the two, his character was rewritten.

To see photos of the house today: Inside the Queen Anne Victorian from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

Click Here to see more TV Houses, from Brothers & Sisters to Gossip Girl.

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