Follow That Dream (1962)
When the Kwimper family car runs out of gas on a new Florida highway and an officous state supervisor tries to run them off, Pop Kwimper digs in his heels and decides to do a little homesteading. He and his son Toby and their "adopted" children - Holly, Ariadne and the twins - start their own little community along a strip of the roadside. The fishing is good and the living is easy until the mob sets up a gambling operation and the state supervisor sics a sexy social worker on the Kwimpers in an effort to take away Ariadne and the twins.
Elvis hits the road to laughter and hits a new high in romance!
Holly Jones: I wonder where the road goes.
Toby Kwimper: It's hard to tell, just from looking at one end.
Crystal River, Florida, USA
Inverness, Florida, USA
Ocala, Florida, USA
Yankeetown, Florida, USA
The courtroom scene was filmed in the Citrus County Courthouse in nearby Inverness, Florida. When the courthouse was restored and made into the Old Courthouse Heritage Museum during the 1990s, photographs of the courtroom were scarce, since courtroom photography was not allowed there for many years. With permission from MGM, still photographs of the film were used as reference to recreate the look of the courtroom. As of 2009, the only known visual record of the original courtroom interior is that which is in Follow That Dream (1962).
Singer/songwriter Tom Petty claims that he first became obsessed with rock and roll after meeting Elvis Presley and watching him act and sing during the making of this movie. Petty's uncle was a crew member working on the film.
A part of SR40 was re-named "Follow that Dream Highway" in honor of this movie having been filmed there. A sign in Inglis, Florida (about 13 miles north of Crystal River) proclaims that fact. However none of the movie was made in Inglis, it was filmed in adjacent Yankeetown. The city council of Yankeetown declined to name their stretch of road after Elvis because of concerns in regards to his drug addictions in later years. As of November 19th 2011 the Mayor of Yankeetown issued a Dedication for the Yankeetown stretch of SR40 to be named Follow That Dream Parkway with a new sign directly under the Yankeetown sign was unveiled. The original Elvis Presley Fan Club-The Elvis Presley Continentals was in attendance for the Dedication.
Herman Raucher was hired to adapt the book "Pioneer, Go Home!" into a movie. The studio heads were displeased with the script he handed to them, saying that the dialogue didn't seem to fit the characters. Raucher told them that since the book didn't feature much dialogue for him to work with, he had to make up most of it up himself, and since he'd grown up in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, he had no idea what farm people sounded like. Raucher refused to re-write the dialogue, and an argument erupted between Raucher and the studio heads, with Raucher being fired from the project. Another writer, Charles Lederer, was called in to re-write the dialogue for Raucher's script, and Raucher received no credit for the work he'd done. In 1963, the script that Raucher had written was adapted into the play "Pioneer, Go Home!" Raucher recounts the story of his work on the movie and eventual firing in his book "There Should Have Been Castles."
While most of Elvis' movies were aimed squarely at Presley's teen-aged female fans, this one was clearly intended for family audiences.
Continuity
When baby Ariadne was in the homemade swing and Holly brought her the water from their 'well' in the Coca-Cola bottle as she was talking to Tobey each time the camera focused in on Holly with the baby behind her the coke bottle was in the baby's hand and the next shot on the ground with the water running all over the sand and then the next shot back in the baby's hand and then on the ground again.
When the tarpon is shown in the water during the fishing battle from the bridge, it's clearly out in open choppy water with the wake of a boat partially visible and the water rushing by as from a moving boat. But the water when viewed from the bridge is calm bay water.
When Toby and Holly are talking about her being "practically a woman," Holly's shirt goes from being tucked into her pants, to being pulled out, and to tucked in again.
Factual errors
The kids are seen trying to knock coconuts out of the palm trees and later you see several coconuts lying on the ground. The problem is that the trees are not coconut palms, but sable palms which have no coconuts.
Revealing mistakes
When Pop Quimper is supposedly playing the guitar while Toby is singing, in more than one place, his hands move when there is no sound and when there is, they are back where they were originally, making it obvious that he is not really playing.
Miscellaneous
All the exterior shots of the gambling trailer show it to be a single wide, but all the interior shots show it to be much bigger and obviously a double wide.
Crew or equipment visible
When Pop is telling the governor that he plans to homestead the land, in one of the shots facing the beach, there is a middle-age man wearing a green short-sleeve shirt watching from the background.