Hollywood Steps Out

Hollywood Steps Out
Merrie Melodies series
Title card from the Blue Ribbon reissue.
Directed by	Tex Avery
Produced by	Leon Schlesinger
Story by	Melvin Millar
Voices by	Kent Rogers (Additional Male Characters-uncredited) Mel Blanc (Jerry Colonna-uncredited) Sara Berner (All Female Characters-uncredited)
Music by	Carl W. Stalling
Animation by	Robert McKimson Virgil Ross Rod Scribner
Studio	Leon Schlesinger Productions
Distributed by	Warner Bros. Pictures
Release date(s)	May 24, 1941 (Original) October 2, 1948 (Blue Ribbon Re-Issue)
Color process	Technicolor
Language	English

Hollywood Steps Out is a 1941 short Merrie Melodies cartoon by Warner Bros., directed by Tex Avery. The cartoon features caricatures of Hollywood celebrities from the 1930s and early 1940s including Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Wallace Beery, Bing Crosby, Greta Garbo and Groucho Marx.

A large bird's-eye view of Los Angeles is shown with beams of light moving to a conga beat. The action takes place in the famed Ciro's nightclub, where the Hollywood stars are having dinner — at $50 ($814.14 today) a plate and "easy terms". The first stars seen are Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche and, at a table behind them, Adolphe Menjou and Norma Shearer, followed by Cary Grant, seated alone. Grant talks to himself: "What a place! What a place! It's as pretty as a picture. But if I ever told my favorite wife the awful truth I'd land right on the front page. Yessireee Bobby." (All these jokes are references to some of his films, although The Front Page was retitled His Girl Friday after the film was mostly completed.)

Then Greta Garbo comes along selling "cigars, cigarettes, butts." Grant buys some, tossing a quarter ($4.07 today) into her tray and asks her for a light. Garbo lifts her enormous foot on the table and strikes a match on the shoe, then lights Grant's cigarette. (Garbo in real life had an average women's shoe size of 8, but her penchant for wearing mannish footwear in public and house slippers on film sets led to a popular myth of her possessing very large feet, and this was caricatured repeatedly in Warner Brothers cartoons of the era.)