MOVIE MAGIC

ON A ROLE

Cary Grant was offered the role of James Bond and refused it before the producers offered it to Sean Connery.

Leonard Nimoy owned a pet store in the 1960s before playing Mr. Spock in Star Trek.

In the first Terminator film, Arnold Schwarzenegger had only 17 lines of dialogue.

David Niven’s voice had to be dubbed in on Curse of the Pink Panther by Canadian impersonator Rich Little. Niven was so ill while filming that he could not speak. It was his last role and he died the year the film was released, in 1983.

In the 1944 movie Arsenic and Old Lace, the character of Jonathan, a murderer on the run from the police, has his face accidentally disguised by his alcoholic accomplice to look like actor Boris Karloff in his famous role as Frankenstein’s monster. This was a reference to the fact that Karloff had played the role of Jonathan in the original stage production on which the movie was based.

Actress Taylor Fry, who played Lucy McClane, Bruce Willis’s character’s daughter in Die Hard, auditioned to reprise the role in the film’s third sequel Live Free or Die Hard, but was rejected.

Julia Roberts and Daniel Day-Lewis were the original actors cast as the leads in Shakespeare in Love; the roles eventually went to Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes.

Actress Maggie Smith, then 38 years old, played a character more than forty years older than her actual age in the film Travels with My Aunt. She was nine years younger than the actor playing her nephew in the film.

The role of Dr. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters was originally intended for John Belushi, but went to Bill Murray after Belushi’s death. Some people involved in the making of the film have suggested that Murray never even read the script and improvised most of his lines.

Richard Gere has played roles that John Travolta turned down three times with great success, in the movies An Officer and a Gentleman, American Gigolo, and Chicago. Sean Connery was originally approached to play Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs, but declined. Anthony Hopkins, who only appears in the film for 16 minutes, won an Oscar for the part—the shortest lead role to ever win an Oscar.

REEL LIFE

In 2007 a court in Naples, Italy, summoned Donald Duck, along with his girlfriend Daisy, Mickey Mouse, and Tweety Bird, to appear as damaged parties in the criminal trial of a Chinese man accused of counterfeiting products of Disney and Warner Bros. Lawyers think it was a clerical error.

 

Marilyn Monroe’s ex-husband Joe DiMaggio had fresh roses delivered to her crypt three times a week for 20 years after her death.

 

The real names of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were Dino Paul Croccetti and Jerome Levitch.

 

The inscription on Rodney Dangerfield’s tombstone reads: There goes the neighborhood.

 

The most copied noses in Hollywood are those of Heather Locklear, Nicole Kidman, and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

 

The real names of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were Frederic Austerlitz Jr. and Virginia Katherine McMath.

 

Film star Audrey Hepburn was fluent in English, French, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, and Italian, and was a member of the Dutch Resistance in World War II at age 15.

 

Before he became a film actor, Humphrey Bogart, as the house player for an arcade, charged 50 cents a game to people who wanted to play chess.

 

Before they became successful in show business, Charles Bronson and Jack Palance both labored as coal miners, as did Ava Gardner’s father.

David Manning was the name of a fictitious film critic created by a Sony employee to provide glowing reviews for the company’s upcoming movies in 2000. After the deception was discovered, Sony made an out-of-court settlement in 2005 promising to refund $5 to anyone who saw the affected movies during their theatrical runs: Hollow Man, The Animal, The Patriot, A Knight’s Tale, and Vertical Limit.

 

A new biography of Laurence Olivier suggests that he was recruited during World War II to be an undercover agent for the British government in America on the suggestion of Winston Churchill.

 

Iconic actresses and sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland have reportedly not spoken since 1975 due to a family feud.

 

Actor Clint Howard, brother of film director Ron Howard, is known to be an avid fan of the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, where he plays a Level 70 Orc Hunter named Extas.

FILM FLUBS

The man who opened the world’s first movie theater in Paris said, “The cinema is an invention without any commercial future.”

There were 207 spottable mistakes in Star Wars, the most found so far in any movie. Second highest was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets with 203 mistakes, and third was Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl with 201.

In the movie Rear Window, Grace Kelly is in a scene arguing with James Stewart, who is sitting in a wheelchair with a cast on his leg. The cast switches from his left leg to his right during the scene.

In the movie The Breakfast Club, Molly Ringwald’s character can be seen putting away her tube of lipstick twice after applying it in a memorable fashion by holding the tube in place with her cleavage.

In Camelot, when Richard Harris as King Arthur makes a speech praising his subjects and realm, he has a modern Band-Aid on his neck.

The 1948 comedy June Bride, which filmed two versions of a line that referenced the candidates to the 1948 presidency, opened in theaters with the wrong future president named. Thomas Dewey seemed a sure win, so the Dewey line was retained in the original release. When Harry Truman unexpectedly won the election, a revised reel was sent to theaters. Star Bette Davis, a Truman supporter, had her costar, Dewey supporter Robert Montgomery, send Dewey a gloating telegram.

Al Capone is shown living in a sumptuous Chicago mansion in the film The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In fact, he lived in a small house in a working-class district of the city.

The Bridge on the River Kwai won seven Oscars, but star Alec Guinness’s name was misspelled in the credits as Alec Guiness.

In the movie Gladiator, when one of the chariots flips over in the Coliseum, a gas tank can be seen on its undercarriage.

Although Mr. and Mrs. Smith is supposed to take place around New York City, in a chase scene a street sign can clearly be seen indicating they are in Los Angeles.

In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when Indiana is masquerading as a Scot to gain access to a Nazi strong-hold, the butler audibly says, “If you are a Scottish lord, then I am Mickey Mouse,” but the movements of his mouth indicate that he is actually saying “. . . then I am Jesse Owens,” which was the original line and was changed in post-production because the filmmakers felt that audiences wouldn’t get the joke.

In The Usual Suspects, when a character flings a lit cigarette at actor Stephen Baldwin and hits him in the face, Baldwin’s reaction is real as the cigarette was supposed to hit him in the chest.

TINSELTOWN MENAGERIE

Only three dogs have a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame: Strongheart, Rin Tin Tin, and Lassie.

Pete the Pup, a pit bull mix that appeared in the Our Gang shorts, had a fresh circle drawn around his right eye before every shoot.

The highest-paid animal actors are bears, which can earn $20,000 a day.

The 1967 film Doctor Dolittle featured the last performance of chimpanzee actor Cheeta, who appeared in many of the Tarzan films of the 1930s and 1940s. Now retired, Cheeta celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday on April 9, 2007, and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s oldest (non-human) primate.

CINEMA SNIPPETS

The longest film title was Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh-Eating, Hellbound Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D in 1991.

It took four months to synchronize the three-minute scene between live actors and animated skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts.

The DVD release of the 1999 Tim Allen comedy Galaxy Quest includes an alternate audio track in which dialogue from the film is overdubbed in the aliens’ “Thermian” language.

The 1999 movie South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut has the dubious distinction of containing the most swear words in any film, 399, and the most offensive gestures, 128.

Flutist Masakazu Yoshizawa was hired by composer John Williams to play the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute similar to a recorder, for the Jurassic Park soundtrack because he thought the instrument sounded like a dinosaur’s cry.

Legend has it that when Alfred Hitchcock bought the film rights for the novel on which Psycho is based, he bought as many copies of the book as he could find to try to keep audiences from discovering the ending.

Both Bruce Willis and his stunt double were injured in separate accidents during the filming of 2007’s Live Free or Die Hard.

The famous Omaha Beach landing sequence in Saving Private Ryan was actually filmed in Ireland. The 24-minute long scene cost $11 million and utilized about a thousand extras, including members of the IRA and actual amputees who portrayed U.S. soldiers maimed during the attack.

The music budget for the film Almost Famous, which includes more than 50 songs, was reported to be about $3.5 million, compared to less than $1.5 million on average for most films.

As of December 2007, the Disney film Toy Story 2 is the only film to have more than 100 positive reviews and no negative ones on the popular film review web-site www.rottentomatoes.com.

The 12 jurors in the movie 12 Angry Men are not called by their names during any of the deliberations; the only jurors whose names are discovered at the end of the movie are the last names of Joseph Sweeney and Henry Fonda’s characters—McArdle and Davis.

Madonna earned the Guinness World Record for most costume changes in a film for her role in Evita, beating Elizabeth Taylor’s record for Cleopatra. Madonna’s 85 costume changes included 39 hats, 45 pairs of shoes, and 56 pairs of earrings.

Babe, a family film about a talking pig, was initially banned in Malaysia due to its title and the fact that its subject matter was not halal.

The tag line for the 1963 comedy Under the Yum Yum Tree, starring Jack Lemmon as a lascivious landlord, was “A delicious sexual frolic for all Jack Lemmon fans!”

Tom Jones is the only film in history to have three cast members nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress—none of them won, though the film did win Best Picture.

The screenwriter for the film Sister Act requested that his name not appear on the final draft of the film since it had gone through many rewrites by other people. He initially suggested the writer’s credit be changed to “screenplay by Goofy,” but when that was rejected he came up with the pseudonym Joseph Howard.

The film Splash is often credited with popularizing the name “Madison” for girls, as that is the name the mermaid played by Darryl Hannah chooses for herself after seeing it on a street sign on Madison Avenue in New York City.

The band Aerosmith was stumped trying to find lyrics for what would become their hit song “Walk This Way” until they took a break and went to a screening of the movie Young Frankenstein, where they were inspired by the famous “walk this way” gag.

Among the actors cut out of the final version of The Thin Red Line during the editing process were Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Jason Patric, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Viggo Mortensen, and Mickey Rourke. John Travolta and George Clooney’s roles were significantly reduced as well.

The title of the film The Usual Suspects refers to a line in Casablanca.

All the characters in the movie His Girl Friday were originally supposed to be male, but the director liked the way his secretary read the male reporter’s lines and rewrote the script to make the character female and the ex-wife of Cary Grant’s character.

Dalton Trumbo, one of the writers of the classic Roman Holiday, was not credited on the film until its DVD release in 2003 as he was on the Hollywood blacklist when the film came out in 1953.

Before the MPAA film-rating system currently in use was established, films made for American audiences had to adhere to the U.S. Motion Picture Production Code. This code stated that, among other things, ridicule of religion, interracial relationships, and depictions of crimes (such as smuggling or arson) were forbidden, along with “revenge in modern times.” This sometimes necessitated changes when films were adapted from novels; for instance, in the novel Rebecca, the husband shoots his wife, while in the film he only thinks about killing her, whereupon she conveniently falls and is fatally injured.

Although A Christmas Story is set in Indiana, the house where main character Ralphie lived is on Cleveland’s West Side. It has been restored, reconfigured on the interior to match the soundstage layouts from the movie, and is open to the public.

In the movie Rosemary’s Baby, when Mia Farrow’s character calls another character on the phone, her real-life good friend, actor Tony Curtis, played the voice on the other line, unknown to her; thus her confusion on screen is real as she tries to place the familiar voice.

The director of the film Trainspotting has stated that he would like to make a sequel to the film but is waiting until the original actors have aged enough to show a passage of time. He jokingly commented that due to the natural vanity of actors, it might be a long wait.

Although the children’s movie Finding Nemo portrays the practice of catching fish for pets in a negative light, the movie’s popularity caused a surge in demand for pet clownfish (the species of the title character).

After the success of the movie Braveheart, a statue of Mel Gibson as William Wallace was placed outside the Wallace Monument in Scotland. This upset locals so much that someone vandalized the face of the statue, causing it to be locked in a cage at night for protection—ironically negating the word “freedom,” which is carved on the plinth.

A “dollar baby” is a term used by author Stephen King to describe the group of aspiring filmmakers or theater producers to whom he has granted permission to create a non-commercial adaptation of one of his short stories for one dollar. Currently about 50 such projects are known to have been made, including a short by director Frank Darabont, who went on to direct three more King stories and novels as feature films: The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist.

In 1994 Schindler’s List became the first Oscar-winning movie to also be nominated for an MTV Movie Award for Best Movie. It lost to Menace 2 Society , which was not nominated for any Oscars. The same year, Tom Hanks became the only Oscar winner for Best Actor to also win the Best Male Performance category at the MTV Awards, for his role in Philadelphia.

The 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries, while well-reviewed, could not be nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar because it had no specific country of origin as the cast, crew, director, and shooting locations were all affiliated with different nations; therefore, no country would claim it as their official entry.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was the first-ever fantasy film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. It won all eleven categories it was nominated in, tying the records of Titanic and Ben-Hur.

As of 2007 only five horror films have been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture: The Exorcist, Jaws, A Clockwork Orange, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Sixth Sense. The Silence of the Lambs was the only winner.

The film Exit to Eden was briefly banned in Saskatchewan upon its release, which puzzled many people as it was the only place to ban the film.

Although the English title of the 2006 Spanish film El Laberinto del Fauno is Pan’s Labyrinth, the director has stated that the faun who appears in the film is not meant to be the Greek god Pan.

M. Night Shyamalan has said that he got the idea for the plot of The Sixth Sense from an episode of the Nickelodeon TV series Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Some residents of Odessa, Texas, claim that the football team featured in the 1999 film Varsity Blues is based on their high school team the Permian Panthers. Whether or not this is true, the Panthers were the basis for the book, movie, and TV series Friday Night Lights.

The scene in the movie Entrapment where Catherine Zeta-Jones slinks her body through a maze of lasers was choreographed by the same man who choreographed the wand battles in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

The second film in the Austin Powers series, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, grossed more money in its opening weekend than the entire box-office take of the first film.

Disney’s 1999 animated film Tarzan had a budget of $150 million, making it currently the most expensive Disney animated film ever made.

The character of Elektra King from The World Is Not Enough is the only woman to be considered the main villain in a James Bond movie, as opposed to just an accomplice.

The line “You can’t handle the truth!” from A Few Good Men was voted the twenty-ninth greatest American movie quote of all time by the American Film Institute.

The DVD packaging for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III refers to the main characters as “American’s favorite amphibians,” though turtles are actually reptiles.

In the 1993 Demolition Man one of the names on the Los Angeles cryoprison’s prisoners list in 2032 is Scott Peterson—coincidentally that is the name of the man convicted in 2005 of murdering his wife, Laci, and their unborn child in a high-profile case.

For the movie The Interpreter, which is about political unrest in the fictitious African Republic of Matobo, the filmmakers hired the director of the Centre for African Language Learning in England to invent a language called Ku, which is actually a cross between the Swahili and Shona languages.

A FRESH TAKE

Success is a great deodorant. It takes away all your past smells.

Elizabeth Taylor

 

 

The duration of a film should not exceed the capacity of the human bladder.

Alfred Hitchcock