Category: Celebs

10 Surprising Facts About Burt Reynolds

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James L. Menzies and Mental_Floss present 10 Surprising Facts About Burt Reynolds.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. HE TURNED DOWN SOME MAJOR ROLES.
Over the course of a near-60-year career, one is bound to pass on some prime roles. And Reynolds has turned down a lot, including (by his own admission in the video above) Han Solo in Star Wars, R.P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Edward Lewis in Pretty Woman, and John McClane in Die Hard. Although he doesn’t regret that final one: “I don’t regret turning down anything Bruce Willis did,” Reynolds told Piers Morgan.

More notably, and perhaps more regrettably, Reynolds turned down a chance to play James Bond in 1969. As Reynolds explains it: “In my infinite wisdom, I said to [producer] Cubby Broccoli, ‘An American can’t play James Bond. It just can’t be done.’ And they really tried to talk me into it. It was a 10-minute discussion. Finally they left. Every night, I wake up in a cold sweat.”

5. HE HAD AN IMPROMPTU PIE FIGHT WITH MARC SUMMERS ON THE TONIGHT SHOW.

Burt Reynolds had just finished up his segment as a guest on The Tonight Show with Jay Lenoin 1994 and had shifted over to make way for the next guest, TV show host Marc Summers (Double Dare, Unwrapped). Reynolds became visibly irritated with Summers for, ostensibly, turning his back on him while he was speaking to Leno. Summers then made the comment to Reynolds, “I’m still married, by the way.” This jab precipitated a water fight between the two combatants: Reynolds dumped his mug on Summers’s lap, Summers retaliated, so on and so forth. The donnybrook culminated in a rather violent pie fight followed by a very awkward hug.

“This was not a bit,” Summers explained. “I didn’t know what to expect. He was going through a divorce with Loni Anderson at the time and he was angry … He hugged me and said, ‘I only did that because I really like you.’ You wait to get on The Tonight Show your whole life. You’re sitting next to Burt Reynolds. He drops water on your crotch then you get into a pie fight!”

6. HE (TICKED) OFF ELMORE LEONARD.
Reynolds was a longtime admirer of writer Elmore Leonard. After reading Leonard’s novel,Stick, Reynolds decided that he wanted to direct and star in the film version. Things did not go well.

After watching Reynolds’s first cut of the film, the studio pushed back its release date and forced him to re-shoot the second half of the movie, much to the actor/director’s dismay. “I turned in my cut of the picture and truly thought I had made a good film,” Reynolds told theLos Angeles Times. “Word got back to me quickly that the [studio] wanted a few changes … I gave up on the film. I didn’t fight them. I let them get the best of me.”

The biggest blow came from Elmore Leonard. “Leonard saw the film the day he was interviewed for a Newsweek cover and told them he hated it,” Reynolds shared. “After his comment, every critic attacked the film and he wouldn’t talk to me. When I reshot the film, I was just going through the motions. I’m not proud of what I did, but I take responsibility for my actions. All I can say—and this is not in way of a defense—is if you liked the first part of Stick, that’s what I was trying to achieve throughout.”

15 Critical Facts About “ER”

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Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 15 Critical Facts About ER.  Here are three of my favorites…

2. GEORGE CLOONEY “BEGGED” FOR AN AUDITION.
“George Clooney begged me for a part,” said executive producer John Wells. The 33-year-old was by that time a TV veteran who hadn’t yet found his breakout role (one of his earlier roles had been on a short-lived 1984 CBS sitcom titled E/R). “George was the first person to audition. He came after me for it,” recalled Wells. “Our second day in the office, George showed up and wouldn’t leave until I’d let him audition … George got his hands on the material and was like a dog with a bone.”

12. SOME ACTORS ASKED TO BE KILLED OFF.
Maura Tierney, who played Dr. Abby Lockhart from 1999 to 2009, asked to be killed off. Instead, she was given a juicy enough storyline that she was okay with sticking around until the end of the series. When Edwards told John Wells that he was leaving the show after eight seasons, Wells said that Dr. Greene was too important a character to just walk away from the show, so he asked Edwards: “‘Do you mind if we kill him?’ And I was like, ‘Nope!’ You’ve gotta do what’s best for the show, so that’s okay.” When Kellie Martin decided her character, Lucy Knight, wasn’t working for her, she requested that her departure be made “big.”

15. THE SHOW SAVED LIVES.
A 28-year-old woman in Texas discovered she had a brain tumor because her tongue went out to the side, just like Dr. Greene’s tongue did when his brain tumor returned. The woman’s tumor was caught early and she survived. A USC study found that subjects were 65 percent more likely to change their eating habits if they watched the episode about obesity. And a 2002 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation discovered viewers “increased their knowledge”of HPV and contraception after viewing episodes of the show.

9 Great Remake Cameos from the Original Movie’s Stars

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Christopher Campbell and Film School Rejects present 9 Great Remake Cameos from the Original Movie’s Stars.

My favorite of those listed is the same as Christopher Campbell’s — Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers…

McCarthy shows up near the start of the movie hysterically running through the street, just as he’d been seen doing at the end of the first version from 1956. It’s like a passing of the torch in a way.

Although Michael Caine’s appearance in the Get Carter remake didn’t make the list, it is also a favorite of mine.

15 Creepy Facts About “Carrie”

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Jennifer M. Wood and Mental_Floss present 15 Creepy Facts About Carrie.  Here are three of my favorites… [Beware of Spoilers!]

5. THE STARS OF CARRIE COULD HAVE BEEN THE STARS OF STAR WARS.
Brian De Palma ended up casting for Carrie at the same time his good friend George Lucas was doing the same for a little sci-fi film he was making called Star Wars. So the two made the rather unorthodox decision to hold joint auditions, which ended up becoming a bit confusing. De Palma liked Amy Irving for the lead in Carrie, but she was also considered for Princess Leia in Star Wars. William Katt also auditioned for Star Wars, alongside Kurt Russell.

7. BRIAN DE PALMA DIDN’T SEE SISSY SPACEK AS CARRIE.
Though De Palma was a fan of Spacek’s work, he was convinced that he had already found his Carrie in another actress. His decision to let Spacek audition at all was mostly out of courtesy to her husband, Jack Fisk, the film’s art director. “He told me that if I wanted to, I could try out for the part of Carrie White,” Spacek recounted to Rolling Stone. “There was another girl that he was set on and unless he was really surprised, she was the one. I hung up and decided to go for it.”

Spacek showed up at her audition in an old dress she hadn’t worn since grade school and with her hair slicked back with Vaseline. When she was done, she waited in the parking lot while her husband reviewed her audition with the rest of the production team. After Fisk came out to tell her that the part was hers, “We sped off before anybody could change his mind,” Spacek said.

13. SPACEK LOVED TO WITNESS MOVIEGOERS’ REACTIONS TO THE ENDING.
“When I was in New York, and Carrie came out, I would go to theaters just for the last five minutes of the film to watch everyone jump out of their chairs,” Spacek recalled. “People are all relaxed. The music is really beautiful and relaxing, and all of a sudden that comes up, and people just go crazy.” [I saw Carrie at a midnight movie during the original theatrical release and had no  idea of the shocking ending.  I jumped out of my seat and probably scared others around me worse than the movie. – Craig]

10 Starry Facts About “Contact”

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Marc Mancini and Mental_Floss present 10 Starry Facts About Contact.  Here are three of my favorites for a movie that I really like and feel is totally under-rated… [Beware of Spoilers!]

1. ITS OPENING SHOT SET AN INDUSTRY RECORD.

Contact begins with a close-up of our home planet. At first, a babel of ’90s radio broadcasts nearly deafens the audience. But as the camera pulls back and Earth grows smaller and smaller, iconic audio clips that were recorded 20, 30, and even 100 years ago greet our ears—only to fade seconds later. By the time our galaxy recedes into an endless cosmic backdrop, there’s nothing left but silence.

This is one of the most ambitious sequences in cinema history. The completely digital intro lasted for 4170 uninterrupted frames, making it the longest computer-generated shot that had ever appeared in a live-action film at the time. Great pains were taken to capture the look of deep space. On the special edition DVD commentary, visual effects supervisor Stephen Rosenbaum recalls getting started by gathering “absolutely incredible” Hubble snapshots of “distant galaxies and stars and other interstellar phenomenon … We laid out what we liked and said, ‘Okay, how can we pass through some of this? How can we combine it together into something [that’s] visually stunning?’”

Brilliant as it is, however, the moment ignores physical law. Just ask Neil deGrasse Tyson. If one could really overtake the radio signals, he argues, “you would hear them in reverse.” Still, the good doctor acknowledges that—for artistry’s sake—everything needed to sound intelligible. “[They] couldn’t have gotten it right and still had the scene work,” Tyson concedes, “so they had to do it the way they did.”

8. MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY REFUSED TO DELIVER A CERTAIN LINE. 
Late in the final script, McConaughey’s character—a self-described “man of the cloth without the cloth” named Palmer Joss—says “My God was too small.” Though Druyan really liked this line, McConaughey called it sacrilegious and wouldn’t say it. Later on, the two talked at length about faith and became good friends (despite differences of opinion).

9. NASA FLATLY DENIES ONE OF THE FILM’S INSINUATIONS. 
In the movie’s third act, a stunned Arroway receives a cyanide pill before entering the pod. According to Zemeckis, Sagan swore that this just-in-case practice was observed “on every single [NASA] mission.” However, Apollo 13 veteran James Lovell has dismissed the idea, writing “many people have asked me ‘Did you have suicide pills on board?’ We didn’t, and I never heard of such a thing in the 11 years I spent as an astronaut and a NASA executive.”

12 High Stakes Facts About “Casino”

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Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 12 High Stakes Facts About Casino.  Here are three of my favorites… [Beware of Spoilers!]

1. IT ONLY EXISTS BECAUSE THE REAL GUY IT’S BASED ON WAS A BIG DE NIRO FAN.
The main character, Sam “Ace” Rothstein, is based on Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, who was retired and living in Florida when writer Nicholas Pileggi came around wanting to write a book about his career. Rosenthal didn’t actively oppose the project, but he had no interest in helping, either—until he found out that Martin Scorsese planned to make Pileggi’s eventual book into a movie, and that Robert De Niro would probably be the star. Then he perked up, asking Pileggi (who also wrote GoodFellas) if he could arrange a meeting with De Niro. Next thing Pileggi knew, formerly reticent associates of Rosenthal’s were coming out of the woodwork, offering their cooperation.

5. JOE PESCI LOOKED SO MUCH LIKE THE REAL GUY THAT SOME CASINO PIT BOSSES DID DOUBLE-TAKES.
Pesci bore some natural resemblance to Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, the violent psychopath who busted heads for Rosenthal, and upon whom his character—Nicky Santoro—was based. In makeup, he looked even more like Spilotro—so much so that, according to Pileggi, when Pesci entered the casino where the movie was being shot, some pit bosses who’d had personal dealings with Spilotro “almost fainted.”

6. ACCORDING TO SCORSESE, THE FILM HAS “NO PLOT AT ALL.”
“There’s no plot at all,” Scorsese said in an interview included on the Blu-ray. “It’s three hours, no plot. So you know this going in. There’s a lot of action, a lot of story, but no plot.”

14 Crazy Facts About “Psycho”

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Scott Weinberg and Mental_Floss present 14 Crazy Facts About Psycho.  Here are three of my favorites… [Beware of Spoilers!]

5. HITCHCOCK FINANCED THE FILM.
Paramount had all sorts of cold feet regarding the project, which prompted Hitchcock to both pay for the film out of his own pocket and forgo his (rather substantial) director’s fee in exchange for 60 percent ownership of the film. This highly uncommon arrangement put a whole lot of money in Hitchcock’s pocket. (Bad move, Paramount.) Plus the film doesn’t even belong to Paramount anymore; it’s been a Universal title since 1968.

12. LATE MOVIEGOERS WEREN’T ALLOWED IN.
Not only was Hitchcock intent on keeping the film under wraps until the last possible minute—he also instructed theaters to not allow anyone in once the film had started. And they did it!

14. THE MOVIE EARNED HITCHCOCK HIS FINAL OSCAR NOMINATION.
Psycho marked the fifth and final time that Hitchcock would earn an Oscar nomination for Best Director. (The Academy gave him the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1968.) Yes, you read that right: Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar for directing. Let that sink in for a bit. [Hard to believe, isn’t it? – Craig]

13 Fascinating Facts About “The Thing”

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James L. Menzies and Mental_Floss present 13 Fascinating Facts About The Thing.  Here are three of my favorites… [Beware of Spoilers!]

4. A DOUBLE AMPUTEE WAS USED TO CREATE THE FILM’S QUINTESSENTIAL SPECIAL EFFECT.
One of the most memorable scenes in the movie (often referred to as the “chest chomp”) occurs when Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) attempts to revive Norris (Charles Hallahan) with a defibrillator. As he presses the paddles to his patient’s skin, Norris’ chest opens up and Copper’s forearms disappear into the cavity, where they are severed below the elbow by a set of jaws inside Norris’ chest.

In order to pull this off, special makeup effects designer Rob Bottin (known for his work onRobocop, Total Recall, Se7en, and Fight Club) found a man who had lost both of his arms below the elbow in an industrial accident. Bottin fit the man with two prosthetic forearms consisting of wax bones, rubber veins, and Jell-O. Then, for the wide-angle shot, he fit the man with a skin-like mask taken from a mold of Dysart’s face (à la Hannibal Lecter) and placed the ersatz arms into the chest cavity, where a set of mechanical jaws clamped down on them. As the actor pulled his arms away, the Jell-O arms severed below the elbows. The rest is practical effects history.

6. KURT RUSSELL ALMOST KILLED HIMSELF WITH A STICK OF DYNAMITE.
Russell threw an actual stick of dynamite during a scene toward the end of the film. He did not, however, anticipate it being so powerful. Russell was literally blown backwards after the device detonated; this take was left in the film.

13. AN ALTERNATE ENDING WAS FILMED, JUST IN CASE.
John Carpenter and editor Todd Ramsay shot and cut an alternate ending to the film that was never used. Ramsay was concerned that the bleak, ambiguous ending would not test well with audiences, so he suggested that Carpenter cover his bases and have a spare ending ready to go. They filmed an additional scene where lead character MacReady (Kurt Russell) is rescued and appears in a room where he is given a blood test to determine whether he has been assimilated, which he passes. Fortunately for fans of the film, this alternate finale was not needed as Carpenter stood firmly behind the movie he had made—ambiguous ending and all

18 So Cool Facts About “True Romance”

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Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 18 So Cool Facts About True Romance.  Here are three of my favorites… [Beware of Spoilers!]

2.TONY SCOTT WANTED TO DIRECT BOTH TRUE ROMANCE AND RESERVOIR DOGS.
Because he was still new to the business, Tarantino knew he couldn’t direct both movies. So he gave both scripts to Tony Scott and told him to pick one. Though Scott wanted both of the films, he ended up choosing True Romance, leaving Tarantino to make Reservoir Dogs.

7. TOM SIZEMORE GOT JAMES GANDOLFINI IN THE MOVIE.
Sizemore was initially cast as Gandolfini’s character, Virgil. But he wasn’t comfortable with a scene that required him to beat up Patricia Arquette, so he asked to play Cody Nicholson instead. When Scott asked Sizemore who should play Virgil instead, he suggested Gandolfini, a then-unknown actor whom he knew from the New York theater world.

16. SCOTT CHANGED TARANTINO’S ENDING.
Quentin had Clarence die; Scott decided that the movie deserved a happier ending. The only other difference between Tarantino’s script and Scott’s interpretation was presenting the movie linearly; Tarantino wrote True Romance as a nonlinear adventure, similar to the style ofReservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

13 Close-Up Facts About “Sunset Boulevard”

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Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 13 Close-Up Facts About Sunset Boulevard.   Here are three of my favorites… [Beware of Spoilers!]

1. MAE WEST WAS BILLY WILDER’S FIRST CHOICE TO STAR.
Initially, writer-director Wilder envisioned the movie as a straightforward comedy, and the famously saucy West seemed like a perfect fit. But she wanted to rewrite her dialogue (as was her custom)—a nonstarter for Wilder, who seldom let his actors change their lines even slightly from what was on the page. It’s probably just as well, since the darker, more nuanced story that eventually emerged was quite different from West’s wheelhouse anyway. [I can’t imagine the movie having near the impact if done as a comedy. Although Mae West in a drama/tragedy would have been interesting. – Craig]

6. THE UNDERWATER SHOT WAS NOT FILMED UNDERWATER.
One of the few showy bits of camerawork in the film is near the beginning, when the corpse floating in Norma Desmond’s pool is seen from underneath. But it was too difficult to put a camera underwater to get the shot, so Wilder and cinematographer John Seitz came up with an ingenious solution: they put a mirror on the bottom of the pool and filmed the reflection from above.

9. HEDY LAMARR WANTED $25,000 TO DO A CAMEO.
When Norma visits DeMille at Paramount, he’s in the midst of shooting Samson and Delilah, which really is what he was up to at the time. For added meta-truthfulness, Wilder wanted to have that film’s lead actress, Hedy Lamarr, be there too, so that DeMille could ask her to let Norma sit in her chair (you know, those behind-the-scenes chairs that have the star’s name on them). For this Lamarr wanted $25,000 (which would be about $250,000 in 2015 dollars). Wilder changed the scene so that DeMille offered Lamarr’s chair to Norma without Lamarr being present. But even to show a chair with her name on it, Lamarr wanted $10,000. So Wilder gave up, and DeMille (who was already being compensated) gave Norma his own chair.