Previews and Reviews that are Z's Views
ScreenRant presents 10 Movie Bloopers that Made it to the Final Cut.
Probably the most well known of the group is the Dustin Hoffman ad lib from Midnight Cowboy, but my favorite from this bunch is again Dustin Hoffman, but this time for Rain Man.
Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 13 Fascinating Facts About Dog Day Afternoon. Here are three of my favorites…
2. THE REAL BANK ROBBER LOOKED A LOT LIKE AL PACINO.
Fluge’s magazine article described John Wojtowicz as “a dark, thin fellow with the broken-faced good looks of an Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman,” so naturally the screenplay found its way into both actors’ hands. (Pacino was Lumet’s first choice, but Hoffman was reportedly approached when Pacino, seeking to take a brief break from movies, initially turned it down.) We see a bit more De Niro in Wojtowicz than Pacino or Hoffman, but Pacino was a good fit, too.
9. THEY LOST A DAY’S WORK BECAUSE OF PACINO’S MUSTACHE.
One of the things the actor did as a means of getting into character was grow a mustache—not because the real robber had one, but because the character was gay, and in the mid-’70s, many gay men had mustaches. In Lumet’s words, however, Pacino’s mustache “looked terrible.” And after the first day of filming, Pacino agreed. Watching the footage, Pacino told Lumet, “The mustache has got to go,” and asked if he could shave it and redo that day’s work. Lumet agreed, and the mustache was gone—as was a day’s worth of footage.10. IT’S THE ONLY TIME LUMET EVER INCORPORATED IMPROVISATION INTO ONE OF HIS MOVIES.
Sidney Lumet’s first film was 1957’s 12 Angry Men. He made 20 more between that and Dog Day Afternoon (and 22 more afterward), and by his own account, he never used improv. “I don’t like actors to improvise, to use their own language,” he said in the Dog Day AfternoonDVD commentary. “They are not going to come up with something … better than a really talented writer who has done months of work on something.”But as Lumet and the cast rehearsed Dog Day Afternoon—especially the parts where the robbers and bank employees are just sitting around killing time—someone asked about the possibility of improv, and Lumet realized it could be useful for helping the actors bond, as well as making the characters’s interactions feel more natural. With screenwriter Frank Pierson present, Lumet let the actors improvise in rehearsal; recorded it; and ended up adding some of their conversations to the script (which won the film’s only Oscar, by the way).
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.
Kristin Fawcett and Mental_Floss present 15 Facts About Silly Putty. I loved playing with Silly Putty when I was a little kid (for about 10 minutes). Here are three of my favorites…
3. SILLY PUTTY WAS FIRST MARKETED TOWARD ADULTS.
Silly Putty wasn’t a hit at the 1950 International Toy Fair. Still, buyers at Neiman-Marcus and Doubleday bookstores picked it up, and before long, the novelty item had received a shout-out in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section. Thanks to the New Yorker, Hodgson received more than 250,000 orders in three days.But Silly Putty really took off once the savvy marketing man identified a more lucrative customer base: children. Hodgson created a TV ad campaign for Silly Putty that’s today credited as one of the first commercials for kids. The strategy paid off; when Hodgson died in 1976, his estate was worth $140 million. Today, it would be worth close to $590 million.
7. IT ONCE LIFTED INK OFF NEWSPRINT.
Before Photoshop, crafty kids could digitally manipulate and distort images by placing Silly Putty over newspaper, lifting it off, and transferring the ink onto a new surface. Sadly, this is no longer the case; today’s newspapers are printed using nontransferable ink. [This is what was fun for me. Copying comic strip panels onto the Silly Putty. – Craig]14. ITS PRICE HAS NEVER CHANGED.
Silly Putty was first sold in 1950 for $1. Today, it retails for the same price—but don’t think you’re scoring the same deal as your parents or grandparents. Silly Putty eggs used to contain 1-ounce lumps. Now, they hold less than .5 ounces.
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.
When I was growing up it wasn’t unusual to see references to hobos in television shows and movies. These were men [can’t remember seeing or hearing of female hobos, but there must have been] who rode the rails, traveled the country, picking up odd jobs or a free meal before moving on to the next town.
Perhaps hobos are now lumped in the homeless category, although I think there is a difference.
Mental_Floss presents 15 Rules from the Hobo Ethical Code of 1889. I wish more people in 2015 followed the Hobo Code of over 100 years ago.
/Film recently posted Quentin Tarantino’s Original Pulp Fiction Cast Wish List.
Although it is hard to imagine anyone else in the key roles it is fun to think about the possibilities. Perhaps Stallone in the Bruce Willis role?
TopTenz and Kristine Alexander present 10 Famous Toys with Wildly Different Original Purposes. I’ve played with everyone of these toys except paintball.
Briff.me presents Breaking Bad: Secrets, Facts, Quotes and Rare Behind the Scenes Photos… [Beware of Spoilers!].
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]
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.”
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.”
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]
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
Sareen Leeds and Mental_Floss present 17 Wonderful (and Not So Wonderful) Facts About The Wizard of Oz. Here are three of my favorites… [Beware of Spoilers!]
2. GETTING DOROTHY HOME TO KANSAS WAS AN EASIER FEAT THAN MAINTAINING A DIRECTOR FOR THE WIZARD OF OZ.
Victor Fleming may be the one officially credited onscreen, but The Wizard of Oz can boast four directors. The first, Richard Thorpe, was fired after less than two weeks. George Cukor was brought in next, but he was summoned away to go work on—of all projects!—Gone With the Wind. Then Fleming stepped in, until he too was called over to assist with Gone With the Wind, and King Vidor was hired to complete the movie.6. FRANK MORGAN PLAYED NOT ONE, NOT TWO, BUT FIVE CHARACTERS IN OZ.
Most of the main actors in The Wizard of Oz played two roles: A Kansas character and his or her Oz counterpart. This meant Ray Bolger (Scarecrow), Jack Haley (Tin Man), and Bert Lahr (Cowardly Lion) doubled as farmhands, and Margaret Hamilton got wicked in both Kansas (Miss Gulch) and Oz (the Witch). But Frank Morgan, who portrayed the shady Professor Marvel in the Kansas scenes (and was only billed for that role in the credits), not only showed up in Oz as the Wizard, but also as the uppity Doorman to the Emerald City, the Horse-of-a-Different-Color-owning Cabbie, and the snippy (later, sobbing) Wizard’s Guard.12. MOVIE-MUSICAL VIRTUOSO BUSBY BERKELEY CHOREOGRAPHED AN EXTENDED (AND DELETED) VERSION OF “IF I ONLY HAD A BRAIN.”
Another casualty of the cutting room floor, this extended “If I Only Had a Brain” sequence showcased Ray Bolger’s deft control over his seemingly elastic body. It is also extremely trippy and gave the Scarecrow the inexplicable ability to fly—which wasn’t going to gel with the rest of the movie (if the Scarecrow could fly, then why didn’t he go one-on-one with the Wicked Witch?). Luckily for Berkeley, the decision to delete this part of the scene in no way hurt the legendary director-choreographer’s place in the annals of movie musical history.
