Category: Trivia

10 Fascinating Facts About “Blade Runner”

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Rebecca Pahle and Mental_Floss present 10 Fascinating Facts About Blade Runner.  Here are three of my favorites…

3. DUSTIN HOFFMAN ALMOST PLAYED DECKARD.
At various times during development, Blade Runner’s original screenwriter, Hampton Fancher, pictured Robert Mitchum, Christopher Walken, and Tommy Lee Jones as Rick Deckard. Ridley Scott wanted to go in a completely different direction by casting Dustin Hoffman, whom he later acknowledged didn’t really fit the type. “I figured, unlikely though he may be in terms of his physical size as a sci-fi hero, as an actor Hoffman could do anything,” explained Scott. “Therefore, it really didn’t matter.”

Hoffman, Scott, Fancher, producer Michael Deeley, and production executive Katherine Haber worked on the film for months, workshopping Deckard’s character and shifting the script in a more “socially conscious” (Scott’s words) direction until Hoffman abruptly dropped out in October of 1980. “Frankly,” Scott later said, “I think it might have been something as simple as money.”

8. PHILIP K. DICK REFUSED TO DO A NOVELIZATION.
Dick was approached about penning a Blade Runner novelization, for which he would get a cut of the film’s merchandising rights. “But they required a suppression of the original novel,” Dick explained, “in favor of the commercialized novelization based on the screenplay,” so he refused. “Blade Runner’s people were putting tremendous pressure on us to do the novelization—or to allow someone else to come in and do it, like Alan Dean Foster. But we felt that the original was a good novel. And also, I did not want to write what I call the ‘El Cheapo’ novelization.” At one point, Blade Runner’s team threatened to refuse Dick and his publishers access to the film’s logo or stills (essentially, subsequent printings would not be able to cite the book as the inspiration for Blade Runner), but they eventually backed down.

10. IT’S CURSED.
It might not be quite as hardcore-cursed as Poltergeist or The Omen, but Blade Runner has a curse of its own … on the businesses whose logos appear in the film. Atari, Pan Am, RCA, Cuisinart, and Bell Phones all suffered severe business problems in the years shortly afterBlade Runner’s release, as did Coca-Cola, whose 1985 “New Coke” experiment was less than successful. Members of the Blade Runner production team refer to this as the “product-placement Blade Runner curse.”

12 Dusty Facts About “Unforgiven”

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Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 12 Dusty Facts About Unforgiven.  Here are three of my favorites…

4. EASTWOOD WAS INITIALLY STEERED AWAY FROM THE MOVIE.
Sonia Chernus, a longtime associate of Eastwood’s (and screenwriter of The Outlaw Josey Wales), read The Cut-Whore Killings in the 1980s and was appalled by it. She wrote Eastwood this memo: “We would have been far better off not to have accepted trash like this piece of inferior work … I can’t think of one good thing to say about it. Except maybe, get rid of it FAST.” (It may be worth noting that Chernus was in her seventies at the time, and the script was full of profanity and violence.) Eastwood took her advice and didn’t read the script. Then, while looking for someone to rewrite a different project, he read The Cut-Whore Killings as a sample of Peoples’ work, not realizing it was the screenplay Chernus had warned him away from.

7. THEY BUILT A PRETTY CONVINCING WESTERN TOWN.
Eastwood’s production designer, Henry Bumstead, and his team built the main set for the 1880s town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming on a lonesome prairie in Alberta from which no signs of modern civilization could be seen in any direction. The nearest big city was Calgary, 60 miles away. For authenticity—and since so much of the movie was to be shot on this set—all of the buildings were fully functional (and expensive), not just facades.

11. THE FINAL PRODUCT SHOWS ALMOST NO CHANGES FROM THE ORIGINAL SCRIPT.
That’s a rarity in Hollywood, where even the best screenplays are tinkered with as they’re converted from words on a page into images on a screen. Eastwood had some ideas for revising Peoples’ script, too, only to discover that “the more I fiddled with it, the more I realized I was screwing it up.” All he ended up changing was the title. According to Peoples, Frances Fisher—who plays Strawberry Alice—told him “that this was the first time she saw a shooting script that was entirely in white. Most of them are multicolored, full of blue and red pages or whatever representing various changes in the screenplay.”

12 Nosy Facts About “Chinatown”

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Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 12 Nosy Facts About Chinatown.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. IT WOULDN’T EXIST IF ROBERT TOWNE HADN’T BEEN FRIENDS WITH JACK NICHOLSON. 
The screenwriter and the actor were good friends, even roommates at one point, and they’d studied acting together. Towne has said repeatedly that he wrote the lead role specifically for Nicholson: “I could not have written that character without knowing Jack.” Furthermore, it was while visiting Nicholson in Oregon, where he was directing Drive, He Said, that Towne started reading Raymond Chandler detective novels and a book about the history of California water rights, all of which led to Chinatown.

9. WE DON’T KNOW ANYTHING THAT J.J. GITTES DOESN’T KNOW. 
This is the sort of detail that’s either “well, duh” obvious, or that blows your mind a little when you realize it. The film is entirely from Gittes’ point of view: he’s in every scene, and there’s no information that we learn before he does. When he gets a phone call, we hear the voice but don’t see the person at the other end. When he gets knocked unconscious in the orange grove, the movie fades with him, fading back in when he wakes up. To emphasize the point that we’re seeing everything from Gittes’ perspective, Polanski often put the camera behind Nicholson, so we see his back and shoulders. Watch for it.

12. THERE’S A RECURRING VISUAL MOTIF THAT SHOWS UP OVER AND OVER—AND IT’S THERE ACCIDENTALLY.
Chinatown frequently shows us images of two things that are identical, except that one is flawed: Two pocket watches side by side, one broken. A pair of eyeglasses, one lens cracked. Gittes’ nostrils, one sliced. Gittes smashes one taillight on Evelyn’s car. He loses one shoe in the reservoir. Evelyn has a flaw in one of her irises. Katherine looks like a duplicate of Evelyn, but is the product of incest. The list goes on. But when Towne is asked about this on the DVD commentary, he says it was totally unintentional; he and Polanski never discussed using such images as a recurring theme. Whatever meaning we may ascribe to the symbolism, the filmmakers didn’t put it there on purpose.

15 Fab Facts About “Help!”

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Sarene Leeds and Mental_Floss present 15 Fab Facts About Help!  Here are three of my favorites…

1. HELP! WAS ALMOST CALLED EIGHT ARMS TO HOLD YOU.
At first listen, “Eight Arms to Hold You” sounds like a nice idea: who wouldn’t want to be held by all four Beatles, right? But when Lester reveals that the Ringo Starr-suggested title was in fact a reference to the multi-armed statue of Kaili that appears in the film, and not a teenage girl’s fantasy of being cradled by The Fab Four, much of the romantic element fades away. In the book accompanying the film’s 2007 DVD re-release, Lester claims that he had wanted to call the movie Help from the get-go, but the title had already been registered. Luckily, thanks to The Beatles’ lack of enthusiasm to write a song called “Eight Arms to Hold You” and a legal loophole involving an exclamation point, the film was able to proceed as Help!

3. THE MOVIE’S INTERNATIONAL LOCALES WERE REALLY JUST AN EXCUSE FOR THE BEATLES TO TRAVEL.
While A Hard Day’s Night stuck to the familiarity of London, Help! was a veritable travelogue, sending The Beatles to such far-flung destinations as the Bahamas and the Austrian Alps in their attempts to evade the evil Clang (Leo McKern) and his cult of Eastern sycophants. But as Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr revealed in Anthology interviews, the film’s travel budget was increased mainly because they wanted to go to the aforementioned locales. McCartney recalled how they would say to the writers, “We’ve never been to the Bahamas—could you write that in?” and “I’ve never been skiing. I wonder if you could write in a scene with skiing?”

But The Beatles learned the consequences of their actions the hard way: the weather in the Bahamas was freezing at the time (“It was absolutely bloody cold,” said Starr), and their crash course in skiing consisted of, according to the drummer, little more than being “edged down the mountain.”

10. THE MUSICAL NOTES IN THE “TICKET TO RIDE” SEQUENCE WERE PRODUCED OUT OF NECESSITY RATHER THAN CREATIVITY.

There’s a cute moment in the “Ticket to Ride” sequence where The Beatles are skiing in the Austrian Alps and they appear to ski right underneath part of the song’s musical score (it starts at around 1:27 in the above video). But as Lester explained in the 2007 documentary that accompanied the film’s DVD release, the decision to add musical notes came from the fact that the lads were skiing under some unsightly “telegraph wires” (Lester’s words; for all we know they could’ve been telephone wires). Since he couldn’t remove the wires digitally—this was the pre-CGI era, after all—he figured they’d make an ideal musical staff instead!

22 Fresh Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”

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Hollywood.com presents 22 Fresh Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.   Here are three of my favorites…

1.  The show was nearly canceled after the fourth season.  During the season finale, Will returns to Philly with the Banks to visit his mom and he decides to stay. Fresh Prince fans were so outraged by the show’s cancellation that NBC brought it back for two additional seasons.

7. Will Smith would memorize and mouth the other actors’ lines so that he could remember his own. If you look closely you can see him doing this in various episodes.

12. Alfonso Ribero who plays Carlton Banks in the series credits Eddie Murphy’s “white man dance” in Delirious and Courteney Cox in Bruce Spingsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” video for his iconic Carlton Dance.

15 Fiery Facts About “Barton Fink”

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Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 15 Fiery Facts About Barton Fink.

1. THE COEN BROTHERS WROTE IT WHILE STUCK ON MILLER’S CROSSING.
Writer-director siblings Joel and Ethan found themselves struggling with the script for their next project, 1990’s Miller’s Crossing, so spent three weeks writing a movie about a screenwriter with writer’s block. From the beginning, they knew that they wanted John Turturro involved in Barton Fink, and they planned to feature the concept of a “huge abandoned hotel.”

14. IT FORCED THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL TO CHANGE THEIR RULES.
Barton Fink won the Palme d’Or, Best Director, and Best Actor honors at Cannes. Because of the hat trick, the rules were changed so that no movie could ever win all three awards again.

15. THERE MIGHT BE A SEQUEL.
Joel said it would be called Old Fink, and they’re waiting for Turturro to be old enough to play Fink in 1967, after turning friends over to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

21 True Facts About “The Matrix”

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Who besides my wife doesn’t love The Matrix?

Hollywood.com presents 21 True Facts About The Matrix.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. The Wachowskis risked the film’s entire budget just to make it the way they wanted. 

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The original budget that the Wachowskis pitched Warner Bros. was over $80 million. Warner gave them $10 million, so they used all of it on the opening sequence with Trinity. The opening scene impressed executives at Warner so much when they showed it, they green-lit the original budget.

2. The film differentiates the Matrix and the real world through color.

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The scenes that take place within the Matrix are tinted green; those that happen in the real world have more of a normal coloring. The fight scene between Neo and Morpheus has a yellow tint, since it takes place in neither.

12. Other actors considered to play Neo were Nicolas Cage, Tom Cruise, and Leonardo DiCaprio.

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Thankfully, Keanu won out. He’s really the only Neo we can imagine. #canttouchthis

14 Things You Might Not Know About “Ghost”

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Garin Pirnia and Mental_Floss present 14 Things You Might Not Know About Ghost.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. WHOOPI GOLDBERG CREDITS HER OSCAR WIN TO PATRICK SWAYZE.
On The View, Goldberg revealed that she only got the role of Oda Mae Brown because Swayze fought for her. The producers resisted casting her, but Swayze told them he wasn’t doing the film unless Whoopi was in it, too, and that she was right for the part—even though at that point she and Swayze had never met. “And I won an Oscar because of Patrick Swayze,” Goldberg said. In her 1991 Oscar speech, she thanked Swayze, calling him “a stand-up guy.”

4. DIRECTOR JERRY ZUCKER SAID HE’D CAST PATRICK SWAYZE “OVER MY DEAD BODY.”
In a video that appears on the Ghost DVD, screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin—who won an Oscar for his script—talks about how Zucker was at first against casting Swayze as Sam. “Jerry wanted to see him on film, so went out and saw the movie Roadhouse, and we walked out of that movie and Jerry said to me, ‘Over my dead body,’” recalls Rubin. Swayze really wanted the role, and because Zucker appreciated Swayze’s gusto, he let Swayze audition. After Swayze read the end of the script aloud, Zucker changed his mind. “We all had tears in our eyes, right there in the office—and we knew how it ends,” Zucker told People in 1990. “I saw a side of Patrick that I never knew existed.”

3. GHOST TURNED DEMI MOORE INTO THE HIGHEST-PAID ACTRESS AT THE TIME.
By the time Ghost was released, Moore was already famous for her roles in St. Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night…, but she wasn’t considered a bankable star. After the unexpected $200 million domestic gross of Ghost, she hit box office gold with a trifecta of other huge hits: 1992’s A Few Good Men ($141,340,178), 1993’s Indecent Proposal ($106,614,059), and 1994’s Disclosure ($83,015,089). If you add up all of Demi’s film grosses, it comes out to more than $1 billion. In 1995, she was paid an unprecedented $12.5 million to take her clothes off in Striptease. The film wasn’t a huge hit, and a few years later she traded Hollywood for Idaho.

A Few Facts About Lucille Ball

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Eddie Deezen and Neatorama present A Few Facts You May Not Know About Lucille Ball.  Here are three of my favorites…

* Lucy was born a brunette. She later was a blond model. It wasn’t until she was pushing 30 that Lucy first dyed her hair the world-famous red color. She became a redhead to appear in the 1943 movie Du Barry Was a Lady.

* Lucy had no eyebrows. For her first movie role inRoman Scandals (1933) she shaved her eyebrows off. (She played a slave girl.) They never grew back.

* Lucy was terrified of birds. Because birds were her main phobia, Lucy refused to stay in any hotel room that had pictures of birds or had birds on the wallpaper. No birds or pictures of birds were ever allowed in her home.

16 Biting Facts About “Fright Night”

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Jennifer M. Wood and Mental_Floss present 16 Biting Facts About Fright Night.  Here are three of my favorites…

2. PETER VINCENT MADE THE STORY CLICK.
It wasn’t until Holland conceived of the character of Peter Vincent, the late-night horror movie host played by Roddy McDowall, that he really found the story. While discussing the idea with a department head at Columbia Pictures, Holland realized what The Boy Who Cried Vampire would do: “Of course, he’s gonna go to Vincent Price!” Which is when the screenplay clicked. “The minute I had Peter Vincent, I had the story,” Holland told Dread Central. “Charley Brewster was the engine, but Peter Vincent was the heart.”

5. RODDY MCDOWALL DID NOT WANT TO PLAY THE PART LIKE VINCENT PRICE.
Once he was cast, Roddy McDowall made the decision that Peter Vincent was nothing like Vincent Price—specifically: he was a terrible actor. “My part is that of an old ham actor,” McDowall told Monster Land magazine in 1985. “I mean a dreadful actor. He had a moderate success in an isolated film here and there, but all very bad product. Basically, he played one character for eight or 10 films, for which he probably got paid next to nothing. ..”

16. VINCENT PRICE LOVED THE MOVIE.
Holland had the chance to meet Vincent Price one night at a dinner party at McDowall’s. And the actor was well aware that McDowall’s character was based on him. “I was a little bit embarrassed by it,” admitted Holland. “He said it was wonderful and he thought Roddy did a wonderful job. Thank God he didn’t ask why he wasn’t cast in it.”

15 Fast Facts About “Days of Thunder”

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Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 15 Fast Facts About Days of Thunder.  Here are three of my favorites…

6. AS WITH SO MANY THINGS, WE CAN THANK PAUL NEWMAN FOR THE FILM’S EXISTENCE.
The legendary actor and part-time racer shared his enthusiasm for motorsports with Tom Cruise when they made The Color of Money together. The two were then introduced to NASCAR team owner Rick Hendrick (the inspiration for Randy Quaid’s character), who let budding racing enthusiast Cruise drive a stock car himself. Cruise’s reaction after taking a car around the track at 175 mph: “Hey, we gotta make a movie about this!”

12. AS YOU’D EXPECT, THE RACING SCENES WERE FILMED WITH THE CARS GOING MUCH SLOWER THAN THEY USUALLY WOULD: ONLY 120 MPH.
That’s down from the 200 miles per hour those cars would do in a real race. And still, even at a reduced speed, the work was dangerous. Tony Scott told The New York Times, “There’s a major crash in the middle of the movie at speeds of 120 to 140 miles an hour manned by stunt drivers. Things happen to metal at 140 miles an hour that don’t happen at 60 miles an hour.” Despite that, Scott boasted that the total on-set injuries for the entire production only added up to 13 stitches.

15. THE SCENE WHERE NASCAR BOSS BIG JOHN THREATENS TO FIRE TRICKLE AND BURNS IF THEY BUMP EACH OTHER ON THE TRACK AGAIN—THEN FORCES THEM TO DRIVE TO DINNER TOGETHER—WAS BASED ON A REAL INCIDENT WITH GEOFF BODINE AND DALE EARNHARDT.
Bodine and Earnhardt did not, however, destroy two rental cars in the process. But such shenanigans were attributed to 1950s racers Curtis Turner and Joe Weatherly, who were the Cole Trickles of their day.