Category: Trivia

Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 16 Hardcore Facts About Full Metal Jacket. Here are three of my favorites…

2. VINCENT D’ONOFRIO GAINED 70 POUNDS TO PLAY LEONARD “GOMER PYLE” LAWRENCE.
In addition to the weight gain, D’Onofrio also shaved his head for the role, and was surprised by how much it affected him. ”It changed my life,” D’Onofrio told The New York Times in 1987. ”Women didn’t look at me; most of the time I was looking at their backs as they were running away. People used to say things to me twice, because they thought I was stupid.” To this day, it’s the most weight any actor has ever gained for a movie role.

5. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER AND BRUCE WILLIS TURNED DOWN ROLES.
Schwarzenegger claimed he was too busy to play Animal Mother (the part that eventually went to Adam Baldwin). Bruce Willis was offered a part two days before he was to start shooting the first six episodes of Moonlighting, so he had to say no, too. Denzel Washington wanted in, but didn’t like that Kubrick didn’t send out a script beforehand to audition.

9. JOKER HAD A NAME.
It was J.T. Davis. In 1961, Specialist James T. Davis was the first recorded American battlefield casualty in Vietnam.

Garin Pirnia and Mental_Floss present 14 Facts About Flashdance.  Here are three of my favorites…

8. KEVIN COSTNER AUDITIONED TO PLAY NICK HURLEY.
Costner, who didn’t become famous until the mid-1980s, auditioned for the role of Nick Hurley, Alex’s boss and love interest in the film. Lyne paid Costner $200 to lie in bed with Beals, but it apparently didn’t work for him as the part went to Michael Nouri. In a strange twist of fate, prior to auditioning for Flashdance, Costner starred in an Apple commercial directed by Lyne. The commercial aired a few months after the film was released and has an uncanny resemblance to Flashdance: Costner on a bike, with a brown pit bull running beside him.

12. THE STUDIO WASN’T BANKING ON A HIT.
Lyne told Entertainment Weekly how Paramount thought the movie would be a flop. “In the two weeks before Flashdance came out, I literally couldn’t get anybody on the phone,” he said. “It was like everybody had run for the hills because they thought it was gonna be a total disaster. I didn’t know either. Paramount sold at least a quarter of their interest in the film in those two weeks. In other words, they saw the film, and thought, ‘Well, this is gonna go down the toilet.’” Luckily for Paramount and Lyne, the film opened to a healthy $4 million gross, which would be almost $10 million today. The film remained in the top 10 weekend box office for 15 weeks straight.

2. THE SONG “MANIAC” WAS ORIGINALLY COMPOSED FOR THE 1980 HORROR FILM MANIAC.
Michael Sembello and Dennis Matkosky’s original lyrics for “Maniac” were as follows: “He’s a maniac, maniac that’s for sure / He will kill your cat and nail him to the door.”

“That direction obviously wasn’t going to work,” Sembello told Song Facts. “Phil Ramone, producer of the soundtrack, [had] the vision to see the potential of the song, [and] asked us to change it to the present concept of a girl possessed with the passion of a gift for dance.” Which is how the far less gruesome lines “She’s a maniac, maniac on the floor / And she’s dancing like she’s never danced before” came about. “Without Phil it would not have happened,” says Sembello.

Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 15 Fun Facts About Weird Science.  Here are three of my favorites…

9. THE SCENE WHERE GARY TALKS LIKE AN OLD AFRICAN-AMERICAN BLUESMAN WAS INSPIRED BY RICHARD PRYOR.
Hall recounted in an interview that he and John Hughes would “watch Richard Pryor movies on the weekend. And we would imitate this character called Mudball that Richard Pryor would do. And so it was really just a product of being Richard Pryor fans that John said, ‘Hey, why don’t we create this scene where you go into a bar and do that?’”

11. IT TAKES ITS TITLE FROM A 1950S COMIC BOOK, BUT OTHER SIMILARITIES ARE COINCIDENTAL.
EC Comics published 22 issues of Weird Science between 1950 and 1953, alongside more popular anthology titles like Tales from the Crypt. Hollywood mega-producer Joel Silver got the rights to all the old EC stuff in the ’80s, and Hughes was in his office one day when boxes of the comics were being delivered and unpacked. Seeing the title Weird Science, and thinking of a beautiful woman he and Silver had seen earlier that day, Hughes said, “What if two kids figure out a way to make that girl that was in the commissary?” This is according to Silver’s recollection, anyway. “I already had rights to the EC books, so that’s how I convinced them to let me have the title.” Now, there was a story in an issue of Weird Science that bore a superficial resemblance to Hughes’ idea—“Made of the Future,” in which a man builds a wife from a kit he got on a trip to the year 2150.

13. BILL PAXTON GOT HIS CHARACTER’S DISTINCTIVE MILITARY-STYLE HAIRCUT WITHOUT HUGHES’ PERMISSION.
His first day on the set, “I told [the film’s makeup artist] I wanted to do a haircut that was really intense,” Paxton told The AV Club in 2012. “He’s the one who suggested the flattop, but long on the sides and slicked back. And he was afraid he was going to lose his job to cut it like that without having it approved by the producer or the director, but I said, ‘Just do it.’” Fortunately, Hughes loved it, along with everything else Paxton brought to the character.

Hollywood.com recently posted 13 Interesting Facts About M. Night Shyamalan Movies.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. Sixth Sense was inspired by an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?.

According to M. Night, the film is based on the episode “The Tale of the Dream Girl”, where the premise was: the lead characters are being ignored by the friends/family and don’t understand that they are dead until the end of the episode.

5. M. Night wrote the screenplay for Unbreakable with Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson in mind.

He always anticipated the two actors agreeing to do the film. This was also their fourth film together, after Loaded Weapon 1 (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995).

6. The Happening is the only movie of his in which M. Night does not physically appear.

He’s the voice of Joey, who calls out to Alma a few times in the film.

7. All of his films are set in, or very close to, Philadelphia.

Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 33 Things We Learned From Joe Carnahan’s The Grey Commentary.  Here are three four of my favorites…

11. The scene with Ottway waking up in the snow was shot in minus twenty degrees. “See Liam’s face, how red that is, there is no makeup on him,” says Carnahan. “They kept saying ‘you can’t put Liam in the snow, you can’t put Liam in the snow,’ but Liam went in the snow.” Barton says Carnahan and the guys complained so much about how cold it was, but the editing room was probably 75 degrees which was also pretty tough. “There was some days the espresso machine was jammed,” adds Hellmann.

13. Carnahan’s wife told him she thinks Ottway was the lone survivor and the rest were simply facets of his personality. “I thought that was really novel until ten other people, all women, said the same thing to me. I thought my god that’s an interesting little trend.” Barton recalls hearing her say that and thinking “Holy crap, what a great thing to say. We had never thought of that.”

21. The high-pitched howl emanating from the woods as the men scramble to start a fire after being chased by the wolves was actually made by Quentin “Rampage” Jackson. They recorded him and modified it some, but he’s the source.

****SPOILER ALERT****

33. The post-credits shot, a remnant of their attempts to capture Ottway’s fight with the wolves, was included for purely artistic reasons on Carnahan’s part. “It certainly, to me, doesn’t answer any questions,” says Barton, “in a good way.” Carnahan adds that a lot of people don’t seem to realize that’s the back of Neeson’s head resting on the wolf’s slowly breathing form.

Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 15 Fun Facts About City Slickers. Here are three of my favorites…

1. JACK PALANCE WAS BILLY CRYSTAL’S ORIGINAL CHOICE TO PLAY CURLY.

When Crystal first came up with the seed of the idea for City Slickers, he immediately thought of Jack Palance as the crusty bad guy with the heart of gold. He thought of him because the first movie he had ever seen was the 1953 movie Shane, where Palance played the bad guy. The actor left a lasting impression on Crystal, who was seven years old at the time of his first movie-going experience. Because his father produced jazz concerts, Billy saw Shane seated on Billie Holiday’s lap.

5. CHARLES BRONSON WAS ANGRY OVER BEING ASKED TO PLAY CURLY.

Jack Palance initially turned down the role of Curly, as he was committed to another project. So Crystal offered the part to Charles Bronson, who was not pleased. He cursed Crystal out because “I’m dead on page 64!” Palance, of course, ended up taking the role (and the rest is history).

6. PALANCE GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT WITH THE DIRECTOR ON THE FIRST DAY OF SHOOTING.

The veteran actor yelled at Ron Underwood over his first direction, but everything went smoothly after that. When Crystal asked what had happened, Palance explained that he always gets nervous on his first day of shooting. Sure enough, Tim Burton told a similar story about Palance snapping at him on his first day of shooting on Batman over how he was told to walk out of a bathroom, with Burton admitting that the incident scared him “to death—I literally saw white and left my body.”

Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 15 Fun Facts About Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL BELIEVES THAT JOHN HUGHES WANTED HIM TO PLAY FERRIS.

Hall told Vanity Fair that his relationship with the director ended rather abruptly following their work together on Weird Science, and after Hall had begun working with other directors. But he believed that Hughes wrote the roles of Duckie in Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller for him. For his part, Hughes said Broderick was the actor he had in mind when writing the screenplay. Casting directors Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins only seriously considered one other actor for the part: John Cusack.

6. LOVE WAS IN THE AIR.

Matthew Broderick and Jennifer Grey (who played Jeanie, Ferris’ sister) met and got engaged just before the movie’s release. Cindy Pickett and Lyman Ward, who played Ferris’ parents, met on the set of the movie and eventually got married and had two children.

7. BEN STEIN WAS INITIALLY SUPPOSED TO DO HIS LECTURE OFF-CAMERA.

The student extras laughed so hard that Hughes decided to put Stein in front of the camera for his speech on supply-side economics. Stein himself picked the topic after Hughes asked him to speak about something he knew a lot about. Before he became a familiar movie and television presence, Stein—who is also a lawyer—was a speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford.

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

4. CHRIS FARLEY WAS THE ORIGINAL SHREK.

Farley was not only cast in the title role, but he had actually completed recording somewhere between 80 to 95 percent of his dialogue before he passed away in 1997. In the version of the film Farley worked on, Shrek was a teenage ogre who didn’t want to go into the family business and had aspirations of becoming a knight.

12. THE MOVIE WAS SCREENED BY DREAMWORKS AND DISNEY LAWYERS TO AVOID POSSIBLE LAWSUITS.

Shrek was considered by some to be a series of jabs at Disney, with its general cynicism toward the traditional fairy tales that Disney had presented in movie form since 1937, Farquaad’s castle resembling Disneyland, and Farquaad’s diminutive stature possibly a reference to an infamous quote by Katzenberg’s former Disney boss Michael Eisner about his hatred of the former employee in a lawsuit. While there was no legal action, some Radio Disney affiliates did not allow Dreamworks to buy ad time to promote Shrek.

5. NICOLAS CAGE TURNED DOWN THE LEAD ROLE BECAUSE HE DIDN’T WANT TO BE AN OGRE.

Dreamworks executives considered Tom Cruise and Leonard DiCaprio for Shrek, until Katzenberg offered Nicolas Cage the part. Cage told the Daily Mail that he turned the role down because “I just didn’t want to look like an ogre.” Though, upon reflection, Cage realized that “Maybe I should have done it looking back.”