“The Big Chill” Trivia

Scott Beggs and Mental Floss present 10 Memorable Things About The Big Chill.  Here are three of my favorites…

3. KEVIN COSTNER PLAYS A DEAD BODY.
The entire movie revolves around the suicide of Alex Marshall, an unseen college friend linking all the other characters together. Alex was originally in the film for one scene, but Kasdan cut it, effectively removing a young Kevin Costner from the movie except for one sequence where he lies motionless as Alex’s body is prepped for the funeral.

7. IT CONTRIBUTED TO GLENN CLOSE MAKING SOME ACTING HISTORY.

Everyone’s obsessed with EGOTing, but with an Oscar nomination for The Big Chill, a Tony nomination (and win) for The Real Thing, and an Emmy nomination for Something About Amelia, Close became the first actress to score all three major acting award nominations in a single calendar year. That’s a feat even fewer people have pulled off than the EGOT. Bob Fosse did it with directing and choreography in 1973, and Jason Robards became the first actor to do it in 1978. Unfortunately, she didn’t win the Oscar—and never has, despite six nominations (so far).

9. AN OCTOPUS ACTS AS A SUBTLE SYMBOL.
If we only saw an octopus once in the movie, it might be a happy accident, but there are at least two times that a soft-bodied cephalopod appears on a TV screen in the massive home the friends are sharing. You don’t have to dig too deeply to see the connection: eight limbs, eight friends, all interconnected and living (for the time we spend with them) as a single unit.