{"id":12846,"date":"2015-06-22T05:30:38","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T09:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/craigzablo.com\/?p=12846"},"modified":"2021-03-22T21:49:41","modified_gmt":"2021-03-23T01:49:41","slug":"12846","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/?p=12846","title":{"rendered":"14 Deep Facts About “The Hunt for Red October”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nEric D Snider <\/strong>and Mental_Floss<\/a> present 14 Deep Facts About The Hunt for Red October<\/em><\/a>. Here are three of my favorites…<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

1. Even though the novel had been a bestseller, nobody wanted to make the movie.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Tom Clancy’s book is a complicated story with a lot of technical jargon, which made Hollywood executives antsy. It also made the movie hard to summarize. “In Hollywood, because of time constraints, very few people in a position to say yes to a project like this read the book,” admitted producer Mace Neufeld. “They generally read the reader’s report. [And] this book doesn’t condense well into two or three pages.” Neufeld got the project off the ground by getting a Paramount executive to read the novel\u2014not just the book report\u2014and see for himself how cinematic it could be.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0Sean Connery was a last-minute replacement.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The film had been under production for two weeks when word came that Klaus Maria Brandauer (Out of Africa<\/em>), the Austrian actor who’d been signed to play the rogue Soviet sub commander Marko Ramius, couldn’t do it after all because of a prior commitment.\u00a0Connery took the part instead, needing only one day for rehearsal. Coincidentally, he and Brandauer had acted together in 1983’s Never Say Never Again<\/em> and would reunite again for 1990’s The Russia House<\/em>, which was shot shortly after The Hunt for Red October<\/em>.<\/p>\n

9.\u00a0Alec Baldwin wanted to return for the sequels but was edged out when Paramount learned they could get Harrison Ford.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s complicated, and there are at least two sides to every story, but here’s the gist: While negotiations with Baldwin were still ongoing, Paramount allegedly offered the part to Ford, who was a bigger box office draw and to whom the studio owed money anyway because of a previous project that had fallen through. Baldwin had been dithering over the specifics of his deal, and now a Paramount executive used that indecision to force his hand: either commit right now to an open-ended contract for Patriot Games<\/em> and whatever came next, or the offer would be withdrawn. Not wanting to give up a chance to appear in A Streetcar Named Desire<\/em> on Broadway, Baldwin left Jack Ryan behind.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric D Snider and Mental_Floss present 14 Deep Facts About The Hunt for Red October. Here are three of my<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":912,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[52,17,54,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-celebs","category-movies","category-trivia","comments-off"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/912"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12846"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26856,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12846\/revisions\/26856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}