Weird Facts About Famous Movies

[Vollifer1949]

Billy Bob Thornton Ad-Libbed His Friday Night Lights Speech After A Friend Betrayed Him The Night Before

 

[Carp]

I love weird stories about classic films.

Just learned from the Rewatchables pod that Good Will Hunting was supposed to be a spy movie. What we saw was only the first half of the movie. The script had him becoming a hero with his genius, putting it to good use. Somebody read the script and essentially said "you have two different movies here, idiots."

What you got?

The thread is too long so not sure if it's been posted already, but the scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams talks about his late wife farting in bed was completely ad-libbed. It's obviously an incredibly funny story so Matt Damon's laughing at the story is also completely real. And you can even see a shake in the footage as well because the camera man was cracking up.

 

[95 Vol Alum]

 

[n_huffhines]

No! Not Thunderlips.

"Movies are bulls***" - Jason "Jay" Derris

 

[orangepridenation]

The original ending of Clerks was meant to show a robber come in the convenience store and fatally shoot Dante. Kevin Smith stated it was originally going to give foreshadowing to Dante's earlier line about Empire Strikes Back when he talked about liking it because "It ended on such a downer! And life is just a series of downers."

Smith obviously scrapped it for a more comedic/lighthearted ending.

 

[orangepridenation]

Wasn't really a famous movie as much as a cult film, but the two leads from the movie Kids, Leo Fitzpatrick and Justin Pierce, faced regular street harassment after the film's release because they were such unknown actors and so many people thought it was real.

I find it very believable too. The acting and dialogue in that movie was incredibly accurate for 1990's urban teenagers.

 

[firestorm]

(1980) Cannibal Holocaust is a very disturbing found footage Italian Horror movie that has real animals being harmed.

Also because the movie is very realistic the director Ruggero Deodato had to prove in Court that he didn’t kill the actors.
He was able to prove his innocence with visual evidence because the actors appeared in Court, and they testified about the special effect methods used to create the realistic violence.

 

[n_huffhines]

Phillip K Dick is the mind behind many great sci fi books/movies like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Man in the High Castle, etc. He popularized the idea of simulation theory (The Matrix) in the 1970's and was willing to say all manner of crazy things at public events. He claimed that many/most of his ideas came from experiences in parallel universes that are horrible in comparison to ours.

This sounds like total insanity, but my best friend has sleep paralysis and he has crazy visions like this. I've seen him when he's in a sleep paralysis state. He'll be sleeping and suddenly he'll be looking fully awake and you try to talk to him but he's not really there. This had been going on as long as I knew him (since HS 23 years ago). He didn't tell me what it was for a long time because he thought it was crazy. It might just be a waking dream state that most don't experience? But he thinks he's in another place and it feels real to him. I studied up on this some and many people make the same claim that they wake up with paralysis and there is somebody in the room with them. Some sort of being. Many come to the conclusion that it's the beings running the simulation checking up on you/downloading information, etc. I wonder what the hell the real explanation is?

I have to be honest, when my friend first told me about this a few years ago, I did think he was nuts. He feels really alone in this. He actually cried when I finally validated him telling him that I found all these other people with the same condition. At last, he had somebody in his corner that knew his deal and didn't think he was nuts.

So when you look at PKD's work and you wonder how the hell he comes up with this stuff, you don't really want to know. The price is a tormented mind, restlessness, loneliness, paranoia, fears of insanity, etc.

 

[VolsSportsFan]

Phillip K Dick is the mind behind many great sci fi books/movies like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Man in the High Castle, etc. He popularized the idea of simulation theory (The Matrix) in the 1970's and was willing to say all manner of crazy things at public events. He claimed that many/most of his ideas came from experiences in parallel universes that are horrible in comparison to ours.

This sounds like total insanity, but my best friend has sleep paralysis and he has crazy visions like this. I've seen him when he's in a sleep paralysis state. He'll be sleeping and suddenly he'll be looking fully awake and you try to talk to him but he's not really there. This had been going on as long as I knew him (since HS 23 years ago). He didn't tell me what it was for a long time because he thought it was crazy. It might just be a waking dream state that most don't experience? But he thinks he's in another place and it feels real to him. I studied up on this some and many people make the same claim that they wake up with paralysis and there is somebody in the room with them. Some sort of being. Many come to the conclusion that it's the beings running the simulation checking up on you/downloading information, etc. I wonder what the hell the real explanation is?

I have to be honest, when my friend first told me about this a few years ago, I did think he was nuts. He feels really alone in this. He actually cried when I finally validated him telling him that I found all these other people with the same condition. At last, he had somebody in his corner that knew his deal and didn't think he was nuts.

So when you look at PKD's work and you wonder how the hell he comes up with this stuff, you don't really want to know. The price is a tormented mind, restlessness, loneliness, paranoia, fears of insanity, etc.

I suffer from sleep paralysis and still have an episode every couple of months. I can tell you I definitely have experienced episodes where I swore someone was in the room with me. I've heard strange voices, seen figures, even felt "people" push me down when I tried to get up. I've moved outside my body, watched myself sleep, felt myself move my arms while still knowing my arms were beside my body. Before I found out what it was, it freaked the hell out of me. I now just believe it's all in my mind created in the state of being between conscious and asleep and it's basically my mind not being able to tell between real and dream. The last episode I had a few weeks ago I thought for sure my arm dropped and hung beside the bed and I heard a very loud pounding on the wall and the pictures were almost falling off. Then I "woke up" and my arm was under the cover and there was obviously no pounding on the wall since my wife was asleep.

I've actually had a few funny "interactions", I've had some where I sensed a being hovering over me and audibly taunting me. That's when I started to try to hit it with my ghost arms and it always moves back so I don't hit it. So I started cursing at it and I heard it say one time "Well that's not very nice...."

 

[n_huffhines]

I suffer from sleep paralysis and still have an episode every couple of months. I can tell you I definitely have experienced episodes where I swore someone was in the room with me. I've heard strange voices, seen figures, even felt "people" push me down when I tried to get up. I've moved outside my body, watched myself sleep, felt myself move my arms while still knowing my arms were beside my body. Before I found out what it was, it freaked the hell out of me. I now just believe it's all in my mind created in the state of being between conscious and asleep and it's basically my mind not being able to tell between real and dream. The last episode I had a few weeks ago I thought for sure my arm dropped and hung beside the bed and I heard a very loud pounding on the wall and the pictures were almost falling off. Then I "woke up" and my arm was under the cover and there was obviously no pounding on the wall since my wife was asleep.

I've actually had a few funny "interactions", I've had some where I sensed a being hovering over me and audibly taunting me. That's when I started to try to hit it with my ghost arms and it always moves back so I don't hit it. So I started cursing at it and I heard it say one time "Well that's not very nice...."

Regular dreams get me anxious, I can't imagine.

 

[n_huffhines]

Matthew Berry, the fantasy football guy, wrote Crocodile Dundee 3. He and his writing partner were kinda bullied into submitting a script for the project by their manager, so they wrote a POS and Paul Hogan accepted it.

Paul Hogan went on to slightly tweak every page, took their names off as writers, and put his own name on it. Berry was fine with this. He wasn't proud of his work and PH made it worse, but then his manager told him they had to contest to the SWA to get royalties, so he did. Hogan lost and appealed 3x.

Berry said a few years after the fact PH jumped on an elevator he was on and didn't say one word to him.

 

[n_huffhines]

This is nuts

"Timothy Mucciante, a producer working on a film adaptation of Lucky, was fired after raising questions about inconsistencies in Sebold's story. Mucciante, who has a legal background, started reviewing the police files; he became even more troubled by discrepancies between the memoir and the facts of the case, to the point where he "couldn't sleep." Mucciante ended up hiring a private investigator to investigate further, and the P.I. broke the case. Broadwater's conviction turns out to have rested on shaky evidence: Sebold had had trouble identifying her assailant—she had initially picked a different man out of a lineup—and the only forensic evidence was a form of hair analysis that the government now considers junk science. "

Man Imprisoned for 16 Years for Raping Lovely Bones Author Is Exonerated

 

[n_huffhines]

All the players for Hickory in Hoosiers played college basketball except the actor who played Jimmy, which is weird for 2 reasons. He really did have the sweetest shot (and he ended up being a golf pro, so that makes sense) so you figure he played major ball. Second, why choose a good basketball player who can't act to play Olly instead of a bad basketball player who can act?

 

[VolsSportsFan]

Jack Nicholson refused to wear a Red Sox hat for the Departed and inexplicably wore a Yankees hat because of his real life fandom. It's the all-time douche power move by an actor, and he did it to Scorsese. It's one of my favorite movies, but Nicholson was bad for the role. His accent wasn't very good and he was so over the top.

Ben Affleck did the same type thing for Gone Girl, he refused to wear a Yankees hat because he's real life fandom of the Red Sox. He instead agreed to wear a Mets hat.

 

[VolsSportsFan]

Also Affleck tidbit, when making Armageddon, he asked Michael Bay what most of us wanted to know; why was it easier to train drillers to be astronauts than to train astronauts to be drillers. Bay's response? "Shut the f*** up".

 

[firestorm]

(1989) The Punisher movie doesn’t have the Punisher wearing the trademark Big white skull symbol because the director wanted a realistic Punisher so really the white skull symbol could have been used except wasn’t for that factual reason.

Predator
Kevin Peter Hall had the challenging task that is play the Predator without being able to see while wearing the terrific quality Predator costume which makes his great performance of the terrifying alien more impressive in this great science fiction horror action movie.

 

[n_huffhines]

I'm reading a book about Mad Max Fury Road. Any film nerd should read this. Craziest production I've ever heard of. Lots of crazy facts:

- George Miller was basically totally new to film when he made Mad Max off $350k and it made over $100m at the box office.
- Miller wrote and produced Babe, which made over $250m. Then he directed Babe 2. If you have ever seen Babe 2, it's totally insane and freaky and that's after they had to cut 17 minutes for being too scary for kids.
- FR was the first movie written as storyboards instead of with a script. 3500 of them that were safeguarded over about 15 years.
- Miller's vision was to have a movie with one long chase and like with many Japanese films, you don't need subtitles to know what's going on. Anybody can figure out the plot just by watching.
- By the time Miller started working on Fury Road in the late 90's, he hadn't worked with Mel Gibson since he became the biggest star in the world and he was nervous to meet him again.
- They were so far in production on FR they had all the vehicles made when Fox pulled the plug. They just melted them all down.
- Miller made Happy Feet, which made like $374m.
- Warner Bros was looking for a new franchise as Harry Potter was phasing out, and they asked for Happy Feet 2. Miller said he would give them 2 franchises, and made them agree to produce Fury Road as well.
- Miller was in love with the idea of Eminem as Max.
- Tom Hardy and Army Hammer had an acting face-off for the part of Max. Hardy spit in Hammer's face. Hammer told Miller to give it to Hardy because he wants it more.
- Theron and Hardy hated each other and the set was very uncomfortable, and by all accounts, it's because Hardy is an a-hole. Many believe this contributed to their on-screen relationship working.
- They put actors in boot camps.
- The war boys really acted like a weird cult all the time at production's tent city.

More to come, I'm sure. Not even halfway through the book.

 

[n_huffhines]

 

[n_huffhines]

I learned this from the Toys That Made Us docuseries, but the reason TMNT II and III were such commercial BS pandering to kids is that when the first movie came out, their manufacturing partner didn't want anything to do with its dark, violent vibe. It was the highest-grossing independent film of all time, but making $125m on a shoestring budget isn't as profitable as back-end toy sales for a POS that costs twice as much to make and rakes in 60% of the box office revenue.

 

[BowlBrother85]

Kurt Russell was originally cast in the role of Crash Davis in "Bull Durham" (1988). Russell was a logical choice, since he really had played minor league baseball in the 1970's, and had even been teammates with Director Ron Shelton. The studio insisted on Kevin Costner, however, due to his box office draw at the time.

Kurt Russell was somewhat vindicated in 1993/1994, when "Tombstone" became a hit, while Costner's "Wyatt Earp" flopped.

 

[VolsSportsFan]

Kurt Russell was originally cast in the role of Crash Davis in "Bull Durham" (1988). Russell was a logical choice, since he really had played minor league baseball in the 1970's, and had even been teammates with Director Ron Shelton. The studio insisted on Kevin Costner, however, due to his box office draw at the time.

Kurt Russell was somewhat vindicated in 1993/1994, when "Tombstone" became a hit, while Costner's "Wyatt Earp" flopped.

I don't know how true this is but I had read Costner originally was originally targeted to be in Tombstone as Wyatt Earp but he didn't like that the movie was more an ensemble type movie and wasn't titled to single out Earp. So he instead used his influence to get Wyatt Earp made into a major movie, when it was originally going to be a TV mini-series. So if true he basically passed because of vanity and made another Earp movie out of spite and it backfired.

 

[n_huffhines]

I don't know how true this is but I had read Costner originally was originally targeted to be in Tombstone as Wyatt Earp but he didn't like that the movie was more an ensemble type movie and wasn't titled to single out Earp. So he instead used his influence to get Wyatt Earp made into a major movie, when it was originally going to be a TV mini-series. So if true he basically passed because of vanity and made another Earp movie out of spite and it backfired.

And Kurt Russell completely saved Tombstone. By all accounts, the director was totally bombing and losing the cast and crew and Russell basically took over production.

 

[RDU VOL#14]

And Kurt Russell completely saved Tombstone. By all accounts, the director was totally bombing and losing the cast and crew and Russell basically took over production.

I heard that as well. I heard that he directed most of the movie.

 

[Jackcrevol]

And Kurt Russell completely saved Tombstone. By all accounts, the director was totally bombing and losing the cast and crew and Russell basically took over production.

Thats the first ive ever heard of that. In fact id always heard and read the exact opposite. That George P Cosmatos was absolutely a visionary. He researched authenticity of all characters and was instrumental in the historicity of the gunfight at OK Corral. He also found the actor who played Ike Clanyon, was just a reenactor.

 

[n_huffhines]

Thats the first ive ever heard of that. In fact id always heard and read the exact opposite. That George P Cosmatos was absolutely a visionary. He researched authenticity of all characters and was instrumental in the historicity of the gunfight at OK Corral. He also found the actor who played Ike Clanyon, was just a reenactor.

I don't think either of us are wrong

How Kurt Russell Saved Tombstone From Disaster