Making of a Blockbuster: 30 Untold Stories Behind Iconic Movies – Part 5

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1Big Lebowski

Big Lebowski

The Big Lebowski secured rights for the song Dead Flowers (closing credits) when rights owner and Rolling Stones manager Allen Klein, who was asking $150,000 heard the line "I hate the f*ckin’ Eagles, man!'' Klein stood up and said, ‘That’s it, you can have the song!'


2. If the story told in the animation "Finding Nemo" was real, when Nemo's mum and siblings got eaten, Nemo's dad would have developed female gonads and formed a breeding pair with Nemo.


3. During the filming of the Wolf of Wall Street, Jonah Hill took revenge on Leonardo DiCaprio by giving him food poisoning. By improvising a line, Hill made DiCaprio eat the last piece of raw yellowtail sushi. DiCaprio had to repeat this 70 times. Only Hill and Martin Scorsese found it funny.


4. During the filming of Taxi Driver, De Niro asked Cybill Shepherd out on a date. She turned him down, and he did not speak to her, except in character, for the rest of the filming. She later said that she regretted turning him down.


5. While the "Shining" was playing in New York and Los Angeles, Stanley Kubrick ordered projectionists to cut the original final scene from the film by hand, and mail the deleted filmstrips back to Warner Bros. The original ending has never been released since.


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6City Lights

City Lights

Charlie Chaplin, while directing his movie "City Lights", made actress Virginia Cherrill re-do a scene where she says "Flower Sir"? 342 times. The movie was a silent film.


7. The "Funny how? Like a clown?" scene in Goodfellas is based on an actual encounter Joe Pesci had with a mobster while working in a restaurant as a young man.


8. The entire movie "Chinatown" is portrayed subjectively through the eyes of the main character, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), who appears in every scene. In fact, in one scene when Gittes is knocked unconscious, the film fades to black and fades back in only when he awakens.


9. During the filming of the Great Escape's famous motorcycle chase, Steve McQueen not only did most of his own motorcycle stunts but also did it as one of the Nazis chasing his character. Thus, through the power of editing, Steve McQueen is actually chasing himself.


10. In 2014, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar was the only film in the top 10 worldwide box office to be completely original.


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11Raiders of the Lost Ark

Raiders of the Lost Ark

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, they limited the onscreen blood from gunshots during the truck chase by using fine red dust instead of liquid fake blood. Unfortunately, the only red dust available for the squibs was Cayenne Pepper, which caused a lot of suffering for the stunt crew.


12. Harrison Ford and Sean Connery filmed their conversation scenes onboard the Zeppelin in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade without pants on, because of the hot set.


13. To get into character as The Bear Jew in Inglourious Basterds, Eli Roth listened to Hannah Montana songs and thought about what it'd be like if he was Hannah Montana because it took him "to a place of insanity."


14. The astronauts of Apollo 8, the first manned mission to leave Earth's orbit, attempted to radio back reporting the appearance of a black monolith similar to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as a prank, but alas discretion prevailed.


15. During the filming of ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ Malcolm McDowell suffered cracked ribs when an actor kicked him in the chest. He also almost drowned when his head was held underwater and got a scratch in the cornea of his eye. Kubrick said, “Let’s carry on, I’ll favor your other eye.”


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16Lawrence of Arabia

Lawrence of Arabia

During filming Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O'Toole added foam rubber to his camel saddle to increase comfort. This eventually spread across the Middle East and O'Toole was called the "Father of Rubber."


17. For the film "Psycho" Alfred Hitchcock insisted theatre managers to put "no late admission" policy so that audience either see the film from the very beginning, or they don’t see it all.


18. The scene in Matrix Reloaded when Trinity hacks into a power station's computer is actually an accurate portrayal of a hack exploiting a real SSH vulnerability.


19. During the filming of Django Unchained, Leonardo DiCaprio stopped mid-scene because he was having "a difficult time" using so many racial slurs. Samuel L. Jackson then pulled him aside telling him, "mother f*cker, this is just another Tuesday for us."


20. Grave of the Fireflies is based on the author’s own experiences as a child and was written as a personal apology for not being able to save his younger sister Keiko who died of malnutrition in Fukui.


21Casablanca

Casablanca

As an experiment, a copy of Casablanca's screenplay was submitted to 217 agencies under the title "Everybody Comes to Rick's". Out of the 85 that read it, only 8 recognized it specifically as Casablanca, and only 3 declared it as commercially viable.


22. For each word he said in Terminator 2, Arnold Schwarzenegger was paid $21,429. 


23. In the original Japanese version of Spirited Away, all of Chihiro's character development is lost in the end, as she forgets her adventure in the Spirit World when she returns to Earth.


24. In the movie "Fight Club" Tyler Durden was originally going to recite a workable recipe for home-made explosives as he does in the novel. But in the interest of public safety, the filmmakers decided to substitute fictional recipes for the real ones.


25. The film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was shown in Swedish theaters for 11 years straight.

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