Making of a Blockbuster: 45 Intriguing Behind-the-Scenes Movie Facts – Part 10

The movie “Baby’s Day Out”, after receiving a negative critical reception and a lack of financial success in the United States, was very popular in India, where it played in Kolkata, West Bengal’s largest theater for over one year and had three remakes made in the country.

27. The movie Apollo 13 was shot in zero gravity on the “Vomit Comet” plane. They made almost 600 dives to get the footage, more than some real astronauts get when training.

28. Demi Moore was the highest-paid actress ever (at the time) in 1996, earning $12.5 million for Striptease, which bombed at the box office and earned her a Golden Raspberry Award. She also was a producer for all 3 Austin Power movies.

29. To film the scenes of the audience watching the “Ass Movie” in Idiocracy (2006), a theater was rented and extras were paid to watch buttocks on the screen, which garnered genuine laughter, making Mike Judge consider his own film a waste of time.

30. Several A-list actors turned down the role of Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry because of excessive violence. Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman turned it down because they both disagreed with the character’s seemingly right-wing politics. Newman recommended Clint Eastwood for the role instead.

The American Humane Association started overseeing all film productions involving animals because of the controversy surrounding animal abuse on the set of “Heaven’s Gate”, including cows being slaughtered to provide blood and ‘fake guts’ for the actors, and a horse being blown up with dynamite.

32. The Ghostface mask was developed for novelty Halloween stores between the 1991/92 season by Fun World employee Brigitte Sleiertin as part of a “Fantastic Faces” series. It was eventually discovered by film producer Marianne Madalena and became the mask for the killer of the Scream films.

33. For the film Stargate, Kurt Russell was paid twice his going rate because he was the only actor at the time to have “zero unlikability” in a global poll.

34. The New Zealand Parliament unanimously passed a motion to censure Ben Affleck, out of anger that a line in his film ‘Argo’ falsely claimed that the British and New Zealand embassies had turned away the six escaped American diplomats in Tehran during the hostage crisis.

35. For the 2015 Chinese film “Wolf Totem”, 35 Mongolian wolves were trained in China for over 4 years by a Scottish trainer, who trained them to sit, snarl, and fight on cue. After filming, the wolves were ultimately relocated to Canada, since they only understood commands in English.

While filming a 170-foot waterfall in the movie Apocalypto, a cow was trying to cross upstream and went over the falls. It emerged at the bottom, banging against the rocks, but after a local man swam in to calm the cow it then climbed up the bank and began eating grass as if nothing had happened.

37. Several actors had their roles shrunk or completely cut out of the film “The Thin Red Line” in post-production. Adrian Brody went from the lead to only two lines of dialog, 3 hours of narration by Billy Bob Thornton was never used, and Mickey Rourke can only be found in the DVD extras.

38. In 1984, frustrated over the failure of his film “The Razor’s Edge”, Bill Murray stopped acting for four years in order to study philosophy and history at Sorbonne University in Paris.

39. When filming Christine (1983), actress Alexandra Paul pranked director John Carpenter by having her identical twin sister film a scene in her place. One-shot with her sister Caroline is in the finished film.

40. The Guinness world record for the longest continuous film shoot is held by Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 erotic drama ‘Eyes Wide Shut.’ The filming took 400 days and ended in June 1998, with the post-production going on till March 1999. Kubrick died 6 days after sending the final cut to the studio.

Guillermo Del Toro introduced James Cameron to the Alita: Battle Angel manga in the 90s, which he fell in love with and then strived to adapt it into a movie ever since by making Titanic and Avatar, in order for SFX tech to evolve enough that adapting the manga would be possible.

42. The Parent Trap (1998) was a remake of a 1961 movie with the same name. The 1961 version got three sequels: The Parent Trap II (1986), Parent Trap III (1989), and Parent Trap: Hawaiian Honeymoon (1989).

43. Actor Gary Busey caused delays while filming Quigley (2003) when he refused to be in a scene set in Heaven, claiming it looked nothing like the ‘real’ Heaven he had seen during a near-death experience. When another actor said they too had seen Heaven, and Busey’s description was wrong, the two came to blows.

44. Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the East) was badly burned while filming The Wizard Of Oz. After being hospitalized she returned to set but refused to do any scenes with fire so her stunt double took her place in a scene riding a prop that spewed smoke which exploded injuring her as well.

45. Leonardo DiCaprio ate raw bison liver while filming The Revenant.