Interesting Movie Facts
There are plenty of interesting movie facts to be found, especially if you know where to look. I’m usually writing about and researching films all week, so I often come across bits of interesting movie trivia. So I figured, why not share these factoids with my readers? A number of this week’s offering feature older movies or stars, but there’s still a little modern goodness thrown in for good measure. Enjoy.
1. Jimmy Stewart was the first big movie star from America to don a military uniform for World War II. He would later go on to achieve the rank of Brigadier General.
2. The last words Walt Disney wrote before he died were “Kurt Russell.” As a child, Russell starred in a number of Disney movies, and he was quite close with the company’s founder. Disney was no doubt about to write a memo about another project for the young star. That, or Snake Plissken traveled through time to murder Disney, and he was trying to tip off the cops as to the identity of his killer. I’m guessing it was the former.
3. Speaking of Kurt Russell, did you know that The Thing originally had a happy ending? John Carpenter shot a more uplifting ending at the behest of editor Todd C. Ramsay. In this never-before-seen ending, MacReady (Russell) gets rescued and takes a blood test to prove that he’s still human. Carpenter preferred the darker ending, and so it was never shown to test audiences.
4. The Killers, a 1964 movies starring Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson, was intended to be the first made-for-TV movie. NBC objected to all the violence, however, and it ended up getting released as a feature film by Universal.
5. Linda Hamilton (Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day) has an identical twin sister. For scenes requiring two Sarah Conners in T2, both Hamilton and her twin were featured on the screen.
6. The Asian film Audition had a rather severe effect on some of its viewers. One woman confronted the director at a film festival and accused him of being evil, while showings at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin caused viewers to pass out from shock (with one audience member being admitted to the hospital).
7. Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda were close friends, but they fundamentally disagreed in their politics. In 1947, this led to a fistfight between the two, and they later agreed to never discuss politics again.
8. Jerry Reed was originally intended to play Bandit in Smokey and the Bandit. The film was also planned as a low-budget B movie. When Burt Reynolds expressed interest, the budget was increased and Reed was recast as Bandit’s buddy.
9. The documentary Gimme Shelter featured a large number of camera operators to capture the action at Altamont. One of these was a young George Lucas, but his camera jammed after shooting about 30 minutes worth of film, and none of his footage was used.
10. In The Maltese Falcon, actor Sydney Greenstreet played the villain often referred to as “The Fat Man.” Greenstreet would often be typecast as an overweight villain, but his popularity grew throughout the ’40s. The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, known as “Fat Man”, was named after his character.
Hope you enjoyed this smattering of interesting movie facts. Join us again next week for an all-new edition. In the meantime, check these articles out:
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5 Responses to “Interesting Movie Facts”
My source is the memoirs of Robert Serber, an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and gave the bomb its name.
Graham Gales
The atomic bomb named after Sydney Greenstreet?
What’s your source for this? For many years, I have been under the impression that the bombs were named for their size and were linked as a result to Roosevelt (Little Boy) and churchill (Fat Man).