by John M. Floyd
I think I've always been in pursuit of movies, and anything involving them. I confess to having watched more movies in my lifetime (both in theatres and at home) than any sane person should watch, and I own so many videos they're beginning to compete for shelf space with my beloved books. My recent suggestion to my wife that we might have to move because my DVD collection needs more room didn't go over well, but she has tentatively agreed that we might add a couple hundred square feet to my home "office." We'll see if that comes to pass, but I'm not optimistic.
A reel addiction
This attraction to filmed fiction might seem, to you, to be a bit immature. If you said that to me outright, my honest response would be, "Of course it's immature." I am fully aware that I haven't yet grown up, and if I do, I hope it doesn't happen anytime soon.
A direct result of all this, of course, is my fondness for movie
trivia. I love discovering little-known facts about films and actors and filmmaking--most of them found in those fascinating DVD "bonus features"--and for today's column, I've put together a list of this incredibly worthless information. (Since most of these little nuggets came as a surprise to me, I hope some of them might surprise you as well.)
The unscientific observations of a movie maniac:
- The original title of
Star Wars was
The Star Wars.
- The main theme song for
Unforgiven ("Claudia's Theme") was composed by Clint Eastwood.
- "Goldeneye" was Ian Fleming's name for the Jamaican beachfront home where he wrote all the James Bond novels.
-
The Blair Witch Project was filmed in eight days.
- Michael Myers's mask in
Halloween was a two-dollar Captain Kirk mask, slightly altered and painted white.
- Actor Sam Shepard, who's also an author, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979.
- Tom Selleck was offered the role of Indiana Jones but had to refuse because of his contract with
Magnum, P.I.
- The cigarettes smoked by the boys in
Stand by Me were made from cabbage leaves.
- The original title of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was
The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy. The names were reversed when Newman decided to take the role of Butch rather than Sundance.
- In
Raiders of the Lost Ark, a drawing of R2D2 and C3PO appears on a column in the Well of Souls.

- Sean Connery wore a toupee in all of his James Bond movies.
- Most of the cast and crew of
The African Queen got sick from the water. Humphrey Bogart and director John Huston were unaffected because they drank only whiskey.
-
Deep Throat cost less than $ 25,000 to make, and earned an estimated $ 400 million.
- Steve Buscemi was once a New York City firefighter.
-
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was adapted from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
- The charcoal drawing of Kate Winslet in
Titanic was actually drawn by director James Cameron.
- The
Jaws line "You're gonna need a bigger boat" wasn't in the script, and was improvised by Roy Scheider.
- When a hurricane hit the set during the filming of
Jurassic Park, the pilot who choppered the crew to safety was the same man who had played Indiana Jones's pilot, Jock, in
Raiders.
- Several battle scenes in
Braveheart had to be refilmed because of extras wearing sunglasses and wristwatches.
- Actor Christopher Lee was an undercover agent for British Intelligence in World War II.
- The final
Lord of the Rings movie,
Return of the King, was nominated for 11 Oscars and won all of them.
- The announcer who replaced Armed Forces Radio DJ Adrian Cronauer (played by Robin Williams in
Good Morning, Vietnam) was Pat Sajak.
- Steven Spielberg waited 33 years to finish college. When he did, he turned in
Schindler's List as his student film requirement.
- For John Carpenter's 1982 movie
The Thing, the entire cast and crew were male.

- The roles of Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae in
Lonesome Dove were originally written for John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart.
- In
The Secret Life of Ian Fleming, Fleming was played by Sean Connery's son Jason.
- To make some of the spacecraft seem larger in the movie
Alien, director Ridley Scott filmed his own two children outfitted in miniature space suits.
- The roles of both John McClane in
Die Hard and Harry Callahan in
Dirty Harry were first offered to Frank Sinatra.
- The martial arts instructor for the the Bond movie
Never Say Never Again was Steven Seagal.
- The original tagline for posters of the movie
Twister was "It sucks."
- Marlon Brando refused to memorize his lines in
Superman. When he spoke to the superbaby, he read words written on a diaper.
- Haley Joe Osmont, the boy who "saw dead people" in
The Sixth Sense, played Forrest Gump's son five years earlier.
- Samuel L. Jackson's
Pulp Fiction quote from Ezekiel (which is inaccurate and mostly fictional) was originally written for Harvey Keitel's character in
From Dusk Till Dawn.
- Alfred Hitchcock was placed under CIA surveillance for his use of uranium as a plot device in
Notorious.
- Among the actors considered for the role of Han Solo were James Caan, Jack Nicholson, Christopher Walken, John Travolta, Kurt Russell, Billy Dee Williams, Nick Nolte, Al Pacino, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, Sylvester Stallone, Bill Murray, Burt Reynolds, and Robert DeNiro.
- Many of the extras in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest were really mental patients.

- Dooley Wilson (Sam, in
Casablanca) didn't know how to play the piano.
- Peter Sellers' salary for
Dr. Strangelove was more than half the budget of the entire film, and the movie
Titanic cost more than the Titanic itself.
- The names of the cab driver and the policeman in
It's a Wonderful Life were Bert and Ernie.
- Both Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were extras in
Field of Dreams (the Fenway Park scene).
- The view-through-the-gunbarrel sequence at the beginning of James Bond films was invented by title designer Maurice Binder, who really did aim the camera down a gunbarrel.
- Kevin Spacey was cast in
Seven only two days before filming began.
- Charles Durning, a WWII veteran, was awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart.
- In the coliseum scenes in
Gladiator, only the bottom two decks contained real people. The other thousands of spectators were computer-generated.
- Gregory Peck's closing "Do your duty" speech in
To Kill a Mockingbird was done in one take.
- In
High Plains Drifter, one of the headstones in the graveyard was inscribed with the name Sergio Leone.
- One of the voices of
E.T. was that of Debra Winger.
- In
The Abyss, many of the underwater scenes were filmed in smoky air instead, using fake bubbles.
- Tippi Hedren (
The Birds) is the mother of Melanie Griffith and the grandmother of Dakota Johnson.

- The carpet in the Overlook Hotel in
The Shining had the same design as the carpet in Sid's hallway in
Toy Story.
- The Nakatomi Tower in
Die Hard was really the (at that time) recently-built Fox Plaza, the headquarters of the studio that produced the movie.
- Martin Balsam was originally hired as the voice of HAL in
2001: A Space Odyssey, but Stanley Kubrick replaced him because he feared Balsam's voice might be too familiar to audiences.
- Actor Donald Pleasance was a POW in World War II.
- In
Raiders of the Lost Ark, Harrison Ford was supposed to have fought with the Arab swordsman in the marketplace. Instead Ford was ill with dysentery that day, and just shot him instead.
- Hannibal Lecter appeared on screen for only 16 minutes in
The Silence of the Lambs, and Darth Vader was on-screen for only 12 minutes in
Star Wars.
- The "You talkin' to me?" scene in
Taxi Driver was improvised by Robert DeNiro. The scripted scene had consisted of only one line: "Bickle speaks to himself in the mirror."
- Cecil B. DeMille originally wanted William Boyd (TV's Hopalong Cassidy) to play Moses in
The Ten Commandments.
- Pierce Brosnan was forbidden, by the terms of his contract, from wearing a tuxedo in any non-James Bond movie from 1995 to 2002.
- Dolph Lundgren has a master's degree in Chemical Engineering.
- George Lucas's dog was named Indiana.
- The working title for
North by Northwest was
In a Northwesterly Direction.
A final piece of trivia:
I watched a movie last week called
The Salvation (2014). It was a Western filmed in South Africa, with a Danish director and actors from Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, the U.S., and England. And it was good.
Who says truth isn't stranger than fiction?