On our latest episode, we went down this list of Bizarre and Shocking Movie Facts. Here’s the rest of the list as promised
1. In It: Chapter Two, a record 5,000 gallons of fake blood (the most for any movie ever) were used to shoot that iconic bathroom scene.
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To get the shot just right, Jessica Chastain basically had to bathe in a kiddie pool of fake blood, which she said was freezing.
2. Megan Mullally was fired from her role in Finding Nemo for refusing to do her high-pitched Karen Walker voice from Will & Grace.
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According to Mullally, the studio originally agreed that she could do whatever voice she wanted for the undisclosed character, but as time went on they kept requesting the one she used for Will & Grace. She refused, so they fired her.
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3. In Singin’ in the Rain, Gene Kelly insulted Debbie Reynolds’ dancing so much that she once hid from everyone under a piano, crying.
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Reynolds only had a few months to learn what Gene Kelly had been doing his whole life, yet he “came to rehearsals and criticized everything I did and never gave me a word of encouragement.” She also worked so hard that her feet literally started bleeding. One day she had enough and hid under a piano on the studio lot, crying, and Fred Astaire found her. He started working with her on the dance routines: “I watched in awe as Fred worked on his routines to the point of frustration and anger. I realized that if it was hard for Fred Astaire, dancing was hard for everyone.”
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4. In Home Alone, the prop department originally created a fake tarantula to put on Daniel Stern’s face, but the director made them use a real one. Also, the tarantula’s name was Barry.
While prepping for the scene, the animal trainer on set said, “Just don’t make any sudden, threatening moves, and you’ll be fine.” Daniel responded, “But I’m going to be screaming in Barry’s face. Do you think he’ll feel threatened by that?!” The animal trainer simply said, “Barry doesn’t have ears. He can’t hear. Relax.”
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5. In Crazy Rich Asians, Henry Golding almost turned down the main role because he thought it called for a “legitimate actor,” and that just wasn’t him.
Golding was a travel host for seven years. Crazy Rich Asians was going to be his first movie ever, so when they offered him the chance to audition he thought he “wasn’t good enough,” saying, “Oh my god. I’ve heard of this, but it’s for someone else who’s a legitimate actor that the studio is going to gamble on.”
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6. In A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper spent six months with a dialect coach trying to imitate Sam Elliott’s voice…before he even knew Sam was going to be cast as his on-screen brother.
Bradley Cooper worked on his character’s voice for four hours a day. When Sam Elliott agreed to be in the film, Cooper responded, “Thank god he said yes, because I would have had to rewrite the whole thing. Six months of work on my voice would have gone down the drain.”
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7. In Miracle on 34th Street, actor John Payne, who played Fred Gailey, loved the movie so much that he actually wrote a sequel to it when he was older.
In Maureen O’Hara’s autobiography, she said, “We talked about it for years, and he eventually even wrote a screenplay sequel. He was going to send it to me but tragically died before he could get around to it. I never saw it and have often wondered what happened to it.”
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8. In The Incredibles 2, Frozone’s wife (Honey) was set to finally make an appearance, but they unfortunately cut her scene for two key reasons.
According to writer-director Brad Bird, the scene with Honey (which would have occurred in the opening fight sequence) was removed because: “1. We felt like we stayed away from the big action scene too long and that we were killing the momentum we were gaining by having the big action scene, and 2. We decided the off-camera-ness of it is part of the joke, and then Honey can kinda be anyone you imagine her to be.”
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9. In Hostel, writer-director Eli Roth came up with the premise for the film after discovering a Thai website where people can pay to torture and kill another human.
Roth was talking to a friend about the worst, sickest things they’d ever seen on the internet. “He told me about this website, in Thailand, where for $10,000 you could shoot someone in the head… I thought it would be a great subject to do a documentary on, but I thought, ‘do I want these people knowing where I live?’ If it’s real, they’ve got my address, and if it’s fake, they’ve probably run off with my credit card!”
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10. In Batman Returns, Michelle Pfeiffer literally had to be vacuum-sealed into her Catwoman costume, which made it very difficult to move and breathe.
She described the process as one of the most uncomfortable things she’s ever done: “They had to powder me down, help me inside, and then vacuum-pack the suit. They’d paint it with a silicon-based finish to give it its trademark shine. I had those claws, and I was always catching them in things. The face mask was smashing my face and choking me.”
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11. In Mammia Mia! Here We Go Again, Cher was basically forced to be in the sequel by the head of Universal Pictures.
Cher recalled the events, saying, “I’ve never planned a single thing in my entire life. It’s like this Abba album. I did the film. I didn’t ask to do it. My friend Ronnie Meyer called and said, ‘You’re doing Mamma Mia‘ and hung up.
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12. In Hocus Pocus, the main role of Max almost went to Leonardo DiCaprio, but he backed out to film two other movies. The role ultimately went to Omri Katz.
Director Kenny Ortega talked about Leo’s audition, saying, “He’s just the most sincere and most centered and a wild child at the same time. He was feeling awkward and was like, ‘I just feel really bad being here because I’m up for two other movies and I really want them both and I don’t want to lead you on.’” DiCaprio ended up booking both of those films (This Boy’s Life and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape), resulting in his first Oscar nomination.
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13. Flynn Rider’s appearance for Tangled was designed during a “Hot Guy Meeting” where women from the studio picked out their favorite physical attributes from pictures of Hollywood’s leading men.
Directors Nathan Greno and Bryon Howard described the whole process, saying, “When we were designing the character, we were trying to get the look down, so one of the things we did was bring a lot of the females in from the building. We wanted this guy to be really, really handsome, so we put up photos all over the walls of the most handsome men in all of Hollywood history and sort of picked out which features sort of worked best. We just listened and let the women have at it. In the end, we put all this stuff together, so he’s this very handsome fellow.”
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14. Chris Farley was originally cast as Shrek, and he even recorded most of his lines for the movie before his death.
Chris Farley recorded about 85% of his lines before dying in December of 1997. There was talk about having someone impersonate Farley for the remaining 15%, but they ultimately brought in Mike Myers to do his own version: “We spent a year banging our heads against the wall until Mike Myers came on board. Chris’s Shrek and Mike’s Shrek are really two completely different characters, as much as Chris and Mike are two completely different people. Myers asked that the script be completely rewritten so that he wouldn’t be starring in the Chris Farley version of the film.”
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15. Jackie Cooper couldn’t make himself cry while filming a particular scene in Skippy, so the director threatened to have Cooper’s dog killed if he couldn’t produce tears.
The film’s director, Norman Taurog, was also Cooper’s uncle. Cooper wrote in his autobiography that the whole exchange was traumatizing for him: “I could visualize my dog, bloody from that one awful shot. I began sobbing so hysterically that it was almost too much for the scene. [Taurog] had to quiet me down by saying perhaps my dog had survived the shot, that if I hurried and calmed down a little and did the scene the way he wanted, we would go see if my dog was still alive.”
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16. In Candyman, Tony Todd had to fill his mouth with real bees during that trademark scene, and he got stung 27 times because of it.
Todd wore a mouth guard to keep the bees from crawling down the back of his throat. He also was sprayed with the pheromone of a queen bee to try to keep all the honeybees on set happy.
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17. Cleopatra was one of the most expensive movies to ever be made. It had an original budget of $5 million, but after two years the film still wasn’t finished, and more money kept being put into it, totaling over $370 million by today’s standards.
The movie almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox. Filming began in September of 1960, but “two years later the film was not yet finished, and Fox executive Darryl F. Zanuck said the cost was $35 million, though Variety later estimated that the true figure was closer to $44 million.”
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18. Lon Chaney, who played the title characters in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, did his own makeup for the roles.
Chaney acted in more than 150 films and was also recognized as one of the best makeup artists in the business. He even wrote the entry for ‘make-up’ in the 1929 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
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19. In Home Alone, that picture of Buzz’s girlfriend was actually a picture of the art director’s son wearing a wig.
Devin Ratray, the actor who played Buzz, admitted that the girl in the picture was actually the son of the movie’s art director: “[They] decided it would be unkind to put a girl in that role of just being funny-looking. The art director had a son who was more than willing to volunteer for the part. I think if he had known it would become the highest-grossing family comedy of all time, he might have had second thoughts about it.”
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20. For Moonlight, Naomie Harris had only three days to shoot all of her scenes because of visa issues. Still, her performance was so good that she was nominated for an Academy Award.
In an interview, Harris revealed that she “couldn’t get a visa to come and film [in America], so that was a problem.” It was ultimately resolved at the last minute, and she claimed this actually helped her performance: “I didn’t have any time to kind of get in my head. I was just doing it. I wasn’t, like, waiting around in my trailer, thinking, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got an emotional scene to do today.’ I just had to get on and do it and work.”
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21. In The Muppet Christmas Carol, Michael Caine insisted that the only way he’d play Scrooge was if he pretended like the Muppets were real people and that he was acting in the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Before shooting, director Brian Henson (Jim Henson’s son) met with Michael Caine to talk about how he might portray Scrooge in the film. Caine said, “I’m going to play this movie like I’m working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I will never wink. I will never do anything Muppet-y. I am going to play Scrooge as if it is an utterly dramatic role and there are no puppets around me.”
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22. Tiffany Haddish turned down Jordan Peele’s offer to audition for Get Out because she refuses to be in scary movies.
Tiffany Haddish had worked with the writer-director before, so he sent her the script and asked her to audition for the movie. Her response was pretty simple: “I don’t do scary movies, dog. I don’t do that. You know, that’s demonized kind of stuff. I don’t let that in my house.”
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23. In Die Hard, Bruce Willis’s role was actually offered to 73-year-old Frank Sinatra first. Sinatra was contractually obligated to get first dibs because he starred in the film’s prequel in 1968.
In 1968, Frank Sinatra starred in a movie called The Detective, which was based on a book. Over a decade later, a sequel to that book was published. That new book was the inspiration for the 1988 movie Die Hard, which technically made it a sequel to Sinatra’s movie. Because Sinatra starred in that first movie, he was contractually obligated to get first dibs on the sequel. He was 73 at the time, so he graciously turned down the role.
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24. Angela Lansbury recorded the song “Beauty and the Beast” in a single take, even after staying up all night on a flight.
Paige O’Hara, who voiced Belle, revealed what happened in an interview, saying: “I remember the day we were in the recording studio with the amazing Broadway singers in the background chorus and the amazing orchestra. And then Ms. Lansbury – who I have admired my whole life – came in after being up all night…and was a trooper. We were all worried she would be too exhausted, and then she comes out and sings ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in one take.”
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25. While filming Move Over Darling, James Garner picked up Doris Day from the ground and accidentally broke two of her ribs.
Doris Day said that James Garner was so big and strong that he “picked me up under his arm a little too enthusiastically and cracked a couple of my ribs. I made that movie mummified with adhesive tape, which made it difficult to breathe and painful to laugh.” The two remained friends for years, and she even joked about the incident with him later on, saying, “Jim, if we don’t speak for a while, I forgive you for breaking my ribs. Both of them. Don’t give it another thought.”
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26. Steven Spielberg refused to collect a paycheck for Schindler’s List, saying it would have been “blood money” and that all profits should be returned to the Jewish community.
Spielberg said that he always planned on giving away the money he made from Schindler’s List to help support the Jewish community: “I’m committed to Holocaust education. But I wanted to strengthen the Jewish community as it is today, to engage Jewish youth, to support the arts, to promote tolerance, and to strengthen the commitment to social justice.”
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27. And finally, but most importantly, The Princess Diaries was actually produced by Whitney Houston.
And the movie’s sequel, The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, was even co-written by Shonda Rhimes. Iconic, tbh!
Credit: buzzfeed.com
