Movie trivia that I like.

Just a short post about little nuggets of movie trivia that I always liked. Noting fancy, just fun to know.

The Rocketeer.

Lila Finn was a stuntwoman. Who, at the wonderful young age of 82, took on a small part in the (best comic book movie of the 90s, nee, ever) The Rocketeer. She basically falls down when the Rocketeer passes her without breaking a hip. But what I love about her is something she said at the time in an interview about falling down some stairs:

"Well, you're only falling a few inches at a time, so it's not all that bad."

I can't refind the interview I watched way back then (and the quote is probably inaccurate) but nevertheless, I love her completely.

A clockwork orange

Malcolm McDowell was making A Clockwork orange under Stanley Kubrick. Now we all know that Kubrick was a perfectionist. So in one scene poor Malcolm is to be spit upon. So take after take he is in his hospital bed and the other actor spits in his face. After about twenty takes of this Malcolm goes up to Stanley and asks him: 

“Am I doing anything wrong, is there something I need to improve?”

“No, dear boy you are great. I just want the spit to travel down your nose and dangle on the end.”

“Ow...eh...alright.”

After forty takes they finally got it. 

Mr. Holmes

Mr. Holmes is a non-canon story about Sherlock Holmes. So it wasn't written by Arthur Conan Doyle. A bit of fun movie trivia about this movie is that it deals with a ageing Holmes at the end of his life trying to solve one last case. One day he goes into a cinema to watch a movie adaptation of one of his adventures/ Watson's stories. In this movie-within-the-movie he/Holmes is played by Nicolas Rowe. The same actor who portrayed Holmes in another non-canon film about Holmes's first adventure: Young Sherlock Holmes.

So as a nice bit of trivia we have the actors playing in both the last and the first non-canon Sherlock Holmes movies in one movie. Nice touch.

Godsend 
I noticed that the classroom in Godsend (around the 35:00 mark). Is the same as in the game Shiver. Computer games do this all the time. The school in Silent Hill –for instance- is based on the school in Kindergarten Cop. However, this was the first time I actually noticed something.

Jaws

To end this little article with two well known bits of trivia from the movie Jaws.

For starters it is well known by now that the shark hardly ever worked. Which turned out to be a great ‘happy accident’ because Spielberg was now forced to keep the shark from appearing until the final act. A trick he later used again with the evil dinosaurs of Jurassic Park.

So, as Richard Dreyfuss has told in various interviews, the usual message coming from the speakers around the island where the movie was shot was: 

“The shark isn’t working. Repeat. The shark isn’t working.”

Which was great for him because that allowed him to continue his nap.

But one day the speaker said something differently:

“The shark is working. Repeat. The shark is working…but the boat is sinking.”

I can just imagine it.

The second bit of trivia from the movie Jaws is that Dreyfuss’s character was originally supposed to die in the scene wherein he’s swimming around in the shark cage. To shoot this scene Spielberg needed a small human inside a small cage. That way the real-life shark used in this scene would appear bigger.

So they lowered a small person in a small cage, in a small wetsuit, with small flippers, into the water. But they forgot the little fact that a small person uses the same amount of oxygen as an average sized person. So this poor fellow saw this gigantic white shark approaching and –panicking- immediately drained all the oxygen from his downsized/scaled oxygen tank.

Gasping for breath he was pulled back to the surface while the shark had a field day with the miniature cage (which –because it was smaller- couldn’t handle the shark’s attack and got destroyed). Once the shark was done they pulled the, what remained of the, cage out of the water and joyfully inquired whether the man wanted to do another take. He refused and that’s the sole reason why Dreyfuss’s character survived the movie.*

*This bit of trivia has kind of gotten a life of its own. Like an urban legend it has grown more spectacular over time. But I still like this version.