29 Fucking Wild Facts About Movies You Probably Didn't Know Until Now
Prepare for your mind to be blown.
There was a specific production budget set aside for cocaine during the shooting of The Blues Brothers.
Universal Pictures
In the scene from Poltergeist where JoBeth Williams swims through a pool of bones and skulls, she wasn't diving with props. They were real dead bodies.
Yep – it turns out that real skeletons were cheaper than fake ones.
– shawny87
Amblin Entertainment
Similarly, all of the worms and snakes in the final scene of The Craft were real.
Columbia Pictures
Natalie Portman was originally cast as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet when she was 13 years old. However, the age difference between her and leading man Leonardo DiCaprio proved problematic.
Leo was 21 at the time, and producers decided to re-cast her because they said "it looked as though DiCaprio was molesting her" in the romantic scenes.
That wasn't the only dramatic occurrence on the set of Romeo and Juliet. One of the movie's hair and makeup artists was kidnapped by gang members and held for ransom. He was returned by being thrown out of a moving car which caused him to break a leg.
– Dalatupp
20th Century Fox
Paul Bateson, who played an X-Ray technician in The Exorcist, was a convicted murderer who dismembered and killed a series of gay men in the 1970s.
Warner Bros
The production team on All The President's Men spent $450,000 (close to $2 million today,) creating an exact replica of The Washington Post's offices, which even included their trash.
When the real Ben Bradlee's daughter visited the set, she was able to walk straight to where her dad's office would be.
Universal Pictures
O.J. Simpson was almost cast as the Terminator, but James Cameron thought he was "too pleasant" to portray a dark character.
Getty Images / Via Hemdale Film Corporation
Gene Kelly performed the title number in Singin' In The Rain with a fever of 103°F.
Warner Bros
The sound of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park is actually a recording of two tortoises having sex on a loop.
Universal Pictures
Just one minute of The Nightmare Before Christmas took an entire week to film.
The stop-motion musical had 24 frames to a second, meaning they had to pose characters 24 times for each second of completed film. That consisted of roughly 110,000 frames meaning one minute took a week to film and the movie itself took three years to complete.
Walt Disney Pictures
Most of the dialogue in The Blair Witch project was improvised. The cast were only given notes outlining the general direction of the narrative for that day's filming.
Haxan Films / Via instagram.com
The cast also had to use GPS to find supply crates which contained Power Bars, fruit and water. The directors purposefully gave the actors less and less food each day in order to create conflict. By the end they were only given a piece of fruit and some water.
CinemaSins / Via youtube.com
Jeremy Ions developed vocal problems mid-way through recording the song "Be Prepared" for the Lion King. The song was completed by Jim Cummings – AKA the voice of Winnie The Pooh.
If you listen carefully you can hear a slight difference after “You won’t get a sniff without me!"
– LeeshFA
Walt Disney Productions
In 1940, Gone With The Wind actor Hattie McDaniel became the first ever African American actor to win an Academy Award. However, thanks to racial segregation, movie executives had to beg for her to even be able to attend the ceremony, where she was then seated at a small table at the rear of the venue away from her fellow nominees.
The poster for Just My Luck features a paparazzi photo of Lindsay Lohan. In fact, the studio loved it so much that they decided to change the movie's tagline to "Everything changed in the wink of an eye."
Silvercup Studios
The famous Star Wars "I love you/ I know" interaction wasn't actually in the original script, but suggested by Harrison Ford.
After suggesting that Princess Leia say: "I love you," in the scene, Ford then told the director that his character should respond with: "I know," because "it's beautiful and it's acceptable and it's funny."
– noorc3
20th Century Fox
Robert De Niro paid a dentist $5,000 to mess up his teeth for the role in Cape Fear, and then $20,000 fix them afterwards.
Universal Pictures
For his role as a drug addict in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Charlie Sheen stayed awake for 48 hours straight to achieve an "authentic look."
Paramount Pictures
James Cameron spent more time with the Titanic on diving excursions than the original passengers did on the ship.
In total, he made 12 dives to the wreck, many of which lasted 15-17 hours.
20th Century Fox
Cameron's commitment to authenticity throughout the movie helped solve a mystery about the shipwreck.
When the wreck was found, the grand staircase was missing and no one could figure out why. Cameron had the movie set built as an exact replica, and while filming the sinking sequence the stairs lifted from their foundation and began to float. It was therefore concluded that when the real Titanic sank, the staircase had similarly floated up and out of the ship.
20th Century Fox
The man at the end of Titanic drinking from a flask was based on a real passenger who survived in the Atlantic as a direct result of his blood alcohol level.
20th Century Fox
If all of the present day scenes in Titanic were deleted leaving only those taking place in 1912, the film would run for 2 hours and 40 minutes – the exact time it took for the Titanic to sink.
20th Century Fox
And, finally, during a celebratory meal mid-way through filming Titanic, the entire cast and crew were poisoned with PCP-spiked clam chowder. To this day no one knows who was responsible.
20th Century Fox
Some submissions have been edited for length/clarity