I Can’t Watch These Iconic ’90s Movies The Same Way After Learning These 100 Interesting BTS Facts
For some reason, ’90s movies just hit different. Maybe it’s just the nostalgia, or maybe films were just better back then. Whatever the reason, I’m still obsessed with rewatching movies from that era — and I’m sure plenty of you are, too!
Here are 100 interesting behind-the-scenes facts about iconic ’90s movies:
1.
Nearly two decades before his poorly received remake of The Mummy, Tom Cruise was reportedly offered the role of Rick O’Connell in the 1999 movie that ultimately starred Brendan Fraser. Other actors who reportedly declined the role included Matthew McConaughey, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck.
2.
Filming the hanging scene in The Mummy almost killed Brendan Fraser. He told The Kelly Clarkson Show, “I was standing on my toes like this, with the rope [around my neck], and you only got so far to go. And [director] Stephen [Sommers] ran over, and he said, ‘Hey, it doesn’t really look like you’re, you know, choking — can you sell it?’ And I was like, ‘All right, fine.’ So I thought, ‘One more take, man.’ … I was stuck on my toes — I had nowhere to go but down. And so [the crew member operating the rope] was pulling up, and I was going down, and the next thing I knew, my elbow was in my ear, the world was sideways, there was gravel in my teeth, and everyone was really quiet.”
3.
To play Imhotep in The Mummy, Arnold Vosloo had to be completely hairless. He told the Irish Independent, “For the first movie, I bravely consented for this lovely Scottish girl, who is my make-up artist, to wax me. That happened one time. I yelled like a stuffed pig. It’s beyond belief what you women go through. It’s unreal.”
4.
Leonardo DiCaprio was offered “more money than [he] ever dreamed of” to star in Hocus Pocus. However, he turned it down because he was holding out for a role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, even though he hadn’t auditioned for it yet. He told Variety, “I don’t know where the hell I got the nerve. You live in an environment where you’re influenced by people telling you to make a lot of money and strike while the iron’s hot. But if there’s one thing I’m very proud of, it’s being a young man who was sticking to my guns.”
The role he was presumably offered went to Omri Katz, and Leo earned his first Oscar nom for his role as Arnie Grape in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.
5.
To play identical twins in The Parent Trap, Lindsay Lohan filmed every scene where both her characters appeared twice. Costar Lisa Ann Walter told Today, “CGI has grown where it’s not so painstaking. But then, they were sort of the groundbreakers for how to shoot those twins, where they did everything with Lindsay on one side and her double on the other and then flipped it. So we did everything twice. So Elaine [Hendrix] and I, part of the reason we became best friends on that set is we spent a lot of time creating fun for ourselves back in the trailers while we waited for setups to happen.”
6.
Lindsay Lohan and Simon Kunz choreographed their iconic The Parent Trap handshake themselves. He told Bustle, “The first time [Lindsay and I] met up, we worked on the handshake idea, about what it could be. I think I’d done something in the audition, just mucking about without Lindsay there, just doing silly moves. They liked a few of those, and so we basically spent an afternoon, two or three hours really, just working out that routine… If you ask me right now [to do it], I’d know one or two bits there, but I tell you what, it would only take me 20 minutes, and then I’d have it absolutely down pat.”
7.
Disney animators would fight over who got to work on Pocahontas and The Lion King. The films were produced at the same time, but Pocahontas was the more popular choice because they thought it would be the bigger hit.
8.
The Lion King was going to be called King of the Jungle until the filmmakers learned that lions don’t live in the jungle. Other working titles included King of the Kalahari and Lions.
9.
Initially, Nathan Lane planned to go out for the role of Zazu. However, at the audition, he crossed paths with Ernie Sabella, who planned to try out to be a hyena. They decided to work together and both auditioned to play hyenas. However, the casting directors had an even better idea — they cast them as Timon and Pumba!
10.
In The Lion King, none of the lion roars were made by actual lions. A few were tiger roars, and others were made by voice actor Frank Welker roaring into a metal trash can.
11.
The wildebeest stampede scene in The Lion King took animators nearly three years to complete. Producer Don Hahn told Screen Rant that it took so long because the wildebeests were computer-animated, and the movie was made during the early days of computer animation. He also said that they took extra care because they were trying to “not traumatize this audience” with the scene’s sensitive nature.
12.
The scene in The Birdcage where Robin Williams suddenly slips in the kitchen was “absolutely not intentional.” Costar Hank Azaria told the AV Club, “If you watch that little piece of film again, you’ll see me laughing and Robin laughing. It’s one of those things that happens that you never really think they’re going to use, but I was so emotionally upset in the scene — I was supposed to be crying — that I just pretended that he was making me cry even more. But I was actually laughing.”
13.
As an Italian American, Martin Scorsese was opposed to making a movie about the Mafia, but then reading Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi changed his mind, inspiring him to adapt it into Goodfellas. He told Empire, “It’s a bit different here. ‘Cause it’s not that. When I read the book, and then, when I started writing the script with Nicholas Pileggi, we gave it such a structure that it seemed to me an exciting film to make. That it would be too bad not to make, too bad for me not to make. It’s an epic, insofar as it covers 25 years, from 1955 to 1980.”
14.
Malcolm X featured lead actor Denzel Washington’s then-7-year-old son, John David Washington, in a small role, marking the future actor’s onscreen debut.
15.
When J.F. Lawton first began working on the script that would eventually become Pretty Woman, it wasn’t even a rom-com! It was a gritty drama titled 3,000. He told Vanity Fair, “Wall Street had either come out or was coming out, I had heard about it and the whole issue about the financiers who were destroying companies. I kind of thought about the idea that one of these people would meet somebody who was affected by what they were doing.” His initial script had many scenes and characters similar to Pretty Woman, but Vivian didn’t end up with Edward. In the finale scene, she and her best friend, Kit, were on a bus to Disneyland. Kit’s excitement was contrasted with Vivian’s staring “out emptily ahead.” After the original company that was attached to the project went bankrupt, it was “upgraded to Disney.”
The script went through multiple rewrites, transforming it into a rom-com, but Lawton was happy with this. He said, “I was thrilled! That’s the other side of it, is that I’m supposed to be the wounded artist in all of this who painted the da Vinci or whatever, and then they slashed it. I was a guy who was writing ninja movies and trying to get a job. If you’re an architect, and you design a cabin for the woods, and somebody says, ‘We want to make it into a skyscraper’…the fact that Disney came in and wanted to do it as a big-budget movie with a major director was a great thing.”
16.
In Pretty Woman, the scene where Edward closes the jewelry box on Vivian’s hand was actually an unscripted prank on Julia Roberts! Director Garry Marshall told DGA Quarterly magazine, “This was not actually a scene written into the movie — rather a prank I played on Julia with Richard’s help. Why, you may ask, would I fool around when ‘time is money?’ The reason is simple: While making a film there are, believe it or not, ‘rotten days,’ ‘cranky days,’ and ‘stupid, absurd days.’ Days when the actors are sluggish from late-night parties and premieres, or from shooting too many days in a row. And sometimes the crew is tired from too hot, too cold, too rainy or too many long days. I find the solution to this problem is to do pranks and jokes.”
He continued, “Other directors use yelling or pep talks or firing people to shake up a shoot. My sister Penny sometimes uses begging, á la, ‘Please, please everybody, act better. I have a stomachache and a headache, and I wanna wrap and go home.’ Kidding around works best for me. For instance, during Julia’s bubble bath scene in Pretty Woman when she went under the soapy water for a few moments, Richard Gere, myself, and the entire crew disappeared and were gone when she came up. It was just her in a tub on a ghost ship. And I also started a rumor during that scene that I had put goldfish in the bathtub, and everybody, including Julia, was looking for the fish.”
17.
Clueless writer/director Amy Heckerling told Entertainment Weekly, “When I auditioned the kids, I’d always ask them for new words. You know, slang and stuff. That’s where I got ‘going postal.’ I loved calling someone a ‘Monet.’ From far away, they’re fucking gorgeous, and up close, they’re totally different. ‘Betty’ was based on Betty Rubble, who was very pretty. And ‘Barney’ is like, How did he get her? ‘As if’ came from the lesbian community. Any outsider group is going to create their own language — whether it’s homosexual, Black, prisoners, or cabdrivers. You just have to be willing to open your ears and listen.”
Alicia Silverstone added, “I didn’t know what anything meant. I would have to say to Amy, ‘What does “As if” mean? She’’s way hipper than I am. I mean, “Surfing the crimson wave”?'”
18.
Cher’s iconic yellow plaid outfit from Clueless is often imitated, never duplicated — but it almost didn’t happen because of Alicia’s hair! Costume designer Mona May told E! News, “She had to shine. She had to jump out of the page, of the screen. We tried red and we tried blue, which is kind of like a more of a blonde color, and nothing really had the pop, and when I found the yellow suit, the Dolce & Gabbana, and we put it on in the fitting, it was like sunshine, like a ray of sun just entered the room, and that was what Amy [Heckerling] loved, and everybody in the room reacted to it so incredibly because it really — you wouldn’t think of yellow for a blonde girl… But, that really was the perfect thing to embody her in that first scene.”
“It had to be plaid. It’s just quintessential school. You’re taking this very much of a Catholic school uniform and now twisting it to high fashion and then transforming it yet again through the eyes of the high school girl,” she said.
19.
The Craft actors and crew reportedly had to return to location to reshoot the ritual scene because of setbacks that had even their witch consultant concerned. Allegedly, as Fairuza Balk said her lines invoking Manon, bats settled over the scene. The tide rose so high that it put out the candles. Director Andrew Fleming said, “Every time the girls started the ceremony, and only when they would start the ceremony, the waves would start coming up tremendously fast, pounding heavily. Then, right when Nancy says her line, ‘Manon, fill me,’ right at that exact moment, we lost power. It was a very strange thing.”
20.
Beauty and the Beast screenwriter Linda Woolverton and lyricist Howard Ashman had to fight for Belle to break the typical Disney princess mold. Linda told Entertainment Weekly, “Howard and I wanted to make a sea change in the Disney heroine. Together, we conjured up Belle, who loved to read. She was unconscious about her beauty. She had dreams of faraway places, and she wasn’t a victim; she’s not sitting around waiting for anybody to rescue her or [for] a prince to come. We, of course, came into a lot of pushback about it. There was a template of what a Disney heroine should be: taking all of this abuse, smiling and talking to little animals through it all. That’s not what I felt the world needed. I used to rail about it, honestly. I didn’t make myself very popular.”
21.
Belle and the Beast’s chemistry came from the chemistry between their voice actors. Paige O’Hara, who voiced Belle, told the Hollywood Reporter, “Robby [Benson] and I would record our lines standing right next to each other. They don’t usually allow that because it’s technically more complicated and more expensive. It takes more time. But the outcome was certainly worth the time, as they all admitted later. The relationship between Belle and Beast was so much more poignant.”
Robby Benson, who voiced Beast, added, “We played it as if we were shooting a feature. Even though it was an animated feature, these characters were very real to us. I know how actor-y and silly that might sound, but we wanted to bring these characters to life.”
22.
After the Beast’s transformation, Belle almost asked him, “Do you think you can grow a beard?” Paige ad-libbed the line while recording, but it was cut from the final version of the film. However, Emma Watson’s Belle posed the question to Prince Adam in the live-action remake.
23.
Beauty and the Beast was the first animated movie ever nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. However, some film actors were extremely unhappy about its nomination. For example, when Sally Field introduced it at the awards show, she made a crack about there being “no actors onscreen” and said, “We members of the Screen Actors Guild hope this doesn’t become a trend.”
24.
During Titanic‘s final shooting day in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, tens of cast and crew members were unwittingly drugged when they ate chowder spiked with the mind-altering substance PCP. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet weren’t on set that day, but Bill Paxton was among the poisoned. Director James Cameron told Q with Tom Power, “This is a 100 percent true story. You haven’t lived until you’ve been high on PCP, which by the way, I do not recommend to anyone.”
Everyone was rushed to the hospital under the initial concern that they might’ve eaten contaminated shellfish. James continued, “There was an emergency room with no one in it and, like, a nurse, and 85 crew members walk in. We don’t know what’s going on. And basically, somebody had taken a pound of PCP and dumped it into the chowder… We have a pretty strong suspicion who it was, although it was never proven.”
25.
The Pasadena house that was used for the exterior shots in Father of the Bride became a real-life wedding venue when the owners, Sarah Bradley and Darrell Spence, used it to host their wedding reception. They purchased the home in 1999 and tied the knot a little under a year later. Sarah told HGTV, “When I gave [the event planner] our address, she said, ‘Oh, you’re near the Father of the Bride house.’ I said, ‘No, we are the Father of the Bride house.'” She said the excited planner shouted, “I’m going to be Franck!”
Additionally, fans love to visit the house — and some even propose there. Once, on the way home from a walk with their two kids, the couple decided to hang back as a proposal unfolded. Sarah said, “I saw the guy on one knee and told Darrell, ‘We can’t go over there with a screaming child.’ They’ll be like, ‘Forget it!'”
26.
Franck, the eccentric wedding planner in Father of the Bride, was reportedly inspired by Kevin Lee, a celebrity wedding and event planner who’s worked with clients such as Kim Kardashian, Nic Cage, and Jennifer Aniston. He told the Daily Dish that a producer informed him of the inspiration. He said, “Oh yeah, absolutely it was me! I said, ‘Wow.’ I was totally shocked when he told me that… [Martin Short] captured my character so well, and I was overwhelmed. Officially, I am the Franck.”
27.
When Andrew Niccol first wrote The Truman Show, he “did envisage something darker.” He told the Hollywood Reporter, “In the original script, there was an innocent passenger attacked on the subway as a way to test Truman’s courage, and Truman had a platonic relationship with a prostitute who he dressed as Sylvia… I always thought the premise was bullet-proof, and even though the original draft is set in an alternate version of New York City — if you can fake it there, you can fake it anywhere — I was happy to embrace [director Peter Weir’s] more idyllic, small-town take on a counterfeit world.”
28.
In The Truman Show, Truman’s iconic catchphrase (and the final line of the movie) — “Good morning! And in case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night” — was the brainchild of Jim Carrey. Writer Andrew Niccol told the Hollywood Reporter, “I think it was originally an ad-lib by Jim, but yes, the duplicitous Christof seized on it and directed the extras in Truman’s life to pretend to be amused… For a while, I think the last line was, ‘You never had a camera in my head.'”
29.
In Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, the triangular symbol on Romy’s blue dress is a hidden Star Trek reference. Costume designer Mona May told Nylon she wanted a “slick” and “futuristic” look, so she added the Star Fleet insignia-esque symbol. She said, “I didn’t want to make it too plain or put stars all over it or anything weird, so it was just enough.”
30.
In its original form, Galaxy Quest was titled Captain Starshine. Producer Mark Johnson’s scouts weren’t impressed with the screenplay itself, but they loved the logline — what if aliens mistook an old Star Trek-esque show as “historical documents” and sought out the crew of out-of-work actors for help when their planet is threatened? So, it was completely rewritten by a different screenwriter. Mark told MTV News, “The original David Howard draft of Captain Starshine — very few people have ever read that. The original concept was brilliant, but we needed someone like a Bob Gordon to take it from there.”
31.
Mulan was initially conceptualized as a rom-com. In the original plot, Mulan ran away from home after her father arranged her engagement with Li Shang. However, screenwriter Chris Sanders decided that the film should adhere more closely to the tale it was based on.
32.
Ming-Na Wen, who voiced Mulan, tweeted, “I obviously have a ‘tell’ on the red carpet! Touching my hair. In the scene between Mulan & her father under the cherry blossom tree, Mulan strokes her hair. My mom said that was when she saw ME. Animators saw it too! Guess I’ve had this nervous habit for awhile now!”
33.
The names of the men that Chi-Fu calls out to serve in the imperial army belonged to members of the staff working on Mulan.
34.
The Leonardo DiCaprio-led Romeo + Juliet was filmed in Mexico, but the production could’ve been a movie itself. Director Baz Luhrmann told Arts Beat LA, “Look, first let me say I would not swap a day that I spent in Mexico for anything in the world. It was the most adventurous time. Having said that, it is true we were there months longer than we needed to be. We had hurricanes that wiped out the set. We all got sick. Shooting shut down for a week while I had a temperature of 110. The hair and makeup person, Aldo Signoretti, who worked with [director Federico] Fellini, was kidnapped. We paid $US300 to get him back. I thought rather a bargain.”
He continued, “I was not there; he was kidnapped. The bandidos rang up and said, ‘For $US300, you can have him back.’ So Maurizio [Silvi, the makeup artist], who is about this high, goes down clutching the money to outside the hotel, holds it up, chucks them the bag, and they threw him out of the car and broke his leg. So we had adventures. It was an incredible quest. It wasn’t a walk in the park, and the fact that the kids did what they did and put up with what they did was amazing.”
“The reason the film is like it is, is that we embraced everything in the film. For example, Mercutio dies in that storm. Well, that was the hurricane that came and blew our sets away. The wide shots, which you could never get, I asked the guys if the cameras could handle it — we got out and did the wides and caught the storms, then we came back and did the close-ups with wind machines. For a budget of ours, which is between $15–17 million, you can’t achieve that short of massive CGIs,” he said.
35.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of the book that Tarzan was based on, predicted that it would be made into a Disney movie nearly 60 years before the film’s production. In 1936, he said that he envisioned Tarzan of the Apes as an animated feature that “must approximate Disney excellence.” The Disney adaptation went into production in 1995.
36.
While working on the Tarzan soundtrack, Phil Collins created all of the percussion sounds in “Trashin’ the Camp” by himself. He broke cups and hit things with sticks all around the studio. He even slapped himself on the forehead.
Composer Mark Mancina told Forbes that “Trashin’ the Camp” was his “least favorite thing to work on, only because the nature of the song…it would just wear your gears out.” He said, “There was foley involved, and there was also Phil playing all sorts of crazy things. [One of the percussionists] brought in boxes and trap cases and tons of stuff, and they were just pulling these things out: bowls and glasses and all sorts of crazy stuff. It was a noisy session.”
37.
Phil Collins composed “You’ll Be in My Heart” for Tarzan while playing the piano at a neighbor’s Christmas party. He jotted down the melody and chords onto a piece of wrapping paper.
38.
Animator Glen Keane, who supervised Tarzan‘s animation, was inspired by Tony Hawk because his teen son was a huge fan. The pro skater’s movements were the basis of Tarzan’s movements through the jungle.
39.
Tony Goldwyn voiced Tarzan, but his iconic yell was actually done by a different voice actor from the cast — Brian Blessed, who played Clayton.
40.
The Matrix production designer Simon Whiteley told CNET, “I like to tell everybody that The Matrix‘s code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes. Without that code, there is no Matrix.” He later told Wired, “The Wachowskis didn’t feel like the design was old-fashioned and traditional enough. They wanted something that was more Japanese, more manga. They asked me if I’d like to have a go working at the code, mainly because my wife is Japanese, and she could help me work out the characters and give me insight into which characters were good and which weren’t.” At home, he went through “stacks of Japanese cookbooks” until he found the perfect one to base his code on.
He continued, “I’ve been kind of not wanting to tell anyone what the recipe book is, partly because that’s the last bit of magic… It’s not actually a book. It’s a magazine, but it’s called a book. It’s something most Japanese people would’ve heard of or have on their bookshelf.”
41.
To test the believability of his Mrs. Doubtfire disguise, Robin Williams wore the costume to an adult store. He told Sirius XM, “I was dressed as her in San Francisco, and I walked into a sex shop… I tried to buy a double-headed dildo, and I was going, ‘That one right there. The big one. Do you have anything without veins? Something without veins would be lovely’…and I can see this guy behind the counter going, ‘Whoa, this old lady.’ ‘And a scented lube would be nice, too. A sandalwood lube, something like that, for a probe.’ And finally, the guy realized it was me and went, ‘Get out of here, Robin, you asshole!'”
42.
Per Yahoo, in the original Ghost script, Bruce Joel Rubin wrote Molly as a wood sculptor, not a potter. When director Jerry Zucker expressed concerns it might seem cliché, Bruce got the idea to make her do pottery when he saw a The Naked Gun sound editor reading a pottery magazine. Demi Moore took a few pottery lessons ahead of filming her famous scene with Patrick Swayze, but he didn’t know anything about pottery until rehearsals. During filming, pro potters started the pots that Demi finished on camera, but things still got messy. The iconic moment when Patrick joins her at the wheel and her pot collapses was totally unplanned. In a DVD featurette, Bruce said, “Nobody expected [the pot] to fall. Demi recovered so quickly… She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t disappointed. In a way, the whole nature of their relationship was shown in that moment.”
43.
Con Air director Simon West told Den of Geek, “The original script was much smaller than the eventual film. It was a character piece, really, by Scott Rosenberg, who did Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead and Beautiful Girls, which were very small, little indie films with great characters. Jerry [Bruckheimer, the producer] liked it, obviously, and I liked it just because of the characters and their names, like Cyrus the Virus and Diamond Dog and things like that. I thought, well, I can do something with this. But I had to make it into a big summer action movie, whereas, at the moment, it’s a small character piece. So then I set about blowing it up out of all proportion, really.”
44.
Interview with the Vampire author Anne Rice was initially so opposed to Tom Cruise’s casting as Lestat de Lioncourt that she attended a protest against him at a bookstore. She told Esquire, “I didn’t speak out in any organized or planned way. These people have stood in line for me three and four hours. They are my readers, and they hate this. I was carried along by my readers. I didn’t start the whole thing at all.”
However, after the film came out, she praised him in an open letter, writing, “From the moment he appeared, Tom was Lestat for me. He has the immense physical and moral presence; he was defiant and yet never without conscience; he was beautiful beyond description yet compelled to do cruel things. The sheer beauty of Tom was dazzling, but the polish of his acting, his flawless plunge into the Lestat persona, his ability to speak rather boldly poetic lines, and speak them with seeming ease and conviction were exhilarating and uplifting. The guy is great. I’m no good at modesty. I like to believe Tom’s Lestat will be remembered the way Olivier’s Hamlet is remembered. Others may play the role some day but no one will ever forget Tom’s version of it.”
45.
The lead character in Sister Act was originally named Terri, but screenwriter Paul Rudnick told the New Yorker, “Whoopi Goldberg was suddenly eager to play the part of Terri, although she asked that the character’s name be changed to Deloris, because, I was told, she’d always wanted to play someone named Deloris.”
46.
Reese Witherspoon helped rewrite parts of the Cruel Intentions script. Her costar (and boyfriend at the time of filming) Ryan Phillippe told Entertainment Weekly, “She loved the movie for me, but it wasn’t a great part at the time for her. She helped Roger [Kumble, the writer/director] turn it into one.” Roger said, “It’s true, she came and sat with me for a week, and we worked on the dialogue together. Annette was the character most removed from me. There’s no way the movie would have its success if it weren’t for [Reese’s] talent as a writer.”
Reese added, “I remember finding Annette too demure and too much of a woman influenced by a guy’s manipulations. I was starting what I guess became my bigger mission in life — of questioning why women were written certain ways on film.”
47.
In the Forrest Gump scene where the protagonist gives a speech at an anti-Vietnam protest, you can’t hear what Tom Hanks is saying. Screenwriter Eric Roth told Yahoo Entertainment, “[Director Robert Zemeckis] never liked the speech I had Forrest Gump give when he was given the microphone at that event. He said, ‘We need something that’s way funnier and way more important.’ Funnier I tried, and I even enlisted some comedians. I asked Billy Crystal to help me, I asked Robin [Williams], [some] other people. And nothing ever resonated. And then I tried to write some big glorious speech about patriotism and Vietnam. It was a really wonderful American speech. And that didn’t quite work. So Bob came up with the solution of he starts speaking, and they pull the plug.”
Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull told TIME, “At that point, none of us knew what we were doing. We didn’t have any production expertise except for short films and commercials. So we were all complete novices. But there was something fresh about nobody knowing what the hell we were doing.”
49.
Since Pixar’s software was so new, there were obviously limits to what it could animate. It was great for geometric shapes, but made organic shapes look plastic, so toys were the perfect main characters for their debut film.
Initially, they tried to avoid animating people, but eventually, they felt the need to add Andy and others in frame.
50.
Originally, Woody was very different. Instead of a pull-string doll, he was a ventriloquist dummy, and he also had a very different demeanor. Animator Ralph Eggleston told the San Francisco Chronicle, “The character of Woody was really abrasive and unlikeable in the way he was being presented. In the guise of attempting to make him hip and cool and edgy, it became kind of snide and cynical. … They went back to the core. That kind of storytelling and writing wasn’t in their heart.”
51.
In 1998, a Pixar employee accidentally deleted most of the files for Toy Story 2. To make matters worse, the backup system wasn’t working either, so it seemed like all hope was lost. However, in a lucky turn of events, technical direction supervisor Galyn Susman was working from home while on maternity leave, so she had a backup copy. Her computer was wrapped in blankets and driven to the office, where they were able to recover a majority of the lost files.
52.
In Toy Story 2, Tom Hanks, who voiced Woody, ad-libbed the scene where his character sees all of the Woody’s Roundup merch for the first time. He got to see sketches of the animators’ designs while recording his lines so that they could capture his real reactions.
53.
The Rescuers Down Under was the first Disney film to be entirely made using the Computer Animation Production System process, essentially marking the company’s first fully digitally animated movie. It was actually the first fully digital feature film ever made!
54.
While on a research trip for The Rescuers Down Under in Australia, animator Pixote Hunt was inspired to make Cody, an Aboriginal boy. The rest of the production team supported the idea. However, co-director Mike Gabriel told Collider that studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg made a “gentle” suggestion that doing so would “cut your box office down worldwide.” Another exec alleged that Katzenberg shouted, “Nobody wants to see that little boy of color.”
Gabriel said, “[Cody] lost his unique identity… He got blanded out a bit. He doesn’t stand out. It would have been so cool.” Fellow animators Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise alleged that they were “fired” from the project and quietly reassigned to a different film because they protested against the decision to remove the character’s Aboriginal background.
55.
The Rescuers Down Under severely underperformed at the box office because it premiered the same weekend as Home Alone, which “came out of nowhere.” Gabriel encouraged people he knew to go see it, but in response, they’d rave about Home Alone. He told Collider, “I couldn’t even get my relatives to see my own movie.”
He added, “One time, I was in line at airport security, and who is right behind me? Macaulay Culkin. This is only about two to three years ago (so around 2017–2018). A lot of water under the bridge, but I was very carefully thinking, ‘How can I say anything?’ It’s kind of a funny story. But I just thought, There’s no way I can broach this without him thinking I’m going to pull out a gun and shoot him. So I didn’t say anything.”
56.
Per Metro, in the Home Alone scene where Marv walks barefoot through the snow, Daniel Stern wore fake feet because of the cold. He told ComicBook.com, “I do get asked a lot, ‘Was that a real tarantula on your face? What’s Joe Pesci like? Did it hurt when you got hit in the face with the iron?’’ That one, I guess getting hit in the face, ‘Did it hurt when you got hit in the face with the bricks?’ I think maybe that one. When people started asking me that, I went, ‘You know it’s fake, right? There’s a prop department. I didn’t get hit in the face with bricks.’ They’re like, ‘Oh.’ The believability of it is wonderful, but it did concern me to a point when that movie first came out actually, that I started teaching a course in media literacy.”
57.
After the box office disappointment of the Rescuers sequel, Mike Gabriel found inspiration for his next animated feature while at his wife’s aunt and uncle’s house for Thanksgiving. He told Collider, “I’m looking at this bookcase, and I see Pocahontas. I went, ‘Wow, that’s it.’ It was a bolt of lightning striking me. Walt Disney’s Pocahontas! … It’s a culture that I couldn’t wait to get into, and the animism, and they see life in every creature and plant and the planet earth in a different way. She puts her life on the line to save the guy. The prince is saved by the princess. And she is the princess; she’s the daughter of the chief! I instantly thought of 1,000 things that make this a great idea.”
58.
Initially, Disney reportedly planned to make Pocahontas and John Smith ages 12 and 15, respectively. However, plans changed after Beauty and the Beast‘s Best Picture nomination, and Katzenberg decided that Pocahontas should be reworked into a sweeping romance in hopes of securing another Oscar nomination. So, the characters were aged up to adulthood, and her talking turkey sidekick (Redfeather, voiced by John Candy) was axed. However, his plan ultimately failed because only the film’s music received Academy Award nominations.
59.
Never Been Kissed actor Drew Barrymore told the podcast Hey Dude…The ’90s Called!, “I would get these calls from the studio, and they were like, ‘I’m sorry, but you’re just looking too unattractive.’ … I was forced to even tone it down a little bit because I had gone even farther, and then they said something that appealed to my sensibilities rather than my ego. They were like, ‘We don’t want you to lose the heart because you’re going so far for the comedy,’ and I was like, ‘Great argument. Let me dial it back a little bit.’ So Josie, what you see there, is me dialed back.”
60.
The chewing tobacco in The Sandlot was “actually shredded beef jerky and black licorice.” Actor Grant Gelt told the Arrow, “They didn’t tell us about the licorice, which, looking back, I think was intended to actually make us feel nauseous. David [Mickey Evans, the director] wanted to capture that immediate sharp reaction of, ‘Holy shit, this is terrible. What were we thinking?’ After a summer of David and the crew having to put up with us, I think that night was a good way for them to get revenge.” Prop master Terry Haskell added, “That was a real tobacco brand, and yep, the black jerky and licorice was me. I absolutely wanted them to feel revolted.”
61.
Carrie Fisher and George Lucas had secret cameos in Hook! According to the Wrap, filmmakers confirmed they appeared as a couple on the bridge that Tinker Bell enchants.
62.
According to Screen Rant, CGI was only used for six minutes of Jurassic Park. Most of the dinosaurs were created using practical effects, such as puppets and animatronics. For example, the sick triceratops that Ellie Sattler interacts closely with is a gigantic puppet with hand-sculpted skin and control rods beneath its flanks.
63.
Friends costars Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow unintentionally wore the same red Moschino jacket in two of their most iconic ’90s movie roles. Courteney wore it during the climax of Scream, and Lisa wore it during Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. Scream costume designer Cynthia Bergstrom told Nylon, “It was funny because Mona and I were at the same time at [Neiman Marcus] in Beverly Hills, and we looked at that Moschino, and we both went for it. She put the jacket with a different skirt, and I bought it as a suit and kept it together. But it was really funny when we were shopping. I’d look over and see what she had in her arms, and she’d look and see what I had. It was so much fun.”
64.
Speed director Jan de Bont told HuffPost that his “biggest aim was making it all look real” — which led to Sandra Bullock actually driving the bus through the street! There was a stunt driver in the back, but she wasn’t on a studio lot or in front of a green screen. According to USA Today, she got a Santa Monica bus driver’s license for the role. She said, “I was at the wheel of projectile. So I was just happy to be alive. I was new to the whole game, so I wasn’t aware of what was happening or what felt right. We were just in it. It was real. When we were smashing into things (on screen), we were really smashing into those things.”
65.
Macaulay Culkin’s role in My Girl was originally smaller. Director Howard Zieff told Entertainment Weekly, “Mack and Anna [Chlumsky] were just two kids working together on a movie. Mack didn’t have the attitude ‘I’m a star and you’re not.’ We added two or three more scenes with him because as he began to work with her, there was terrific synergy.”
66.
According to Digital Spy, She’s All That was filmed in the same high school as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Torrance High School, which is in California). There’s another connection between the two — Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar made a cameo in She’s All That! And of course, she went on to marry the lead of the movie, Freddie Prinze Jr.
67.
In Thelma & Louise, Geena Davis’s real-life ex-boyfriend, Chris McDonald, played her onscreen husband on her recommendation. According to WLIW, she told director Ridley Scott that Chris was “the funniest guy in the world.” His humor was on full display during his audition, and it carried into production. While filming a scene where he walks to the car, Chris accidentally tripped, but his comedic timing was so perfect that the shot stayed in the final cut.
68.
In Addams Family Values, Fester is significantly shorter than Gomez, but in real life, actor Christopher Lloyd is only an inch shorter than Raúl Juliá. Christopher told BuzzFeed, “I always had my knees bent to make me look shorter and more squat. It worked out well because it gave me kind of a funny walk.”
69.
Per Yahoo, the effects in Death Becomes Her were a groundbreaking mix of computer graphics and practical effects. Here’s an example: For Meryl Streep’s head spin scene, she filmed the scene facing backwards on set. Later, at the Industrial Light & Magic studio, she wore a blue bodysuit and sat in a chair while performing with only her head. The two shots were combined in post-production.
Visual effects art director Doug Chiang told Yahoo, “A lot of those things involved shooting elements after the fact, and choreographing it very carefully so that her expressions matched her body poses. And it was a very delicate thing. In hindsight, it’s very, very complex, whereas today we would probably do most of that visually. But back then, it was still old-school, because we were blending traditional techniques with the new tools that we had in computer graphics.”
70.
Aladdin co-director Ron Clements told Entertainment Tonight, “Right from the start, we saw the Genie as a very special character in this movie, and the concept of him being able to change form constantly was there right from the start. We wrote the script for Robin Williams from the beginning.”
To get Robin on board as the voice of the Genie, animator Eric Goldberg created test footage using bits from his comedy albums. The footage was screened for Williams, and he reportedly belly-laughed while watching it. He was so excited to be part of the production that he reportedly reduced his $8-million fee, taking only $75,000 for the role.
71.
Robin Williams reportedly did 16 hours of ad-libbing while recording his lines. So much of his dialogue was improvised that Aladdin was allowed to be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars.
In a Reddit AMA, he said, “Initially I was just doing the scripted lines and I asked, ‘Do you mind if I try something?’ and then 18 hours of recording later, they had the Genie. I just started playing, and they said, ‘Just go with it, go with it, go with it.’ So I improvised the character. I think that in the end, there were something like 40 different voices that I did for that role.”
72.
Aladdin’s character design was inspired by Tom Cruise. Initially, supervising animator Glen Keane envisioned him “more like a Michael J. Fox character,” but studio chairperson Jeffrey Katzenberg suggested basing him on the actor’s performance in Top Gun. Keane told Entertainment Tonight, “I got the film and I looked at him, and what I noticed was all of his poses. His attitudes. There was this confidence. The way his chest stuck out. There was a cockiness to him. And Aladdin, we wanted to have a little bit of that edge on him.”
73.
After the release of Aladdin, Robin Williams had a public fallout with Disney, alleging they broke an agreement by using his voice to market merchandise. However, then-chairperson of Walt Disney Studios Joe Roth publicly apologized to the comedian, and Robin agreed to reprise his role as the Genie in the direct-to-video sequel Aladdin and the King of Thieves — for the reported salary of $1 million.
74.
Aladdin wasn’t the first time Disney approached Robin Williams about a genie role. Originally, voice director David Wiemers wanted him as Gene the Genie in DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp. Wiemers told Syfy, “I called Jeffrey [Katzenberg, then-chairperson of Walt Disney Studios and] said, ‘I want Robin Williams to be the voice of the genie.’ He said, ‘I think that is a terrific idea! I’ll start working with Robin’s managers, and I’ll get back to you.'” However, though Katzenberg assured Weimers that he was talking with Robin’s team, days went by without an answer. David said, “And suddenly, Jeffrey isn’t taking my calls.”
75.
The DuckTales genie role went to Rip Taylor, who basically decided to fake it ’til he made it. He told Tulsa World that, when he was called back to the studio to record new dialogue, “They said to me, ‘Can you loop?’ And I said, ‘Of course. Who can’t?’ It’s like when they ask you if you can ride a horse; you always say yes. What they do is, they put you there in the studio, and they run the picture for you, and there are three beeps. On the fourth beep, you start the dialogue. So they put me in there, and they ran the three beeps, and nothing happened. So they did it again. And nothing happened. Finally, they called in and said, ‘Can you hear the beeps?’ Like I was deaf. And I realized I was supposed to be coming in. So I said, ‘Oh, yes, but you know, I was just so involved in the movie that I forgot to come in with the dialogue.’ Well, you know they bought that.”
And later on, when he needed to record more additional dialogue, he literally phoned it in. He said, “I was in Atlantic City appearing at Resorts International for Merv Griffin when they called me and said they needed to change some dialogue. I couldn’t go back there, so I found a phone in a radio studio and phoned in six or seven pages of dialogue. I had to do it seven times. Not because they didn’t like it, but because they kept changing the dialogue.”
76.
DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp was the first animated Disney movie to be animated outside of the Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank. Most of it was animated in a Paris suburb. Writer David Wiemers told Syfy, “Disney wanted to experiment. They wanted to see if we could do sort of ‘Disney-lite,’ a feature film, but for less money; they also wanted to see if they [foreign animators] could succeed, so we set up special studios in London, France, and Australia.”
77.
Mike Myers told Newsweek that the Austin Powers cast was allowed to “do their own thing.” He said, “About 30 to 40 percent is improv.”
78.
A League of Their Own producer Robert Greenhut told ESPN, “The casting took forever. We were trying to get actresses who actually played baseball, so that narrowed down the field right away. In some cases, it wasn’t that crucial because maybe their scenes didn’t require that much playing. But for others, they really had to display some sort of athletic prowess. So we all quickly learned how hard it is to throw from first base to third to get somebody out. It looks so easy when you see it on television.”
However, Madonna didn’t have any baseball experience prior to landing the role of Mae Mordabito. According to Sports Illustrated, she spent a summer in Chicago learning the sport.
79.
A Goofy Movie director Kevin Lima told SlashFilm, “Powerline was always a pop superstar. We were looking at folks like Prince, Michael Jackson, Bobby Brown. There’s been a rumor for a long time that he’s based on Bobby Brown and that Bobby Brown actually recorded some of the tracks for the film. It’s not true at all. He never recorded anything as far as I know.”
80.
Disney hired a real choreographer to come up with Powerline’s “I2I” dance. Storyboard artist Steve Moore told SlashFilm, “We met, looked at the storyboard reel, and talked for a bit, and then two or three days after that, we were in a little soundstage in Burbank. We’d hired a guy to video record [the choreographer] and his dancers, and they did the ‘I2I’ dance. From the boards, he came up with the ‘I2I’ dance, and that’s why you can actually do the dance – because it wasn’t left to animators to come up with, it had actual moves to it.”
81.
One A Goofy Movie animator got the boot because he was too obsessed with Paula Abdul to get any work done. Moore told SlashFilm, “I had this one animator, he kept pulling out Paula Abdul videos. I said, ‘We have reference.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, but she does this really good –’ [And I was like] ‘The reference!’ He just wouldn’t do it. I finally had to boot him off the crew because I couldn’t get any work out of him. He was so obsessed with Paula Abdul. He was a good animator, too! But I was like, ‘Look, if you can’t do this, I have to move on.’ I warned him, and he just wouldn’t listen to me.”
82.
Groundhog Day is famously set in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but it was actually filmed in Woodstock, Illinois. Director Harold Ramis told Collider, “We didn’t use Punxsutawney for the film because Punxsutawney itself didn’t have a real town center that looked very good on camera, so we wanted a town that looked perfect, so the town you’ll see is Woodstock, IL. We scouted all of southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois looking for the perfect town, and we pulled into Woodstock just the way the van pulls into town in the movie. It was the last town we saw, and we looked at this little town square and thought, ‘Aw, this is perfect.'” He also said that the people of Punxsutawney “were very jealous that the movie wasn’t shot in Punxsutawney, but when they saw Woodstock, they thought it looked better than their town.”
83.
According to Screen Rant, one of the two animatronic cats used for Thackery Binx in Hocus Pocus was reused as Salem Saberhagen in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Nick Bakay, who voiced Salem, told Vanity Fair, “ABC did not love the animatronic cat. And I get it: it’s not like it was going to fool anyone. But I think that it was part of the charm of the show—quaint, old-school, practical magic and weird cat puppets. And for some reason, it kind of worked.”
84.
In Hercules, the role of Phil was written for Danny DeVito, but he refused to audition for it. In a blog post, co-director John Musker said, “Danny wouldn’t read for the part. So we auditioned a number of wonderful actors who were willing to come in and read, including, among many others, Ed Asner, Ernest Borgnine, and Broadway veteran Dick Latessa, who we almost cast. Red Buttons came in and read for it, and as he was leaving, said, ‘I know what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna give this part to Danny DeVito!’ Ron [Clements, the co-director] and I shared a guilty look.”
“Ultimately, we did cast Danny. He didn’t read but was interested, and we met him for lunch in his trailer at the LA Arboretum, where he was directing Matilda, the Roald Dahl book he adapted. He fixed a pasta lunch for Ron, me, and producer Alice Dewey. After lunch, Danny offered Ron and me a cigar to smoke with him. Both of us non-smokers declined. I seem to recall, though, that Alice was a bit put out that Danny hadn’t invited her to smoke with him. I think she would have taken him up on the offer. Fortunately, Danny agreed to do the part despite his directors’ lack of machismo, maybe because he sensed a kindred spirit in Alice,” he said.
85.
Similarly, Hades was written for Jack Nicholson, but he refused to audition. In his blog post, Musker wrote, “He was willing to come in and talk about it. We prepared to show him our visuals to entice him to do the role… Jack arrived at our warehouse/development building on Flower Street in Glendale one brisk November day with his then relatively young children, Raymond and Lorraine, who he’d had with actress Rebecca Broussard. Lorraine was dressed as Snow White, and Jack proudly carried her around, ‘Look at the pretty pictures, ‘Raine!’ It was very sweet…”
He continued, “We showed Jack our artwork, influenced by the painter Alma-Tadema, with whom he was very knowledgeable… We showed him some test animation done to one of his lines from A Few Good Men where we had a simmering Hades idly playing with a lick of flame as he said, ‘Take caution in your tone, commander. I’m a fair guy, but this fuckin’ heat is driving me absolutely crazy…’ Andreas Deja had done a brilliant job with it, and Jack loved it. We plied his son and daughter with a lot of plush toys, which Jack took out to his car as they prepared to leave. One of my favorite memories of that day was when Jack returned from the windy street for one last load of swag for his kids. With his shades on and his hair blown into devilish horns by the fall breeze, he hoisted the bags of plush on either side of his smiling face and gave a cheery, ‘Merry Christmas!’ and off he went…”
86.
Hercules co-director John Musker told the Seattle Times, “There are 1940s screwball comedy aspects to this story. We thought of Hercules as the young Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
“Meg (his devious girlfriend) is modeled on Barbara Stanwyck, especially the characters she played in The Lady Eve and Meet John Doe,” he added.
87.
In Hercules, the Fates show Hades a prophecy of only six planets aligning because the ancient Greeks only knew of six planets. Predating the telescope, they were only aware of the planets that could be seen with the naked eye.
88.
You’ve Got Mail faced a common problem we’ve all likely encountered on social media — the username they wanted was already taken. For legal reasons, they had to ask the real woman behind the screen name Shopgirl to let them have it. Writer/director Nora Ephron told E! News, “She actually worked at an autobody shop.”
89.
Richard E. Grant didn’t want to be in the Spice Girls movie, but his daughter made him. He told Vulture, “When my daughter was 9, I got offered the part in Spice World, and she said I had to do it. ‘But my acting credibility…’ And she’d say, ‘No, no, you have to. You have to because I want to meet them.’ So I did, and she was so thrilled. I had school playground credibility for about two semesters, and then, of course, you dip into the other side when they go, ‘No, I was never a Spice Girls fan!’ Now that generation has all come back around again going, ‘Yeah, we love the Spice Girls!'”
He continued, “In essence, a similar thing happened when I got called to be in one episode of Girls. My daughter literally levitated. She’s a creative writing degree student, and she said, ‘You have no idea what it would mean if I could meet or be in the same room or breathe the same air as Lena Dunham.’ I feel as a father if I’ve done anything right at all, I’ve done both the Spice Girls movie and Girls.”
90.
Matthew Broderick reprised the role of Simba in The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride. His then-girlfriend (and now wife) Sarah Jessica Parker was in talks to play Aisha, Simba’s daughter. Jennifer Aniston was also considered for the role. However, the character, later renamed Kiara, was ultimately voiced by Neve Campbell.
91.
Initially, Kovu, Kiara’s love interest, was going to be Scar’s son, making him her cousin as well. According to Variety, this was “a topic of heated discussion between top Disney execs.” In the end, the storyline was altered, making Kovu the son of Zira, Scar’s loyal follower, instead.
92.
Space Jam was initially the brainchild of David Falk, Michael Jordan’s agent, who’d initially kept the NBA legend away from the silver screen. He told the New York Times, “We got piles of scripts. But they didn’t fit Michael Jordan. He can’t really act. And you have to know your limitations.”
93.
Christopher McDonald “nearly didn’t do” Happy Gilmore — and he actually turned down the role of Shooter McGavin twice. He told And So It Begins, “I was tired. I wanted to see more of my family. But then I played a round of golf in Seattle, and we won. And that high was something else. So, with my golf shoes still on, I went in the locker room, called my agent, and said, ‘Is that golf movie still available? Because I just won this tournament and I’m feeling a little bit, well, Shooterish.’ So I met Adam [Sandler], because I didn’t know if the guy who did Opera Man was going to be any good. I laughed the entire time I spoke with him, and I knew that this kid was really smart.”
94.
Disney outsourced some of the animation for The Hunchback of Notre Dame to artists actually in Paris. About 100 animators from the French Disney Animation Studio worked together to complete 10 minutes of animation to add authenticity to the film’s landscapes and architecture.
95.
On a research trip to Paris for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the filmmakers were given “unrestricted access” to Notre Dame — including the catacombs.
96.
In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Phoebus only has facial hair because Katzenberg left Disney mid-production. Co-director Gary Trousdale told SlashFilm, “Jeffrey never liked characters to have facial hair. No beards, no mustaches, nothing. There’s original designs of Gaston [with] a little Errol Flynn mustache. Jeffrey hated it. ‘I don’t want any facial hair.’ Once he left, we were like, ‘We could give [Phoebus] a beard now.'”
97.
Hunchback lyricist Stephen Schwartz told SlashFilm, “I thought they would never let me get away with [‘Hellfire’]. And they never asked for a single change… When Alan [Menken, the composer] and I tackled ‘Hellfire,’ I did what I usually did: write what I thought it should be and assume that [Disney would] tell me what I couldn’t get away with. But they accepted exactly what we wrote.”
Trousdale added, “The [MPAA] said, ‘When Frollo says, “This burning desire is turning me to sin,” we don’t like the word “sin.”‘ We can’t change the lyrics now. It’s all recorded. Kinda tough. ‘What if we just dip the volume of the word “sin” and increase the sound effects?’ They said, ‘Good.'”
98.
Every crowd scene in A Bug’s Life had between 25–1,000 ants in each shot. Every single ant was fully animated to make them appear as unique individuals.
99.
To get a view of vegetation from a bug’s perspective, A Bug’s Life production designer Bill Cone took a camera and crawled on his belly.
100.
And finally, according to Screen Rant, during the height of his professional rivalry with Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger read the terrible script for Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, then he spread a rumor about having “tremendous interest” in it, which he knew would prompt Sylvester to accept the lead role. Sylvester described the movie as “one of the worst films in the entire solar system, including alien productions we’ve never seen.” It earned him his fourth Razzie for Worst Actor.
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