5 People Who Ran Side Hustles While Making Movies

5 William Shatner Rented Out His Own Horses To Star Trek Generations

William Shatner is really into horses, because one look at the Shat tells you that he avoids walking whenever he can help it. He not only owns horses, but he also breeds them and participates in competitions when not running his own charity horse show. So when it came time to make Star Trek Generations, the writers included a four-minute scene wherein Shatner and Patrick Stewart ride horses together as a blatant appeal to get him to sign on to the film.

And it worked! Shatner got a kick out of the scene, which feels like it was ripped from a Lifetime movie about a troubled city girl learning to love the country while saving her grandma's old ranch, and he agreed to do the movie. Not only did he get to ride a horse, he even used his own horses, each of which presumably went on to a lucrative career on the convention circuit. But he didn't lend them to the movie's production company; he rented them out for sweet, sweet profit. Hey, if somebody's gotta ride, and somebody's gotta be ridden, might as well be the rider, right?

4 A Game Of Thrones Actor Opened A Direwolf-Themed Bakery

Ben Hawkey played Hot Pie on Game Of Thrones. As both fans and people who are capable of extrapolating basic traits from silly character names know, Hot Pie was into food. Hawkey decided to capitalize on his character's affinity by teaming up with a British food delivery company to open an online bakery called, god help us all, You Know Nothing John Dough.

The store only had one item on the menu: a direwolf-shaped piece of whole wheat bread with a bit of orange zest. That sounds perfectly adequate and not one zest more, but every single one of the snacks sold out on the same day they were announced, and there's no indication they'll ever return. We're guessing Hawkey made a tidy sum from agreeing to be the face of the promotion and squawking some terrible adspeak nonsense about how the delivery service is so convenient that you won't even have to walk down the dangerous King's Road.

Hopefully it was a lot of money, because that does not sound worth it.

3 A Sopranos Actor Sold Fan Art For A Small Fortune

Actor Federico Castelluccio, who played enforcer Furio Giunta on The Sopranos, took a trip to Florence in 2008, where he saw a famous painting by Piero della Francesca that depicted the Duke and Dutchess of Urbino, and he immediately sprouted 16 extra chest hairs from the overload of concentrated Italian. As an artist himself, Federico was inspired to recreate the piece, but with Tony and Carmela Soprano in it instead.

Normally, that's the sort of idea that leads to a few nice comments on DeviantArt, and that's it. But one Canadian oil executive saw the piece and had to have it. He bought it from Castelluccio for $175,000 . Yes, this rich Sopranos watcher dropped more money than you'll make in ten years on a whimsical fan mash-up. Try not to feel too angry about that when you decide which student loan you can risk not paying this month.

That wasn't the end of Castelluccio's adventures in the art world. Once, at auction, he bought what was advertised as an 18th-century painting, but turned out to be an early 17th-century Guercino! OK, that sounds like one of the punchlines from Frasier that you don't get, but the point is that by spending about $140,000 on the painting, and then having it tested and restored, he wound up with a work of art worth $10 million.

2 The Set Of Interstellar Was Also A Small Corn Business

Some of Interstellar's 14 hours touched on the idea that in the future, corn would be one of the world's only viable crops. In the film, Matthew McConaughey plays a corn farmer, and that doesn't sound right at all now that we type it out. Regardless, at least some of the movie was shot in a cornfield. We're pretty sure about that. You'd think the production team could have just wandered Nebraska until they found a farmer willing to rent out their field, but Christopher Nolan insisted that an entire field be grown from scratch. Because when you get enough of it, money turns you into a mad god.

Hollywood frequently abandons even the most expensive sets, so you'd assume they'd be fine with walking away from a bunch of plants. But no, when filming was over, they turned around and sold that corn for a tidy profit. Nolan got the idea from none other than Zack Snyder, who also grew a couple hundred acres of corn for Man Of Steel. Somewhere, a wistful corn farmer dreams of making movies, unaware that thousands of miles away in Hollywood, all the filmmakers really want to grow corn.

1 The VFX Artists For The Abyss Sold The Program They Made For The Film ... To Adobe

1989's James Cameron Almost Drowns A Bunch Of People And Then Himself: The Movie featured groundbreaking special effects. Especially noteworthy was the shapeshifting tentacle of water that aliens use to communicate with the main characters.

The software used to create "Morpha" up there began as a 1987 side project of Thomas Knoll. He was a doctoral candidate who needed a break from his thesis, and rather than play video games and masturbate like the rest of us, he wrote up a program called Display, which could project "grayscale images on a black-white bitmap monitor." The implications of that are so obvious that we won't even bother explaining them, but he thought it was a mostly useless novelty. Then it caught the attention of his brother John, who worked at special effects studio Industrial Light and Magic. Together, they used Display as the basis of a new special effects program for The Abyss, and that program was in turn refined and demoed to Adobe.

Adobe was blown away, and in 1990, they published the first edition of Photoshop -- a program so ubiquitous today that its name has become a verb. So let this be a lesson, kids: If you neglect your schoolwork to tinker with side projects, you too might create something that millions of people use to edit walrus penises onto SpongeBob SquarePants screenshots.

Mark is on Twitter and has a book.

If you can't get an adorable Direwolf cookie, you can at least get an adorable Direwolf plush toy. Maybe that will fill the void until next season.

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For more check out 5 Celebrities You Had No Idea Quit Fame For Normal Jobs and 6 Insane Celebrity Side Project Fails (You Never Knew About).

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