6 Backstage Disasters From Famous Movie Scenes

Getting into this thing required an exceptional amount of lubrication, both on the costume and Munn herself. Even once inside it, she was hardly safe from humiliation. At one point, she (in her own words) "popped the crotch," bursting the latex around a delicate area while on set. We will not be illustrating that.

Rebecca Romijn had an even worse experience while portraying Mystique, whose costume consisted of little more than "Rebecca Romijn" and "paint." She was basically naked the entire time, and the crew classily wasn't shy about telling her that. Worse, for those who don't know, the human butt famously has a crack in it. Right up the middle. Check your own if you're uncertain. Anyway, you can't really show that in a movie (of this type, at least), so they had to paint over it and otherwise maintain it. Well, it was during one of these routine bouts of crack maintenance that director Bryan Singer walked in and found Romijn "literally bent over a chair getting [her] crack touched up." He thought she needed some white wine. She concurred.

On a stickier note, both Romijn and Jennifer Lawrence (who played Mystique starting with X-Men: First Class) evidently had a lot in common with another famous supervillain: Tobias from Arrested Development. If you've seen that show and recall his role as an understudy for the Blue Man Group, you can guess where this is going: They left blue paint everywhere. Everyone knew when Romijn was using the bathroom on set thanks to the blue toilet seats she left behind, and Lawrence had trouble getting the security deposit back on her apartment after turning the bathtub blue.

This obviously had the potential to be a rather gory moment -- something Spielberg was eager to avoid. He didn't want any blood splashing around, so the night before the shoot, he went to his stunt coordinator, Kit West, and asked for some other kind of visual effect. A red dust or mist, maybe. West was on the case, and the next day, when all the squibs went off, they released a nice, visually pleasing cloud of red dust. It looked great.

It did not, however, feel great. There were not a lot of options when it came to procuring red dust on short notice in a small town in Tunisia. Certainly no OSHA-approved suppliers with full sets of MSDS, anyway. So West used the only red dust he could find at the local stores: cayenne pepper. Within seconds, everyone on the set was coughing and sneezing and had all of the fluids pouring from their eyes and noses.

While they were clowning around with the robot shark, as any of us would do, at one point Lucas stuck his head in its jaws. Operating the controls, Spielberg shut the shark's mouth ... and the shark chose this moment to break. Decades later, we can only reel at the potential implications of George Lucas dying in this moment.

Luckily, the shark didn't crush Lucas' valuable melon, only trapping it for a time. Eventually, the team of movie-makers managed to free their buddy before sprinting out of the hangar like a bunch of teenagers. Jaws overcame this setback to become the first summer blockbuster, and we didn't have to grow up in a world without a sequel to American Graffiti.

Wait, Lucas didn't direct the sequel to American Graffiti? Oh, so there would have been no difference at all in the timeline if he had died, then. Phew.

But this would not do for the Bandit. Reynolds insisted on doing the stunt himself, and possibly because they were trying to get rid of him, they let him. In Reynolds' own words, here's what happened next:

"I went over the falls and the first thing that happened I hit a rock and cracked my tailbone, and to this day it hurts. Then I went down to the water below and it was a whirlpool. I couldn't get out and guy there said if you get caught, just go to the bottom. You can get out but you can't swim against it. So I went down to the bottom. What he didn't tell me was it was going to shoot me up like a torpedo. So I went out."

Badass, Burt. But it gets better! Because while the whirlpool released him from its clutches, it did not grant the same courtesy to his clothes. That's right, the whirlpool stripped him, boots and all, and fired a naked Burt Reynolds back into the land of the living. Think about that for a moment. Take your time.

And was it worth it? Well, while recovering in the hospital from waterfall-related injuries, Reynolds asked director John Boorman how the shot looked. Boorman's response: "It looked like a dummy falling over a waterfall."

Which brings us to Spider-Man -- the Tobey Maguire one from 2002, to be clear. Possibly the most iconic moment from that film was Maguire's famous upside-down kiss with Kirsten Dunst. It's famous for a reason. You'd never seen anything like it, gravity and tongue geometry being what it is. In fact, the more you think about the details, the more you'll realize how awkward of a move it is.

But this kiss was more than awkward to film. It was close to torture. And all for one very simple reason: The scene was set in the rain.

Unless Spider-Man has the nostrils of a spider, which the canon isn't clear on, this meant vast amounts of water were pouring into Maguire's nose as they filmed the scene. He was waterboarded, essentially, and was apparently gasping for breath out of the corner of Dunst's mouth the whole time. He claims that he did manage to "sneak some pleasure" out of it, though. Which seems plausible. Dunst is quite pretty, and everyone's got to discover their affinity for erotic asphyxiation at some point.

Still, it seems risky. Something to keep in mind the next time you and your partner are having a romantic moment while fighting crime in New York or fixing a shower or whatever.

Chris Bucholz is a Cracked columnist and your best friend. As the author of the amazing novels Freeze/Thaw and Severance, he thinks you should definitely go buy both of those now. Join him on Facebook or Twitter.

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