6 Famous Movie Scenes That Were Total Backstage Disasters

So they shoot the scene, Bond's hands look amazing, and months later, they're editing it and suddenly realize what a colossal mistake they've made. Earlier in the film, they'd gone to great lengths to establish that Bond had a gun with sensors that read his fingerprints so that it wouldn't work if anyone else tried to fire it. There was a whole big scene with Q when they introduced it, and the gun not firing for some thug in Macau is a key plot point. But if that's the case, then how the hell would the gun work when Bond was wearing gloves?

We should point out that this anecdote hasn't been confirmed by anyone official. But the evidence for it is substantial. Check out this production shot distributed before the movie was released to see Bond during the Shanghai sequence with both the gun and the stupid frigging gloves:

Yeah, that's not going to work. As the story goes, when they realized the problem in post-production, they knew that none of the solutions would be easy. Most of them would have required re-shooting hefty chunks of the film. What they eventually came up with (throwing computers at it) more or less solved the problem, but it's hardly perfect. They CGI'd Bond's hands back into all the scenes in which he was wearing gloves, which means that if you pause during the right scenes, you can see Bond sporting some damned puffy-looking hands.

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.

Along with looking like one of the fakest things ever, the mechanical sharks (there were four of them) almost never worked properly. Hydraulically operated by teams of up to 16 people, there were so many moving parts that it was almost a guarantee that they would never all be working at the same time. But! They were badass robot sharks, and if you've got the keys to a badass robot shark, yeah, you're going to show it off to your buddies. Which is how on one day in 1974, Steven Spielberg ended up taking some of his filmmaker buddies -- Martin Scorsese and George Lucas, to name a couple -- around to the hangar to play with his new toy.

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.

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."

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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For more, check out 8 Movies That Looked Hilarious (Before The CGI Was Added) and 6 Famous Movie Moments That Look Hilarious With CGI Removed.

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