5 Incredible Movie Facts (That Are Actually Total BS)

Jenny dies without us learning anything more about her disease, but it has to be AIDS, right? She had been a drug addict and a prostitute, and she dies in 1982, the same year the media first reported on it. Surely this is an extremely dark twist on Gump's 20th-century retrospective? The movie's fans widely assume it's AIDS, discussing it as a given, and the University of Pennsylvania has an essay discussing how Jenny's poor life choices ended with her contracting AIDS. Even Family Guy did a bit on how Forrest is too dumb to grasp the implications of sex with an HIV-positive woman.

But the movie never actually says "AIDS." Jenny drops dead of Plot Convenience Syndrome, and viewers rushed to assumptions based on the fact that she slept around. The sequel to the original novel, Gump And Co., clarifies that it was in fact meant to be hepatitis C. That fits the timeline perfectly. Hep C wasn't identified until 1989, but "non-A, non-B hepatitis" was acknowledged as a mysterious new disease in 1981, the same year Jenny reveals her condition to Forrest. Granted, it did have a name, but it's not unreasonable to assume that Jenny left as many multi-syllabic words as possible out of her explanation to Forrest. At least you don't have to worry about Forrest and his son suffering slow, painful deaths after the movie anymore.

If you don't want to take the word of a novel that also sees Forrest go to jail for his role in Iran-Contra while Jenny watches over him as a ghost, director Robert Zemeckis clarified that they explicitly didn't pick a specific disease because they didn't want it to be the issue viewers focused on. We hope you learned your lesson, Robert.

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It's normal for film sets to overlook certain details. Game Of Thrones was roasted for having a visible coffee cup in one episode, and even more egregiously, multiple movies have left Johnny Depp in all sorts of scenes. But it beggars belief to think that an entire film crew would not only fail to notice a suicide on set, but also fail to react to it in post-production after the body was discovered. The urban legend worked because we think of the Hollywood of the past as relentlessly callous and cruel. And it was, but not that callous and cruel.

But then, what is going on in the background? It turns out that what you're seeing is nothing but a big dumb bird. The production brought in birds to wander around and liven up certain scenes, and a big one (probably a crane) was caught on camera spreading its wings. To further debunk the rumor, the scene in question was filmed before any of the Munchkin scenes, so none of the actors would have even been on set. So this is example 5,427,134 of why you shouldn't believe everything you see on YouTube.

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Once again, there's clearly something going on there, and the legend gained credence in 2013 when a man claiming to be the infamous Fan #2, Kris Haggerty, called into a Minnesota radio station and explained that he had exposed his own teen wolf for the camera after an attempt to adjust uncomfortable underwear went horribly awry. But this caught the attention of the real Kris Haggerty, who had two major differences: She was a woman, and she really appeared in the movie.

Haggerty did her own interview with the blogMovie Vigilante and explained that, while she wasn't the flasher in question, she's pretty sure she knew what happened. Tight pants were in fashion back in 1985, but they got very uncomfortable when you spent hour after hour sitting around on bleachers. So Haggerty and a few other extras got in the habit of unzipping in-between takes, and by the time that take was shot at around 3 in the morning, one exhausted woman probably got caught with her literal pants down. That's a woman's underwear, not some guy's dick.
 

That makes as much sense as we're ever going to get. Now the real question is why some dude decided to pretend that the Teen Wolf penis was his claim to fame. This is one of those legends that spreads best among people who haven't actually seen the movie, because even if your anatomical knowledge is terrible, it's clear that there's nothing wangy in sight. And if you watch the scene in full instead of picking apart individual frames like it's the Zapruder film, it does look like the woman is surprised, realizes her mistake, and covers her crotch while she zips back up. So if you want to see a flaccid penis in a movie, you'll once again have to resort to Johnny Depp films.

Related: 6 Weird Offscreen Facts About Great Movies You Can't Un-Know

Supposedly, the building was meant to blow up the moment Ledger hit the button, but some of the explosives malfunctioned. The part where Ledger looks back and starts punching the detonator like a frustrated kid wasn't scripted, and Christopher Nolan simply kept filming the whole thing to capture Ledger's magnificent improv skills. And somehow the story caught on, with many sites reiterating this supposed trivia as fact. Hell, even Googling the keywords "confirms" it. And when you look at the comments of that YouTube video up there, you'll see a bunch of people praising Ledger's incredible talent.

That is, of course, not at all what happened. It is true that the crew only had one take to get it right (they were blowing up a real building, after all), but the explosion was meant to "malfunction." It wasn't an error, and Ledger knew exactly what was going to happen and what he was going to do. Because when you blow up a damn building, you rehearse obsessively, and you're strongly discouraged from "just trying something" like it's your college improv troupe.
 

This is all explained in the documentary Gotham Uncovered: Creation Of A Scene, which shows how Nolan and his team planned the entire thing, right down to the part where the Joker looks back when the building doesn't explode. Movies are more than a couple of geniuses working around everyone else's screw-ups, and it would be insane to not carefully map out a scene that involves real people interacting with real explosives. Ledger wasn't improvising; he was acting. Feel free to Google the semantics yourselves.

Related: The 34 Most Mind-Blowing Behind-The-Scenes Factoids Ever

We're not perfect, but we're also inclined to blame whoever did the fake Spike Jonze commentary track that started all this.

A voice attributed to Jonze says that the beer can toss wasn't in the script, but he decided to keep it in the movie because it was so funny. He even claims that the extra in question got a raise and a SAG card after the fact. Which should've been a red flag, because in what world would Malkovich not get someone fired for randomly throwing a beer can at his head?

You can search high and low for any proof of this commentary's authenticity, but you won't find any. And we're reasonably sure that the creator of this clip, who goes by The Dung Heap, isn't affiliated with Spike Jonze.

There's also the fact that Malkovich himself has debunked this. In 2007, he did an interview with Time Out Chicago in which he confirmed that the scene was indeed scripted, and that Jonze even thought of cutting it because they were running out of shooting time. A writer who volunteered managed to hit Malkovich perfectly on the first take, so the real kudos should go to that dude for having killer aim. And since that interview didn't seem to kill the story, when Malkovich did a 2013 Reddit AMA, he again refuted the myth. At this point, he'll probably chuck a beer can at you if you bring it up.
 

Zanandi also writes for Macaulay Culkin'scomedy site, and can be found onTwitter.Abraham loves eating tacos de suadero in his hometown Mexico city. You can say hi to him on Twitterhere, or laugh at his bad drawings on DeviantArthere. RG Jordan is not big on social media, but he is big on working and eating food, so you can contact him atRGJordan4@gmail.comif you think his words are funny or insightful. You can follow Mike Bedard onTwitterif you'd like to stay in the Bedard loop.

For more, check out 4 Bulls#!% Facts That Movies Love To Quote - Obsessive Pop Culture Disorder:

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