5 Hilarious Jobs That Made Your Favorite Movies Possible

You'd think that he could just, I don't know, record an actual horse going to town on a salt lick, but you're not thinking it through. Bullseye is not a real horse. He's a toy. Those must sound differently from real horses. And what's the real-life equivalent of toy horses, in the mind of a sound effects artist? That's right, cows. Rydstrom therefore took the only action that was reasonable in his mind: He had a volunteer smear their face with peanut butter and then got it slurped off by a hungry cow. That was in no way a joke. I have no idea how the crew explained their plan to the cow's owner, but they probably just assumed it was better not to ask any follow-up questions.

In any case, once the sound designer had all the licking sounds he needed, he separated, enhanced, and mixed them until they sounded exactly right. And then literally nobody who's ever seen the movie noticed or cared.

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Murray, who thinks the world only exists for his own amusement, decided to hire a deaf assistant who only knew sign language to fuck with people, because no one else on set knew ASL, including himself. So for a while, all communication between the crew and Murray was done through a man whom no one could understand, which meant it wasn't done at all.

This was somehow even more insulting than just not talking to anyone. Not talking is a passive move. Hiring a middleman whom no one can understand is a very active "Fuck you" to everyone around you. Murray actually announced that he would learn ASL, probably to keep the joke going longer, but after a few weeks, he gave up on it.

Amazingly, they made it through filming and created a modern classic, though Murray and Ramis never talked again. Yeah, maybe that was for the best.

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That same night, Goyer and some of the cast went out to a strip club. There, Goyer spotted a couple of bikers and offered them a deal: "I'll pay for all your drinks if you show up to set tomorrow and pretend to be my security." Booze and the chance to visit a real movie set while also threatening Wesley Snipes? Most people would pay money for that, so naturally the bikers accepted. When Snipes saw them on set the next day, probably while stretching his choking arm, he reportedly freaked and ran back to his trailer.

This gave both the director and actor time to cool down, after which they calmly sat down and told each other "Fuck you. You should quit the movie." In the end, though, Snipes decided to stay on, but for the rest of the shoot, he would only communicate with Goyer through Post-It notes, probably because he couldn't find a deaf assistant on such short notice.

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Also, Halloween was shot on a budget that would need to be doubled to be considered shoestring, and when the production finally got to the opening scenes, they didn't have any more money to pay the child actor playing Michael. So between the issues of budget and basic morality, they needed to find a grownup on set with tiny, delicate childlike hands to do the murdering.

They wound up using writer and producer Debra Hill. So the "child hands" you see in the classic opening of one of the best horror movies ever made are actually those of a 27-year-old writer/producer from New Jersey.

This whole sequence would play out again about three decades later, when they inexplicably decided to remake Halloween in 2007. In that one, young Michael slits a dude's throat, which on a film set meant dragging a prop knife across a thin latex appliance that's designed to spurt blood:

The actor getting his throat slit wasn't crazy about an 11-year-old doing that without accidentally slicing his throat for real, so once again, they had to find the smallest woman on set (in this case an unnamed stunt double) to do it. These are all important tricks you should keep in mind if you aspire to one day film a child's killing spree.

Related: 5 Jobs That Hollywood Apparently Doesn't Realize It Needs

Nope! Those are real birds. But when director Nick Cassavetes went to New Line Cinema with his concept for the lake scene, they got in touch with every animal wrangler in Hollywood ... who then told them that this idea was pure lunacy. You can't control that many birds. It would be absolute chaos. Now, if it's a horny cow that they needed ...

But Cassavetes and one of the producers didn't accept that. Instead they went out, got a trailer, bought a bunch of bird hatchlings, and just spent months raising them. Every day, the pair would march their bird family to the lake to feed them, and in time, they were able to control them "like the Pied Piper." Thanks to their hard work, the scene went off without a hitch,, and the movie became a classic. I don't know what happened to the birds after that, so I'm going to assume they were all cooked and eaten by the crew.

For more of Cezary's writing, follow him on Twitter, visit the website where he interviews interesting people, or check out his comedy site that will one day be used against him in a court of law.

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