32 Cinematic Bits of Movie Trivia That Act All Hoity-Toity, But They've Honestly Earned It

These facts don’t make movies. They make films
32 Cinematic Bits of Movie Trivia That Act All Hoity-Toity, But They've Honestly Earned It

Normally we roll our eyes at pretentious filmmaker facts, because it’s like, cool, they make some movie facts. Big whoop. 

Well, we threw that flippant irreverence right out the door when these beret-clad, curly mustache-sporting facts strolled in and sat down on their personalized director’s chairs. Once you see the visual art they’ve created, you’ll know exactly what we mean. 

We’ll be right back. We have to go get them a Diet Coke!

The Social Network

Natalie Portman consulted on The Social Network. When she heard David Fincher was doing the movie, Portman (who went to Harvard from 1999 to 2003) called him over for dinner. She told him about how final clubs worked and how prestigious they were for underclassmen -- which made its way into the movie, as it starts with Zuck talking about how much he wants to join one. NOW YOU KNOW CRACKED.COM

Mars Attacks

Mars Attacks is secretly Christmas-themed. PROP DAY The skeletons are bright green or bright red because the movie was scheduled to be released for Christmas. NOW YOU KNOW CRACKED.COM

Another Time, Another Place

Sean Connery defended himself against a gunman on the set of Another Time, Another Place. While filming a love scene for the movie, his co-star's gangster boyfriend got jealous and pulled a gun on him. Connery grabbed the gun from his hand and twisted the guy's wrist un- til he ran off the set. CRACKED NOW YOU KNOW

The Polar Express

In 2010, a Florida jail forced some inmates to watch The Polar Express on repeat. One inmate said, I hear those little kids screaming through my brain. All night long I can hear them, he told CNN. I can close my eyes, but I'm still going to hear them over and over and over. CRACKED NOW YOU KNOW

Safe House

Denzel Washington volunteered to actually be waterboarded for the movie Safe House. For the interrogation scene, Washington was re- ally put through the tor- ture, albeit for a few sec- onds at a time. Co-star Ryan Reynolds called it one of the most disturb- ing things I've ever seen. CRACKED NOW YOU KNOW

X-Men

Hugh Jackman changed it so, as Wolverine, he would be naked in X-Men: Days of Future Past. It was written that Wolver- ine was to wake up in 1973 in his underwear, but Hugh Jackman claimed that if he were to wake up next to a really good looking girl, he wouldn't be wearing anything. CRACKED NOW YOU KNOW

The Dark Knight

The infamous Batman growl in The Dark Knight was not Christian Bale's fault. CRACKED.COM The real voice during film- ing was more toned down and then heightened to a rougher, grittier vibe during post-production un- der the decision of director Christopher Nolan.

Shaun of the Dead

An extra disparaged 'Shaun of the Dead' to Edgar Wright while filming. CRACKED.COM One of the zombie extras walked up to Edgar Wright, and not knowing he was the director & co-writer, whis- pered in his ear and joked, Oof, straight-to-video for this one!

Bee Movie

Bee Movie was inspired by a random joke Jerry Seinfeld once told at dinner. At a dinner with Spielberg, to fill the silence, Seinfeld said that a movie about bees called B-movie would be funny - that got Spielberg really excited. CRACKED.COM

Yoda

Yoda was partly based on Stuart Freeborn, the guy that brought him to life. Freeborn was a Hollywood makeup artist who had worked on the Star Wars franchise and had helped design Yoda, basing him on himself and Einstein. CRACKED.COM

John Cazale

John Cazale, who played Fredo in the first two Godfather films, only made five movies. All five were nominated for Best Picture Academy Awards. NOW YOU KNOW CRACKED.COM

Jurassic Park

The sound of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park is a recording of mating tortoises. CRACKED.COM It's somewhat embarrassing, said Gary Rydstrom, the sound designer for the original 1993 film, but when the raptors bark at each other to communicate, it's a tortoise having sex.

The Oscars

Oscar winners can't legally sell their awards. Since the Academy doesn't want their statuettes in the marketplace, there's a rule that if you want to sell your Oscar, you have to first offer to sell it back to the Academy itself, for just $10. Sounds like a weird rule, but a judge upheld it as legal in 2015. CRACKED.COM

Camera Operators

CRACKED.COM Being a camera operator is deadlier than being a stunt performer. Movie stunts are quite risky - especially for the people getting them on camera. When stunts go wrong, four camera operators die on average for every dead stunt performer.

Ace Ventura

RICK MORANIS WAS ALMOST ACE VENTURA. CRACKED.COM ACE PET VENTURA Jim Carrey's breakout role nearly went to SCTV/ Ghostbusters / Honey I Shrunk The Kids star Rick Moranis. But luckily for fans of butt-talking, Moranis had pretty much retired from acting at that point. All things being equal, Moranis was probably fine with skipping the whole being-birthed-from-a- rhino's-sphincter thing in the sequel.

Jurassic Park

CRACKED.COM R Jurassic Park JOHN HAMMOND was originally a greedy, unsympathetic jerk. Children gaping in awe at dinosaurs? На! The only reason Hammond creates the park in Michael Crichton's novel is getting tons of money, and cares about nothing except that.

Leatherface

GUNNAR HANSEN HAD TO WEAR A RANCID SHIRT EVERY DAY IN THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Filmmakers only made one Who will survive costume for Leatherface, and what and it couldn't be cleaned will be for fear of its color fading. left of His shirt became so stiff them? and putrid after wearing it 16 hours a day, Hansen said after a month, you THE America's most bizarre and TEXAS otimes!.. could lean my suit up CHAINSAW MASSACRE against the wall. What happened the - the motion - - - - - - zumm - - www.XC CRACKED.COM

Bohemian Rhapsody

CRACKED.COM QM In Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen performs Fat Bottomed Girls during their first U.S. tour in 1974. That's impossible, because that song wasn't recorded and released until 1978. BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

Raising Arizona

The Coen Brothers and their movies Raising Arizona The movie was intentionally made as the opposite of Blood Simple. For their second outing, the Coens chose a lighter, faster comedy with wacky characters and frenetic camera movements. Raising Arizona was a commercial success, and it helped the Coens not be pigeonholed and set the terms of their own careers. CRACKED.COM

Prince of Egypt

It took 318,000 hours to render the parting of the Red Sea in Prince of Egypt. And that scene was a total of seven minutes long. CRACKED.COM

Dragon Lord

One scene in the Jackie Chan movie Dragon Lord took 2,900 takes. the g a log adidas YOUR OR It was a super-intricate scene that ran for almost ten minutes and involved Chan pulling off a difficult kick-in 1982, they couldn't fix it in post-production, so they just kept filming until they got it right. CRACKED.COM

Wall-E

The Pixar crew behind Wall-E watched Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin films every day for a year. They watched at least one of those movies every single day, so they could learn how to get across emotion without spoken words. CRACKED.COM

Edge of Tomorrow

Emily Blunt and Tom Cruise had to walk around in 85-pound exosuits in Edge of Tomorrow. The suits had 320 custom-made components, plus another 150 off-the-shelf ones. CRACKED.COM

RoboCop

It was so hot on the RoboCop set, Peter Weller sometimes lost eight pounds a day. CAN EN OUR ROS They filmed in Dallas, where it would get over 100 degrees in the summer, and the heat made it so hard to be in the RoboCop suit that Weller would sometimes have cool air hoses stuffed into it. CRACKED.COM

Gandhi

Over 300,000 extras showed up in Gandhi's funeral scene. It holds a Guinness World Record for most extras in one scene -- and, amazingly, it was shot in one morning. CRACKED.COM

Avatar

One fully finished minute of Avatar took up around 17 gigabytes of storage. The movie had to use a custom cloud computing and digital management system, called Gaia, developed specially by Microsoft just for Avatar. CRACKED.COM

Psycho

It took seven days to film Psycho's 45-second shower scene. Hitchcock used a total of 78 setups and 52 cuts for that scene. CRACKED.COM

The Lord of the Rings

1 out of every 160 New Zealanders worked on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. L To give you a sense of their ludicrous scale, there were 20,000 extras, and over 48,000 individual weapons were made just for those movies. CRACKED.COM

Return of the Jedi

Making Jabba the Hutt for Return of the Jedi took three months. The puppet cost half a million dollars to build, and weighed one ton. CRACKED.COM

Interstellar

The black hole imagery in Interstellar was made with a custom program with over 40,000 lines of code. The program relied on solving equations for how light beams move through a black hole's curved space-time --any other movie would probably have just hired an artist to crank out some passable CGI with off-the-shelf software. CRACKED.COM

Predator

The shot of Arnie and his team crawling with binoculars in Predator was super hard to pull off. They needed a crane and a remote control camera to film it, and it took three hours. CRACKED.COM

Deathly Hallows

For the bank vault scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows-Part 2, the crew minted over 200,000 new coins and several thousand other trinkets, all of which were meticulously placed by hand. CRACKED.COM

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