A notable visual scene in The Bonfire of the Vanities, is when Maria Ruskin arrives in New York on an Air France Concorde. The film’s Second Unit Director, Eric Schwab, calculated the time and day when a runway at JFK would line up exactly with the setting sun, to serve as a backdrop, and managed to film in the single 30-second time period when this occurs in any given year, while winning a bet that he could make the scene an essential part of the movie. The 5-camera shot cost $80,000 and lasts just 10 seconds in the final cut.
Posts tagged trivia
Brock Peters started to cry while shooting the testifying scene, without rehearsing it this way, and Gregory Peck said that he had to look past him, instead of looking him in the eye, without choking up himself.
(Source: gregorypecks)
Natalie had a panic attack before shooting the scene in Rebel Without a Cause when Judy bursts into tears at the police station. Beverly Long, who played one of the gang members, found her in the bathroom saying “I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t, I just can’t cry,” and then she started to cry. Beverly told her to go to the set quickly while she was still crying, but Natalie felt she could not do it. Long says when she left the bathroom, Natalie had a little ring made, with a cup on it, and she put Vicks in it. When she had to do a crying scene, she’d rub the Vicks into her eye—that’s how she cried in the scene in Rebel.
Pulp Fiction trivia: Speculation abounds as to the nature of the mysterious glowing contents of the case:
- Could it be Elvis’s gold suit, seen worn by Val Kilmer (as Elvis) in True Romance?
- The most persistent theory (most usually attributed to a friend of a friend who saw it posted on a message board by someone whose brother had read a report of a radio interview with Tarantino himself) is that it is Marcellus Wallace’s soul. The story goes that when the Devil takes a person’s soul, it is removed through the back of the head (this isn’t part of any known religion, but this is what the message board posters say). When we see the back of Marcellus’s head he has a Band-Aid covering the precise spot indicated by tradition for soul removal. Perhaps Marcellus sold his soul to the devil which would also explain why the combination to open the briefcase is 666.
- Quentin Tarantino has said that the band-aid on the back of Marsellus Wallace’s neck had nothing to do with an allusion to the Devil stealing Marsellus’s soul… but that the actor Ving Rhames had a scar on the back of his neck he wanted to cover up.
- Or could it be simply a 20-watt light bulb?
- According to Roger Avary, who co-wrote the script with Quentin Tarantino, the original plan was to have the briefcase contain diamonds. This seemed neither exciting nor original, so Avary and Tarantino decided to have the briefcase’s contents never appear on screen; this way each filmgoer could mentally “fill in the blank” with whatever struck his or her imagination as best fitting the description “so beautiful”. The orange light bulb (projecting shimmering light onto the actors’ faces) was a last-minute decision and added a completely unintended fantastic element.
- In a radio interview with ‘Howard Stern’ in late 2003, Quentin Tarantino was asked by a caller the contents of the briefcase, and he answered, “It’s whatever the viewer wants it to be.”
During the Nipples of Venus scene, Elizabeth Berridge did not know she could spit out the candy (which was really lumps of marzipan) between takes and ate about 15 whole pieces. She later describes how she thought that they were disgusting and that she eventually made herself sick.
In the scene where Jack is writing and gets mightily upset when Wendy interrupts him, the chair behind Jack vanishes and then reappears. This was intentional from Kubrick. The audience was supposed to get a subconscious feeling that something was wrong.
(Source: oakenshielld)
”We had done a cross-country search and seen 2,100 actors.The character was so complex it was just really tough to find a truthful performance. This kid walked in and I couldn’t believe it. He was a prodigy. I got on the phone to the director, and said, ‘Get on a plane right away.”
Deborah Aquila (casting director of Primal Fear) talks on Edward NortonDo you realize the number of people in this movie? It is incredible! I never noticed until today….it is packed with amazing talent.
(Source: remote96uzak)
monicabing: Did you know? - Friends Little Things 9/9
Submit yours!
![This film was originally to be filmed in black and white, as was the standard practice with “artistic” films in the 1950s. However, once Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor were cast in the leads, director Richard Brooks insisted on shooting in color, in deference to the public’s well known enthusiasm for Taylor’s violet and Newman’s strikingly blue eyes.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) [x]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/ef17dec113033abb944600a05646965d/tumblr_mjgre5EH6i1qkfjt8o1_400.jpg)
This film was originally to be filmed in black and white, as was the standard practice with “artistic” films in the 1950s. However, once Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor were cast in the leads, director Richard Brooks insisted on shooting in color, in deference to the public’s well known enthusiasm for Taylor’s violet and Newman’s strikingly blue eyes.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) [x]
(Source: hitchcockalfred)
The British crew, who had happily been putting up with the filth for several weeks now, were rather taken aback but there was nothing they could do except watch him storm off. ‘Well,’ said Reed, ‘its his first day, he’s nervous, and we’ve got so many other things to do. We will just have to build a sewer in Shepperton.’
Given his refusal to go down the sewers, there was very little for Welles to do in Vienna. He ‘had one day’s shot walking to the Prater wheel, and away from the Prater wheel,’ recalled Guy Hamilton, ‘and I think I’m right in saying that was the sum total of Orson’s Viennese contribution.’ All the shots of him in the sewers took place many weeks later at Shepperton - with its more hygienic water supply.
- In Search Of The Third Man, Charles Drazin
(Source: krzysztofkieslowski)
During rehearsals, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton found out that they both hated the new Volkswagen Beetle with a passion, and for the scene where Tyler and The Narrator are hitting cars with baseball bats, Pitt and Norton insisted that one of the cars be a Beetle. As Norton explains on the DVD commentary, he hates the car because the Beetle was one of the primary symbols of 60s youth culture and freedom. However, the youth of the 60s had become the corporate bosses of the 90s, and had repackaged the symbol of their own youth, selling it to the youth of another generation as if it didn’t mean anything. Both Norton and Pitt felt that this kind of corporate selling out was exactly what the film was railing against[…].
