Peter Jackson’s first choice to play Aragorn wasn’t Viggo Mortensen. He originally signed Bob Saget to the role, but replaced him after seeing the dailys.
The end credits to “Schindler’s List” originally had bloopers from the film.
The horse’s head in “The Godfather” was actually a zebra head painted brown.
The B&W footage from “The Wizard Of Oz” was filmed in color, then hand-painted by cheap illegal alien labor to black and white tones.
The Day the Earth Stood Still originally ended with a long epilogue in which the Earth did, in fact, actually stand still, but this was cut after preview audiences found it depressing.
Scanners is based in part on a long-lost but recently discovered play by Christopher Marlowe.
Quest for Fire was conceived as a musical, but the actors had trouble learning to grunt in harmony so the script was reworked.
The hobbits in LOTR were given skateboards to sit on as they filmed, to save the stress on their knees.
Contrary to popular belief, no actual computerization was used in the LOTR trilogy. Gollum is a Muppet.
It’s a Wonderful Life originally contained a 7 minute simulated oral sex scene between George and Mary but was cut when studio execs found it “too erotic for a holiday picture.”
A tap dance sequence was cut from Throne of Blood.
Rope was initially envisioned by Hitchcock to be performed by little pieces of rope fashioned into puppets, but the idea was deemed “a logistical nightmare” and scrapped.
Spielberg used live ammo during the D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan, resulting in thousands of deaths.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is, in fact, a documentary.
Spielberg’s original title for Schindler’s List was Close Encounters of the Third Reich.
It’s well-known that the mechanical shark used in Jaws was named Bruce. Less well known: its last name was Smith.
The Chief uprooted an actual sink in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the hospital where the scene was filmed sued the production for the water damage.
Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope was originally titled Trading Places because of the Good and the Bad sides essentially changing places, but it was felt that this title wasn’t Sci-Fi enough.
It’s A Wonderful Life was originally produced in Romania using stop action animation of tin cans and artillary shells painted up to look like people. Adolf Hitler had the producers shot and the writers escaped to America where history was made one frame at a time with stop action animation of Jimmy Stewart who had already died.
Gone With The Wind was originally planned as a serial, but Clark Gable wasn’t able to commit to the four years of planned shooting.
Gremlins is based on a true story.
Yoda is neither a muppet or a CGI effect, but is actually the first extraterrestrial with a Hollywood agent.
The deaths in Saving Private Ryan were deliberate and part of Spielberg’s plan to keep the movie under budget.
The corpses from Poltergeist weren’t recycled from Raiders Of The Lost Ark as many think; they were actual corpses from an old indian burial ground. The resulting actual supernatural phenomenon was used in the film, which had to be changed to a horror movie from a documentary about moving corpses from old indian burial grounds.
Despite claims to the contrary, This Is Spinal Tap was based entirely on the career of Liberace.
Tom Cruise? Robot.
Julia Roberts and Shelley Duval are, in fact, the same person.
Robin Williams enlarged his forearms for Popeye by masturbating 50 times per day.
Griffin Dunne was accidentally killed by wolves during the filming of An American Werewolf In London and was replaced by his twin brother, Clovis.
One of the biggest cinematic bloopers of all time, occurs in a combat scene of the “Green Berets” whereby you can just see John Wayne in the far distance burning an American Flag and laughing hysterically. (He didn’t know the cameras were rolling.).
Yogi Berra was the first choice to play the Terminator, but he could not due to prior contractual commitments.
Bette Midler died during the filming of The Rose. Her appearance in Bitches, I mean, Beaches was 100% CGI.
The visual costume effects in the film Tron were achieved by gluing hundreds of feet of those bendy glowsticks, in various colors, to the actors’ costumes.
Just like in every other project he’s ever been involved with, Bill Paxton’s character in the video for the Barnes & Barnes song Fish Heads, dies at the end. When the video was first shown on Saturday Night Live, the graphic scene of Paxton being bludgeoned to death with a rotting fish corpse was deemed too graphic by the NBC censors, and the video was trimmed by 15 seconds.
It’s a common misperception that the dinosaurs in the film Jurassic Park were entirely CGI effects. The sad truth of the matter is that Steven Speilburg had a large number of Gila Monsters, Iguanas, and baby Crocodiles physically altered by Costa Rican black market plastic surgeons for the film. The sadder footnote to the story is the fact that, when principle filming was completed, he simply abandoned the now deformed creatures on the island where shooting took place, to live or die on their own.
One Hour Photo is actually a documentary about how Robin Williams was stalking a local neighborhood family. Williams is currently receiving treatment for his obsessive behavior.
In the late 1930s Victor Fleming set out to make a depressing art house film about a little person (midget) who becomes despondent after being rejected by his lady friend and commits suicide by hanging himself. The resulting film was unreleasable but some footage was incorporated into his next film, The Wizard of Oz.
Star Wars Episodes I and II were intended to be received as straight-up comedies. George Lucas is actually very hurt that no one seems to get the “joke”.
Actually, that would explain quite a bit.
Gay robots? That must make the fundies angry.
Stanley Kubrick tried to get Mattel toys to buy the rights to the characters from 2001, in order to market little David Bowman figurines and toy EVA pods. Mattel turned him down, but then went on to market their Major Matt Mason astronaut dolls.
Earth VS The Flying Saucers was in fact commissioned by the US government as a propaganda film when it was believed that UFO aliens were about to publicly reveal themselves.
Kirsten Dunst appears totally nude in all of her movies. The clothes are added later with computer technology.
Groundhog Day originally was conceived as normal linear movie. Only when Bill Murray kept screwing up all his scenes of the first day did the director decide to rewrite the story as involving a single repeating day.