Right. But my point is, The Program was a high-octane film. The dangerous stunt was in keeping with the overall tone, and it was meant to appeal to the kind of people who act first and think later, so I’m not surprised some dumbasses tried it on. The Notebook is a glurgefest, but it still has two scenes that would be dangerous IRL: this one, and the scene on the Ferris wheel*. Fortunately, though, the kind of people who take it seriously apparently have not been inspired to risk getting run over or breaking their necks for the sake of a romantic gesture. Then again, I’ve heard that cruise ship crews have had to specifically forbid passengers from trying to recreate the “flying” scene from Titanic. The majority of people are kinda dumb.
*Rachel McAdams’ character is on a Ferris wheel with her date. Ryan Gosling’s character is not going to let a silly thing like that get in his way, so he climbs up, while the wheel is stopped, and dangles one-handed from a bar until she accepts a date with him. Look, I only watched it, on DVD, because the people I was with wanted to, and I figured, what the heck, I’ll be able to get the references…
The hero of Philip K. Dick’s story we Can Remember it for you Wholesale was named Quayle. When they made it into the movie* total Recall they changed the name to Quaid, because we had a Veep named Quayle.
Even long afterwards in 2012, when Quayle was long out of office, the remade version of the film still has the character named Quaid, not Quayle.
*With plenty of padding, which I’ve maintained is lifted from Robert Sheckley’s novel The Status Civilization. Some of this stuff remained in the 2012 remake of the movie.
I got the impression that the foredeck on cruise ships was a working area, ropes and anchor chains and such, and was off-limits to passengers. Other than that, just going to the front of the ship and spreading your arms out doesn’t strike me as all that dangerous.
Probably. But prior to 1997, it might not have been so much “off limits” as “not of interest to passengers”. Afterwards, people might have tried climbing over that stuff in order to have their moment.
Certainly. But being right on the prow would be dangerous, not to mention getting in the way of the crew.
The death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman with a few weeks of filming left in, “Hunger Game: Mockingjay” caused the reshuffling of unfilmed scenes to utilize other characters…although there was talk of using CGI or digital manipulation, in the end, they rewrote the scenes for other actors and simply took his character out of other scenes…
A lot of Superman II was shot as part of Superman: The Movie and not used, which ticked off a some of the actors since they essentially got paid once for shooting two movies. Brando refused to do re-shoots or shoot new “Jor-El” scenes without getting paid again (See? It’s not just Mark Wahlberg!)and was replaced by Kal-El’s mom; Gene Hackman’s dialogue was dubbed over a body double shot from behind for a couple of scenes.
The suicide of his daughter caused Zack Snyder to step away from Justice League. Joss Whedon stepped in and completed filming and also apparently changed some of the original vision.
The original directors of the new Han Solo movie were fired for turning it into a wacky farce. Ron Howard was brought in to finish filming and to do extensive reshoots. It’s a good bet the finished product will look nothing like the original directors wanted it to.
The reality is that Bela Lugosi was already dead before Plan 9 even started filming. But Wood had some already shot stock footage of Lugosi, and adding that footage into the movie let him put Lugosi’s name on it.
Some have the crew-only pool and party area there, making it accessible to passengers only on behind-the-scenes tours.
It wouldn’t take much to fall overboard there if you’re already half overboard, and possibly drunk too. You’ll be seen on the ubiquitous security cameras, no matter where on the ship you fall from, but what happens next will be a body-recovery operation, not a rescue.
That wouldn’t be the first time Shockley’s material was lifted for an adaptation. It could be argued that the Stephen King novel and film The Running Man lifted liberally from both Shockley’s The People Trap (itself filmed on ABC’s Playhouse 67) (which I was actually in), and possibly Peter Watkins’ film Punishment Park (which was shown in the U.S. largely on college campuses at the time when King was attending college in Maine), and which also may have been an influence on the Richard Bachman book The Long Walk. I think I heard the story that he’s admitted that he may have subconsciously lifted some plot elements from Sheckley, and used Harlan Ellison as an intermediary to make financial restitution to him, but I’m not certain that’s accurate.
I’ve said all this many times before. Sheckley has to be one of the most ripped-off writers ever. I’m not the only one who sees significant similarities between his Dimension of Miracles and Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide. Adams admitted to being a big fan of Sheckley’s, but denies any conscious lifting from his work. (But come on – an Earthman who gets taken off Earth because of screw-ups in alien bureaucracy, who spends time hopping from one absurd alien planet to the next, encounters the Contractor who built the Earth, startling aliens noted for their poetry (really good poetry rather than really bad, in Sheckley’s case). No similarities there!)
Ironically, when people have filmed his stuff, they screw it up – as I think I said upthread. *Condorman, Freejack, * and Watchbird were really pretty awful and not at all faithful to Sheckley’s cockeyed vision (Well, Condorman is a quirky cult hit now, but wasn’t anything much when it came out.)
The movie “Giant”. Not sure about this, but it seems to me there was a revision to the story after Dean’s death. The fairly lengthy movie is centered around the rivalry between Rock Hudson’s character and Dean’s character, including a love triangle with them and Elizabeth Taylor’s character (married to Hudson, but kind of liking Dean).
In the finished film, Dean’s character is last seen a drunken mess, having gone seen his political ambitions go down in flames and being publically embarrassed, although there’s no actual resolution of the rivalry. The next scene has Hudson and Taylor stopping at a roadside diner and Hudson getting into a fight with an ornery cowboy (just like Dean’s character!) The scene, just seems so jarringly out of place, especially as its the finale of the movie, that it kind of ruins what went before. I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect that Dean’s character was supposed to show up and have one last man-to-man throwdown with Hudson (and perhaps Taylor finally choosing sides). That would have been a lot more satisfying finish. But oh well…
Anyway…the movie “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” was originally intended to be a follow-up rematch between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (not a direct sequel, but a new story playing off the same rivalry). Crawford actually fimed a few scenes before quitting in a huff or getting fired, depending on who is recounting the events. In the film, when Olivia de Havilland’s character first arrives at the plantation in a cab, if you squint during the long shots, you can see Crawford in the back of the cab (they decided not to reshoot that one scene, hoping no one would notice.) The whole bruhaha was recounted in the recent show “Feud.”
