At the beginning of Gladiator, the war cries of the Germanii are lifted directly from the soundtrack of Zulu (1963).
In the beginning of Kennth Brannah’s Dead Again, the character Roman is seen in prison being prepared for execution. As an insdie joke that Brannagh had also directed and starred in Henry V, the number on Roman’s prison clothes is the date of the Battle of Agincourt.
I just purchased that movie on DVD. What part of the movie? Do you mean when one of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish)'s foster “girls” comes out of the store and Rev. Powell (Robert Mitchum) tries to “sweet-talk” her?
“Die Hard” is TECHNICALLY a sequel to the Frank Sinatra
film “The Detective,” as both movies are based on novels by the same author,who used the same lead character in both books. Also, a then-unknown Bruce Willis has a walk-on role in the Sinatra film.
Stuff I learned from the new “Die Hard” DVD…
With an x-acto knife and some glue, you can re-arrange the title on posters for the 1986 Judge Reinhold movie Off Beat to read “Beat Off”. Do enough of them and become a campus hero. Now that’s trivia my friends.
I’m sure I’m the last person on earth to figure out that Travis Bickle’s “You talkin’ to me” bit from Taxi Driver is a reference to the scene from Shane where Chris confronts Shane in the bar.
I remember that Alexandro Jodorowosky was supposed to direct a version of Dune in the late 70’s, early 80’s and that each of the three planets where to be represented by a different band, one was Tangerine Dream, another Pink Floyd and I don’t remember the third.
Now for my pieces of trivia, Clint Eastwood had is screen debuts in Revenge of the Creature and that Leonard Nimoy had a very small part (a cameo really) in the 50’s SF classic Them !.
On, and I don’t know if that counts, but Groucho Marx claimed to have lost its virginity in Montréal ! 
Sofa King writes:
> In watching Night of the Hunter the other night, I think
> I may have seen a young Warren Beatty spit out a
> completely uncredited one-liner (he’s the cap-wearing
> teenager leaning against the wall in the alley shot).
I’m pretty sure this isn’t the case. Night of the Hunter came out in 1955. Warren Beatty graduated from high school that year. He didn’t graduate from Northwestern University until 1959, and it was that year that he went to Hollywood and got his first acting job there (playing the character of Milton Armitage in the TV series Dobie Gillis).
Euty
I thought it was the AE-35 unit in 2001 that was going to fail. I watch it tonight to make sure.
Another thing about Star Wars is that John Williams used a bit of music from Psycho in the scene where they come out of the hidden compartment in the Falcon while on the DeathStar.
Neither, and there are no dailies. Not a single second of film was ever rolled on either Jodorowsky or Ridley Scott’s “Dune” projects. Artists H.R. Giger and Jean Giraud spent a great deal of time developing conceptual artwork, and Jodorowsky prepared a script and preproduction work, but the project fell apart long before principal photography was ever an issue. Ridley Scott’s project never even got that far, but he did hire Giger on to design the production for “Alien.” Nobody went broke, nobody got anything half-fiished.
Giger’s conceptual art for “Dune” can be seen here.
Zebra–You’re right-it was the AE-35 unit.
Even better: One of Sinatra’s co-stars in “The Detective” was Lloyd Bochner. Lloy’d son is Hart Bochner, who co-starred as Ellis in “Die Hard.”
Is that true, about Willis being in “The Detective,” though? He would only have been 13 years old at the time.
Another little bit of Star Wars trivia. When Han Solo is about to be lowered into the carbon-freezing chamber, Leia says “I love you.” Han responds with “I know.” That was improvised. Leia’s lines were written the say Carrie Fisher spoke them. Harrison Ford ad-libbed the “I know.”
More random trivia:
The name Marvin Nash is in both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.
Phil Collins was an extra in “A Hard Day’s Night.”
Joe Pesci first found fame as a member of the rock group Joey Dee and the Starlighters (“The Peppermint Twist”). He appeared in a film with them in 1961.
Robert Blake appeared opposite Humphrey Bogart in “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” (playing a paperboy).
Boris Karloff’s name was left off the opening credits of “Frankenstein” (They merely said “The Monster . . . ???”)
The first use of the word “gay” to mean “homosexual” in the mainstream media was by Cary Grant in “Bringing Up Baby” in 1938. When asked why he was wearing Katherine Hepburn’s dressing gown, he said “Because I just went gay all of a sudden.”
Ah…I knew I’d have others–these deal with records:
*Caligula has the record for the most cuts by a censor, for a sexual-explicit film. The Japanese censors imposed 450 “blurs” to shield audiences from the sight of parts of the human anatomy they believed should be revealed only to one’s spouse.
*Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights has the record for most takes. It took 343 takes to work out how to get the blind flower girl to mistake Charlie Chaplin for a rich man. With recent movies, the record goes to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. One scene with Shelly Duvall took 127 takes.
*The longest movie title is Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attacks of the Evil, Mutant, Hellbound, Zombified, Flesh-Eating, Sub-humanoid Living Dead–Part 4(1993). Gee…must have gone straight to video.
*The funeral scene of Gandhi (1982) had the most extras–300,000 people. 94,560 of them were contracted at a rate of one dollar for the day and the remainder were unpaid volunteers summoned by the press.
*The Flintstones (1994) had 32 scriptwriters.
*Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) has the record for longest credit sequence: 12 minutes.
Wendell is most likely correct. But take a look at it anyway, Arnold. It is indeed the scene where the girl sneaks away for sewing lessons. The guy’s line is, “must be Thursday,” or something like that. Check out the smirk. It’s uncanny.
As an extra little bit of sort-of-trivia, you might consider Shelley Winters’ role in Night of the Hunter as compared to her similar role in Lolita. Along the same lines, Janet Leigh finds herself in closely analogous situations in both Touch of Evil and Psycho. An advanced form of typecasting, perhaps?
Oops, that didn’t come out right. I meant to say that Janet Leigh also found herself in nearly the same situation in two different films. Janet’s and Shelley’s situations are not similar to each other, except that they are all creepy.
Since I feel obligated to toss out more junk, Outland is essentially a sci-fi remake of High Noon, but you’d all know that if you saw them both.
As evidence of my mispent youth, I’ll dispute this. It wasn’t Strassman. This story was related by Angie Grabowski, who played Melanie Haller on the show, in the copy for her Playboy layout a few years later. She also said that the tape didn’t work, so they had to reshoot whole scenes in a heavily padded bra.
Anyhow, that was TV trivia.
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It’s also said during the movie that Michael Jackson is watching during the beginning of Thriller.
“'There’s a note…written in blood.
‘What’s it say?’
‘See you next Wednesday.’”
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Eddie Murphy was seriously considered for a starring role for the-then-in-development Star Trek IV. At the time, Eddie was basically the biggest star in movies, just having come off Beverly Hills Cop, and he contacted the producers asking to become involved. But the writers couldn’t find a way to work him into the whale story that made sense, so it didn’t come to pass (thankfully!!).
I’m sure everyone knows this one, but it’s my favourite so I’m posting it anyway. In Star Wars, when Luke gets out of his starfighter after his successful gopher shoot and Princess Leia runs up and congratulates him, he calls her “Carrie”, not “Leia”.