Dexys Midnight Runners did a cover version of ‘Jackie Wilson Said’ and performed it on ‘Top of the Pops’ the weekly music show on the BBC. The backdrop was a huge picture of the darts legend Jocky Wilson. There is still some debate as to whether it was a deliberate joke or a genuine mistake.
Beyonce Knowles’s mother claiming she got the name “Destiny’s Child” from a passage in the Book of Isaiah. This phrase appears nowhere in any English translation of the Bible, but was the name of a 1967 hit for Waylon Jennings. When the group started no one thought about how embarassing it would be for the biggest star of R&B music to be associated with a country song, so they came up with the nonsense explanation later and people accept it because they want to.
Every porn star who claims they were a piano prodigy as a child and majored in computer science in college before deciding to “express myself.” Of course none of them can complete a sentence or add 2+2 if put on the spot, and things they claim to have done that would have attracted archived news coverage under their real name never have any, but they were all geniuses. The general culture of treating “porn star” personas as real people instead of creations designed to cater to the lowest common denominator fans and interviewing them in-character, which is somewhere between interviewing “Randy Savage” and interviewing Batman in terms of expecting any correspondence at all to a real biography instead of a completely fictitious character created by an actor.
I buy this one. John was pretty open about his drug use by that point. Also, didn’t the actual drawing by Julian get auctioned off at one point?
You’re not the only one. That was absolutely my reaction. Vader was an evil liar, and that was exactly the sort of lie a villain would use to confuse a tormented orphan.
Which is why his next line was “Search your feelings, you know it be true.” Feelings, in this context, meant the Force - meaning that Luke used his Force sensitivity to confirm what Vader was saying. Sure, I suppose Vader would have been using his own Force powers to manipulate Luke’s abilities, or the Force could have been lying somehow, but that seems a bit too convoluted under the circumstances.
There’s a story that Chief Brody’s famous line in Jaws – “You’re going to need a bigger boat” – actually started out as a running gag among the cast and crew. The story goes that the boat used by the catering service wasn’t big enough to handle the whole crew, who were often heard to joke “you’re going to need a bigger boat.” When it came time to film the scene, Roy Scheider ad-libbed the line that had been heard so much around the set.
I don’t know if I believe it or not but it’s a fun story.
Thought of another. I never bought that Kill Bill was going to be one movie. Maybe an early draft of the script was self-contained, but there’s no way Miramax was going to release a four and a half hour kung fu movie. Partly because a) QT’s movie immediately (well, six years) before that was Jackie Brown which had made money, but substantially less than Pulp Fiction had, and the director’s mega box office successes were still several years in the future and b) structurally it’s flawless as a two-parter, with the cliffhanger about B’s daughter at the end of part 1 setting up the entire climax of part 2. The whole “hey, let’s chop it in half!” brainstorm seems really fanciful.
Listen, in 1980, when I was 19, my judgment was famously spot on. I may have missed this one, but how dare you say my conclusion was convoluted. 
Nevertheless, this appears to be what happened. In an interview on Graham Norton, Mark Hamill confirmed that director Irvin Kershner took him aside, gave him the script with the “I am your father” line, and told him that George Lucas knew, he - Kershner - knew, and now Hamill knew; and if there was a leak, they’d know it came from Hamill.
I mean, I presume Lawrence Kasdan also knew, seeing as he wrote the script.
In the interview, Hamill just said Lucas and Kershner. IANA screenwriter, but I understand that directors and producers alter scripts all the time.
Here’s John Hurt’s take on it:
“It was a much publicized fact that the cast didn’t know what was going to happen,” Hurt noted in The Eighth Passenger. “Well, of course they knew what was going to happen; they knew that the alien was going to arrive that way. What they didn’t know is that it was going to be capped with little explosives, and that when it actually burst through there would be quite a shattering explosion and that they’d all get splattered with blood and stuff.”
It’s certainly true that some press and fans promulgate a misleading impression of how in the dark the cast were, but Scott definitely set it up to be as surprising for them as he could.
Thanks for sharing that; I hadn’t heard Hurt’s explanation before, and it makes sense.
Reminds me of how they (supposedly) filmed the scene on Mad Men where Guy’s foot gets run over by a riding lawnmower (ep. “Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency”):
The cast knew in advance that they would be splattered with fake blood, but the director told them it would happen on the count of three…after he’d already arranged for it to happen on the count of two.
That sounds a lot like what director John McTiernan did to Alan Rickman in his Die Hard death scene - he told him they’d drop him on 3, and dropped him on 2 instead, leading to a famously surprised facial expression:
Rickman was not amused
There is the one about the horse’s head used in The Godfather. I guess that one is verified.
Another one I heard was that Sean Connery, appearing as James Bond in a scene implying some lovemaking with some hottie, with both being scantily clad for the shoot, and he being worried about becoming, uh, aroused, told the actress “Something may happen, or it may not, but either way I apologize.”
Hitler’s distinctive toothbrush mustache was a result of his experience in World War I (according to writer Alexander Moritz Frey, who served with Hitler in the trenches). Apparently, he was ordered to trim his full mustache so that his gas mask would seal better against his face. But why did he keep it after the war?
It was indeed a bit of a fashion trend in Germany at the time, but I believe those who attribute Hitler’s influence on Charlie Chaplin, whose movies Hitler enjoyed.
I doubt Adolph enjoyed being parodied by Charlie in The Great Dictator, however.
I can’t really blame him. I could see using a cheap trick like that on an untrained actor, but Rickman? He would have nailed it 20 times if it somehow took 20 takes.
I came across this piece of trivia that the mask in the movie Scream was based on the painting by Edvard Munch. When I repeated that here someone quoted the director who said he got the idea for the design from some '40’s cartoon.
I call BS. The name of the movie is Scream and the mask looks like the painting.
I thought that too. But it’s even more incorrect than the Director’s claim; it was a pre-existing costume.