Hated Tropes
(Hated Trope) A piece of "trivia" isn't true, but it gets repeated like it does
Jim Carrey pulling the tablecloth off then improvising knocking everything off- this was written into the script (How The Grinch Stole Christmas)
Many people to this day believe that Isaac Hayes, the voice of Chef, left the show because he was offended by the show's portrayal of Scientology, of which Hayes was a member. This is not true. It's true that a statement was released in Hayes' name claiming that he wanted to leave the show because of it's "religious intolerance". However this statement was actually written by members of Hayes' inner circle, all of whom were devout scientologists, while he was recovering from a stroke and not in a suitable position to make such decisions. Hayes never issued any statements on his own claiming that he was unhappy with the show and his surviving family believes that he was essentially forced to quit the show by the church (South Park)
The snow in the wizard of oz wasn't asbestos, it was gypsum. The source for the asbestos was from a random unsourced news article, while the gypsum source is from the senior makeup artist.
And on a hopefully real note of chemical exposure in old ass movies: in the OG Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there’s a scene where the cast is doused in soap bubbles. They’re not like made of turpentine and C4 or whatever, just normal soap.
And that’s still very much a problem, actually.
After reshooting the scene many times over, they’d been exposed to enough soap residue left on their skin for hours to get some very light chemical burns for their trouble. You never really notice it because most interactions with soap involve copious amounts of water, but it’s still very much a base, a couple clicks behind bleach. This is most of why soap burns if it gets in your eyes.
The british sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf also used flaked soap as snow while filming a scene on a blizzard planet. The actors complained that it kept getting in their eyes and stung like hell.
Can confirm this. Back in high school I took a film class, and we took a close look at this scene because someone mentioned the urban legend. Props to our teacher for giving us an important lesson in critical thinking!
The great thing about VHS is it let people scrutinise background details in a way you couldn't before, the bad thing about VHS is that it looked like VHS so those background details weren't always that much clearer even with the ability to pause.
There's definitely a weird instinct for people to attribute literally every memorable moment to actors improvising, as if writers and directors are completely incapable of ever coming up with something good for the actors to do and they all need to come up with it themselves.
I remember watching a 20th anniversary interview with the three main actors from the Big Lebowski: the interviewer was clearly disappointed when Goodman, Bridges, and Buscemi all stated that everything was written in the script and that their job as actors was to do what the Coen Brothers told them to do. It's like they're professional actors or something!
Yeah this one. The most generous interpretation i ever had is it wasn't in sync with the guys who actually held the switch to the bomb but his performance is too natural for it to be completely unexpected. I dont know. This one always seemed a little too good to be true
I've heard folks say it about the "Ill be back" line from terminator, where arnold had to convince em to make it that or something
but arnold's got a whole interview where he says the writer had it like that at first and he disagreed about it only for the writer to be like "well i'm the writer guy, you're the actor guy, i'll write, you act" and then realized how hard that line hit for audiences and was pretty chill about his being wrong about it
No, Will Smith did not emotionally break down shooting the "how come he don't want me?" scene for Fresh Prince due to unresolved issued with his own father. It was just good acting. As far as I'm aware he maintains a good relationship with his father to this day, and if I were Smith senior I'd feel kind of pissed that everyone on the Internet just baselessly thought I was a deadbeat.
Will has actually talked about how James Avery (uncle Phil) was really pushing him to get that scene right, and that during the hug in the final take he whispered something like “now that’s acting”.
That's a better story than the made up one if you ask me. His on-set mentor pushing him to greatness is so heartwarming, and makes me like James Avery even more.
Reminds me of Will's answer when he was asked if they were ever going to get the cast back together for a revival and he said no because James Avery isn't with us anymore and there's no Fresh Prince without James Avery.
What I find funny about that rumor is that, while Will Smith doesn’t fit the bill, James Avery does. So the start of the scene, the part where Uncle Phil confronts the father before Will arrives, does have the exact “from the heart and speaking from personal and emotional experience” people want for that “fun fact.” They were just looking at the wrong actor.
Not quite a trope, or so I'd imagine, but I do share your frustration with all the "fun facts" about movies that people blatantly make up for content & inevitably get shared across the Internet.
Every time someone repeats that bullshit about Darth Vader's name (that it's a hidden reference to the word "father") I get irrationally frustrated. It's so demonstrably false; George Lucas didn't come up with the plot twist of Vader being Luke's father until he was working on ESB, it is literally impossible for him to be secretly referencing something that didn't exist yet.
There's an entire market for internet videos that try to explain everything and connect everything canonically, even if the incongruities were unintentional or the product of last minute changes.
Most blatant one for me is "data tapes" from the original Star Wars. It's about the only thing besides maybe the hairstyles that really dates an otherwise timeless film.
People couldn't let it go, came up with all sorts of silly reasons why there are tapes. And then Rogue One came out.
Adding on this: in the original movie, the Death Star plans are referred to as both "stolen data tapes" and "transmissions". Rogue One made sense of it by presenting the plans as being stolen from an imperial base that stored them in the form of advanced data tapes and then having them transmitted to the good guys' fleet.
Theres also the fact that the dutch word vader, sharing the latin root word pater, has a soft A (think how a is pronounced in the word father) compared to Vaders long A, taken from invader.
Basically every thing about Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker in The Dark Knight is not true
NO him scaring the champagne out of Alfred's glass wasn't because he was so scary (It was because Michael Caine accidentally stood too close to the elevator, and they decided to keep him throwing the glass for the rest of the shoot)
NO him playing The Joker wasn't the reason he died before the movie came out (It was because of a severe drug addiction probably compounded with the fact everyone HATED him for playing The Joker, slandering him online, and he never actually got to see how people loved his performance)
NO he didn't improvise the moments with the hospital blowing up, those were all incredibly tight and scripted, as they only had one chance of filming the hospital blowing up (Seriously, just because one of the explosions is delayed doesn't meant it wasn't planned, do you know how dangerous it would be)
HOWEVER. There is one thing in the movie that was improvised by Heath Ledger. The scene where he throws a wad of cash at the guy sat on top of the pile of money. According to the actor who played that money guy, that was improvised
But MOST The stuff you hear about his performance isn't true
I do think there's a difference between improvisation and not planned. The delayed explosion was planned and he was told to improvise his reactions. That doesn't mean "he didn't know it was coming and made it up" but by the same token his actions weren't planned out.
This is different from say Indiana Jones shooting the swordsman where a rewrite happened from an improve moment or the ADR done in D&D to allow for an unexpected scene.
Yes and no. He did take a period of time to explore the character by checking into a hotel and creating a diary filled with comic panels, movie quotes, and dark imagery but he did not method act and was not constantly in character or weird on set. Everyone talks about how funny, charming, and warm he was during filming and after the fact Heath said it was the most fun he's ever had filming.
So he did some method adjacent acting exercises with the diary but the idea that he was actually method acting and super depressed is totally untrue.
Ill also add that he didn't apply his make-up himself. I had a classmate in uni confidently repeat that fact and I had to point out how his make-up consistently degrades over the course of the film. If he'd been applying it himself it would be all over the place.
The one I absolute hate is people saying when he is giving Harvey a chance to shoot him, he keeps his hand over the trigger, controlling whether or not Joker can shoot it. But if you watch that scene, he has his thumb there for like a second out of the full minute thar it takes
It took me a long time to realize the cash guys was literally burned alive on top of that pile of money. It's not even acknowledged but he throw the cash at the guy, sitting on top of the pile, then soon after lights the whole thing on fire
See, I heard that he did that as a deliberate affectation, because his research into people with similar scars showed that they tend to build up spit around the edges of their mouth if they don't.
However, as with everything in this thread, take it with a pinch of salt because I don't have a source.
Since I’ve scrolled a good way down and haven’t seen it yet…Alpha culture, Alpha Wolf / Alpha Dog stuff. The guy who theorized it made it popular, later tried to refute it but it had caught on and regrets spreading it. Now influencers and board room execs and Omega-Verse fans LOVE them some “Top Dog / Alpha Wolf” analogies!
For additional information - it was originally determined by studying captive wolves. Later the researcher realized that the "Alpha" was dad/grandpa and that wild wolves don't act like that
The explosions not going of in the dark Knight. If explosions actually didn't trigger immediately on que they wouldn't keep filming the guy who's paid an obscene amount of money to be the explosives expert has to go in and check the lines and defuse the device and check why the charges didn't deploy
It would also be really stupid of Heath Ledger to hang around a building rigged to explode if things were not going according to plan, even at that distance.
Given how strict union and safety laws are for sets if a bottle rocket didn't immediately go off I'm pretty sure they need to cut and clear the area until the explosives guy checks it.
Given what happened on the set of the movie Rust being a perfect example of why everyone is only allowed to ever touch their explicit things and nobody else's
And i believe the actual story is that the explosions were always meant to go off in two stages.
The first just those small ones that they could easily reset if something had gone wrong. If there'd been an issue with the cameras, or Heath had tripped over his own feet or something. They hadn't actually blown anything major up, and could easily reset.
And then once Heath was clear and completely safe, they could manually trigger the big explosions that took down the building. If something had gone wrong with the trigger then Heath was safe, and theyd be able to cut and figure out what was wrong without him being in any danger. So the pause and him thinking the trigger hadn't worked was just written into the script to explain that separation.
This probably stems from confusion over this really not being in the original script. He was supposed to just walk away with the hospital exploding behind him but it was too dangerous so they later wrote the gag to get him to a safer distance. This fact probably evolved to "Heath Ledger improvised it" because people didn't bother to read the rest after seeing "not in the original script" and it got repeated everywhere
What probably also sells it is he jumps a little when the explosions go off making people think it wasn't planned but I would definitely jump a bit if a bomb went off by me
Last I heard that factoid came from a reporter misunderstanding what a neuroscientist had said about how much of the brain we understood at the time and thus published that they said we only use 10% of our brains when what was actually said was that we use all of our brains but only knew what about 10% was specifically doing.
Harrison Ford has two: "I know" and shooting sword guy with a gun. They weren't improvised on the spot, but they were changes to the original script that were discussed with the director before shooting.
And honestly thats what most actual improvised lines or scenes are. The actor will have an idea and suggest it to the director, and they'll try it out.
Unless its a movie with Robin Williams of course. Matt Damon told the story about he came up with the line "son of a bitch stole my line" on the spot. But thats Robin Williams, improviser extraordinare, an outlier that shouldn't really be counted.
The "son of a bitch stole my line" was also just one of dozens of takes he did on the day, all of which were different. There was probably a bunch of wacky jokes he did that were wildly out of tone for the scene, but when they saw that one, they knew it was the one.
"Improvised" also has a pretty broad spectrum of meanings that usually gets morphed exclusively into "made up entirely mid take" whereas usually in movies it's a scene that's been broadly blocked out and the actors know the beats they need to hit but the words aren't set in stone or it was improvised in rehearsals well before the take we see in the movie
I think some of the famous improvisations could have happened during the reading of the script or in one of the first takes of a scene, the director liked them and adapted to them in that moment. It’s not that the improvisation happened in the take and it was left like that. It’s not like it is live.
One of the ways this trope is played straight that I actually love is in The Social Network. The first line in the movie is Zuck going "Did you know there's more people with genius level IQs in China than there are people of an IQ in the US?"
Total bullshit, but it sounds plausible enough on its face, and the movie never comes back to it. That bit of misinformation really aged like fine wine as the opener to a movie about Facebook.
Many people claim that during the recording of the scene where Charlie says goodbye to Anne Marie Burt Reynolds cried for real due to the death of Anne Marie's voice actress Judith Barsi.
However this was debunked by many people involved in the production, including Don Bluth himself, who claimed that all voice recordings had already finished before Barsi's death.
What's frustrating is that you don't need to change the story for it to be a tearjerker. It's a deeply sad scene and it takes on a far sadder feeling when you know that one of her final scenes is saying goodbye. It's not necessary to punch up the story a little, it already makes me cry like a fucking baby.
That one is doubly crappy because not only is it minimizing Burt Reynolds perfomance by implying that it was as good as it was because he wasn't actually acting, but it's using the real death of a child to do so.
However, when Don Bluth finally debunked it, he did say that they had to stop working on the character of Anne Marie for about two weeks, because listening to the recordings of her voice just made everyone so sad.
No they did not use milk for this scene in "Singing in the Rain", it was backlit by lighting and there's even accounts that they struggled with low water pressure from local supplies. Just stop and think for a moment how awful it'd be to not only have to source that much milk but also flood a soundstage with it.
The fact that people still believe that the old lady sued over her coffee being hot when in fact that incident set a industry wide standard that there is a safe temp for hot beverages because at the time there wasnt a standarized temp at mcdonalds. Just google the whole mcdonalds coffee thing. I wrote this extremely fatigued and may have made it really confusing.
Yup. Also, people wildly underestimate the damage she received.
She was splashed with coffee hot enough to cover about 1/8 of her body in 3rd degree burns and worse. (A short guide to that) It was notably about 40 F hotter than most restaurants or homemade coffee, which McDonald's required of its franchisees.
Yeah, she had incredibly extensive burns and injuries and just wanted the medical bills covered. McDicks opted to attack her and call her fucking stupid instead.
If memory serves, the company ignored "safe hot temperature" and kept it almost boiling because it made the coffee last longer, and brewing fewer batches of coffee saved more money than any fines/expenses they might incur.
Also, iirc, they had ignored previous complaints that the polystyrene cups they were using were not suitable for the temperature of the coffee they were serving.
Not to mention McDonald's had been sued several times over the issue and the court basically used this one extreme case to set the precedent and punish them. The woman only sued for like $20k or something to cover her medical expenses but ended up being awarded much more
The big thing people ignore is that this lady was like the 20th person that was seriously injured. McDonald's was warned multiple times by courts that their coffee was dangerous and they needed to do something.
They refused and the COURT decided to make that woman's lawsuit that large as a punitive measure. Original she just wanted medical expenses covered.
And it should be noted she originally was asking just for her medical bills to be covered. Since she was burned so horribly she required hospitalization. The lawyers were pushing for the larger sum iirc. McDonald's launched a huge PR campaign to paint the lawsuit as frivolous to try and save face.
Interesting fact on that one, McDonald's actually admitted that it served the coffee at heat beyond safe levels of consumption to drive through customers. They tried to frame it as a customer service tactic, stating that they served it extra hot, so by the time the driver arrived at their destination, the coffee would have cooled to still hot but now safe for consumption.
That lady got burned horribly. It spilled in her lap and hospitalized her. Catastrophic injuries to an area so bad people make jokes about ending themselves if they damaged it.
The scientists in Philomena Cunk episodes do know they are in for a comedy show. They just don't know the questions beforehand and asked to keep a straight face. Diana Morgan herself said it multiple times, somehow I still heard the claim that BBC tricks these people.
There is a quote from her about how "initially" some people weren't quite sure what the show was and a few were difficult.
But that doesn't mean they didn't know it was a spoof show, it just means they weren't aware of the exact tone or the general direction of the show or how they were going to be presented, before any of the other shows were made, and some academics might have a bit of a stick up their bum if they feel like they're the ones being made fun of during filming
The "Biggus Dickus" scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian.
While the extras were instructed to not laugh a whatever they were about to encounter, they were NOT told that the scene was going to be completely serious, and were NOT threatened with losing their jobs or pay if they failed to keep composure. The extras knew that the intent was to make them laugh from the outset.
Honestly, the cast of Monty Python telling me as a random extra "okay now this scene is actually not a joke at all, and if you laugh you're fired" would probably make me break instantly, so it's better that they were more upfront
In Halifax, amongst the Titanic dead, there is a grave for "J Dawson." Titanic fans flock to that grave, thinking then "Jack Dawson must've been real."
if it is ever revealed that he did NOT actually break his toe and it was all the smartest PR / marketing ruse, do NOT, i repeat, do NOT tell me that. i choose the blue pill. it's nicer there. i don't care.
One LOTR story told often is that a real sharp knife got thrown at Viggo's face accidentally because Lurtz's stuntman couldn't see and Viggo batted it away saving his life.
This one has multiple parts some of which is true. Lawrence Makoare (who played Lurtz) did say he was supposed to throw it past Viggo but he couldn't see well and his friend told him he'd thrown it at Viggo (he didn't know because he couldn't see).
However, it wasn't a real knife (as in a real metal sharp knife), Peter Jackson said Viggo deflected it "on the first take". It was always planned for the prop knife to get thrown at Viggo and for him to deflect it with his sword, it may have just been thrown a bit closer to him than intended.
You can see in the first frame when it cuts to him that he is already lined up to try and hit it before it actually gets thrown.
Yeah there's no chance a real metal knife would be used for that shot. Hell, other than carefully controlled hero shot props there's no reason for metal weapons to be anywhere on set. Rubber weapons look good enough on camera.
If it is, they thought about it on set too. There's a behind the scenes feature where Peter Jackson talks about how they shot the scene four times before because he wanted Viggo to kick the helmet past camera. So There's actual footage of him kicking it several times without breaking his toe, and then the one where he does and screams ten times louder than all those previous takes.
I have the exact same classic "you know he broke his toe" experience every time I watch The Princess Bride with someone, because that movie also has a great broken toe story.
That movie has a lot of crazy stories that turned out to be true. Billy Crystal adlibbing, fractured rib from riding an ATV, muscle pull from not laughing, Andre the Giant being himself…
The ATV broke the toe, the not laughing bruised a rib. At least according to Carey Elwes' book.
The thing in the book I didn't know about previously is that when Rugen knocked out Wesley, Carey Elwes actually went unconscious, and they took him to the doctor they had on staff, who also treated his toe. Then, when Carey woke up, the doctor apparently said something along the lines of "Fragile, aren't you, Zorro?".
That's also why Wesley knocking out Inigo in the same way doesn't actually make contact.
fun fact, heath ledger improvised the entire joker character, no one wanted him in the movie. he just came into the set and started to do weird shit. the movie didnt even had the joker, the mf just came and said "why so serious" over and over
I just want to add that Isaac Hayes III had publicly denied that his father quit South Park over Scientology, stated that the CoS quit for him, and was recently voicing Chef in a brief reel.
Myth: Wolf of Wall Street - that Margot Robbie did not wear underwear during the infamous scene where she "flashes" Leonardo diCaprio's character to get a genuine reaction.
Imagine thinking that Margot Robbie has so little respect for Di Caprio's skills as an actor that she decides to show him her genitals for inspiration. Like what? How would that make him better at acting?
I listen to Last Podcast on the Left which features Henry Zebrowski, who played Alden Kupferberg. I get to hear all kinds of fun facts about the movie.
DiCaprio watched a ton of videos of people drunk and on drugs to study for the scene where he was whacked out on something. I think quaaludes? I don't remember. It was the scene where he was crawling down the stairs.
I think if Robbie actually flashed DiCaprio that would have been mentioned at some point. Not to mention this is DiCaprio we are talking about. I imagine he has seen a vagina before.
This movie's intimacy coordinator came forward and kinda debunked this. Most movie sets have a "no unnecessary nudity" clause and the costume designers were very strict in the 2010s.
She probably didn't wear conventional underwear, but intimacy coordinators have ways around that. They have skin colored cups and pads that just cover the genitalia.
Can I just say, almost every famous instance of an actor improvising some iconic line is very likely fake? Or at least more complicated than people make out.
For instance, ‘say hello to my little friend’ is often cited as improvisation in the Scarface remake, but was a scripted line. Likewise, most of the ‘spontaneous’ moments that came from Ledger’s joker were in the script.
There are also examples like ‘I’m walkin here’ where the actor (Hoffman) did ad-lib, but it gets exaggerated as some unplanned taxi almost running the actors down, when the encounter is in the script, just not that line. There are also examples where the actor came up with something and worked it out with the director, they didn’t just come up with it in the spot.
Another one that bothers me: ‘in being John Malkovich, the driver who hits Malkovich in the head with a beer can was non-scripted! It was some random crew member who randomly assaulted him during filming!’
Nope, was in the script. It’s a myth that’s been spread by a fake commentary track on YouTube .
I think people genuinely want these actors to have come up with these lines, because they don’t want to credit the script writers over the actors they have a connection to. However, scriptwriters are in their trade for a reason. They know how to write good dialogue better than the majority of people in the industry.
There’s also a fair number of these where, the line WAS an idea they had on set, but the take you’re seeing is probably the 5th, 6th, or 17th time they shot it, not the moment of inspiration.
Like, in Django Unchained, the apocryphal story about Leo’s hand getting cut and then they kept rolling. Half true. Yes he cut his hand. But by the time he gets to Kerry Washington and rubs the blood on her face…. That’s a different take, with fake blood. It’s not one take, they just used a real idea and got other departments involved to turn it into something.
People also forget that actors are professional liars and that many of them enjoy spreading lies or mini-myths about themselves. Yule Brenner was famous for telling wildly different stories about his youth and heritage depending on the interviewer, and this was before the internet could fact check him.
Yule Brenner was famous for telling wildly different stories about his youth and heritage depending on the interviewer, and this was before the internet could fact check him.
For instance, he infamously told Time Magazine that his first name wasn't spelled with an "e."
Just about the only instance I can actually believe is Chris Pratt improvising the 'network connectivity problems' joke in Parks and Rec - specifically because Michael Schur has joked about how annoyed he is, as a writer of the show, that Pratt came up with such a good joke on the spot.
It's also a comedy show, which usually contain a lot of ad-libbing. That's why they hire comedians. There's a level of ad-libbing that you expect in that kind of circumstance.
And even then, that's because movies and shows have very different shooting schedules. Movies will shoot multiple takes to get angles, so coming up with a different line needs to be discussed in advance so everything lines up. TV shows need to film episodes and meet deadlines so it's easier to fill in lines because you only need the final shot.
Are you still listen to office ladies which is the recap podcast done by Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. They are very open about the fact that the show was scripted but it they did leave room for the actors to improvise.
This kind of collaboration between the actors and writers was pretty highly unusual, because television time is money, they have less than a week to film the show and spending time on filming a scene over and over again with adlibs can be viewed as a waste of money.
I think on community they were somewhat more open to adlibbing I think in one case Dan Harmon or another writer was blocked on how to end a scene so he just literally wrote In "Donald Glover will come up with a great ad lib to end the scene"
Totally agree! I’m reminded of an interview with Lauren Graham where an excited interviewer or fan asked how much of Gilmore girls was improvised and she responded that absolutely nothing was improvised and they had amazing writers
It’s wild to think some fans thought any part of that show was improvised. I love it still because I grew up watching it, but it’s one of the most scripted feeling shows in the world lmao
You know, I've met more than one person who thinks that the Indiana Jones instance where Harrison pulls his gun and shoots the swordsman was improvised on the spot and the swordsman actor just went with it instead of being a change that was collectively agreed upon and written into the script before shooting on that scene even began.
Or that while they may have improvised something in a scene, they just plug the improvised line into the script and do multiple takes with the new line added.
A good example of this with the full context, in Knives Out, during the Will reading, Jaeden Martell did improvise the line “anchor baby” during one take but wasn’t heard except by Michael Shannon who immediately told Rian Johnson that Jaeden had a good line and they redid it with Jaeden given a mic.
The claim that "took an arrow to the knee" means the character got married and settled down, referring to kneeling during the proposal.
Some people get surprisingly upset and refuse to believe that is fake, but the people spreading that claim can't even agree on where it's supposed to have had that meaning. I have seen people say it's in ingame Nord culture, real life ancient Norse culture, or even modern Nordic countries.
However:
There is zero lore backing up that meaning in-universe, and Emil Pagliarulo (who wrote the damn line) has explicitly stated that it's only ever meant to be literal.
There are zero sources for that meaning ever having existed in real life. Snopes even did a fact check with experts, debunking it.
It absolutely does not have that meaning in modern Nordic cultures (source: am Nordic).
Hell, it doesn't even make logical sense, as neither ingame Nords nor real life Norse would kneel to propose.
"A woman got burned by drinking McDonald's coffee, sued the company and got more than a million dollars." It developed into the idea that you can just sue big companies and get millions over silly injuries.
The case was about an elderly woman that bought a coffee in McDonald's, it fell on her lap and caused serious burns because the temperature was high to the point it was dangerous. There were hundreds of previous complains about the high temperature of the coffee. The woman wanted enough money to cover the medical bills, but McDonald's wanted to give her $800. The jury found McDonald's liable and awarded the woman with more than 2 million dollars in damages.
There is a rumor that McDonald's paid for misinformation to be spread to dismiss the case as the "sue big company over silly injury" situation.
Facts is also it was in a parked car when the lie makes it out that she was driving. And she even took responsibility for it spilling. The burns fused her labia, ouch. Poor lass died a few years later, i think unrelated to the injuries, and got her name dragged through the mud.
At the time, McDonald's served practically boiling hot coffee in the drive thru because they wanted it to stay hot long enough that people didn't complain about it getting cold, completely ignoring how ridiculously unsafe that is.
The woman who spilled coffee had her skin so badly burned that she needed skin grafts. I'd be suing for an awful lot too.
At this point half of Instagram and Facebook is just posts claiming every scene in cinema history was improvised in the moment like that Grinch one. I've no idea why people find that idea so attractive.
Ive noticed that a lot of people really love denying writers contributions to a piece. Now my first thought was that people dont respect that part of the process, but actually I think its tied into how parasocial people get over fictional characters. They want to think of them as real people, so the more they can attribute lines to the actors and less to someone else writing them, the more they can think of those characters as real.
Except, for some reason, in improvised stuff. Every D&D show gets accused of being pre-scripted, every video of funny people playing a game, every surprising coincidence.
I wonder if it's a weird kind of extension of conspiracy thinking. Like it's the same motivation of wanting to feel like you know some secret truth that other people don't know. Nothing can just be as it appears because that doesn't give you any opportunity to 'investigate' it.
Did you know that Bohemian Rhapsody (the song, not the clusterfuck of a "movie") was recorded in one take? There wasn't even supposed to be a tape in the machine, they were just testing the signals and the band jammed and had fun.
Harrison Ford was hired to be Han Solo because he was building a shelf for George Lucas in his office. People quote this "fact" for all kinds of nonsense reasons, but it only makes sense if you don't know Harrison Ford was in American Graffitti a movie George Lucas directed that released in 1973 four years before the first Star Wars movie. Harrison had also been in several commercials and small TV appearances before that.
He was initially hired by Lucas to read the Han lines in the script opposite whoever was auditioning for Luke and Leia. It just so happened that Lucas slowly realized Ford was really nailing the lines and decided to just cast him.
Yeah, the happened to have him do some work, then ended up giving him the role part is correct. It just wasn't a shelf. He was buddies with Harrison after American Graffiti, so asked him to read some lines for the auditonees to play off of in screen tests. Then decided, "hey, you're actually perfect for that part you've been reading."
And also he was working as a carpenter to support himself while he tried to make it as an actor
People tell the story as though he had never acted before and George Lucas just decided he needed this charismatic, good-looking carpenter for his movies. But for Ford, becoming an actor was always the main goal and carpentry was just a side gig to pay the bills
Honestly this is the first time I heard it was about a shelf in George's office. For decades, the one I had heard was that he had been working as a carpenter for the studio, like helping construct sets, when George picked him.
Yeah that was the version I had heard, he was on set already doing some carpentry work and George recognized him and asked him to read the script opposite some of the people that were auditioning that day so they had someone to play off of
Yes; Leonardo DiCaprio did cut his hand when he slammed it on the table.
No; DiCaprio did not smear his blood on Kerry Washington's face. That was fake blood, added during a break in filming, during which everyone agreed to go ahead with this direction.
Stephen Hillenburg (Creator of SpongeBob) NEVER stated that he outright hated spin-offs or banned them, it was just that he didn't see them happening anytime soon/wasn't interested in them, which is VERY DIFFERENT from him saying he hated them. Eventually, he did manage to work on Kamp Koral before his death, making it one of the final few SpongeBob projects he has ever worked on.
Still, it's mind boggling to me that even nearly a decade after his death, a bunch of folks can never understand this misconception, and it's absolutely... saddening, to me.
It's because people want to get validation for a thing they don't like, armoring up with "the creator never wanted this!"
Similar with not getting a thing they wanted: Sweet Victory played at the Super Bowl halftime show. Folks love to say "they promised it but they didn't play it" but they (the band) said no such thing.
Myth: during the fight between Aragorn and Lurtz at the end of Fellowship of the Ring, Aragorn parrying the knife Lurtz throws at him was unscripted; several versions exist, but the most popular says that in the script Lurtz was supposed to miss, but Lawrence Makoare misjudged the throw due to heavy prosthetics limiting his vision and ended up tossing it straight at Viggo Mortensen, who instinctively deflected it. Some versions also claim that Makoare ended up mistakenly throwing real metal knife intended only for closeups instead of the cheaper and safer rubber prop used for fight scenes.
Truth: it was always in the film; that said, Viggo Mortensen actually nailed the stunt on the first try, when filmmakers expected it to take several hours and multiple attempts.
Everytime I hear that a part of a movie was improvised, I take it with a grain of salt. What they usually mean is that the line was improvised during rehearsals.
My favorite actual improv moment is Dustin Hoffman's "I'm walking here!" line. What no one mentions, however, is how he completely drops character for that moment.
But seriously the MCU is worse for this, at best the improvisation was RDJ asking "can i say this?" and it being added to the script or how people claim the cast are given empty scripts when in reality, they just get their own dialogue for the scene
Stan Lee creating mutants as a civil rights allegory. That did come into play later with later writers, but Lee’s intent with mutants was simply avoiding having to make up new origins for super powers.
To be fair, the allegory was explicit, it just came later. And Stan Lee did regularly support civil rights and had the whole "Stan's Soapbox" where he would talk about random things, including his politics which were in support of civil rights and equality.
So I get why people think that even though the 'mutant' origin of the powers was just laziness.
A long time ago, it was thought that the original King Kong vs Godzilla from 1962 had two endings that were region-exclusive. Those over in Asia got the ending where Godzilla won, and the U.S. and Europe got the ending where Kong won. This originated from sci-fi magazines around the time of the movie’s American release, and since people didn’t have access to the Japanese version at that point, it was assumed to be true and spread around like it was. It wouldn’t be until around the 90s and into the 21st century that people got their hands on the Japanese version and learned the truth that no matter which version of King Kong vs Godzilla you watch, all versions ended with Kong as the winner, though some consider their initial fight a draw.
That in the original Alien. Sigourney Weaver in her underwear scenes had visible bush in every shot that had to be removed. No one had the time, money, or reliable technology to paint over EVERY Frame to do that in 1979.
And the restoration of the bush cut for the 4K release was an article on a satire website.
Recent one cropping up in the Star Wars fandom on youtube: Boba Fett was supposed to be revealed to be Luke's mom. Variant is that Mark Hamill pitched this but Lucas said no.
The truth comes from an interview Hamill did about finding out Leia was going to be his sister. He sarcastically told George, "And what, Boba Fett's my mom?"
But the clickbait youtubers have turned this into him being serious and then it being George's plan.
Myth: Harrison Ford hated Han Solo and had him killed off in Episode 5 due to how much he hated Han Solo.
Fact: He doesn't mind Han Solo. He was originally signed for 2 movies. He prefers Indiana Jones, but at most he has a lukewarm feeling about Han Solo. He only wanted him killed for emotional weight and sacrifice.
Amusingly, this also holds for Alec Guinness and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Guinness did hate the role and would take credit for the idea to kill the character off, but Kenobi's death was planned beforehand.
The stories about Nintendo running a taxi service and love hotels in the 50s. The CEO of the company at the time had a few other businesses separate from Nintendo, one of which was a taxi service, but they weren’t part of Nintendo. If I recall correctly, he didn’t even have love hotels so that claim is even more of a stretch. These claims all date back to an unofficial Nintendo history book from the 90s that keeps being listed as a source despite being disputed on multiple occasions.
Mr. Ed not being a palomino but actually being a zebra because 'horses didn't look right on B&W tv' was just plain stupid, and shame on anyone who went along with that. (y'know, decades later.)
I will base my example on the content I used to watch from italian youtubers, but I suppose it can still be applied in geneal. For a while, there was this mysterious aura behind what really happened there. A lot of videos keep repeating that the colonies that arrieved there first where likely killed by the locals or just disapperead without leaving a trace behind. Now, I don't exactly know if this is 100% confirmed but the thing repeated there wasn't entirely true. They arrived in the island, and after a while they were just integrated into the local tribe. So even the "croatoan" writing isn't something spooky or unexplainable: it may be a reference to a nearby island and the tribe that lived there
It's honestly confusing how Roanoke became a mystery. Like. Guys.
"The only marker was 'Croatoan" marked into a tree."
"Would that happen to have anything to do with the Croatoan tribe nearby? The tribe where we've had reports of 'white-skinned Indians'? The tribe that has several kids with blue eyes? The tribe that the people of Roanoke were on decent terms with? The tribe that has a remarkably high rate of people that speak English? The tribe that would be the obvious place to look if someone were to, I don't know, carve a note like 'Croatoan' into a tree to let future settlers know where they went? That tribe?"
"I can't tell. It truly is a mystery. Perhaps we may never know."
It was a "mystery" because the English ships sent to check on them were driven off by storms and disease before they could ever really look and just marked them as "lost." It's only been in the last decade or so that we've been able to definitively prove what happened to them, although honestly it's been just a argument between the island or heading inwards and integrating there. And it turns out it was both: most fled to the island and integrated, as DNA testing shows, and there are English-style Christian burials from the correct time frame inland as well.
To be entirely fair, it wasn't mystery to the dude who founded it.
Before he left, they quite literally made the decision that if life there got to be untenable, they were to move to Croatoan and work with the Natives there. They were going to go can check, but IIRC they had to head back to England. Then a war with Spain got way worse and he never saw the Americas again.
In the hundreds of years after that, people who weren't a part of it spun the story and mythologized it into a mystery because we never got confirmation of what happened to them. Which like, sure, we dont definitively know what happened, but we're pretty sure.
Basically like coming home to an empty house, seeing a note that says "out for milk" and then filming a multipart documentary about the mystery of where your wife is.
Daniel Radcliffe's scream in Order of the Phoenix was muted because it was so intense and left his co-actors in tears, and this came from Daniel losing his grandmother shortly beforehand.
I’ve never heard this but it is absolutely moronic.
The claim is literally he acted too good for them to use it in the movie? They were like “no, this scream is actually so sad it’s dangerous for audiences to hear it, but too good to do another take.”?
Half of « The Shining » trivia was created out of nowhere, like this thing about Jack Nicholson disliking cheese and being fed cheese sandwiches during the whole filming (which is reported in no biographies or any serious source)
Not the point of the post but the way Carrey casually flips the table as he's walking away is still fucking hysterical. Even following a script he has a way of moving that is completely irreplicable.
The reverse of this trope is actually in the original John Wick (2014).
Originally Keanu Reeves was supposed to talk the bad guys out of shooting and fighting, but when he started just outright killing them, the director liked it so much he just started throwing people at Keanu to kill. They had to beg him to stop killing folks when the production wrapped. But he wouldn't stop, so they kept filming. And that is how we got three sequels out of that.
Every time I see "Fun Fact: Goofy is actually a cow!" I want to scream.
No, the character formerly known as Dippy Dawg isn't a cow. We get a Disney cow in Clarabelle, and she has shorter ears and horns. It's not a plot hole that Pluto also exists and is a dog, no one ever questions how Pete is now a cat, yet Minnie has a pet cat. Chip and Dale are just regular chipmunks, there are just regular animals in the anthropomorphic animal world.
Extremely basic research would clear that up. It's not even engagement bait, I've been seeing this for a long time and on platforms where there is no reward for interactions. It's just a reminder that fun fact accounts do not check before sharing.
People keep spreading the lie that this turtle club scene from "Master of Disguise" was filmed on 9/11. The movie didn't start filming until almost 2 weeks after the event.
2.8k
u/Boring-Dig4583 12h ago
The snow in the wizard of oz wasn't asbestos, it was gypsum. The source for the asbestos was from a random unsourced news article, while the gypsum source is from the senior makeup artist.