Random Movie Trivia

– In the film Die Hard: With a Vengeance, a madman has placed a bomb at an elementary school and threatens to detonate it if Bruce Willis refuses to travel to Harlem and wear a sign he had hidden there. In the “theatrical version” of the film, the sign Bruce is forced to wear says “I hate niggers”; in the “broadcast version”, the sign says “I hate everybody”. Because that part of the film was shot on location in Harlem, the producers feared a riot would break out if Bruce wore the “theatrical version” of the sign… so he wore the “broadcast version”. So the TV version of the film has been left unedited, while the version shown in theatres was edited. As you know, it’s usually the other way around.

Pride of the Yankees is a 1942 film starring Gary Cooper as New York Yankee legend Lou Gehrig. One problem with casting Cooper was immediately obvious: Cooper was right-handed, while Gehrig was left-handed. Since the film was released only a year after Gehrig’s death, the producers were certain that the moviegoing public would notice the inconsistency. To solve the problem, everything in the game scenes – all of the uniform numbers and logos, the billboards and scoreboard – were printed in reverse, and when Cooper hit the ball, he’d run to third base, not first. The producers then simply flipped the film over, and Cooper now appeared to be left-handed, and all of the text on the uniforms, billboards, etc. appeared to be correct.

– In the 2003 Tim Burton film Big Fish, a young Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor) leaves his small Southern hometown to see the world. Early in his journey, he discovers a perfect small town called Spectre. As he enters the town, he sees a middle aged man playing the banjo on his front porch. The actor playing the banjo? Billy Redden, best known for his only other film role – the “inbred kid” that plays a banjo in Deliverance.

– In the 1985 film Back to the Future, the first time Marty and Doc test out the time machine was in the parking lot of “Twin Pines Mall”. Marty accidentally knocks over one of the trees later on in the film, and when he comes back to the present day the mall is known as “Lone Pine Mall”.

– In the 2007 Brit comedy Hot Fuzz, an overachieving London cop (Nicolas Angel, played by Simon Pegg) makes everyone around him look bad, so his superiors transfer him to the sleepy village of Sandford in rural Gloucestershire. Once there, he is partnered with local cop Danny Butterman. Danny is not very bright and also has a vast DVD collection of over-the-top cop film like Bad Boys and Dirty Harry. Danny, in awe of being close to a “big city” cop, constantly peppers Angel with questions like “Have you ever had to shoot two people at once?”, to which Angel always replies “No, that only happens in movies”. Every question that Butterman asks Angel comes true by the end of the film.

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