- “The Shawshank Redemption”. There’s a character named Brooks who has a pet bird. And there’s a scene where he feeds it a maggot. But there was a rep from the ASPCA on the set who wouldn’t let them give the bird a live maggot.
So they actually had to sit and watch a bucket full of live maggots, waiting for one of them to die of NATURAL CAUSES before they could proceed.
- “Gone Girl”. There’s a scene where BEN AFFLECK is in an airport and he doesn’t want to be recognized, so he puts on a baseball hat. Director DAVID FINCHER wanted it to be a YANKEES hat.
But Ben is such a diehard Red Sox fan he REFUSED. Neither of them would budge, and things reportedly got pretty heated. Someone finally came up with the solution of giving him a METS hat. That worked.
- “The Sound of Music”. One of the most famous movie scenes in history is JULIE ANDREWS in that meadow, singing “The Hills Are Alive”. Well, the producers paid a German farmer a lot of money to use his land for that scene.
What they didn’t realize was that he was CRAZY. The day they started filming, he came running, waving a pitchfork, and complaining that his cows were refusing to produce milk because of all the noise. He had also sabotaged a fake stream they built.
- “Airplane!” The guys who wrote and directed it wanted it to take place on a propeller plane in the ’50s. But they had a deal with Paramount, who demanded it be set on a modern jet in the present day . . . which was 1980.
They were so adamant about their vision, they took the movie to other studios, but nobody wanted it. So they had to go back to Paramount and do it their way.
- “Casino Royale”. This is the ORIGINAL “Casino Royale” from 1967, starring PETER SELLERS as James Bond.
WOODY ALLEN was also part of the cast, and one day a Columbia Pictures exec came to the set and mistook Sellers for Allen. So Sellers played along, pretending he WAS Woody Allen and having a conversation with the guy.
But the guy started talking about what a JERK Peter Sellers was. Sellers didn’t tell him who he really was, but the next day he disappeared to Sweden. And he didn’t come back for a while, which forced them to do massive rewrites.
- “Napoleon Dynamite”. The opening credit sequence where a pair of hands is shown picking up and putting down plates, and opening a wallet to show Napoleon’s school I.D. was originally done by star JON HEDER.
But an executive at Fox Searchlight thought it was disgusting, because Jon had, quote, “hangnails or something.” So they had to redo the sequence with a hand model, which took about two weeks.
