Hollywood Trivia

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Robin Williams last words on camera were 'Smile, my boy. It's sunrise.' in Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb.

^^ .....and then it was "twilight", for HIM. Oh, God----soooo sad----I still haven't "recovered", from the news.....

So true....

And now, of course, the families are bickering over his estate.....his houses, to be exact.

What ever happened to mourning with dignity.......

Did we learn nothing from Jacqueline Kennedy's example?

I know----that's so messed-up.....

The characters in Alien are only ever referred to by their last names, i.e., Dallas, Parker, Lambert, etc. This is because the screenwriters essentially wrote the characters as unisex, so that any of them could be cast as male or female. The lead character, Ripley, isn't given a first name (Ellen) until the sequel.

There's one scene in 'Alien' that features 'old Hollywood' effects. When the ship sets down on the surface of the planet where the alien ship is broadcasting a signal, there's a shot of the actors in spacesuits climbing down a ladder to the surface. Since this was way before CGI, they cut the cost of building the ship full size by having children in scaled down spacesuits climb down an equally scaled down ladder.

(Check out the video "The Making of Alien" on YouTube.)

Jon Finch seemed to be on the verge of stardom after his lead roles in Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971) and Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), but it never quite happened. He was offered the role of James Bond in Live and Let Die (1973) but turned it down. He was later cast in Alien (1979) as Kane, the character who's killed by the chest-bursting alien, but had to drop out after a few days of filming after taking ill. Footage of Finch as Kane can be seen in the documentaries on the Alien DVDs and Blu-rays, or you can skip to 1:30 in this YouTube video.

He was never bitter about losing out on fame, since he never had any desire to be a big movie star. He chose to do one or two films per year and live a quiet and relaxing life while away from Hollywood. He reunited with Ridley Scott in 2005 for Kingdom of Heaven, and this time his footage made it into the finished product. It was his final film; he died in 2012 at the age of 70.

In writing the script for "Alien", Dan O'Bannon drew inspiration from many previous works of science fiction and horror. He later stated that "I didn't steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!" 'The Thing from Another World' (1951) inspired the idea of professional men being pursued by a deadly alien creature through a claustrophobic environment. 'Forbidden Planet' (1956) gave him the idea of a ship being warned not to land, and then the crew being killed one by one by a mysterious creature when they defy the warning. 'Planet of the Vampires' (1965) contains a scene in which the heroes discover a giant alien skeleton; this influenced the Nostromo crew's discovery of the alien creature in the derelict spacecraft. (A detail that remains as yet unexplained.) Also 'Junkyard' (1953), a short story by Clifford D. Simak in which a crew lands on an asteroid and discovers a chamber full of eggs. He has also cited as influences 'Strange Relations' by Philip José Farmer (1960), which covers alien reproduction, and various EC Comics horror titles carrying stories in which monsters eat their way out of people. (Blimey ! !)

Near the end of "Forbidden Planet" (love that title) the invisible monster that has been killing the crewmen is revealed in a clever animated sequence. But it wasn't animated by the MGM blokes who did "Tom and Jerry", the attack of the "Id Monster" was created by the veteran animator Joshua Meador, who was lent out to MGM by none other than Walt Disney Pictures.
I wonder how the MGM animators felt about that ...

Ron Jeremy was an extra in "Ghostbusters".

^^ EXCELLENT!!

Dan Ackroyd wrote the original script for 'Ghost Busters', but it was considered unfilmable. At Ivan Reitman's suggestion, Aykroyd and Ramis gave the story a major overhaul, hammering out the final screenplay during a marathon three-week stay in a Martha's Vineyard bomb shelter in May–June 1982.

"Ain't afraid of no ghost ...."

As a teen, Quentin Tarantino was arrested for shoplifting Elmore Leonard's novel The Switch. He later adapted the book's sequel, Rum Punch, into the film Jackie Brown.

Bette Davis fell very much in love with Franchot Tone when they filmed together, and confidently expected to marry him.

But he married Joan Crawford.

Years later, in one of her autobiographies, Ms. Davis wrote:

"She took him from me.

She did it coldly, deliberately and with complete ruthlessness.

I have never forgiven her."

Ms. Davis made sure that her publicist told any and all available gossip publications that during their filming of

'Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?' together, the glasses of water that Ms. Crawford was always sipping was, in

Ms. Davis' words, "100% vodka".

Fact:

Rocky V is the only one of the six Rocky films to be rated PG-13 instead of PG. It got the higher rating due to a brief shot of Sylvester Stallone nude in the shower.

Opinion:

If any of these films had to be rated PG-13 instead of PG, it should have been Rocky IV. The violence in that one is easily the most brutal of the entire series, with one scene involving a major character being savagely beaten to death. But I guess a bare ass is more offensive than graphic violence in the MPAA's warped little world.