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You know that scene in The Shawshank Redemption where the guy feeds a maggot to his baby bird? The American Humane Association told them that if they wanted the "No animals were harmed during the making of this film" notice in the end credits, then they were not allowed to feed the bird a live maggot. They had to find one that had died of natural causes. Which is what they did.


When they started preparing to film The Wizard of Oz, the costume guy went to a thrift store to find a ragged coat for the scarecrow. When the actor got the coat he found "L. Frank Baum" written in one of the pockets, the writer of the Oz books. They checked with the man's widow, and she confirmed that it had belonged to him and she had donated it after he died.


On the set of Total Recall, Arnie noticed that Michael Ironside was on the stage phone a lot between takes. He asked him why, and Ironside revealed that his sister had just gotten cancer. Arnold took Ironside to his (Arnold's) trailer, rang the sister on his own phone, and spent three hours cheering her up. He also outlined a complete diet and exercise plan to keep her as healthy as possible during her treatments. Ironside regards Arnie as one of his closest friends to this day.


In Alien Resurrection, many people assume that some camera trickery was used for Sigourney Weaver's "not looking, throw the basketball over her head" shot into the basket, because the ball goes out of the shot when she throws it before coming back on to drop into the net. Nope. She did that shot, for real, on the first take. They had to cut away quickly because Ron Perlman all but cheered.


In Scrubs, all of the Janitor's scenes were improvised. The scripts literally had lines that said "Whatever Neil says" whenever he was supposed to speak. The original plan for his character was that it would eventually be revealed that he wasn't real, just somebody JD imagined. This idea was dropped when they decided to have him interact with others.


In the original Stargate movie, when the Abydos natives were cheering the defeat of Ra, the director had a tough time explaining what they were supposed to do. He told them to celebrate, and after a few minutes the assembled crowd began to do Mexican waves.


When Ronald Reagan saw Back to the Future, he was perplexed that Doc Brown would be so amazed at the idea of himself becoming President. He had them stop the movie and rewind it a few minutes so he could rewatch the scene.


Talking of Back to the Future, Crispin Glover (Marty's dad) thought it very immoral that Marty's family became much richer / more successful through time travel shenanigans. He argued against it, but the director insisted he film the scenes and since he was under contract, he did - but he went on to refuse to be in the sequels. They got around it for the second movie by using some unused footage from the first and a lookalike. Glover sued, leading to stronger regulations about doing things like that in movies.


When The Dark Knight was filmed there were only 4 IMAX cameras in the whole world. An accident during the truck sequence resulted in one of them being smashed.


Christopher Lee worked for the secret service during World War II, doing stuff like going behind enemy lines to sabotage equipment. During Lord of the Rings he objected to the way Jackson asked him to act when he was killed. "Have you ever heard the sounds a man makes when he's stabbed in the back?" Lee asked. Jackson admitted that he had not. "Well I have," Lee said. "Trust me, I know what to do."


Although he has a reputation for all but torturing his actors, Stanley Kubrick was extremely protective of children. So much so that the kid in The Shining had no idea it was a horror movie until long after filming finished.


Hitchcock's movie Rope contains some very long shots. Deep into one such shot a very large and heavy dollycam ran over a stagehand's foot. The man beside him immediately clamped his hand over the guy's mouth and dragged him off set so they wouldn't ruin the shot.


Mandy Patankin's father died of cancer during the filming of The Princess Bride. He took some time off for it, then returned - to film the scene where his character declares "I want my father back, you son of a bitch!"


Whilst filming Robert Downey Jr has a habit of hiding food around the set so he can snack between takes. On the Marvel movies his co-stars took to trying to find the stashes, but never could. This became such a thing that Downey started to do his eating on screen - watch the movies and there are numerous occasions when Tony Stark is snacking on something during a scene.


During filming of Guardians of the Galaxy they had to reshoot some scenes because Chris Pratt had a tendency to make "pew pew" noises when he fired his laser gun. Similarly, during the Phantom Menace Ewan McGregor often made lightsaber noises during his fight with Darth Maul.


When Brian tells the crowd "You're all individuals!" the response "I'm not" was ad-libbed by an extra. The Pythons loved the line, though they had to pay the guy for a speaking role instead of an extra role for the day.


In the notoriously bad "The Room" the line "Oh, hi doggie!" wasn't in the script. Tommy said that he made the exclamation because he "hadn't realised the dog was a real thing."


Originally there was a plan to do a Commando 2, in which Arnie would take on terrorists who attacked an office block. When Arnie passed, the script was rewritten and became Die Hard.


Snakes on A Plane was the working title of the movie, never intended to be the actual title. Samuel L Jackson told them the title was the only reason he took the role, so they kept it. During the buzz for the movie "I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this mutherfucking plane!" went around as a joke, a parody of the kind of over the top thing a Sam L Jackson character would say. He liked it so much he asked if they could film it for real and put it in the movie, so they did.


The squirrels in Charlie & The Chocolate Factory are not CGI. Forty actual squirrels were trained to crack nuts.


More than half of the entire budget of Dr. Strangelove went to paying Peter Sellers' wages. Kubrick joked that he got "Three for the price of six".


The total footage shot for 2001: A Space Odyssey was some 200 times the final length of the film.


After Top Gun came out, Navy recruitment increased fivefold.


Steven Spielberg went to college to do a film degree, but dropped out to start directing. He always wanted to finish, so he finally returned to complete the course in 2002. For his student film requirement, he submitted Schindler’s List.


The police demanded that the director of Cannibal Holocaust prove in court that the actors were still alive and were not actually murdered and eaten during filming. He did.


Return of the Jedi never once calls the Ewoks, Ewoks.


Whilst playing Bond, Pierce Brosnan was contractually forbidden from wearing a tuxedo in any other movie.


Fox passed on The Watchmen, referring to the script as "one of the most unintelligible pieces of shit we've read in years."


Katherine Hepburn was disgusted with the heavy drinking ways of John Huston and Humphrey Bogart throughout production of The African Queen. As a protest, she only drank water herself. She and most of the cast and crew of the movie got terrible diarrhea from drinking the local water, whilst Huston and Bogart remained just fine drinking nothing but whiskey.

All of these are both enlightening AND funny. Thanks for the post!

MORE TRIVIA!!!!!

The actors in Saving Private Ryan were put through a "boot camp". Run by an ex-military guy, the actors had to do forced marches and runs, eat horrible food, sleep outside in cold weather, etc - all whilst being referred to as "Maggot" by their instructor. Most of them wanted to quit after a few days, but Tom Hanks talked them into staying on. In gratitude he was henceforth referred to as "Maggot #1". Matt Damon was excused the camp, because Spielberg wanted the other actors to have genuine resentment towards him.

JK Rowling told Alan Rickman that Snape had been in love with Harry Potter's mother, so that Rickman could properly play the character's hatred for Harry. She told nobody else at all, not even the writers and directors of the movies, until she absolutely had to.

Bill Murray has a reputation for being kind of weird. He fired his agents many years ago because "they wouldn't stop calling him up". Instead he has an unlisted 1-800 number; if you want to offer him a role you have to ask around Hollywood insiders and try and find out what the number is, then ring it and leave a pitch for a movie on an answering machine. Bill listens whenever he feels like and picks out whatever role interests him from the pitches. He'll then ask you to send a script, which you're required to mail to a printing shop near where he lives. They keep the scripts for him to pick up when he comes in. He has said, however, that he will take almost any role Wes Anderson offers to him.

Another story about Murray - when he was making Groundhog Day he was so dismissive of talking to the studio that they requested he hire an assistant to handle communications with them. Murray hired a deaf mute who could only communicate through American sign language.

In "Interview with a Vampire", during any scene when Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise were walking together, Pitt had to walk in a trench so that he wasn't noticeably taller than Cruise.

During the boat ride scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the other actors didn't know that Gene Wilder was going to do his super-creepy rendition of the poem. Their reactions are real - they were seriously creeped out, wondering if Wilder had genuinely had some kind of mental breakdown.

Mark Hamill had a horrible time filming Empire Strikes Back. If you examine the film you see that he hardly ever acts against other people. He does when he's recovering from the Wampa attack, and in the At-At attack he's back to back with a gunner he can't see. Then the fight with Vader, and the final scene on the medical frigate. Outside of that he's acting against puppets like the Tauntaun, Wampa, R2-D2, Yoda, or ghost figures who weren't on set like Kenobi. He said that between takes Frank Oz would pull out of Yoda and the puppet would just slump over, and everyone would head off and leave Hamill just sitting in a swamp. He found it a lonely and frustrating experience.

During Singing in the Rain, Gene Kelly would castigate the young Debbie Reynolds when she messed up takes, as it was difficult to reset elaborate routines and made for long days. At one point Kelly viciously insulted her dancing, leading to her running off set and hiding under a piano where she broke down in tears. A guy passing heard her and asked what was wrong - when she told him he spent some time calming her down and then coaching her to help her improve her dance steps. The guy's name? Fred Astaire.

Tyler Durden's house in on Paper Street. A "paper street" is a street town planners lay out and plan to build, but which is then never actually constructed for whatever reason. The non-existent street name is a hint that Durden himself is not real.

The commentary track for the original Total Recall is legendarily odd. Schwarzenneger and Verhoeven spend the entire time doing nothing but enthusing about what's going on in the scenes in their thick foreign accents. There's nothing about the acting or directing choices made, no production stories, they literally just describe what's happening ("Look, I hit him so hard in the face!") and repeatedly say how great it is and how pretty the girls are. It could almost serve as an audio description for blind fans of the film.

In Apollo 13, when Hanks arrives back on the carrier he's saluted by a Navy Captain. The role is played by Jim Lovell, the real Apollo 13 astronaut. They asked Lovell to play an Admiral, but he told them he retired as a Captain and wouldn't feel right pretending to have a higher rank.

When filming the 1958 film "Another Time, Another Place", star Lana Turner's gangster boyfriend came to visit the set. He became enraged at Sean Connery, thinking that he was having an affair with Turner, and pulled a gun on him. Connery disarmed the man and knocked him flat on his back.

During the filming of Planet of the Apes people noticed that the actors in ape makeup tended to hang out in species groups - gorillas with gorillas, chimps with chimps, orang-utans with orang-utans. Nobody ever told them to, everybody just naturally stuck to their own kind.

The Joker sarcastically applauding Gordon's promotion to commissioner was an unscripted ad-lib by Heath Ledger.

Speaking of Ledger, the first time Michael Caine saw him in character and makeup as the Joker was when they filmed the scene where the Joker crashes Bruce's party. Caine was so unnerved by the sight that he went blank and completely forgot to say any of his lines.

In The Fifth Element, the hero and the bad guy never meet.

In Star Trek II, the hero and the bad guy never meet either.

Armageddon has more factual mistakes than it has minutes of run time. NASA uses it as a training film to see how many errors astronauts can spot.

Some of the actors on Predator had to have "handlers" with them at all times to stop them from getting into fights.

In Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy finds the Tin Man there's a peacock wandering around. This wasn't deliberate - the bird escaped from another set and just wandered into the scene.

Psycho has a scene where Marion flushes a torn up note down the toilet. This was the first appearance of a flushing toilet in any American movie - up to then censors didn't allow it. The scene was written specifically to break that rule.

Spielberg was a huge fan of Alfred Hitchcock, and during the filming of Family Plot he took to hanging around the set in hopes of meeting his idol. Hitchcock ordered him removed from the set. When told who the young man was Hitch said that he was well aware of Spielberg, but refused to meet him because Hitchcock had provided a voiceover for the Jaws ride in exchange for a $1,000,000 fee. Hitchcock said he felt like he was cashing in on Spielberg's movie, literally saying he was a whore, and would be too embarrassed to meet him.

Five hundred and thirty two cars were destroyed during the production of Transformers : Dark of the Moon.

O J Simpson was considered to play the Terminator. He was rejected because Cameron thought nobody would believe that he could be a killer.

Jimmy Stewart almost turned down It's A Wonderful Life because World War II had only ended the year before, and he thought a movie about suicide was the last thing America needed right then. He almost quit acting rather than do the movie, but changed his mind at the last minute. The movie re-launched his career.

Contrary to popular belief there is not a ghost visible in the background in Three Men and a Baby. It's actually a cardboard cutout of Ted Danson, part of a dropped plotline in which it would have been for a commercial his character was doing.