50 Amazing Facts about Movies and Movie Making | Amazing Facts 4U
- Russia has more cinemas than any other country in the world.
- About 500 movies are made in the US and 800 in India annually.
- In 1888, Hollywood was founded by Harvey and Daeida Wilcox, who named the city after their summer home in Chicago. Prohibitionists banned liquor from the town and offered free land to anyone willing to build a church.
- The movie “Clue” has three different endings. Each ending was randomly chosen for different theaters.
- In the movie, “Gandhi” in 1981,300,000 extras appeared in the funeral scene. Of the 300,000, approximately 100,000 received a small fee, and the other 200,000 did it for free.
- During the chariot scene in ‘BenHur’, a small red car can be seen in the distance.
- It cost 7 million dollars to build the Titanic and 200 million to make a film about it.
- Alfred Hitchcock did not choose to conclude the film, The Birds, with the usual “THE END” title because he wanted to leave the audience with the feeling of unending terror and uncertainty.
- Lion used in the original MGM logo killed its trainer and two assistants the day after the logo was filmed.
- “Top Gun” was such an effective advertisement for the Navy that the Navy had recruitment booths right there in theaters.
- Twelve different buses were used in the filming of the movies Speed.
- A family of 26 can go to the movies in Mexico city for the price of one in Tokyo.
- Raider’s of the lost arc ( 1981) used about 7500 boas, cobras, and pythons in the film.
- More than 150,000 feet (28+ miles) of the film was used by David O. Selznick just to film the screen tests of potential actresses for the lead role of Scarlett O’Hara in his 1939 epic “Gone With the Wind”.
- The largest outdoor film set ever built was the Roman Forum used in The Fall of The Roman Empire (1964). It was 1,312 feet long by 754 feet wide, took 1,100 workers seven months to construct, and rose some 260 feet in the air. 75.
- The largest indoor film set ever built was the landing site for the UFO in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Constructed inside a 10 million cubic foot hangar in Mobile, Alabama. it was 450 feet long by 250 feet wide and was 90 feet tall.
- Sherlock Holmes is the most portrayed character on film, having been played by 72 actors in 204 films. The historical character most represented in films is Napoleon Bonaparte, with 194 film portrayals. Abraham Lincoln is the U.S. President to be portrayed most on film, with 136 films featuring actors playing the role.
- Screenwriter Joe Ezterhas was paid $3 million for his script, Basic Instinct, the highest amount ever paid to a screenwriter.
- The largest cast of living creatures in a Hollywood film where the 22 million bees employed by Irwin Allen in The Swarm (1978).
- The new “Karate Kid” movie doesn’t have any Karate in it. It’s actually about Kung-Fu.
- The longest movie ever made is The Cure for Insomnia, lasting 5220 minutes (87 hours long!)
- Zzyzx Road, a 2006 thriller with a budget of $1.2 million flopped. It only grossed $30. It ran a single screening at noon each day for a total of seven days. Only six people paid to see it!
- The 2008 film The Women did not feature a single male actor.
- There are more Godzilla movies (28) than James Bond movies (22)!
- Over 90% of American films made before 1929 are lost, no copies are known to exist.
- The Movie “Paranormal Activity” cost less than $15,000 to make but grossed over $193,000,000.
- Movie Iron Man had no screenplay! The director and star just made up scenes as they went along. All they really had was an outline.
- Time Travel depictions in films and TV are banned in China.
- Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood.
- Macaulay Culkin was paid only $100,000 for his role in Home Alone, but was paid $4.5 million for his role in Home Alone 2!
- Theater in Paris has shown the movie “Life of Pi” in floating boats.
- Cuban leader Fidel Castro has appeared in two-holiday movies namely “Holiday in Mexico” & “Easy to Wed” as a background extra. Both were made in 1946.
- It took five directors and 14 writers to bring The Wizard of Oz to the big screen.
- In the movies, The Wizard of Oz, wicked witch actress Margaret Hamilton was severely burned in the scene where she disappears into a cloud of smoke. Her stand-in and stunt double, Betty Danko, was also injured during the skywriting sequence.
- Gone With The Wind producers were fined $5,000 for allowing obscenities in the film’s dialogue. The offensive and expensive word? Damn.
- One of the films Will Smith is known best for almost didn’t happen. The actor didn’t want to participate in Men in Black until his wife persuaded him otherwise.
- Chocolate syrup was used as the blood in the movie Psycho. Hitchcock himself thought the texture really helped to make it more realistic.
- Film executives were a bit nervous about casting Leonardo DiCaprio as the Kid in The Quick and the Dead. As a result and to show her confidence in the actor, costar Sharon Stone paid his salary out of her own pocket.
- The shortest dialogue script since the introduction of talkies was written for Mel Brook’s Silent Movies (1976), which has only one spoken word throughout: “Non.”
- The Hollywood star who played the most leading roles in feature films was John Wayne (1907-1979), who appeared in 153 movies.
- With an alleged budget of $280 million, Avatar is one of the most expensive movies of all time. The word avatar is Sanskrit for “incarnation” and is used in Hindu scripture to refer to human incarnations of God.
- The top five largest worldwide grossing movies of all time before inflation are Avatar (2009), Titanic (1997), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), and The Dark Knight (2008).
- The first movie to gross over $100 million was Jaws (1975).
- The first picture to sweep all five major Academy Awards—winning for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay (adaptation)—was Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.
- The second movie to sweep all five major academy awards was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).
- It took 15 crew members to operate each of the three full-scale (25-foot) mechanical sharks used in Jaws (1975).
- A real bridge with a real train crossing it was blown up for 1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai.
- The most expensive black-and-white movie ever made was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966). Production costs totaled $7.5 million, due in large part to the salaries of its stars, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.
- The greatest number of takes for one scene in a film is 324 in Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 City Lights.
- The largest make-up budget was $1 million for Planet of the Apes (1968), which represented nearly 17% of the total production cost.
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