Author: Roger Cormier

Steve Martin and John Candy starred in the holiday movie classic Planes, Trains and Automobiles, writer/director John Hughes’ first big foray away from writing about teenage angst. Martin played Neal Page, a marketing executive desperate to get back home to Chicago to see his wife and kids for Thanksgiving, who along the way is thoroughly aggravated by shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith (Candy), and the many, many, many mishaps that befall the two throughout their travels. Here are some facts about the film that are not pillows.

1. JOHN HUGHES ONCE HAD A HELLISH TRIP TRYING TO GET FROM NEW YORK CITY TO CHICAGO.

Before he became a screenwriter, Hughes used to work as a copywriter for the Leo Burnett advertising agency in Chicago. One day he had an 11 a.m. presentation scheduled in New York City on a Wednesday, and planned to return home on a 5 p.m. flight. Winter winds forced all flights to Chicago to be canceled that night, so he stayed in a hotel. A snowstorm in Chicago the next day continued the delays. The plane he eventually got on ended up being diverted to Denver. Then Phoenix. Hughes didn’t make it back until Monday. Experiencing such a hellish trip might explain how Hughes managed to write the first 60 pages of Planes, Trains and Automobiles in just six hours.

2. HOWARD DEUTCH WAS ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO DIRECT.

Deutch directed Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful for Hughes. Hughes decided to direct himself after Steve Martin signed on. Deutch got to direct The Great Outdoors instead.

3. STEVE MARTIN THOUGHT THE SCRIPT WAS TOO LONG.

The comedian, who had written his own screenplays, thought the 145-page length of the script was a lot for a comedy. When Martin asked Hughes where he thought they might cut scenes, Hughes was confused by the question. Martin later claimed that the first cut of Planes, Trains and Automobiles was four and a half hours long.

4. HUGHES ACTED OUT THE ENTIRE MOVIE TO SOMEONE ON HIS JOB INTERVIEW.

Reid Rosefelt went in to meet Hughes for the unit publicist position. Rosefelt recalled in his blog that he found it strange, but admirable, that Hughes did not allow Rosefelt to see the script to the movie he would potentially work on and promote beforehand. After the two grew more comfortable with one another at their meeting, Rosefelt asked what the movie was about—he only knew Steve Martin and John Candy were starring and it was called Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Hughes then performed the entire movie for him. Rosefelt didn’t get the job.

5. JOHN CANDY ARRIVED ON SET WITH EXERCISE EQUIPMENT.

On the first day of shooting, the crew brought in treadmills, weights, and other exercise equipment for Candy to use in his hotel suite. Martin said Candy didn’t use any of it.

6. IT WAS ALL MEANT TO BE SHOT IN CHICAGO, BUT THERE WASN’T ENOUGH SNOW.

Some exterior scenes were filmed in Buffalo, New York. Martin said that the cast and crew pretty much lived the plot of the movie. “As we would shoot, we were hopping planes, trains, and automobiles, trying to find snow.”

7. THE CONSTANT DELAYS ON PRODUCTION WERE VERY BENEFICIAL TO ONE ACTOR.

In John Hughes: A Life in Film, Kirk Honeycutt wrote that one actor, who played a truck driver, was only supposed to have one line and work for one day. Hughes chose to keep him on standby. The actor ended up working enough days while the crew waited for the snow to come that he was able to make a down payment on a house. It’s very possible this was Troy Evans, who was uncredited, as the shy truck driver in the movie. He went on to appear, credited, on ER for the show’s final five seasons as Frank Martin.

8. SUSAN PAGE WAS WATCHING ANOTHER HUGHES MOVIE, SHE’S HAVING A BABY.

In the scene that goes back and forth between Neal trying to sleep next to Del clearing his sinuses and Neal’s wife (Laila Robins) watching TV alone in their bed, she is somehow watching She’s Having a Baby, which wouldn’t be released in theaters until February of the following year. Kevin Bacon stars in that movie, and made a cameo in Planes as the guy who out-hustles Neal in getting a cab. Some people believe Bacon—who was officially listed in the credits as “Taxi Racer”—was playing his She’s Having a Baby character, Jake, in that scene.

9. EDIE MCCLURG’S IMPROVISATIONS IMPRESSED HUGHES.

McClurg, probably best known as Grace, Principal Rooney’s secretary in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, played the St. Louis car rental employee upon whom Neal dropped 18 F-bombs. For the first few takes, McClurg simply raised her finger and had a standard phone conversation with a customer. Then Hughes told her to improvise talking on the phone about Thanksgiving. She then came up with the stuff about needing roasted marshmallows and taking care of the crescent rolls because she can’t cook based on her own life. When she finished, Hughes asked her how she came up with those details so quickly. When McClurg explained she just got it from her own life just like he does with his scripts, he said, “Oh yeah!” She claims people to this day ask her to tell them they’re f*cked.

10. A SCENE IN A STRIP CLUB WAS CUT.

After their car blew up, Neal and Del went inside a strip club to use a phone, where Del got distracted by the dancers. Actress Debra Lamb didn’t know that her scene was cut until she went to a screening.

11. JERI RYAN WAS ALSO CUT FROM THE MOVIE, BUT HER SCENE WASN’T.

It was the actress’s first role. She was one of the passengers on the bus ride and couldn’t help but laugh at Martin and Candy’s antics. They reshot the scenes without her.

12. ELTON JOHN WROTE A SONG FOR THE MOVIE.

Elton John and lyricist Gary Osborne were almost finished writing the theme song when Paramount insisted on ownership of the recording master, which John’s record company would not allow. The song has never been released.

13. IN THE ORIGINAL ENDING, DEL FOLLOWED NEAL ALL THE WAY HOME.

Hughes decided during the editing process that instead, John Candy’s character would be “a noble person” and finally take the hint from Martin’s character, and let Neal return home alone, before Neal has a change of heart and finds Del again.

14. IN THE SCENE WHERE NEAL THINKS ABOUT DEL ON THE TRAIN, MARTIN DIDN’T KNOW THE CAMERA WAS ON.

In order to get the new ending he wanted, Hughes and editor Paul Hirsch went back to look for footage they previously didn’t think would be used. Hughes had kept the cameras rolling in between takes on the Chicago train, without his lead’s knowledge, while Martin was thinking about his next lines. Hughes thought Martin had a “beautiful expression” on his face in that unguarded moment.

The first Rocky—which was released 40 years ago—told a seemingly improbable rags-to-riches story about a loan shark/amateur boxer going the full 15 rounds against a champion fighter that weirdly mirrored the improbable story of how the movie went from a distant dream of Sylvester Stallone’s to a real, Best Picture Oscar-winning film and subsequent franchise. On the 40th anniversary of the original film’s release, here are some heavy-hitting, high-flying facts about the Rocky series.

1. STALLONE WROTE THE FIRST DRAFT OF ROCKY IN THREE AND A HALF DAYS.

With a little bit of screenwriting experience, and the idea for Rocky in his head for almost a year after witnessing a Muhammad Ali fight, Sylvester Stallone—who had $106 in the bank at the time—spent about 84 hours using a pad and a pen to write the first draft of Rocky. In his original version, Adrian was Jewish, Mickey was racist, the Paulie character was Adrian’s Jewish mother, Apollo Creed was Jamaican, and the script ended with Rocky throwing the fight and opening a pet store for Adrian with the money he made.

2. THE STUDIO WAS INTERESTED IN HAVING JAMES CAAN, BURT REYNOLDS, OR RYAN O’NEAL PLAY ROCKY.

United Artists offered Stallone up to $340,000 to sell them the rights to the screenplay if he agreed to not star in the movie. When the budget was lowered to $1 million, the studio was no longer allowed to keep Stallone from starring. He was paid $20,000 for the script and a SAG minimum of $350 per week for acting instead.

3. ADRIAN WAS ALMOST PLAYED BY SUSAN SARANDON.

Stallone and the producers decided that she was “too sexy.” Cher was also considered. Bette Midler was offered the role but turned it down. Carrie Snodgress had in fact won the part, until her agent asked for too much money. Talia Shire auditioned at the last minute to save the day.

4. STALLONE AND CARL WEATHERS REHEARSED THEIR (FIRST) BIG FIGHT FOR FOUR WEEKS.

Director John G. Avildsen shot their rehearsals on Super 8 so that the actors could see what they were doing. When it came time for the actual pretend Creed/Balboa I, filmed at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, producers advertised that anyone who showed up to play the audience would receive a free chicken dinner.

5. ROCKY AND ADRIAN VISITED THE SKATING RINK AFTER IT WAS CLOSED FOR BUDGETARY REASONS.

Originally, Adrian and Rocky have a date during the skating rink’s operating hours. Because it would’ve cost money to pay for extras to skate around them, Avildsen asked Stallone to change the scene so that the couple had the rink all to themselves.

6. IT WAS A FAMILY AFFAIR FOR THE STALLONES.

Sly’s brother, Frank Stallone Jr., played a street corner singer in Rocky, while Frank Sr. was the timekeeper for the fight. Stallone’s first wife, Sasha, received a kiss from Rocky during his training session in Rocky III.

7. CHARLIE CHAPLIN AND ELVIS PRESLEY WERE FANS OF THE FIRST MOVIE.

Chaplin wrote to Stallone that Rocky reminded the silent film star of a character he used to play. Stallone regretted turning down Chaplin’s invitation to visit him in Switzerland after the director died a few months later. Similarly, Stallone turned down Elvis’ offer to watch Rocky with him in Memphis months before The King passed away.

8. BURT YOUNG LOST WEIGHT FOR THE SEQUEL BECAUSE HE HADN’T PLANNED ON BEING IN IT.

He lost weight for another film; Young initially did not want to play Paulie again. Stallone wrote a line into Rocky II to address the obvious physical difference.

9. ROCKY’S FAMOUS RUN LASTED FOR 30.61 MILES.

Or his run in the sequel did, according to a 2013 calculation by Philadelphia magazine. Eight hundred Philadelphia children were used as extras for Rocky’s run from his house to the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

10. THERE WAS AN ALTERNATE ENDING TO ROCKY II.

Footage was shot of Adrian and Paulie actually witnessing Rocky and Apollo’s second fight in person, instead of back at home with the newborn baby. In that version, Adrian gets swept up into the ring with the other spectators and ends up in Rocky’s arms to end the movie.

11. THERE WAS A BIG DEBATE OVER THE ROCKY STATUE.

Stallone donated the 8’6”, 2000-pound statue of Rocky Balboa to the Philadelphia Museum of Art after filming of Rocky III concluded. Philly residents were divided on whether or not the statue deserved to remain at the top of the museum steps. The Art Commission eventually placed it on the sidewalk of the Philadelphia Spectrum sports arena. It briefly returned to the top of the steps in 1990 for Rocky V, then back to the Spectrum until 2006, when it traveled to the base of the Art Museum steps for its 30th anniversary, where it remains.

12. WYOMING AND CANADA PLAYED THE ROLE OF THE SOVIET UNION IN ROCKY IV.

The epic training Rocky went through before fighting Ivan Drago was shot in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Camera, sound, and transportation equipment froze in the minus-20-degree weather. The Balboa/Drago match held in Drago’s U.S.S.R. was filmed at the PNE Agrodome in Vancouver, British Columbia.

13. DOLPH LUNDGREN SENT STALLONE TO THE HOSPITAL.

Lundgren hit Stallone so hard in the chest when shooting the first round of the Balboa/Drago fight that Stallone’s heart hit his breastbone and began to swell. Had he not been sent to the ER and then intensive care for eight days, the heart would have continued to swell until he died.

14. ROCKY WAS SUPPOSED TO DIE AT THE END OF ROCKY V.

Stallone cried writing the death of his iconic character. It was all for no reason, since two weeks into filming, Avildsen—who came back to direct Rocky V after Stallone directed parts II, III, and IV himself—was told by a studio executive that Rocky Balboa, like Batman, Superman, and James Bond, could never die. In the original script, Tommy “Machine” Gunn kills Balboa in their street fight, concluding with Adrian giving a heartfelt speech to the reporters crowded outside the hospital about how Rocky’s spirit will live on forever. 

15. BOXERS JOE FRAZIER AND CHUCK WEPNER FELT THAT STALLONE TREATED THEM UNFAIRLY AFTER HEAVILY BORROWING FROM THEIR LIVES TO WRITE THE MOVIES.

Before Rocky Balboa did it, “Smokin'” Joe Frazier ran the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and spent some early mornings punching meat at the slaughterhouse that employed him. He said in 2008 that he only received compensation for his Rocky walk-on cameo, and it was all a “sad story” for him. Stallone was initially inspired by watching Muhammad Ali fight a major underdog fighter named Chuck Wepner in 1975, who lost but managed to knock Ali down once in the match and became a local New Jersey hero. Wepner even wrestled Andre the Giant at Shea Stadium before Balboa battled the Hulk Hogan character Thunderlips in Rocky III. Wepner sued Stallone in 2003. The two settled for an undisclosed amount.

Ali, meanwhile, noted the similarities between himself and Apollo Creed. He didn’t seem to mind.

16. ROCKY’S TURTLES CUFF AND LINK OUTLIVED A COUPLE OF THE CHARACTERS.

The female red-eared sliders that appeared in 2006’s Rocky Balboa are the same turtles from the original 1976 picture.

Paul Newman starred in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke as Lucas Jackson, a rebellious man who becomes a hero to his fellow prison camp members for his apparent fearlessness. Over time, he gets beaten down physically and emotionally when his numerous attempts to escape are thwarted, and he eats an insane amount of eggs.

George Kennedy—who won an Oscar for his performance—played Dragline, the chain gang leader who grows to respect Luke and eventually becomes his best friend. The film also boasted great performances from Strother Martin (Captain), Dennis Hopper (Babalugats), Wayne Rogers (Gambler), Harry Dean Stanton (Tramp), and others. Here are some facts about the anti-establishment classic.

1. IT WAS WRITTEN BY AN EX-CON.

While in the Merchant Marine, Donn Pearce was caught counterfeiting money and thrown in a French prison. He escaped, returned to the U.S., and became a safe-cracker. A waitress ratted him out and he spent two years on a prison road gang where he heard about a Luke Jackson—someone who was an excellent poker player, a banjo expert, and who had once eaten 50 boiled eggs for a bet. He wrote about him in his book Cool Hand Luke, which was published in 1965. Pearce sold the movie rights to Warner Bros. for $80,000, and got an additional $15,000 to write the screenplay.

But it was his first time trying to write a screenplay, and Frank Pierson was later hired to rework the draft. Pearce appeared in the movie as the convict Sailor and was the production’s technical adviser. He punched someone out on the final day on set and was not invited to the film premiere.

2. JACK LEMMON OR TELLY SAVALAS COULD HAVE PLAYED LUKE.

Jack Lemmon’s production company, Jalem Productions, produced the movie, so Lemmon had first dibs on playing the lead, but he recognized that he wasn’t right for the part. Telly Savalas was then cast as Luke, but he was in Europe filming The Dirty Dozen, and since he refused to fly, the production had to look elsewhere for the starring role to get started on time.

3. PAUL NEWMAN STUDIED WEST VIRGINIANS TO GET THE ACCENT DOWN.

Newman heard about the project and asked for the part before he had even read the script. Newman, a Cleveland native, spent a weekend in Huntington, West Virginia, with businessman Andy Houvouras, on the recommendation of a mutual friend who was the director of the U.S. Office for Economic Opportunity. Houvouras drove Newman to various counties, where Newman talked to residents and recorded them. Everybody apparently knew who he was with one exception:

“He went to St. Joe High School to go pick up my sister Anne, and this nun walked up to see what the commotion was,” Houvouras’s son recalled decades later. “Dad said, ‘I would like you to meet Paul Newman,’ and the nun said, ‘Nice to meet you, Mr. Newman, what do you do for a living?’ She had no idea who he was.”

4. IT WAS SET IN FLORIDA, BUT FILMED IN STOCKTON, CALIFORNIA.

A crew went to Tavares Road Prison in Tavares, Florida, to take photographs and measurements so it could be rebuilt in Stockton. A dozen buildings were constructed, including barracks, a mess hall, and guard houses. Spanish moss imported from Louisiana hung from the trees. The actors stayed at the local Holiday Inn. Their mode of transportation to the set and back to their rooms were the trucks used in the movie. They rode on the backs of them.

5. NEWMAN JUDGED THE SHOOT WITH HIS NOSE.

Apparently, Newman had a good feeling about the film. “There’s a good smell about this,” Newman told a visitor on the set one day. “We’re gonna have a good picture.”

6. THE BOXING MATCH TOOK THREE DAYS TO SHOOT.

George Kennedy said he and Newman were both completely worn out from their boxing match—Kennedy from the fighting, Newman from the fighting and falling onto hard ground for three days in a row.

7. BETTE DAVIS WAS THE ORIGINAL CHOICE TO PLAY LUKE’S MOTHER.

Bette Davis turned down the chance to play Luke’s mother, Arletta, which was a one-scene role. It went to Jo Van Fleet (East of Eden) instead, even though she was only 11 years older than Newman. For her single day of shooting, Van Fleet sat on a tree stump, 200 yards from everyone else, looking over her lines. Harry Dean Stanton recalled that Van Fleet asked him to sing to her before her take, and it made her cry.

8. THE DIRECTOR WOULDN’T ALLOW THE ACTORS’ WIVES ON SET.

To get the men to feel like they were truly members of a chain gang, director Stuart Rosenberg banned women from the set. Even Joy Harmon (“Lucille”) was kept away from the cast. She stayed in a hotel all alone for two days and shot her scene with just Rosenberg.

9. THE CONVICTS WERE REALLY COLD DURING THE CAR WASH SCENE.

Harmon didn’t realize how suggestive the scene in which the men watch her wash her car was until she saw it in the theater.

“I just figured it was washing the car. I’ve always been naive and innocent,” she said. “I was acting and not trying to be sexy. Maybe that’s why the scene played so well. After seeing it at the premiere, I was a bit embarrassed.”

When Rosenberg shot the convicts in the ditch watching Lucille, he used a stand-in: an overcoat-wearing 15-year-old girl. Despite the coat, Kennedy remembered her teeth were chattering from the cold weather. He also wrote, “Those guys shivering in a ditch did some great acting.”

10. NEWMAN HAD TROUBLE LEARNING TO PLAY THE BANJO.

Originally, the scene where Newman plays “Plastic Jesus” as an ode to his mother was scheduled for the beginning of the shoot, but after Newman insisted on learning the instrument, Rosenberg delayed it a few weeks. When they tried it and the playing was unsatisfactory, it was bumped until the next to last day of production. Newman and Rosenberg had a shouting match after Newman still couldn’t get it down. In what Kennedy remembered as a “tense, electrically charged, quiet” place, Newman tried again. When he finished, Rosenberg called “Print.” Newman insisted he could do better. “Nobody could do it better,” Rosenberg replied.

It was Stanton who taught Newman how to play “Plastic Jesus.”

11. THE STUDIO DEMANDED TO SEE NEWMAN’S BLUE EYES.

Cinematographer Conrad Hall said the studio drove him “insane,” and that his filming techniques were repeatedly questioned. Eventually, they explained that he wasn’t showcasing Newman’s famous eyeballs enough. He had to shoot a scene four times before shooting Newman “correctly.”

12. FRANK PIERSON WROTE A WHOLE BACKSTORY FOR THE CAPTAIN TO EXPLAIN ONE FAMOUS LINE.

“The phrase just sort of appeared on the page,” Pierson said of the film’s famous “What we’ve got here is … failure to communicate” line. “I looked at it and thought, ‘Now that’s interesting,’ Then I thought, these words are going to be spoken by an actor (Strother Martin) who is playing a real redneck character who probably never went beyond high school, and it has a faintly academic feel to it, that line. I thought, people are going to question it.” So he wrote a backstory for the character.

According to Pierson’s biography of the Captain, Strother Martin’s character advanced in the prison guard ranks by taking courses in criminology, where he was “exposed to an academic atmosphere.” Donn Pearce still thought it was too intelligent of a statement to be made by the Captain, but Pierson won out.

13. NO, NEWMAN DID NOT EAT 50 EGGS.

About that now-iconic hardboiled egg scene? “I never swallowed an egg,” Newman admitted to a reporter.

George Kennedy got into the specifics in his book Trust Me: A Memoir. He wrote that Newman “consumed” as many as eight eggs. As soon as Rosenberg would yell “cut”, Newman vomited into nearby garbage cans.

14. GEORGE KENNEDY PAID FOR HIS OWN ADVERTISING TO HELP HIM WIN THE OSCAR.

Kennedy took out $5000 in trade paper advertising to campaign for an Oscar. The ad read “George Kennedy—Supporting” over a still from the movie of Dragline carrying Luke. Even so, Kennedy was still surprised when he did take home the statue for Best Supporting Actor—so much so that he hadn’t even prepared a speech.

15. DONN PEARCE DIDN’T THINK PAUL NEWMAN WAS RIGHT FOR THE PART.

Though Newman received a lot of acclaim, and a Best Actor Oscar nomination, for playing the part of Luke, Pearce wasn’t impressed. “They did a lousy job and I disliked it intensely,” he said in 2011. Pearce thought Newman “was so cute looking. He was too scrawny. He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on the road.”

In 1991—long before the term “gritty reboot” came into this world and lost all of its meaning—Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro teamed up to make a gritty reboot of J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 thriller Cape Fear. De Niro played Max Cady, a vengeful sex offender who, once out of jail, attempts to torture his lawyer, Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), who he blames for his 14-year imprisonment. Juliette Lewis made what was for many a first impression for the ages as Sam’s daughter, Danielle. The impressive supporting cast included Jessica Lange as Leigh, Sam’s wife, and cameos from actors who were in the original, including Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck (in what would be his final film). Here are 15 facts about Cape Fear in honor of its 25th anniversary.

1. STEVEN SPIELBERG TRADED THE MOVIE TO MARTIN SCORSESE FOR THE RIGHTS TO SCHINDLER’S LIST.

Martin Scorsese was apprehensive about making Schindler’s List after the controversy surrounding his previous two films, Goodfellas and The Last Temptation of Christ. Steven Spielberg, on the other hand, said he “wasn’t in the mood” to make a movie about a “maniac.” So, once Scorsese promised Spielberg that the Bowdens would survive in the end, they traded. Spielberg had Bill Murray in mind to play Max Cady. Scorsese had other ideas.

2. THE SCREENWRITER PASSED ON THE PROJECT, BUT SPIELBERG DIDN’T NOTICE.

Spielberg had originally contacted screenwriter Wesley Strick (Arachnophobia) about adapting the original 1962 screenplay by James R. Webb, which was based on John D. MacDonald’s 1958 novel The Executioners, but Strick wasn’t interested. “They sent me the original movie and I watched it and didn’t like it very much,” Strick admitted. “It seemed like sort of a failed Hitchcock, which doesn’t really turn me on. And also I didn’t like the vigilante implications of the story—you know, there comes a point when a man’s gotta be a man with a gun and shoot this guy down. It’s not a message I ever wanted to send in a movie.”

Strick planned to pass on the project, but found himself unable to say no to Spielberg when they met in person. “I didn’t want to insult him and tell him I didn’t think it was a good movie idea, but I wanted to convince him that I wasn’t the writer for it, in a sort of polite [way],” Strick explained. “So we sat there and we talked. Actually I did most of the talking; I kind of explained what aspects of the story bothered me, and he listened, and then when it was all over he stood up and said, ‘Well, I’m really glad that you’re coming aboard.’ And he shook my hand, and as I shook his hand back my mouth moved, my lips moved and I said ‘Me, too.’ It was like, in person, I was unable to say no to him, and I remember driving home thinking, What have I done?”

3. SCORSESE MADE THE SCREENWRITER TAKE OUT THE PARTS THAT WERE “TOO CLEVER.”

When Scorsese took over, he kept Strick, but made him take out all of the overly clever dialogue. “Anything that smacked of television, all the dialogue he perceived as being ‘clever,’ everything that was too well reasoned, too neat, too clean, with ideas that were somewhat predigested—he wanted it gone,” Strick told The New York Times. Strick’s new boss insisted on 24 drafts before filming began.

4. IT COULD HAVE STARRED HARRISON FORD AND ROBERT DE NIRO.

Scorsese asked De Niro to ask Harrison Ford to play Sam. Ford told De Niro he would only be interested in working on the film if he played Cady and De Niro played Sam. De Niro said no to that.

5. NICK NOLTE REALLY WANTED THE PART.

Nick Nolte wore a blazer and tie to the Goodfellas premiere, with the hope that Scorsese would see he could play the part of Sam Bowden. “He had played this bear-like man, very big and rough, and I didn’t think he would be right for Cape Fear,” Scorsese admitted. Only after “several” discussions between the two did Nolte win the role. For research, the actor spent many weeks in public defenders’ offices. For the climatic scenes in Cape Fear, he channeled the primates in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey because, according to Nolte, the cast and crew were “all trying for a very primal image.”

6. REESE WITHERSPOON BLEW HER AUDITION TO PLAY DANIELLE. SO DID DREW BARRYMORE.

“It was my second audition ever,” Witherspoon said in 1999. “My agent told me I’d be meeting Martin Scorsese. I said, ‘Who is he?’ Then he mentioned the name Robert De Niro. I said, ‘Never heard of him.’ When I walked in I did recognize De Niro, and I just lost it. My hand was shaking and I was a blubbering idiot.”

Drew Barrymore auditioned for the role, too, but believed she overacted for one of Scorsese’s assistants. In 2000, she called the audition “the biggest disaster” of her life and said that Scorsese thinks she’s “dog doo-doo” because of it.

7. JULIETTE LEWIS WAS THE FIRST ACTRESS TO BE INTERVIEWED BY DE NIRO FOR THE ROLE OF DANIELLE.

Juliette Lewis first met De Niro for an interview in a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “It was to my advantage because I knew that was not a normal situation for [De Niro], interviewing young girls,” Lewis said. “I could tell he was a little uncomfortable. I mean, all the other girls came in with their moms.” Lewis had herself declared as an adult at 14 to be free of child actor labor laws. “So I said something to put him at ease. I summed everything up very quickly, meaning I didn’t tell him an elaborate story of all the pieces of [crap] work I’d done. I said, ‘If you want to see if I can act, just look at this movie-of-the-week I’ve done.'” Moira Kelly, Fairuza Balk, and Martha Plimpton also auditioned, but Lewis won out.

8. DE NIRO BECAME A GYM RAT.

To prepare for the role, six months before shooting began De Niro and his longtime trainer began hitting the gym six days a week, for two to three hours per day. Once filming started, he worked out for five hours a night. De Niro suggested that Scorsese hold off on shooting any scenes that showed off the actor’s muscles until the very end of production, so that he could be as fit as possible, and the director agreed.

De Niro also reportedly paid a dentist $5000 to grind down his teeth, then another $20,000 after filming wrapped to have them fixed.

9. DE NIRO AND LEWIS DIDN’T REHEARSE THEIR MOST FAMOUS SCENE.

Scorsese put one camera on De Niro and one on Lewis for the long scene, which was filmed three times. The first take was the one used in the final cut. Lewis did not know De Niro was going to stick his thumb into her mouth before kissing her. She only received a nonchalant warning from her director that De Niro was “going to do something.”

10. ILLEANA DOUGLAS BASED HER CHARACTER ON THE PREPPY KILLER’S VICTIM.

In the early morning hours of August 26, 1986, 18-year-old Jennifer Levin was murdered in Central Park by Robert Chambers, who came to be known as the “Preppy Killer.” Illeana Douglas had that infamous crime in mind when preparing to play the role of Lori Davis. “I was the one who suggested my part,” Douglas said of her role in Cape Fear. “The original part was called ‘The Drifter.’ She didn’t even have a name. I was in school when Jennifer Levin was murdered in Central Park by Robert Chambers, and I was profoundly affected by that … In the back of my mind, 100 percent it was based on Jennifer Levin. I tried to put myself in the position of somebody who’s new to New York, who’s young, who doesn’t see anything bad coming.”

11. DOUGLAS’S TORTURE SCENE TOOK TWO VERY LONG DAYS TO SHOOT.

Filming the scene in which Cady tortures Douglas’s Davis was no small task. It took two days to complete the scene, and the first day lasted 17 hours. “It really hurt,” Douglas told The AV Club. “My arms really were quite banged up. At one point, De Niro hopped off the bed and started whispering to Marty, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to fire me! I’m terrible!’ I’d been crying for hours on end; I’ve never cried so much in my life. Then De Niro hopped back on, and Marty came and said, ‘Bob says you’re done.’” It was like Stephen Boyd in Ben-Hur—like, ‘Just take him off. He’s done.’ I could barely walk, and my arms were all cut up from thrashing around, and then De Niro complimented me. He said that Charles Grodin was a p*ssy, because he couldn’t take the handcuffs when they did Midnight Run. I thought that was a supreme compliment.”

12. GEORGE C. SCOTT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE IN IT.

George C. Scott was scheduled to appear in Cape Fear, but ended up needing an angioplasty after a heart scare while shooting another movie. He never made it to the Fort Lauderdale set.

13. THE HOUSEBOAT SCENES WERE SHOT INDOORS.

Cape Fear‘s houseboat scenes were shot indoors, on a soundstage made just for the production, and featuring a 90-foot water tank. Rain and wind machines helped capture the torrential storm. “It was hard making that commitment to build something so big,” producer Barbara de Fina said. “In the overview, I guess the amount of money we spent to build the tank we’ll save by not having to worry about things like weather and tides and alligators.” In post-production, miniatures of the houseboat were shot in England.

14. ELMER BERNSTEIN RECYCLED SOME MUSIC.

Composer Elmer Bernstein adapted Bernard Herrmann’s 1962 score from the original Cape Fear, even though Bernstein admitted that Herrmann probably would have hated the idea. “He would have killed me,” Bernstein said. “He would have yelled and screamed with no question.” Bernstein said he was in a state of depression for weeks working on the score because the movie was “so depressing.” When Bernstein needed music for scenes not from the original, he “did something else which Herrmann would have hated. As part of the music for scenes for we which didn’t have … appropriate music in the original, we used some of [Herrmann’s] rejected music to Torn Curtain in the score, which was also very effective.”

15. PREVIEW AUDIENCES WERE CONFUSED.

After Scorsese noticed a lot of preview screening audience members wrote that the movie “skips around a lot” on their comment cards, he added shots to connect some of the dots, including one of Max’s arm grasping a rope off of the houseboat. Originally, Cady fell off the boat and got back on with no explanation as to how.

Set in 1951 in the fictitious tiny Indiana town of Hickory, Hoosiers (1986) starred Gene Hackman as Norman Dale, a man whose promising career coaching college basketball was forever ruined when he hit one of his players. After spending more than a decade in the Navy, Dale gets a second chance at coaching with the Hickory High School Huskers, where he quickly discovers how important even high school basketball is to the town and to the Hoosier state.

Slowly, Dale manages to win over the town and its former star player, Jimmy Chitwood (Maris Valainis), when his seemingly unusual tactics begin to yield positive results on the court. By changing Jimmy’s mind and helping to get the local drunk, Shooter Flatch (Dennis Hopper), on the wagon with the promise of an assistant coach position, Dale also impresses his world-weary colleague, Myra Fleener (Barbara Hershey). In honor of the film’s 30th anniversary, here are 10 facts you might not have known about the Oscar-nominated sports classic.

1. NORMAN DALE WAS BASED ON BOBBY KNIGHT.

First-time feature film writer Angelo Pizzo and equally-green director David Anspaugh grew up in Indiana and were roommates at Indiana University, so naturally they wanted to make a movie about the state and its love of basketball. But while they had heard and been inspired throughout their lives by the story of the tiny 1954 Milan High team that shocked everybody by winning the state championship, Pizzo discovered they were “too nice” and had “no real conflict,” so instead he made the team out of five of his friends from high school, created an assistant coach from scratch, and made Dale with Bobby Knight, Indiana University’s longtime—and legendarily volatile—head coach in mind.

“I wondered what would happen if Knight punched a player,” Pizzo said. “I utilized Knight’s offensive philosophy: four passes before a shot. I also created an arc for him where he actually listened to a player.” (In real life, Knight was accused of several acts of violence, and eventually dismissed from his position at Indiana for what the school’s president described as a “pattern of unacceptable behavior.”)

2. JACK NICHOLSON WANTED TO PLAY THE COACH.

After reading the script, Nicholson told Pizzo and Anspaugh, “I have to play this character.” However, he was unable to take the role because he was serving as a witness in a lawsuit, which sidelined him for six months. After the film came out, Nicholson said to Anspaugh that the movie and its stars were great, but that it would have been a “megahit” if he been its star.

3. HARRY DEAN STANTON WAS APPROACHED TO PLAY SHOOTER.

Venerable character actor Harry Dean Stanton was offered the role of Shooter, but passed. In 2013 he expressed regret over saying no to the film, and couldn’t remember his reasons for declining it. Dennis Hopper was also reluctant to play Shooter, as he had “just stopped drinking,” but eventually signed on and earned an Oscar nomination for his efforts.

4. SEVEN OF THE EIGHT PLAYERS WERE FROM INDIANA.

The lone non-Hoosier was David Neidorf, who played Shooter’s son Everett. (He auditioned at the Beverly Hills Y.) The rest were picked from an open casting call in Indianapolis for anyone who could play hoops. Estimates on how many people auditioned range from 400 to 800 hopefuls.

The athletes studied 1950s game film and trained and rehearsed for over two months. “We’d spent all our lives learning to play one way, and then we had to start shooting a completely different way,” Steve Hollar, who played Rade, said. “No behind-the-back passes, no hand-checking.”

5. GENE HACKMAN’S AGENT TRIED TO GET THE DIRECTOR FIRED.

Hackman and Anspaugh clashed throughout most of the production. “Gene had me on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” Anspaugh told Vulture. “He gave me my first anxiety attack: One morning I woke up and I couldn’t walk, the room was spinning. I thought every day on the film was going to be my last because Gene’s agent was trying to get me fired.“

According to Anspaugh, the only thing that saved his job was the dailies. “The producers said, ‘Look, David’s not getting fired,'” the director recalled. “And we showed a half-hour of dailies to Gene’s agent and he saw that what we were making was actually pretty good.”

6. HACKMAN TOLD DENNIS HOPPER THAT THE MOVIE WAS GOING TO SINK THEIR CAREERS.

During a happy montage of Hickory winning a string of games, Dale was shown saying something to Shooter on the bench that made Shooter laugh. It wasn’t until years later that Anspaugh learned what Hopper was laughing at: Hackman had told him, “Hopper, I hope you’ve invested well, because you and I are never gonna work after this movie. This is a career-ending film for both of us.”

7. HOPPER USED JAMES DEAN AS INSPIRATION.

Hopper had acted alongside James Dean in both Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). For a scene where he needed to act drunk in the latter film, Dean asked director George Stevens for 30 seconds so that he could spin around to better feel the inebriation. Remembering this, Hopper asked Anspaugh for the same 30 seconds.

There’s another connection between Hoosiers and Dean: in 1951, the Marion, Indiana-born actor had played basketball against the Milan High School team.

8. HOPPER FOUGHT TO HAVE A SCENE CUT FROM THE FILM.

In the original script, Shooter leaves rehab to watch the state championship. Hopper, who had just gotten sober, thought it was detrimental to the story. “We sat down over coffee, and he said, ‘Guys, I wish I had brought this up earlier. I knew there was something that bothered me about this scene. It doesn’t work. It can’t happen. It would suggest Shooter didn’t take his sobriety seriously. And I know from experience that Shooter made a real commitment, and there’s no way he would leave that hospital,'” Anspaugh recalled. “And Angelo and I had been living with that scene in our heads for years. And we really argued against [cutting] it. And Dennis said, ‘No, trust me.’ And we trusted him, and he was absolutely right.”

9. ORION MADE THE FILMMAKERS CUT ALMOST A FULL HOUR FROM THE FILM.

Anspaugh and Pizzo wanted to release their two-hour-and-48-minute version of the movie. The studio insisted that they needed to cut it down to 114 minutes. Among the many scenes excised was Buddy (Brad Long) asking back on the team and two scenes that developed Norman and Myra’s budding romance more. Anspaugh said “the audience really got cheated and robbed” over the cuts.

10. HACKMAN ENDED UP BEING IMPRESSED WITH THE FILM, AND ANSPAUGH.

Hackman insisted on viewing the movie before he agreed to go in to re-record some of his audio. “Angelo and I knew that if he didn’t like the movie, he wouldn’t show up at the studio to re-record his dialogue,” Anspaugh said. “But he showed up. He walked in to the room, took his glasses off, looked me in the eyes, and said, ‘How the f*ck did you do that?'”

While it had its “Capra ending,” Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) was an otherwise fairly dark film—much like It’s a Wonderful Life would be a few years later. Jimmy Stewart starred as the wet-behind-the-ears interim state senator Jefferson Smith, appointed because the likes of Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains) and others in power assume he’ll be naive enough to back a conspiracy to make them richer. Stewart’s character has his reputation ruined by Paine when he threatens to expose them all, culminating in a 23-hour filibuster by Smith to Congress, as suggested by his seemingly one ally, his secretary Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur). Not surprisingly, real-life American politicians weren’t crazy about how they were portrayed.

1. IT WAS MEANT TO BE A SEQUEL TO MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN.

Initially, director Rouben Mamoulian bought the rights to Lewis R. Foster’s unpublished story, “The Gentleman From Montana” (known elsewhere as “The Gentleman from Wyoming”), for $1500, which he then sold to Columbia Studios chief Harry Cohn at the same price in exchange for the chance to direct another movie. In 1938, Columbia and Frank Capra issued a press release announcing that Capra’s next movie would be Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington, starring Gary Cooper, the lead in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). But Cooper was not under contract with the studio, and negotiations to make the film as it was originally envisioned eventually stalled. Capra was able to get James Stewart on loan from MGM, and the title was changed. Capra later said that Cooper was too old to play the naive Jefferson Smith anyway.

2. FRANK CAPRA HAD TO DEAL WITH SOME TECHNICAL ISSUES.

Because he wanted to rely on natural reaction shots in the three-tiered Senate chamber, which was recreated on a sound stage exactly as it was in Washington, D.C., Capra needed to employ what was then a unique multiple-camera, multiple-sound approach so that he could shoot multiple scenes before moving all of the filming equipment somewhere else. “Had we tried to photograph the Senate with the usual single camera, ‘jackassing’ tons of heavy equipment (lights, sound booms, camera platforms) for each single new set-up—we might still be there,” Capra wrote in his 1971 autobiography.

3. JIMMY STEWART CALLED IT “THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME.”

Having declared the part “the role of a lifetime,” Stewart was determined to make sure he completed the film. “He was so serious when he was working on that picture,” Stewart’s co-star, Jean Arthur, recalled. “He used to get up at five o’clock in the morning and drive himself to the studio. He was so terrified something was going to happen to him, he wouldn’t go faster.”

4. STEWART WAS GIVEN PERFORMANCE-DIMINISHING CHEMICALS.

To make his voice hoarse, as if he really had been filibustering for 23 hours, Capra wrote that, “Twice a day Jimmy’s throat was swabbed with vile mercury solution that swelled and irritated his vocal cords. The result was astonishing. No amount of acting could possibly simulate Jimmy’s intense pathetic efforts to speak through real swollen cords.”

5. HARRY CAREY HAD SOME TROUBLE WITH HIS LINES.

Harry Carey was brought in to play the President of the Senate. The 60-year-old kept blowing his lines until Capra cornered him after a lunch break. He asked the actor who he was. “Well, Harry Carey, of course.” “No, you are the Vice President of the United States,” the director told him. It did the trick.

6. THE BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA WANTED NO PART OF THE FILM.

Jefferson Smith helps out the fictitious Boy Rangers, and not the Boy Scouts, because the latter group made it clear to Capra that they didn’t want to be associated with the film. Capra, having already filmed some scenes in which the Boy Scouts were mentioned, had to lose that footage.

7. THE SUICIDE ATTEMPT WAS CAPRA’S IDEA.

Sidney Buchman was the credited screenwriter on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but Capra had a big say in the final draft of the script. One of Capra’s contributions, which Buchman hated, was Senator Paine’s suicide attempt.

8. IT ORIGINALLY ENDED WITH A PARADE.

The movie originally ended with Jefferson and Saunders returning to Smith’s hometown, following the filibuster, for a parade in his honor. Smith also visited Paine to forgive him, as well as his mother, to get her blessing to marry Saunders. Test audiences didn’t seem to love this ending, so Capra cut it, though some of the original ending still lives on in the film’s trailer.

9. COLUMBIA PREEMPTIVELY ADDRESSED A PLAGIARISM LAWSUIT.

As Capra was finishing final edits on the film, the legal department at Columbia discovered a Pulitzer Prize-winning play called Both Your Houses (1933) by Maxwell Anderson that was a bit too similar to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for their comfort, legally speaking. They paid $23,093 for the rights to it so they wouldn’t get in trouble later.

10. ONE SENATOR CALLED IT “SILLY AND STUPID.”

The Washington Press Club screened the film at Constitution Hall with a number of congressmen, senators, and Supreme Court justices in attendance. Capra claimed that a third of Washington’s finest left, in disgust, before the film even ended. Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley described the movie as “silly and stupid” and complained that it “makes the Senate look like a bunch of crooks.”

11. JOSEPH KENNEDY DIDN’T WANT THE FILM TO BE SEEN IN EUROPE.

Joseph P. Kennedy, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom (and patriarch of the Kennedy clan) sent a cable to Harry Cohn and Capra claiming, according to Capra, that Mr. Smith “ridiculed democracy” and would “do untold harm to America’s prestige in Europe.” He begged them to withdraw it from distribution in Europe. The two mailed Kennedy favorable reviews of the film, which appeased the ambassador enough that he backed off.

Are You Afraid of the Dark? is the reason why ’90s kids might look back at their Saturday nights with a little bit of terror. The anthology horror series, which closed up the SNICK block of programming, must have cost millions of children precious hours sleep with the scary tales presented by The Midnight Society under the cover of darkness. Submitted for your approval, here are some facts about the classic Nickelodeon series.

1. NICKELODEON DIDN’T WANT IT FOR OVER A YEAR.

Creators D. J. MacHale and Ned Kandel unsuccessfully pitched the series to Nickelodeon, who told the two that scaring children was a non-starter. One year and network hiring of an executive named Jay Mulvaney later, the two tried and failed again to sell a different show. But Mulvaney, who had read a three-page treatment of Are You Afraid of the Dark? and wondered why the network had passed on it, asked MacHale and Kandel if they were still interested in making their original idea.

2. ITS TITLE WAS INSPIRED BY DR. SEUSS.

The show’s original title was Scary Tales, which Nickelodeon didn’t like it. “There was a scary story written by Dr. Seuss … called What Was I Scared Of?, and I always loved that story,” MacHale told Splitsider. “So, I took that title and thought, ‘Well, I was afraid of clowns and I was afraid of the dark …’ And that’s where the title [of our show] came from: Kind of an answer to that Dr. Seuss title.”

3. THE THEME WAS COMPOSED IN AN AIRPORT.

Jeff Zahn was waiting for his plane to arrive at the airport in Montreal when he just started to sing the theme. “I just thought about the series, about mystery, hauntings, scary, supernatural things, thrillers—and kids—and it came to me,” Zahn told Art of the Title. “I didn’t have music paper, so I scribbled out the notes on a napkin. I really liked it and kept singing it. Then when I played it on piano the important countermelody came to me, which I used as an introduction and for linking material. It came together very quickly and easily, unlike a lot of other themes I’ve done.”

4. NICKELODEON PUSHED FOR A DIVERSE, “NON-DISNEY” CAST.

Diversity was such a strong mandate at Nickelodeon that the series ended up being nominated for an NAACP award. Nickelodeon also turned away kids if they were “too Disney,” which MacHale described as “apple pie, freckles, cute, over-the-top acting.”

5. MACHALE GOT THE CHICKEN POX FROM AUDITIONING KIDS.

MacHale traveled to Vancouver, Toronto, New York, and Montreal to fill out the show’s cast. After a trek to Vancouver, he came down with the chicken pox. He was quarantined in Montreal for 10 days.

6. RYAN GOSLING TURNED DOWN JOINING THE MIDNIGHT SOCIETY.

MacHale wanted to hire Ryan Gosling, but he chose to join the now legendary The All-New Mickey Mouse Club cast, alongside Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and Keri Russell instead. Gosling did, however, guest star in the episode “The Tale of Station 109.1.” Plenty of other future stars appeared on the series, too.

7. NONE OF THE CHARACTERS EVER ACTUALLY LIT THE CAMPFIRE.

All of the Society’s fires were already lit when the audience joined the action because Nickelodeon didn’t want to educate the kids watching at home on how to strike matches. In the one episode where a character was allowed to light a lantern, the actress, Mia Kirshner, didn’t know how to do it.

8. THEY SHOT AN ENTIRE SEASON’S WORTH OF MIDNIGHT SOCIETY SCENES TWO TO THREE WEEKS AT A TIME.

Ross Hull (Gary) recalled that 13 episodes were shot over a “two to three” week span. Elisha Cuthbert, who was a part of the second group of Society kids, had a similar experience. “It was interesting for me and everyone in the Midnight Society because we would shoot all of our scenes back to back in two weeks, and then we wouldn’t do it again until the following year,” she said.

9. NICKELODEON WANTED THE STORIES TO BE BASED ON CLASSIC HORROR TALES.

The network’s logic was that if parents ever complained about the show’s darker themed content, the network could just say it was based on classic literature. According to MacHale, a lot of the stories had literary antecedents. (But there were never any complaints.)

10. SOMETIMES THE LOCATIONS WOULD INSPIRE THE STORY.

“There was an episode we did called ‘The Tale of the Hatchet,’ which was about a private boarding school that turns out [laughs] it’s run by lizard people,” MacHale said. “In the basement of the school there were these giant tanks with floating eggs, where the lizard people were nurturing all these little monsters. That came from the fact that this location scout took me to this water purification plant from the ‘30s where all these tanks were, and I thought, ‘Ooh, I can build a story around this.’”

11. THE MIDNIGHT DUST WAS NON-DAIRY CREAMER.

The “midnight dust” that Society members tossed on the campfire while introducing their stories was a non-dairy creamer (and it reportedly burned). Daniel DeSanto (Tucker) did not know the secret until he joined the cast. “I came on third season and I was so excited for the magic dust used in the fire. But it’s just a bag of CoffeeMate and glitter. The fire was a pyrotechnic trick.”

12. THERE WAS A CHANGE WITH GARY AFTER THE FIRST SEASON.

Ross Hull had to take the lenses out of his glasses because it was catching the reflection of the studio lights.

13. THEY SHOT IN REAL CEMETERIES, BUT WITH FAKE NAMES.

There are laws against showing real names on tombstones, so foam ones with phony names were used when necessary.

This fact did not ease editor Paul Doyle’s paranoia. “I remember working very late one night, bleary-eyed, cutting a scene from a graveyard,” Doyle said. “The camera creeps among the tombstones with a rolling fog and comes to rest on a tombstone reading, ‘Here Lies Blind Paul.’ I burst out laughing and the assistant editor came running in to see what was the matter. To this day D.J. [MacHale] denies that he was commenting on my editing.”

14. MOSQUITOES WERE A SERIOUS PROBLEM.

A Montreal arboretum allowed the show to film the “deep, dark woods” scenes on their premises, but they did not permit the use of any mosquito-killing insecticides. This resulted in the crew having to actually wear beekeeper outfits and gloves. Several takes through the years were dumped because a mosquito would bother an actor.

15. ‘THE TALE OF THE NIGHT SHIFT’ WAS MEANT TO BE THE SERIES FINALE.

It was the only episode of the series where the Society fire was not put out in the end. The hospital room door in the final shot had the number 65 on it because it was the 65th episode. “In that same shot, if you listen closely, you can hear the Dark theme coming from the hospital room,” MacHale said. But after an almost three-year drought with no new episodes, another two 13-episode seasons were shot.

Starting in 1938, Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Lurch, Grandmama, Wednesday, Pugsley, and Thing appeared in The New Yorker in a series of cartoons by Charles Addams. After two seasons in the mid-’60s as a sitcom, then two more as a Saturday morning cartoon in the ’70s, the adventures of the strange, morbid Addams family seemed destined to solely exist in illustration form. Then, after Charles Addams’ passing in 1988, even the cartoons stopped—but in 1991, The Addams Family movie brought the pale gang to the cinema. Here are a few things you might not have known about the film.

1. THE IDEA TO BRING BACK THE ADDAMS FAMILY CAME FROM A CAR RIDE.

Scott Rudin, head of production at 20th Century Fox, was riding in a van with other company executives one day after a movie screening. “Everyone was there—(studio chiefs) Barry Diller and Leonard Goldberg and (marketing chief) Tom Sherak—when Tom’s kid started singing ‘The Addams Family’ theme,” Rudin told the LA Times. “And suddenly everyone in the van was singing the theme, letter perfect, note for note.” The next day, Rudin proposed to Diller and Goldberg that they make an Addams Family movie—and they went for it.

2. MC HAMMER WROTE AN AWARD-WINNING SONG FOR THE MOVIE.

The “Addams Groove” music video played before the film during its first few weeks in theaters. The final track on Too Legit to Quit would end up being MC Hammer’s last visit to the top 10 of the Billboard singles charts in the U.S. It also won the 1991 Golden Raspberry for Worst Original Song, beating out fellow nominees “Why Was I Born (Freddy’s Dead)” by Iggy Pop, and Vanilla Ice’s “Cool as Ice.”

3. ANTHONY HOPKINS TURNED DOWN THE ROLE OF FESTER.

Hopkins instead opted to play Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (he got the role after Sean Connery was initially approached). Hopkins would win the Best Actor Oscar for his performance.

4. TIM BURTON WAS INITIALLY SET TO DIRECT.

Burton had worked with Addams Family screenwriters Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson on previous projects, but ended up not taking the job. Almost 20 years later, Burton was rumored to be developing a 3D stop-motion animated Addams Family movie, but it was announced last year that he was off the project.

5. IT WAS BARRY SONNENFELD’S DIRECTORIAL DEBUT.

The Addams Family was Barry Sonnenfeld’s directorial debut, but he had experience as a cinematographer on films like Blood Simple, Big, Raising Arizona, Misery, When Harry Met Sally…, and Miller’s Crossing. After his agent told him that he would lick a carpet if he couldn’t find him a directing job within one year, he found Sonnenfeld a seemingly plum first time assignment helming a high profile movie (in less than a year). As a joke, Scott Rudin let it be known to Sonnenfeld that he wasn’t his first choice by putting a different director’s name on the back of the director’s chair every morning on set. Some of the names that replaced Sonnenfeld’s were Joe Dante, Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, and Rudin’s first choice, Tim Burton.

6. SONNENFELD FAINTED DURING SHOOTING.

Three weeks into directing, Sonnenfeld was talking to a studio executive who was concerned about the budget for the film when he felt a “tremendous pressure” in his chest, “as if someone was blowing up a balloon inside me,” then passed out. He also dealt with sciatica during filming, and had to shut down the Los Angeles production for several days when his wife needed major surgery in New York.

7. THERE WAS A “BLACK CLOUD” HANGING OVER THE MOVIE.

Owen Roizman, the film’s cinematographer, quit to work on another movie shortly after Sonnenfeld’s fainting incident. His replacement, Gayl Tattersoll, stopped production for a couple of days when he needed to be hospitalized for a sinus infection, and never returned. Sonnenfeld ended up doing the job himself. In front of the camera, a blood vessel burst in the eye of Raul Julia, the actor who played Gomez. These incidents led the future Get Shorty and Men In Black director to say that he felt like there was a “pervasive black cloud” hanging over the movie.

8. THERE WAS AN ACTOR REBELLION, LED BY 10-YEAR-OLD CHRISTINA RICCI.

The actors were concerned about the ambiguity of the big Fester storyline in the script. Initially, it was going to be unknown if Gordon, the man suffering from memory loss that looked just like Uncle Fester, was actually Fester. The actors nominated Wednesday Addams herself, Christina Ricci, to give an impassioned plea to Rudin and Sonnenfeld two weeks before shooting that Fester should not be an imposter. Sonnenfeld remembered that the only actor to not care was Christopher Lloyd, the man playing Fester.

9. ANJELICA HUSTON WATCHED “GREY GARDENS” TO PLAY MORTICIA.

Cher was interested in playing Morticia, but Huston was producer Rudin’s first choice. Huston, who grew up in Ireland, was more familiar with the Charles Addams drawings than the old TV show, and decided it would be pointless to try and replicate actress Carolyn Jones’ “ideal” portrayal of Morticia anyway. The future Academy Award winner turned to the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens—a movie about the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy who lived in a deteriorating mansion filled with garbage and animal waste—for inspiration instead.

10. HUSTON HAD TO GO THROUGH A LOT TO GET INTO CHARACTER.

”Morticia has a shape only a cartoonist can draw,” Sonnenfeld told Entertainment Weekly, ”so we lashed Anjelica into a metal corset that created this hips-and-waist thing I’ve never seen any woman have in reality.” The role also required Huston to get gauze eye lifts, neck tucks, and fake nails daily. ”Come afternoon, I could be prone to a really good headache from my various bondages,” she told EW. ”And because I couldn’t lie down (in the corset) or rest, it was fairly exhausting.”

11. THE COMPANY FINANCING THE MOVIE SOLD IT WHILE IT WAS BEING FILMED.

Because Orion Pictures had the rights to The Addams Family, they were the ones responsible for financing and potentially releasing the movie. Even though there were some budget concerns, selling the movie to another company was something Rudin and Sonnenfeld had not even considered. But three-quarters of the way through filming, Rudin was informed that Orion had sold the movie to Paramount by Hollywood Reporter writer Andrea King. Even though Rudin was also working on a movie at the time with Paramount, in addition with having phone conversations daily with Orion over The Addams Family, he had absolutely no idea.

12. “VALLEY BOYS” CUT THE BIG MUSICAL NUMBER.

Initially “The Mamushka” scene was much longer, and it featured Gomez and Fester singing about brotherly love. Even though Broadway veterans were hired to write the traditional Addams clan number, most of the scene was cut because a California test audience mostly composed of 16- to 32-year-old white males didn’t care for it.

13. THE STUDIOS WERE SUED AS SOON AS THE MOVIE CAME OUT.

David Levy, the executive producer of the old Addams Family TV series, sued Paramount and Orion after the movie was released to surprising commercial success. Levy claimed that too many of his ideas, which were originally from his show and not from the Charles Addams cartoons, were used in the movie. Levy, who still owned the rights to the TV show, created specific character quirks and concepts that were used in the movie, such as Gomez’ love of blowing up toy trains, and Thing being a disembodied hand, as opposed to being a normal background character in the cartoons. Paramount and Levy ultimately settled out of court.

Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, illustrator Terry Gilliam, and director Ian MacNaughton joined forces to create Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a show that quickly became one of television’s most influential comedy series after making its premiere on October 5, 1969—and remains so to this day, nearly 50 years later.

1. IT WAS INFLUENCED BY SPIKE MILLIGAN.

Spike Milligan created The Goon Show (a favorite of The Beatles), a surrealistic radio program starring himself, Harry Secombe, and Peter Sellers before Milligan moved to television with Q… (1969-1982). The first series, Q5, debuted less than a year before Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and made quite an impact.

“Terry Jones and I adored the Q… shows,” Michael Palin said. “They were filled with surrealism and invention, and [Milligan] took huge risks … When it came to Python, Terry [Jones] and I were so impressed that we looked for the name of the director on the end credits and hired him. That’s how we met Ian MacNaughton.”

2. THERE WERE MANY POTENTIAL TITLES.

A BBC executive originally wanted to name the series Baron von Took’s Flying Circus as a nod to Barry Took, the network’s comedy adviser, who was credited with bringing the Pythons and BBC together. He was also the warm-up comic for the studio audience before the first night of filming. But there were plenty of other considerations for the title, including Owl Stretching Time; Bunn, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot; Whither Canada?; Ow! It’s Colin Plint; A Horse, a Spoon, and a Bucket; The Toad Elevating Moment; and The Algy Banging Hour. The BBC, in a state of agitation, was keen on “Flying Circus,” and the troupe added “Monty Python.”

3. THE OPENING THEME WAS JOHN PHILIP SOUSA’S “THE LIBERTY BELL.”

The Pythons chose John Philip Sousa’s “The Liberty Bell” (as played by the Band of the Grenadier Guards) as their theme song, largely for financial reasons: Since it was in the public domain, it was free.

4. THE GIANT FOOT IN THE OPENING CREDITS BELONGS TO CUPID.

The giant foot seen in the show’s opening credits belongs to Cupid, and comes from Bronzino’s painting “An Allegory with Venus and Cupid.” According to The National Gallery, the painting dates back to “about 1545” and was presented to King Francis I of France as a gift. Terry Gilliam saw the painting at The National Gallery in 1969 while searching for some Flying Circus inspiration.

5. IT WAS ALMOST CANCELLED AFTER ONE EPISODE.

According to some unearthed internal memos, BBC1 controller Paul Fox said the troupe went “over the edge of what was acceptable.” Head of arts features Stephen Heast said they “wallowed in the sadism of their humor.” Entertainment chief Bill Cotton thought Monty Python “seemed to have some sort of death wish.” Despite those thoughts, and low audience ratings, the show managed to hang on for three and a half seasons—for 45 total episodes—through 1974.

6. THE PARROT SKETCH WAS ORIGINALLY WITH A CUSTOMER AND A CAR SALESMAN.

Cleese and Chapman penned How to Irritate People, a sketch special which also starred Michael Palin that aired in the United States in January 1969. What would become the “Dead Parrot” sketch originally had Chapman complaining that the car he had just purchased from Palin was literally falling apart, with Palin consistently denying the glaring, mounting evidence. When writing for the first season of Flying Circus, Cleese and Chapman thought about reviving the basic idea for the sketch, but improving it by giving it a different setting, and casting Cleese as the customer instead of Chapman.

7. THE PYTHONS WERE PAID ABOUT $200 PER EPISODE.

In that same aforementioned internal BBC memo, it was revealed that the Pythons were compensated £160 per episode, which would be about $208.78 today.

8. “AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT” CAME FROM REAL NEWS SHOWS.

When two news stories that had no relation to the other were presented back-to-back on BBC TV and radio broadcasts, the anchor would say “And now for something completely different.” That was no longer the case after Monty Python made it popular.

9. JOHN CLEESE GOT A DIRTY LOOK WHILE RESEARCHING THE CHEESE SHOP SKETCH.

“I always remember going into the local delicatessen with this notebook and just standing there writing down the names of all the cheeses in the cheese display cabinet,” Cleese recalled with a laugh. “One of the shop assistants watching me with a very suspicious look.” According to Cleese, he and Palin used almost all of the varieties he had scribbled down. Some, like “Venezuelan Beaver Cheese,” were invented.

10. CLEESE LEFT THE SERIES BEFORE ITS FOURTH AND FINAL SEASON.

Cleese, who had to be persuaded to continue co-writing and co-starring after its first batch of episodes, wanted to move on before the others did. “I wanted to be part of the group, I didn’t want to be married to them—because that’s what it felt like,” Cleese said. “I began to lose any kind of control over my life and I was not forceful enough in saying no.”

11. THE EPISODES WERE ALMOST TAPED OVER.

In 1971, Terry Jones was informed by the BBC that, as was standard penny-pinching procedure at the time, the network was about to erase all of the original Monty Python tapes. Gilliam purchased the videotapes before they were erased.

12. DALLAS WAS THE FIRST CITY TO SHOW IT IN AMERICA.

PBS station KERA-TV had the honor of being the first American city to broadcast the series, thanks to its first chief executive, Bob Wilson, who first saw the show through one of his reporters. It made its American debut on September 22, 1974, in the middle of their final season in England.

13. ABC WAS SUED FOR HEAVILY EDITING SOME EPISODES.

The American Broadcasting Company acquired the American rights to the six episodes of season four, which they wanted to run as two 90-minute, late-night specials. When the troupe saw how ABC put together the first special, they filed for an injunction against ABC running the second one. ABC had removed eight minutes of material from the three episodes, including all of the uses of the words “damn,” “hell,” and “naughty bits” as well as entire characters, and—worst of all—punchlines.

The Pythons sued the network, and Gilliam and Palin appeared in court in New York. The judge watched both versions, and laughed more at the original British cuts, but ruled in ABC’s favor anyway. By the time the U.S. Court of Appeals heard the case in December 1975, the second special had already aired. In a settlement, the rights to those episodes went back to the Pythons, who sold it to PBS.

14. THE SHOW HAS MADE ITS MARK IN THE COMPUTING WORLD.

When Guido van Rossum first implemented his programming language Python, he was reading published Flying Circus scripts.

It’s widely believed that unsolicited emails became known as “spam” thanks to the multi-user dungeon online community back in the 1980s. “Spam” was used to describe pointless data flooding. It was a reference to the classic Monty Python sketch (above).

Once it became clear that Freaks and Geeks was going to leave behind a beautiful corpse, executive producer Judd Apatow decided to take another stab at network television and create Undeclared. The show, which premiered on September 25, 2001, revolved around a group of freshmen at the fictional University of Northeastern California, particularly the trials and tribulations of the geeky and too-nice-for-his-own-good Steven Karp (then-newcomer Jay Baruchel).

While Steven deals with his recently separated and lonely dad Hal (Loudon Wainwright III), he also has to work around his feelings for his neighbor Lizzie (Carla Gallo), the fellow freshman to whom he lost his virginity, and navigate his friendships with his roommates, including Ron Garner (Seth Rogen) and Lloyd Haythe (Charlie Hunnam). An impressive roster of future stars appeared on the series, including Amy Poehler as head RA Hillary, Jason Segel as Lizzie’s jealous ex-boyfriend Eric, and Kevin Hart as the religious Luke. To celebrate the series’ 15th anniversary, here are 15 major facts about Undeclared.

1. THE IDEA STEMMED FROM JUDD APATOW’S DESIRE TO KEEP THE FREAKS AND GEEKS CAST AND CREW EMPLOYED.

“I enjoyed my writing staff and production staff so much that I just wanted to try and keep everyone working,” Apatow admitted of Undeclared‘s origins. “So we thought, what would be the best show we could come up with that allows us to hire a lot of these same people and a lot of these same actors? And we thought, well, by the time we get this on, most of these Freaks and Geeks kids will be college age; let’s do a college show! It was as lazy as that.”

2. APATOW CAST THE ACTORS BEFORE WRITING THE PILOT.

Fox ordered six episodes before ever seeing a script, giving Apatow the chance to talk to the actors about what they were like as college freshmen. He then wrote the characters based on what they said. Improvisation and messing around with the dialogue was also encouraged.

3. JASON SEGEL WAS THE ORIGINAL CHOICE TO PLAY STEVEN KARP.

But Fox didn’t believe Segel was enough of an underdog. Instead, Apatow cast the Freaks and Geeks star in the recurring role of Eric, Lizzie’s obsessive ex-boyfriend.

4. JAY BARUCHEL BEAT OUT A REALITY TV STAR TO WIN THE LEAD.

Colin Mortensen from Real World: Hawaii tried out for Steven. “Thank God you beat that guy,” Rogen told Baruchel at the 2011 PaleyFest reunion.

5. LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III DID NOT WANT TO AUDITION.

The musician/actor hated auditioning, and because auditioning in front of network executives was particularly stressful, Apatow simply told Fox he was out of town. Instead, Apatow showed the network a tape of Wainwright. “So I saved him the trouble, even though he was really only five minutes away at the time,” Apatow admitted.

6. IN A WAY, IT HELPED LAUNCH DANNY MCBRIDE’S CAREER.

Timm Sharp, who played Steven’s suitemate Marshall Nesbitt, had to drop out of David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls (2003), where he was set to play “Bust-Ass.” Danny McBride ended up making his big-screen debut in the part instead.

7. TOM WELLING AUDITIONED, BUT APATOW THOUGHT HE WAS TOO GOOD LOOKING.

“I had this kid, Tom Welling, come in for Undeclared, and he was great, but too good-looking,” Apatow told The New York Times in 2007. “We put him in a small part in the first episode as a frat brother. I’d tell people, ‘There goes the next Tom Cruise.’ Six weeks later he was cast as Superman in Smallville.”

8. APATOW HAD A “NO NAPSTER JOKES” POLICY.

“I’m trying to make the show somewhat timeless,” Apatow said in October 2001, when the series was just a few episodes old. “I don’t want to do 800 Napster jokes, and then Napster goes under, and someday in reruns, my show looks ridiculous. I just try to keep it in that netherworld where the show hopefully makes as much sense in 10 years as it does now.”

9. AN ENTIRE STORY INVOLVING TED NUGENT WAS TAKEN OUT AND REPLACED IN THE SECOND EPISODE.

In “Oh, So You Have a Boyfriend”, the A-story had Steven and Lizzie attending an on-campus screening of American Pie (1999). In the originally shot but ultimately unaired version, in an episode then titled “Full Bluntal Nugety,” Steven and Lizzie’s first date involved them going to a Ted Nugent lecture, where Uncle Ted himself cameoed. Fox thought the Ted Nugent thing was possibly “too obscure.”

10. KEVIN RANKIN REMEMBERED AMY POEHLER BEING INSECURE.

Kevin Rankin, who played RA Lucien, compared Amy Poehler—who officially joined SNL a few weeks into Undeclared‘s run—to a Beatle in 2010. “She’s like John Lennon-esque in her genius of comedy,” he said. “She was so insecure and we would do a take and she’d be like, ‘That’s just not funny.’ I’m like, ‘No, you’re doing great,’ not knowing who she really was at the time.”

11. MENTIONING TOPHER GRACE STARTED A FEUD.

Mark Brazill, co-creator of That 70s Show, was upset that he heard from another party that Apatow wanted to get his show’s star, Topher Grace, to guest star on Undeclared. In a heated email exchange that was leaked to the public, Brazill accused Apatow of stealing an idea he was going to use for a new TV series for a sketch on The Ben Stiller Show.

12. FOX WANTED A LAUGH TRACK.

Baruchel remembered that throughout the production of the series, as far as the cast and crew were concerned, there was a “sword hanging over our heads”—the constant threat of cancellation. “They thought we needed a laugh track because otherwise, how will the audience know where the jokes are?” Baruchel added. “Stuff like that. We’d get notes like ‘We want it to be more like Road Trip,’ whatever that means.”

13. APATOW DIDN’T TAKE THE IMPENDING CANCELLATION WELL.

Apatow framed a rave review from TIME magazine of Undeclared and sent it to the Fox executive who was about to cancel the series after 17 episodes. It came with a note that used rather adult language.

14. BOTH SUPERBAD AND ADVENTURELAND GOT THEIR STARTS ON THE SET OF UNDECLARED.

Seth Rogen got his start writing for television on Undeclared. He showed Apatow a script he and his friend Evan Goldberg had written called Superbad. Apatow ran a table read of the script with Rogen and Segal as the leads, David Krumholtz and Kyle Gass—both of whom played Rogen’s buddies on the show—as the cops, and as future Superbad director Greg Mottola later recalled, the rest of the Undeclared cast reading the other parts. Mottola, who directed five episodes of Undeclared, immediately asked Apatow to think of him if the movie ever got made.

Mottola himself later wrote and directed Adventureland (2009), with the help of an inebriated evening with Undeclared‘s writers. “One night I was getting drunk with the writers from Undeclared and we were swapping worst-job-ever stories, and I talked about the summer of 1985, when I worked at an amusement park on Long Island, the kind of place where someone would pull a knife on you if they wanted a better prize than you were giving them,” Mottola explained. “And at one point one of my friends, a writer on the show, Jenny Konner, said, ‘You should write about that.’ I’d already started outlining the young-love story, and I thought, ‘Well, that kind of fits.'”

15. A FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL DVD EXTRA REVEALED THE FATES OF STEVEN, LIZZIE, AND ERIC.

According to Segel, nothing came of Steven and Lizzie’s relationship; Eric and Lizzie ended up having a one-night stand years later, and Eric still wasn’t over her. When Carla Gallo was asked what her character would be up to now, she speculated that Lizzie would probably be single. “I think she’s out there annoying everyone, being too perky,” Gallo said. “Maybe still living with Rachel. They’re still single ladies on the town trying to lock down a man.”