Fascinating Film Facts
1. People have often decried the use of computer graphics as the death of movies, but they’ve actually been around for far longer than you would think. The first Hollywood film to make use of computer graphics was Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 1958. Admittedly, the graphics were basically limited to the intro sequence, but still, it was a harbinger of things to come.
2. Next time you’re watching It’s a Wonderful Life around Christmas time, you might notice that two of the supporting characters, specifically the cop and the taxi driver, are respectively named Bert and Ernie. If that sounds familiar, then you’re absolutely right, as the iconic duo on Sesame Street got their names from these two characters.
3. One of the most famous films of Steve McQueen’s career was The Great Escape, set during the Second World War and focusing on Allied soldiers trying to escape imprisonment. One of the more famous scenes involves McQueen’s character fleeing from a number of Germans on a motorcycle. Ironically, McQueen was pulled over by German police during the production and jailed for speeding!
4. While filming the classic 12 Angry Men, director Sidney Lumet insisted that the actors spend several hours in the same room together going over the script. He didn’t even film these takes, he just wanted the actors to get a real idea of what it would be like to be stuck in the same room with the same people for hours on end.
5. From the very start of his time as James Bond in the 1962 film Dr. No, Sean Connery was actually wearing a toupee.
6. The first film to sweep the Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Lead Actor, Best Lead Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay was the Frank Capra film It Happened One Night in 1934. This accomplishment wouldn’t be repeated until One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, around 40 years later.
7. In one of the more iconic scenes in Gone with the Wind, the city of Atlanta is burned during the Civil War. To achieve this terrifying spectacle in an age without CGI, the filmmakers ended up burning the sets of a bunch of older movies that the studio didn’t mind throwing away. These included sets from the original King Kong.
8. The great irony of Casablanca’s famous line, “Play it again, Sam” isn’t just that the line was never actually said in the finished film; Dooley Wilson, who played Sam, couldn’t play the piano! While Wilson was certainly a talented musician, he was actually a drummer. He had to mime the piano-playing of a pianist off-screen while filming took place.
9. We’ve all heard of cursed productions like Poltergeist, but Rebel Without A Cause may have been the original cursed production: all three of the lead actors died young under tragic circumstances. James Dean infamously perished in a car crash in 1955, Natalie Wood drowned in 1981, and Sal Mineo was stabbed to death in 1976.