Some of the most famous movie scenes were a lot stranger than most people realize, especially when they find out what was happening just outside the frame.
That smile hid a 103-degree fever
You might think that the title number in Singin’ in the Rain looks ridiculously easy. Gene Kelly definitely makes it look that way, as he’s grinning and spinning around lampposts. He’s also splashing in puddles. But the truth is, he was very sick during the filming of that scene.
Kelly was running a fever of around 103 degrees while filming, and the scene itself only made things worse. The rain came from overhead pipes on MGM’s backlot, meaning Kelly was getting soaked after each take. It only made his sickness worse. The fact that nobody can tell he’s sick is a testament to how great an actor he was.
The attic attack wasn’t all movie magic
The attic scene in The Birds is pretty hard to watch, but this fact will make it even harder. Most of it wasn’t trick photography. No, actress Tippi Hedren spent days filming the attack while live birds were thrown and flown around her. They even attached some birds to her clothing.Â
One bird came dangerously close to her eye. The thing is, the movie used mechanical and fake birds in other scenes, but the filmmakers chose to use real ones for this scene. Hedren had to sit through five days of this.
One scream came from an injured back
One of the most famous scenes in The Exorcist involves Ellen Burstyn being yanked backward during an argument with the possessed girl, Regan. Burstyn was wearing a harness that pulled her backward. But during filming, it pulled her back so hard that she landed on her coccyx.
Burstyn injured her back and later said she suffered from the problem for years. So that scream you hear in the scene wasn’t simply acting, as Burstyn was genuinely in serious pain. It kind of makes the whole scene look very different, honestly.
One Top Gun flight never came back
Top Gun featured a lot of real pilots who helped create those sweeping aerial shots. One of them sadly never returned during filming. His name was Art Scholl, and he was a respected aerobatic pilot who flew a camera-equipped Pitts Special over the Pacific.
The aircraft unfortunately went down around five miles off the Southern California coast. Search crews tried their hardest to find him, but they were unable to recover Scholl or his plane. He was given a dedication in the finished movie.
The buffalo scene was real
The ending of Apocalypse Now sure does feel uncomfortable. It was even worse filming. Turns out, the water buffalo shown being killed was actually killed on camera, and it all started after director Francis Ford Coppola saw a local ritual while making the movie in the Philippines.
He decided to film a similar slaughter for the sequence that we see happening alongside Colonel Kurtz’s death. American Humane, an animal welfare group, wasn’t happy, as you can probably imagine. It gave the film an ‘Unacceptable’ rating because of the killing.
The witch’s exit went badly wrong
Margaret Hamilton had quite a difficult time during the filming of the classic 1938 film, The Wizard of Oz. There’s a scene when she disappears in a fiery puff of smoke. During the scene, however, the effect used for the Witch’s exit went off before Hamilton had fully dropped through a trap door.Â
She suffered severe first-degree burns to her face and second-degree burns to her hand. To make matters worse, her green makeup contained copper, so it had to be removed quickly before doctors could even treat her burns.
Roar really was that dangerous
A lot of the danger in the infamous box-office bomb Roar was completely real. Actors Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith, and Noel Marshall, along with the crew, spent years making the movie. They lived around dangerous animals like lions and tigers, as well as other large animals. The injuries soon piled up.Â
Around 70 cast and crew members were hurt, including cinematographer Jan de Bont. He had part of his scalp torn away and had to get 200 stitches to treat it. Griffith was also injured near her eye, and Hedren fractured her leg after an encounter involving an elephant. It doesn’t seem like any of that was worth it, as the film only grossed $2 million against a $17 million budget.
The cabin snake wasn’t a prop
There’s a very brief scene in Friday the 13th when a snake is killed with a machete. The scene is horrible enough, but it turns out that it was a real snake, and it was actually somebody’s pet. Adrienne King, who plays Alice Hardy, said that director Sean S. Cunningham did it.Â
It wasn’t exactly a planned scene, and it was more like the filmmakers saw a snake and decided to kill it. To make matters worse, they didn’t tell the animal handler that they were going to kill it, nor did they tell the snake’s owner.
A late-night meal sent dozens to hospital
Making the classic film Titanic was definitely difficult, but someone decided to make it harder on August 8, 1996. The cast and crew stopped for food during the shoot in Nova Scotia. Around 80 of them ended up in the hospital shortly after.
The reason was that someone had deliberately put PCP in the chowder and poisoned them. Some of the people affected included director James Cameron and actor Bill Paxton. The police did investigate, but nobody ever found out who it was or why they did it.
Ducky’s actress never saw the release
Judith Barsi was only 10 years old when she worked on The Land Before Time, and she voiced the dinosaur called Ducky. She never got to see the movie arrive in theaters. In July 1988, Barsi’s father shot both Barsi and her mother before turning the gun on himself.
The film didn’t open in the U.S. until November 18, meaning she likely never got to see the film in full. Barsi had already finished another voice role, too, by the time of her death. She voiced Anne-Marie in All Dogs Go to Heaven, which also came out after her death.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
