Top 10 Favorite Random Facts About Hollywood and the Movie Business
BY DANI FAITH LEONARD
Everybody has a friend who is the King (or Queen) of Random Facts. Mine is my friend and often partner in comedy (we performed together in the sketch group Really Sketchy), Mark Garkusha. If you were playing a trivia game, you would want him on your team.
I was filming a commercial this week and had some downtime while on set. I started looking up random movie facts on my phone and here are my Top 10 Favorite Random Facts About Hollywood and the Movie Business:
10 - The shortest dialogue script since the introduction of talkies was written for Mel Brook’s Silent Movie. It only has one spoken word throughout: “Non.”
9 - The longest movie ever made is The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple at 27 hours long. The film was split into 18 features that were shown from 1928 through 1931, instead of being shown in its entirety.
8 - One little person playing a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz fell into a studio toilet and was trapped there until somebody finally found him.
7 - The American Humane Association (AHA) objected to the scene in the Shawshank Redemption where the character Brooks feeds his crow a maggot. The AHA stated it was cruel to the maggot, and it required that the crow be fed a maggot that had died from natural causes. Don't maggots feed on flesh? Seriously?
6 - In The Godfather, John Marley’s scream in the horse head scene was real, as he was not told that a real horse head was going to be used. Where was the humane association then?
5 - The famous “burning of Atlanta” scene in Gone with the Wind consisted of burning the old sets from King Kong, The Last of the Mohicans, and Little Lord Fauntleroy.
4 - In the 1985 horror film Day of the Dead, zombies are actually feasting on turkey legs that were barbecued in a special way to look like human flesh. I knew there was a reason I've always thought Renaissance fairs were creepy.
3 - Thomas Edison is often credited for inventing the first moving pictures, which were small film images that could be viewed in a box. Although he did own the patent for the motion picture camera, he was actually was influenced by the earlier work of Eadweard Muybridge.
2 - Lucille Ball auditioned for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. That would have been crazy and I imagine somewhat like Carol Burnett's Went With the Wind:
1 - The earliest known American pornographic film is the 1915 A Free Ride, a.k.a. A Grass Sandwich. The film was directed by “A. Wise Guy” and was written by “Will She.”
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