The US title for the exceptionally wonderful A Matter of Life and Death was Stairway to Heaven. Dan Akroyd’s original script for Ghostbusters was set in a future where Ghostbusters were everyday figures of society like paramedics and firemen.ĩ1. Coppola acquiesced when he decided to make it a film about American capitalism and not “the mafia”.ĩ2. Paramount super producer Robert Towne was adamant he wanted Francis Ford Coppola to make The Godfather even though the director was uninterested in the project.
In 1994, during one famous lunch at Pixar, filmmakers John Lasseter, Pete Docter and Joe Ranft came up with ideas that would eventually become A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, Monster Inc. Like Facebook, Star Wars was originally prefixed by the definite article ‘The’. It is rumoured he had a loaded gun by his desk for “inspiration and motivation”.ĩ6. Paul Schrader wrote Taxi Driver in five days. The idea for the poster for The Usual Suspects came before any script or story.ĩ7. Disney turned down the chance to make Back to the Future claiming the mother/son relationship was too risqué.ĩ8. The names were reversed when Paul Newman took on the role of Butch.ĩ9. William Goldman’s original script title for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy.
For the rest, feel free to add some more below and I hereby apologise to the uninterested partners of the geeks that will trot these statistics and titbits out during home movie viewings. Perhaps you know one or two of them, perhaps you know a good proportion of them, perhaps you even know them all. The number of facts? Why, it’s a third of Frank Miller’s 300, a dozen mph short of the speed needed for DeLorean time travel and 8.3 times the number of Angry Men. A mass of quite interesting factoids abut your favourite flicks that you can pass off in pubs up and down the land to either the choruses of cheers, hails of boos or the polite nod. For the geeky, for the nerdy, for the true cinema believers, this one’s for you.