There was something different in the Hollywood air in the ’90s. No matter what generation you’re part of, movies from that era just hit different.
Here are 40 interesting behind-the-scenes facts about iconic ’90s movies:
1.
The Leonardo DiCaprio-led Romeo + Juliet was filmed in Mexico, but the production could’ve been a movie itself. Director Baz Luhrmann told Arts Beat LA, “Look, first let me say I would not swap a day that I spent in Mexico for anything in the world. It was the most adventurous time. Having said that, it is true we were there months longer than we needed to be. We had hurricanes that wiped out the set. We all got sick. Shooting shut down for a week while I had a temperature of 110. The hair and makeup person, Aldo Signoretti, who worked with [director Federico] Fellini, was kidnapped. We paid $US300 to get him back. I thought rather a bargain.”
He continued, “I was not there; he was kidnapped. The bandidos rang up and said, ‘For $US300, you can have him back.’ So Maurizio [Silvi, the makeup artist], who is about this high, goes down clutching the money to outside the hotel, holds it up, chucks them the bag, and they threw him out of the car and broke his leg. So we had adventures. It was an incredible quest. It wasn’t a walk in the park, and the fact that the kids did what they did and put up with what they did was amazing.”
“The reason the film is like it is, is that we embraced everything in the film. For example, Mercutio dies in that storm. Well, that was the hurricane that came and blew our sets away. The wide shots, which you could never get, I asked the guys if the cameras could handle it – we got out and did the wides and caught the storms, then we came back and did the close-ups with wind machines. For a budget of ours, which is between $15–17 million, you can’t achieve that short of massive CGIs,” he said.
2.
During Titanic‘s final shooting day in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, tens of cast and crew members were unwittingly drugged when they ate chowder spiked with the mind-altering substance PCP. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet weren’t on set that day, but Bill Paxton was among the poisoned. Director James Cameron told Q with Tom Power, “This is a 100 percent true story. You haven’t lived until you’ve been high on PCP, which by the way, I do not recommend to anyone.”
Everyone was rushed to the hospital under the initial concern that they might’ve eaten contaminated shellfish. James continued, “There was an emergency room with no one in it and, like, a nurse, and 85 crew members walk in. We don’t know what’s going on. And basically, somebody had taken a pound of PCP and dumped it into the chowder…We have a pretty strong suspicion who it was, although it was never proven.”
3.
To test the believability of his Mrs. Doubtfire disguise, Robin Williams wore the costume to an adult store. He told Sirius XM, “I was dressed as her in San Francisco, and I walked into a sex shop…I tried to buy a double-headed dildo, and I was going, ‘That one right there. The big one. Do you have anything without veins? Something without veins would be lovely’…and I can see this guy behind the counter going, ‘Whoa, this old lady.’ ‘And a scented lube would be nice too. A sandalwood lube, something like that, for a probe.’ And finally, the guy realized it was me and went, ‘Get out of here, Robin, you asshole!'”
4.
Interview with the Vampire author Anne Rice was initially so opposed to Tom Cruise’s casting as Lestat de Lioncourt that she attended a protest against him at a bookstore. She told Esquire, “I didn’t speak out in any organized or planned way. These people have stood in line for me three and four hours. They are my readers, and they hate this. I was carried along by my readers. I didn’t start the whole thing at all.”
However, after the film came out, she praised him in an open letter, writing, “From the moment he appeared, Tom was Lestat for me. He has the immense physical and moral presence; he was defiant and yet never without conscience; he was beautiful beyond description yet compelled to do cruel things. The sheer beauty of Tom was dazzling, but the polish of his acting, his flawless plunge into the Lestat persona, his ability to speak rather boldly poetic lines, and speak them with seeming ease and conviction were exhilarating and uplifting. The guy is great. I’m no good at modesty. I like to believe Tom’s Lestat will be remembered the way Olivier’s Hamlet is remembered. Others may play the role some day but no one will ever forget Tom’s version of it.”
5.
Clueless writer/director Amy Heckerling told Entertainment Weekly, “When I auditioned the kids, I’d always ask them for new words. You know, slang and stuff. That’s where I got ‘going postal.’ I loved calling someone a ‘Monet.’ From far away, they’re fucking gorgeous, and up close, they’re totally different. ‘Betty’ was based on Betty Rubble, who was very pretty. And Barney’ is like, How did he get her? ‘As if’ came from the lesbian community. Any outsider group is going to create their own language — whether it’s homosexual, Black, prisoners, or cabdrivers. You just have to be willing to open your ears and listen.”
Alicia Silverstone added, “I didn’t know what anything meant. I would have to say to Amy, ‘What does ‘As if’ mean? She’’s way hipper than I am. I mean, ‘Surfing the crimson wave’?
6.
Cher’s iconic yellow plaid outfit from Clueless is often imitated, never duplicated — but it almost didn’t happen because of Alicia’s hair! Costume designer Mona May told E! News, “She had to shine. She had to jump out of the page, of the screen. We tried red and we tried blue, which is kind of like a more of a blond color, and nothing really had the pop, and when I found the yellow suit, the Dolce & Gabbana, and we put it on in the fitting, it was like sunshine, like a ray of sun just entered the room, and that was what Amy [Heckerling] loved, and everybody in the room reacted to it so incredibly because it really — you wouldn’t think of yellow for a blond girl…But, that really was the perfect thing to embody her in that first scene.”
“It had to be plaid. It’s just quintessential school. You’re taking this very much of a Catholic school uniform and now twisting it to high fashion and then transforming it yet again through the eyes of the high school girl,” she said.
7.
The Matrix production designer Simon Whiteley told CNET, “I like to tell everybody that The Matrix‘s code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes. Without that code, there is no Matrix.” He later told Wired, “The Wachowskis didn’t feel like the design was old-fashioned and traditional enough. They wanted something that was more Japanese, more manga. They asked me if I’d like to have a go working at the code, mainly because my wife is Japanese, and she could help me work out the characters and give me insight into which characters were good and which weren’t.” At home, he went through “stacks of Japanese cookbooks” until he found the perfect one to base his code on.
He continued, “I’ve been kind of not wanting to tell anyone what the recipe book is, partly because that’s the last bit of magic…It’s not actually a book. It’s a magazine, but it’s called a book. It’s something most Japanese people would’ve heard of or have on their bookshelf.”
8.
Per Yahoo, in the original Ghost script, Bruce Joel Rubin wrote Molly as a wood sculptor, not a potter. When director Jerry Zucker expressed concerns it might seem cliche, Bruce got the idea to make her do pottery when he saw a The Naked Gun sound editor reading a pottery magazine. Demi Moore took a few pottery lessons ahead of filming her famous scene with Patrick Swayze, but he didn’t know anything about pottery until rehearsals. During filming, pro potters started the pots that Demi finished on camera, but things still got messy. The iconic moment when Patrick joins her at the wheel and her pot collapses was totally unplanned. In a DVD featurette, Bruce said, “Nobody expected [the pot] to fall. Demi recovered so quickly…She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t disappointed. In a way, the whole nature of their relationship was shown in that moment.”
9.
Per Metro, in the Home Alone scene where Marv walks barefoot through the snow, Daniel Stern wore fake feet because of the cold. He told ComicBook.com, “I do get asked a lot, ‘Was that a real tarantula on your face? What’s Joe Pesci like? Did it hurt when you got hit in the face with the iron?’’ That one, I guess getting hit in the face, ‘Did it hurt when you got hit in the face with the bricks?’ I think maybe that one. When people started asking me that, I went, ‘You know it’s fake, right? There’s a prop department. I didn’t get hit in the face with bricks.’ They’re like, ‘Oh.’ The believability of it is wonderful, but it did concern me to a point when that movie first came out actually, that I started teaching a course in media literacy.”
10.
In Pretty Woman, the scene where Edward closes the jewelry box on Vivian’s hand was actually an unscripted prank on Julia Roberts! Director Gary Marshall told DGA Quarterly Magazine, “This was not actually a scene written into the movie — rather a prank I played on Julia with Richard’s help. Why, you may ask, would I fool around when ‘time is money?’ The reason is simple: while making a film there are, believe it or not, ‘rotten days,’ ‘cranky days,’ and ‘stupid, absurd days.’ Days when the actors are sluggish from late-night parties and premieres, or from shooting too many days in a row. And sometimes the crew is tired from too hot, too cold, too rainy or too many long days. I find the solution to this problem is to do pranks and jokes.”
He continued, “Other directors use yelling or pep talks or firing people to shake up a shoot. My sister Penny sometimes uses begging, á la, ‘Please, please everybody, act better. I have a stomachache and a headache, and I wanna wrap and go home.’ Kidding around works best for me. For instance, during Julia’s bubble bath scene in Pretty Woman when she went under the soapy water for a few moments, Richard Gere, myself, and the entire crew disappeared and were gone when she came up. It was just her in a tub on a ghost ship. And I also started a rumor during that scene that I had put goldfish in the bathtub, and everybody, including Julia, was looking for the fish.”
11.
The chewing tobacco in The Sandlot was “actually shredded beef jerky and black licorice.” Actor Grant Gelt told The Arrow, “They didn’t tell us about the licorice, which, looking back, I think was intended to actually make us feel nauseous. David [Mickey Evans, the director] wanted to capture that immediate sharp reaction of, ‘Holy shit, this is terrible. What were we thinking?’ After a summer of David and the crew having to put up with us, I think that night was a good way for them to get revenge.” Prop master Terry Haskell added, “That was a real tobacco brand, and yep, the black jerky and licorice was me. I absolutely wanted them to feel revolted.”
12.
Carrie Fisher and George Lucas had secret cameos in Hook! According to The Wrap, filmmakers confirmed they appeared as a couple on the bridge that Tinker Bell enchants.
13.
In The Truman Show, Truman’s iconic catchphrase (and the final line of the movie) — “Good morning! And in case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night” — was the brainchild of Jim Carrey. Writer Andrew Niccol told The Hollywood Reporter, “I think it was originally an ad-lib by Jim, but yes, the duplicitous Christof seized on it and directed the extras in Truman’s life to pretend to be amused…For a while, I think the last line was, ‘You never had a camera in my head.'”
14.
In the Forrest Gump scene where the protagonist gives a speech at an anti-Vietnam protest, you can’t hear what Tom Hanks is saying. Screenwriter Eric Roth told Yahoo Entertainment, “[Director Robert Zemeckis] never liked the speech I had Forrest Gump give when he was given the microphone at that event. He said, ‘We need something that’s way funnier and way more important.’ Funnier I tried, and I even enlisted some comedians. I asked Billy Crystal to help me, I asked Robin [Williams], [some] other people. And nothing ever resonated. And then I tried to write some big glorious speech about patriotism and Vietnam. It was a really wonderful American speech. And that didn’t quite work. So Bob came up with the solution of he starts speaking, and they pull the plug.”
15.
Reese Witherspoon helped rewrite parts of the Cruel Intentions script. Her costar (and boyfriend at the time of filming) Ryan Philippe told Entertainment Weekly, “She loved the movie for me, but it wasn’t a great part at the time for her. She helped Roger [Kumble, the writer/director] turn it into one.” Roger said, “It’s true, she came and sat with me for a week, and we worked on the dialogue together. Annette was the character most removed from me. There’s no way the movie would have its success if it weren’t for [Reese’s] talent as a writer.”
Reese added, “I remember finding Annette too demure and too much of a woman influenced by a guy’s manipulations. I was starting what I guess became my bigger mission in life — of questioning why women were written certain ways on film.”
16.
According to Digital Spy, She’s All That was filmed in the same high school as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Torrance High School, which is in California). There’s another connection between the two — Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar made a cameo in She’s All That! And of course, she went on to marry the lead of the movie, Freddie Prinze Jr.
17.
In Addams Family Values, Fester is significantly shorter than Gomez, but in real life, actor Christopher Lloyd is only an inch shorter than Raúl Juliá. Christopher told BuzzFeed, “I always had my knees bent to make me look shorter and more squat. It worked out well because it gave me kind of a funny walk.”
18.
The Pasadena house that was used for the exterior shots in Father of the Bride became a real-life wedding venue when the owners, Sarah Bradley and Darrell Spence, used it to host their wedding reception. They purchased the home in 1999 and tied the knot a little under a year later. Sarah told HGTV, “When I gave [the event planner] our address, she said, ‘Oh, you’re near the Father of the Bride house.’ I said, ‘No, we are the Father of the Bride house.’ She said the excited planner shouted, “I’m going to be Franck!”
Additionally, fans love to visit the house — and some even propose there. Once, on the way home from a walk with their two kids, the couple decided to hang back as a proposal unfolded. Sarah said, “I saw the guy on one knee and told Darrell, ‘We can’t go over there with a screaming child.’ They’ll be like, ‘Forget it!'”
19.
Franck, the eccentric wedding planner in Father of the Bride, was reportedly inspired by Kevin Lee, a celebrity wedding and event planner who’s worked with clients such as Kim Kardashian, Nic Cage, and Jennifer Aniston. He told The Daily Dish that a producer informed him of the inspiration. He said, “Oh yeah, absolutely it was me! I said, ‘Wow.’ I was totally shocked when he told me that…[Martin Short] captured my character so well, and I was overwhelmed. Officially, I am the Franck.”
20.
In Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, the triangular symbol on Romy’s blue dress is a hidden Star Trek reference. Costume designer Mona May told Nylon she wanted a “slick” and “futuristic” look, so she added the Star Fleet insignia-esque symbol. She said, “I didn’t want to make it too plain or put stars all over it or anything weird, so it was just enough.”
21.
Friends costars Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow unintentionally wore the same red Moschino jacket in two of their most iconic ’90s movie roles. Courteney wore it during the climax of Scream, and Lisa wore it during Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion. Scream costume designer Cynthia Bergstrom told Nylon, “It was funny because Mona and I were at the same time at [Neiman Marcus] in Beverly Hills, and we looked at that Moschino, and we both went for it. She put the jacket with a different skirt, and I bought it as a suit and kept it together. But it was really funny when we were shopping. I’d look over and see what she had in her arms, and she’d look and see what I had. It was so much fun.”
22.
Macaulay Culkin’s role in My Girl was originally smaller. Director Howard Zieff told Entertainment Weekly, “Mack and Anna [Chlumsky] were just two kids working together on a movie. Mack didn’t have the attitude ‘I’m a star and you’re not.’’ We added two or three more scenes with him because as he began to work with her, there was terrific synergy.”
23.
In Thelma & Louise, Geena Davis’s real-life ex-boyfriend, Chris McDonald, played her onscreen husband on her recommendation. According to WLIW, she told director Ridley Scott that Chris was “the funniest guy in the world.” His humor was on full display during his audition, and it carried into production. While filming a scene where he walks to the car, Chris accidentally tripped, but his comedic timing was so perfect that the shot stayed in the final cut.
24.
The lead character in Sister Act was originally named Terri, but screenwriter Paul Rudnick told the New Yorker, “Whoopi Goldberg was suddenly eager to play the part of Terri, although she asked that the character’s name be changed to Deloris, because, I was told, she’d always wanted to play someone named Deloris.”
25.
Per Yahoo, the effects in Death Becomes Her were a groundbreaking mix of computer graphics and practical effects. Here’s an example: for Meryl Streep’s head spin scene, she filmed the scene facing backwards on set. Later, at the Industrial Light and Magic studio, she wore a blue bodysuit and sat in a chair while performing with only her head. The two shots were combined in post-production.
Visual effects art director Doug Chiang told Yahoo, “A lot of those things involved shooting elements after the fact, and choreographing it very carefully so that her expressions matched her body poses. And it was a very delicate thing. In hindsight, it’s very, very complex, whereas today we would probably do most of that visually. But back then, it was still old-school, because we were blending traditional techniques with the new tools that we had in computer graphics.”
26.
According to Screen Rant, during the height of his professional rivalry with Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger read the terrible script for Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, then he spread a rumor about having “tremendous interest” in it, which he knew would prompt Sylvester to accept the lead role. Sylvester described the movie as “one of the worst films in the entire solar system, including alien productions we’ve never seen.” It earned him his fourth Razzie for Worst Actor.
27.
Groundhog Day is famously set in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but it was actually filmed in Woodstock, Illinois. Director Harold Ramis told Collider, “We didn’t use Punxsutawney for the film because Punxsutawney itself didn’t have a real town center that looked very good on camera, so we wanted a town that looked perfect, so the town you’ll see is Woodstock, IL. We scouted all of southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois looking for the perfect town, and we pulled into Woodstock just the way the van pulls into town in the movie. It was the last town we saw, and we looked at this little town square and thought, ‘Aw, this is perfect.'” He also said that the people of Punxsutawney “were very jealous that the movie wasn’t shot in Punxsutawney, but when they saw Woodstock, they thought it looked better than their town.”
28.
According to Screen Rant, one of the two animatronic cats used for Thackery Binx in Hocus Pocus was reused as Salem Saberhagen in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Nick Bakay, who voiced Salem, told Vanity Fair, “ABC did not love the animatronic cat. And I get it: it’s not like it was going to fool anyone. But I think that it was part of the charm of the show—quaint, old-school, practical magic and weird cat puppets. And for some reason, it kind of worked.”
29.
According to Screen Rant, CGI was only used for six minutes of Jurassic Park. Most of the dinosaurs were created using practical effects, such as puppets and animatronics. For example, the sick triceratops that Ellie Sattler interacts closely with is a gigantic puppet with hand-sculpted skin and control rods beneath its flanks.
30.
Speed director Jan de Bont told HuffPost that his “biggest aim was making it all look real” — which led to Sandra Bullock actually driving the bus through the street! There was stunt driver in the back, but she wasn’t on a studio lot or in front of a green screen. According to USA Today, she got a Santa Monica bus driver’s license for the role. She said, “I was at the wheel of projectile. So I was just happy to be alive. I was new to the whole game, so I wasn’t aware of what was happening or what felt right. We were just in it. It was real. When we were smashing into things (on screen), we were really smashing into those things.”
31.
Robin Williams improvised many of his lines as the Genie in Aladdin. In a Reddit AMA, he said, “Initially I was just doing the scripted lines and I asked ‘Do you mind if I try something?’ and then 18 hours of recording later, they had the genie. I just started playing, and they said ‘just go with it, go with it, go with it.’ So I improvised the character. I think that in the end, there were something like 40 different voices that I did for that role.”
32.
Space Jam was initially the brainchild of David Falk, Michael Jordan’s agent, who’d initially kept the NBA legend away from the silver screen. He told the New York Times, “We got piles of scripts. But they didn’t fit Michael Jordan. He can’t really act. And you have to know your limitations.”
33.
Mike Meyers told Newsweek that the Austin Powers cast was allowed to “do their own thing.” He said, “About 30 to 40 percent is improv.”
34.
Richard E. Grant didn’t want to be in the Spice Girls movie, but his daughter made him. He told Vulture, “When my daughter was 9, I got offered the part in Spice World, and she said I had to do it. ‘But my acting credibility…’ And she’d say, ‘No, no, you have to. You have to because I want to meet them.’ So I did, and she was so thrilled. I had school playground credibility for about two semesters, and then, of course, you dip into the other side when they go, ‘No, I was never a Spice Girls fan!’ Now that generation has all come back around again going, ‘Yeah, we love the Spice Girls!'”
He continued, “In essence, a similar thing happened when I got called to be in one episode of Girls. My daughter literally levitated. She’s a creative writing degree student, and she said, ‘You have no idea what it would mean if I could meet or be in the same room or breathe the same air as Lena Dunham.’ I feel as a father if I’ve done anything right at all, I’ve done both the Spice Girls movie and Girls.”
35.
Lindsay Lohan and Simon Kunz choreographed their iconic The Parent Trap handshake themselves. He told Bustle, “The first time [Lindsay and I] met up, we worked on the handshake idea, about what it could be. I think I’d done something in the audition, just mucking about without Lindsay there, just doing silly moves. They liked a few of those, and so we basically spent an afternoon, two or three hours really, just working out that routine…If you ask me right now [to do it], I’d know one or two bits there, but I tell you what, it would only take me 20 minutes, and then I’d have it absolutely down pat.”
36.
Christopher McDonald “nearly didn’t do” Happy Gilmore — and he actually turned down the role of Shooter McGavin twice. He told And So It Begins, “I was tired. I wanted to see more of my family. But then I played a round of golf in Seattle, and we won. And that high was something else. So, with my golf shoes still on, I went in the locker room, called my agent, and said, ‘Is that golf movie still available? Because I just won this tournament and I’m feeling a little bit, well, Shooterish.’ So I met Adam [Sandler], because I didn’t know if the guy who did Opera Man was going to be any good. I laughed the entire time I spoke with him, and I knew that this kid was really smart.”
37.
You’ve Got Mail faced a common problem we’ve all likely encountered on social media — the username they wanted was already taken. For legal reasons, they had to ask the real woman behind the screen name Shopgirl to let them have it. Writer/director Nora Ephron told E! News, “She actually worked at an autobody shop.”
38.
Never Been Kissed actor Drew Barrymore told the podcast Hey Dude…The ’90s Called!, “I would get these calls from the studio, and they were like, ‘I’m sorry, but you’re just looking too unattractive.’ …I was forced to even tone it down a little bit because I had gone even farther, and then they said something that appealed to my sensibilities rather than my ego. They were like, ‘We don’t want you to lose the heart because you’re going so far for the comedy,’ and I was like, ‘Great argument. Let me dial it back a little bit.’ So Josie, what you see there, is me dialed back.”
39.
To play Imhotep in The Mummy, Arnold Vosloo had to be completely hairless. He told the Irish Independent, “For the first movie, I bravely consented for this lovely Scottish girl, who is my make-up artist, to wax me. That happened one time. I yelled like a stuffed pig. It’s beyond belief what you women go through. It’s unreal.”
40.
And finally, A League of Their Own producer Robert Greenhut told ESPN, “The casting took forever. We were trying to get actresses who actually played baseball, so that narrowed down the field right away. In some cases, it wasn’t that crucial because maybe their scenes didn’t require that much playing. But for others, they really had to display some sort of athletic prowess. So we all quickly learned how hard it is to throw from first base to third to get somebody out. It looks so easy when you see it on television.”
However, Madonna didn’t have any baseball experience prior to landing the role of Mae Mordabito. According to Sports Illustrated, she spent a summer in Chicago learning the sport.
What’s your favorite piece of ’90s movie trivia? Let us know in the comments!
