1. The movie that was most weekends at #1 was E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). The move that occupied the most consecutive weeks at #1 was Titanic (1997). The lowest grossing #1 movie of all time was Jerry Maguire (1996).^m
2. The movie to hit $100 million the fastest was The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009).^m
3. The original title for Ghostbusters (1984) was “Ghost Smashers.”^e
4. After a difficult battle with censors, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) was the first movie released with the stipulation that no one under age 18 would be allowed in the theater.
5. The first feature film created solely with Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) was Toy Story (1995). Over 800,000 hours of mathematical equations went into the film, which works out to more than a week of computer time for every second on the screen.
6. The first movie shot in CinemaScope was The Robe (1953).
7. The first picture to sweep all five major Academy Awards—winning for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay (adaptation)—was Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. The second movie to do the same was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).^l
8. In Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), live trained birds^a
9. The laser swords in Star Wars (1977) were actually fiberglass rods coated with a highly reflective material. Light was reflected onto the rods by mirrors in front of the camera lens and color was later enhanced by animation.
10. In The Exorcist (1973), Regan (Linda Blair) turns her head almost completely around to face backward. A life-like dummy with a swivel neck performed the famous scene. The sound of her neck turning was made by twisting an old leather wallet around a microphone.
11. It took 15 crew members to operate each of the three full-scale (25-foot) mechanical sharks used in Jaws (1975).^a
12. A real bridge with a real train crossing it was blown up for the 1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai.^a
13. When early executives at Warner Brothers were having financial difficulties, they decided to take a risk on this unusual first-time film: The Jazz Singer (1927), the first “talkie” picture.^e
14. The swimming pool used in the opening scene of Sunset Boulevard (1950) was the same one James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo played at the bottom of in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).^t
15. One 10-minute scene in Heaven’s Gate (1980) cost nearly $4 million. The film is not only one of the most notorious flops of all time, but the noted amount of animal abuse during filming prompted the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) to authorize the American Human Society to monitor the use of animals in all subsequent filmed media.
16. Gary Cooper was the first choice for the part of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind (1939), but Cooper had just signed a contract with Goldwyn Studios, and Goldwyn was unwilling to lend him to MGM.
17. Adolph Hitler put studio head Jack Warner on his “extinction list” because of his film Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939).
18. Katherine Hepburn, Loretta Young, Helen Hays, and Lana Turner all tested for Gone with the Wind's Scarlet O’Hara. Even Lucille Ball read for the part.
19. Planet Vulcan in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) is actually Yellowstone National Park.