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FILM 1640: FAHRENHEIT 451

TRIVIA: Oskar Werner cut his hair for the final scene to purposely create a continuity error. This was due to his hatred for the director.

The film's credits are spoken, not read, in keeping with the film's theme of destruction of reading material.

According to producer Lewis M. Allen, François Truffaut and Oskar Werner hated each other by the end of filming. For the last two weeks, they didn't speak to one another.

Author Ray Bradbury never did any fact-checking in regards to the title. He asked a fire chief what temperature book paper burned at, and was given the answer "451 degrees Fahrenheit." He liked the title so much, he didn't bother to see if it was the correct temperature. Actually, The Chief went to burn an actual book, because he didn't know the answer when Bradbury asked him; he read the temperature with a thermometer.

Producer Lewis M. Allen said the studio's legal department requested that only books in the public domain be shown burning for fear of being sued by offended authors. Director François Truffaut and Allen ignored the request, believing that anyone would be flattered to have their book included.

François Truffaut reportedly said that he found science fiction films uninteresting and arbitrary. Because of this, a friend of his told him the story of Ray Bradbury's novel 'Fahrenheit 451'. Immediately afterward, Truffaut wanted to make a film from the novel and subsequently spent years raising the financing.

Among the books burned by the firemen is the film journal "Cahiers du Cinema" for which director François Truffaut wrote. Pictured on the cover is a picture from Breathless (1960), written by Truffaut. Also among the books burned is "The Martian Chronicles" and "Fahrenheit 451" itself, both written by Ray Bradbury.

The monorail featured in the film had been built in France in 1959 by the SAFEGE consortium as a test track. It was dismantled shortly after filming.

The first and only English language film for director François Truffaut.

Books shown or mentioned in the movie: Don Quixote - Othello, the Moor of Venice - Vanity Fair - Madame Bovary - Le monde a coté - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass - Gaspard Hauser - Robinson Crusoe - The World of Salvador Dali - Jeanne d'Arc - Life and Loves - The Weather - My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin - Les negres - Confessions of an Irish Rebel - The Ginger Man - Petrouchka - The Catcher In The Rye - The Moon and Sixpence - Lolita - David Copperfield - Mein Kampf - She Might Have Been Queen - Social Aspects of Disease - The Ethics of Aristotle - The Brothers Karamazov - The Sorrows of Young Werther - The Martian Chronicles - Plato's Republic - Fahrenheit 451 - Pride and Prejudice - Gone with the Wind - Animal Farm - No Orchids for Miss Blandish - Jane Eyre - Moby Dick - The Picture of Dorian Gray - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - The Trial.

According to producer Lewis M. Allen, it was his last-minute idea to have Julie Christie play both main female roles. Allen says Terence Stamp then withdrew from playing Montag because Stamp felt that with two parts, Christie would overshadow him.

Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Aznavour, Peter O'Toole, and Terence Stamp were all considered for the role of Montag.