FILM 1413: THE FLY

TRIVIA: The infamous cat-monkey scene where Brundlefly fuses a cat and the remaining baboon and then beats it to death with a lead pipe was cut following a Toronto screening. According to producer Stuart Cornfeld the audience felt that there was no turning back for Seth and they lost all sympathy for his plight, which caused the rest of the film to not play as well. In Cornfeld's own words: "If you beat an animal to death, even a monkey-cat, your audience is not gonna be interested in your problems anymore".

After watching some of his early films, director Martin Scorsese asked to meet David Cronenberg. Upon meeting him, Scorsese said he looked like a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. This inspired Cronenberg to give himself a cameo as a doctor.

In a 1987 interview on Sinister Image (1987) Vincent Price revealed that when this remake was released, star Jeff Goldblum wrote him a letter saying, "I hope you like it as much as I liked yours." Price was touched by the letter, he composed a reply and went to see the film, which he described as "wonderful right up to a certain point... it went a little too far."

The line, "I'm saying I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it, but now that dream is over and the insect is awake," is a reference to author Zhuangzi's famous Butterfly Dream story. It's also a reference to Franz Kafka's famous short story, The Metamorphosis.

David Cronenberg met with some opposition when he announced that he wanted to cast Jeff Goldblum in the lead role. The executive at Fox who was supervising the project felt that Goldblum was not a bankable star, and Chris Walas felt that his face would be difficult to work with for the make-up effects. Both, however, deferred to Cronenberg's judgment. Cronenberg himself later had reservations when Goldblum suggested Geena Davis, his girlfriend at the time, for the other lead role, as he did not want to have to work with a real-life couple. Cronenberg was convinced after Davis's first reading that she was right for the role. Producer Stuart Cornfeld suggested that they audition more actresses saying that it's the "script that is brilliant". Cornfeld relented after "nobody else even came close".

Michael Keaton was offered the role of Seth Brundle, but he declined.

FILM 1232: OBLIVION

TRIVIA: A full-sized bubble ship was created with doors that opened on their own and the cockpit controls were built with input from Tom Cruise, who is a licensed pilot.

Joseph Kosinski and Claudio Miranda didn't like the extensive use of blue screen mattes in TRON: Legacy (2010) to such an extent, that for this film, they wanted to use real glass, mirrors and shiny surfaces for the glass tower set. The sky footage was projected on a 500 by 45 feet screen consisting of 21 monitors taken from three weeks of footage of a volcano in Hawaii. The monitors took 10 technician weeks to install and fine tuning with floor-level rig support. In the end it had the actors complimenting the production team for that set design that as such Tom Cruise declared that the glass tower was one of his favorite film sets.

Jack Harper sitting on a precipice watering a small plant, was filmed on Earl's Peak in Iceland, 2000 feet high. The crew had to use helicopters to get people and equipment to the filming location.

The painting on the wall showing a woman in a wheat field is titled "Christina's World" and was painted by the American artist Andrew Wyeth in 1948. The woman is based upon a real person who had been partially paralyzed due to polio. Wyeth was inspired to create this art when he saw her crawling across the field.

At Jack's house by the lake, he flips through a vinyl record collection and displays the following albums in order: Next in Line by Conway Twitty (1968), Rio by Duran Duran (1982), Some Enchanted Evening by Blue Öyster Cult (1978), Exile on Main Street by The Rolling Stones (1972), The Wall by Pink Floyd (1979), and Asia by Asia (1982).

In his review of Oblivion for the National Public Radio program "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," David Edelstein admitted he had such a hard time following the plot of this movie, he had to resort to reading the summary on the movie's Wikipedia entry, and checking the IMDb Message Boards for the answers to some of his questions: "Confused? Everything will be made clear. Not in the movie itself, which is the most incoherent piece of storytelling in years, and had me crying what, what over the din of the explosions. It was Wikipedia's "Oblivion" entry that spelled out what was going on in the final flashback. And a few, but not all my complaints, were answered on an IMDB board in which posters argued over whether the problem was our lack of attention spans or atrocious screenwriting."

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