FILM 1938: EDWARD SCISSORHANDS

FILM 1938: EDWARD SCISSORHANDS

TRIVIA: The idea for the movie was inspired by a drawing Tim Burton had done when he was a teenager. The drawing depicted a thin, solemn man with long, sharp blades for fingers. Burton stated that he was often alone and had trouble retaining friendships. "I get the feeling people just got this urge to want to leave me alone for some reason, I don't know exactly why."

Winona Ryder dropped out of The Godfather: Part III (1990) to appear in this film. Reportedly, it was Johnny Depp who actually convinced her to do so.

Edward says only 169 words in the film.

The role of The Inventor was written specifically for Vincent Price.

Vincent Price's role was intended to be larger, but the veteran actor was very ill with emphysema and Parkinson's disease, so his scenes were cut to a minimum.

Tim Burton has never intended to make a sequel as he said it would rob the film of its "Purity".

The entire story is meant to be seen through Edward's eyes, which is why the neighborhood looks so "fantastical."

Although Tim Burton said this isn't his greatest film, he said it is his favorite of all his films, and the score is Danny Elfman's favorite of all his soundtrack compositions.

Johnny Depp had to lose a reported 25 pounds for the role of Edward Scissorhands.

Johnny Depp stated that he "cried like a baby" when he first read the script.

The little blonde boy on the Slip 'N Slide, at the beginning of the film, is Nick Carter of The Backstreet Boys. Though uncredited in the film, Carter himself has confirmed this in several interviews.

O-Lan Jones arranged and actually played the organ music her character Esmeralda performs on-screen.

Edward's hair is based on Robert Smith of The Cure's hair.

This film marks the first time that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp worked together. They ended up becoming good friends since this film.

Gary Oldman was offered the title role, but he turned it down.

Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder dated throughout filming of this movie, and became engaged during the same year (1990).

Alan Arkin (Bill) says when he first read the script, he was "a bit baffled. Nothing really made sense to me until I saw the sets. Burton's visual imagination is extraordinary".

Tim Burton hired Caroline Thompson, then a young novelist, to write the Edward Scissorhands screenplay as a spec script. Burton was impressed with her short novel, First Born, which was "about an abortion that came back to life". Burton felt First Born had the same psychological elements he wanted to showcase in Edward Scissorhands. "Every detail was so important to Tim because it was so personal", Thompson remarked. She wrote Scissorhands as a "love poem" to Burton, calling him "the most articulate person I know, but couldn't put a single sentence together".

During the scene where Edward is cutting the neighborhood ladies hair, the song playing is from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Johnny Depp would later go on to play Sweeney Todd in another collaboration with Tim Burton.

When Peg looks in her rear view mirror at Edward's castle for the first time, the castle she sees is a small study model from the art department, held up on a C-stand.

Included among the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider.

Caroline Thompson wrote Peg based off her own mother, who used to bring home strangers. She based the women in the neighborhood off people she grew up around.

DIRECTOR TRADEMARK: Tim Burton: [music] Music by Danny Elfman.

DID YOU KNOW?

As an avid gourmet chef, Vincent Price wrote a number of cookbooks.

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FILM 1707: TALES OF TERROR

TRIVIA: The "Black Cat" segment was recycled for The Comedy of Terrors (1963) (even the presence of a meddlesome cat). Many of the same actors appear in both films, only here Peter Lorre plays the drunk married to devoted Joyce Jameson, with Vincent Priceintroduced as the third member of the triangle; in "Comedy of Terrors" Price and Lorre exchange roles, and Jameson essentially repeats her performance. Not only that, but Price's line "What place is this?" from the "M. Valdemar" segment of "Tales of Terror" is recycled as a running gag for Basil Rathbone in "Comedy of Terrors".

FILM 1254: THEATRE OF BLOOD

TRIVIA: Considered by its star Vincent Price to be his personal favorite of all his films.

Lionheart's tomb is an actual monument in Kensal Green Cemetery, London. It belongs to the Sievier family, and shows the sculpted figures of a seated man, one hand placed on the head a woman kneeling in adoration, while the other holds the Bible, its pages opened to a passage in the Book of Luke. This monument was altered for the film by plaster masks of Price and Rigg substituting for the statue's real ones, the Bible became a volume of Shakespeare and there is a suitable engraving at the front with Lionheart's name and dates.

Lionheart's theatre hideout was the Putney Hippodrome, built in 1906. It had been boarded up for fourteen years when it was chosen as a location for this film.

This film was shot entirely on locations in and around London. No scenes were shot in a studio.

Film 971: The Tingler

Trivia: The earliest film to depict an LSD trip.

William Castle toyed with other ideas to frighten audience members, in addition to 'percepto'; among them: rolling bean bags to brush against the legs of audience members, speakers mounted at different areas that would give a 'screech' when the tingler appeared, and possibly even using 'shills' to operate some type of mechanical device to tickle the legs of the audience members; but the only viable way of doing it was by attaching buzzers in select seats to coincide with the appearance of the tingler- 'percepto'.

This film is listed among The 100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book THE OFFICIAL RAZZIE® MOVIE GUIDE.

Pamela Lincoln and Darryl Hickman, who play the young suitors, actually got married on November 28th after the Tingler release on July 29th 1959. They had two children, and divorced on December 8th, 1982.

Film 912: Laura

Trivia: The character of Waldo Lydecker appears to be based on the columnist, broadcaster, and "New Yorker" theater critic Alexander Woollcott, a famous wit who, like Waldo, was fascinated by murder. Woollcott always dined at the Algonquin Hotel, where Laura first approaches Waldo.

Darryl F. Zanuck was opposed to casting Clifton Webb because of Webb's well-known (in Hollywood) homosexuality, but producer/director Otto Preminger prevailed and the 54-year-old Webb, making his first screen appearance since the silent era, was nominated for an Oscar.

The portrait of Laura is, in fact, a photograph done over with oil paint.

Vera Caspary's novel "Laura" falls into five sections and five separate voices, telling its story from the viewpoint of each of its principal characters. It was too cumbersome a structure for a 1940s mystery, so the script (by Jay Dratler and others) simplifies and concentrates the narrative for director Otto Preminger to play with.

The first cut of the film included a sequence in which Vincent Price sings a song and accompanies himself on the piano. Twentieth Century-Fox's PR department planted stories declaring that Price (who sang with the Yale Glee Club and had a song in The House of the Seven Gables) would become the next Perry Como. The number was cut, however, and Price's singing "career" never happened.