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Film 917: Argo

Trivia: Besides being the title of the "movie" being filmed in the movie, "Argo" is from Greek mythology. It was the ship Jason and the Argonauts sailed in to retrieve the Golden Fleece.

In order to make the movie feel like the 1970s, Ben Affleck shot it on regular film, cut the frames in half, and blew those images up 200% to increase their graininess. He also copied camera movements and bustling office scenes from All the President's Men for sequences depicting CIA headquarters; for L.A. exteriors, he borrowed from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.

As shown in this movie, by the late 1970s, the Hollywood sign (which had first been erected in 1923 as "HOLLYWOODLAND" to advertise an upcoming real estate development) had fallen into severe disrepair. In 1978, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce had a fund-raising campaign in which they solicited nine prominent people to give about $28,000 each (one donor for each letter) for the restoration. Some of these benefactors included: Playboy Magazine founder Hugh M. Hefner, who gave the Y; singers Gene Autry and Andy Williams (the second L and the W, respectively), and heavy metal/shock rock star Alice Cooper, who replaced the third O (by far the most damaged of the letters) in memory of Groucho Marx. Warner Bros. Records, a division of the company that later released Argo, donated the second O. However, unlike the movie's depiction, this renovation was completed by the end of November 1978 -- a year before the hostages in Iran were even taken.

The character of Jack Kirby (played by Michael Parks), shown briefly as the artist of the storyboards for the fake movie, is the same Jack Kirby who was a pioneer of the American comic book industry and a co-creator of such seminal comic book characters as Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk, the Silver Surfer, and the teams known as The Avengers, The Fantastic Four, and The X-Men. Kirby did indeed create storyboards for the adaptation of Roger Zelazny's novel Lord of Light, which were used as "proof" of the movie production during the real-life "Canadian Caper."

While Chambers, Mendez, and Siegel are trying to figure out how to make their fake movie project look plausible, Siegel recalls that he made a movie once with Rock Hudson, and from that draws the conclusion that if you want people to believe a lie, you should have the media disseminate it for you. This seeming non sequitur is a reference to the fact that Hudson, one of the biggest Hollywood stars and sex symbols of the 1950s, was secretly gay, and his agent, Henry Wilson, actively fed misinformation about Hudson's "girlfriends" (really studio-arranged dates for publicity only) to the mainstream media. When the gossip tabloid "Confidential" threatened to expose Hudson's homosexuality, Wilson instead fed them then-scandalous information about two of the less-famous stars on his roster (Rory Calhoun and Tab Hunter) and arranged a sham marriage between his secretary and Hudson. Hudson's homosexuality was not widely known outside of Hollywood until about half a decade after this movie takes place.

The script used for the fake film project was based on the 1967 science fiction novel "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny. In real life, makeup artist John Chambers (played by John Goodman) came up with the title "Argo" because he loved knock-knock jokes. In the film, the title becomes an off-color joke.

John Goodman appeared in two consecutive Oscar Winner Best Pictures: The Artist and Argo. In both films he performed a man involved in Hollywood Industry; in The Artist he was a producer, and in Argo he was a make up artist.

With John Goodman's performance as John Chambers, this is the only time that a real-life Oscar winner is portrayed in a film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

During one of the many promotions for this film Alan Arkin didn't realize that Bryan Cranston was in Little Miss Sunshine, surprisingly quoting "Get out of here. I had no idea!". This was due to the fact that both actors didn't share scenes together (just like in Argo).