Events from 1990s Movies You Won't Believe

1. In the 1994 film adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire, Tom Cruise famously played the title character of Lestat; however, both Anne Rice and co-star Brad Pitt “hated” Cruise and didn’t want Cruise in the movie. In actuality, Pitt only agreed to the project because he believed he would be playing Lestat alongside Daniel Day-Lewis.

Recently, director Neil Jordan laughed and said, “Oh, they loathed him. “Anne Rice thought it was confusing. Actually, Brad Pitt did the same.

Jordan, however, stood by his decision to cast Cruise, declaring, “I’ve always thought he’s a great actor.” He added that Cruise’s megastar status had equipped him for the role of a vampire. “Famous individuals prefer not to enter an unmediated environment.” Both who they encounter and how they meet them must be under their control. They must manage their reputation. It resembles a universe of specters in some ways.

2. The buzz surrounding the interrogation scene in the 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct, in which actress Sharon Stone momentarily uncrossed her legs while not wearing any underwear, contributed to the movie’s enormous success. But according to Stone, Paul Verhoeven, the filmmaker, conned her into the nudity.

The iconic scene was being filmed when Verhoeven reportedly said to Sharon, “We can’t see anything — I just need you to remove your panties. The white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on.“

She only discovered the reality at an early screening attended by business leaders. She added, “That was how I first saw my vagina-shot.“

After the showing, Sharon slapped Verhoeven in the projection booth. She then contacted her attorney to see if she could obtain an injunction stopping the release of the movie that contained the scene.

But in the end, she made the decision to approve the scene’s inclusion “because it was right for the film and for the character; and, after all, I did it.”

3. Count this as “Only in the ’90s” material: The erotic thriller Poison Ivy, which can only be characterized as a remake of Fatal Attraction with a teenage girl destroying the middle-aged man’s life instead of, you know, Glenn Close, was directed by Drew Barrymore when she was just 16 years old.

If the aforementioned wasn’t disgusting enough, previous iterations of the movie’s poster included the pull quote, “Drew Barrymore rivals Sharon Stone in indulging her basic instincts.”

4. Leonardo DiCaprio made his theatrical film début in the movie Poison Ivy, but he only had a five-second cameo, exiting a classroom, because the future Academy Award-winning actor kept forgetting his lines.

Leonardo revealed that he was cast as a character who was meant to give a verbose insult to Sara Gilbert’s character on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. However, the director decided to make it easier for him and instructed him to simply approach the room, look at Sarah, and say, “Problems.” The entire scene was ultimately removed from the final product.

5. Hardcore movie fans are aware that Chris Farley, Myers‘ Saturday Night Live co-star, had the role of Shrek before Mike Myers was recruited to voice the character. Farley worked on the movie for over a year and had completed 80–90% of Shrek’s lines before passing away from a drug overdose on December 18, 1997, at the age of 33. Less well known is the fact that the company continued to work on the movie even after Farley passed away, adding John’s voice as well.

John Farley, who recently made an appearance on the Fly on the Wall podcast featuring Dana Carvey and David Spade, stated, “He had, like, five (looping) days left, he’d shot it all.” The studio, he continues, requested him to complete the audio that was missing. However, it was immediately following Chris’s passing in 1997, so I declined. Now I’m thinking, “Dear God, what have I missed? ”

John claimed he could do it “back in the day” when the producer asked him to mimic his brother’s voice. It was way too soon, he said again. So I told myself to “forget it.”

6. After a stressful family vacation to Europe, writer/director John Hughes of “mom I missed the plane” pondered the possibility that one of his children had been unintentionally left at home. He wrote the final 44 pages of the 1990 film’s script in just 8 hours.

MTV; ©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection

Hughes was well-known for penning his screenplays rapidly; he even finished Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in under a week.

7. In The Hunt for Red October, Alec Baldwin created the character of Jack Ryan; however, Harrison Ford took over the part for Patriot Games. Baldwin will respond that Ford completely screwed him if you ask him why.

aramount Pictures / courtesy Everett Collection / Paramount

Baldwin claims in his book Nevertheless that Ford approached the studio about taking over the part while he was in the middle of negotiations with them for the sequel. Baldwin continues by claiming that when director John McTiernan questioned Ford about taking the part away from Baldwin, Ford responded, “Fuck him,” according to Baldwin. In a subsequent interview, Baldwin referred to Ford as “a little man, short, scrawny, and wiry, whose soft voice sounds as if it’s coming from behind a door.“

Baldwin was starring in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway when the studio was negotiating for the sequel, and Ford can be excused for being frustrated by his refusal to be specific about when he’d finish the play and be ready to shoot Patriot Games. Therefore, the studio’s relocation to Ford wasn’t entirely unjustified.

Ford reprised his role as Ryan in Clear and Present Danger, which overtook The Hunt for Red October as the most financially successful entry in the Jack Ryan series. (a fact that must pain Baldwin to no end).

8. In 2023, movie premieres on the internet will be commonplace, but that wasn’t the case in the 1990s, when Parker Posey’s Party Girl, which debuted on June 3, 1995, was the first film to do so.

(c)First Look Pictures / courtesy Everett Collection

As you might expect, the stream’s quality wasn’t very excellent. The web hosting firm used only 1.5 Mbps, according to Defector (which conducted an interesting deep dive on this historical event). (which was significantly less than the current average of 42.86 Mbps).

According to film critic Lucy Mohr, who was recruited to emcee the streaming event (which, by the way, cost $7.50 to watch), it was probably the lowest-fidelity movie ever to be streamed online. She then made a comparison between it and Eadweard Muybridge’s project Horse in Motion, which was completed in 1876, many years before the advent of movies. It featured a collection of images that, when viewed sequentially, gave the impression that a horse was moving. Therefore, early days things.

Still, Party Girl deserves credit for going first (it’s also a cult classic worth watching if you’re a fan of Parker Posey and/or indie ’90s movies).

9. The worldwide box office for Toy Story 2 in 1999 was $511 million, comfortably surpassing the $394 million taken in by the original. The sequel received superior reviews than the original movie as well! However, the iconic film would have been made available on direct-to-video if Disney had its way.

Buena Vista Pictures / Â©Buena Vista Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Disney had previously made successful direct-to-video sequels to their hit animated films (like Aladdin 2: Return of Jafar), and the strategy had become their model for keeping the characters alive…and making the sequels more affordably. Pixar, however, pushed back on downgrading the Toy Story franchise to direct-to-video, and got their theatrical release…something Disney is surely happy with today.

10. Kevin Costner attempted to create a follow-up to The Bodyguard in which he would have been defending Princess Diana rather than Whitney Houston.

Warner Bros., Princess Diana Archive / Getty Images

A huge hit in 1992, The Bodyguard starred Kevin Costner as a former Secret Service agent hired to defend Whitney Houston’s music star. You almost surely are familiar with the soundtrack, which included Whitney Houston’s hit song “I Will Always Love You,” even if you haven’t seen the movie.

A few years later, Costner pursued a crazy idea: he wanted Princess Diana to appear in a sequel where his bodyguard character would be charged with guarding a member of the royal family! Diana reportedly expressed a cautious interest in making her acting debut and granted permission for Costner to have a screenplay written for them, according to Costner. Sadly, Costner received the completed screenplay just one day before she passed away.

11. One of the greatest successes of the summer of 1994, The Crow, about a rock singer brought back from the dead to avenge his and his fiancé’s murder, made star of lead actor Brandon Lee. Sadly, Lee was killed on set while shooting the scene where his character was going to be shot and killed, so he was unable to witness any of it.

Miramax

The 28-year-old star was shot with the remains of a real bullet instead of a dummy cartridge, which is what ultimately caused Lee’s death (whose father Bruce also passed away terribly young). The actor shot Lee fatally while the cameras were running.

The movie was abandoned by Paramount, but Miramax took it up and invested an additional $8 million to see it through to completion. Lee’s final scenes were finished using a stunt double and CGI effects following some rewrites.(that were revolutionary at the time). This deception was made more credible by The Crow’s long hair and the grimy, gloomy tone of the movie.

12. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, starring Chris Pratt, isn’t the first time the iconic video game has been adapted for the big screen.One of the biggest critical and financial failures of 1993 was Super Mario Bros., with Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo playing the titular siblings. The production was equally shambolic.

Buena Vista Pictures

According to Leguizamo’s autobiography, it was obvious from the beginning that the film would be a failure, so the on-screen Mario and Luigi frequently drank Hoskins’s scotch to help the time pass more quickly.

Sadly, during one take, an inebriated Leguizamo—not a smart idea!—was behind the wheel of their characters’ van when the door crashed shut on Hoskins’ hand, breaking his finger. If you pay careful attention, you can see that Hoskins occasionally has a cast on his finger in the movie.

13. One of the greatest successes of the decade was the 1998 sci-fi film Armageddon, directed by Michael Bay, about a group of blue-collar deep-core drillers sent by NASA to stop an asteroid on a collision path with Earth. The film grossed $534 million globally. In the DVD commentary for the movie, actor Ben Affleck irritated director Michael Bay by asking, “Why was it easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers?” The movie also had a reputation for being a little silly. Bay retorted, “Shut the fuck up,” in response.

Despite the minor tension in the room, Affleck didn’t stop talking. He spent several more minutes on the commentary segment making fun of the movie’s premise.

14. Nicolas Cage, who won Best Actor for his magnificent portrayal of a severely troubled alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas and actually got drunk while shooting some of his scenes, gave a towering performance.

United Artists

On Inside the Actor’s Studio, Cage stated, “I never drink when I act, but I wanted to incorporate real drinking in some scenes. I was extremely inebriated during that moment in the casino when I was freaking out.”

When security removes Cage’s persona from the casino in the scene, Cage continually yells, “I am his father!” The actor made up this statement on the spot. “That was sort of a primal scream that came out of me that wasn’t in the script,” he said to Lipton.

15. Finally, Edward Furlong, who made his name playing John Connor in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, rose to prominence as one of the most popular young actors of the 1990s solely because he frequented The Boys’ Club with his friends.

Cbs Photo Archive / CBS via Getty Images

Growing up in the greater Los Angeles area, Furlong was a typical working-class boy who frequented The Boys’ Club with his friends and collected CDs. Furlong lived with his mother and later his aunt; his father wasn’t involved. He had no cause to believe anything unusual was about to occur when he entered The Boys’ Club one day in the early 1990s, but it most certainly did.

The casting director for Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Mali Finn, had grown weary of all the professional actor children who had auditioned for the part of young John Connor, and she made the decision to go search for a more natural child out in the world. The Boys’ Club was one of her stops, and there she saw Furlong playing with his pals.

Furlong, who had never performed on stage before, was extremely wary when this unknown woman approached him and requested to speak to him. I had no idea who she was, he confessed to the Los Angeles Times. Can I speak with you? she asked as she walked over to me. I therefore asked, “What did I do wrong?”

After three intense interviews and some acting lessons, Furlong found himself on set acting opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger. He finished the ‘90s as one of the decade’s most popular teen stars, with additional roles in films like American History X, Pecker, and Detroit Rock City. All thanks to The Boys’ Club!

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