21 Scandalous Secrets And Juicy Drama From '80s Movie Sets That Are All But Forgotten

Short Round — Indiana Jones’ fast-talking 11-year-old Chinese sidekick — was an incredible character on the pages of the screenplay for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but finding a kid talented enough to do the part justice was not easy. The production held casting calls all over the globe (including in Toronto), but did not find their man, er, kid.

With production scheduled to start in a little over three weeks, the increasingly desperate producers put on a massive open casting call at an elementary school in Los Angeles and asked the teachers at the school to encourage any kids who might be right to audition. One teacher was convinced a student of hers was perfect. The boy — who was born in South Vietnam to parents of Chinese descent — agreed to stay after school and audition. There was only one problem: the boy normally walked his younger brother home after school, so his little brother would have to tag along to the audition too. The boy probably hoped his younger brother would sit and wait quietly, but that's not what happened.

Quan — who had never seen a Steven Spielberg film — wasn't intimidated one bit and quickly said yes. His audition must have gone well, because the next day Spielberg sent a driver to pick up Quan.

Quan said, "At that time, my mom didn’t know what this was all about, she thought it was some important meeting, so she put me in this three-piece suit with a little gold chain and a vest and everything.”

Upon arriving at Spielberg’s office, Spielberg told him to come back the next day in jeans and a T-shirt. Quan did as told, and when he returned, he met Spielberg (the director), George Lucas (the producer), and Harrison Ford (Indy, of course). “We spent an afternoon together, and three weeks later I was on a plane to Sri Lanka, and it was one of the greatest adventures of my life."

What did Quan’s brother think of all this? It turns out he was happy for his brother because he never wanted to be an actor anyway, and he was excited to play with the U-Haul’s worth of Star Wars toys Lucas sent over for the Quan boys to enjoy.

If you were alive in the late '80s and '90s, there's a 98% chance someone told you about the ghost in Three Men and a Baby. A wild claim, for sure, but there's no denying that if you pause the film during the scene above, you will see the figure of someone (or something) looking on. Creepy, right?

Well, not really. As RogerEbert.com pointed out, no boy died in the home because the scene wasn't filmed in a home...it was filmed at a Toronto soundstage.

Most likely, the cutout was placed in the window and no one thought to move it before they filmed this scene. Nowadays, it would have been removed with CGI, but they didn't have that option back in 1987!

Bruce called himself a "knucklehead" for turning down the role that eventually went to Patrick Swayze, but said he didn't understand how a romance with a ghost could work. 

Whoopi, meanwhile, was originally told they wanted an unknown for the role, but they circled back to her six months later. Good thing, too, as she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.

In the original ending, Glenn Close's Alex — who became obsessed with Michael Douglas's married family man, Dan, after the two had an affair — cut her own throat using a knife Dan had handled, framing him for her apparent murder. 

Clever, but test audiences didn't find this satisfying. Michael Douglas later told the New York Times, "The audience viscerally wanted to kill Alex, not allow her to kill herself."

Close told the New York Times, "I fought it for two weeks. It was going to make a character I loved into a murdering psychopath. I was in a meeting with Michael, Stanley, and Adrian. I was furious! I said to Michael, 'How would you feel if it were your character?' He said, 'Babe, I’m a whore.'”

Eventually, Close agreed to do the reshoots, and came to understand (if not love) the need for them. She told the Oxford Union, "I don’t think it would have become the phenomenon it became if they hadn’t changed the ending, if they hadn’t given the audience with the shedding of Alex’s blood a sense of catharsis, a hope that somehow the family unit would survive the nightmare." 

Close, however, still holds reservations about the ending, saying that while the film became a hit, it also "heightened the stigma and fear around mental disorders."

Many critics agreed with Close about what it was saying about mental health, but screenwriter Dearden disagreed, telling the New York Times, "The critics decided we were saying, 'Well done, you put another crazy bitch out of her misery.' That was absurd. But that ending probably put another $100 million into the box office."

Shortly after E.T. became a worldwide phenomenon in 1982, director Steven Spielberg, despite being famously averse to making sequels, teamed with E.T. screenwriter Melissa Mathison to cook up an idea for a sequel.

The result of their collaboration was a nine-page film treatment entitled E.T. 2: Nocturnal Fears. In it, Elliot, Gertie, and Michael cross paths with evil carnivorous aliens who have come to Earth looking for E.T. The evil aliens hold the kids captive on their ship, where they interrogate them about E.T.'s whereabouts — and nearly kill Elliot with their razor-sharp teeth! In the end, E.T. returns to Earth to save the kids and banish the aliens. (You can read the treatment here.)

Though the treatment is short and not fleshed out, it doesn't sound...great. Perhaps that's why Spielberg declined to pursue it any further.

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The problem? It was way too violent. In this version, for example, the infamous opening scene showed Joe Pesci's character stabbing the man in the trunk 10 times instead of the four seen in the final version.

Scorsese told Entertainment Weekly this was a lesson in what an audience can tolerate. He re-cut the film, softening the violence (relatively, this is Goodfellas after all), and leaned into the scenes with Joe Pesci and his mother, which audiences enjoyed and felt humanized Pesci’s character. The changes worked — Goodfellas was nominated for six Academy Awards.

One of the nice things to come out of 2020 was Josh Gad's Reunited Apart, which reunited over Zoom the cast and crew of famous films. On the episode featuring the alumni of Splash, the film's director, Ron Howard, told a story about how John Candy arrived late and drunk to shoot the famous racquetball court scene.

Howard says the normally very professional Candy apologized, bellowing, "Here's what happened, I'm telling you the truth. I'm at the bar and Jack Nicholson is at the bar. Jack Nicholson knew my name, Ron! And he starts buying me drinks. I said, ‘But I've got to go shoot.’ And he said, ‘You're going to be all right, kid. Don't worry about it.’ And he kept buying me drinks. I never went to bed, Ron. I never went to bed.”

Episode 5 was filming in England when, the day before an early call time, Monty Python's Eric Idle invited Fisher over to hang out with the Rolling Stones. As she told the Daily Beast, “I called Harrison and said, ‘Get over here! This is ridiculous!’ I wonder how he remembers it. I remember that we never went to sleep, so we weren’t hungover — we were still drunk when we arrived in Cloud City the next day. We don’t really smile a lot in the movie, but there we’re smiling.”

If you don't know, there's probably no bigger faux pas you can commit on a movie set than yelling "Cut!" if you're not the director. But messing up and yelling "Cut!" on the set of arguably the greatest filmmaker of all time? Well, that's a whole other level of embarrassing.

Stiller's mortifying moment came while they were filming a complicated, six-minute steadicam shot following star Christian Bale through camp. Stiller only had one line halfway through the shot ("Hey, kid, would you like a Hershey bar?"), but blew it, swore, and yelled, "Cut!"

Stiller told USA Today that after that, "I hear this huge silence. Steven Spielberg is in another building watching on the monitors, and he yells: `What happened?' I'm like, 'I just yelled cut because I screwed up,' and he's yelling, 'No, no, you never cut!' I literally turned white and shrunk because my hero and idol, Steven Spielberg, is yelling at me."

Awkward? Oh yeah. Stiller says that while he's "lived with this shame for years," he has since laughed about the moment with Spielberg (who, of course, remembers it).

Indeed, many people at screenings of Teen Wolf did a double take as the camera panned across the crowd in the final scene. Times being what they were, though, there was no way to rewind the movie or go online to discuss what they saw. As the rumors spread, the story was cemented in the public's mind: Some wild bastard actually whipped out his business and got it into the movie!

Movie Vigilante spoke to Kris Hagerty, another female extra on the film, who gave her expert opinion of what exactly was going on. According to Hagerty, the much-buzzed-about moment most likely had to do with the super-tight pants girls wore at the time:

 "When you are sitting on hardwood bleachers for hours upon hours, they (the pants) get uncomfortable, and anyone having been in the movie business knows it's a *hurry up and wait* gig. I had seen a few girl extras unzipping their pants in between takes and then zipping up when we were about to shoot. I believe that was what happened. Her pants were uncomfortable; she unzipped them. It was about 3–4 a.m. that night the scene was shot and we were all pretty tired — some were even falling asleep between takes — so she was probably not quite awake and coherent, not realizing they had yelled action."

So, sorry, '80s kids. There's no penis in Teen Wolf. 

According to Klein's attorney, "Mr. Penn swore at Mr. Klein, spat at him, Klein spat back, and Mr. Penn, with a closed fist, struck Mr. Klein several times and had to be restrained by several people."

A warrant was soon issued for Penn, which was especially bad news for the actor, because he was already on probation.

Penn ended up being sentenced to 60 days in county jail for the assault of the extra. The filming of Colors wasn't affected as Penn was allowed to begin his sentence after filming wrapped. 

Ermey was a career Marine and drill instructor who became a technical adviser on military films like Apocalypse Now (which he briefly appeared in). He was again working as a technical adviser on Full Metal Jacket. when he impressed director Stanley Kubrick so much that he was cast as a drill instructor who unleashes many scathing tirades. 

The performance launched Ermey's acting career, and he appeared in over 100 movies and TV shows, the majority of which weren't as military personnel. 

Aliens' production was impacted by Remar's arrest — they ended up having to reshoot almost all of the scenes with Remar in them. If you look closely, though, you can see Remar in a wide shot or two of the final film. (You can also see some photos of Remar on set here.)

Before Jean-Claude Van Damme was an action star in the '90s famous for his acrobatic martial arts skills in hits like Time Cop and Universal Soldier, he was a hungry, aspiring action star in the '80s with one measly credit to his name. That seemed about to change when he was cast as the title character in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Predator.

Whatever the truth, the disappointment was short-lived for Van Damme. Eight months after the release of Predator, the Muscles from Brussels scored a hit as the star of Bloodsport, which allowed him to show off his moves and not wear a poorly designed, potentially suffocating mask.

Poltergeist, about a family who discovers their home is haunted by angry ghosts, was a hit in 1982 and spawned two sequels. Sadly, a number of cast members — including two very young ones — died during the time this trilogy was made.

Finally, after filming was completed on Poltergeist III, 12-year-old Heather O’Rourke, who played the family’s youngest daughter, Carol Anne, unexpectedly died of cardiac arrest caused by a bowel defect.

Because of these high-profile deaths, and the films' focus on supernatural entities who mean to do harm to the living, the idea the production was cursed spread far and wide in the '80s, often with embellishments. For example, as Snopes points out, one version of the rumor claimed that Oliver Robbins, who played the family’s other child, also died. He, however, is still alive and working in the business.

After the smash success of Back to the Future, Universal was excited to bring the entire cast back but ran into a couple of snafus.



First, Claudia Wells informed the studio that she wouldn’t be appearing in the sequel because she needed to care for her mother, who was sick with cancer. They quickly recast the role of Jennifer with up-and-coming star Elisabeth Shue (fresh off hits The Karate Kid and Cocktail).

So the filmmakers and studio pivoted and hired Jeffrey Weissman to a) mimic Glover, and b) look like him by wearing a mold of Glover's face made for the first film. The sleight of hand worked wonderfully, as most viewers of the sequel had no idea that a new actor was playing George McFly.



One person it didn’t work for, though, was Glover, who sued Universal. Looking back recently, Glover said it was the use of a face mold to make Weissman look like him that crossed the line. “Had they only hired another actor, which is kind of what I thought had happened, that would have been totally legal, and I would have been completely fine with it,” he said.

Universal and Glover settled out of court for $760,000, but the case started an important conversation about celebrities and the ownership of their likeness. In more recent years, the Screen Actors Guild established rules protecting actors in situations like this.

Filmmakers Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale originally wanted Michael J. Fox to play Marty but weren’t able to cast him because he was busy filming the hit sitcom Family Ties. So, Eric Stoltz, who the head of Universal Sid Sheinberg was a fan of after his dramatic turn in Mask, was cast as Marty. Sheinberg was so convinced Stoltz was the right guy that he told Zemeckis he could reshoot with someone else if it didn’t work out.

Stoltz filmed almost all of the classic scenes from the film but eventually there was no denying he wasn’t right. While Stoltz was a fine actor, his performance was too dramatic and lacked the comedic touch the role required. The filmmakers reached out to Fox again (was he really, really not available?), and arranged a deal where he would film Back to the Future at night after he wrapped that day’s shooting of Family Ties. Zemeckis broke the news to Stoltz himself and said it was “the hardest meeting I've ever had in my life and it was all my fault. I broke his heart." Interestingly, the role of Jennifer — which had gone to Melora Hardin (who later played Jan fromThe Office) in the Stoltz version — was also recast.

Stoltz probably doesn’t love missing out on a massive franchise, but he has had a long, successful career since in films like in Pulp Fiction.