Originally, the “stone” tablets in The Ten Commandments (1956) were made of stone, but these were too heavy for Charlton Heston (playing Moses) to carry.
A new pair made of wood was used in the movie.
Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Any Which Way You Can (1980) featured an orangutan. The orangutan’s name was Clyde.
The name of director Howard Hawks’s musical remake of his own film Ball of Fire (1941) was A Song Is Born (1948). Who played the leads in each film? Ball of Fire, Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck; A Song Is Born, Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo.
No. W. C. Fields’s gravestone does not read, “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia” In the first place, he isn’t in a grave: his ashes are housed in a vault. Second, the epitaph doesn’t appear there. Third, it wasn’t his joke. The line first appeared in the magazine Vanity Fair in the 1920s….
Franz Waxman wrote the music for Universal’s Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials in the 1930s. It is actually the same score he wrote for The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), often recycled in low-budget Universal productions.
Richard Burton, playing British malcontent Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger (1959).
Between June 1928 and December 1929, the major studios spent about thirty-seven million dollars converting their filming structures to sound stages.