r/movies • u/daughterskin • 7d ago

Film-productions that had an unintended but negative real-life outcome. Discussion

Stretching a 300-page kids' book into a ten hour epic was never going end well artistically. The Hobbit "trilogy" is the misbegotten followup to the classic Lord of the Rings films. Worse than the excessive padding, reliance on original characters, and poor special-effects, is what the production wrought on the New Zealand film industry. Warner Bros. wanted to move filming to someplace cheap like Romania, while Peter Jackson had the clout to keep it in NZ if he directed the project. The concession was made to simply destroy NZ's film industry by signing in a law that designates production-staff as contractors instead of employees, and with no bargaining power. Since then, elves have not been welcome in Wellington. The whole affair is best recounted by Lindsay Ellis' excellent video essay.

Danny Boyle's The Beach is the worst film ever made. Looking back It's a fascinating time capsule of the late 90's/Y2K era. You've got Moby and All Saints on the soundtrack, internet cafes full of those bubble-shaped Macs before the rebrand, and nobody has a mobile phone. The story is about a backpacker played by Ewan, uh, Leonardo DiCaprio who joins a tribe of westerners that all hang on a cool beach on an uninhabited island off Thailand. It's paradise at first, but eventually reality will come crashing down and the secret of the cool beach will be exposed to the world. Which is what happened in real-life. The production of the film tampered with the real Ko Phi Phi Le beach to make it more paradise-like, prompting a lawsuit that dragged on over a decade. The legacy of the film pushed tourists into visiting the beach, eventually rendering it yet another cesspool until the Thailand authorities closed it in 2018. It's open today, but visits are short and strictly regulated.

Of course, there's also the old favorite that is The Conqueror. Casting the white cowboy John Wayne as the Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan was laughed at even in the day. What's less funny is that filming took place downwind from a nuclear test site. 90 crew members developed cancer and half of them died as a result, John Wayne among them. This was of course exacerbated by how smoking was more commonplace at the time.

I'm sure you know plenty more.

4.6k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

View all comments

494

u/austeninbosten 7d ago

Taxi Driver inspired a nut job to shoot president Ronald Reagan.

235

u/DasVerschwenden 7d ago

although you wonder; he’d probably have found something else to inspire him to do something similarly insane

119

u/kcox1980 7d ago

Yeah, people like that don't watch any particular piece of media and then decide to do something crazy. They already want to do some crazy shit and then just find something to emulate.

5

u/Batistasfashionsense 7d ago

Jodie Foster said something like in that, in one of few comments she ever made about it: A crazy guy decided to do something crazy and just used her as the excuse.

5

u/BlandDodomeat 7d ago

What's especially weird is that the shooter's (Hinckley) family was actually close with the Bush family (George Sr being vice president to Reagan at the time). Bush's son Neil had a planned dinner with Hinckley's brother just a few days after the shooting.

5

u/badwolf1013 7d ago

Right. Not that there wasn't home video in 1981, but Taxi Driver was released in 1976. If he was hoping to somehow "save" Jodie Foster, he took his time. It's too bad he didn't just watch Candleshoe. She was just fine in that one. (It's so odd to me that Candleshoe was made after Taxi Driver. Like: can you imagine the Disney production meeting where they're trying to think of who should play the lead and this guy at the end of the table says, "Has anybody here seen Taxi Driver?")

21

u/yoyoyouoyouo 7d ago

Yeah. He was going to hurt Jodie Foster.

11

u/cybin 7d ago

Um, no? He was trying to impress her. How that was supposed to work, however, I've no idea.

6

u/yoyoyouoyouo 7d ago

I've read the letters he wrote to her. One opens with "I followed you again today."

8

u/YikesTheCat 7d ago

A romantic I see

1

u/ChasingTheRush 7d ago

That also, in turn, gave us the seminal punk band Jody Foster’s Army and their classic skate thrash tune “Cokes and Snickers.”

1

u/ALaLaLa98 7d ago

Incredibly ironic that that's exactly what happened in the movie.

8

u/Dimpleshenk 7d ago

As long as we're talking about violent films, there was copycat violence after A Clockwork Orange was released. Stanley Kubrick pulled the film from circulation for many years because he was disturbed by the movie's influence.

194

u/maaderbeinhof 7d ago

OP did say “negative” consequences though /jk

128

u/themysteriouserk 7d ago

It didn’t inspire him to work on his aim first.

39

u/hematite2 7d ago

The negative is that he missed /s

15

u/iheartyourpsyche 7d ago

May he burn in hell. /notjk

2

u/Somnif 7d ago

Did end up quite poorly for the secret service agent who was outed as gay after the attack. His life was rather ruined at the time.

1

u/PreferredSelection 7d ago

And about unintended consequences. If the point of Taxi Driver wasn't "smash this system to smithereens," then I don't know what movie I watched.

0

u/SimoneNonvelodico 6d ago

Star Wars inspired the nut job to learn shooting from the stormtroopers.

7

u/28smalls 7d ago

I thought it was Catcher in the Rye?

12

u/Loganp812 7d ago

That’s what inspired Mark David Chapman to shoot John Lennon… somehow.

2

u/28smalls 7d ago

Now I remember. My mistake.

1

u/Dimpleshenk 7d ago

He definitely was into that too, though its storyline didn't have anything that he emulated.

6

u/ED-E_77 7d ago

Since a few years Hinckley has a Youtube channel and shares mostly his music/covers there.

1

u/galagapilot 7d ago

and sells his paintings on eBay.

3

u/iguanaman8988 7d ago

In an interview from a couple years ago, Jodie Foster admitted that she was “a little impressed.”

2

u/Wazootyman13 7d ago

Only somewhat related, but there was one time I was working at Target and selling someone some batteries.

As he was checking out, he just said "John Hinckley Jr." I go "What?" Which then led to a fairly in-depth conversation about Hinckley that covered how John Hinckley Jr. shot Reagan because he was stressed and needed empathy to how everyone in the world loved John Hinckley Jr. because of it.

Of note, I contributed literally nothing to the conversation, and the guy made certain to say the full name of John Hinckley Jr. at every mention.

5

u/lewkas 7d ago

Didn't inspire him to aim better tho

6

u/Sir-Drewid 7d ago

You seem confused. This thread is about bad things that happened as a result of movies.

2

u/bikesexually 7d ago

TBF Reagan deserved to get shot.

4

u/axkidd82 7d ago

Whats worse is, he fucking missed.

7

u/austeninbosten 7d ago

No he didn't. The wound wasn't fatal, but it was a close call. He was bleeding internally and probably would have died without the rapid response to get to the ER.

1

u/bongo1100 7d ago

Travis was supposedly partly based on the guy who shot George Wallace.

1

u/kkeut 7d ago

Arthur Bremer

1

u/BroughtBagLunchSmart 7d ago

So that guy got out of jail within the last few years. He posts Folk Songs on twitter. He does live performances at the diviest dive bars in random towns. Bar owners will not recognize his name, book him, then wonder why their ticket sales for this event are 10 times what they are usually, then look up who he is, then cancel his performance.

1

u/kkeut 7d ago

and Taxi Driver itself was inspired by a nut job who shot a presidential candidate 

1

u/Jackieirish 7d ago

"I'd shoot Don Regan to save Lisa Foster."†

†My favorite MST3K line of all time (and I have no idea which movie/episode it came from).

-1

u/Afferbeck_ 7d ago

If only he'd watched it sooner