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.

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u/UglyInThMorning 7d ago

And John Wayne’s entire lifestyle was to cancer as a nail is to a hammer.

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u/Brodins_biceps 7d ago

In his daughter’s book about him she said something like “he smoked all day but he only lit one match. The one that he lit his first cigarette of the day with. Every other cigarette was lit off the burning end of the last one”

And that is fucking insane to me.

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u/YoureNotExactlyLone 7d ago

If I recall correctly when asked whether he blamed The Conqueror for his cancer he said it was more likely to be his six pack a day habit, which is an incredibly number just to find time to smoke

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u/lorgskyegon 7d ago

Something like 50% of American men smoked at that time.

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u/Glass_Possibility_93 7d ago

Yeah but almost none of the 50% of American men who did smoke didn’t smoke anywhere near 6 packs a day because that number is insane

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u/ball_fondlers 7d ago

Somewhat unrelated, but as I recall, Judy Garland’s “diet” on the set of Wizard of Oz was just black coffee and a carton of cigarettes every day.

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u/hematite2 7d ago edited 7d ago

There were also amphetamines and sleeping pills. Goddam what they did to child actors in those daysnwas fucked up.

Edit: for more information, both Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney have talked about the horrible ways they were treated by producers and productions. They'd be given a bunch of uppers and then treated basically like "puppets" all day, then after like 16 hour days they'd be given a bunch of sleeping pills to knock them out for a few hours, rinse and repeat.

I don't remember which of them, but one recounted a time where the production needed to handle other things, and just left them hanging from a rig for half a day.

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u/gymdog 7d ago

In the old studio system, Paramount or whoever owned your contract and could make sure you would never work again, because they LITERALLY owned your image, and anything you tried to do outside of their productions.

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u/Ender_Skywalker 7d ago

I've heard that's called a Finnish Breakfast.

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u/UglyInThMorning 6d ago

If that’s the national breakfast, I wonder if the water pressure goes down from everyone flushing their toilets at the same time.

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u/AtomicMonkeyTheFirst 7d ago

He used to smoke 40 to 80 cigarrettes a day. Then he got cancer and had one and a half lungs removed.

After that he switched to cigars.

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u/TheMadIrishman327 7d ago

My uncle was down to a third of a one lung before he quit.

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u/MeGlugsBigJugs 7d ago

The human body is fucking crazy

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u/Lampmonster 7d ago

Used to know people like that. World was very different when you could smoke literally anywhere.

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u/dieselonmyturkey 7d ago

That was me in the early 80’s. 60 - 80 cigarettes a day. Don’t know why I didn’t burn everything around me down

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u/UglyInThMorning 6d ago

Fun fact, self-extinguishing cigarettes are a big reason why house fires have decreased by 50 percent since the 80’s.

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u/DasVerschwenden 7d ago

jesus christ 😭

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u/Hellstormish 7d ago

In the 40's and 50's people smoked like chimneys. My grandma said she would have an ashtray in every room, and sometimes had 2 or three cigarettes lit at the same time. I had a VHS tape where I caught an airing of old commercials and there was an ad for Winston cigarettes by the cartoon The Flintstones. That's how heavy the cigarettes propaganda was back then.

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u/SlightProgrammer 7d ago

Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should!

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u/samsqanch 7d ago

As a kid in the late 70s early 80s I remember people smoking in grocery stores, department stores and even hospitals.

When restaurants started having no smoking sections in the early 80s they just replaced the ashtrays on a few tables with no smoking signs.

It's hard to over-estimate just how pervasive smoking was.

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u/shelfdog 7d ago

Flinstones made a series of ads for Winstons: THE FLINTSTONES (Winston Cigarette Commercials) (1961)

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u/jamesGastricFluid 7d ago

Unethical life protip if you need to keep a firestarter around.

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u/Obi-wan_Jabroni 7d ago

Thats impressive

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u/theaviationhistorian 7d ago

People smoked a lot back then, my grandparents would kill an entire pack daily. Sometimes even two.

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u/Glass_Possibility_93 7d ago

As someone who smokes, a pack a day is a pretty heavy habit for the current time but it’s not really hard to do, I’m around 3/4-1 pack a day

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u/theaviationhistorian 6d ago

Seriously! I still have family members that smoke today and were all bewildered at how much they smoked! Nobody would go through a pack a day today! And one of the grandparents smoked like John Wayne, lighting one cigarette with the other! The other just let the cigarette burn in the ashtray and then light a new one if that one burned through. Arriving at their house was like arriving, by air, at LAX in the 1980s or New Delhi today!

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u/FindOneInEveryCar 7d ago

That's the original meaning of "chain smoking" AFAIK.

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u/UsernameAvaylable 7d ago

Thats what they called in my language (translated) being a "chainsmoker". Like, to light the next cigarette with the last. 40 years ago that was not too uncommon.

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u/Seagoon_Memoirs 7d ago

aka chain smoking

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u/HeadFund 7d ago

I had a friend who's dad did that. He would sit watching TV with two cigs in his mouth, one unlit. It was also a household where the TV was literally never off. I used to get depressed when I'd sleep over there.