Movie Secrets Hollywood Doesn't Want You Knowing

Hollywood is generally associated with glamorous movie stars driving sports cars and lounging in the sun. However, the bright lights of Hollywood have a dark side, and the movie biz is full of horrifying secrets that are kept hidden from the public. Let's investigate what really goes on in Hollywood, exposing cancer-causing snow, true horror movie moments, and Mafia connections as we explore the movie secrets that Hollywood doesn’t want you knowing.

Tom Cruise's Thong

When it comes to action heroes, you’ll be hard pressed to find one more iconic than Tom Cruise. The actor is known for beating bad-guys, driving motorbikes and jumping out of airplanes, and the Hollywood superstar famously performs all his own stunts.

As you can imagine, performing these high-octane scenes requires a lot of preparation, and there’s no doubt Cruise takes part in extensive training before shooting an action flick. However, the star has also admitted that one crucial part of his process is a little bit unconventional, and whenever he performs a stunt on set, he’ll put on a G-string thong.

Every time Cruise dives out of a plane or climbs a skyscraper on-screen, he does so secretly wearing a tiny thong, but it isn’t because they make his butt look good. According to Cruise, regular underwear doesn’t give him enough flexibility, so he wears the stretchy and revealing undies to feel unrestricted while performing challenging action sequences. Cruise reportedly does this on every movie that requires him to perform stunts, and his work on Mission Impossible often starts with the impossible mission of squeezing into some panties.

Marlon Brando's Cue Cards

Tom Cruise regularly puts his life at risk by performing those stunts, but some actors aren’t so committed to their craft. Marlon Brando is an actor who starred in The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and Julius Ceasar, and some critics have lauded him as the greatest actor of all time. However, by the end of Brando’s career his attitude to his craft became a little lax.

On several movie shoots, he didn’t even bother to learn his lines, and the production team would hide cue cards on set so he could read his script while acting.

In the 1978 version of Superman, Brando played the superhero’s father, and incredibly, Brando insisted that his lines were written on the back of baby superman’s diaper. This allowed him to glance down and read the script, while pretending to look lovingly at his child.

Surprisingly, Brando used similar techniques while playing Don Corleone in The Godfather, and he’d regularly get his co-stars to tape his lines to their chests. What’s more, one of The Godfather’s most famous scenes involves Brando sitting in an office, while stroking a cat on his lap, and some fans have theorized that the only reason the cat was used in the scene is so Brando could hide a cue card behind its body.

This specific rumor hasn’t been confirmed, and seems pretty unlikely with how much the cat moves around in the scene. But that doesn’t change the fact that Brando openly admitted to using cue cards throughout his later career. He claimed that he didn’t learn his lines because real people don’t recite from a script during a conversation, and he wanted his performances to be more natural. However, his agent Jay Kanter offered a more honest explanation, stating that the actor was lazy, and he just wanted to do as little work as possible when shooting a movie.

Brando’s such an iconic actor, that his laziness is pretty surprising to the uninitiated, however, he was paid $3.7 million for Superman, and he won an Oscar for The Godfather, so his work-ethic clearly didn’t hinder his career! And receiving that kind of money to read lines off some cue cards was an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Harrison Ford's Dysentery

In Hollywood, your public appearance is everything, and generating a image as a heartthrob, a glamorous starlet, or a tough action hero is a crucial part of a screen actor’s career. As a result, when something embarrassing happens to an actor, they’d rather it didn’t become public knowledge.

Unfortunately for Harrison Ford it hasn’t always worked out that way, and while filming Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1980, he experienced an embarrassing incident that could’ve tarnished his tough-guy image. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ford’s Indiana Jones beats up a lot of bad-guys, but one of the movie’s most famous scenes shows him dispatching a swordsman with his trusty revolver.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (3/10) Movie CLIP - Sword vs. Gun (1981) HD by Movieclips

This moment is pretty iconic, but it was originally planned to be a complicated, choreographed sword fight. However, Ford couldn’t film the long, choreographed sequence for a rather embarrassing reason.

Director Stephen Spielberg filmed this section of the movie in Tunisia, and several members of the cast and crew, including Ford, contracted dysentery after eating some spoiled food. Ford was incredibly ill, so he could only shoot his scenes in 10 minute bursts before having to run to the little archaeologists room to deposit some treasure.

This runny routine didn’t give Spielberg enough time to shoot the full fight sequence, so he replaced it with this comically abridged version, as suggested by Ford. This resulted in an iconic fight scene, which Spielberg ultimately preferred, and with one of the most amusing back-side-stories of any scene in cinema history.

The Asbestos Snow In The Wizard Of Oz

The Wizard of Oz is a magical movie, with singing, dancing and a winding yellow brick road. However, the film’s production is surrounded by a number of incredibly dark and dangerous secrets. For starters, whenever it snows in the movie, the powder falling from the sky is actually a deadly little carcinogenic substance you might know called asbestos.

The Wizard of Oz - poppies by theairinthebranches

In the early 20th century, asbestos was very commonly used to create all sorts of things, ranging from house insulation, to vinyl floors, and fake snow. However in the 1980s, Asbestos products were banned throughout much of the world, after it became widely accepted that when asbestos dust is inhaled, the fibers can lodge within and scar your lungs, and drastically increase your risk of contracting certain cancers.

This means that the Wizard of Oz’s main cast were literally doused with carcinogens for hours and hours of shooting, and indeed, two of them eventually passed away from diseases that are associated with asbestos. Ray Bolger played the brainless scarecrow in the movie, and he contracted bladder cancer at 83. Similarly, the actor behind the cowardly Lion, Bert Lahr, passed away at 72 after contracting pneumonia that was exasperated by an undiagnosed cancer.

Both men were pretty old when they passed, so their deaths weren’t exactly premature. However, asbestos exposure significantly increases the chances of contracting the diseases that killed them. So today, the snow sequence in the Wizard of Oz is pretty haunting to watch, as the cast link arms and skip through a blizzard made of the most sinister snow ever put to film.

Costume Problems Of The Wizard Of Oz

It isn’t clear whether the asbestos snow actually harmed any of the cast or crew, however, The Wizard of Oz is still hiding other dark secrets. The costume department, for example, made some pretty horrific choices during production. The first example came when they decided to use real lion pelts to make the outfit worn by the cowardly lion.

The costume was a product of poaching, and while testimonies regarding how many lion pelts went into it range from 1 to 5, what’s certain is that the thing was heavy! It clocked in at over 60lbs in weight and was so thick that Bert Lahr would sweat buckets through it while performing, causing the damp fur to stink out the studio.

This was pretty gross for Bert, but the costume department made far more dangerous mistakes during production. When Buddy Ebsen was cast as the Tin Man, he was painted with white face paint that was coated with aluminum powder.

Unfortunately, 9-days into shooting Ebsen started having difficulty breathing, and he eventually had to go to hospital, where he was placed on oxygen for 2-weeks. It turns out, inhaling aluminum dust can irritate your lungs, and Ebsen had such a severe reaction to the substance that he almost died. The actor complained of lung ailments after this for the rest of his life, which he directly attributed to, in his words, “that damned movie.”

The studio replaced Ebsen with an actor called Jack Haley, who we see in the movie today, and they used different silver makeup from then on. However, they didn’t entirely learn their lesson, as they still used an incredibly toxic makeup on the Wicked Witch’s actress Margaret Hamilton.

This paint was made using copper, which can be extremely dangerous if it gets into the bloodstream in significant quantities. This became a serious problem during this scene involving a giant fireball. They filmed this by placing a trapdoor under Margaret, that allowed her to duck underground before the fireball erupted.

The Wizard of Oz | 75th Anniversary "I'll Get You My Pretty" | Warner Bros. Entertainment by Warner Bros. Entertainment

However during one take, the flames shot out too early, leaving Margaret with first-and-second-degree burns on her face and hands. If Margaret’s makeup got into these wounds, it could’ve been fatal. But the crew couldn’t wipe the makeup away without inadvertently pushing it into her burns, which forced them to remove it by pouring rubbing alcohol all over Margaret’s burnt skin.

When this agonizing process was finished, Margaret was rushed to hospital, but after just 6-weeks of recovery she had to return to set and finish the movie. According to Margaret, if she quit the production or sued the producers, she’d be blacklisted and would’ve never worked again.

Shockingly, various studies have since found that exposure to copper can significantly increase your chances of developing Alzheimer’s, something Margaret battled with in the later stages of her life. This means that even though her burns fully healed with minimal scarring, the toxic copper makeup may have contributed to her death. There really is no business like show business.

The Conqueror's Radioactive Set

The Conqueror is a historical drama from 1956, in which John Wayne plays the famous warlord Genghis Khan. Casting an actor from Iowa to play a historic Mongolian is pretty questionable, but the movie’s main controversy was a lot more nuclear.

They shot the movie in the middle of the Escalante Desert, 137-miles downwind from a US nuclear weapons test site. The US government assured the producers that it was safe to film in the desert, however, they’d conducted 11 bomb tests just a year earlier, and the whole area was contaminated with radiation. The movie’s cast and crew spent months filming on location, unwittingly interacting with radioactive dirt, water and air.

The Conqueror (1956) John Wayne, Agnes Moorehead (Scene) . by Eddie 88

This was incredibly dangerous, and in the years after the film was made, 91 of the 220 people who worked on the movie ended up developing cancer, and 46 of them passed away from the disease. And while in the world today 1 in 2 people will get cancer in their lifetimes, the crew’s mass-diagnoses all occurred within just a couple of decades of the shoot, strongly suggesting a connection to the nuclear testing.

All in, 41% of The Conqueror’s crew eventually got cancer, and John Wayne himself died of Stomach Cancer at 72-years old. This is tragic, and it doesn’t help that The Conqueror is widely considered to be one of the worst movies ever made, meaning that the actor’s most critically panned role might’ve also taken his life. He certainly regretted taking that job.

The Exorcist: When William Friedkin Fired A Shotgun

The Exorcist is known as one of the scariest movies of all time, and the film’s success is partly owed to the innovative directing techniques used by William Friedkin. Most directors arrive on set with fold-up chairs and megaphones, however, Friedkin used a different tool while working on his movie.

During production, he started coming into work with a shotgun. During breaks in-between takes, Friedkin would fill this gun up with blanks before getting his prop master to randomly shoot it up in the air. As the actors relaxed and waited to resume shooting, this gunfire caught them by surprise, resulting in genuine screams of terror.

Even though the actors were on a break, Friedkin recorded these reactions, and used them in the movie when the characters had to react to scary moments. These realistic reactions made the movie even more terrifying, though I’m sure the actors weren’t too happy with Friedkin’s demonic antics!

Candyman: Tony Todd Filled His Mouth With Live Bees

The Exorcist isn’t the only horror movie that was terrifying to film. Candyman is a horror from 1992 that involves a titular boogeyman with a hook for a hand and a body that’s filled with bees. The producers insisted on using real bees while shooting the movie, which proved pretty horrible for the Candyman actor Tony Todd, due to a scene where bees pour out of the villain’s mouth.

The Candyman's Congregation | Candyman (1992) by Fear: The Home Of Horror

To shoot this horrifying scene, the producers used 500 real bees to fill Tony’s mouth over several different takes. The producers didn’t want Todd to get stung, so they only used bees that were 12 hours old, as they have less powerful stingers. They covered Todd in pheromones that are given off by a queen bee, which would make the bees in his mouth think that the human actor was the queen of their hive, and hence not sting him.

These precautions gave Todd a lot of protection, but he was still pretty scared of being stung, so he convinced the producers that they should pay him $1,000 for every sting he received. This turned out to be a great financial move because the bees still got pretty busy, and Todd was stung over 23 times while filming the movie. This gave the actor a nice payday on top of his regular contract, though, it's unsure $23,000 would be enough to cover the amount of therapy most would need after putting 500 bees in their mouths!

Casablanca: Small Planes, Little People

A true classic, the 1942 romantic drama Casablanca’s most famous scene involves two lovers talking on a runway, as a group of people board a plane in the background.

Rick and Ilsa - We'll Always Have Paris by Kennedy Cardoso

The dramatic scene looks like it’s taking place outdoors, however, the scene was actually shot inside a studio soundstage. This indoor space was far too small to fit a full-sized plane at the desired distanced away, so director Michael Curtiz had a smaller plywood model of the aircraft created instead for the illusion of a full-sized plane.

Unfortunately, regular extras pretending to prep the plane in the background would’ve instantly exposed the model’s true size, as they would’ve towered over it. So, Curtiz came up with the idea of casting several little-people as the extras instead, as their relative heights made the model appear as large as a full-sized aircraft.

This forced perspective trick was aided by fake fog and soft camera focus, making the plane’s true size near-impossible to make out while watching the movie. However, when Ingrid Bergman’s character eventually goes to board the plane, the camera cuts away before she can get too close to it, because if she actually approached the tiny wooden aircraft, the illusion would be shattered.

Casablanca: Humphrey Bogart's Platform Shoes

The use of forced-perspective in Casablanca’s runway scene is pretty impressive, and it isn’t the only time Michael Curtiz made something small look bigger in the movie. Back in the 1940s, Humphrey Bogart was one of Hollywood’s most popular actors. But incredibly, the star was insecure about his height, and while shooting Casablanca, he wore shoes with giant lifts to make him appear taller on screen.

Bogart was 5ft 8, and his female costar Ingrid Bergman was taller than him at 5’9, so when she wore high heels, she towered over him. As a result, Bogart was forced to wear these platform shoes to shoot certain scenes in the movie, allowing him to look down at Ingrid.

Of course, several modern actors still use custom shoes to enhance their height onscreen. Tom Cruise is only 5ft 7, so he frequently wears platform shoes or stands on a box to appear taller than his female co-stars.

Similarly, when Daniel Craig played James Bond in Quantum of Solace, the silver-tongued spy had to use platform shoes to shoot several scenes. See, Craig is actually relatively tall at 5ft 10, and his bond girl Gemma Arterton was marginally shorter than him at 5’7. However, whenever Arterton wore heels in the movie, she stood taller than Craig, so the producers put him in shoe lifts, as they claimed it looked better on-screen.

Isla Fisher Almost Drowned When Filming "Now You See Me"

Now You See Me is a 2013 movie that follows a group of magicians who use their abilities to commit heists. During the film, Isla Fisher’s character performs a trick where she’s wrapped up in chains and locked inside a tank full of water, before performing an incredible escape. The trick is pretty awesome, but it turns out, Fisher actually almost drowned while shooting it!

Now You See Me (2/11) Movie CLIP - The Piranha Tank (2013) HD by Movieclips

When the producers prepared the stunt, the tank was fitted with an emergency switch that Fisher could push to instantly empty all the water. However as she performed the stunt, she got tangled up in her chains, preventing her from reaching the switch. At this point, Fisher was stuck in the tank for real, but as she started to thrash around in the water, the crew thought she was still acting, so nobody attempted to save her.

Luckily, Fisher managed to free herself and reach the emergency switch, emptying the tank and saving her own life. Reportedly, they actually used that fateful take in the movie, so as her character bangs on the tank and screams for help, Fisher was genuinely scared for her life. Talk about a convincing performance.

Louis Eppolito, The Mafia Cop

Let’s move to another unusually realistic performance. Louis Eppolito was an ex-NYPD cop who had a brief career as an actor in the 90s. He had minor roles in movies like Predator 2, and his most famous part came in 1990 when he played a mafioso called Fat Andy in Goodfellas.

Meet the crew (Goodfellas - 1990) by Empire State Studios

His role in the movie was small, but he was arguably the best casted actor of all time, because in 2005, the police discovered that he genuinely worked for the Mafia, and the crooked cop had conducted several diabolical deeds for the Luchese and Gambino crime families.

Eppolito worked for the Mafia throughout the 90s, so it’s entirely possible that he would finish a day’s acting in Goodfellas, before leaving set and immediately taking part in some real organized crime. This is some extreme method acting, but unfortunately, the police weren’t impressed with his performance.

When Eppolito was arrested in 2005, he was sentenced to life imprisonment plus 100 years, after being charged with 8 counts of the most final crime there is. He passed away in jail back in 2019, but he's definitely secured his legacy as one of the most authentic roles in cinema.

Disney & The Lemmings Death March

Let’s stay on criminals in Hollywood, as we check out some documentary makers who committed a terrible crime to capture their footage. Nature documentaries allow us to learn more about the world around us; however, their information isn’t always entirely accurate, and there are lots of myths about animals that are passed as fact.

Lemmings are small rodents that live in arctic climates, and there’s a strange myth that claims that they will often meet their demise by leaping over the edges of cliffs in large groups, seemingly without reason. This myth is false, but back in 1958 a Disney documentary called White Wilderness claimed it was true, showing footage of lemmings jumping from a cliff into a treacherous body of water.

White Wilderness by complience

Wildlife experts immediately questioned how Disney captured the footage, before determining that their documentary makers must have forced the lemmings off the cliff. An investigation with inside sources eventually confirmed this, revealing that Disney’s producers, who had been aware of the strange myth surrounding lemmings, had told their filmmakers that they had to capture footage of the event. So, a group of lemmings was transported to the filming location, jostled on turntables, and repeatedly shoved off a cliff.

In, 1982 a Canadian investigative journalism show called The Fifth Estate publicly called Disney out for the crime, while explaining the origins of the strange lemming myth. Apparently when lemmings meet, they reproduce incredibly quickly, and their population can get ten times larger over one winter season. After this mating period, some of the lemmings will set off and try to find a new home, and they’ll follow each other over wide rivers and steep cliffs.

During these pilgrimages, lemmings will often drown and fall to their deaths, and it’s thought that people witnessing the behavior at some point wrongly assumed that the lemmings were willingly following each other to die, for no apparent reason.

This myth soon became incredibly well-known, and unfortunately, Disney went to extreme lengths to try and prove it was true. You can only wonder what other atrocities the company has committed to make their movies. To begin with, who really shot Bambi’s mom?

Found Footage: The Blair Witch Project

Let’s move onto an entire genre that’s built around lying to the audience. "Found Footage" movies are fictional films that present themselves as real documentaries, filmed by the characters in the narrative. One of the first notable found-footage movies was The Blair Witch Project, a horror that follows three students making a documentary about a witch that lives in a wood in Maryland. The students stumble across some terrifying things in the woods, and at the end of the movie, they disappear, leaving their cameras and footage behind.

The Blair Witch Project Opening by Bita Sophia

The movie came out in 1999, before anyone was familiar with found-footage movies, so the directors decided to create an elaborate marketing campaign that would make their unsuspecting audience genuinely believe the movie was real.

Each of the Blair Witch’s three actors played altered versions of themselves in the movie, using their real names. This allowed the producers to pretend that the actors were genuinely missing, by posting fake police reports, fake news reports and fake missing posters on a website.

They also listed the actors as "missing, presumed dead" online, and the cast’s contract stated that they weren’t allowed to make any public appearances until the film was released, to make sure the secret wasn’t spoiled. This campaign was so convincing, that the actors’ parents started getting concerned calls and sympathy cards from friends, who completely believed they were missing.

This meant that when the movie finally came out, a large chunk of the audience genuinely believed that they were watching a terrifying documentary. This was aided by the movie’s semi-realistic narrative, which lacked over-the-top monster-movie moments, and as a result, the movie was a box-office smash.

Of course, the secret was revealed soon after the movie’s release when the actors came out of hiding and made public appearances on TV. The producers received a lot of praise for their marketing campaign. However some people felt like they’d been tricked, and they were genuinely disappointed that the movie wasn’t real. That must’ve been tough for the actors, imagine people telling you that they’re disappointed that you’re alive.

Boring Props

When creating sci-fi or fantasy films, filmmakers often have to display weapons and vehicles that don’t exist in the real world, so the props department has to get creative and build totally new futuristic or magical items from scratch. One of the clearest examples of this creativity can be found in 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. During the movie, certain viewers noticed that some of the futuristic grenades used were incredibly familiar.

And they bore a striking resemblance to a children’s toy called an echo mic. The plastic microphone has a sphere at the top with a distinct pattern, and when you look closely at the Star Wars grenades, it’s clear that they were created by removing and spray painting the echo mic’s plastic ball.

Turning a kid’s toy into a grenade is pretty ingenious, but this creative repurposing of everyday items, like this dog toy spray-painted to look high-tech, is actually super common in cinema, and not just in Star Wars.

Back in 1992, Micheal Keaton starred in Batman Returns, and his version of the superhero wore a shiny black suit. However, this costume wasn’t as high-tech as it initially appears, because as Michael Keaton’s Batman runs around Gotham and fights petty criminals, he does it in a pair of Jordan’s. It turns out, Batman’s boots are a pair of Nike Jordan 6’s that have been painted black and customized with some shin armor.

The shoes were heavily altered, so it’s hard to spot them during the movie. However, they didn’t alter the shoe’s sole, so as Batman stomped out crime in Gotham, he did so with the iconic "Jumpman" logo. It turns out the Dark Knight was a real sneakerhead!

If you were amazed at these movie secrets, you might want to read about the biggest movie plots holes. Thanks for reading!