29 Interesting Film Prop Facts!

29 interesting film prop facts from Tinseltown! Enjoy!

1. Chocolate syrup was used as the blood in the shower scene from Psycho – because the film is in black and white, the color difference wasn’t a problem!

2. In the book, the famous Ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz are in fact silver. One pair of the slippers (of which there are thought to be four) from the film raised $666,000 at auction in 2000.

3. James Cameron drew the charcoal picture of a nude Kate Winslet featured in Titanic.

4. In Rocky, the lead character points out a mistake on a banner at the match venue. This line wasn’t scripted; Sly had to do this as the art department had made a genuine mistake!

5. The design of the carpet in Sid’s hallway in Toy Story is almost identical to one of the hotel corridor carpets in The Shining.

6. The mask used by Michael Myers in Halloween was a Captain Kirk mask painted white.

7. The faeces used in the iconic toilet scene in Trainspotting was actually made out of chocolate, and apparently smelt delicious.

8. A real horse’s head (purchased from a local dog-food factory) was used for the iconic scene in The Godfather. John Marley wasn’t told that the plastic prop that they had been using had been replaced, and therefore his reaction is real!

9. In Highlander, the swords were made to spark by wires which ran down the actors’ sleeves and were connected to car batteries. Dangerous, anyone…?

10. The fake testicles from Step Brothers cost $20,000 to make

11. The green sick in The Exorcist is Andersen’s Pea Soup. The crew initially went with Campbell’s soup, but weren’t too happy with how it looked.

12. Coconuts were used not just for comedy value in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – the filmmakers couldn’t afford to hire horses.

13. Director Sam Raimi has a ‘lucky car’ which he has used in every one of his films – even his western The Quick and the Dead, set before cars were even invented.

14. The apple pie in American Pie was actually purchased from Costco.

15. Some of the props used in the 2005 version of King Kong – including spears, a shield and drums – were original props from the 1933 film which Peter Jackson himself actually owned.

16. The mechanical shark used in Jaws was nicknamed Bruce.

17. The cake in the movie Sixteen Candles is actually made out of cardboard.

18. In one single afternoon, three $300,000 Aston Martins were destroyed whilst filming Casino Royale.

19. In The 40 Year Old Virgin, Steve Carell’s character has his chest hair removed. Amazingly, it was NOT a prop – it was his real hair! The scene had to be filmed in one take, and five cameras were set up to capture the action.

20. The costumes for wonderfully eerie stop-motion film Coraline were all knitted by Althea Crome using miniature needles – some of them took six months to make!

21. Jim Carrey found his Grinch make-up to be so confining that he received special counselling on torture resistant techniques from a US Navy Seal.

22. The Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz was originally played by an actor called Buddy Ebsen, however he had to be replaced after being hospitalised – he had an allergic reaction to the aluminium powder in his make-up.

23. The make-up budget for Planet of the Apes totalled 17% of the entire movie’s production cost.

24. The wookie costumes in Star Wars are made from 100% human hair.

25. In preparation for his role in X-Men: First Class, James McAvoy shaved his head. However, it turned out that the director wanted his character to have a full head of hair, and so he had to wear extensions for the first month of shooting.

26. Pennywise’s hair in “It” was in fact actor Tim Curry’s real hair.

27. Harrison Ford kept himself in such good shape between 1989 and 2008 that his costume measurements for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull were exactly the same as they were when he filmed The Last Crusade 20 years before!

28. The killer’s robe in Scream was originally intended to be white, but the director changed it because it looked too similar to a Ku Klux Klan outfit.

29. Part of the costume worn by Edward Scissorhands was made from an old sofa from Tim Burton’s first apartment

Taken from The Amazing Book of Movie Trivia by Jack Goldstein which you can buy from Amazon