Jean G

Shore Leave - S1-E16

Trivia: William Shatner recalls having a "lame-brained" attack of bravado during "Shore Leave's" filming and insisting that Kirk should wrestle the tiger - without a stunt double. Gene Roddenberry finally convinced him that he was much too valuable to the show to risk his life for a stunt. Thirty years later on a Sci Fi Channel special, Shatner said, "Thank you, Gene, for preventing me from becoming a hair ball!"

Jean G

Shore Leave - S1-E16

Trivia: Because Theodore Sturgeon's original script for "Shore Leave" was so complex, many scenes were too expensive to film. Gene Roddenberry had to hastily rewrite many of these minutes before they were shot, resulting in some segments that were ad-libbed because the rewrites hadn't been completed. McCoy's "distracted" scene with Yeoman Barrows is one of these.

Jean G

Trivia: This was David Niven's final film. He was so ill during production that his lines throughout most of the movie had to be overdubbed by impersonator Rich Little.

Jean G

Trivia: The Silence of the Lambs is the only horror movie ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture.

Jean G

Trivia: The role of Hannibal Lecter was originally offered to Sean Connery, who turned it down.

Jean G

Trivia: This is the first fantasy film ever to win a Best Picture Oscar. It also tied records set by Ben-Hur and Titanic in winning all 11 Oscar awards for which it was nominated. Of the three, it is the only film to have won in all the categories it was nominated for.

Jean G

Trivia: Audrey Hepburn was fluent in English, French, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish and Italian. She served with the Dutch Resistance in WWII - at the tender age of 15.

Jean G

Trivia: The character of Jonathan is referred to several times in the film as a thug who "looks like Boris Karloff." This was an in-joke referring to the fact that Karloff played the role of Jonathan in the original Broadway production of Arsenic and Old Lace..

Jean G

Trivia: Because he'd been blacklisted by the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) in 1953, co-writer Dalton Trumbo's name didn't appear in the credits for this film until its DVD release in 2003.

Jean G

Trivia: The Patriot was one of several movies (including A Knight's Tale) in 2000 that became part of a major lawsuit against Sony. The studio had invented a fictitious film critic named David Manning, who naturally wrote glowing reviews of all its films. In 2005, the studio finally settled out of court and agreed to refund $5 to every theater goer who'd been duped by "Manning." How many ever took advantage of the offer was never disclosed.

Jean G

Trivia: One of the guests announced by the crier at the king's ball is "The Count Henri de Mancini," an in-joke tribute to noted film composer Henry Mancini.

Jean G

Trivia: Gene Wilder declined a role in Catch 22 in order to make this film.

Jean G

Trivia: Originally slated to be filmed in Czechoslovakia, this movie ended up being shot on location in France instead, when the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia intervened.

Jean G

Loud as a Whisper - S2-E5

Trivia: Closed captioning, in its infancy in the 80s, often dropped words and letters by accident. In the original broadcast of this episode, the captioning of Riva's line, "We could dine together," lost an N, resulting in a rather bizarre exchange. Riva: We could die together. Troi: I'd like that.

Jean G

Trivia: This was the first US TV series ever to resolve its story line and air a definitive ending, despite network objections that doing so could harm its syndication revenue. The 2-hour finale, "The Judgment," garnered the highest TV ratings ever up to that time, a record it held for many years afterward.

Jean G

Trivia: The correct Russian spelling of Illya's name should be "Ilya," with only one L. But series creator Sam Rolfe chose the name as an homage to Illya, the Greek character in Never on Sunday, and retained the Greek spelling. "Kuryakin" came from the Greek word for Sunday, "Kyriaki."

Jean G

Trivia: More than a dozen writers worked on various versions of the Oz script. Some of their "original" ideas that were (thankfully) scrapped: an opera-singing Princess Betty of Oz; a stupid son for the Wicked Witch with ambitions to be King of Oz; and a budding romance between Dorothy and one of the farmhands. For a while, the Wicked Witch was to be glamorous (a la Disney's witch in Snow White), but fortunately, saner heads prevailed and kept her as L. Frank Baum had originally written her.

Jean G

Trivia: During filming, Toto was accidentally stepped on by one of the Witch's guards, and had to be replaced for several days with a look-alike. Other on-set accidents included two winged monkey actors who fell when their support wires snapped, and Margaret Hamilton being severely burned when the elevated platform that made her disappear from Munchkinland in a puff of smoke malfunctioned.

Jean G

Camera Obscura - S2-E36

Trivia: The closing scenes were shot through green-gold filters to give the streets a drab, hellish appearance. An appalled film lab technician tried to dye the sequence pink, and defied the director's order to "leave it green." NBC, the lab tech argued, would never accept those scenes because this was supposed to be color television. After demanding several re-dos, the director won the shouting match, the green prevailed, and NBC, apparently, never noticed.

Jean G

Mr. Neutron - S4-E5

Trivia: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's author Douglas Adams appears in this episode as "the pepperpot with the missile." He also co-wrote (with Graham Chapman) the "patient abuse" sketch for the final episode.

Jean G