18 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About '90s Movies That Are Ridiculously Interesting

Years later, cast and crew are more apt to spill the tea.

Movie lovers know that a movie is only part of a work of art. The story of how the film came to be and the people who made it are just as much part of the lore as the story they tell.

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Nowadays, we know all the tea about what's going on while movies film courtesy of interviews, social media, and more.

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That wasn't the case in the '90s, however. Movies were made in the midst of total chaos, with hot goss aplenty and nowhere for it to go.

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Here are some juicy details about major movie titles from the '90s that you may have missed when it was all going down.

1. Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen — who served as producers on Twilight — threw the house party in Swingers to help Jon Favreau save money on production (and Mike White and Adam Scott were there).

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"They wanted people to stick around so they could have the liveliness of a real party. They provided booze. Maybe too much booze," White told Grantland. 

Scott added, "I was at that party. We would see them walking around, shooting these little scenes. And we had no idea what it was they were doing."

"I remember them shooting, and I actually thought, at the time, 'This is so embarrassing for them,'" White added. "The cast and crew saw us as just background to the movie, but from our perspective, it was a real party. It wasn’t like I was an extra."

2. Bruce Willis was responsible for M. Night Shyamalan's first hangover — while filming The Sixth Sense.

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"Bruce definitely introduced me to the notion of partying and letting loose. Back in those days, he was a big DJ and the parties were super fun. He definitely gave me my first hangover," Shyamalan told Variety of the incident. "He’d always keep giving me shots that he kept calling 'candy': 'Here’s candy, here’s candy.' And then the next morning I could not get off the sofa. And I didn’t know what this throbbing pain in my head was. He was just laughing his butt off."

3. Cameron Crowe had Tom Hanks in mind for Jerry Maguire.

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Hanks enjoyed working with Jerry Maguire producer James L. Brooks on Big and wanted to work with him again. He was also a fan of Crowe's Say Anything, so it made sense that the three discussed teaming up on Jerry Maguire.

"The idea was, let’s not be slaves to writing this as a Tom Hanks in capital letters movie, but let’s have Tom Hanks on our minds as a guy who would play Jerry Maguire. So we were kind of developing it for him, based on us knowing he really wanted to do something with us," he told Deadline in 2017.

"But as Hanks got more and more into that white-hot heat of superstardom, I always did think, well, if Tom Hanks doesn’t do this, who would be the dream Jerry Maguire? More and more over time, that was Tom Cruise. I really felt that in my gut."

4. Alan Cumming based his prosthetics in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion off of some major '90s stars.

Alan Cumming in the makeup chair on the set of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997)
by u/Str33twise84 in Moviesinthemaking

Alan Cumming / Via alancumming.com

"The makeup in the dream sequence was funny because I got to choose: I had Alec Baldwin's lips, Brad Pitt's chin, somebody else's forehead. I made this amalgam of handsome Hollywood hunks on my face and attached it to my body," Cumming told InStyle in 2017.

Added costar Lisa Kudrow, "I don't know how long [Alan] spent with the prosthetic chin. I was like, 'Why'd you have to have that?'"

5. According to writer Steven Brill, the original script for The Mighty Ducks contained two Black characters.

Disney

"The biggest thing that changed was that Casey, who was Bombay’s love interest, and Charlie Conway were African-American in the first script that I wrote. It was just a factor that I put in there, an interracial romance. It didn’t change because I was told to change it. It just changed as a natural evolution of the script," Brill told The Hockey News. "There wasn’t a social message that was necessary to put through with this movie. It sort of overwhelmed everything else. It felt a little stuck in there. I might've actually changed that in the first draft that Disney saw, but as a young writer, I was trying to put more issues and elements into the piece."

6. During tests of Love Jones, Black female viewers responded that the rain scene was unrealistic.

New Line Cinema

Writer/director Theodore Witcher told the Los Angeles Times. "My idea was that he was so committed to trying to convince her to be with him that the fact that they were standing in a downpour didn't matter to him. So focused was he on her that he was completely oblivious to the rain. But perhaps I strained credibility a little too far, because we tested the movie, and all of the test cards from black women in the audience made note of the fact that they didn't buy that a black woman, with her hair, would stand in the rain for anybody or anything."  

"On the one hand, I thought that was [messed] up, and on the other hand, I was mad at myself because I thought it was a failure that if I haven't locked you into this movie by this point such that some minor plot inconsistency is taking you out of the movie, then I have failed as a filmmaker. Apparently, for black women, the rain was a bridge too far."

The studio wanted to reshoot the scene which "really upset" Witcher. "I remember getting those cards back and reading comment after comment after comment about the hair and I was, like, 'The ... hair? Are you kidding me? Really? Her hair?' Apparently, 'Yes. Really, ...yes, her hair. Get it right. Yes.'"

7. There was originally a romance between Dottie and Jimmy in A League of Our Own.

Columbia Pictures

Lowell Ganz said that he and co-screenwriter Babaloo Mandel "kicked that to the curb."

"We shot some of the stuff, but it just tainted the movie. It was predictable. We wanted to take the high road," Mandel told Rolling Stone.

Ganz agreed, adding, "It felt like, 'Well, you’ve got Tom Hanks, and you’ve got Geena Davis, so you should do something with that.' But it looked obligatory. And as Babaloo said, it was a waste of time.'"

8. Will Smith broke the stunned silence on the set of Independence Day after the cast and crew listened in to the O.J. Simpson verdict while on set.

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Bill Pullman told The Hollywood Reporter, "We were in base camp waiting for a shot when they announced the verdict to the O.J. Simpson trial on the radio. It was right then they knocked on the door. 'Let’s go to set.' "People were walking in small groups and no one was talking. Everyone is processing quietly and we got on the set. And it’s still quiet. We are waiting for Roland (Emmerich, the film's director)."

"And then Will said, 'Woah, standing out here with a lot of angry white folks!' (Laughs.) Everybody burst into laughter. He just totally took the tension right out of the room."

9. Castle Rock was originally behind Good Will Hunting, but Ben Affleck and Matt Damon explored other options after realizing execs weren't reading their script edits.

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"We were so frustrated that Castle Rock wasn’t reading the script, so we felt like we had to develop this test. We started writing in screen direction like, 'Sean talks to Will and unloads his conscience.' And then: 'Will takes a moment and then gives Sean a soulful look, and leans in and starts blowing him,'" Ben Affleck told Boston Magazine.

Damon agreed, "They weren’t reading the script closely anymore. It was literally probably a full paragraph about what these two characters were doing to each other."

"We would turn that in, and they wouldn’t ever mention all those scenes where Sean and Will were jerking each other off," Affleck recalled.

10. Four Weddings and a Funeral almost had very different titles that gave the film different vibes than we've come to know.

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"Our US distributor Gramercy had some bad ideas for new titles. Rolling In The Aisles is the one I remember. There was also Loitering In Sacred Places," writer Richard Curtis told Deadline. "The statement I recall was ‘only women like weddings and no one likes funerals so you’ve only got a quarter of the audience’. We almost called the film The Best Man."

11. "There were a lot of hookups" during the filming of Dazed & Confused, producer Jonathan Burkhart told The Ringer.

Gramercy Pictures

"Milla Jovovich and Shawn Andrews were always stoned and staring into each other’s eyes. They were always making out. Always," he dished.

Casting exec Catherine Avril Morris added, "They had a long row of individual cast member trailers, and Milla and Shawn were just doin’ it every night. Because all of our trailers were connected, they would all be rocking."

12. Reese Witherspoon worked with writer/director Roger Kumble to develop Annette's character in Cruel Intentions.

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"She loved the movie for me, but it wasn't a great part at the time for her. She helped Roger turn it into one," Ryan Phillippe told Entertainment Weekly of the conversations with his then-girlfriend about the film.

Kumble agreed, saying, "It's true, she came and sat with me for a week, and we worked on the dialogue together. Annette was the character most removed from me. There's no way the movie would have its success if it weren't for [Reese's] talent as a writer."

As Witherspoon recalled, "I remember finding Annette too demure and too much of a woman influenced by a guy's manipulations. I was starting what I guess became my bigger mission in life — of questioning why women were written certain ways on film."

13. Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted the accents of the Cool Runnings cast to sound more like Sebastian from The Little Mermaid.

DIsney

Director Jon Turteltaub told The Guardian, "The lead actors – Leon Robinson, Doug E Doug, Malik Yoba and Rawle Lewis – had such perfect Jamaican accents that there was a fear non-Jamaicans wouldn’t understand them." 

"Jeffrey Katzenberg, then chairman of Walt Disney Studios, was getting very frustrated and I began to worry he’d fire me if I couldn’t get them to speak the way Sebastian the crab did in The Little Mermaid," he recalled. "But instead of coming up with some fancy, directorial reason why they should lessen the Jamaican accent while representing the dignity of their Caribbean heritage, I just mumbled: 'I’m going to get fired if you don’t sound like Sebastian.' They laughed and saved my job, doing so without compromising their authenticity."

14. Writer/director Amy Heckerling was picturing the Beastie Boys' Adam Horovitz when writing the role of Josh in Clueless.

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"[Casting Josh] was the hardest. I had a vision in my head and it wasn’t jelling with people out there," she told Vanity Fair. "When I’m writing, I usually have little pictures of what I imagine the guy looking like. And I had the Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz. There was something smart and funny about him."

15. Harvey Keitel recruited Bruce Willis to be in Pulp Fiction after picking his daughter up from a playdate at Willis' home.

Miramax, Miraxmax

"He mentioned that Quentin Tarantino was getting ready to do another film," Willis told Vanity Fair. "It was so far ahead of anything."

Keitel introduced the two at a barbecue at his home, with Willis interested in Travolta's role and Tarantino having Matt Dillon in mind for Butch, the boxer. When Dillon passed, Willis was in.

16. Steve Zahn, Tom Everett Scott, and all overslept on the same day of filming That Thing You Do! disappointing Tom Hanks.

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Scott recalled to The Ringer, "Tom said to me and John, Steve, Ethan and Liv, 'This is my golden rule: be on time and know your lines. If you can do that, everything will take care of itself.'"

"​​I remember we were late once. We were all kind of straggling in 10 minutes late," Zahn shared.

"Steve overslept, I overslept, and coincidentally Johnny overslept. The weirdest day to oversleep, Scott said. "Gary takes us aside, he’s like 'OK, you can never be late, Tom’s very disappointed.' That’s all we needed to hear. Never late again."

"I’ve never been late since then. Not one time," Zahn added.

17. Writer/producer George Zaloom got trolled after the release of Encino Man.

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"I had heard these stories: 'If your movie does well, be prepared. You could get a huge payday.' I think it was a week or two after the movie came out. We get this call: 'Jeffrey (Katzenberg, then chairman of Walt Disney Studios) wants to see you upstairs.'” 

Zaloom thought he and the film's director Les Mayfield were going to get that payday, but that wasn't quite it.

"He was like, 'Guys, I got a little surprise for you.' I’m thinking, 'Is it a hundred thousand? Is it a million? Maybe it’s a car,'" Zaloom told Inverse.

"Jeffrey gets up, opens the door. And it’s Goofy! Like, Goofy from the park strollers. Jeffrey’s like, 'Hey, Goofy!' And Goofy gives him a nod, and this big white hand pats Jeffrey on the head. He’s like, 'Guys. Goofy has something for you.' And from behind his back, [Goofy] whips out two envelopes. They’re super thick. It’s like one of those mob movies where they slide the envelope full of cash over the table."

Zaloom continued, "I took the envelope and I put it in my pocket. Jeffrey’s like, 'No, no, come on. Open it up.' 'OK. We’ll open them up.' It’s got to be hundreds of thousands of dollars. I open it up and I pull the money out. It's Disney dollars! The look on my entire face — I was like, 'It’s Disney dollars!' He was like, 'Yeah, you can spend these at the park!'”

18. Chris Tucker and Faizon Love tried ducking out of the Friday screening at Howard University because they thought everyone was going to hate it.

New Line Cinema

"They sent Chris and me to Howard University to premiere it. We go there and we watch it and we’re like, 'Ay, let’s get the fuck out of here before the movie ends,'" Love told Vulture. 

"As we’re leaving, the lady that’s running it stops us, like, 'Where you guys going?' We hear the crowd erupt, like 'Aaahhhh!' We were like, 'Damn, do they want their money back? What the fuck?' They loved the movie—they started clapping and wanted us to sign autographs."

What other '90s flicks have some major tea around them? Share in the comments!