We asked the BuzzFeed Community to tell us the coolest and weirdest facts they know about Old Hollywood. Here are the wild results.
1.When child actors misbehaved on sets, they were sometimes sent to "the black box" and were forced to sit on a block of ice as punishment.
2.During a scene in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Bette Davis kicked Joan Crawford so hard that she needed stitches. Crawford retaliated by putting "weights in her pockets so that when Davis had to drag Crawford's near lifeless body she strained her back."
3.Buster Keaton fractured his neck while performing a stunt in Sherlock Jr., but he didn't realize it until years later.
4.Gene Kelly insulted Debbie Reynolds' dancing so constantly while filming Singin' in the Rain that she once hid from everyone under a piano, crying.
5.In Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, live birds were tied to Tippi Hedren and also thrown at her while filming the iconic attic scene.
6.Lilies of the Field was shot in only 14 days and had such a small budget that Sidney Poitier gave up his usual salary in order to make the film.
7.Margaret Hamilton, aka the Wicked Witch, suffered second-degree burns on her face and third-degree burns on her hand when a stunt went wrong in The Wizard of Oz.
8.Lon Chaney, who played the title characters in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, did his own makeup for the roles.
9.In Meet Me in St. Louis, Margaret O'Brien's mother would get her to cry on command while filming the sad scenes by telling her that her rival actor on the MGM lot was a better crier than her.
10.Cleopatra was one of the most expensive movies to ever be made. It had an original budget of $5 million, but after two years the film still wasn't finished, and more money kept being put into it, totaling over $370 million by today's standards.
11.The Cowardly Lion costume from The Wizard of Oz was made of real lion hair.
12.In It's a Wonderful Life, writer-director Frank Capra helped create a new type of artificial snow because the current movie method (using Cornflakes that were painted white) was too noisy when the actors had to walk in scenes.
13.And in The Wizard of Oz, the "snowstorm" that took place wasn't made of snow or cornflakes either. It was asbestos.
14.Humphrey Bogart was two inches shorter than Ingrid Bergman, so he reportedly had to stand on boxes and sit on cushions to appear taller in Casablanca.
15.While filming Move Over Darling, James Garner picked up Doris Day from the ground and accidentally broke two of her ribs.
16.Hattie McDaniel was the first black person to be nominated for an Oscar, but in 1940 the hotel that hosted the awards had a strict "no blacks" policy. Gone with the Wind's producer had to call in a special favor just so McDaniel could enter the building. That night, she won the Oscar.
17.The actors who played Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz were only paid $50 a week, while Toto the dog was paid $125 per week.
18.In Miracle on 34th Street, actor John Payne, who played Fred Gailey, loved the movie so much that he actually wrote a sequel to the Christmas classic when he was older.
19.In It's a Wonderful Life, the whole holiday picture was actually shot in the summer of 1946, and it occasionally got so hot that production literally had to be shut down for a few days.
20.Buddy Ebsen was the original Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, but the aluminum dust from the makeup nearly killed him, and he was quickly replaced by Jack Haley.
21.The release of Psycho marked the first time a flushing toilet had ever been featured on screen before, and the movie censors almost didn't let it happen.
22.Some of the most iconic sets from King Kong were destroyed to film the burning of Atlanta scene in Gone with the Wind.
23.And Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland were forced by the studio to take pep pills + sleeping pills so they could work 72 hours straight and then crash for a few hours before filming more scenes.
