10 Fascinating Hollywood Stories You Didn't Know
The one about werewolf apes, for a start.
Not only is truth stranger than fiction, there are fewer clichés. In Hollywood, a town that runs on clichés, what goes on behind the scenes of most movies is usually more interesting than the pictures themselves.
On the set of Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf, director Philippe Mora, shooting in Soviet-controlled Prague, was constantly yelling “Clit!” – the Czech word for “shut up” – at his local crew. When the werewolf suits arrived, Mora realized they weren’t specially commissioned wolf costumes, like he’d asked for, they were ape suits left over from Planet Of The Apes. Phoning the producers in a blind panic, he explained he couldn’t be expected to substitute apes for lycanthropes. “People might notice the difference,” he said.
The film’s star, Christopher Lee, jokingly proposed a solution: he’d give a speech where he explained that the characters transformed into apes before becoming werewolves. Mora turned him down, and all the werewolf scenes were shot later in the production - using cheap-looking rubber masks.
It’s too bad that Mora never captured those scenes for a documentary, because Howling II’s Making Of would be as screamingly funny as the movie itself. More so, because all the laughs would be intentional.
There are many such stories in Tinseltown. Here are 10 more.
10. That's Demi Moore On The Poster For I Spit On Your Grave
It’s never been acknowledged publicly, but according to Charles Band, the fast and cheap mastermind who produced Metalstorm: The Destruction Of Jared Syn and Ghoulies, Demi Moore admitted as much to him in the early 80s.
The pair met on the set of 1982’s Parasite, the 3D Alien rip-off that gave the actress her first leading role. The way Band remembers it, they were chatting in his office, where he just happened to have the I Spit On Your Grave poster on his wall. Noticing it, Moore said, “Don’t tell anybody, but that’s me up there…”
She’d done a model photo shoot when she was 18, not knowing what it was for, and was surprised to herself plastered across video boxes and billboards, advertising a film Roger Ebert described as “so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can barely believe it’s playing in respectable theatres.”
The picture’s lead actress, Camille Keaton, has always denied that it was her on the poster, so if true it has has to rank among Hollywood’s worst kept secrets.