20 Things You Didn't Know About O Brother, Where Art Thou?
13. The KKK Extras Were Mostly African Americans
The baptism may have been the hardest, but undoubtedly the strangest scene to film in the movie was the Ku Klux Klan rally in the third act.
The sequence required 350 extras, courtesy of a military formation troupe, to march in unison dressed in the distinctive pointy hoods and cloaks of the ridiculously-clad racists. It was shot in Los Angeles right beneath the flight path into Van Nuys airport, leading the cast to speculate over what passengers on incoming flights might be imagining was going on.
The formation troupe was largely made up of African American soldiers, meaning that many of the movie's Klansmen were actually black beneath their hoods.
Looking back on the production of the movie, Joel Coen recalled lines of black performers waiting at portaloos and craft tables holding Klan hoods. "This is the freakiest thing," he remembered one of these extras saying to another.
Yes, Spike Lee may have given us a Black Klansman in 2018, but there were already plenty in O Brother, Where Art Thou? almost two decades earlier.