50 Fun Facts About Greatest Movies of All Time

Who directed and starred in Citizen Kane, number one on both American Film Institute top 100 lists?

Orson Welles made Citizen Kane as his first feature film, co-writing and producing it as well as playing the newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane.

Dorothy's ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz were what color in L. Frank Baum's original book?

Silver shoes became ruby slippers because red made a better showcase for the three-strip Technicolor process the film was shot in.

Which candy does Elliott leave in a trail to lure the alien home in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial?

Reese's Pieces got the part only after Mars refused to let M&M's appear, and the candy's sales jumped once the film opened.

Which film was wrongly announced as Best Picture at the 2017 Oscars before Moonlight was declared the winner?

La La Land's producers were midway through their acceptance speeches when the mix-up surfaced: the presenters had been handed the wrong envelope.

Who became the first African American to win an Oscar, for playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind?

Hattie McDaniel collected her award at a segregated ceremony, where she had to sit at a separate table at the side of the room.

Which actor refused his Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather, sending Sacheen Littlefeather to decline it for him?

Marlon Brando stayed away in protest at the film industry's treatment of Native Americans, and Littlefeather would not even touch the statuette.

The Shawshank Redemption, a box-office flop turned rental favorite, was adapted from a novella by which author?

Stephen King's name was mostly kept off the advertising, because the studio feared a writer known for horror would put off a prestige audience.

Which Pixar film was the first feature-length movie made entirely with computer animation?

Toy Story earned its director, John Lasseter, a Special Achievement Oscar for the techniques that made a computer-animated feature possible.

What nickname did the crew of Jaws give the mechanical shark, borrowed from Steven Spielberg's lawyer?

Bruce malfunctioned so often once salt water got into the hoses that Spielberg mostly hinted at the shark, letting the music signal its approach.

Which actor voiced Darth Vader in the original Star Wars while David Prowse wore the costume?

James Earl Jones dubbed the lines afterwards because George Lucas felt Prowse's strong West Country accent was wrong for the villain.

In Citizen Kane, the mystery of Charles Foster Kane's dying word is solved by which childhood object?

A sled, the one Kane was playing on the day he was taken from his Colorado home, is thrown into a furnace by staff who never learn what it meant.

What is the name of the ship's computer that turns on its astronaut crew in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

HAL 9000 got its calm voice from a replacement actor, hired after Stanley Kubrick decided his first choice sounded too colloquially American.

Which actor won a posthumous Oscar for playing the Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight?

Heath Ledger died months before the film opened, so his family accepted the Best Supporting Actor award on his behalf.

Which South Korean thriller made history as the first non-English-language winner of the Best Picture Oscar?

Parasite had already taken the Palme d'Or at Cannes by a unanimous jury vote before it made Academy Awards history.

Which film won all 11 Oscars it was nominated for, tying the record held by Ben-Hur and Titanic?

The Return of the King went eleven for eleven and became the first fantasy film ever to take Best Picture.

Which wartime romance stars Humphrey Bogart as an American nightclub owner who helps an old flame escape the Nazis?

Casablanca grew out of a stage play that had never been produced, yet the film went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture.

Which Best Picture winner stars Tom Hanks as an Alabama man who drifts through decades of American history?

Forrest Gump relied on extensive visual effects to slip Hanks into archived footage of real events, part of a haul of six Oscars.

Which guardian angel earns his wings by saving George Bailey in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life?

Clarence, an angel second class, changes George's mind by showing him what the world would be like if he had never existed.

Which actor won an Oscar for playing the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II?

Robert De Niro spoke mainly in Sicilian dialects for the part, delivering only a few of his lines in English.

Which Quentin Tarantino film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and revived John Travolta's career?

Pulp Fiction brought Travolta a Best Actor nomination, and the film's success reinvigorated a career that had gone quiet.

Which Steven Spielberg drama, shot mostly in black and white, picks out one little girl in a red coat?

Schindler's List was filmed without color because Spielberg wanted it to match the feel of documentary footage from the era.

Which 1991 thriller swept the Big Five Academy Awards, a feat managed only twice before?

The Silence of the Lambs took Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Adapted Screenplay, matching It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Which 1952 Gene Kelly musical pokes fun at Hollywood's awkward switch from silent films to talkies?

Singin' in the Rain is set in the late 1920s because many of its songs had been written back then, during the real changeover to sound.

Which Shakespeare play inspired the story of rival New York gangs in the musical West Side Story?

Romeo and Juliet was moved to 1950s Manhattan, with the feuding families replaced by two teenage street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks.

Which folk-rock duo recorded the soundtrack to the 1967 Dustin Hoffman film The Graduate?

Simon & Garfunkel saw their profile boosted by the film, whose soundtrack produced the hit single Mrs. Robinson.

Who wrote, directed and starred in City Lights, released without spoken dialogue after talkies had taken over?

Charlie Chaplin began the script as talking pictures were on the rise, yet gave his Tramp only a musical score and sound effects.

Which Hayao Miyazaki film follows a girl whose parents are turned into pigs by a witch?

Spirited Away shared the Golden Bear at the Berlin festival and went on to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

Which character, played by Gregory Peck in 1962, did the American Film Institute name its greatest movie hero?

Atticus Finch, the principled lawyer of To Kill a Mockingbird, also won Peck the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Which actor won an Oscar as the hot-tempered gangster Tommy DeVito in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas?

Joe Pesci's Best Supporting Actor award came out of six nominations for the film, which was also up for Best Picture and Best Director.

Which Brazilian city's slums are the setting of the 2002 crime drama City of God?

Rio de Janeiro's Cidade de Deus suburb gives the film its title, and the story follows organized crime there from the 1960s into the 1980s.

Which Alfred Hitchcock thriller set in San Francisco topped the 2012 Sight and Sound critics' poll?

Vertigo drew mixed reviews on release, yet in that poll it ended Citizen Kane's fifty-year run as the critics' number one.

Which Billy Wilder comedy with Marilyn Monroe did the American Film Institute name the funniest American movie?

Some Like It Hot topped the institute's comedy list in 2000, and a 2017 BBC poll of critics from 52 countries put it first as well.

Which Akira Kurosawa epic about villagers hiring warriors to fight bandits was remade as a 1960 Hollywood Western?

Seven Samurai returned as The Magnificent Seven, the best known of many remakes and reworkings of its story by Western filmmakers.

Which David Lean epic starring Peter O'Toole has no speaking roles for women at all?

Lawrence of Arabia may be the longest theatrical film without one: women are seen only in crowd scenes or as extras.

Which actor plays Juror 8, at first the lone vote for acquittal, in the 1957 drama 12 Angry Men?

Henry Fonda also produced the film, whose script was first produced as a television play and was inspired by a jury summons.

Which actor plays three roles, including the US president, in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove?

Peter Sellers was the studio's condition: Columbia agreed to finance the film only if he took on at least four major parts.

Which Joseph Conrad novella did Francis Ford Coppola move to the Vietnam War for Apocalypse Now?

Heart of Darkness is set in the Congo of the late 1800s, and George Lucas was originally lined up to direct the Vietnam version.

Which composer wrote the score for Sergio Leone's Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?

Ennio Morricone's music was often played on set, because Leone liked to run it over a scene to put the actors in the mood.

In Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, a medieval knight challenges Death to which game to delay his fate?

Chess buys the knight time, because he believes he can stay alive for as long as the match goes on.

Which real middleweight boxing champion is the subject of Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull?

Jake LaMotta's own 1970 memoir supplied the story, and Scorsese was reluctant to take it on until he came to relate to the fighter.

Which director appears in his own film Chinatown as the thug who slices Jack Nicholson's nose?

Roman Polanski wielded a special trick knife that could really have cut Nicholson if he had held it the wrong way round.

Which German director said the sight of New York's skyscrapers inspired his 1927 silent film Metropolis?

Fritz Lang co-wrote the film with Thea von Harbou, whose 1925 novel of the same name was written as a treatment for it.

Which city, occupied by the Allies after World War II, is the setting of the 1949 thriller The Third Man?

Vienna also supplied the famous zither score: director Carol Reed heard Anton Karas playing in the city and had him compose it.

Which director's Jeanne Dielman topped the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll, a first for any woman filmmaker?

Chantal Akerman's film had placed only 35th in the same poll ten years earlier before leaping to first place.

Which Japanese director made Tokyo Story, voted the greatest film ever in a 2012 Sight and Sound directors' poll?

Yasujirō Ozu loosely adapted the 1937 American film Make Way for Tomorrow, which he had not even seen; his co-writer suggested the plot.

The famous staircase massacre in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is set in which Black Sea port?

Odessa's great stairway is now also called the Potemkin Stairs, although the massacre never took place there as the film portrays it.

Which star of the silent era plays the faded actress Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard?

Gloria Swanson's character is a recluse who pulls a struggling screenwriter into her fantasy of a triumphant return to the screen.

Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, shot on location with untrained actors, is the best-known film of which movement?

Neorealism began informally with Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City and brought a new degree of realism to Italian cinema.

Which French New Wave director made his debut with The 400 Blows, about a troubled Paris schoolboy?

François Truffaut based the boy, Antoine Doinel, partly on himself, and the film became his biggest success in France.

Which Italian director titled his 1963 film 8½ after counting up the films he had made so far?

Federico Fellini reckoned it was his eight-and-a-halfth picture, a self-referential title for a story about a director.