19 Wildly Juicy Events In '00s Movie History That Are All But Forgotten Today
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1.Johnny Depp and Mark Wahlberg both turned down the chance to join George Clooney in the cast of 2001's Ocean's Eleven. Speaking at the 2023 TCM Classic Film Festival, Clooney said, "Some very famous people told us to fuck right off. Mark Wahlberg, Johnny Depp. There were others. They regret it now."
Both Depp and Wahlberg were in talks to play the role of Linus, which eventually went to Matt Damon. As Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman said, "Big mistake! Big! Huge!" Ocean's Eleven went on to gross $451 million and spawn three sequels.
2.Bill Murray was replaced by Bernie Mac in the Charlie's Angels sequel Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle because there was a lot of on-set drama with Murray. Director McG claimed that Murray headbutted him, describing it as “square in the head. An inch lower and my nose would have been obliterated." Murray has vehemently denied this, saying, "That’s complete crap! I don’t know why he made that story up. He has a very active imagination.”
Murray also allegedly told co-star Lucy Liu that she couldn’t act, and she supposedly responded by throwing punches. Murray, when asked about this, said, “I will dismiss you completely if you are unprofessional and working with me. … When our relationship is professional and you’re not getting that done, forget it.”
Lui herself later discussed the incident on the Los Angeles Times' Asian Enough podcast. She said they were preparing to film a scene when "Bill starts to sort of hurl insults. ... Some of the language was inexcusable and unacceptable, and I was not going to just sit there and take it. So, yes, I stood up for myself, and I don’t regret it. Because no matter how low on the totem pole you may be or wherever you came from, there’s no need to condescend or to put other people down. And I would not stand down, and nor should I have."
3.Mark Wahlberg may have passed on Ocean's Eleven, but he desperately wanted to win the film rights to the Fifty Shades of Grey book series — but was outbid by Universal Pictures and Focus Features. Wahlberg was furious about the missed opportunity, saying at the Hollywood Reporter's Producers Roundtable, "We were aware of the book from very early on, and we were close to securing the rights, and then we get into this bidding war. ... We were so close to having it. That was one of the few times I was going to fire Ari (Emanuel, his agent)."
Interestingly, Wahlberg only wanted to produce the films and had no interest in playing Christian Grey. Instead, he hoped to cast Brad Pitt in the role.
4.Eliza Dushku and Jesse Bradford were arrested — and jailed! — while on a trip to Tijuana in the middle of filming the 2000 cheerleading opus Bring It On. Director Peyton Reed told BuzzFeed, "Eliza and Jesse and a couple of the cheerleaders decided to cross the border into Mexico and party, and they ended up in a Mexican jail and had to be bailed out."
"It was before one of the outdoor scenes — I think it was the car wash scene — they barely made it to set," Reed continued.
Executive Producer Max Wong told MTV News, “[They] were on the beach drinking and got arrested and thrown into Mexican jail. And at some point, Eliza and a couple of the actors felt like they were in so much danger they decided to make themselves less attractive [by] using lipstick to draw all over their faces. I don’t know how that worked, but that was their strategy.”
Dushku added, "There may have been an incident in TJ one weekend, but we got ourselves out of it. ... I am quite a negotiator. I would admit there was an incident, but we got out in that turquoise convertible VW beetle and were back for work on time."
5.In 2006, a Chinese billionaire named Jon Jiang set out to make a big-budget, Hollywood-style blockbuster called Empires of the Deep — about a human and mermaid who fall in love — but things did not go well...at all. The screenplay went through 40 drafts and 10 screenwriters, actors (like Sharon Stone and Monica Bellucci) signed on and then ran for the hills, directors came and went, and — after a troubled shoot — the movie has spent years mired in post-production hell.
It's now 2023 and, other than uninspiring trailers released in 2010, 2012, and 2016, Empires of the Deep has yet to see the light of day (and likely never will). Jiang is believed to have spent $130 million on his unreleased extravaganza.
6.Tom Cruise earned $100 million for his work on 2005's War of the Worlds, a figure that — when adjusted for inflation — is closer to $150 million today. How did he earn so much? By taking a lower salary up front in exchange for a significant portion of the film's first dollar gross, essentially betting on himself and the film.
Cruise did the same thing on Top Gun: Maverick, and took home another nine-figure pay day for that film, too!
Something interesting to point out about this — while lots of stars ask for a percentage of their film's backend, meaning they get to share in the profits of the film once its earnings have exceeded the studio's costs, Cruise's deals start paying out the first day the film appears in theaters, regardless of whether it ends up in the red or not.
7.Colin Farrell says Miami Vice was the last film he made while still using drugs and alcohol, and he has no memory of making it. "I couldn’t remember a single frame of doing it. I was at the premiere and didn’t know what was happening next. But it was strange because I was in it."
He added, "The second (the movie) was finished, I was put on a plane and sent to rehab as everyone else was going to the wrap party.”
Thankfully, today Farrell is sober and experiencing a high point in his career, having just earned a Best Actor nomination at the Academy Awards for his performance in The Banshees of Inisherin. And while a lot of the film takes place in a pub, Farrell drank nothing but non-alcoholic Guinness 0 in those scenes.
"Guinness 0, thank God for it," Farrell remarked to Irish Central.
8.Legally Blonde had to dump its original ending after test audiences hated the film's last five minutes. How did the movie originally end, you ask? Well, it had Reese Witherspoon's Elle kissing Luke Wilson's Emmett, then cut to a year in the future where Elle and a now-blonde Vivian (Selma Blair) hand out Blonde Legal Defense Fund pamphlets on campus.
Cowriter Karen McCullah told Entertainment Weekly, “The test-screening audience didn’t feel like it was an exciting enough ending for her, success-wise." So, the filmmaking team brainstormed the more satisfying graduation speech ending.
They soon gathered the cast for reshoots, and if you look closely at the new graduation ending and compare it to the rest of the film, you'll notice Witherspoon's hair is redder. This is because she was in the middle of shooting another film, The Importance of Being Earnest, when she did the reshoots.
You might also notice Luke Wilson's hair doesn't quite look the same. He had to wear a wig because he'd recently shaved his head while filming The Royal Tenenbaums.
9.Bill Hader based Officer Slater — the character he played in the 2007 comedy Superbad — on a real-life cop who arrested him when he was a teenager after a prank went wrong. He told Jimmy Kimmel last week that when making the film, he mentioned to Seth Rogan, his co-star and the film's co-writer, that "I got messed with by a cop with glasses,' and Seth was like, 'Oh yeah, that's, like, so lame. I can't take a cop with glasses seriously!'"
The prank, by the way, entailed tying fishing wire to trash cans on opposite sides of the street, and then waiting for a car to drive through the wire, causing the cans to swing into the street and smack into each other.
Unfortunately for Hader — or fortunately, since the experience inspired his Superbad performance — the first car to pass by was a police car.
"It scared the shit out of this cop," Hader said, adding that the officer slammed on his brakes while all of his friends took off running. Hader, however, tried to play it cool. "So, I went over to my car and was just smoking a cigarette, like, 'Hey, what happened, officer?'"
He may have been a future award-winning thespian, but he didn't fool the seriously pissed off cop who arrested him.
10.The up-and-coming but largely still unknown actor Kel O'Neill spent weeks playing Eli Sunday in 2007's There Will Be Blood until he was fired and replaced by Paul Dano.
If you dig around the internet, you will see people claim O’Neill lost the job because he was intimidated acting opposite a powerhouse like Daniel Day-Lewis. But that’s a claim that has been denied by Day-Lewis, director Paul Thomas Anderson, and O’Neill himself.
According to O’Neill, he could tell after a couple days of filming that something wasn’t working. “You know,” he told Vulture. “You just know.” Being fired put O’Neill off acting, and he soon transitioned into a successful career as a documentarian.
As for recasting the role of Eli Sunday, Anderson found his replacement right there on set. He asked Paul Dano, who was already playing Eli Sunday’s brother Paul, to play Eli as well. To facilitate this, slight tweaks were made to the script to make it clear the brothers were identical twins.
11.Russell Crowe is most famous for his Academy Award-winning performance as Maximus, but he recently revealed he almost dropped out of the film because he thought the script "was rubbish, absolute rubbish."
His biggest complaint? "Strange sequences" and scenes where the chariots that gladiators ride had advertisements for things like olive oil on them. The advertisements were inspired by historical fact — gladiators did have endorsement deals — but Crowe thought modern audiences would say, and I quote, "What the fuck is all this?"
Crowe confesses, "I did think a couple times, ‘Maybe my best option is just to get on a plane and get out of here.’ It was my continued conversations with Ridley (director Ridley Scott) that sort of gave me faith.”
Crowe says Scott promised him they wouldn't film any scenes he didn't believe in 100%. "So, when we actually started that film, we had 21 pages of script that we agreed on. A script is usually between 103 or 104 or 110 pages. So, we had a long way to go, and we basically used up those pages in the first section of the movie. So, by the time we got to our second location, which was Morocco, we were sort of catching up.”
12.Speaking of Gladiator, it's finally getting a sequel next year starring Paul Mescal as Lucius, but in the 2000s, Crowe — despite his character Maximus dying in the original — tried to spearhead a frankly batshit sequel that would follow Maximus as he entered the afterlife.
In fairness, the idea to explore the Romans' beliefs about the afterlife in a sequel wasn't so out of left field — many fans view the final images of Maximus in Gladiator (seen above) as him reuniting with his murdered wife and son in the afterlife.
So, along with director Ridley Scott, Crowe hired Nick Cave (yes, the musician turned filmmaker) to write a script. The result involved the Roman gods sending Maximus back to earth to kill Jesus (yes, really), before, as Cave told Marc Maron on his podcast, Maximus becomes “this eternal warrior and it ends with this 20-minute war scene which follows all the wars in history, right up to Vietnam and all that sort of stuff, and it was wild.” (You can read the script here.)
13.Chloë Sevigny performed oral sex on costar Vincent Gallo in the climax of the 2003 film The Brown Bunny. Gallo, who also wrote and directed the movie, told Film Freak Central that he pitched the project to Sevigny (with whom he'd had a previous relationship of sorts) by saying, "Remember that night in Paris when I did that thing to you, but you didn't do it to me because you weren't so into it? Well, you might have to do that. On film."
Gallo went on to say that, to his eyes, the scene was needed to demonstrate the connection between male sexuality and self-loathing.
That Sevigny agreed to be in a sure-to-be-notorious scene was surprising, considering that she was an Academy Award-nominated actor, but she doesn't regret her decision. “I’d probably still do it today. I believe in Vincent as an artist, and I stand by the film,” she told Variety in 2016, adding, “It was a subversive act. It was a risk."
Unfortunately, the risk didn't quite pay off. The debut screening of the film at the Cannes Film Festival ended in massive boos.
14.Director Sam Raimi secretly inserted footage from his 1990 film Darkman (starring Liam Neeson as a burn victim turned superhero) into 2002's Spider-Man.
Raimi didn't include the footage just to be cheeky — he needed new shots to create the dream sequence where Peter collapses in his room after being bitten by the radioactive spider, but didn't have the budget to shoot new material. So, he and editor Bob Murawski got creative, using some shots from Darkman (plus an old Italian horror film) to create the trippy, dream-like scene.
15.Billy Bob Thornton got rip-roaring drunk to film the scene in Bad Santa where his character Willie T. Soke drunkenly melts down at the mall and attacks a decorative Christmas donkey. Thornton told PeopleTV's Couch Surfing he started his day by drinking three glasses of red wine, a vodka and cranberry juice, and then a few Bud Lights. "By the time I got to that scene there, I barely knew I was in a movie,” he said.
Later, while shooting the part of the scene where he rides an escalator in a drunken stupor, Thornton says he fell asleep standing up, and was jolted awake upon reaching the top — and that's the take that was used in the movie.
16.A remake of the '80s comedy Revenge of the Nerds filmed (briefly) in 2006. Fox Atomic was two weeks into filming the remake with Adam Brody, Jenna Dewan, and Kristin Cavallari when they pulled the plug. Why? Well, it seems two things went wrong — Georgia's Emory University rescinded their agreement to let the production film on campus after reading the script, and film dailies weren't impressing Fox Atomic executives.
17.Ice Cube wrote a script for a fourth Friday film in the 2000s that he said "was the shit," but Warner Bros. rejected it. The reason? The plot was about Craig and Day-Day going to jail for selling weed (before it was legal). “They were like, ‘Yo, we don’t want Craig and Day-Day in jail...' I was like, ‘What you mean? This shit is funny.’ Then, after they rejected it, they had all these movies about going to jail.”
Ice Cube wrote a second script for a potential fourth film that the studio also rejected. He said, “The other script was about the youngsters in the hood having beef with the OGs in the hood, and Craig has to come back and squash that because Smokey’s son is the new Deebo and he’s wilding.”
Despite all the development trouble, yet another potential sequel — to be entitled Last Friday — could still possibly see the light of day.
18.Jim Carrey's character Joel talks a lot about his ex-girlfriend Naomi in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but she's never seen in the film. The production did, however, shoot scenes with the character — and none other than a pre-Grey's Anatomy Ellen Pompeo played the role.
In the end, director Michel Gondry decided not to use the Pompeo scenes, perhaps for reasons expounded upon in this video essay. But if she was bummed about getting cut out of the classic film, she didn't have to wait long for things to go her way — Grey's premiered almost exactly one year after the release of Eternal Sunshine.
19.And lastly, Robert Pattinson, when called on to simulate masturbating in the 2008 film Little Ashes, felt his efforts weren't coming off realistic enough, so he went ahead and did the deed on camera. In a 2013 interview with Germany's Interview magazine, Pattinson explained why he didn't just simulate the scene, saying, "Try it. I can tell you right now, no chance. It just doesn’t work."
Pattinson was worried the scene might ruin his career, but very shortly after production wrapped, he got the call telling him that he'd been cast in Twilight.
It seems that Pattinson's acting chops have improved since those early days of his career as he has since successfully simulated masturbation in four more movies: High Life, Damsel, The Devil All the Time, and The Lighthouse.