THE MOST INTERESTING PEOPLE IN MOVIES: 250 ANECDOTES

By David Bruce

Dedicated with Love to Rosa Jones

Copyright 2009 by Bruce D. Bruce

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Cover Illustration

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The Most Interesting People in Movies: 250 Anecdotes

Chapter 1: Academy Awards to Critics

Academy Awards

• In 2008, Charlize Theron, 32 years old and an Oscar-winner as Best Actress in the movie Monster, and AnnaSophia Robb, 14 years old and the lead actress in the kids’ movie Because of Winn-Dixie, starred together in the movie Sleepwalking. Normally, actors will study each other’s work before acting together; however, Ms. Robb had seen very few movies starring Ms. Theron. Why? She explains, “My parents won’t let me see them, especially Monster.” Of course, winning an Oscar for Monster was very satisfying for Ms. Theron, especially because it was so hard to get the movie made and to find distribution for it. Ms. Theron says, “There wasn’t one person in this industry who wanted that film made. We had our financiers calling us at 3 a.m. and asking us what the h*ll we were doing. They didn’t like the way I looked [the beautiful Ms. Theron put on weight for the movie and looked ugly], and they wondered who would want to see this movie. When we finished, we couldn’t pay a distributor to take it. We were hours away from signing a straight-to-video deal with Blockbuster when we found a distributor. For that reason alone, the Oscar was especially sweet.”

• At one time, film producer Harvey Weinstein tried to convince Barbra Streisand to star in the movie version of Chicago, which was to be directed by Anthony Minghella, who had just directed The English Patient. Always a straight talker, Ms. Streisand told Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Minghella over dinner that The English Patient was “overlong and overpraised.” Later, of course, The English Patient was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and won nine, including Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. At the Academy Awards, Ms. Streisand was seated directly behind Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Minghella. As The English Patient won Oscar after Oscar, Ms. Streisand was a good sport, patting Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Minghella on the back and laughing at her critical appraisal of The English Patient. Mr. Minghella even told Mr. Weinstein about Ms. Streisand, “She ended up being our good luck charm.”

• A famous scene in the movie Jerry Maguire, starring Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding, Jr., occurs when Mr. Gooding’s character, a football player, makes Mr. Cruise’s title character, a sports agent named Jerry Maguire, jump through a few hoops before he allows Mr. Maguire to continue to represent him. One hoop is to shout “Show me the money!” like he meant it. Jerry does that, and he gets to continue to represent Mr. Gooding’s character. Mr. Cruise was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor, and Mr. Gooding was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor. After learning about the nominations, they got together on the telephone and shouted. Mr. Gooding says, “We screamed at each other for ten minutes. It was nothing intelligent, just ‘Arrrggghhh! Ahhh! Yeaaahhh!’ I yelled. He yelled. Then he went hoarse.”

• Actress Angelina Jolie has the respect of people in the movie industry. In 2000, when she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Girl, Interrupted, she was making a movie titled Original Sin in Mexico. After flying back to the movie location following the Academy Awards, she was asleep when suddenly a mariachi band started playing outside her trailer. She went outside, where the cast and crew of Original Sin greeted her. Each member of the cast and crew gave her a rose—she ended up with almost 200 roses! Many of the crewmembers, including director Michael Cristofer, had worked with her before in the television movie Gia, and they were ecstatic that she had won an Oscar.

• Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, gave Gregory Peck, who played Atticus Finch in the movie, a pocket watch that had belonged to A.C. Lee, her father, the model of Atticus. (After the book was published, friends asked A.C. to sign their copies as “Atticus,” which he gladly did.) Mr. Peck was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, and at the Academy Awards, he held that watch. He was still holding it when he won the Oscar, and he made sure to thank Ms. Lee in his acceptance speech.

• Shirley Temple became a child star in movies before she learned how to read. So how did she learn her lines? Her mother read her the scripts of her movies at bedtime. In 1934, little Shirley won a miniature Oscar to recognize a major accomplishment: According to Hollywood, she had brought “more happiness to millions of children and millions of grownups than any child of her years in the history of the world.”

• Actress Jessica Lange has won two Oscars, and her advice to anyone who is nominated for an Oscar is to have a few words that you can say “just in case” you win. She also says that the best speech ever given by a winner was very short. Tommy Lee Jones said, “Thanks for all the work.” In Hollywood, getting work is very important.

• At the Oscar awards ceremony, Shelly Winters announced a winner but didn’t want to hand over the Oscar, explaining, “This is very hard for an actress to let go of.”

Actors

• This may be a shock to some people, but at one time, two-time Oscar-winner Jody Foster thought about giving up acting. She found acting not to be rewarding anymore, and she thought about entering some other profession where she could use her analytical skills. Ms. Foster says, “I had been feeling there was something kind of not intellectually valuable about being an actor. It had started to seem like a really dumb job.” Fortunately, she realized what the problem was: “It was me. It was my fault. I wasn’t bringing enough to it. I hadn’t realized that it was my responsibility to go deeper, to really build a character from the ground up; that to really be a good actor, you had to be able to discuss a movie, any movie that you’re taking on, and to see the literature in it. Then it becomes fascinating. Then you get better as an actor. Then you learn to really love movies.” With this realization, Ms. Foster rededicated herself to her career—at age 12. This paid off in a big way. Just two years later, when she was 14, she played a prostitute in Taxi Driver, earning an Oscar nomination.

• Too often, Hollywood has stereotyped actors and actresses, sometimes because of their ethnicity. Anna May Wong played many, many Oriental stereotypes in the 1930s, something she disliked. So, of course, did other actors and actresses with Oriental features (or makeup that made them appear Oriental). Once, Ms. Wong said, “Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain? And so crude a villain. Murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that. How should we be, with a civilization that is so many times older than that of the west?” In 1960, after appearing seldom in movies for two decades, she played Lana Turner’s housekeeper in Portrait in Black. Again, the stereotypes came out, this time from the publicity department, which explained Ms. Wong’s long absence from the screen by passing along a proverb that supposedly had been taught to Ms. Wong by her mother, “Don’t be photographed too much or you’ll lose your soul.” Ms. Wong’s own explanation was different: “I was so tired of the parts I had to play.”

• Jeff Bridges had a good reason for wanting to star in the 1976 remake of King Kong: “I used to pretend I was sick whenever I saw [in] the TV Guide [that] King Kong was going to be on, so I could stay home from school and watch the original.” Mr. Bridges, however, is critical of the performance of one of his co-stars in the remake. He says, “The monkey in that was just terrible. Oh, my God. Just terrible.” Mr. Bridges has also seen another movie numerous times: The Big Lebowski, a cult favorite in which he plays The Dude. He says, “Normally when a movie of mine comes on I’ll turn the channel, but when Lebowski comes on, I’ll say, ‘I’ll just wait until Turturro licks the [bowling] ball, then I’ll change the channel.’” But after Turturro licks the bowling ball, Mr. Bridges will say that he’ll wait until another key moment in the movie occurs, and then he’ll turn the channel. This keeps repeating itself until Mr. Bridges discovers that he has watched The Big Lebowski yet another time.

• In 2007, Kenneth Branagh directed the movie Sleuth, with Michael Caine acting in a version reworded by Harold Pinter. Of course, Mr. Branagh has his roots in the theater, and so he used theatrical techniques in creating the movie, including two weeks of rehearsals before filming began. After the two weeks of rehearsal, everyone ran through the film one more time, with actors reciting their lines, and Mr. Branagh using a wheelchair to move Mr. Pinter to the place where the camera would be filming. Unfortunately, this made Mr. Caine nervous, and after 10 minutes of this, Mr. Caine said, “I’ve got to stop. I’ve got to stop just for one minute. I have never been this f**king nervous since I did live television. I’ve got f**king Harold Pinter’s face about two feet from me, and above him I’ve got f**king Branagh giving me notes. Let me have a cup of tea.”

• One problem that many actors have is acting in bad weather conditions of extreme heat or extreme cold, often at unpleasant times such as night or very early in the morning. In her acting, Laura Linney deals with industrial-strength issues such as death, illness and personal failure. However, she says, “You know what’s more difficult, what they don’t teach you in drama school? How to act at 4:30 in the morning in the freezing cold or boiling heat. That’s more challenging than any sort of emotional work. And it’s like childbirth. You forget about it once a movie’s finished and you’re on to the next.” While acting in the 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma, Russell Crowe ran into the problem of an unpleasant acting environment: “We were surrounded by four-and-a-half feet of snow doing scenes where we’re talking about the drought.”

• Script supervisor May Wale Brown was very impressed by the professionalism shown by Henry Fonda in the making of Gideon’s Trumpet, which was a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie. In the movie, Mr. Fonda used a pair of wire-rimmed glasses in his portrayal of the character he was playing. His own real glasses had heavy rims because they contained a hearing aid that he needed due to his old age. In a scene with Fay Wray, the camera focused on Ms. Wray, and Mr. Fonda was not, of course, in her close-ups. However, Mr. Fonda said his lines well, and he continued to wear the wire-rimmed glasses. When Ms. Brown told him that he could wear his own glasses (she did not want to mention the hearing aid), Mr. Fonda replied, “I want Fay to see the Gideon character when she looks at me. It’ll make it easier for her.”

• When he was four years old, actor Steve Buscemi was hit by a bus and got his skull fractured. This doesn’t mean that he was unlucky—the accident could have been a lot worse. In addition, when he became 18 years old, he received a $6,000 settlement from the city. He used the money to pay for acting school at the Lee Strasberg Institute, where he studied with John, Lee’s son, who was more laid-back than his famous father. For example, Mr. Buscemi describes an acting scenario at the institute: “They had this thing where if you were in a desert and imagining sun beating down on you, you couldn’t use the stage light to imagine the sun. But John said if the stage light works, that’s fine. The audience don’t know and don’t care.” Mr. Buscemi, of course, gets results, as is evidenced by his roles in such movies as Fargo, Reservoir Dogs, and Ghost World.

• As a teenager, Scottish actor Ewan McGregor knew what he hated, and he knew what he wanted to do with his life. He hated school, and he wanted to act. His parents also knew what he hated, and they knew what he wanted to do with his life. And so one day, when Ewan was 16, his mother told him, “Look, I’ve spoken to your dad, and if you want to leave school you can.” Lest anybody is wondering what planet his parents are from, since they allowed him to leave school, Mr. McGregor says that they are from “[t]he planet of common sense, I think. It was a wise decision. A week later I was working in Perth Repertory Theatre helping to build sets, learning my trade from the bottom up.” Of course, in his case, dropping out of school worked out well, and he became a famous and successful and good actor.

• Walter Slezak was an actor—he played the part of the German submarine captain in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. Because his father was the famous opera singer Leo Slezak, he was able to make his stage debut very early in life. At the Cologne Opera House, the director of the opera Lohengrin created a startling trick with perspective. At first, a boat carrying Lohengrin seemed far away, then it seemed very close to the audience. The trick worked through the use of two boats. The first boat was actually very small, and the Lohengrin seen in it was actually a child, wearing a fake beard to seem like the adult Lohengrin. The second boat was large and carried the adult tenor singing the part of Lohengrin. At one performance, the tiny but bearded Lohengrin was four-year-old Walter Slezak.

• Near the end of filming the erotic thriller Deception, actor Ewan McGregor had to fake sexual intercourse with five different actresses, none of whom he had met before. This made him tense, but his co-star, Hugh Jackman (who played Wolverine in the X-Men movies) made jokes. Mr. Jackman, who also co-produced the movie, says that one of the actresses telephoned him because she was worried that she was not in the movie anymore. Fortunately, her scene had simply been rescheduled to a later date. The actress said, “I just want you to know I’ll do anything, and I’m really flexible.’” Mr. Jackman told her that he knew that this was her first movie and it was important to her, but he jokes, “I don’t think she was talking about the scene!”

• A couple of beefy movie stuntmen thought they could easily defeat martial arts expert Bruce Lee in a fight because he was only 5-foot-8-inches tall and weighed only 145 pounds, so he demonstrated his strength and skill to them. He placed them a few feet from a swimming pool, gave each of them an inflated bag for protection, and then told them to assume any stance they wanted. He then said that he would attempt to give one kick to each of them, without a windup or a running start, that would send the stuntmen into the swimming pool. Mr. Lee gave one kick, and the first stuntman flew into the pool, then he gave another kick, and the second stuntman flew into the pool.

• In 1981, Karen Allen played the only “girl” whom Indiana Jones ever loved in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and in 2008 her character met the hero again in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Of course, she was a couple of decades older, and filming took a little adjustment, although she “dove right back in, driving these big dusty, clanking old trucks on these remote locations, just like old times!” Still, Ms. Allen says, “In the beginning, I was saying, ‘Oh, I don’t need the knee pads. Nooo, I don’t need elbow pads!’ After a few days, though, you’re like, ‘If I put a double set on the knees, will the camera see them through my pants?’ All that flinging yourself around is the hard part.”

• Some actors such as Chris Cooper act with reserve, using mainly their eyes to show emotion. Very often this emotion appears only on the big movie screens, not on the video monitors that many directors use. For example, during the making of Seabiscuit, Gary Ross, the director, would look at the video monitor, and then say to Mr. Cooper, “Y’know, I want to see a little more.” Mr. Cooper would reply, “Please just go see the dailies on a big screen.” Mr. Ross did, he saw the emotion he wanted, and he apologized to Mr. Cooper and then added that the next time he said, “Y’know, I want to see a little more,” Mr. Cooper should “just tell me to shut the f**k up.”

• When comic actress Carole Lombard started filming Twentieth Century, she was very nervous and so she was not funny. Director Howard Hawks talked to her in an attempt to get her to loosen up, and among other things he asked her what she would do if a man insulted her in a particular manner. After hearing the insult, Ms. Lombard said that she would kick the man in a very painful place. Mr. Hawks said that Mr. Barrymore was insulting her in that particular way, so she should try to kick him in that place in their next scene together. In the scene, Ms. Lombard tried repeatedly to do exactly that—with the result that when the scene was over, Mr. Barrymore yelled, “THAT WAS FABULOUS!”

• Actor Jack Nicholson is aware that two Jacks exist. Big Jack is the image, a raiser of h*ll complete with sunglasses and smokes and other stimulants. Regular Jack is a lot quieter, especially at age 70. Occasionally, people see Big Jack when Mr. Nicholson wants them to see Regular Jack. This occurs a lot with bartenders. Mr. Nicholson says, “I can’t tell you how many bartenders I’ve had to grab by the lapel and say: ‘Look, give me a very big glass with a lot of ice and a small amount of bourbon.’ They see Big Jack and they want to give Big Jack that extra shot of bourbon. But you can’t be Big Jack all the time.”

• Hollywood actress Virginia Madsen shot to fame with her role as a lonely waitress in the 2004 critically acclaimed film Sideways, about two men visiting the wine country of central California. She was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for her role. In real life, she seldom drinks wine, pointing out, “Seriously, if I buy any good stuff, it doesn’t last. All my friends come over and drink it.” Ms. Madsen was born on September 11, but because of the terrorist attacks on that day, she says about her birthday, “I celebrate it on a different day now.”

• Great art is frequently earthy. One of the most famous scenes in Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander shows the character Uncle Carl amusing children with his virtuoso farting; his talents include being able to blow out a candle with his wind. Was the actor who played Uncle Carl really farting? Unfortunately, no. Bertil Guve, who played the boy Alexander, explains, “They had a person sitting right next to the candle with a tube.” Watch the scene carefully. When the candle is blown out, the wind does not come from Uncle Carl’s backside.

• Actor Jimmy Stewart once told director Peter Bogdanovich about a stranger, a fan, who told him how much he liked his delivery of a piece of dialogue that Mr. Stewart had said in a movie made 20 years previously. Mr. Stewart reflected, “And I thought, that’s the wonderful thing about movies. Because if you’re good, and God helps you, and you’re lucky enough to have a personality that comes across, then what you’re doing is, you’re giving people little … tiny … pieces of time … that they never forget.”

• Sir Laurence Olivier paid attention to the little things in his effort to make his wonderful acting even better. For example, when he was going to play Dr. Astrov in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, he was extremely happy when he acquired an authentic pair of 19^th-century pince-nez to wear when he played the role. He explained, “No one else might know it is real, but the fact that it is adds authority to my feeling about the role.”

• Actor John Hurt co-starred with Harrison Ford in the 2008 action-adventure movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The 66-year-old Mr. Ford had kept himself in shape, and he did his own fights and many of his character’s stunts in the movie. At one point, after performing a harrowing stunt, Mr. Ford turned to Mr. Hurt and joked, “Well, you don’t think they employ me to act, did you, John?”

• Robert Mitchum’s last movie was Dead Man (1995), directed by Jim Jarmusch. In it, Mr. Mitchum’s character carried a big shotgun, so Mr. Jarmusch gathered together a bunch of antique shotguns, took them to Mr. Mitchum’s house, and asked him to pick the shotgun he wanted to carry in the movie. Mr. Mitchum looked at the antique shotguns, then asked, “Which one is the lightest?”

• Many actors, including Ryan Reynolds, who starred in the movie Definitely, Maybe, had a hard, penniless time breaking into show business. For a while, Mr. Reynolds and a friend lived in a cheap motel in Los Angeles, and he drove around the city in a Jeep that had been stripped by thieves and therefore lacked a few luxuries—including doors.

• Jack Lemmon’s first big movie was It Should Happen to You, starring Judy Holliday and directed by George Cukor. Jack was an enthusiastic actor, and Mr. Cukor kept telling him to act less. Eventually, Jack became upset and yelled, “If I do it any less, I won’t be acting!” Mr. Cukor replied, “Exactly.”

Animals

• Chris Lemmon, the son of actor Jack Lemmon, wrote a memoir of his father titled A Twist of Lemmon: A Tribute to My Father. In the book, and in interviews about the book, he tells stories about the two of them chasing a couple of poodles through the yard of actor James Coburn. Chris and Jack look up, see Mr. Coburn glowering at them through a picture window, and they point to each other and say, “It’s his fault.” By the way, Mr. Coburn is actually a nice guy. Chris said in an interview that “he was just one of the biggest teddy bears you’d ever want to meet on the face of the earth.”

• When Yousuf Karsh went to Peter Lorre’s home to photograph the famous actor, he saw a sign by the driveway: “Beware of Ferocious Dogs.” The “ferocious dogs” turned out to be a couple of frisky Pekinese, a breed of very small, toy-sized dogs.

Auditions

• John Cho and Kal Penn are the Korean and Indian stars of the 2004 cult movie Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, but they have done much more acting than that film and its sequel. Mr. Cho played Sulu in a Star Trek movie and appeared as a hip-hop-savvy accountant named Kenny in TV’s Ugly Betty. Mr. Penn appeared on TV’s House and landed a role in the dramatic movie The Namesake in part because of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. He explains that Namesake director Mira Nair let him audition because “her 14-year-old son, who was a Harold & Kumar fan, […] every night before bed said, ‘Mom, please audition Kal Penn for the part.’”

• Laura Linney, renowned stage and movie actor, studied theater at Julliard, but like other famous actors, she went through a bad period in which she was trying to establish herself. One bad experience was auditioning for a TV commercial—during the audition this future multiple Oscar nominee had to dance around like a chicken.

Automobiles

• Actress Angie Harmon started modeling as a baby—hospitals used her to demonstrate how to properly give a baby a bath. Later she appeared in advertisements for child car seats. Of course, she is beautiful, and she had gone through her geeky, awkward phase by age 12. She says, “When I was 12, I looked like I was 18. It was terrifying for my parents. I don’t look forward to that with my daughters at all.” By the way, as a teenager she won a contest that was sponsored by Seventeen magazine. Her prize was a car that sat unused for a year in her family’s driveway—until she was old enough to drive it.

• The makers of Raiders of the Lost Ark needed a 1936 German staff car for the movie, so Craig Hinton built them one by using a 1960 Jaguar chassis on which he placed a 1936 German staff car body. The movie-makers then took the car to Tunisia to film a spectacular chase scene. Immediately, the people of Tunisia treated the car with respect. Wherever Mr. Hinton drove the car, people waved at it or saluted it. Later, he learned why the Tunisians were treating the car with such respect. Tunisia had one other 1936 German staff car, and it was owned by the Tunisian President.

Bathrooms

• The brother of journalist Donald Liebenson once saw actor Paul Newman at an airport and asked him for an autograph for his mother, who was a big fan. Mr. Newman replied, “Sorry, pal. Tell your mom that I don’t sign autographs, but I’d be happy to buy her a beer.” Years later, Mr. Liebenson saw Mr. Newman at a publicity junket and recounted that story to him. Mr. Newman replied that he could remember the exact moment that he began declining to sign autographs: “I was standing at a urinal in Sardi’s, and this guy came though the door with a piece of paper. I thought this was inappropriate. It wasn’t just an invasion of privacy. It was an invasion of purpose.”

• John Waters’ very first film, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, a 15-minute black-and-white movie recorded on stolen film, has an original ending. The final shot shows a piece of toilet paper on which the words “The End” have been written being flushed down a toilet.

Casting

• Shawn Edwards, a movie reviewer for Fox-TV in Kansas City, loved movies from an early age. When he was in the 7^th grade, he and some friends used a room at their school as a movie studio. Mr. Edwards calls the studio “the claymation joint,” and he remembers, “We convinced the science teacher we were working on a science project, built these sets out of papier-mâché and started shooting our epic. It was about a group of cavemen who hunt for a dinosaur for a big celebration and please the volcano before it gets mad.” When Mr. Edwards was attending Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, Spike Lee filmed School Daze there. Mr. Edwards had broken his ankle during football practice, but he showed up at an audition for small parts and extras. He remembers that the people casting the movie looked at him as if they were thinking, “Baby, there’s not a part in this movie where you can be walking around with a cast.” But Mr. Edwards said, “I don’t sing. I don’t dance. I can’t act. And I’m not that funny. I just want to be in the movie.” He got lucky and appeared in a scene in which “Da Butt” was played. Mr. Edwards says, “I totally hate that song now because that’s all I heard all spring. It took three freaking days to shoot” that scene.

• Best-selling novelist Jackie Collins got kicked out of her school at age 15, so her parents asked her, “Hollywood or reform school?” Joan, her sister, was making movies in Hollywood, so Jackie chose Hollywood. Joan gave her a lot of freedom, meeting her at the airport and saying before disappearing, “OK, learn to drive, I can’t look after you, I’ve got to go off on location, goodbye, here’s the keys to the car, here’s the list of people who can help you if you get into any trouble.” Jackie says, “And I appreciated that, because […] I was a street-smart kid, and I wanted to be by myself.” For a while, Jackie appeared in movies—“always playing the Italian girl”—and she was able to take care of herself. When she went out for a part in a movie, guys would tell her, “Well, honey, let’s have dinner and discuss the part.” Jackie says, “And I would always say, ‘Take your part for yourself,’ and I would leave. So I was always that street-smart kid, you know?”

• When Quentin Tarantino was casting Kill Bill, he held a meeting with the actors. Ricardo Montalban was supposed to be present to read the part of a Mexican pimp who was Bill’s mentor, but he did not show up. Michael Parks, who was to play the role of a Southern sheriff, did show up, and he also read the part of the Mexican pimp. Mr. Tarantino liked the reading so much that he immediately hired Mr. Parks to act the part of the Mexican pimp as well as the role of the Southern sheriff. David Carradine, who played the role of Bill, was at the meeting. He remembers resolving never to miss a Quentin Tarantino meeting, and he thinks the other actors present made the same resolution.

Children

• In 2008, brothers Drew and John Erick Dowdle had a hit with the horror movie Quarantine. They consciously modeled their careers on filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Cohen, with one brother studying moviemaking and the other brother studying business. After all, you have to come up with the money to make a movie before you actually make a movie. Their father, Dr. John Dowdle, an orthopedic surgeon in St. Paul, Minnesota, remembers thinking that perhaps the two brothers would not make a good team, based on their relationship while they were growing up. He says, “John was always causing Drew trouble in school. When Drew came in for freshman initiation day, they made him kneel on the floor and sing the school anthem with his head in the locker. When he finished and looked around, they were all gone.” The two brothers do cast their father in their movies, but only in small parts. He mock-complains, “They haven’t given me a speaking part yet. I consider that parental abuse.”

• In 2008, Dustin Hoffman and Angelina Jolie lent their voices to the animated movie Kung Fu Panda, which starred the title character voiced by Jack Black. Actually, Mr. Hoffman had met Ms. Jolie in 1991, when she was 16 years old and he was starring in the movie Hook. Ms. Jolie’s father, Jon Voight, called Mr. Hoffman to say, “My kids are dying to meet Captain Hook. Are you in costume? Can I come over with the kids?” Mr. Hoffman agreed to meet Mr. Voight’s kids, and he remembers, “So he brings over his kids. I’m introduced to his son and his daughter and she’s this tall, thin, gawky-looking girl with a mouth full of braces and he introduces us.” Making small talk, Mr. Hoffman asked the kids what they wanted to do. He remembers that Ms. Jolie had an answer ready: “And she gave me a laser-like intensity look and she says, ‘I’m going to be an actress.’ And I went home to my wife and I said, ‘I don’t think this kid has any idea what a tough road she’s got.’”

• Mary Badham, who played Scout in the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird, did not want filming to end, so on the last day of shooting the movie, she deliberately flubbed several takes. However, her mother finally told her to say the lines because if shooting took much longer, the Los Angeles traffic would be very bad. During the making of the movie, the child actors frequently made Gregory Peck a target of their water pistols, so when the last take was completed, he stepped away quickly and laughed as the lighting crew poured buckets of water on the child actors. By the way, Mary was feisty. She was a nine-year-old who was playing a younger child, and when someone told her that she was little for her age, she replied, “You’d be little, too, if you drank as much coffee as I do.”

• Fayard Nicholas of the dance team the Nicholas Brothers loved vaudeville and hung out in the theaters, watching all the acts and learning from them. When he was 11 years old, he decided to become an entertainer, and so he created an act for himself and his brother and sister. They stayed up late rehearsing the act, and when their parents reminded them that it was a school night, Bayard told them, “We have something to show you.” Their parents watched the act, then they looked at each other and said, “Hey, we have something here.” Their father had them audition for the manager of the Philadelphia’s Standard Theater, who quickly told him, “They’re booked for next week.” The Nicholas Brothers became a famous dance team in movies.

• After making the movie Get Smart, Steve Carell, who plays Maxwell Smart, knew that his seven-year-old daughter and some of her friends wanted to see it. However, he warned her that seeing the movie might be embarrassing for her: “I had to prepare her for a scene where you see me with my trousers off. I said, ‘You’re going to go see this with your friends, and you’re going to see my naked butt. Are you going to get embarrassed? Because you don’t have to go.’” His daughter asked, “Is it funny?” Mr. Carell replied, “I think so.” And she made her decision: “Well, okay then.” Her decision made Mr. Carell, who values funny highly, happy.

• Charles Laughton directed the movie The Night of the Hunter, in which an insane preacher played by Robert Mitchum chases a small boy named John, played by Billy Chapin, to get him to reveal where some money is hidden. After the film had been released, Mr. Laughton heard Mr. Mitchum ask Billy, “Do you think John’s frightened of the preacher?” Billy replied that John wasn’t, so Mr. Mitchum said, “Then you don’t know the preacher, and you don’t know John.” Billy, who was somewhat cocky, said, “Oh, really? That’s probably why I just won the New York Critics’ Circle Prize.” Mr. Laughton, hearing this, roared, “GET THAT CHILD AWAY FROM ME!”

• Even when she was in kindergarten, actress Angelina Jolie liked boys. She was a member of a group known as the Kissy Girls, who would chase after the boys and kiss them—some of the boys wanted the Kissy Girls to catch them. However, at the time, Angelina’s one true crush was on Star Trek’s Mr. Spock. Angelina also started acting when she was a toddler. Holding a video camera, her brother would tell her, “Angie, act!” Immediately, she would start acting. And her father, actor Jon Voight, would film her as she pretended to be auditioning for a role in a movie.

• According to Brad Pitt, his children are “the funniest people I’ve ever met.” For example, in 2008 his daughter Shiloh went through a phase where she wanted to be called by another name: John or Peter. Mr. Pitt calls it “a Peter Pan thing” where whenever he starts to call her by her real name she responds, “I’m John.” Of course, Mr. Pitt is right when he says that this stuff is “cute to parents” and he is wrong when he says that this stuff is “probably really obnoxious to other people.” It’s actually pretty cute to other people.