The ’80s were before my time, but some of my all-time favorite movies — like Heathers and Beetlejuice — come from this era.
Here are 40 interesting behind-the-scenes facts about iconic ’80s movies:
1.
The famous Top Gun volleyball scene nearly cost director Tony Scott his job. On THR’s Behind the Screen podcast, editor Chris Lebenzon said, “That scene was scripted as a real game. They kept score and everything, and Tony shot it like a commercial, and they were angry.” Editor Billy Weber said, “The studio was so pissed off. The head of production, Charlie McGuire, he said, ‘I’m gonna fire him’…because he spent a whole day shooting this scene…And then, of course, it turns out it’s one of the most famous scenes in the movie.”
2.
When Harry Met Sally… originally ended with the two leads walking away from each other, but director Rob Reiner changed the ending after he fell in love. He told the AV Club, “They did. Because at that time, I couldn’t figure out how I was going to get with anybody, so I just had them walking in opposite directions at the end. And then I met the woman who became my wife during the making of the movie, and I changed the ending.”
3.
There’s a longstanding rumor that the young cast of The Goonies weren’t allowed to see One-Eyed Willy’s pirate ship until the cameras were rolling in order to capture their real-life reactions. However, at a reunion panel during 2025 Awesome Con, Sean Astin said, “I was sort of offended that they had that idea, that they wouldn’t let the kids see the pirate ship, so that they could capture their real reaction. Like, what? We don’t know how to do real? We did real reactions all the time. But I remember wanting to perform in such a way, because I had had a sneak peek of it. So I wanted to perform in a way that really made them think that they had captured the honest reactions, so they would for 40 years be like, ‘Oh, we got these kids to do this thing!'”
However, Martha Plimpton added, “I hadn’t seen it. My performance was honest…One [take]. [That’s] all they needed, baby.”
4.
Christian Slater told Entertainment Weekly that he and Winona Ryder “tried” dating after wrapping Heathers. Winona said, “We never went out! He was dating Kim Walker. And I had, like, such a big crush on him…It’s funny, the last time I watched the movie, I was like, ‘God, we have really great chemistry!”‘ And I wonder if it was partly to do with the fact that, you know, I wished I could. There were a couple of times where we tried to go out, but there was always some sort of drama. Nothing happened until after the movie. Then I do remember, like, making out with him a few times after he broke up with Kim.”
5.
Matthew Broderick and Jennifer Grey, who played siblings in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, publicly dated IRL after the movie’s release. In her memoir Out of the Corner: A Memoir, Jennifer revealed that they actually secretly dated while everyone stayed in the same hotel during filming. She wrote, “Suddenly you’re living one of those bedroom farces, padding down the carpeted hallway, barefoot in your robe, or in various stages of undress. The row of peepholes on the other guests’ doors can feel like an army of eyeballs watching your every move.” They were engaged in 1988 but broke up shortly after.
However, they weren’t the only couple to come out of the movie. Per Business Insider, Lyman Ward and Cindy Pickett, who played their onscreen parents, got married in 1986. However, they divorced in 1992.
6.
On the set of 9 to 5, Dolly Parton composed her song of the same name using her acrylic nails as an instrument. On The Graham Norton Show, she said, “I was bored always in between ’cause they have so much time between setups with lighting, and you just sit around. And what are you gonna do? You can’t really get, you know, into a good book or anything ’cause you don’t know when they’re gonna call you. So, on the set, I would watch everybody, because this was all about women in the workplace. And part of my deal with Jane Fonda, if I was in the movie, that I would get a chance to right the theme song. So, I didn’t have a chance to get my guitar, go back to the trailer all the time, so I would just kinda roam around on the set watching everything that was going on. And I would take my nails because with the acrylic nails, it makes, like, a percussive sound…”
She continued, “It sounded like a typewriter too, so I just started to write little words and things that I would see and things I would think that would fit with that day-to-day, nine-to-five job — getting up and drinking your coffee, stumbling to the kitchen and all. So then, I’d go back at night into my hotel room and then put those things down. But I did that over a period of time, and after we recorded the song, I brought all the girls down that was on the show, and I played my nails. So I have a credit on the back of the album that says, ‘Nails by Dolly.'”
7.
The Outsiders actor C. Thomas Howell told Entertainment Weekly, “There’s a moment at the beginning of the movie when we’re at the drive-in theater, and Matt Dillon leans back in his chair and falls. I turn and laugh right into the camera. I thought they would cut, right? Well, of course, Francis [Ford Coppola] doesn’t, because those are the moments that he searches for.”
8.
While playing Bender in The Breakfast Club, Judd Nelson went method. Not breaking character between takes, he bullied his castmates, especially Molly Ringwald. In the book You Couldn’t Ignore Me if You Tried, she said, “I am not a method actor, but I could see it was so clearly what [Judd] was doing that I think I was just sort of rolling my eyes…It really did upset John [Hughes]…He was incredibly protective of me…I have never, ever seen him so angry. He was really irate…Everybody sort of rallied together – myself included – and pleaded with John not to fire him…I really wanted Judd in that part. There was nobody who got that part the way he did.”
9.
Eric Stoltz was initially cast as Marty McFly in Back to the Future, but his method acting and drama skills didn’t translate to screwball comedy as well as production hoped. So, a couple weeks into filming, director Robert Zemeckis and writer Bob Gale made a deal with studio head Sid Sheinberg behind his back — they’d keep filming with him until they could bring in the lead actor they really wanted — Michael J. Fox. According to the book We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy, Eric reportedly took the news pretty hard.
Ahead of the announcement, some cast and crew members allegedly felt that something was “off” on set. Cinematographer Dean Cundey said, “There were signs, especially the last week or so. When we would set up a shot and we would shoot Chris Lloyd’s angle, but we wouldn’t do the reverse on Marty. I’d say, ‘Don’t we need the angle?’ and Bob would say, ‘No, no, no, let’s not worry about that.’ It didn’t take long for me to see that we were saving our energy for what would come next.”
10.
Reese’s Pieces weren’t originally part of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Director Steven Spielberg told Entertainment Tonight, “I wasn’t in direct communication with M&Ms. I simply made the request. It was M&Ms in the screenplay.” However, because he was trying to keep E.T.’s appearance underwraps, he didn’t want to send the script to Mars, Inc., which ultimately led them to decline the product placement. Steven continued, “I was just told that we weren’t given permission to use M&Ms, so I said, ‘Well, what’s my next favorite candy?’ Which [has] now become my most favorite candy, because I’ve been eating it now for 20 years, and that’s Reese’s Pieces. [Hershey] said yes, and that became the candy of the hour.”
11.
Per Digital Spy, the Die Hard producers were contractually obligated to offer the leading role to Frank Sinatra, who was 70 at the time, before any other actors could be considered. The offer had to be made because he starred in the 1966 film The Detective, which was based on the book that preceded Nothing Lasts Forever. Die Hard was adapted from Nothing Lasts Forever, making it a loose sequel to The Detective. However, the singer turned it down — as did Clint Eastwood, Sylvestor Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Richard Gere, James Caan, and Mel Gibson. Bruce Willis actually declined the role at first, but after his show Moonlighting had to pause production to accommodate his costar Cybill Shepherd’s pregnancy, he accepted.
12.
Per Entertainment Weekly, the boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark was 500 pounds of fiberglass, and it was 22 feet wide. To create the sound, sound designer Ben Burtt slowly drove his Honda Civic over gravel.
13.
While filming the bug scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Kate Capshaw had several buckets of live bugs poured on her. In a behind-the-scenes featurette, she said, “I was really asking people. ‘Is there a pill? There must be something I can take to keep myself from freaking out.’ Because I don’t want everyone to look at the movie going, ‘She’s on drugs!’ But I did take something that was like a relaxant.”
14.
Michael Keaton initially turned down the titular role in Beetlejuice three times, but the last time he met with Tim Burton, the director said a few things that stuck in his mind. Michael told Charlie Rose, “I said, Give me the night or two days,’ and I called the wardrobe department at the studio…and said, ‘Send me a bunch of wardrobes from different time periods, randomly. Just pick a rack.’…And then I thought of an idea of teeth and I thought of an idea of a walk, and I knew it had been there. And I called and said, ‘I got an idea, and I don’t know if it’s going to work or not, so let’s just go do this thing.'”
“Here’s the amazing part about it: He never saw any of it. We discussed it. I said, ‘I want hair that looks like I stuck my finger in an electrical socket.’ And to the great Ve Neill in wardrobe, I said, ‘I want mold somewhere…So I showed up for work, and I walked on the stage and said, ‘This is either going to be way off the mark, or he’s just gonna — I don’t know what he’s gonna do.’ He got it immediately,” he said.
15.
Per Screen Rant, in Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker reportedly debuted a new green lightsaber because the previous blue design was difficult to see against the sky.
16.
Ghostbusters visual effects crew member Steve Johnson told Bloody Disgusting that designing the now-iconic ghost Slimer “was the most annoying, horrendous experience [he’s] ever had working with art directors, producers, and directors, ever.” Writers Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis wanted to design Slimer in the likeness of their late friend John Belushi, who’d been cast as Peter Venkman before his death — but no one told Steve until the day before his final design was due.
He said, “I didn’t know until the last fucking day. I’d been working for six months sculpting hundreds of Slimer variations, and they finally said, ‘Make him look more like Belushi, and I said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ So I pulled out a stack of headshots of John Belushi, poured a gram of cocaine on it, and started chopping lines up. I was three grams into the night and in a cocaine-induced delusional paranoia, and I literally thought that John Belushi’s ghost came to me to help me out.”
17.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who’s a big fan of The NeverEnding Story, tweeted that the Falkor prop “was 43 feet long, party made out of airplane steel, and weighed hundreds of pounds (just the head was 200 lbs.)”
18.
The Color Purple author Alice Walker was heavily involved with the 1985 film adaptation of her novel. According to the AFI Catalog, her contract required that half of the production be female, African American, or “people of the Third World.” She also advocated for the casting of “lesser-known actors” because she felt they’d better relate to her characters.
19.
The Lost Boys wasn’t originally envisioned as a teen vampire movie. Co-screenwriter James Jeremias told the Guardian, “I’d read Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice and was inspired by the little girl, Claudia, trapped in the body of a five-year-old for eternity. It got me thinking about JM Barrie’s Peter Pan – where our title came from. What if the reason he came out at night, could fly, and didn’t grow up was because he was a vampire? We took a fictional character and put him in a new light. What if it wasn’t all goodness and there was some evil intent? Warner Bros paid us $375,000 for the script. About a year later, we had a meeting with [original director, later executive producer] Richard Donner about rewrites. It was brutal.”
“We had designed the film to be a boy’s adventure, set in a time before sex rears its head. But that’s not what the studio wanted. Donner wanted the boys to be old enough to drive. What he meant was old enough to fuck. He also wanted Star – whom we’d written as a boy – to change sex and be the love interest. He was turning our story into a teenage vampire movie. Once we sold the script, it was out of our hands,” he said.
20.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High actor Jennifer Jason Leigh reportedly told LAHExam that, to get in character as a high school student, she got a job at Perry’s Pizza in Sherman Oaks Gallery for three weeks. She also reread all of her old letters and diaries from high school.
21.
According to Empire, Beverly Hills Cop star Eddie Murphy wasn’t a coffee drinker. However, one day on set, he had a strong cappuccino. As a result, he improvised a monologue that was so funny, director Martin Brest had to leave the room and use blankets to soundproof his laughter.
22.
In his book As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales From the Making of The Princess Bride, Cary Elwes said that, while filming the scene where Christopher Guest knocks him out with a sword, he was struggling to time his reaction correctly, so he asked the other actor to just tap him with it. He wrote, “Chris swung the heavy sword down toward my head. However, as fate would have it, it landed just a touch harder than either of us anticipated. And that, folks, was the last thing I remember from that day’s shoot. In the script, Bill [Goldman]’s stage directions from the end of this scene state: ‘The screen goes black. In the darkness, frightening sounds.’ Which is precisely what happened.”
He continued, “I woke up in the emergency room, still in costume, to the frightening sound of stitches being sewn into my skull…and, of course, Chris felt absolutely terrible about the whole thing, even though I kept telling him it wasn’t his fault. It was my dumb idea. But you know what? That particular take was the one that ended up in the film. So when you see Westley fall to the ground and pass out, that’s not acting. That’s an overzealous actor actually losing consciousness.”
23.
Paula Abdul choreographed the wedding dance in Coming to America. She told Rolling Stone, “This was one of my moments of having to really prove myself, because I was still pretty new in my career as a choreographer. John Landis, the director, wanted the person that choreographed Janet Jackson. I was still a Laker Girl. I went in and he looked at me and said, ‘What are you, a teenager?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am!’ He basically was telling me, ‘What do you know about African dancing?’ And this is my whole thing when becoming a choreographer: ‘I’ll just tell everyone yes, I know exactly what I’m doing, and then I’ll figure it out later.’ That’s basically what I did.”
“I said, ‘I know a lot!’ And he goes, ‘Hmm, I don’t think so, because I was expecting someone like Debbie Allen to come in.’ And I said, ‘I may be young, but I know what I’m doing.’ So he left me alone. When you think about it, back then we didn’t have the Internet, so there was no research you could really do, other than going to the library. I created my own style of what I thought should be right for the movie, and John Landis loved it. I worked with Nile Rodgers on the music, and we came up with a drum loop. There were lots of intensive rehearsals, and it was hardcore; it was a lot of work. It was not an easy thing to accomplish, but it’s one of the things I’m most proud of,” she said.
24.
John Cusack was hesitant to film the iconic boombox scene in Say Anything. Director Cameron Crowe told USA Today, “[John] thought it was too subservient. The defiance that he has when he’s doing the scene is what makes the scene great. He made it work. The way he performs it, it’s just blatantly defying you to consider it cheesy. That’s why he’s so heroic in that moment. He’s still doubting whether the boom box scene is going to work at all. He’s kind of fighting for the scene.”
25.
Tom Hanks learned the rap that he does in Big from one of his sons. On Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, he said, “It was actually a thing that my son learned at summer camp, and we were looking for something to throw into the movie that we would both know. And I said, ‘Well. how about we do this thing…?'”
26.
Christopher Lloyd doesn’t blink once in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He told Entertainment Weekly, “A toon doesn’t have to blink their eyes…I mean, they’re not human. So I just felt Judge Doom should never blink. It makes him even more ominous, more scary. I just loved to find little things that make him even more evil.”
27.
While filming A Christmas Story, Peter Billingsley didn’t actually say, “Fudge.” He told BuzzFeed, “Oh, they had me say ‘fuck.’ On all the takes. I think we looped in the word ‘fudge’ on top of it, so you could get the mouth to curl to the consonant of ‘K’ instead of ‘D.’ I was like, ‘Ohhhhhh, fuuuuuuck!’ I had been in Hollywood for a long time at that point; it wasn’t the first time I’d heard it, or probably said it.”
28.
Per Vanity Fair, while The Blues Brothers was filming in Chicago, John Belushi — who was from the city — was so popular with the locals that Dan Aykroyd called him “the unofficial mayor of Chicago.” Journalist Mitch Glazer, a friend of the two actors, told the outlet, “John would literally hail police cars like taxis. The cops would say, ‘Hey, Belushi!’ Then we’d fall into the backseat, and the cops would drive us home.”
29.
Inhaling the fake cocaine in Scarface damaged Al Pacino’s nose. He told Fox 5 Washington DC, “I knew, with Scarface, they combined it with stuff — not real, I mean not narcotics — but something else to cut it down so it was possible. But for years after, I have had things up in there. I don’t know what happened to my nose, but it’s changed. My breathing apparatus has been sort of altered a little, but other than that it was easy to do. But in moviemaking, you know, they have ways of making it look like it’s more than it is. There’s just so much of that stuff you can take.”
30.
Blue Velvet makeup supervisor Jeff Goodwin told Entertainment Weekly, “David [Lynch, the director] and I approached [the ear] like a character in the film. We actually called it Mr. Ear…My first ears I made, I actually made casts of my own ears. I made them out of material which was kind of the norm back in the day then, which was liquid latex. Rubber, you know? I took them into David’s office. He was actually on the phone. I put them on the desk. He’s playing with them, looking at them. He gets off the phone and goes, ‘These are great, these are great, but let’ s make them adult ears.’ I said, ‘David, those are my ears!’ He looks at my ears and says, ‘You have the smallest ears in the world.’ It’s true. I never noticed before. I do have small ears!” So, he ended up creating Mr. Ear by casting producer Fred Caruso’s ear.
31.
Anthony Michael Hall hit a growth spurt before reshoots on National Lampoon’s Vacation. He told Business Insider, “We did the reshoot for Vacation six or nine months later. The funny thing is that puberty had fully kicked in for me. I’m literally seven inches taller. So if you look at the movie closely, you’ll see that my hair is darker, and I got taller and skinnier.”
32.
According to a Facebook post from the official Stanley Kubrick page, “To create the elaborate wintery maze in The Shining, it took nearly 900 tonnes of salt and crushed Styrofoam.”
33.
Gremlins was inspired by the mice living in screenwriter Chris Columbus’s home. He told Indiewire, “By day, it was pleasant enough, but at night, what sounded like a platoon of mice would come out, and to hear them skittering around in the blackness was really creepy.”
34.
The Karate Kid was almost an Eastwood family production. Before Clint Eastwood turned down directing the film, his son Kyle auditioned for the lead role. Kyle told the Guardian, “I didn’t turn it down — I was actually willing to do it. My father was looking at the script originally and then decided not to do it. He had mentioned it to me and said he thought it was an interesting part. He ended up passing the script on to somebody else, and it ended up becoming The Karate Kid.”
35.
Joan Rivers’s scene with Miss Piggy in The Muppets Take Manhattan was a challenge to film. Frank Oz told NPR, “I was directing that movie also, and we rented Bergdorf Goodman’s on a Sunday morning, and Sunday all day, and Joan had to leave. She had an engagement that evening, some performance she had to do. So we only had her for one day, and not a complete day either. So I had two cameras going and — in the scene, really, although you didn’t play it all, it ends with them hysterically giggling and losing control, just laughing like two, you know, two friends laugh. And we — it just wasn’t working. I mean, I — it’s very hard to if you try, it’s very hard to have a spontaneous laughter. It wasn’t working.”
“And Joan — because I didn’t know Joan that well, I guess she didn’t know me. So I said to one of the production assistants, we were close to the Plaza Hotel, I said, ‘Get about four Bloody Marys.’ And so they came back after looking and I had a couple of Bloody Marys, and Joan had a couple Bloody Marys. And we shot the scene kind of like that. And actually, then Joan left. I had to do some pickup work. And I was feeling really good, and I didn’t care where the hell the cameras were,” he said.
36.
Per Entertainment Weekly, Aliens writer/director James Cameron and special effects artist Stan Winston decided to make the Alien Queen a puppet instead of an animatronic for safety reasons. After the director sketched out what he wanted it to look like, they tested it by building a 15-foot metal frame, hanging It up, placing two puppeteers inside, and covering them with trash bags. The final Alien Queen puppet was 14 feet tall. According to the Telegraph, operating it required 18 puppeteers, control rods, cables, and hydraulics.
37.
In the docuseries Arnold, The Terminator writer/director James Cameron said, “I had been told by [Orion Pictures cofounder] Mike Medavoy that the movie was all cast. ‘I got this all worked out. O.J. Simpson and Arnold Schwarzenegger.’ I said, ‘Well, which is which?’ Those two names just sounded so wrong to me.” Recalling his meeting with the director, Arnold added, “During our conversation, it became clear no one was hooked to O.J. Simpson playing Terminator because he could not be sold as a killing machine.”
38.
Friday the 13th actor Adrienne King’s mom’s reaction to the ending helped sell the movie. Adrienne told Uproxx, “Sean [S. Cunningham, the director] allowed me to come to a screening at a small theatre where the buyers, the head of buyers and distributors, would come to watch it, and he allowed me to bring my mom. It was the first time I saw it, and I saw it with her, and, of course, in the Monopoly scene, she gets a little nervous. Then we get through that. Then, coming to the end, and we’re sitting there, she starts to grab her coat because it’s March, and it’s cold in New York City, and I put my hand on her lap, like, ‘Chill, cool, chill down, don’t get up yet.’ At the point where Jason pops out, she launched out of her seat and screamed so loud that I turned around, and there’s Sean.”
“He’s shaking hands with the distributor. And I knew, genetically speaking, where I got my scream from. It was hysterical. It couldn’t have worked out better. Here he was doing me a favor letting my mom come. Well, my mom’s scream, I think, sold that movie. It was Warner Brothers and Paramount in the back, and they both wanted it. Unheard of. And the rest is history,” she said.
39.
After a horseback riding injury forced Sean Young to drop out of Batman, producer Jon Peters wanted Michelle Pfeiffer to replace her. However, Michael Keaton reportedly blocked her casting as his love interest because they were exes in real life. Costar Robert Wuhl told The Hollywood Reporter, “At the time, Michael told me he was trying to get back with his ex-wife. Keaton was firmly, and underline firmly, against that casting of Pfeiffer, and he and [producer Jon] Peters got into it.”
However, Michael changed his tune when Michelle was cast as Catwoman in Batman Returns. She told Entertainment Tonight, “It was great actually working with him, having had a history, because I was really out of my element. Also, the fact that he had done this kind of picture before, and I didn’t know what to expect. I felt really comfortable with him. I felt really safe with him. I could go to him and say, ‘Why am I feeling so awful? I don’t know what’s going on.’ And he would explain it to me. ‘I know. I went through it on the first one.'”
40.
And finally, per Universal Pictures All-Access, An American Werewolf in London director John Landis was eager to make the transformation scene unlike any werewolf transformation scene before. To make David Naughton’s chest hair grow, they filmed the shots in reverse order, starting with a hairy chest. Then, they removed and trimmed some hair for each subsequent shot. To make David’s body transform from human to wolf, they made what special effects makeup artist Rick Baker called “change-o-heads,” “change-o-hands,” and “change-o-backs.” These stretchy, flesh-like props had mechanisms inside them that distorted them into different shapes.
What’s your favorite ’80s movie? Let us know in the comments!
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