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The Great Unasked-For Answers About Cinema

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    The Great Unasked-For Answers About Cinema

    In This Is Spinal Tap, each member of the band develops a cold sore on their mouth as the film wears on, which is never explained.

    It's probably quite funny left that way, because it invites you to fill in the gaps yourself. However, I went to a talk by Harry Shearer the other week in which he exclusively (or maybe non-exclusively) revealed that they filmed a whole subplot in which there was a support act on the tour called The Dose, who had a groupie played by Angie Bowie, who shagged the Tap one by one, spreading the infection.

    According to Shearer, this has never been explained before, and he doesn't think it even made the outtakes and deleted scenes on the DVD extras. I've got the DVD, and I can't be bothered to find out. In fact I can't even be bothered looking on Wikipedia to see if it gets mentioned there.

    Anyway, there you go, a great answer to a cinematic question none of you asked for.

    #2
    The Great Unasked-For Answers About Cinema

    In A Prairie Home Companion, which I think was Robert Altman's last film (although, in the spirit of the thread, I can't be arsed to find out), Kevin Kline pops a champagne bottle and says "Sorry" before carrying on the scene. He'd apparently hit Altman, off camera, in the forehead with the cork and Altman made the 'keep rolling' gesture. It's a cutesy, quaint film that most of you probably won't enjoy. But I did. And if you see it, now you'll know why Kline says a random 'sorry'.

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      #3
      The Great Unasked-For Answers About Cinema

      SR: Shearer was having you on. It was pretty widely known. I think even imdb.com had it under trivia.

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        #4
        The Great Unasked-For Answers About Cinema

        The Spinal Tap A to Z (first published in 1995) would appear to have "scooped" Shearer by 15 years.

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          #5
          The Great Unasked-For Answers About Cinema

          A River Runs Through It, one of my favorite films ever for a variety of reasons that I won't deliniate, is about a family in Missoula, Montana - mostly in the 1920s - that cannot communicate with each other even though they all get along and love each other. It's based on a autobiographical novella by former Chicago poetry professor Norman MacLean with lots of other stuff from his younger days that are not in the book, but are based on information the screenwriters got from his family and from letters he wrote to his wife Jessy, who is played by British actor Emily Lloyd in the film but barely appears at all in the book. The film sets everything around the time Norman is 22-23. In reality and in the book, the stuff that happens in the film happened when he was about 30 and was already married.

          Much of the book and film is about fly-fishing, which is a metaphor for other stuff, and in the story they fish the Big Blackfoot River. The film and the book portray it as a fantastic trout stream.

          And it was in the 1920s, but they couldn't shoot the film there because now it is fished-out and is regarded as one of the most polluted streams in America.

          Sad. But fitting, maybe.

          Emily Lloyd is also the name of a friend of mine from school who was an actress and stage manager and still does stuff with theater. The Emily Lloyd in the film doesn't do much acting these days because she's got a bad case of the OCD. Sad.

          Maclean wrote the book in the 70s, which means it took him over 40 years to write the story - such was the emotional pain of it. He really wanted to see it made into a movie, but for the usual Hollywood reasons, it took a while. He worked out the script with Robert Redford, and told his kids that his last wish was to see it made, but sadly he died before it even began shooting.

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            #6
            The Great Unasked-For Answers About Cinema

            a family . . . that cannot communicate with each other even though they all get along and love each other

            I have come to believe that this describes a significant majority of families on the face of the earth.

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              #7
              The Great Unasked-For Answers About Cinema

              Yeah, that's true. It just doesn't always end up quite so tragically and most families don't have a writer of Norman Maclean's caliber to tell their family's story. The universality of that them is why it's such a great story and especially resonated with me when I first saw it when I was 19. I related to both of the brothers in different ways.

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