Saturday, November 22, 2014

Top Movie Quotes: Nos 80-76



Continuing the countdown of the American Film Institute’s top 100 movie lines (compiled 2005), on their own at first to enable you to see if you can identify the film and the actor speaking the line, then followed by an identification and some trivia.


The next 5 in the countdown:

80. "Yo, Adrian!"

79. Striker: "Surely you can't be serious." 
      Rumack: "I am serious...and don't call me Shirley."

78. "Open the pod bay doors please, HAL."

77. "Soylent Green is people!"

76. ”Hasta la vista, baby.”


80. "Yo, Adrian!"

Spoken by Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa in Rocky (1976)

Stallone was broke with $106 in the bank and trying to sell his dog because he couldn’t afford to feed it when he was offered $350,000 for the script he had written for Rocky. His acceptance was conditional on his playing the lead, which major studios refused. They wanted Robert Redford, Ryan O’Neal, Burt Reynolds or James Caan. Eventually United Artists agreed to fund for $1m with a guarantee that if filming went over budget, Winkler and Chartoff would personally fund the extra. The film did go over budget by $100,000, Winkler and Chartoff mortgaging their homes to raise it.

Most of the iconic scenes of Rocky jogging through the streets of Philadelphia were shot without permits, without equipment and without extras. Shopkeepers filmed looking at Rocky jogging had no idea why a man was running and being filmed, although in the context of the movie they are depicted as supporters. The shot of the stall owner tossing him an orange was improvised by the stall owner. He had no idea a movie was being filmed or that he would be in it.

From IMDB:

Writer Sylvester Stallone was inspired to write the screenplay for the film after seeing the Chuck Wepner – Muhammad Ali fight on March 24, 1975 at the Richfield Coliseum outside of Cleveland in Richfield, Ohio. Thirty-six year old Wepner was considered a moderate talent, but no one thought he had a hope against Ali. Indeed, no one expected Wepner to last more than three rounds. As such, the longer the fight went on past the opening three rounds, the more shocked people became; Wepner even managed to knock Ali down in the ninth round (although Ali has always maintained that Wepner was standing on his foot when he fell). Ali immediately opened a blistering offensive in an attempt to drop Wepner and for the next six rounds, he pummeled Wepner mercilessly, breaking his nose and opening large gashes above both his eyes. No matter how hard Ali hit him however, Wepner kept moving forward and continuing to fight (it was this specific aspect of the fight which inspired Stallone). Eventually, with 19 seconds left in the fifteenth and final round, Ali scored a TKO.


79. Striker: "Surely you can't be serious." 

                        Rumack: "I am serious...and don't call me Shirley."

Spoken by Robert Hays as Ted Stryker and Leslie Nielsen as Dr Rumak in Airplane! (1980), released in Australia as Flying High

For the argument between announcers concerning the white and red zones at the airport, the producers hired the same voice artists who had made the real-world announcements at Los Angeles International Airport. At the real airport, the white zone is for loading and unloading of passengers only, and there's no stopping in the red zone (except for transit buses). They were also married to each other in real life.

For the famous scene of the 747 crashing through the large windows inside the terminal, producer Jon Davidson mentions (in the DVD extras) that after the movie, he received numerous letters from various pilots telling him that they have come very close to re-enacting that very scene in real life, with some pilots admitting that they've come so close as to touch the glass with the noses of their airplanes.

Actors such as Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves and Leslie Nielsen were cast because of their reputation for playing no-nonsense characters. Until this film, these actors had not done comedy, so their "straight-arrow" personas and line delivery made the satire in the movie all the more poignant and funny. Bridges was initially reluctant to take his role in the movie, but his sons persuaded him to do it.


78. "Open the pod bay doors please, HAL."

Spoken by Keir Dullea as Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

In the premier screening of the film, 241 people walked out of the theater, including Rock Hudson who said "Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?" Arthur C Clarke once said, "If you understand '2001' completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered.”

In honor of the book and movie, NASA named a Mars orbiter: 2001 Mars Odyssey. This was not the first time NASA had a connotation with the film; the Apollo 13 command module's callsign was Odyssey during the ill-fated mission.

The movie has many instances of product placement for IBM. The most apparent are the computer panels in the space plane that docks with the space station, the forearm control panel on Dave's spacesuit, and the portable viewing screens on which Dave and Frank watch "The World Tonight." Adding one letter to HAL gives IBM but Kubrick has said that he was not aware of it and would have changed HAL’s name if he had realised.


77. "Soylent Green is people!"

Spoken by Charlton Heston as Dr Robert Thorn in Soylent Green (1973)

The word "Soylent" is a holdover from the Harry Harrison novel "Make Room! Make Room!" upon which this film is based. In the novel, the word is supposed to suggest soybeans and lentils.

A small, green spirulina-based cracker called "Soylent Green" (officially licensed by MGM) was released in July, 2011. The box does not use any images or characters from the film, but rather attempts (humorously) to be an actual product. The ingredients list does not list "people."


Soylent Green is a running gag that has appeared in some Simpsons episodes set in the future. In one such episode, there is a sign in the Kwik E Mart stating that Soylent Green now has 30% more girls:



76. ”Hasta la vista, baby.”

Spoken by Artnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Given Arnold Schwarzenegger’s $15-million salary and his total of 700 words of dialog, he was paid $21,429 per word. "Hasta la vista, baby" cost $85,716.

Sarah Connor’s opening narration:

Three billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines. The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two Terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human resistance, John Connor, my son. The first Terminator was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984, before John was born. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself when he was still a child. As before, the resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first.


The world famous phrase "Hasta la Vista, Baby" is translated to "Sayonara, Baby" in the Spanish version of the film, to preserve the humorous nature.



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