Category: Television

MUMBAI: Star Gold is launching a ‘Hollywood Monster Mela’ which would air the monster movies, Jurassic Park, The Lost world and Jurassic Park 3 in Hindi on every Saturday at 8:30 pm.

The Original Idea:

– The original idea for Jurassic Park came from Michael Crichton’s attempt in 1983 to write a screenplay about a Pterodactyl being cloned from an egg. The screenplay and movie never came to fruition. He had originally intended for the story to be through the eyes of a child who was at the park when the dinosaurs escaped.
– The first draft of the screenplay had Hammond left behind on the island.
– With every new draft of the script, there was a different set of survivors and a different set of characters dying. At various points during pre-production, Hammond, Malcolm, and Dr. Wu were going to die and Gennaro and Muldoon were going to live.
– In the original script, the T-Rex skeleton in the lobby was hooked up to pulleys like a giant marionette. In the ending, Grant was going to man the controls and act as puppeteer, using the skeleton’s head and feet to crush the raptors.

Firsts on the movie:

– Jurassic Park was the first film to use DTS digital surround sound.
– Jurassic Park was Richard Attenborough’s first acting role in 15 years.
– Steven Spielberg got to direct the man who beat him to the Best Director Oscar in 1983 (Richard Attenborough, whose film Gandhi (1982) beat Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) as Best Picture).

Awesome Visual Effects:

– Director Steven Spielberg was worried that computer graphics meant Nintendo type cartoon quality. He originally only wanted the herd of gallimimus dinosaurs to be computer-generated, but upon seeing ILM’s demo animation of a T-rex chasing a herd of galamides across his ranch, he decided to shoot nearly all the dinosaur scenes using this method. The animation was first plotted on an Amiga Toaster, and rendered for the film by Silicon Graphics’ Indigo workstations.
– The glass of water sitting on the dash of the Ford Explorer was made to ripple using a guitar string that was attached to the underside of the dash beneath the glass
– Shots of a full dinosaur was computer-generated, but shots of parts of dinosaurs were of animatronics.
– The full-sized animation of the tyrannosaurus rex weighed about 13,000 to 15,000 pounds.
– During the shooting of the initial T-rex attack scene that took place in a downpour and was shot on a soundstage, the latex that covered the T-rex puppet absorbed great amounts of water, making it much heavier and harder to control. Technicians worked throughout the night with blow driers trying to dry the latex out. Eventually, they suspended a platform above the T-rex, out of camera range, to keep the water off it during filming.
– A baby triceratops was built for a scene where one of the kids rides it. Special effects technicians worked on this effect for a year but the scene was cut at the last minute as Steven Spielberg thought it would ruin the pacing of the film.
– There were so many wires and rigging to control the velociraptor animatrons in the kitchen stalking scene that the child actors had to literally step over and around them while the scene was being filmed.
– The ending where the T-rex saves the day was added when the production team and John Williams decided that it was the hero of the film.
– At one point Lex is hanging from a floorboard between stories. She looks up for a moment. The stunt double looked up accidentally while filming and Ariana Richards’ face had to be superimposed in post production.
– The super computer used in the control room was one of only two ever built to that size (1024 nodes). The other machine was at Los Alamos.
– Steven Spielberg wanted the velociraptors to be about 10 feet tall, which was taller than they were known to be. During filming, paleontologists uncovered 10-foot-tall specimens of raptors called Utahraptors.
– The raptors in the kitchen scene was filmed on Joseph Mazzello’s birthday. Due to a misunderstanding, Joseph ran into one of the raptors on one of the takes and was injured.
– The scene where the T-Rex comes out of the bushes and eats the gallimimus was actually shot on the island of Oahu at Kualoa Ranch. This was the only outdoor scene not filmed on Kauai, due to Hurricane Iniki.
– Before Steven Spielberg decided to use animatronic dinosaurs and computer-generated effects, he wanted to use stop motion animation for the dinosaur effects and had Phil Tippett put together a short demo of the kitchen scene using claymation dinosaurs (Barbie dolls were substituted for the actual actors).
– The blip sound on the Silicon Graphics computers and the blip on the Apple Macintosh Quadra 700 is a blip sound from a Motorola-brand cell phone.
– The helicopter used in the movie was later involved in an accident in Hawaii in March 2001. In the accident, the chopper dropped ten feet to the ground, bounced back up and then tipped on its right side.

Records:

– Jurassic Park held the box office record until it was beaten by Titanic (1997).
– Both the film and the book generated so much interest in dinosaurs that the study of paleontology has had a record increase in students, and interest in general has skyrocketed, and has been at an all-time high ever since.
– The novel was published in 1990. However, pre-production of the film began in 1989, using only Crichton’s manuscript. It was widely believed that the book would be such a hit that it would make an outstanding movie. It turns out that assumption was correct.

Truth behind fact and fiction:

– In the scene where the survivors are crawling through vent spaces, a raptor is seen with shadows from the vents all over its body. The shadows form the letters GATC, the four letters used to denote the components of DNA
– Ariana Richards’ audition consisted of standing in front of a camera and screaming wildly. Director Steven Spielberg -wanted to see how she could show fear.-
– For the part where the T-Rex catches a Galliminus and shakes it in his mouth, the sound was taken from a dog shaking a toy in its mouth.
– Sean Connery was offered the role of John Hammond.
– The name of character -Lewis Dodgson- is a fusion of the –Alice in Wonderland– author’s pen-name Lewis Carroll, and his real name -Charles Dodgson-.
– Principal photography finished 12 days ahead of schedule and on budget.
– The release strategy was planned 15 months before the studio had the chance to see a frame of the movie.
– In the shots of the gift shop, clearly visible is a book entitled -The Making of Jurassic Park– by Don Shay and Jody Duncan. This title was published but tells the behind the scenes story of how the film was made. Jody Duncan also wrote the –Making Of- book for The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997).
– When the T-Rex comes through the glass roof of the Explorer in the first attack, the glass was not meant to break, producing the noticeably genuine screams from the children.
– All the merchandise (T-Shirts, stuffed dinosaurs, lunch boxes, flasks, etc.) shown in the film were, in some part, actually created to be sold with the movie.