Trivia / Inchon

• All-Star Cast: The lead actors are Laurence Olivier, Jacqueline Bisset, Ben Gazzara, and Richard Roundtree, with supporting roles by David Janssen, Gabriele Ferzetti, Rex Reed, Omar Sharif and legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: David Janssen and Ben Gazzara accepted their parts in the film in order to work with Laurence Olivier.
• Backed by the Pentagon:
  • The U.S. military agreed to support the film after reading the initial script, which was submitted in 1978 and was more broadly accurate to history than the final version was, because it gave a positive portrayal of U.S. armed forces and presented a story built on Black-and-White Morality in which the good guys (the U.S. and Western military) defeat the bad guys (the Communistic North Korean forces) and help save the day, a portrayal that had become uncommon in Hollywood because of the public backlash over The Vietnam War. The filmmakers were allowed to film on the USS Cleveland and the Department of Defense loaned them 1,500 soldiers from the Army and Marine Corps to serve as extras in the film. However, as the premiere drew closer and the involvement of Sun-Myung Moon and his church sparked controversy, not to mention the film's lack of historical accuracy, the DOD asked the film company behind it to remove all mention of their assistance from the film's credits.
  • Not unexpectedly, Sun-Myung Moon and the Unification Church contributed handsomely to the film's production as well. In addition to them eventually paying the film's entire budget,^note Moon initially contributed $30 million to the production company, but when the project couldn't get funding from Japanese banks, he and/or the Church wound up covering the rest of the $46 million it came to cost several members of the Japanese and Korean Unification Churches worked on the film for free and appeared in the film as extras.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $46 million. Box office, $5,200,986. In 1995, it made the Guinness Book of World Records as "the biggest money-loser in history", later to be surpassed by Cutthroat Island.
• Bury Your Art: After the film turned out to be a Box Office Bomb, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ended its theatrical run prematurely, and its ties to the highly controversial Unification Church ensured that it would only scarcely resurface over the years. It never returned to theaters, has never been released on home media or streaming services, and was only sporadically aired on the Unification Church's own TV network, ALTV. After ALTV was acquired and renamed by ComStar Media Fund in 2009, the film would never reenter the public eye outside of bootlegs.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Terence Young, who directed most of the film (not including Rev. Moon's reshots), was not happy with the version that went to theaters, saying the film had been turned into a propaganda piece.
  • Film critic Rex Reed, who played a small role in the film, was among the many critics who panned it upon release.
  • Some crew members were apparently displeased to find out that the Unification Church was responsible for the movie and said they would never have agreed to work on it if they'd known.
• Creator Couple: The blonde war photographer, Marguerite, is played by Sabine Sun, the wife of director Terence Young.
• Creator Killer:
  • After directing this film, Terence Young (known for three James Bond films) never directed another internationally released film.
  • The Unification Church never mounted another big-budget film.
• The Danza: David Janssen as David Feld.
• Deleted Role: Zigzagged. David Janssen plays David Feld, the head of the team of journalists that appears throughout the movie. However, because he died in 1980 and the producers didn't want the film to seem dated, the scenes with him in it were cut after the film's 1981 premiere, which cut roughly 35 minutes in total. However, Janssen's scenes are still in the 140 minute cut that was aired on the Good Life Network, one of the only times that the movie was ever aired on TV and the source for the bootlegs that make the only available copies of the film nowadays.
• Executive Meddling:
  • A case when the higher-ups directly reworked the footage and edited it, despite not having any experience whatsoever.
  • Mitsuharu Ishii, the owner of the film's production company, One-Way Productions,^note A reference to the Unification Church's teachings of "one way" to God and a member of the Unification Church, specifically told the screenwriter to portray Douglas MacArthur in a spiritualistic way and to include three love stories; one between two Americans, one between two Koreans and one between an American and a Korean.
• Fake American: Laurence Olivier as General Douglas MacArthur. The awful W. C. Fields-esque accent mentioned in the main article? That was deliberate, being based on a description of The Old Soldier's accent from someone who claimed to have known him, but who apparently never listened to his farewell speech to Congress. The same speech that is played at the end of this film.
• Fake Nationality:
  • Toshiro Mifune (Japanese) as a Jaehan Ilbonin (Japanese-born expatriate to South Korea).
  • Gabriele Ferzetti (Italian) as a Turkish general.
  • Omar Sharif (Egyptian) as an Indian Army colonel.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • The film is only available on bootlegs due to being pulled from theaters as fast as it came in, and because the production company — which got most of its finances from religious leader Sun Myung Moon — won't even give it the dignity of a home video release. The now-defunct GoodLife TV, which was owned by Moon, played the film a few times, but it has not been seen since; those TV broadcasts make up some of the bootlegs. It's the only Razzie Worst Picture winner to never have a single official release.
  • However, Jerry Goldsmith's score to the film was popular enough to warrant a few releases (including a special edition CD from Intrada in 2006. This was the second release of the score from the label - the first was an expanded release, the second was a 2-CD set featuring the original album presentation on one disc and the complete score on the other).There was a third release in 2020 with a remastered 3-CD presentation. CD 1 - The 1982 soundtrack album; CD 2 - the score in its 2006 album assembly; CD 3 - the score in film order.
• Money, Dear Boy: The Trope Namer. This is the only reason why Sir Laurence Olivier accepted a role in this movie. He even had the bonuses paid out to him (due production going over schedule) delivered to him personally in actual briefcases full of money by helicopter.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The film was shot from May to September 1979, but had a difficulty finding a distributor due to the Unification Church's involvement. Finally, after screenings in Washington, D.C. and the Cannes Film Festival, MGM agreed to distribute the film and was given a general release in September 1982.
• Troubled Production: Filming was as problematic as you'd expect a Sun Myung Moon-produced movie to be.
  • The producers had trouble securing a director - supposedly psychic Jeane Dixon advised Moon to pick Terence Young after the original director, Andrew V. McLaglen, dropped out. Laurence Olivier agreed to play Douglas MacArthur for a $1.25 million salary plus overtime pay (it's no surprise the movie was his inspiration for the famous Money, Dear Boy quote). Being in his 70s, he suffered from heat stroke and exhaustion and had to rest between takes to make it through the filming. Due to poor health, he later refused to return to Korea for re-shoots; as such, a reshooting of the final scene had to be done in Rome instead.
  • The film's script went through multiple drafts, each more divergent from history than the last. The first version that was submitted to the Pentagon when the filmmakers were seeking their financial support was historically accurate enough and gave a favorable enough portrayal of the U.S. military to receive their support. Because of the many differences from history in the final draft, the filmmakers had to agree to include a disclaimer in the film stating that certain events had been fictionalized.
  • Eventually, Moon himself got personally involved in making the film, even taking part in the editing and reshots made because of changes to the script. In the finished movie, Moon is listed in the opening credits as "Specially Advised By". Because of the film's several reshoots, the filmmakers had to return to South Korea three times and to Rome and Los Angeles twice to work on the film. One of the reshots in question was of a scene near the end where MacArthur steps out of a limo, which was redone because the crowd in the original shot was said to be too small. Other scenes featuring David Janssen were also reshot when he died because it was thought that his presence in the movie would make it feel dated (though his scenes were included in the last known version of the movie). And at least one Korean extra was killed filming the battle scenes when a jeep crashed on top of him.
  • Months of shooting time were wasted trying to import equipment to Korea, where the film industry was (at the time) not nearly advanced enough to handle such a large-scale production. The worst blow came when production was delayed by two typhoons followed by an earthquake. These mishaps ensured that the budget ultimately ballooned from $18,000,000 USD to $48,000,000.
  • As the premiere approached, rumors about the involvement of Rev. Moon and the Unification Church started circulating, resulting in protests by the public. The cast and crew claimed to have been kept in the dark about Moon's involvment in the project and not to have been told until eight weeks after filming had started; some crew members stated that they wouldn't have signed up for working on the film if they had known about it. The press releases given by the filmmakers didn't endear the movie to many; one of them included a story of how a B-29 pilot supposedly had photographed the face of Jesus appearing in the middle of a group of bomber planes during the war and claimed that MacArthur himself supported the movie - even though he had passed away in 1964.^note This was apparently the result of one of the film's producers being told this by a psychic. The production company was able to get a distribution deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but they pulled it from theaters quickly because of the poor box office performance. Along with critical thrashings (including many Razzie Awards), the movie made only $2,000,000 in theaters and has never been released on video, rivaling Cutthroat Island and John Carter as an all-time box office bomb.

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