Trivia / Silent Movie

• Actor-Inspired Element: The joke about Burt Reynolds having his initials on his house came from the fact that he really did have his initials emblazed on everything in his house, even the doorknobs.
• Actor-Shared Background: All over the place. All of the stars are represented by their hobbies.
  • Paul Newman is in a racing wheelchair (at the time, he was car racing as a hobby).
  • Marty Feldman's character, Marty Eggs, is a personal allusion to Feldman's vegetarianism, which made him very fond of eggs.
• All-Star Cast: And reportedly gotten on the cheap because nobody had to learn any lines!
• The Danza: All three main characters count: Mel Brooks as Mel Funn, Marty Feldman as Marty Eggs, and Dom De Luise as Dom Bell.
• Corpsing: Liza Minnelli legitimately cracked up when Mel, Dom and Marty fell over in their suits of armour and it was left in the film.
• Creator Couple:
  • The pregnant woman they pick up at the beginning of the movie and drop off at the hospital is Dom De Luise's real wife Carol Arthur. It isn't a double-family member, though - she was not actually pregnant at the time. Their youngest son, David, had been born a few years previously.
  • There's also Mel Brooks' wife, Anne Bancroft.
• Deleted Scenes: Mel Brooks' biography states there was a scene in a restaurant where two giant lobsters pick out a human from a swimming tank to eat. Despite Mel and the crew loving it, the scene wasn't received well in the previews.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Marcel Marceau playing a role As Himself, the world's most famous mime...and the only audibly speaking character in the film.
• Production Posse: Double-layered. Marty Feldman and Dom De Luise are part of Mel Brooks' posse, and they're playing members of Brooks' character's posse.
• Those Two Actors: Dom De Luise's frequent co-star, Burt Reynolds also appears.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Mel Brooks wanted Gene Wilder to star, but he was busy making The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother.
  • The original screenplay also featured an actual movie filming scene on the set of the movie, which is also called Silent Movie. That scene shows the set designer at work, girls on the set wearing hats shaped like a Christmas tree and the characters standing near a pool with no water at first. The line Mel Funn said in the scene via title card was "Lights! Camera! Action! No Sound!"

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