Trivia / Stop Making Sense

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• Bad Export for You: The international CD release of the 1984 Live Album removes the foldout portion in the middle and prints the interior photos in black and white rather than in full color; said photos and their accompanying captions are also resized and rearranged in order to truncate the booklet to 12 pages. The 1999 version, meanwhile, features the US liner notes worldwide.
• Channel Hop: For the release of the soundtrack album, the band moved from Sire Records to EMI outside the U.S. and Canada for the remainder of their career.
• Costume Backlash: In the DVD commentary, Tina Weymouth riffs on the baggy gray coveralls she wears during her first few numbers, stating "Ah yes, the blimp suit. It must have looked very modern in the '80s."
• Creator Backlash: While by no means hating the film as a whole, bassist Tina Weymouth was horrified when she saw Tom Tom Club's performance of "Genius of Love" in the final cut, given that it only existed to give David Byrne time to change into the Big Suit, and subsequently got in and lost an argument with Jonathan Demme over the scene's inclusion.
  • Even with his own fondness for the song, Chris Frantz has joked on a number of occasions (including during press for the 2023 restoration) that he wishes he had "kept [his] mouth shut" during "Genius of Love", referring to his excited chanting.
• Deleted Scene: Performances of "Cities", "Big Business", and "I Zimbra" were shot for the film, but were ultimately left out of the final cut. They would be incorporated on early home media releases before being made optional extras on the DVD and Blu-ray releases, with streaming services leaving them out entirely. The songs would also be left off of the Live Album until 2023, when they were included on a double-LP reissue commemorating A24's theatrical rerun of the movie.
• Feelies: The initial LP release of the live album and the 2023 expanded reissue include a book juxtaposing color photographs from the film's concerts with eccentric ruminations on everyday society. CD releases include the book's contents as part of the liner notes.
• He Also Did: Cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth also worked on Blade Runner, among others.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The film was out of print on home video for a while until the Palm Pictures' DVD re-release in 1999, which no doubt helped sales of the soundtrack album reach double platinum status.
• Looping Lines: Byrne's famous line "Thank you! Does anybody have any questions?" after the band finishes "Life During Wartime" was dubbed in, over the far more mundane "We're going to take a short break... we'll be right back" (which can still be heard on the 1984 version of the live album). Other instrumental parts were occasionally overdubbed to get rid of imperfections like feedback.
• Referenced by...:
  • Muppets Tonight features a performance of "Once in a Lifetime" by Kermit the Frog based on the film, with Kermit donning an oversized white suit similar to Byrne's and performing in front of sequential rear projections on a starkly-lit black stage.
  • The film was spoofed in the Documentary Now! episode, "Final Transmission" with the band Test Pattern.
  • For Byrne's appearance on Saturday Night Live as the musical guest on February 29, 2020, hosted by John Mulaney, one of the eyecatches had Mulaney wearing Byrne's big suit from the film and dancing with a lamp.
  • The film's austere set-up seemed to influence one of Jonathan Demme's next projects, New Order's 1985 video for "The Perfect Kiss", from their own album Low-Life, that had the band playing the song live in the studio (as they refused to lip-sync at the time).
  • The technique of incrementally adding musicians as the concert progresses, rearranging the songs to fit these additions and subtractions, informed Nine Inch Nails' 2013-2014 Tension tour, which similarly added elements as each show went on. Frontman Trent Reznor has been open about Talking Heads' influence on his music, citing Remain in Light as one of his favorite albums and basing NIN's logo on the typography on that album's cover.
  • The music video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's "UHF", which parodies a number of music videos that were popular on MTV throughout the '80s, ends with Al recreating the "Girlfriend is Better" performance from this film, wiggling on-stage in a big suit of his own.
  • R.E.M.'s world tour in support of Green featured frontman Michael Stipe donning his own version of the big suit and mimicking some of David Byrne's mannerisms, as captured in the 1990 Concert Film Tourfilm.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The audience was lit and filmed during the first night, but the audience members appeared stiff and self-conscious about being on camera (thanks in part to the extra lighting needed to make them visible), so audience shots were left out of the remaining performances. We only see audience reaction shots at the very end, during "Crosseyed and Painless". This ultimately ended up working in the film's favor: fans and critics cite the scarcity of audience shots as being one of many aspects of the film that enable a greater focus on the performances and allow it to stand out from other concert films.
  • "Heaven" was to include shots of Lynn Mabry singing the harmony vocal from backstage, but it was ultimately decided that the film would only show what the audience would have seen, so we just hear her vocal with just David Byrne and Tina Weymouth onstage.
  • Jonathan Demme suggested shooting extra footage on a soundstage mimicking the Pantages Theater, but the band shot the idea down, feeling that the lack of audience energy would inhibit their performance (a feeling that was partly influenced by their bad memories of the first concert filmed, in which the nervousness of the audience made the band too insecure to perform properly).

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