Trivia / Twister

• Channel Hop: The original Twister was released by Warner Bros. in North America and Universal internationally (hence why Twister...Ride it Out was at a Universal theme park). For Twisters, the upcoming sequel directed by Lee Isaac Chung^note of Minari fame the situation is reversed: Universal is handling the domestic release, and Warner is handling international distribution.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: When Jo and Bill come up with the idea to attach aluminum propellers to DOROTHY’s data sensors so they can be carried by the F5 tornado, Gary England (then the chief meteorologist at Oklahoma City CBS affiliate KWTV) can be heard discussing the ongoing tornado outbreak, including the F4 that hit Wakita (where Jo, Bill and their chase crew were at the time to rescue Meg) and the predicted F5. His sign-off line is interpreted as "News 89 will keep you advised" in English captions/subtitles of the film’s TV, home video and digital/streaming prints. However, the real-life weather update sign-off coined by England was actually, "Stay with us at TV-9, we’ll keep you advised."^note The tagline—which KWTV retained after England’s 2013 retirement—has since been changed to reflect the station’s current identity as “News 9”, which the station adopted as its news branding in March 1997 (ten months after the film’s release) and as a universal brand in 2003. Furthermore, the UHF broadcast band only ever went up to channel 83, though the Federal Communications Commission reallocated channels 70–83 (used mainly for low-power and broadcast translator stations) for use by analog cellular telephone providers in 1989.^note The FCC has since reallocated other spectrum in the designated UHF high-band for wireless communications through auctions conducted in 2008 (for the 700 MHz spectrum, previously assigned to channels 52–69) and 2016 (for the 600 MHz band, previously assigned to channels 38–51).
• The Danza:
  • Bill Paxton as Bill Harding.
  • Joey Slotnick as...Joey.
• Defictionalization: Despite the fact that Dorothy was based off a real NOAA experiment ^note  Specifically, the TOtable Tornado Observatory: AKA Toto. More details are on the main page. (which was sadly unsuccessful), in 1996 charging directly at a tornado to put something in its way was exactly what real storm chasers did not do (they would get as close as they could, but generally speaking they were still several miles away, especially in the case of an F4 or F5 tornado). Fast forward to the 2010's and now storm chasers are more or less emulating the characters in the film in terms of technique, including building armored cars to drive right into the tornado itself!
• Dueling Movies: Twister was one of three disaster films centering on an outbreak of tornadoes that were released in 1996; the other two were made-for-TV films:
  • Night of the Twisters was released first (on February 11, 1996); The Family Channel original movie was a loose adaptation of a 1984 Ivy Ruckman young adult novel inspired by the June 1980 Grand Island, Nebraska tornado outbreak, centering on a boy who tries to reunite with his family as a series of destructive twisters hit his town.
  • Tornado!, which debuted on Fox four days before Twister‘s release (on May 7, 1996), was a pretty blatant rip-off of the latter: both centered on a team of storm chasers trying to deploy weather observation instruments into a tornado to get data analysis for tornado research and warning improvements, had Villainy-Free Villains (in this case, a TV meteorologist rival to the lead chaser), and had the main characters ending up inside the Big Bad tornado in the film’s climax (with the Cool Old Guy grandfather of the protagonist sacrificing himself to secure the TOTO/DOROTHY knockoff).
• Fake American: The very British Cary Elwes as the very southern Jonas, though he's supposed to be from the Midwest and his accent is hard to place.
• Hostility on the Set: Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt grew to dislike each other during filming, so much so that in the former Twister attraction at Universal Studios, they had their scenes in the pre-show shot separately and in completely different locations.
• Life Imitates Art: During the film's theatrical run, a Canadian drive-in, the Canview Drive-In in Thorold, Ontario, was hit by a tornado which went through one of the screens, much like in the film. However, unlike the film, it happened during the day while the theatre was closed, though Twister was actually supposed to play on the screen that night.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The tractor tire flying at a windshield, done as part of the initial special effects tests. This also falls under Never Trust a Trailer at the last few seconds.
  • Though it does show up in the 'interactive menu' on the DVD (this being the first film widely released on the format). So they did, at least, make use of it.
  • It also turned up on the website. And by how it looks, it was meant to take place during the final act of the film (as there is a point where in the actual film, Jo and Bill react to a tractor tire hitting the windshield and bouncing off).
• The Red Stapler: Sales of the Dodge Ram pickup nearly doubled thanks to this film, with red quickly becoming that model's most popular color. While Chrysler sold 280,000 Rams in 1995, sales skyrocketed to over 400,000 units in 1996 and stayed that way through 1999. Even after the boom faded, the popularity of the Ram convinced Chrysler to spin it off into its own make. In a variation of this trope, tornado chasers are now popularly characterized as driving red pickup trucks in reference to this film. More broadly, the film popularized storm chasing to the wider world outside of meteorologists. Despite the mistakes in the film, it remains popular among meteorologists, storm chasers, and weather fanatics, some of whom say they were inspired to go into the field because of it.
• Referenced by...:
  • Seattle-based technology company F5 Networks named themselves after the F5 tornado; it's said that the founders of the company were fans of the film.
  • The National Weather Service were so amused by the film that they named their on-site eatery at Norman, Oklahoma’s National Weather Center, the Flying Cow Cafe.
• Science Marches On
  • The tornadoes in this movie are classified on the Fujita Scale, which used a combination of recorded wind speed and damage to determine a tornado's intensity. In 2007 it was replaced by the Enhanced Fujita Scale which places more emphasis on the damage done by a tornado to gauge its intensity.
  • Early on in the film, a bit of exposition talks about how tornado warnings are "nowhere near good enough" at 3 minutes, and that if Dorothy is successful, that could be increased to 15 minutes or more. As of 2013, the average warning lead time in the United States is 15 minutes, and can be as much as an hour under favorable conditions.
• Technology Marches On: Many have said that the team's navigator and map keeper Robert "Rabbit" Nurick (Alan Ruck) would now be replaced by Google Maps.
  • In fact, storm chasers today use smartphone apps and GPS-enabled computers to broadcast their location in real-time to other spotters, as well as emailing direct reports to the National Weather Service.
• Troubled Production: The film was almost as disaster-plagued offscreen as it was onscreen.
  • The original concept for the film was pitched in 1992, and Michael Crichton and his wife Anne-Marie Martin were reportedly paid $2.5 million to turn it into a feature-length screenplay. However, Joss Whedon was hired as a script doctor in early 1995, and had to leave the production twice - once after developing bronchitis (resulting in Steven Zaillian being brought in while he recuperated) and once shortly after production began when he married Kai Cole (this time, Jeff Nathanson took over as script doctor). Neither Whedon nor his temporary replacements were credited in the finished film.
  • Much of the film shoot took place in sunny weather, requiring Industrial Light and Magic to more than double the number of "digital sky replacement" shots needed to make the weather look suitably dark and stormy. Even when they did get dark skies, the weather changed so quickly and so often that director Jan de Bont had to schedule at least three scenes a day. Worse, however, was the solution to the inappropriate weather conditions for shots of Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt in the cab of their truck; bright electronic lamps were set up behind the cameras that burned their retinas, leaving them unable to see at the end of a day's shooting. Eventually, Plexiglas filters were put in front of the lights, while Paxton and Hunt needed eyedrops and special glasses for several days to recover.
  • Hunt's problems didn't end with the bright lights. She and Paxton had to be injected against hepatitis after hiding in a particularly unsanitary ditch, and while filming the same sequence, Hunt stood up too quickly and hit her head on a low wooden bridge. In the scene where the truck drives through a cornfield, she inadvertently let go of the door of the truck and was hit in the side of the head by it (suffering a concussion according to some sources); the door was wedged open for further attempts at the sequence. Jan de Bont later said that much as he loved working with Hunt, he described her as "clumsy", which Hunt didn't appreciate.
  • The crew also had problems working with de Bont, whom they saw as "out of control". The first director of photography, Don Burgess, blasted de Bont for not knowing "what he wanted till he saw it", resulting in numerous cases of shooting a scene from one direction, then insisting on shooting from the other direction immediately and losing patience with the time the crew members needed to move cameras and lights and sound equipment around to the far side of the set. When he knocked over an assistant cameraman for missing his cue, Burgess and his crew walked out en masse, to the shock of the cast. Jack N. Green and his camera crew were hired to replace Burgess, but things didn't go smoothly for them either; a hydraulic house set that was rigged to collapse on cue was accidentally set off too early while Green was inside, and he was hit on the head and back by the falling ceiling and had to be rushed to hospital, forcing de Bont to take over as director of photography for the final two days of filming.
  • Filming was planned to finish in time for Hunt to resume her commitments to Mad About You, but inevitably it ran over schedule, and Hunt's Mad About You co-star and series creator Paul Reiser agreed to push back production on the 1995-96 series to accommodate the delays. Because of de Bont's insistence on using multiple cameras, 1.3 million feet of film were printed (more than three times the amount usually printed for a film of its length), propelling the final budget to $92 million. It became a box-office smash despite tepid critical reception, but it had a difficult time getting there.
  • Troubles even extended to the soundtrack. The filmmakers asked Van Halen to provide two songs for the soundtrack, but it proved to be terrible timing; both Eddie and Alex Van Halen were having surgery to deal with hip and back problems, Sammy Hagar and his wife were about to have their first child, and they were taking a year off anyway to cool off inner band tensions that had been growing for some time. Their manager talked them into it so they could be set financially for the rest of the year though, and the band agreed, explicitly against Hagar's wishes. Sammy ended up flying back and forth multiple times from his home in Maui to work or re-work the song "Humans Being", eventually getting fed up and writing the final lyrics on the dashboard of his car in ten minutes so he could get back to his wife. Producer Bruce Fairbarn ended up getting caught between the arguments, and eventually had to keep Sammy and Eddie away from each other in the studio. Ultimately Sammy would not respond to calls to rework the second song, leading their other contribution to be an Eddie instrumental, "Respect the Wind". Further manipulations from Eddie would continue behind the scenes concerning their upcoming Greatest Hits package, and after giving Sammy an ultimatum, he eventually left in acrimony in 1996. He and Eddie didn't speak again until shortly before Eddie's death in October 2020, when they finally mended fences.
• Uncredited Role: Joss Whedon was uncredited script doctor.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Tom Hanks was the original choice for Bill Harding. Hanks even briefly accepted the role and read lines with the cast before dropping out. Kevin Costner, Richard Gere, Mel Gibson, Michael Keaton, Dennis Quaid, Kurt Russell and John Travolta were also considered.
  • Laura Dern was considered for Dr. Jo Harding. Incidentally, years earlier Hunt had tested for the part of Dr. Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park and lost the role to Dern.
  • Christopher McDonald was considered for the role of Dr. Jonas Miller, but was already committed to Happy Gilmore where he ironically plays a similar arrogant, smug villain.
  • Garth Brooks turned down the role of Dustin Davis.

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