Silent Movie - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Silent Movie or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Silent Movie

[willard]

The DVD contains audio tracks in English, Spanish and French... even though the only word ever spoken is virtually the same in the 3 languages.

[michele]

Carol Arthur: Dom DeLuise's wife plays the pregnant woman in the beginning.

[nora]

Marcel Marceau, the famous mime, has the only speaking line in this movie: "Non!" (when refusing a role in the silent film). As a result, the movie has been listed in the Guinness Book Of World Records as having the fewest spoken lines of any sound movie.

[frederick]

The movie features the first onscreen pairing of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, who dance a tango together. The couple were married from 1964 until Bancroft's death in 2005. Aside from an uncredited cameo as a congregation member in Blazing Saddles (1974), Bancroft had not previously appeared in any of her husband's films. They later starred together in To Be or Not to Be (1983), and Bancroft starred in The Elephant Man (1980) and 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), which were produced by Brooks.

[darrell]

Mel Brooks and his writers concocted a sight gag they loved, in which the customers at a seafood restaurant would be human-sized lobsters, who pick terrified humans out of an aquarium to be cooked for dinner. However, the gag bombed at sneak previews, and was deleted.

[ruby]

Italian censorship visa # 69304 delivered on 29 October 1976.

[carl]

Mel Brooks claimed that he was able to get all of the big star cameos for under three hundred dollars a day, far below their normal salaries.

[lonnie]

The running gag with all the Coke products is a reference to Mel Brooks' wife and guest star in the movie, Anne Bancroft. In 1963, Bancroft was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Miracle Worker (1962), but was appearing on Broadway in "Mother Courage and Her Children," and couldn't attend the awards ceremony. Joan Crawford convinced Bancroft to let her accept the Oscar on her behalf, so she (Crawford) could upstage Bette Davis, her hated co-star in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?? (1962), who was also nominated. Crawford, a longtime member of the Board of Directors for Pepsi Co., had never thanked Bancroft for allowing her to do that and hard feelings existed between the two actresses for years afterwards.

[chad]

A running gag in the film involves the front page of Variety magazine: headlines about the making of "Silent Movie" periodically appear onscreen, with apparently gibberish headlines for other articles ("Pix Tix Nix Mix", "Boff Noff Toff Roff", etc.) lower down the page. Mel Brooks is making fun of the jargon Variety writers used to use ("auds" meaning audiences, "nabes" meaning neighborhood theaters, and so on).

[caroline]

The first of Mel Brooks' films in which he plays the lead role.

[frances]

The villainous company Engulf & Devour is a spoof of Gulf + Western, which between 1965 and 1970 swallowed up eighty different companies, including Paramount Pictures in 1966.

[wallace]

On the May 19, 1981, broadcast of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), Alan Alda related his experience of attending the film's 1976 premiere in Westwood (which had Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft in the audience). Alda said he probably laughed harder than anyone in the crowd, and once the movie had ended, he approached Brooks and Bancroft to compliment them on a job well done. According to Alda, Bancroft didn't miss a beat and responded, "Oh, that was you laughing? You see Mel? I told you SOME idiot would find this funny!"

[sylvia]

Part of a cycle of movies made during the mid 1970s about Hollywood, Old Hollywood, and its Golden Age, including the Silent Film era. The pictures include Inserts (1975), Valentino (1977), Nickelodeon (1976), this movie, The Wild Party (1975), The Last Tycoon (1976), Hearts of the West (1975), The Day of the Locust (1975), and The World's Greatest Lover (1977).

[claude]

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!"

[willard]

Final film of Harry Ritz. Mel Brooks has described Ritz as "the funniest man on Earth", and one of his strongest comedic influences.