Silkwood - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

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

[richard]

An autopsy of Karen Silkwood's body found plutonium contamination in several organs. A civil court case followed, went on for several years, and resulted in the eventual out-of-court settlement of $1.3 million.

[ray]

Lily Tomlin auditioned for the role of Dolly.

[jeffrey]

Karen Silkwood is buried in an East Texas cemetery. A few years ago a local television reporter paid a nighttime visit to her grave, on Halloween, with a Geiger counter. The grave still emits enough radiation to set the Geiger counter clicking.

[jesse]

Debut feature film screenplay (co-written) for Nora Ephron.

[kenzi]

Cher directed and starred in If These Walls Could Talk (1996) with Diana Scarwid, who played her girlfriend in this film.

[camila]

Movie posters for the film featured a preamble that read: "On November 13, 1974, Karen Silkwood, an employee of a nuclear facility, left to meet with a reporter from the New York Times. She never got there".

[sylvia]

One of the first major tasks that Cher had to tackle when she arrived on location was to find the right look for her character Dolly. In the beginning, according to Cher, Dolly was written as a "glamorous barrel rider." They tried a screen test of Cher with that look, but Mike Nichols didn't like it. Nichols told Cher to wash her face, then wash her hair and let it dry flat to her head without doing anything to it. Then he and costume designer Ann Roth began to dress her in dowdy clothes, working hard to strip every trace of glamour from the usually picture perfect star. "They were just merciless with me, until I had on some horrible men's bowling shirt and awful chino pants, with two pairs of jockey shorts underneath to make me look heavier," said Cher. "When I stepped out in my new costume, Kurt Russell said, 'What the f*ck are you supposed to be?' I ran in tears to the back bathroom, which had the only mirror in the house, and I cried my eyes out."

[kristen]

The scenes that take place in Los Alamos are all interior scenes. There are no recognizable shots of the national laboratory or the city.

[beth]

This film's epilogue says, "The precise circumstances of Karen's death are unknown. It is also not known whether she had any documents with her. None were found. An autopsy revealed a high level of the tranquilizer Methaqualone and some alcohol in her bloodstream. Oklahoma police ruled her death a single car accident. A year later, the plant shut down."

[ronnie]

Mandy Valems of the book 'Smog City' (ISBN: 150246974X) was based on Karen Silkwood.

[ivan]

De-glamorizing herself was difficult for Cher, who had made her career on a trademark style of being dressed to the over-the-top nines. "But I was looking at the big picture," she said. "Everyone was trying not to laugh, and not doing a very good job of it. Mike was looking really pleased. 'That's perfect,' he said. I couldn't believe it. My first real time in front of a camera in a big film, and this was the way I had to look?"

[albert]

The main character of the fiction novel "Sysco, the Worst Disaster Ever Created", was based on Karen Silkwood, and another character in the book was named Dolly, as a connection to the character from Silkwood. In fact the movie is quoted several times in the book.

[carla]

When Karen Silkwood's real-life boyfriend at the time, Drew Stephens, saw the film, he was very moved. "It was magic," he told People magazine. "It makes a human being out of Karen instead of a myth."

[carla]

The scene where Karen sets off the radiation alarms actually happened. Her level of contamination was forty times the safe limit.

[gabriel]

In an interview with "Entertainment Weekly", Mike Nichols said that this film was "the beginning of me exploring a more fluid, less conscious approach to movies."

[bernice]

According to Cher, when she and Meryl Streep hung out together, they talked mostly "about our kids, music people, where we wanted to live, what I wanted to do when I grew up. Meryl," she said, "couldn't care less what she wears. I'd tease her about that and she'd tell me to shut up. And she did her own ironing, which drove me insane. She says it keeps her down to earth. I don't know what keeps me down to earth, but it isn't ironing. I send my stuff out."