Smile - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

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

[ken]

Bruce Dern improvised part of his dialogue in the scene where he talks with the Marines. In the original script he was just suppose to simply end the conversation and leave.

[kylie]

In 1986, "Smile" was turned into a short lived Broadway musical. The show had music by Marvin Hamlisch, and book and lyrics by Howard Ashman, who also directed. The musical featured Jodi Benson, who later provided the voice of Ariel, the title character in Disney's "The Little Mermaid", for which Ashman also wrote the lyrics.

[albert]

Screenwriter Jerry Belson and director Michael Ritchie took their last of many satirical jabs at the random nature of beauty pageants by choosing four of the five finalists from characters the audience had barely gotten to know over the course of the film, and crowning a character that had no dialogue whatsoever and was seen only in group shots.

[frances]

According to Annette O'Toole, who gave an interview about the movie for the Projection Booth podcast in 2016, there were only eight professional actresses among the beauty contestants. The rest of the girls were either extras or actual professional beauty contestants.

[ken]

According to Nicholas Pryor, the filmmakers made a dial with the local Denny's fast food restaurant to promote the company's products in the movie, if the company gives free food vouchers to the crew.

[ella]

Nicholas Pryor and Joan Prather would go on to play a wife and husband of two main characters on Eight is Enough.

[cameron]

According to Bruce Dern, who talked about the movie on The Projection Booth podcast in 2016, there were suppose to be 2500 extras in the film for the pageant scenes. Since it was really important that the same faces show up in the audience in every scene for consistency, the filmmakers came up with an idea to give away five Cadillacs each day of the three-day pageant shoot to five lucky extras. Each extra would get a ticket in the morning and by the end of the day they'd get to enter the Cadillac lottery. This not only made sure that the same people would return each day, but 7000 additional people showed up to play extras and try to win the cars. Since they didn't need that many extras, the filmmakers decided to charge the extras 25 dollars to let them be in the movie and play the Cadillac lottery. Dern concludes the anecdote by amusingly stating that this was the only time in his career that he saw a movie making money directly off the people who worked for the movie.