Ordinary People - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

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

[manuel]

The film cast includes one Oscar winner: Timothy Hutton; and three Oscar nominees: Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch and Elizabeth McGovern. (None of them were such at the time of the film's release).

[norma]

Received an R rating for relatively mild profanity; this was before the PG13 rating.

[scarlett]

Pachelbel's Canon, the main theme played throughout the film, gained a good deal of new popularity as a result of this film. It is tradionally played at weddings.

[maureen]

All three of the leads have several moments when they "space out", have some sort of a flashback, and then are brought back to reality by other characters in the scene. Beth spaces out twice; once when she goes into Buck's room and looks around wistfully in a sort of trance; only to be brought back to reality by Conrad walking in the room. She has another scene like this when she's shopping for clothes and stares at one item for several minutes; only to be brought back by the sales woman who asks if she wants it in her size. Conrad spaces out and has flashbacks to the funeral when he is riding to school in the car with his friends to school; he also spaces out when he is in English class and his teacher has to ask him about the Jude the Obscure reading assignment, twice. Calvin spaces out when he is talking to Ray his business partner about their secretary. He also has flashbacks when he is jogging in the middle of the movie. And he has flashbacks when he and Beth are flying home from Houston; dreaming of younger, happier times in his marriage to Beth.

[wesley]

First film as a director for Robert Redford. Reportedly, Redford's salary for this film was scale, receiving only around $53,066, the Director's Guild minimum wage. For many years, Redford had been intending to one day become a film director. Prior to this movie, Redford had been starring in Brubaker (1980), a film whose shooting schedule went over-time and consequently Redford had to start work on this picture with very little time at all between projects.

[duane]

The title stems from the following line in Judith Guest's novel: "They are ordinary people, after all. For a time they had entered the world of the newspaper statistic; a world where any measure you took to feel better was temporary, at best, but that is over. This is permanent. It must be." A virtual textbook in the management of familial grief, the novel is still required reading in the English curricula at many American high schools.

[liam]

Robert Redford decided to do the film because the story's family reminded him of his own in the way it talked around issues.

[ronnie]

The restaurant scene between Conrad and Karen was filmed in Wilmette, Illinois at the Original House of Pancakes. A photograph of Robert Redford, taken during production for the film, hangs above the cash register at the front entrance.

[bernard]

In "Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted", Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's book about "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", Mary Tyler Moore herself spoke about her cautiousness with other people: "'I'm cautious in my dealings. I'm a hang back person when things get uncomfortable. I'm reserved, I guess,'" she said. If you compare this to the way Calvin describes Beth at the end of Ordinary People, you can see the similarities between Mary Tyler Moore and the character Beth: "You can't handle mess. You need everything neat and easy. Maybe you can't love anybody", Calvin says to Beth.

[victoria]

Beth's maiden name is Butler. The Butlers are the other primary family in the book and movie; Ward, Beth's brother in Houston and his wife Audrey; and Beth's parents Howard and Ellen.

[jeffrey]

The majority of the movie was filmed on location in and around the northern suburbs of Chicago. The scene set in Texas was actually filmed in Apple Valley, California, at the Apple Valley Country Club, just down the street from Roy Rogers' house. Note the Joshua trees in the background.

[marc]

Calvin was an orphan in the novel; this plot point was dropped from the movie.

[maureen]

In a recent article in Esquire Magazine (March 31st, 2013), Robert Redford claims that the reason film critic Pauline Kael criticized "Ordinary People" was because she had previously asked to meet with him to give him tips on improving his movies/acting, and he had refused. "And then she really got pissed", he said. "Everything I did from then on, she just tore into me."

[veronica]

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[alyssa]

The only Best Picture Academy Award winner set in Chicagoland. Actually Chicago; which was set in Chicago; was set in Chicago. But that was set there and not filmed there. (It was filmed in Toronto).

[janice]

Author Judith Guest shared her feelings about the character Beth in a recent op-ed about the making of the movie: At one point I confided to (Robert Redford) my many frustrations with the character of Beth, the mother. "I don't see her as a villain," I said. "But people seem to hate her. I have a lot of sympathy for her, and yet I wasn't able to get that across. Some characters are like poems: you never finish them, you just abandon them in despair. " He told me, "I see how you as the author might feel like that, but for me, and for the purposes of this movie, I think she works just fine." So I quit worrying about her.

[tammy]

Scenes shot in Chicago: Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore eat lunch at the Sun Times Plaza; or Timothy Hutton and Dinah Manoff have coffee at the Walker Brothers on Greenbay in Wilmette, a Chicago suburb; Beth goes up the escalator at Water Tower Place and waves hello to her friend going down while they are shopping for Christmas; Various scenes at the Jarret house in Winnetka; Various scenes at Lake Forrest High school; Ray and Calvin walking over the bridge over the Chicago River; and they stop and talk about Calvin and family problems; Various scenes of Calvin taking the Metra from Chicago to Lake Forrest and Back; various scenes of parks and streets in Lake Forrest; Winnetka and Glencoe; all suburbs of Chicago.

[kylie]

Time's Richard Schickel said : "Robert Redford has created an austere and delicate examination of the ways in which a likable family falters under pressure and struggles, with ambiguous results, to renew itself. This is not very show-bizzy stuff, but for once, a movie star has used his power to create not light entertainment or a trendy political statement, but a work that addresses itself quietly and intelligently to issues everyone who attempts to raise children must face."

[sylvia]

Various critics noted the similarities between Alan Ball's Oscar winning film about the breakdown of the American Family, "American Beauty", and predecessor Robert Redford's Oscar Winning movie on the same subject, "Ordinary People." Film critic had this to say about the subject: "Ordinary People" is an easy enough film to dismiss today, partly because it beat Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull" for the best picture Oscar, and partly because its insights into suburban malaise soon became widely circulated clichés. (The ambitious, tortured wife played by Annette Bening in "American Beauty" is merely the most obvious of Beth Jarrett's many descendants.)