Updated March 2, 2022 3.5k votes 985 voters 138k views
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Vote up the stories of '80s stars behind the scenes that you find most interesting.
The films of the 1980s were full of big names like Tom Cruise, Molly Ringwald, John Cusack, Ralph Macchio, and many more. Although many people know the movies well, they might not know the stories of what happened behind the scenes of these '80s movies.
These little-known tales of actors catching dysentery, hating their makeup, not wanting to film a scene, and more, show what it was really like behind the scenes for these '80s Hollywood stars and their colleagues.
While filming the 1981 action film Raiders of the Lost Ark in Tunisia, star Harrison Ford contracted dysentery and couldn't spend too much time away from his trailer, so the scene in which he fights an expert swordsman had to be much shorter.
[B]oth [director Steven Spielberg] and I realized it would take two or three days to shoot this... I was puzzling how to get out of this three days of shooting, so... I proposed to Steven that we just shoot the son [of] a b*tch... So [the actor who played the swordsman] drew his sword - the poor guy was a wonderful British stuntman who had practiced his sword skills for months in order to do this job - and was quite surprised by the idea that we would dispatch him in five minutes. But he flourished his sword, I pulled out my gun and shot him, and then we went back to England.
James Cameron's 1986 sci-fi film Aliens follows Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), as she tries to warn anyone who will listen about predators after she survived an apocalyptic onslaught 57 years prior. According to ABC News, in a 2011 Moviefone interview, Weaver recalled how she went above and beyond for her fellow actors:
There were a lot of deaths and I gave a bouquet to each character the day they were killed; it was like, "Oh, that's your day today! You get killed today!" It was fun giving Paul Reiser [who played Burke] his bouquet; I just gave him a bunch of dead flowers.
Filming The Truffle Shuffle In 'Goonies' Was Actually Painful For Director Richard Donner
Ask any fan their favorite scene in 1986's The Goonies, and they're likely to respond with two words: "Truffle Shuffle." Chunk (Jeff Cohen) has to perform a distinctive dance for his friends to be let into Mikey's (Sean Astin) house.
Director Richard Donner felt so bad about asking Cohen to film the scene that it's been on his mind for years. The director told Uproxx:
Jeff became very special as an individual for me when he did the Truffle Shuffle because there was an honest pain in that scene for that little boy in front of those little kids. When I saw that, and you could see it, my heart went out... There was no direction. I don't take any credit for that; it was just Jeff. He had to stand on that stump and be ridiculed by his friends so he could come in the house, and he did it as best as that character could do it. So much humor comes from pain. Although, I'm sure he was too young to be analytical about it, but I'm sure that was part of his instincts. It was a painful scene.
Ralph Macchio, playing ostracized teenager Daniel in 1984's The Karate Kid, catches a fly with a pair of chopsticks. On The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2018, Macchio shared how they filmed the popular scene:
We went through like five incarnations of how to figure out how to catch this fly. First they had a big metal pipe frame, maybe a 4-foot frame with a piece of fishing line and a plastic fly, and there were two crew guys off-camera going like this [motions showing how they held the frame] and I was going like that [shows how he held the chopsticks]. It just looked hideous. And the next thing... they were catching flies, crew guys were catching flies and taking thin monofilament and fishing line and lassoing flies. Like putting them on a leash. And so they said, "Just find the thing and go down to the fly." Well, I was decapitating, like, heads going here, there... and yeah, I [eventually] caught it, I caught it.
Ally Sheedy played Allison Reynolds in 1985's The Breakfast Club, the quiet loner who is labeled a "basket case" for her dark clothes and withdrawn attitude. In a pivotal scene, Claire (Molly Ringwald) gives Allison a makeover, replacing her edgy look with a softer ensemble, and removing her hair from her eyes.
Sheedy, however, wasn't a fan of the makeover, tellingElle magazine:
It was written in the script... that they wanted Allison to go from being very plain to being suddenly very glamorous. I didn't like that. I had come up with this thing about her black eye makeup and very pale skin, so I thought, "Could it be more that she's taking this mask off?" [Director] John [Hughes] did give me that and they didn't really put a whole bunch of makeup on me; it was more about revealing who Allison is. I wish it had been a little more of that and a little less of, "Let's make her pretty."
In 1982's Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman plays Michael Dorsey, a failing actor who disguises himself as a woman to score a role on a soap, alongside Bill Murray as Jeff, his playwright roommate.
According to his contract, Murray decided to opt out of the credits. News reports differ about why he didn't want to be credited. Some sources say it was just a practical joke; others say he was a big star at the time and didn't want to take the limelight from Dustin Hoffman, or for audiences to think it would be a typical "Bill Murray film."
