Meg Ryan turned down plum lead parts in the films Steel Magnolias, Pretty Woman, and Silence of the Lambs. A few years after her rejection of Silence of the Lambs, which earned Jodie Foster a Best Actress Oscar, Ryan disclosed to Barbara Walters in a television interview that she had felt the role "was dangerous and a little ugly. I felt it was too dark -- for me."
Mel Blanc the voice of Bugs Bunny was allergic to carrots. After a near-fatal auto accident in 1961, Blanc did his cartoon voices, including the first 65 episodes of "The Flintstones," flat on his back, with the microphone hanging over his bed.
Meredith Baxter-Birney played the mother, Elyse Keaton on the hit TV sitcom Family Ties. Her actress mother also played a mom: Dorothy Baxter, on TV's Hazel.
Mexico banned imported films that depicted Mexicans as villains in 1926. The ban was ignored by Hollywood, but the effect on exports south of the border was sufficiently serious for the Hays Office to order no more Mexican heavies in 1930. Film censors let it be understood that it would be quite acceptable for the stock foreign undesirable to be portrayed as Russian, in retaliation for Soviet restrictions on Hollywood imports.
MGM box office favorites Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, while paired as sweethearts in many successful film musicals in the 1930s and 1940s, were rumored to be enemies, each ruthlessly determined to outshine the other on the screen.
MGM film bathing beauty and box-office darling Esther Williams arrived on the Hawaiian island Kauai to film the musical, Pagan Love Song,(1950) co-starring Howard Keel, Rita Moreno, and Philip Costa. Overall, this film was fairly routine, but in it, Williams performed her first salt water swimming ballet. Williams was a great swimming athlete who had qualified for three events in the 1940 Olympics, only to have them cancelled by World War II.
Mia Farrow had originally accepted the role as Mattie Ross in Paramount's 1969 film True Grit, but backed out after Robert Mitchum unnerved her with horror stories about director Henry Hathaway's ruthless directing style. Tuesday Weld was offered the role, but turned it down. Kim Darby finally took the part, but had just settled into family life and was reluctant to work on the film.
Michael Sylvester Stallone dropped his birth-given first name before becoming a famous film star.
Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Dey, Louis Gossett, Jr., Claude Akins, and David Hasselhoff have one lamentable thing in common: they were the lead cast members for ill-fated TV shows that were cancelled within a scant month's time. Pfeiffer was in "B.A.D. Cats" in 1980; Dey was in "Loves Me, Loves Me Not" in 1977; Gossett starred in "The Lazarus Syndrome" in 1980; Akins was in "Nashville 99" in 1977; and Hasselhoff, long before "Baywatch," was in "Semi-Tough" in 1980.
Mickey Mouse has four fingers on each hand.
Milton Berle's comedic genius changed the course of early television when his variety-comedy show, "Texaco Star Theater," launched in the fall of 1948. His first show's guests were Pearl Bailey, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Smith and Dale, and Se๑or Wences.
Mitzi was the name of the dolphin that played Flipper in the movie. For the TV series, she was replaced by Suzy and Cathy.
Model-turned-actress Andie MacDowell's real name is Rose Anderson MacDowell.
More than 150,000 feet (28+ miles) of film was used by David O. Selznick just to film the screen tests of potential actresses for the lead role of Scarlett O'Hara in his 1939 epic Gone With the Wind.
More than 2,500 cover versions of The Beatles' "Yesterday" exist, making it the most recorded song in history.
More than 43 million people tuned in to at least some part of the highly acclaimed Baseball documentary miniseries on PBS in September, 1994, giving Ken Burns' brainchild the largest cumulative audience in the network's 25-year history.
Most countries follow the established formats of TV game shows they import from the United States. Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! are the top games shows in most of the other countries where they air, but the French didn't take to Jeopardy!; the answer-question format "just didn't seem right to them," said president of King World International, Fred Cohen. The company wouldn't change the format, so the show went off the air.
Moviegoers tend to take the film editing process for granted today. However, the very concept of it was revolutionary at the turn of the century. The first film shot and edited with intercutting for a more complex narrative rather than telling a story as if it were a filmed stage play was Edwin S. Porter's innovative The Life of an American Fireman in 1902. It was the first film to use editing to tell a story from two points of view, and to intercut between two places and courses of action.
Muppets creator Jim Henson first created Kermit in 1955 as a lizard. He was made from Henson's mother's coat and two halfs of a Ping-Pong ball (no flipper feet or eleven-point collar). He didn't become a frog until 1968..
Natalie Cole, daughter of music legend Nat "King" Cole, became the first black to win the Best New Artist Grammy Award in 1975. The 25-year-old singer released her debut album, "Inseparable," exactly 10 years after her father's death.
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