These Great Movie Moments Were Not Scripted

Filmmakers labor over catching great movie moments in their films. They want that memorable moment that will still be discussed years from now. Sometimes, they write a scene over and do a scene over until the entire staff is about to fall out. Then sometimes, they happen by pure accident.

In the 1971 film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, Gene Wilder first introduces himself as a man who needs a cane to walk. But when he approaches the crowd, he falls forward and does a flip before addressing everyone. Gene came up with that himself.

He wasn’t supposed to do all that. But he thought it would be a good introduction because from that moment on, you never knew if he was lying or telling the truth.

Alicia Silverstone actually mispronounced Haitians during her debate scene in the 1995 film Clueless. But they let it go because they didn’t want her to know that she was actually pronouncing it wrong.

In the 1975 film Jaws, the cast and crew had an inside joke whenever anything went wrong, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” Roy Scheider thought it would be a great idea to work the joke into the movie and it finally stuck in one of the biggest scenes they shot.

In the 1980 film The Shining, Jack Nicholson improvised when he delivered the line, “Here’s Johnny!” It’s definitely a nod to the late-night talk show host Johnny Carson and Stanley Kubrick almost cut the line from the movie. What a mistake that would have been.

In 1976, Sylvester Stallone was a young actor who was virtually unknown at this point. He wrote Rocky in three days and refused to let anyone else star in it even though United Artists was offering him huge money for the rights. In this scene, there’s a subtle moment when a guy in the marketplace throws Rocky an orange.

That wasn’t scripted. The guy thought Silvester was just some unknown man going on a run and gave him an orange. Little did he know, he was being filmed and would end up in a movie.

Tom Hanks is gold. Anything he touches is sure to become a pure masterpiece. The 1994 film Forrest Gump was bound to be one of them. When he tells Bubba his name and repeats it, he was going off-script.

But it was perfect because he was introducing himself the way Bubba had just done it. That’s why the director went with it. It worked better in the scene than what Tom was supposed to say.

There are great movie moments all over Hollywood. Sometimes, you don’t even know they’re there. But the business of filmmaking will always have those stories of how something was done by accident or they made it up on the spot and it just worked.

Don’t forget to check out The Deeper Dark, a psychological thriller available on Amazon! When a hero comes home from the war, he finds his world went on without him and now he has a new war to fight as a corrupt network of evil threatens the only person he has left in his life.

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