JURASSIC PARK AND LOST WORLD FUN FACTS

JURASSIC PARK fun facts !

* Steven Spielberg was origionally going to use effects-whiz Phil Tippetts' stop-motion puppets for all the dinosaur sequences which could not be done with animatronics. But a week before filming, Dennis Muren and the team at Industrial Light and Magic had just received a new software package with amazing capabilities. ILM made up a quick sequence of a T-rex chasing Gallimimuses across an african background plate and sent it to Spielberg. Steven was so astounded that he cancelled all of Tippetts' puppets and handed the non-animatronic effects of JURASSIC PARK over to ILM. Tippett stayed on the JP project, however, as digital effects supervisor.

* The set for Jurassic Park's control room was built on stage 28 at Universal Studios. The room was filled with nearly $1 million worth of sophistocated computer equipment that was actually on loan from industry leaders like Silicon Graphics, Apple and Super Mac.

* After three weeks of filming JURASSIC PARK on the Hawaiin island of Kauai, Hurricane Iniki swept across the island with the film crew still there ! Iniki arrived on September 11 1992, bringing devastating winds of up to 190 km. Laura Dern later commented, "I was standing on the beach with Sam Neill, and I turned around for one moment and suddenly this huge wave came out of nowhere and hit us neck high. This was at 9 in the morning, and it was not supposed to arrive until 3 in the afternoon." The JP crew sought shelter in their concrete-enforced hotel, but there was no hiding, as Iniki ripped the hotel's roof off ! When the hurricane ended that evening, JURASSIC producer Kathleen Kennedy recalled, "That morning, we were on a beautiful, tree-lined street. Now, virtually every single tree had been flattened." The power and phone lines had been knocked out, and the airport was severly damaged. However, Kennedy was able to hitch a flight to Honolulu on a Salvation Army plane. From there, she organised the safe return of the JP crew to Los Angeles, and arranged more than 9000 kilos of relief supplies to be flown into Kauai.

* The screenplay for JURASSIC PARK went through several writers before becoming the version that was filmed. Initially, Michael Crichton was given the job of penning the JP screenplay. However, neither Steven Spielberg nor Crichton himself was satisfied with the finished product. Yet since Crichton knew better than anyone how to balance factual detail against the needs of narrative, one of Crichton's drafts was agreed upon only so effects technicians could use it to visualise dinosaurs and settings. In October of 1991, on the set of Spielberg's HOOK, Kathleen Kennedy asked Dustin Hoffman's screenwriter Malia Scotch Marmo if she would like to take a crack at re-writing Crichton's screenplay. By March 1992, Marmo had completed her version. In it, she removed the character of Ian Malcolm, a pivotal mouthpiece of Crichton's novel, and gave his anti-biotechnology sentiments to Alan Grant. She transformed Grant into a crusader against the commercialisation of science. Spielberg disliked her screenplay, however, and passed the job to screenwriter David Koepp. Koepp's version was the one that ended up being filmed. In the movie, Crichton is credited as having co-written the screenplay with Koepp, but Koepp insists he wrote his screenplay on his own, without having ever read Crichton's or Marmo's versions.

* Steven Spielberg was actually heavily into production of SCHINDLER'S LIST when JURASSIC PARK was in post-production. To be able to oversee JURASSIC'S completion properly, he asked Richard Attenborough to take over shooting of SCHINDLER for two weeks while he finished editing PARK. When Attenborough was not available, George Lucas handled day-to-day supervision of JURASSIC PARK, for which he got a special credit at the end of the film.




THE LOST WORLD fun facts !

* When filming the 'abandoned villiage raptor chase' sequence towards the end of LOST WORLD, there was a raptor animatronic who's arm was constantly doing 'something weird', and this was interrupting production. Stan Winston checked his raptor animatronic and found the trouble was easy to fix, but they were running late, so in the finished movie, Steven Spielberg arranged for the camera to shoot the raptor so that the offending appendage was out of view.

* Spielberg was originally going to end LOST WORLD with a Pteranodon sequence, in which two of the flying creatures would attack the rescue helicopter. This idea was later scrapped because Spielberg wanted to go with the T-rex in San Diego scene.

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