I could have sworn I’d seen Behind the Music: Aerosmith multiple times, but I just saw it for the first time today. A few things I didn’t realize:
- Joe Perry came up with the guitar lick for “Walk This Way,” and Steven Tyler, playing around on the drums, immediately came up with the drums to go with the guitar — but he couldn’t think off any lyrics to go with the music. Then the band took a break and caught a showing of Young Frankenstein. When Igor (“No, it’s prounounced eye-gor.”) said “Walk this way,” they had their lyric.
- I knew that the band broke up when their drug use got out of control. I didn’t realize that when they finally got back together again and started fresh, with a new producer and a new manager, they were all still on drugs. Their new manager did eventually get them all off drugs, but it took years. Then he started micro-managing their lives, and they fired him.
When I looked up Young Frankenstein Trivia on IMDB, I found a few amusing items:
- When Victor finds his grandfather’s private library, he finds a book titled “How I Did It.” This is actually a joke for those people who have read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the book, Frankenstein, Shelley never reveals how Victor reanimated dead flesh. The screenwriter obviously knew this and inserts the “How I Did It” book as a joke.
- The original cut of the movie was almost twice as long and was considered by all involved to be an abysmal failure. It was only after a marathon cutting session that they produced the final cut of the film, which both Wilder and Brooks considered to be far superior to the original product. At one point they noted that for every joke that worked, there were three that fell flat. So they went in and trimmed all the jokes that didn’t work.
- The experiment the medical student mentions, where Darwin preserved a worm in fluid until it came to life, is mentioned in Mary Shelley’s foreword to the novel “Frankenstein”. The Darwin in question was Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the famous Charles Darwin.
When I read Frankenstein in college, no one else in class noticed that Shelley never explains how Dr. Frankenstein creates the monster. In fact, everyone thought I was crazy for suggesting that it was left to our imagination. They all “knew” the monster was sewn together from corpses.