Breaking News

We interrupt your regularly scheduled "For the Love of NATM" programming for this update.

So I caught Night at the Museum on FX's DVD on TV, where they go into some behind the scenes info and trivia during commercial breaks, and I've decided to take it upon myself to provide you with a summation of all that I've learned:

• The woman interviewing Ben Stiller for a job is actually his mother, who was also Miranda's mother-in-law from Sex and the City, made 36 appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show and was on Seinfeld once.
• Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest elected president at 32 and the first American to win the Nobel Prize. His refusal to shoot an animal while out hunting led to the creation and naming of the Teddy Bear in his honor (and we all love those cute little things). He also survived an assassination attempt in the middle of a big speech, taking a bullet in the chest and deciding since he wasn't dying right there to continue giving his ninety-minute speech. Doctors decided it was too dangerous to remove the bullet and he carried it around with him for the rest of his life.
• In real life, the giant globe and the statue of Theodore Roosevelt are absent from the lobby of the American Museum of Natural History. In fact, all the filming took place at a replica sound stage in Vancouver, Canada, wherein hallways led to nowhere, the front facade opened up to a replica of the facade of the real thing and then nothing, and pictures were used for backgrounds.
• Apparently no one thought they could land Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney for the movie, but they did it and may have ironed their faces onto the guards for modern fans of the franchise. In interviews, they were described as "funny" and "history...Hollywood", respectively.
• Some people consider Cecil's motivation for scaring Larry up for debate, though I personally think he's just trying to be malicious and foreshadow for Larry what he's in for, though Larry doesn't get it.
• Rexy was inspired by a real life dinosaur skeleton composed of two sets of T. Rex bones, including the first complete T. Rex skull ever found.
• Speaking of bones, there are enough bones in the real life museum to make a pile outside that's three stories tall (it's about 50 million bones), and among them is Lucy, the approx. 3.2 million-year-old early human discovered in 1974.
• Tyrannosaurus Rex means "Tyrant reptile".
• The visual effects movie entails sticking to a plan, and a solidly defined one at that, but since Shawn Levy is open to new ideas, the end result is that the back flip Larry does early on is Ben Stiller's idea and results in a better sequence than what was originally sequenced.
• Some guy in a guy in a green screen unitard inspired Ben Stiller to do this.
• Levy wanted Roosevelt to be played by Robin Williams pretty much the entire time. Williams toned down the improv because he was playing a historical figure, but it makes his character more human and less imposing dead white guy.
• Crystal (Dexter) spent a month and a half training before filming started and continued training while filming was going on. She stopped work at six thirty (which Ben Stiller thinks is unfair to human actors who don't have that as part of their schedule), and it is easier to train her to stick her tongue out than to smile. Smiling in monkeys is a sign of fear and aggression.
• The blue whale has an aorta large enough for a grown man to crawl through. It's as long as three school buses and weighs as much as 24 African Elephants. Their underwater calls can be heard for miles.
• Steve Coogan and Owen Wilson were out of the country when they filmed their scenes, and they were added digitally to the shots with Ben Stiller, who improv'd 15 different versions of a conversation (Levy probably pulled that number out of his ass for emphasis, but it makes sense), to which the actors had to come up with proper responses.
• There was also a lot of improvisation between Ben Stiller and Ricky Gervais during filming.
• The Easter Island Head obsessed with dum-dums giving him gum-gum is Ben Garant from Everybody Loves Raymond. Garant primarily considers himself a writer, and this is his ninth film with Ben Stiller.
• Levy himself is Rexy off-camera. He does a lot of off-camera performance, which Stiller calls "hugely entertaining".
• The creative team had a few lines to draw with Rexy. He couldn't be the real thing (since it was fragile enough that touching its tooth would make it all shake), but he still had to be huge, run around, and make sense.
• The costumes (this is an interesting bit) are a fine balance between historically accurate and "loyal to the way we imagine history" while also being fun and eye-catching.
• Neanderthals in general were a lot smarter than we give them credit for. They were capable of controlling fire and such but incapable of art and language, for example.
• Levy found it amazing to see images that he thought up on a movie screen, calls it incredible and said it "kind of makes you hooked." On what is still up for debate.

Sadly, there's no similar trivia splurge for Battle of the Smithsonian, which is playing as I type this.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled "For the Love of NATM" programming.