Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Short description
Neal Page is a marketing executive trying to get from New York to Chicago to spend Thanksgiving with his family. Bad weather disrupts his flight, and he finds himself stuck with Del Griffith, a cheerful and extremely talkative salesman of shower curtain rings. The two men, who have little in common and quickly get on each other's nerves, must keep travelling together as one leg of the journey after another goes wrong.
John Hughes wrote, produced and directed the film, which followed Ferris Bueller's Day Off among the five features he had directed up to that point. Steve Martin plays Neal and John Candy plays Del, with Laila Robins as Neal's wife Susan and smaller parts for Michael McKean, Dylan Baker and Kevin Bacon. The production cost about 15 million dollars and took roughly 50 million at the worldwide box office, a solid return for a comedy of its size.
The film holds a critics' rating of 8.1 out of 10 from 68 reviews, higher than its audience scores: 7.6 on IMDb from 180,000 votes and 7.3 on TMDB from just over 2,300 votes. It runs 92 minutes and was released in the United States on November 26, 1987.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film crew had to rent 20 miles of railway track and repair old rolling stock, build airport sets, invent an emblem and uniforms for a car rental company, and rent 250 cars, as existing companies on the market flatly refused to risk their own image.
- John Hughes shot over 600,000 feet (180,000 meters) of film, almost twice the average for films of that length.
- The film features one scene that completely clashes with this otherwise conflict-free family comedy—an argument with a car rental agency employee, during which the characters utter the word “fuck” 19 times. Because of this, the film received an R rating from the MPAA, and this scene is most often cut when the film is shown on television.
- It took John Hughes three days to write the first draft of the screenplay. During that period, it typically took him three to five days to write a script, followed by rewriting (ultimately resulting in just over twenty versions).
- The scenes at St. Louis Airport were filmed in winter, but the winter was mild, so snow had to be brought in for the airport.
- Steve Martin, who initially refused to appear in the film, was persuaded by two scenes he read in the script—the scene with the car seats and the tirade with profanity near the car rental counter.
- It is known that John Hughes often put his actors in situations where they were caught off guard, as the director needed to elicit unforced reactions from them. For example, after filming several takes of the scene where Steve Martin and Dylan Baker's characters meet, he quietly instructed Baker to spit into the palm of his right hand, and then shake Martin's hand. Martin wasn't expecting anything like that; he shook Baker’s hand and immediately went to wash it, and Hughes achieved the genuine reaction he was looking for.
- Steve Martin's seven-room house was built on the set and took five months to construct. The construction cost $100,000, which infuriated studio executives.
- Footage from the cabin of a “Boeing 707” from the 1980 film “Airplane!” (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker), also released by Paramount Pictures, was reused in the scenes in the airplane cabin.
- According to editor Paul Hirsch, the original version of the film was 3 hours and 40 minutes long. He and John Hughes cut it down to 2 hours. They then held test screenings, after which the film was reduced to 1 hour and 43 minutes. According to Hirsch, the two-hour version of the film still exists, but he doesn't know where it is.
- The idea to write the screenplay and make the film came to John Hughes (writer and director) after a flight from New York to Chicago. The plane was diverted to Kansas, making his journey home take five days.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
