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I assume most of us have seen it. And I assume that anyone who has seen it, loves it.
It is THE Thanksgiving movie. Unless Christmas, which has many viable contenders for the GOAT title, Thanksgiving has only one: Plains, Trains and Automobiles.
John Hughes wrote and directed this film, which I'm willing to go so far as to say might be the best of his entire career, at least in terms is his directorial career. (I know that statement won't be met with universal agreement, but fuck it.)
Anyone else watching this one today? Or watched it this month?
Here's an interesting Salon.com article I found about the movie:
https://www.salon.com/2017/11/22/how-planes-trains-and-automobiles-redefined-thanksgiving/
And here are 10 fun entries from the IMDB trivia on the movie:
* No transportation company wanted to appear inept or deficient in any way, so crews had to rent twenty miles of train track and refurbish old railroad cars, construct a set that looked like an airline terminal, design a rent-a-car company logo and uniforms, and rent two hundred fifty cars for the infamous Rent-a-Car sequence.
* The exterior of their aircraft in flight, is a re-use of the 707 flying through the storm, from the movie Airplane! (1980), also released by Paramount Pictures.
* John Hughes, in an interview on the "Those Aren't Pillows" DVD, said he was inspired to write the film's story after an actual flight from New York to Chicago he was on, was diverted to Wichita, Kansas, thus taking him five days to get home.
* John Hughes wrote the first-draft of the screenplay in three days. His average writing time for a screenplay in those days was about three to five days with twenty-some re-writes.
* Cast and crew travelled from the Midwest to the East Coast and back in search of snow for many scenes, which seemed to melt whenever they arrived. The shoot was hellish, and according to some who worked on it, John Hughes' grumpy behavior (he was going through rough times) only made it worse.
* The movie She's Having a Baby (1988) is showing on the television in the motel scene in Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), even though the film hadn't been released yet.
* According to Editor Paul Hirsch, the original cut of this movie was three hours and forty minutes long. He and John Hughes edited it down to two hours. This version was test screened, and it was probably used to edit trailers for the film, which is why they show a lot of deleted scenes. The movie was then edited again down to one hour and thirty-three minutes for theatrical release. According to Hirsch, a two hour version still exists, but he doesn't know where it is.
* Upon receiving the script through his agent, Steve Martin was surprised to discover the script's one hundred forty-five page length, with a comedy typically aiming for ninety pages. When Martin met with John Hughes, he asked if he had any intention of cutting the script. According to Martin, Hughes looked at Martin strangely and said "Cutting?", making Martin realize he had no intention of cutting the script.
* In the airport scene in Wichita, when the airline employee announces that the flight has been cancelled, you can see on the board behind him that the destination of the flight is "nowhere".
* Neal's (Steve Martin's) house was also a set built from scratch, consisting of seven rooms, and taking five months to complete. It ended up costing one hundred thousand dollars, which angered Paramount executives, and caused turmoil on the set.