Line #2 Trivia/SouthlandTales


1	* BoxOfficeBomb: Budget, $15 million. Box office, $374,743. It actually did ''worse'' internationally than in the US[[note]]$99,363 internationally, $275,380 domestically - to be fair, it was only released in the UK ($81,656) and Turkey ($11,707)[[/note]], and as noted below, is likely one of the reasons why Richard Kelly hasn't been directing much.
2	* CoversAlwaysLie: Sarah Michelle Gellar is all over the advertising posters and DVD/Blu-ray covers (sometimes the sole person featured or portrayed as the main character) despite having less than 20 minutes of screentime and only a couple of dozen lines.
3	* CreatorKiller: The film's divisive reception and box-office failure pretty much destroyed most of the clout that Richard Kelly had built up with ''Film/DonnieDarko''.
4	* DeletedRole: Creator/JaneaneGarofalo appears dancing with Pilot Abilene at the very end. It's all that's left of her role as General Teena [=MacArthur=], the military overseer of the Utopia tidal generator. Her storyline had her communicating with another victim of the post-Cannes trimming, Simon Theory (played by Creator/KevinSmith), where they discussed some of the more metaphysical {{Technobabble}}-ish parts of the story.
5	* DeletedScene: A scene that never even made it into the Cannes cut involves Boxer, right after [[spoiler:Starla gets shot]], 'bleeding' back in time to the 1920s and meeting Inga von Westphalen as a young fortune teller.
6	* ExecutiveMeddling: In [[http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/southland-tales-richard-kelly-interview this interview]], it seems like roughly half of Kelly's answers are "I totally explained that, but the studio made me cut it for pacing". Even Pilot Abilene's cryptic reference to black umbrellas is an orphaned CallBack to a deleted scene where Boxer Santaros becomes unstuck in time and "bleeds" back into the 1920s.
7	* FollowUpFailure: To ''Film/DonnieDarko''. Some called it Richard Kelly's ''Film/HeavensGate''.
8	* MagnumOpusDissonance: While ''Film/DonnieDarko'' might have been Richard Kelly's most well-received work, this remains the one that he is the most enthusiastic about.
9	%% * PlayingAgainstType: Pretty much the entire cast.
10	* PlayingTheirOwnTwin: Creator/SeannWilliamScott as Private Roland Taverner and Officer Ronald Taverner.
11	* StarringAStarAsAStar: Creator/DwayneJohnson as a movie star.
12	* TheWalrusWasPaul: Director Richard Kelly (who also did the equally convoluted ''Film/DonnieDarko'') has admitted that he made the plot so convoluted that almost no meaning can be extracted from it. It includes TimeTravel, the impending end of the world, Orwellian dystopia, revolutionary new energy sources which will change the world, Neo-Marxist terrorists, an actor who seems destined to be the new Messiah, and a government conspiracy all colliding in Los Angeles aka the Southland.
13	* WhatCouldHaveBeen:
14	** The story was originally planned to be a 9 part saga, with the film representing the last 3 parts. The first 6 parts were going to be told in 6 graphic novels, but that number was later trimmed down to 3.
15	** Creator/BenicioDelToro was Richard Kelly's original choice for Boxer Santoros.
16	** Creator/AliLarter, Creator/ClorisLeachman, Creator/JasonLee and Creator/TimBlakeNelson were offered parts in the film.
17	** According to assistant editor Priscilla Elliott, Kelly's original ending had Boxer on the airship about to shoot himself, but instead shooting the air and hitting the helium inside the blimp, causing everyone to speak in high voices.
18	** Kelly's first draft was very different:
19	--->The first draft was very much like an L.A. crime caper. It was centered on a group of rejected, failed actor-comedians, because I was hanging out with a lot of comedy actors at the time. So I wrote this script about a comedy troupe that ends up trying to extort money from a big movie star who's researching to play a detective in a film. They're going to stage a racially motivated cop killing in front of the actor and then try to extort him for money to get the tape back. That was the foundational plot device: the ride-along with the actor, the staged shooting with the squibs. And then an extortion attempt to try and get money out of this kind of crazed movie star, because these actors are very angry, and they’re just trying to do this as a way to lash out. And, of course, everything goes wrong. And it had this big dirigible at the end, which didn’t quite make sense—someone shoots a rocket launcher at the blimp and it explodes into this Hindenburg kind of disaster over downtown Los Angeles. And this tape of the state’s racially motivated shooting ends up getting released and causing civil unrest and a riot-type situation as the Hindenburg explodes over downtown Los Angeles.

Context Trivia / SouthlandTales