Trivia / The Fabelmans

• Acclaimed Flop: Like West Side Story the year prior, Steven Spielberg again saw audiences indifferent to his movie in spite of incredibly positive reviews, turning it into the lowest grossing film of his career since The Sugarland Express.
• Actor-Inspired Element: David Lynch insisted on wearing the John Ford costume for two weeks before shooting his scene so that it would be more ratty and broken down, and thus more emblematic of how the real Ford would have looked at the time.
• Award Category Fraud: Michelle Williams's performance as Mitzi was nominated in the lead category for what was arguably a supporting role. While Williams does have the largest female role in the film, its point of view dominantly belongs to Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle). Mitzi is almost entirely absent from the third act, but she does have her own defined story and arc when she is on-screen. Williams' decision to pivot to the lead category almost certainly cost her an Oscar; early in the award season, she was considered the heavy favorite to win for supporting, while in the lead category she didn't have much of a chance against front-runners Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett. There were reports that Williams was concerned that a supporting nomination for a borderline role would damage her ability to bargain for larger salaries.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $40 million. Box office, $45.6 million. While the film received glowing reviews, it was nevertheless released during a highly packed winter 2023 season with big, mass-appealing spectacles including Avatar: The Way of Water, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and even Spielberg's prestige couldn't draw in much theatre attention for this relatively quiet, mid-budget drama.
• Fake American: Sam Rechner, who plays Logan (one of the students who bully Sam), is Australian.
• In Memoriam: The film is dedicated to Spielberg's parents, Leah Adler and Arnold Spielberg.
• Production Posse: Composer John Williams, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, editors Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar, producer Kristie Macosko Krieger, production designer Rick Carter, screenwriter Tony Kushner, and VFX house Industrial Light & Magic are all longtime key collaborators with Steven Spielberg.
• Reality Subtext: David Lynch shares John Ford's opinion on what makes a horizon in a frame boring or interesting, making his portrayal of Ford feel all the more insightful in the final film.
• Starring a Star as a Star: More like starring a director as a director: when Sammy meets legendary filmmaker John Ford at the end of the movie, he's played by David Lynch. Like most of the movie, this meeting is based on a well-known true event that Spielberg has often spoken about.
• Wag the Director: One of David Lynch's conditions for accepting the role of John Ford was that there had to be a big bag of Cheetos in his dressing room, due to it being one of his favorite snacks.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Spielberg had initially discussed making a semi-autobiographical film based on his youth in the late 1990s, to be titled I'll Be Home and written by his sister, Anne Spielberg, but held off on it for fear of offending his parents.
  • With the Summer 2022 announcement of John Williams' retirement, The Fablemans was going to be the composer's final collaboration with Spielberg — or at least his final collaboration on a film personally directed by Spielberg (as Williams was also scoring the Spielberg-produced Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny). However, in January 2023, Williams postponed his plans to retire and so this will not be their final collaboration after all.
  • David Lynch wasn't initially interested in taking up the role of John Ford, as he was concerned that he would be taking the role from actual well-acclaimed actors such as Harrison Ford and George Clooney. He eventually changed his mind though, as he legitimately liked the scene, and agreed with Ford's interpretation on horizons in a frame.

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