Trivia / A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

• Banned in China: The film was banned in Queensland, Australia for a while due to its drug references.
• Billing Displacement:
  • Not in the film itself, but most of the DVD covers and some of the latter VHS covers give Patricia Arquette top billing and the most space on the cover, despite Heather Langenkamp really being the lead actress.
  • Some home video releases show Laurence Fishburne along with Langenkamp and Arquette, despite the fact that Fishburne was only a supporting cast member with only a few minutes of total screen time, and his character doesn't even encounter Freddy in the movie.
• Creator Backlash: Although Wes Craven and Bruce Wagner are credited in the film, the final version of the movie is quite different from their original screenplay. Craven did not approve the changes made by Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont:
  “I was just completing Deadly Friend, so I wasn't available, but I mentioned an idea they liked, so I wrote the script. I wanted to do Nightmare 3 because I felt compelled to come back and expand on the original concept. I like taking that one more step and it was important for me in a business sense that I was able to negotiate a percentage point in the sequels I didn't have from the original film. We decided that it could no longer be one person fighting Freddy. It had to be a group, because the souls of Freddy's victims have made Freddy stronger. I took an executive producing credit. My understanding was that I would be asked about things all along. I would be brought in to casting and have a real creative part in the picture. The reality was that New Line Cinema never really contacted me again after they had the script. They changed it quite drastically in some ways. The director and a friend of his rewrote it and changed the names of all the characters, and included several key scenes of their own. A lot of the reasons I had agreed to do the picture were taken away.”
• Cut Song: DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince's song "A Nightmare On My Street" was recorded for the film, but was rejected by the producers. Will Smith and Jazzy Jeff released it anyway on their album He's The DJ, I'm The Rapper and as a single, reaching #12 on the Billboard Hot 100. A messy legal battle with New Line Cinema over the song's release (the single being released the same time the movie was) forced the duo to destroy the tapes of a music video for the single and disclaimers disassociating the song from the Elm Street franchise were hastily added onto vinyl pressings of the single, though it was later revealed that a copy of the song's music video had survived.
• Hostility on the Set: Chuck Russell according to Ken Sagoes "didn't always know how to talk to people" and could be aggressive to the cast and crew such as to Patricia Arquette. The tension and long hours grew among everyone and it eventually got to a point where-also according to Ken Sagoes-a producer got on set and gave a big speech about "how this shit needs to stop".
• Romance on the Set: According to Robert Englund, every teen male cast member had a crush on Patricia Arquette, citing it as "the most love-sick set" he'd ever been on.
• Spared by the Cut: Joey and Kincaid die in the first script draft (leaving Kristen as the Final Girl of the mental patients), but they survive alongside Kristen in the filmed version.
• Throw It In!: Robert Englund improvised quite a few of Freddy Krueger's one-liners, but the best-known example happened in a scene where Freddy emerges from a television set and kills a girl by smashing her head into it. The scripted line was "This is it, your big break in TV!" which Englund said on the first take. When the director went for an alternate angled shot however, Englund changed the line to "Welcome to Prime Time, bitch!" The different camera angle made it easy to edit the two lines together, and it became probably Freddy's defining one-liner. According to The Other Wiki, the line was originally "You're on TV now, girl!"
• Troubled Production: The film began as a satirical meta-film about Freddy haunting the lives of people who worked on the film, but the studio didn't like it (ironically, this ended up being the basis for Wes Craven's New Nightmare). Wes Craven was hesitant to return as a writer, as he vowed never to do sequels. Additionally, people weren't fond of the newer cast in the previous film, requiring Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon to return in side roles. Fortunately, when it came to finalizing the script and shooting, things went well for the most part. Producer Robert Shaye also found it hard to supervise filming, due to New Line having expanded into a bona fide studio by this point, eventually forcing him to acknowledge that he was being too much of a control freak and hand most of his producer's duties over to production manager Rachel Talalay. The film thankfully did well at the box office, keeping the franchise running strong and was even seen as the second best of the series. Patricia Arquette became a star thanks to the film.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original idea for the film was Freddy invading the real world and killing the people responsible for the Elm Street films, an idea that would later be used in Wes Craven's New Nightmare.
  • Before it was decided what script would be used for the film's story, John Saxon wrote his own scripts for a third Nightmare film. In Saxon's script called "How the Nightmare on Elm Street All Began", which would have been a prequel story, Freddy would ultimately turn out to have been innocent, or at least set up for the murders by Charles Manson, who along with his followers would have been the main culprit of the murders. Freddy would be forced by the mob of angry parents to make a confession of the crimes, which would enrage them further. After they lynch Freddy, he comes back to avenge his wrongful death by targeting the parent's children.
  • Robert Englund wrote an unused treatment for the film. In Englund's treatment called Freddy's Funhouse, the protagonist would have been Tina Gray's older sister, who would have been in college by the time Tina was murdered, and ends up coming back to Springwood to investigate how she died. In the script, Freddy had claimed the 1428 Elm Street house for his own in the dreamworld, setting up booby traps like Nancy did against him. According to Englund, part of it later ended up being used in the pilot episode of Freddy's Nightmares after the script had been lying around unused for a few years.
  • The original screenplay by Wes Craven and Bruce Wagner was quite different from the final version. The main differences are: Nancy was not an expert on dreams; Dr. Neil was younger and he and Nancy had an affair, something that is only hinted at in the final version; the teenagers had different names and personalities; Donald Thompson believed that Freddy was still alive from the beginning; Joey and Kincaid die; and finally, the subplot about Amanda Krueger did not exist in this original script.
  • In the original script, it was made explicit that the light on the model of the Elm Street house at the end represents Nancy's spirit protecting the survivors. This is suggested in a scene that was supposed to take place during Nancy's funeral, where Dr. Neil and Kristen talk that he will receive a visitor at night.
  • Lisa Wilcox and Lezlie Deane had both auditioned for roles in Dream Warriors. They would later be cast in the following sequels The Dream Master and Freddy's Dead, with Wilcox playing the role of Alice Johnson and Deane playing the role of Tracy.
  • Winona Ryder auditioned for the role of Kristen, but director Chuck Russell felt that Ryder was too young for the role. Ryder would later become engaged to Johnny Depp who starred in the first film of the series.
  • The script had Sally Kellman in the scene which featured Zsa Zsa Gabor.
  • Among the concepts and FX that had to be abandoned for various reasons:
    • Taryn's head was supposed to explode when Freddy stuck in the needles, but the gag wouldn't work correctly.
    • In the original script, one of the Warriors dreams up a giant Transformers-style robot to fight Freddy. The sequence even made it into the storyboards stage, but budgetary constraints made filming it impossible.
    • FX creator Mark Shostrom created a desiccated "little girl corpse" which Kristen would discover she was holding, but it was decided that the item was too grotesque. A miniature skeleton was used instead.
    • The iconic sexy nurse dream sequence could have been so very very different: an alternate version was filmed with Stacey Alden (who played the nurse) transforming into Freddy with Alden made up to look like Robert Englund from the neck up (there are images on Google; seek them at your own risk). It was decided this was too much even for an Elm Street film so the sequence was refilmed with Alden in normal make-up, rescuing a defining cinematic moment for adolescents everywhere.
    • The mirror room scene, which was to be set in the house's sewing room with a three-way clothing mirror, had clones of Freddy charging from it to attack the group.

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