Trivia / Brainstorm

• Box Office Bomb: Only brought back $10.2 million on an $18 million budget, though to be fair it was dumped out to limited screens due to the controversy surrounding the film and the Troubled Production delay.
• Died During Production: Natalie Wood was found dead in the waters of Santa Catalina Island on November 29, 1981 at age 43, during a holiday break from the production of the film. Both Christopher Walken and Robert Wagner were on the yacht she fell from that night, and Wagner has been named a "person of interest" in the case in 2018.
• In Memoriam: The film has the dedication "To Natalie" at the end of the credits.
• Posthumous Credit: The film was released two years after Natalie Wood died.
• Science Marches On: At least at a basic level, the technology has been achieved.
• Swan Song: Nearly got shelved after Wood died. Required some reshoots before the film was released.
• Troubled Production:
  • Following the death of co-star Natalie Wood, MGM tried to cancel production of the film and collect the insurance money. Douglas Trumbull fought to have the movie finished, since almost all of Wood's scenes were already completed. This caused turmoil between the studios and him for years, and he vowed never to shoot another mainstream film again (He ended up returning in 2011 to work on Tree of Life). It ended up being delayed for over a year and being dumped into a dry month for movies in limited screens.
  • Even before production started, Bruce Joel Rubin's script — like Jacob's Ladder — was unconsidered unfilmable for a long while.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film was supposed to be the debut of the director's new film technology called Showscan, which can record and project 70mm film at 60 frames per second (compared to the industry standard of 24fps), in order to make the film look more realistic and exciting during the "virtual reality" segments. But unfortunately the plans fell though to use this new film process, so the director made a compromise by filming said segments in 24fps but with 70mm and adding surround sound effects, while everything else was filmed in normal 35mm with mono sound and a less-wide aspect ratio.
  • The films was mostly shot in and around the Research Triangle in North Carolina. Local actor Ira David Wood (no relation to Natalie, he was most famous for a popular local production of A Christmas Carol) was going to get his big Hollywood break as David Wood, who has an affair with Karen. Natalie Wood's death left all but one of his scenes out of the finished film.
  • Several of Natalie Wood's scenes had not yet been filmed when she died, leading to story changes and whole subplots being removed to salvage the film in editing.

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