Trivia / Empire Records

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• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $10 million. Box office, $303,841. After forcing director Alan Moyle to cut out over 40 minutes and several characters, Warner Bros. severely slashed the amount of theaters playing the film and gave it no ads after a poor test screening with a Latino audience. It was despised by critics, but audiences loved it and it became a Cult Classic thanks to cable airings.
• Dawson Casting: Played straight with Rory Cochrane and Robin Tunney (23) and Renee Zellweger (26), averted for most of the other actors playing teenage record store employees and their friends.
• Deleted Role:
  • A young Tobey Maguire's scenes as Andy were cut.
  • Corey's sister Lily (Dianna Miranda) was cut from the film.
• Deleted Scene: A whole section on Rex Manning coming back and earning his redemption.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Robin Tunney shaved her head on-screen, requiring her to wear a wig for The Craft.
• Fake American:
  • Maxwell Caulfield as Rex Manning.
  • Anthony LaPaglia (he's Australian).
• Real-Life Relative: Coyote Shivers was Liv Tyler's stepfather at the time.
• Screwed by the Network: According to BuzzFeed's article on the film's 20th anniversary, a month before releasing the film, even after forcing director Alan Moyle to cut 40 minutes and several characters, Warner still planned to give it a wide release and advertise it heavily late in September 1994. One test screening in the LA area with a teen audience bore out the hopes that it would be a huge hit with the teen audience. But then, after another one with a mostly Latino teen audience elsewhere in the city, didn't go so well (maybe because all the characters were white, as was the music they listened to?), the studio drastically changed its mind and cut the release to less than a tenth of the theaters originally planned, with no national ads. It took the film a generation to become the Cult Classic it could have become in weeks that year.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original timespan was filmed to take place over two days, but edited into one.
  • Warren was supposed to have a sister, but she was deleted from the final script.
• Write What You Know: The movie was written by a former employee of Tower Records store #166 (Christown Mall) in Phoenix, Arizona. When the film was released and for a long time afterward, a number of her former coworkers still working cited anecdotes and other elements of the film that related to the store. This store closed in early 2005, ten years after the film's release.

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