Trivia / Splash

• Ability over Appearance: Tom Hanks and John Candy played brothers in this movie even though they looked nothing alike. The two had such perfect chemistry together that Ron Howard felt that the audience would accept the casting.
• Baby Name Trend Starter: “Madison” as a first name was almost nonexistent when the movie was made, and was mostly a boy's name when it did appear. (It derives from an old English/Welsh name that either means "Matthew's son" or "Maude's son", so that makes sense.) Then after the film's mermaid picked up the name, it exploded in popularity as a girl's name, reaching the top ten in girls' names in the United States in 1997, staying there over a decade and a half, and even reaching second in 2001 and '02, before dropping to eleventh in 2015. (It also reappeared as a boys' name after Splash was released, but never attained the explosive popularity that it did as a girls' name.) In the film itself, it was a Line-of-Sight Name taken from a street sign (Madison Avenue in New York City); Tom Hanks' character's immediate reaction is, "That's not a [feminine first] name!"
• Breakthrough Hit:
  • The film's $69.8 million gross made it Disney’s first real live-action hit since The Love Bug in 1969, and established Touchstone Pictures as the go-to brand for mature live-action Disney movies in the 1980s and through the 1990s.
  • The film was this for director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer. Although their previous film, Night Shift, was a modest hit, the huge commercial success of Splash very much solidified their partnership, and provided them the clout they needed to form their own production company Imagine Entertainment one year later.
• Cast the Expert: The swimming skills of Daryl Hannah (Madison) and Shayla Mackarvich (Young Madison) played a role in both of their castings.
• The Cast Show Off: The mermaid tail Daryl Hannah wore was fully functional. The showoff part is that, ironically enough, Hannah had learned to swim mermaid style (legs together) since childhood due to her fascination with the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Little Mermaid. As a result, she swam so fast with the tail that the safety divers couldn't keep up with her. See No Stunt Double for more details.
• Creator-Chosen Casting:
  • Brian Grazer wanted Daryl Hannah for the role of Madison after he saw her in Blade Runner. As mentioned in the film’s “making of” documentary, Brian Grazer loved how Hannah looked in Blade Runner, and he thought that there was, in his words, “an iconography in her presence”.
  • Screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel wanted Tom Hanks to play Allen after seeing him guest star on an episode of Happy Days. Ganz and Mandel, who were consultants on Happy Days, then told Ron Howard’s assistant Louisa Velis about Tom Hanks, who agreed to that suggestion (since Louisa was a big fan of Bosom Buddies) and thus recommended Tom Hanks to Ron Howard.
• Deleted Scene: A sequence involving a “sea hag” who explained to Madison the "rules" (that is, Madison only has 6 days on land and must come back to sea before the moon is full, otherwise Madison would face banishment just like the sea hag) was filmed (in fact, brief footage of it can be seen in the film’s “making of” documentary on the DVD). However, in an interview with Cinefantastique Magazine, Robert Short, who was the head of makeup on Splash, said that the “merhag scenes” were cut due to test audiences finding them to be “very low-key and foreboding”. Because the sea hag’s appearance was meant to serve as a Jump Scare for Madison just as she was about to exit the sunken ship, the soundtrack titled “Underwater” originally ended on a very discordant note.
• Follow the Leader: The success of the film spawned quite a few Magical Girlfriend films in the latter half of the 1980s, like Weird Science, Mannequin, Date with an Angel, High Spirits, and My Stepmother Is an Alien.
• Inspiration for the Work: Brian Grazer conceived of Splash in response to his unhappy love life in the mid-1970s which consisted of him dating “California girls” who were beautiful on the outside but were shallow, materialistic, and phony on the inside. While driving on the freeway, Brian then thought about how a beautiful mermaid would counteract the negative “California girl” stereotype by being pure, sweet, and honest.
  “About six years ago, I was single and much like Allen Bauer, [the character played by Tom Hanks] the lead in the movie. I was just a guy living in Los Angeles, a single guy that really wanted to have a meaningful relationship with a girl but instead was going out with all these girls who had to have a red Jaguar or a Ferrari or some kind of fancy thing in order for them to like you. So I started wondering if there was a girl out there who was pure and innocent and wonderful. I started fantasizing on the freeway about what it was a mermaid, a girl who was entirely from another civilization, who wasn’t polluted from what a very urban society can create. I thought it would be great if I could fall in love with a mermaid and from that I wrote a 10-page story.”
• Missing Trailer Scene: After attending a wedding, Allen then goes outside and looks sadly at a couple kissing each other inside a hansom cab. It was a part of a much larger scene in an earlier draft where after the wedding, Allen leaves the bar and we then get a montage of him feeling sad and envious over all the happy couples he notices down the street and later at the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink. The scene was cut from the final film, and it instead had Allen at the bar getting drunk and doing a tearful monologue about how he wants to meet a woman, get married, and have kids.
• No Stunt Double: Director Ron Howard originally wanted to hire a Stunt Double to do Daryl Hannah’s underwater scenes, so he asked her to go to a pool in downtown Los Angeles, so she could watch the stunt doubles swim with the tail on, as well as make sure that her body type matched with the stunt double’s. However, Hannah did not approve of any of the stunt doubles, and she told Howard that she could do the underwater stunts herself, since as a kid she had frequently practiced the “mermaid swim” (that is, she tied her feet together in the pool). Howard relented, and after watching Hannah swim in the pool with the tail on, he was so amazed by her ability to hold her breath longer and swim faster than the stunt doubles that he decided to let her do her own swimming in the film.
• One-Take Wonder: John Candy being able to serve and then have the racquetball hit him in the head was done in one take.
• Saved from Development Hell: According to Brian Grazer, it took seven years for Splash to get made. Grazer first came up with the concept back in 1977, and it took him 6 years to finally find a studio that would greenlight his film - Disney, of all places! According to Steven Bach's 1985 book Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven's Gate, producer Brian Grazer had originally pitched the film to United Artists. The book described it as “so sweetly silly it was irresistible”. It was one of many projects that was taken to another studio following the massive failure of Heaven's Gate. ^note  According to “AFI Catalog”, Splash was supposed to start filming in the spring of 1981, but that plan ultimately fell through after United Artists was put up for sale by Transamerica in 1980, due to Heaven's Gate bombing at the box office.
• Star-Making Role:
  • Daryl Hannah
  • Tom Hanks. He was not unknown, but this was the first sign that he could not only make the transition from television, but outright headline a movie.
• Throw It In!: Tom Hanks improvised the bit where Allen leaves his apartment, presses the buttons on the two elevators facing each other, and then runs towards the elevator arriving to his floor first.^note Initially Ron Howard was reluctant to include that bit, but he relented, figuring that he could always leave it on the cutting room floor. However, when Ron Howard discovered during preview screenings that audiences laughed at that bit with Allen pressing the buttons on the elevator and running towards the one arriving to Allen’s floor first, Ron kept it in the movie and realized that if he ever worked with Tom Hanks again, he would trust Tom more.
• Wag the Director:
  • According to Ron Howard, the film originally had a lot more nudity, but Daryl Hannah refused to do nude scenes ^note (despite previously appearing nude in her films Summer Lovers and Reckless), so he decided to tone down a lot of the nudity by having Daryl only appear nude during her encounter with Tom Hanks at the beach, and the “Statue of Liberty” scene. Because she was shy about showing off her nude body, she wore pasties, round bandaids on her nipples, a body stocking, and a wig that would be glued onto her breasts and butt.
  • Daryl also refused to do the “lobster scene” due to being a strict vegetarian. Originally, the filmmakers concocted a fake lobster that was made of “fortune cookie” dough, so Daryl Hannah wouldn’t have to eat an actual lobster. Unfortunately, Hannah had a hard time biting into the fake lobster due to the “fortune cookie” dough, so Director Ron Howard decided to have Hannah eat an actual lobster which, unlike the fake “cookie lobster”, had a shell that was easier to bite into. Ron assured Daryl that she didn’t have to swallow the lobster meat and that she could instead spit the lobster meat into a bucket placed to the side of her chair after each take. When Hannah picked up the lobster to do her scene, the lobster started to wilt in her hand, and she freaked out, dropping the lobster from her hands. After Hannah got over her fit of hysteria, Ron Howard was finally able to coax Daryl into doing the scene by taking the lobster meat out of its shell, and stuffing it with leeks, potatoes, and hearts of palm.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The scene where a TV show makes Madison upset and Allen explains the TV show is fictional and didn't really happen was originally going to be part of a Brick Joke where Madison later watches a real life plane crash on the news and laughs.
  • According to Brian Grazer’s book A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life, Grazer himself wrote the first draft of Splash (originally titled Wet), which would be about a mermaid who washes up on the shore, falls for a human man along the way, and learns to adjust to life in New York City. When he pitched his version of Splash to various studio executives, it kept getting rejected, and Grazer soon found out that it was because he pitched Splash “too much from the perspective of the mermaid”. As a result, Grazer flipped the perspective and recontextualized the story, so he instead pitched Splash as a Romantic Comedy told from the perspective of the guy who falls for the mermaid. Naturally, the male studio executives were more accepting of Grazer’s new pitch.
  • Bruce Jay Friedman's original script had the film mostly take place underwater, in which the audience would get to see Madison and the merpeople who live there. However, Ron Howard suggested that it would be easier (for logistical reasons) to have the story take place on land rather than under the sea, so Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel were hired to do rewrites, with the focus now being more on Allen and his relationship with his “mermaid girlfriend” Madison.
  • According to Bruce Jay Friedman’s memoir Lucky Bruce, the original screenplay of Splash had a decidedly Jewish tone: the human protagonist was a Jewish man named Adam who owned a smoked fish business, and the Poseidon character was modeled after famed Jewish entertainer Zero Mostel. However, the screenplay was rejected by United Artists for being “too Jewish”, so Adam became Allen, and his business went from selling smoked fish to selling produce instead. In fact, Friedman explicitly recalled one comment that he got from a UA executive telling him that “Poseidon comes off as being too Jewish. Think John Gielgud.”
  • Stan Dragoti was originally attached to direct. According to Bruce Jay Friedman’s above-mentioned memoir, Bruce wanted Stan Dragoti to direct the film because he had attended a screening of Dragoti’s vampire comedy Love at First Bite, and wanted Splash to be in the “spirit” of that film. Friedman lobbied hard to have Dragoti direct Splash, and for a while it worked. Unfortunately though, like Bruce, Stan was eventually fired from the project. Dragoti would go on to direct Mr. Mom, a film that, ironically enough, Ron Howard turned down in order to direct Splash.
  • The original ending didn't have Allen jumping in the water to be with Madison. In the DVD Commentary, Ron Howard said the ending was changed at the suggestion of his wife, Brian Grazer's wife, and the wives of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (in fact, Babaloo's wife went as far as saying to Babaloo, “If he doesn't go, you go!”).^note  Even the June 1984 issue of the British sci-fi magazine Starburst corroborated this, by having Ron Howard state ”At one point we didn’t really go for a happy ending, more for a bittersweet one. Actually all of our wives protested about that so much that we listened to them - and I’m so glad we did!”.
  • Jeff Bridges, Chevy Chase, Richard Gere, John Heard, Michael Keaton, Kevin Kline, Dudley Moore, Bill Murray, Christopher Reeve, Burt Reynolds, John Travolta^note He turned it down on the advice of his agent and Robin Williams were all candidates for Allen Bauer.
  • Steve Guttenberg revealed in his memoir The Guttenberg Bible that he auditioned for the role of Allen, but he did not get it, much to his disappointment.^AInterestingly, the day that Steve didn’t get the part in Splash, his agent told him that The Ladd Company wanted him to screen-test for the movie Police Academy.^BIronically enough, Ron Howard would give Guttenberg a role in the film Cocoon.
  • Rosanna Arquette, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Melanie Griffith, Jodie Foster^note She turned it down in favor of The Hotel New Hampshire, which ironically came out the same day as Splash, Mariel Hemingway, Diane Lane, Tatum O'Neal, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tanya Roberts, Ally Sheedy, Brooke Shields^note She turned it down in order to study French Literature at Princeton, Sharon Stone, Kathleen Turner and Debra Winger were all candidates for Madison. Genie Francis (General Hospital's Laura) says she was offered the role and turned it down.
  • Tim Allen and Michael Keaton were considered for Freddie Bauer.
  • According to Cinefantastique Magazine, Robert Short initially wanted Madison’s mermaid tail to resemble a dolphin, since he felt that it would make “zoological sense”. However, Ron Howard rejected Short’s design and insisted that the mermaid’s tail resemble a goldfish, since the tail’s bright orange color would remain visible when filming under 50 feet of water. Short agreed with Howard’s suggestion, and he instead decided to base the mermaid’s tail on Japanese Koi fish.

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