Fiction, Movies

16 Things You Didn’t Know About Jurassic Park

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16 Things You Didn’t Know About Jurassic Park

  1. Jurassic Park contains only 75 digital effects shots. The rest of the effects were achieved with animatronics, miniatures, and models.

  2. All of the film’s explicit sex scenes were cut. They were later repurposed for the Sylvester Stallone movie The Specialist.

  3. Actors considered for the role of Dr. Alan Grant included Harrison Ford, Tom Selleck, Don Johnson, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, John Travolta, Anthony Hopkins, Sir John Gielgud, Meg Ryan, the ghost of Lucille Ball, Ronald Reagan, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Benji, Grape Ape, an old toaster, Theodore Rex, and Mary-Kate Olsen by herself.

  4. And also Bill Pullman.

  5. No one was considered for the role of Dr. Ian Malcolm, including Jeff Goldblum.

  6. Travis Barker, age thirteen, saw Jurassic Park twenty-seven times in the theater, setting a record that he was unable to verify but that no one could refute. In an interview with his local ABC affiliate, Travis breathlessly summarized the plot of the movie scene by scene, showing off an impeccable imitation of both the Dilophosaurus and Wayne Knight. All of this was cut from the broadcast, though footage of his wild gesticulations could be seen briefly in montage over the reporter’s misleading explanation of the film’s plot. Travis called the news to complain, both about his unused footage and the misleading plot synopsis, but they could only tell him this was ABC Carpet Cleaners, not the TV station.

  7. Travis tried to ride his bike down to the local ABC affiliate to give them a piece of his mind, but when his mom found out she got in her car and drove and drove and finally found him walking his bike down a highway median because the local ABC affiliate was like forty miles away from his house.

  8. Travis Barker is not the drummer from Blink-182. That is the name of the drummer from Blink-182, but this kid was not him. When Blink-182 rose to prominence in the mid-90s, Travis Barker referred to himself as the original Travis Barker, though the one from Blink-182 was five years older than him. He wrote the actually-original Travis Barker a cease and desist letter, which was a letter where he asked Travis Barker to cease and desist. I said, Travis, what are you asking him to cease and desist? Living? He told me to cease and desist talking.

  9. Travis Barker was my best friend growing up. I didn’t see Jurassic Park the first time he saw it because he rode his bike out to the mall to go to the Thursday night previews before it opened on Friday. I couldn’t make that commitment; he didn’t look surprised when I told him that. He said for sure Matt Oswalt would go with him, anyway, although when I mentioned it to Matt, he didn’t know anything about it and also looked hurt, like he’d been disinvited from the plans that Travis probably just made up on the spot. But Travis saw it again with me that Saturday afternoon, saying certain lines along with the movie in a low mutter, like he’d been up all night memorizing the screenplay. At the time I assumed this was only the second time he’d seen it, but looking back it may have been the third or fourth. One time at the lunch table, when we asked him for documentation on the twenty-seven times he supposed saw it, he got super-defensive and I never could tell if he was embarrassed that he might have seen it several times before he saw it with me or embarrassed that maybe he didn’t see it twenty-seven times, or that he lost count.

  10. Travis wanted to own a dinosaur to a degree far greater than most thirteen-year-olds but probably not to the same degree as most ten-year-olds. When he would talk about Jurassic Park, the edges of his face would start to contort, like his lack of a personal dinosaur was physically hurting him. Seeing it twenty-seven times was the closest he could get.

  11. I stopped hanging out with Travis Barker when he got super into potato guns. Both parts of that transaction were gradual. I noticed in the lunch room he was always paging through this catalog that specialized in weird backyard shit that looked like illegal shit — shit that both looked illegal on its own, and physically resembled other, definitely illegal shit. It was basically like the people who made candy cigarettes made a whole catalog of stuff, although the catalog did not sell candy cigarettes. If they did, though, it would’ve been by the carton, do you know what I mean? He used to carry the catalog in between three or four school books but then after a couple of months, sometimes I’d see him just carrying the catalog. I was like, Travis man, where’d your books go? And he would laugh a scary laugh. But he wasn’t really clear about what stuff in the catalog he had his eye on. I assumed he was saving up to order a lot of it, a whole arsenal of butterfly knives and water cannons and firecrackers. He never told me, though. Instead, I found out when everyone else did, maybe slightly before. I was walking home from school — a couple of miles, but worth it not to have anyone shooting rubber bands at me on the bus. — and this car pulled up next to me with Travis in the passenger seat. A girl smoking a cigarette was driving, saying nothing. Travis stuck half his body out the window, let out a war cry, and brandished a gleaming new potato gun. He blasted it at the nearest stop sign and over the wobbly clang he screamed something about chaos theory that may not have been grounded in rigorous scientific study. Remember, no science book, just a catalog. I was like, Travis, what the hell is that, man. Because I didn’t really know what potato guns were. He told me it was a potato gun and told me to get in the car before the cops came. I got in the back and started to roll down the window so my clothes wouldn’t smell like smoke and my mom wouldn’t hassle me. The girl in the front looked at me in the rearview mirror and said, kid. Just kid. But I knew that meant to stop. Her window was open and Travis’s window was open but I rolled mine back up. Travis didn’t introduce us. I spent most of the ride wondering if she was the older sister Travis talked about or someone else entirely, which is why I didn’t realize we were driving into a nice neighborhood, one of those developments on the outskirts of town, and into a long driveway I didn’t recognize. The girl kept the engine running and her cigarette lit as Travis got out of the car. I’m pretty sure he said come on, but before I could decide whether to listen, he had blasted a potato through the window of a nice sky-blue house with yellow trim. I recognized the man who came charging out of the house, but not at first, because local TV weathermen generally try pretty hard not to use those words on the air. I also didn’t know that the weather guy for the local ABC affiliate lived in our town, or just outside of our town. The girl peeled out of the driveway and sped away, never cracking a smile. I told Travis that wasn’t cool and he said I wasn’t cool and I had him drop me off unnecessarily far away from my house just to get out of the car sooner. It wasn’t the last time I saw Travis but it was probably the last time I gave serious consideration to listening to him when he told me to do something.

  12. In tenth grade, I made friends with this guy Topher who lived right next door to the weather man in the wealthy development. Going over to his house sometimes, I always thought in the back of my head it was possible that he’d come storming out of the house, flanked by policemen, who would haul me away for questioning and make me narc out on Travis. I tried to picture myself staying cool under pressure, but every time, I made the fantasy cops grind me down until I broke and told them every terrible thing Travis had ever done.

  13. Travis also invited me to his birthday party in tenth grade, only I got to his house and it seemed like it was just Travis hanging out with this girl, no cigarette, definitely not his sister. Definitely an actual girlfriend. Beth something, from another school. She was pretty; I’m sure this was Travis’s favorite thing about her. The way he talked about girls in sixth and seventh grade, I could tell he thought if they were pretty, they had to be a good person on some level. I could tell he thought that when I realized he had pretty much convinced me of the same thing. I realized it when I saw Beth, actually, and thought: she looks like a good person. Because she was really pretty. No other reason. Maybe you could say because she was hanging out with Travis, she was also probably generous? But Travis wasn’t a bad-looking guy when he got rid of his mustache.

  14. My actual favorite thing about Beth, though was the way she talked to Travis a little bit like a misbehaving child. A little bit like the girl in the car talked to me. I liked that she put him in his place a little, to be honest. Hanging out with the two of them, I felt less afraid that Travis would shoot me in the back of the head with a potato gun. Even so, I had the feeling he wanted to introduce her to me to make me go, holy shit, Travis is baller as hell without me.

  15. I sincerely hope Travis was baller as hell without me. It all feels a little better if he’s baller as hell without me.

  16. I thought about Travis when I went to see The Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park that was released in 1997 and broke box office records for highest opening weekend and highest Memorial Day weekend. I expected to see him there on opening night, without a girlfriend or a potato gun or a driver, and for his mom to pick me up from the movie theater, even though I was with different people, and for him to break his record. Twenty-seven times four years ago seemed like nothing. More times than I ever saw a movie all together, much less in a theater, but still: hardly impossible at all.

Jesse
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