Hollywood, the name conjurers up images of glamorous actresses, handsome leading men and block buster movies. It is a place that every actor strives to get to and the mark of success in some cases. We have all seen extravaganza movies that are produced there and some that are made on more of a tight budget, but how many of us know that certain movies are believed to be cursed? Sometimes some scenes require a lot of dangerous actions and it is only by the skill of the movie makers that no one gets hurt. Stunt scenes are rehearsed many times before they are carried out and every precaution is taken to prevent injury. Even with all these precautions, things go wrong. In Final Destination 3, there was a fireworks scene where fireworks were shooting all over the place and were set in motion by events that were meant to claim lives. Apparently one of the fireworks didn't take the planned path and almost hit an actor in the eye.

I guess these kind of things are bound to happen once in awhile, for there is no way of creating a situation that is perfect every time. Sometimes things happen to people involved with a movie that mirror the movie itself. There can be no explanation for some of these strange things that happen to people connected with these films. It is said that Jennifer Carpenter, who played "Emily Rose" in "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" had the experience of waking up in the middle of the night only to find that her stereo kept turning itself on. Was this caused by some unhappy spirit that didn't like the idea of the movie being made? I'll leave this decision up to you.

Death has not been a stranger in Hollywood. One of the most famous deaths there had nothing to do with the person, but it did have to do with the way she decided to die. Peg Entwhistle decided to end her life because she felt that she failed. She looked for a spectacular way to do it and this is what she found. She decided to jump off the famous Hollywood sign. To this day it is said that the spirit of Peg Entwhistle haunts the sign and you can feel her presence when you get near it.

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Sometimes movies can cause trouble. What may be acceptable in some parts of the world, may not be acceptable in others. Moustapha Akkad was a Hollywood director. He had been born in Syria when it was under French rule and migrated to the United States where he received several degrees in the Arts. He had worked as a production assistant under the famous Sam Peckinpah, who made many famous westerns. In 1976 he decided to produce the movie "The Message". The movie starred Anthony Quinn and it attempted to tell the story of early Islam. He couldn't show a figure representing the Prophet Muhammad, since it is not permitted under Islam. He decided to show a shadow that represented the Prophet Muhammad and made the movie. This movie caused problems with some Muslim groups and with some westerners. Some hostages were even taken. He could no longer get funding for religious movies and turned to horror movies. He produced "Halloween". While visiting Iraq he was blown up by an Iraqi suicide bomber and died.

When movies are made, we only see the finished result. There is a lot more to a movie than we ever suspect. When "Gone With The Wind" was finished they had almost 450,000 feet of film. That is enough for a movie that is almost 90 hours long. Can you imagine what a hard time the film editor had, to make a movie out of this mess? When the editor was finished, the film totaled a little over 20,000 feet. Beside that, film sketches had to be made for the different sets that were to be used. There were 1,500 of them plus 3,000 sketches for the scenes in the film. The crew built 90 sets along with 53 buildings. This was not the end of construction because streets had to be laid to represent Atlanta and other areas. The total was 10,000 feet. Before even one foot of film was shot, 250,000 man hours were used in pre-production. By the way Vivien Leigh was paid $30,000 for the movie, can you imagine what she would have received today?

Sometimes scripts are changed before a movie is made, but lines are left in strange places. An example of this was the movie "Shawshank Redemption". The original story by Stephen King had Red as an Irishman. In the movie Morgan Freeman played the part, yet the line he had to say went unchanged and it was "Maybe it's cause I'm Irish". Every scene that contained the crow in the movie had to be monitored by the American Humane Association. If this story is true, they went a little too far. It is said that one scene called for the feeding of a live maggot to the crow. They stopped that scene because they said it was too cruel to the maggot. When the studio needed photos of a young Morgan Freeman for his parole papers they used photos of his son Alfonso. Stephen King used the number 237 as Freeman's cell number, as the room number in his story "The Shinning" and the total of change in his story "Stand By Me". I guess he likes this number.

Did you ever wonder what was the strangest movie ever made? I did, but there are too many out there to be exact. As far as plot goes, I guess it is a tie between Eraserhead and El Topo. Eraserhead was made in 1977 and is the story of a mutant baby born to two strange people and it took over five years to complete. It took so long that you can sometimes see the different in ages of some actors from scene to scene. It gets even more creepy when one scene show an actress going through a doorway and when she comes out the other side she is eighteen months older, Yikes. El Topo is hard to describe so here is the tag line from internet movie database "See the naked young Franciscans whipped with cactus. See the bandit leader disemboweled. See the priest ride into the sunset with a midget and her newborn baby. What it all means isn't exactly clear, but you won't forget it." . Yep there are some really odd movies out there.

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Before I finish this article, I think it might be nice to find out what was the most successful movie ever made. In order to do this we have to adjust the cost to 2007 dollars and also the profits. No not Titanic, but that was a good guess. I think you know the answer now, it was "Gone With The Wind".