More Trivia
- When Hurricane Iniki hit, the cast and crew were all required to move into the ballroom of the hotel they were staying in. Richard Attenborough, however, stayed in his hotel room, and slept through the entire event. When asked how he could possibly have done this, Attenborough replied, "My dear boy, I survived the blitz!"
- Shortly after Nedry makes his first appearance in the control room, during his argument with Hammond, you can clearly see the movie Jaws (1975) playing in a small video window on one of Nedry's computer screens. That movie was, of course, directed by Steven Speilberg.
- Steven Spielberg was so confident with this film that he started making his next film (Schindler's List (1993)), placing post-production in the hands of George Lucas.
- The crew were caught in a very dangerous Hurricane, Hurricane Iniki which hit the island of Kauai. The film-makers managed to capture shots from the Hurricane and use it in the movie. This incident was told in a recent episode of Storm Stories.
- Steven Spielberg was in the very early stages of pre-production for the film "ER" (based on a Michael Crichton novel), when he heard about the "Jurassic Park" book. He subsequently dumped what he was doing to make the film. Afterwards, he returned to "ER" and helped develop it into a hit TV series (ER (1994)).
- The company name "InGen" is the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish word for "nobody".
- Perhaps to increase the general sense of anxiety (if only subconsciously), the Triceratops mural behind Hammond as he eats ice cream in the visitors center also incorporates elements from "Guernica," Pablo Picasso's famous painting of the horrors of war.
- When Dr. Grant is talking to the boy in the beginning of the movie, there is a dinosaur's head depicted on the mountain in the back.
- In this film, Steven Spielberg directs the man who beat him to the Best Director Oscar in 1983 (Richard Attenborough, whose film Gandhi (1982) also beat Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) as Best Picture).
- In the scene where the survivors are crawling through vent spaces, the computer monitors are shining on the raptor after them. This is usually mistaken as being the shadows from the air vents. It's the letters GATC, the four letters used to denote the components of DNA.
- As the movie was released in Costa Rica, local theater owners scratched/blurred the San Jose tag during the scene when Nedry waits for his contact in what supposedly was the country's capital, because the local audiences reacted negatively to inaccuracies in the scene's geography.
- When getting an update on a storm, Hammond says "Why didn't I build in Orlando?" The distributor, Universal Studios, has two theme parks there. One of them, Islands of Adventure has a Jurassic Park ride.
- All the merchandise (T-Shirts, stuffed dinosaurs, lunch boxes, flasks, etc.) shown in the film were, in some part, actually created to be sold with the movie.
- Later in the movie, as one of the jeeps pulls up, right before they get out, the camera zooms in on the jeep door. The Jurassic Park (1993) logo is on the door, but it is covered in mud so that the only words that can be read is "ur ass Park", perhaps a subtle joke about many of the characters getting hurt or killed in the movie.
- Fred Sorenson was the pilot who flew the crew off Kauai when the hurricane hit during production. He played Jock, the pilot who flew Indiana Jones away in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), also directed by Steven Spielberg.
- Before Steven Spielberg decided to use animatronic dinosaurs and computer-generated effects, he wanted to use stop motion animation for the dinosaur effects and had Phil Tippett put together a short demo of the kitchen scene using claymation dinosaurs (Barbie dolls were substituted for the actual actors).
- Newspaper clippings on the fridge in Grant's trailer read "Space Aliens Stole My Face" and "Dinosaurs On Mars!"
- A large photo of J. Robert Oppenheimer (one of the scientists who created the atomic bomb) is displayed on Dennis Nedry's workstation.
- In the shots of the gift shop, clearly visible is a book entitled "The Making of Jurassic Park" by Don Shay and Jody Duncan. This title was published but tells the behind the scenes story of how the film was made. Jody Duncan also wrote the "Making Of" book for The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997).
- The scene where Grant, Tim and Lex meet the heard of Gallimimuses was scheduled to be the last scene shot on location in Kauai. When Hurricane Iniki hit, filming for this scene had to be postponed.
Production returned to California and then, a few weeks later, Sam Neill, Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards had to travel back to Hawaii, but this time to the island of Oahu, to shoot the scene.
- Director Steven Spielberg and author Michael Crichton first met over two decades earlier, when Spielberg gave Crichton a tour of Universal Studios during the production of The Andromeda Strain (1971).
- The picture that can be seen taped to programmer Dennis Nedry's computer monitor is of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The picture is partly obscured by a post-it with an atomic bomb mushroom cloud drawn on it.
- The tyrannosaur paddock set was constructed both on location and as a studio set. The former was for the daytime scene in which the creature fails to appear, and the latter for its nighttime escape, in order to accommodate Stan Winston's robotic t-rex. This set required a soundstage much bigger than Universal had to offer, so it was filmed at Warner Bros.
- The park software is written in Pascal; a program is clearly visible in one of the monitor close-ups on the UNIX system. The graphical interface recognized as a UNIX system was the experimental Silicon Graphics 3D File System Navigator.
The version number of the Silicon Graphics UNIX Operating System is 4.0.5 and is visible in one of the close-ups in the operating system's shell window (command program).
- The computer in the back of the computer room with the many (65536) red LEDs is actually a real computer: The Connection Machine CM-5 made by Thinking Machines. It contained many SPARC 2 RISC processors and the LEDs were added to make the machine more aesthetically pleasing than their previous models.
Unfortunately, it was not actually a very good supercomputer and the company failed not long afterward. The comment about networking eight connection machines is pretty superfluous as they were meant to be used like this. The bigger problem was writing programs that efficiently mapped onto the data parallel architecture.
- The scene where the T-Rex comes out of the bushes and eats the gallimimus was actually shot on the island of Oahu at Kualoa Ranch. This was the only outdoor scene not filmed on Kauai, due to Hurricane Iniki.
- Was followed by two sequels. There were plans for a fourth film, but they were immediately scrapped in late 2008, after the death of Michael Crichton. However in 2012, they eventually did decide to set things into motion, and have announced a planned release date for 2014.
- Principal photography finished 12 days ahead of schedule and on budget.
- The release strategy was planned 15 months before the studio had the chance to see a frame of the movie.
- In a moment of the movie, one Velociraptor appears in head shot illuminated with a computer screen full of four letters repeated time and time again: "ACGT". These letters are the acronym for Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine, the DNA's base pair.
- Tim makes references about Robert Bakker and his dinosaur book. Bakker was a technical advisor on Jurassic Park (1993).
- On 11 September 1992, Hurricane Iniki hit the island of Kauai, delaying production of the film. Much of the crew helped in the clean up.
- It was while supervising post-production on this film that George Lucas decided that technology was good enough to begin work on the Star Wars prequels. Appropriately, Samuel L. Jackson was able to appear in those films as well.
- As the story takes place on an island near Costa Rica, the filmmakers originally considered filming in Costa Rica. This idea was quickly abandoned when they realized that the Costa Rican government would not allow them to build roads to get to their filming locations.
- According to Daan Sandee (Thinking Machines Corp), the CM-5 super computer used in the control room was one of only two ever built to that size (1024 nodes). The other machine was at Los Alamos. The machine used in the movie was sold as smaller segments after the scenes were complete. Mirrors were used to make it seem like more CM-5's were present.
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