20 facts you might not know about 'The Rock'

The Rock started as a spec script from the writing team of Douglas Cook and David Weisberg. A writer named Mark Rosner also got credit for his screenplay work. However, Quentin Tarantino, Aaron Sorkin, and Jonathan Hensleigh all did uncredited work. In fact, director Michael Bay was quite annoyed by this. Bay actually wrote an open letter to the Writers Guild calling their ruling a “travesty” relating to Hensleigh’s lack of credit.

Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson were one of the biggest producing duos of the ‘80s and ‘90s. They had produced movies like Beverly Hills Cop and Top Gun. Sadly, Simpson died of a drug-induced heart attack in January 1996, five months before The Rock came out. The film is dedicated to his memory.

Bay is not known for being an easygoing guy, and he can be hard to work with. Apparently, he was having a lot of heated discussions with studio executives while working on The Rock. Then, Sean Connery came to his aid. Connery, who was also a producer on the film, accompanied Bay to a meeting with the executives one day. He stood up and said what a good job Bay was doing, and the executives didn’t bother him again.

There’s plenty of violence and vulgarity in The Rock, but most of it doesn’t come from Cage’s character. He decided his character Dr. Stanley Goodspeed wouldn’t swear. Although, during the film’s climax, some swearing does occur.

The role of Goodspeed, an FBI special agent who works as a chemical weapons specialist, is not some sort of superhero. He’s just a guy who overcomes things to get the task at hand done. Even so, the part was offered to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who would have been an odd choice. However, it’s Schwarzenegger who turned the movie down, as he didn’t like the script.

The Rock is set on Alcatraz, and they did indeed shoot scenes on the island. Since it was no longer a prison but instead a national park, though, it was not possible to shut the park down to film. That meant they had to film the movie around tourists and onlookers.

Connery wasn’t interested in traveling back and forth from the mainland to Alcatraz. He asked the producers to build a temporary cabin for him on the island so that he wouldn’t have to do all that traveling. The producers agreed.

With so many writers working on The Rock, why not add a couple more? Connery personally brought on the British screenwriting team of Dıck Clement and Ian La Frenais to rewrite his dialogue.

Cage showed Bruckheimer and Bay the movie Jaws during the production of the film. Why? Because he wanted to bring their attention to Richard Dreyfuss’ performance. Specifically, he wanted to mimic Dreyfus’ performance in Jaws for the bomb-dismantling scene in The Rock.

Harris is an acclaimed and esteemed actor who has brought gravitas to many serious roles. But even he has trouble being entirely professional on occasion. One day when shooting, Harris couldn’t stop laughing at the actor who was the tour guide at Alcatraz. He chalked it up to having the “giggles.”

Harris and Biehn are on opposite sides of the conflict in The Rock, but the actors had some shared history. Both of them were in The Abyss. Biehn actually played a Navy SEAL in both of these films.

We don’t know if Bay would vote Stanley Anderson to be president, but he seems to like the idea. The actor plays the president in both The Rock and Armageddon. In both films, he’s just credited as “The President.” We wonder if he’s supposed to be the same character?

San Francisco is not an easy place to film, apparently. Bay called the car chase scene one of the hardest filming experiences he’s had in his career. It took hundreds of signatures to shoot across even two blocks. Filming this section of the movie ended up putting things behind schedule.

The scene where Mason dangles FBI Director Jim Womack off the balcony was shot at the actual famed Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Apparently, not everybody was aware that a movie was being shot. The hotel received several calls from concerned onlookers about a man dangling from the building.

In the original screenplay, David Morse’s Major Baxter turns on Harris’ General Hummel and kills him. In the film, though, Baxter merely pretends to turn on Hummel and then opens fire on the mutineers.

The Rock is a big, bombastic ‘90s action movie, and it had a $75 million budget as a result. It still made plenty of money, though. The Rock reeled in $335.1 million, making it the seventh-highest-grossing movie of 1996.

You don’t imagine a Bay movie getting nominations from the Academy Awards, for The Rock got itself one nomination. Not for directing, of course, but for Best Sound. It did not win, but Cage and Connery did win Best On-Screen Duo at the MTV Movie Awards.

The Criterion Collection releases DVDs of films that tend to be critical darlings, arthouse films, indies, and things of that ilk. They also released The Rock in their collection. This was, needless to say, a bit of a surprise for the company that champions “cinema at its finest.” Criterion’s release was accompanied with an essay of support by none other than Roger Ebert. Ebert was not a fan of Bay at all, but he gave The Rock three-and-a-half stars.

Bay made two Bad Boys movies and a million Transformers movies, give or take. He also had plans for a sequel to The Rock that never happened. The film would have followed Connery’s John Mason while he was on the run, but it never got past the development stage.

The director has admitted a “major logic flaw” in The Rock. Namely, why are the boilers at Alcatraz still working when the prison hasn’t been in use for years? Bay’s answer to his own nitpick? “Screw it, it’s entertaining.”