Fans of killer-reptile movies were a little nonplussed a while back when it was reported that New Line’s SNAKES ON A PLANE had been rechristened PACIFIC AIR FLIGHT 121, before it was announced that the movie would retain its original, less generic title. While chatting with Josh Olson, scripter of David Cronenberg’s A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (like SNAKES, a New Line production shot in Canada), Fango found out that the PACIFIC moniker was never intended to be the film’s final title. “Our line producer on HISTORY worked on SNAKES ON A PLANE,” Olson explains, “and he told me that their concern was going to airports and saying, ‘Hi, we’d like to film SNAKES ON A PLANE here.’ So they decided to come up with a working title, so they could say, ‘Hi, we want to shoot PACIFIC AIR FLIGHT 121 here.’ And somehow it leaked out that they had changed the [official] title, when in fact they had not.”
Olson further reveals that “On HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, we did the same thing” when scouting rural locations for the brutal thriller. “Imagine coming to someone’s door saying, ‘Hello, we want to shoot David Cronenberg’s A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE in your living room.’ They’re going to slam the door in your face. So during production, the movie was just referred to as ‘David Cronenberg’s HISTORY.’ ” HISTORY opens this Friday, September 23 in limited release and goes wider Sept. 30; see Fango #247, on sale this month, for a Cronenberg interview. SNAKES flies in August 18, 2006.
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