Mom, I Missed the Plane : The movie Kevin is watching doesn’t exist, and it took a lot of work

You all remember that iconic scene from Mother, I Missed the Plane, in which Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) gulps down an ice cream while watching a heist movie, thinking that this provocation will leave his parents with a possible hiding place to scold him. This gangster movie is not real, it’s a fake movie that had to be invented from scratch and the team put all their heart into it.

Improvised title

It is also the first sequence of the film to be filmed, probably because it did not need to be the lead actor. A kind of warming up. It was originally filmed without a title until someone on the set realized that in order to insert Kevin into a VHS VCR, the title had to be put on the edge of the tape.

It would be “Angels with Dirty Souls”, referring to the movie “Angels with Dirty Faces”: “We really wanted to pay homage to the movie, but we didn’t watch it too much. We just wanted to create the feel of the classic gangster movies.” Confirms Maman’s director of photography, I Missed the Plane, Julio Macati THR.

Working day 1 minute and 20 seconds

“Being in Chicago really helped us, we had theater actors…”Makati recalls. “I knew right away it was from the theater because it was larger than life. We shot the whole thing in one day, very quickly.”

Ralph Food plays Danny (John in the original version) and was indeed the theater man we saw in Nico and the Contract. The snakes were played by Michael Guido, seen in the soap The Force of Destiny.

In this 1 minute and 20 second short film, the Snakes bring some “drugs” to a certain Dennis, who asks them to leave it on the doorstep and “get the hell out.” Except Snakes demands to walk away with the money Danny owes him, with at least “20% in cash”. Then the latter takes the machine gun and orders the snakes to run away. The thug obeys, but is still knocked down by a relentless current. It’s too much for little Kevin McAllister, who immediately relaxes and calls his mother.

Recreating that film noir atmosphere still took a lot of work, as Julio Makati recalls. : “I found black and white film at Kodak ASAWhich means there is powerful lighting for exposure. We needed three or four times more light than usual. Then we had a strong back light that fogged the room and gave us a typical film noir shutter. I used dual anti-fog filters and combined them with the camera lens and a compensator in front of the lens to further reduce highlights. “

The attention to detail shows that even for a short sequence that has no real impact on the narrative, the team took their recreation of 1930s gangster films very seriously. But achieving this kind of precision required resources that were hard to come by.

Warner’s strategic mistake

In preparation for filming at Warner, the studio realized that the film was too expensive for a small Christmas production, which they estimated to cost $10 million to produce. Director Chris Columbus realized he couldn’t make the movie he wanted with Warner and took the project to Twentieth Century Fox, who gave him what he needed.

The result: Mom, I Missed the Plane became the third biggest US box office hit of 1991, competing with the blockbusters Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (Warner) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (TriStar). A big mistake for Warner, who would end up with two films in the top 3 and who would have a hard time releasing any other big hits that year.