(screams)
- Kevin!
- [Narrator] Home Alone redefined Christmas movies,
but for the people who made this mega hit,
it was no holiday.
- He didn't wanna hear my ideas, he didn't wanna talk to me.
(gun fires)
- [Narrator] This is the surprisingly painful story
of one of movie history's greatest Christmas miracles.
(shovel thuds) (hollers)
- Bob Daly said, all right, well,
if you can do this movie for 10, we'll make it.
- [Narrator] 10 million might sound like a lot,
but compared to most movies that came out in the late 80s,
$10 million was nothing.
So you might be wondering how they pulled off
all that stunt work, star power.
- Polka king of the Midwest.
- [Narrator] And pyrotechnics.
(screams)
- [Narrator] For only $10 million.
Well, they didn't.
New Trier wasn't just any old high school.
That's right, the ghost of John Hughes' films past
inhabited the halls,
being a location for Ferris Bueller's Day Off
and Uncle Buck.
- We walked into this gym and we were like,
it's got a grid in the ceiling, and it's big enough,
and we could build a house in here, I would think.
(hammer pounding)
And the next thing we knew,
we built all the sets in this school.
It was a beautifully built,
structurally built, two floors, so you could walk up steps.
Actually, the front door we shot here.
- We're the wet bandits.
- You know, the trueism is any time you build a set
with water in it, it's gonna leak.
- I mean, it is what it is, right?
We have to have a set, we have to have it flooded,
where are we gonna do it?
- [Narrator] The answer was down this hall,
past the canteen, through the auditorium, and in this door.
- The pool, the pool, it has water in it now.
And it's like, well it may as well drip into
an empty pool, right?
(dramatic music)
So we built the set down at the shallow end.
Yes, that is correct.
(dramatic music)
- It was such a fun project and there was so much enthusiasm
for it that even though the budget was climbing.
- 11, 92, 12.
- 13 million to 14 million.
- John believed that Warner Brothers would be comfortable
with whatever budget that it ended up at.
- [Narrator] An eerie feeling
began haunting the vacant school.
- John finally came and said, they're having issues
with the budget.
- Unless we could deliver
a 13 and a half million dollar budget the next day
they were gonna pull the plug.
- This is Warner Brothers, aren't we close enough,
I mean, it's not like we said it was 25.
I hang the phone and I had seen the production manager
from Warner Brothers going to each office
telling everybody the project is dead.
Close up, pack up, leave, go home.
- [Narrator] And with that, Home Alone was dead.
- We were walking back from the commissary
and we ask him, how's it going on Home Alone
'cause we heard about it
and John said well, I'm actually fighting with the studios
and Warner Brothers.
- [Narrator] And thus began a legally questionable exchange.
- Who is it?
- [Narrator] Between John Hughes and 20th Century Fox.
- Legally another studio isn't supposed to see
a piece of material until it's legally in turn around
and that didn't exactly happen.
- Leave it on the doorstep and get the hell out of here.
- Basically a screen play was left somewhere
so that somebody could pick it up.
It was clandestinely delivered.
Click, pick up the phone, dial Fox
and say we got the call and they said
you're now a Fox picture.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] A valid question was.
- How much snow, did we have enough money
in the budget for snow.
- But the heavens provided a Christmas miracle.
- I remember the day kind of started to rain a little bit
and then it just dumped.
(dramatic music)
- And our beepers started going off saying
we're moving to the McCallister house
first thing in the morning, make it happen.
- [Narrator] On just their second day of shooting
they nailed one of the most important shots in the movie.
- The money shot, that's what it was it was the money shot.
- The snow was fantastic, it was more snow
than we really needed but we weren't gonna mess with it.
- [Narrator] But their little snowy miracle
came with a side of trimmings.
- We used potato flakes because we needed snow blowing,
within a day or two when the snow started to melt,
the potato flakes started to degrade
and it became like this horrible funky vegetable smell.
- [Narrator] So two days into shooting it dumped
and things were turning rotten.
To star alongside Pesci they cast Daniel.
- Daniel. - Daniel.
- Dan Roebuck.
- [Narrator] Roebuck.
- And then we did a screen test with that actor
and Joe Pesci.
- I don't think Joe felt like they had chemistry.
- They just felt a little flat.
- And after three days, Chris came into our office
and said guys we have to replace Dan Roebuck,
it's not working.
- I really need to try to get Dan Stern into this movie.
- That's a good idea.
- Then when we did the camera test with Joe Pesci
and Dan Stern, it was magical.
- Does that bother you when I do that?
- Nope.
- You know you could get locked up for--
- The hardest thing for Pesci was not swearing.
- Don't (beep) me out.
How the (beep).
Give me a (beep) break.
(beep) give me the drive through.
- Joe said an interesting thing to me,
he said every time I get a script,
it's not a Scorsese script, the only way I can read it
is if I add (beep) every three or four words.
- [Narrator] Although it's a wholesome family film
one might excuse the odd swear word.
(hollers) - What?
- And he said I wanna make a language like a (mumbles).
- What? (mumbles)
- What, what? - What happened!
- Like a cartoon rough guy.
- [Narrator] Everybody looked forward to the day
when John Candy would be on set.
♪ Holka polka polka ♪
- I don't think John Candy knows
it was gonna be 23 hours.
- And here was a point where Candy looked at John
and it was like, you son of a (beep).
- Maybe we shouldn't talk about it.
- [Narrator] For a 23 hour day,
an actor as big as John Candy must have made a fortune
in overtime or something.
- John Candy did that as a favor for us.
- Sure, you know, it's Christmas time.
- There wasn't some big salary, it was scale.
- [Narrator] Yep, that's right, Dan Charles, the pizza boy
made more than John Candy on Home Alone.
- Cheapskate.
- When I did the first stair fall,
no one told me how to take the fall,
I just launched myself as high and as far as I could.
(hollers)
- [Narrator] The falls in Home Alone
had a huge impact on the stunt industry.
(hollers)
- Now when somebody does a fall where they get a lot of air
and they fall on their back, they call it the Home Alone.
(hollers)
- [Narrator] But there was one other iconic moment
in the film that wasn't exactly performed as written.
(hollers)
- John scripted that moment.
He was supposed to do this and then pause and scream
but he did this and then.
He kept his hands there just
because it was such a little kid thing to do.
But as a result he created this iconic moment
by putting his hands there and keeping them there.