Did You Know?
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Spoilers (1)
Luke's prison number (37) is a reference to the Bible - Luke 1:37. ("For with God nothing shall be impossible.")
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The music cue where Luke gets the men to work faster on the road was used later for many years by many ABC television stations as their "Eyewitness News" theme.
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The movie's line "What we've got here is failure to communicate." was voted as the #11 movie quote by the American Film Institute
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The lines "What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it. I don't like it any more than you men." can be heard in the intro of the song "Civil War" by Guns N' Roses. They would use audio of the first line again during the song "Madagascar" on the 2008 album "Chinese Democracy."
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Truckloads of Spanish moss were shipped from Louisiana to the set in California to hang in the trees around the prison.
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A Southern prison camp was built for this movie just north of Stockton, California. A dozen buildings were constructed, including a barracks, mess hall, warden's quarters, guard shack, and dog kennels.
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While passing by the prison camp set, a San Joaquin County building inspector thought it was a recently constructed migrant worker's complex, and posted "condemned" notices on the buildings for not being up to code.
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In the "road-tarring" sequence, the actors actually blacktopped a mile-long stretch of highway for the county.
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Jack Lemmon was the owner of Jalem Productions, which co-produced many of his films as well as Cool Hand Luke.
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The opening scene, where Luke is cutting off the heads of parking meters, was filmed in Lodi, California. After the filming, the city did not replace the meters, and for many years afterward, you could go there and see a block long row of metal posts, sans meters.
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According to Jack Lemmon's son, Chris, in an Icons Radio Interview Lemmon was originally selected to play the part of Luke, but Lemmon, reading the script, saw that Paul Newman would be better. So Lemmon decided to produce it.
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Donn Pearce who wrote the novel on which the movie is based, spent 2 years on a chain gang for safe-breaking. Pearce makes a cameo appearance in the movie as a convict named Sailor.
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Actor Morgan Woodward, who played Boss Godfrey, a.k.a. "The Man With No Eyes," remained in character during breaks between scenes. He would sit in his chair, still wearing his mirrored sunglasses, and not speak to anyone.
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When the famous line "What we've got here is a failure to communicate" is no originally spoken by the Captain (Strother Martin) he omits the "a"; but when Luke (Paul Newman) repeats the line at the end while in the church, he says "a failure to communicate." Thus, the line can be quoted correctly both with and without the "a".
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Spoilers
Just before Luke is brought back from one of his escape attempts, Dragline lets one of the inmates (Koko) look at the picture of Luke that he hides in the magazine. As Koko opens the magazine, clearly visible on the opposite page is an article titled "The Illusion That Kills" with an image of a hunter firing a rifle, which is pointed directly at Luke's chest. This is obviously a reference to "The Man With No Eyes".
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