Trivia: Closely listen to the TV playing in the background, when Mathew Broderick comes home from school, before all his trouble starts with the Feds. The local news is on, and is saying "a fire broke out in a prophylactic recycling factory."
Trivia: When filming ROTJ, Lucas didn't want anyone to find out that they were shooting the third Star Wars movie, because pandemonium could break out. So when someone asked the crew what they were filming, they said "Blue Harvest". All of the crew had shirts and hats that said Blue Harvest on them. The fictitious film's tagline was "Horror beyond imagination."
Trivia: The last assignment Christopher Walken gives his students before his accident is to read about the headless demon in the story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Years later he played the Headless Horseman in the movie "Sleepy Hollow."
Trivia: Vic Morrow, one of the leading actors in the movie, and two children, Renee Chen and My-ca Le, were killed during filming when one of the helicopter stunts went wrong.
Trivia: Clint Eastwood's friend Horace, the black male first seen sneaking up on him with a shotgun is also in other movies with Dirty Harry. His first appearance is the first "punk" where Harry gives his famous "Do you feel lucky...?" line to. He also appears in the Enforcer as Mustafa, the black militant leader. He is also in the second, Magnum Force, playing a pimp who is followed in his Cadillac with tiger skin seat off the freeway by the corrupt traffic cops. He talks a little to the officer and then, like other dodgy characters in the film, is shot a few times.
Trivia: When Arnie and Leigh discover that the car has been trashed at Darnell's Garage and Arnie suddenly turns on Leigh, yelling at her and shoving her backwards, note the look of shock on her face - it's real. Keith Gordon (Arnie) explains on the DVD that in rehearsing the scene, he purposely didn't react as violently, so when the scene was shot, his behavior change actually shocked Alexandra Paul (Leigh). (00:57:20)
Trivia: The title is an "in-joke" as Sean Connery said he would never play Bond again.
Trivia: When Mary and Norman go into Mother's room, before Mary turns on the light look at the shadow on the wall on the right. It is a silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock, the director of the original "Psycho" (1960). (00:24:10)
Trivia: At some of the theaters showing this film, when the shark explodes, the "guts" are actually E.T. dolls that were being sold.
Trivia: Contrary to longstanding rumors, Natalie Wood's death did not change the plot or threaten production of this film. At the time of her death, Wood had already completed all of her principal photography, including the ending. According to producer/director Douglas Trumbull, the truth of the matter was that Metro Goldwyn Mayer was in financial trouble and saw Wood's death as an opportunity to bail itself out of debt; so, MGM halted production of "Brainstorm" and tried to write-off the film as a loss in order to collect a sizable insurance claim from Lloyd's of London. When Lloyd's investigated the claim and deposed Douglas Trumbull, he told Lloyd's that the movie was not at all damaged or threatened by Wood's death, and that it could easily be completed. Although MGM refused to pay for the film's completion, Lloyd's of London itself gave Trumbull $5.8 million to finish production.
Trivia: According to the audio commentary on the DVD, actress Jamie Lee Curtis makes a very quick cameo at the beginning of the film. However, her name is not listed in the credits.
Trivia: The deformed, mentally challenged killer, masked too with a mean overly protective mother seems to have taken inspiration from the first 2 Friday the 13th movies.
Trivia: When Warren Stacy is in the dorm he picks up a police radio and the dispatcher can be heard saying Code 6 (Code 6 Stay out of area - http://www.radiolabs.com/police-codes.html) at Florence And Normandie. This is the intersection where the Rodney King Riots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots) would break out nine years later. (01:33:05)