10 Things You Didn’t Know About Stone Cold
Kino Lorber recently released a special edition Blu-ray for 1991’s Stone Cold.
I received my copy last week and it wasn’t long before I was diving in to all the special features the release has to offer… New interviews with Lance Henriksen, Arabella Holzbog, Sam McMurray and “The Boz” himself, Brian Bosworth… There is also a commentary track with the dream team of action film historians, Mike Leeder and Arne Venema, who blew me away with the information that Brian Bosworth was almost one of Dr. Evil’s henchmen in Austin Powers!?!
The special features also provided me with plenty of Stone Cold knowledge and I will share some of that with you right now with these 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Stone Cold…
1. The original director for the film was Bruce Malmuth. Malmuth had directed action movies like Nighthawks and Hard to Kill prior to getting the job on Stone Cold, but he was replaced early on in the production by Craig R. Baxley. The directorial change also changed the film from a character driven story to a more action driven story.
2. Michael Douglas was an uncredited producer (as part of Stone Group Pictures). It was actually Douglas that called and convinced Brian Bosworth to take the part of Joe Huff.
3. Stone Group Pictures also produced the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Double Impact in 1991. Some of Double Impact‘s budget was cut and reallocated to Stone Cold because Stone Group felt Stone Cold had a better chance of hitting big at the box office. Double Impact ended up being a hit at the box office, while Stone Cold lost money.
4. Brian Bosworth rode his own personal motorcycle in Stone Cold with some customizations done for the movie. Lance Henriksen borrowed Mickey Rourke’s motor cycle and Rourke wisely sent a bill for the use of his bike in the movie.
5. The original title for the film was Heart of Stone and the script depicted Joe Huff as a family man. The opening scene of the film from the original scrip, saw Joe Huff’s father being caught and killed by outlaw bikers after they find out Huff’s father was an undercover cop. This would set up Joe Huff following in his father’s law enforcement footsteps and eventually getting the opportunity to infiltrate that some group of bikers and finish what his father started.
6. The actual opening scene of the movie features the wild man Joe Huff taking out a “supermarket psycho”… that psycho was played by Jerry Colker, who up to that point had been known for being a writer on the ABC sitcom, Growing Pains.
7. After reading the script and seeing that Chains Cooper’s dialogue was nothing but quotes from the Bible, Lance Henriksen ended up writing all of his own dialogue. Henriksen felt the audience would not take Chains seriously as his part was originally written. Henriksen and Bosworth would get up early, do a quick rehearsal of the scenes they had for that day and then go ahead and shoot them.
8. Henriksen was also instrumental in giving Stone Cold an authentic outlaw biker feel, because he went out and recruited actual outlaw bikers to play extras in the film. Brian Bosworth also shared that an old One Percenter named Magic was hired to be a technical advisor on the movie.
9. The motorcycle chase featuring Bosworth’s John Stone aka Joe Huff and William Forsythe’s Ice was shot over three states… starting with Alabama, then Mississippi and eventually wrapping it up in Los Angeles, California.
10. It was Sam McMurray who pitched the Die Hard like ending that saw his FBI Agent Lance shoot Chains Cooper after Chains grabs a gun from a State Trooper’s holster and that Lance should be wearing an earring, to show that working with Joe Huff was starting to rub off on him. When everyone agreed that was a good idea, Sam had a production assistant take him to a nearby mini-mall so he could get his ear pierced.
