Did You Know?

William Hurt was offered the role of Dr. Grant, but he turned it down without reading the book or the script.

Richard Attenborough's first acting role in 15 years.

In Michael Crichton's novel, John Hammond proudly says that the narrator on the prerecorded park tour is Richard Kiley. Later, Kiley was hired to play himself in that role for the movie; possibly the first instance of a celebrity appearing in a book, and then later cast as him or herself in the film version. This feat was not repeated until 2009, when boxer Paolo Roberto played himself in the film version of The Girl Who Played with Fire. He too was already previously featured as a character in the book.

Director Steven Spielberg was worried that computer graphics meant Nintendo type cartoon quality. He originally only wanted the herd of gallimimus dinosaurs to be computer-generated, but upon seeing ILM's demo animation of a T-rex chasing a herd of galamides across his ranch, he decided to shoot nearly all the dinosaur scenes using this method. The animation was first plotted on an Amiga Toaster, and rendered for the film by Silicon Graphics' Indigo workstations.

The full-sized animatron of the tyrannosaurus rex weighed about 13,000 to 15,000 pounds. During the shooting of the initial T-rex attack scene that took place in a downpour and was shot on a soundstage, the latex that covered the T-rex puppet absorbed great amounts of water, making it much heavier and harder to control. Technicians worked throughout the night with blow driers trying to dry the latex out. Eventually, they suspended a platform above the T-rex, out of camera range, to keep the water off it during filming.

The park software is written in Pascal; a program is clearly visible in one of the monitor close-ups on the UNIX system. The graphical interface recognized as a UNIX system was the experimental Silicon Graphics 3D File System Navigator. The version number of the Silicon Graphics UNIX Operating System is 4.0.5 and is visible in one of the close-ups in the operating system's shell window (command program).

There were so many wires and rigging to control the velociraptor animatrons in the kitchen stalking scene that the child actors had to literally step over and around them while the scene was being filmed. The kitchen set was greatly expanded from the original design to accommodate the velociraptors. Some reports say that all of the dinosaurs in the kitchen scene were computer-generated.

The first film to use DTS (now Datasat) digital surround sound.

At one point Lex is hanging from a floorboard between stories. She looks up for a moment. The stunt double looked up accidentally while filming and Ariana Richards' face had to be superimposed in post production.

In this film, Steven Spielberg directs the man who beat him to the Best Director Oscar in 1983 (Richard Attenborough, whose film Gandhi also beat Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial as Best Picture).

According to Daan Sandee (Thinking Machines Corp), the CM-5 super computer used in the control room was one of only two ever built to that size (1024 nodes). The other machine was at Los Alamos. The machine used in the movie was sold as smaller segments after the scenes were complete. Mirrors were used to make it seem like more CM-5's were present.

Scenes of the T-Rex attacking Grant and the kids while they ride down a river and through a running waterfall were cut before filming.

Tim makes references about Robert Bakker and his dinosaur book. Bakker was a technical advisor on Jurassic Park.

Juliette Binoche was offered the role of Dr. Ellie Sattler, but she turned it down in order to make Three Colors: Blue with Krzysztof Kieslowski.

On 11 September 1992, Hurricane Iniki hit the island of Kauai, delaying production of the film. Much of the crew helped in the clean up.

Ariana Richards was upset by the fact that an action figure of her character was not produced. (Kenner only made dolls of Grant, Sattler, Muldoon, Nedry, Tim, and eventually Malcolm.)

All the merchandise (T-Shirts, stuffed dinosaurs, lunch boxes, flasks, etc.) shown in the film were, in some part, actually created to be sold with the movie.

After Joseph Mazzello was turned down for a role in Steven Spielberg's Hook for being too young, Spielberg told Mazzello that he was still impressed with his audition and would try to cast him in a future project. Mazzello was then cast as Tim in this movie. As Mazzello recalls, "Steven had me screen-test with Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman for Hook. I was just too young for the role. And because of that, Steven came up to me and said, 'Don't worry about it, Joey. I'm going to get you in a movie this summer.' Not only a nice promise to get, but to have it be one of the biggest box-office smashes of all time? That's a pretty good trade." Mazzello's casting led Spielberg to reverse the ages of the children, as he decided that casting a girl younger than Mazzello would be too young to be placed in danger. Lex was therefore made the older child, and the computer expert as well. In Crichton's original novel, Tim is older, and is both the dinosaur and computer enthusiast.

The helicopter used in the movie was later involved in an accident in Hawaii in March 2001. In the accident, the chopper dropped ten feet to the ground, bounced back up and then tipped on its right side.

Newspaper clippings on the fridge in Grant's trailer read "Space Aliens Stole My Face" and "Dinosaurs On Mars!"

In the original script, the T-Rex skeleton in the lobby was hooked up to pulleys like a giant marionette. In the ending, Grant was going to man the controls and act as puppeteer, using the skeleton's head and feet to crush the raptors.

The novel was published in 1990. However, pre-production of the film began in 1989, using only Michael Crichton's manuscript. It was widely believed that the book would be such a hit that it would make an outstanding movie. It turns out that assumption was correct.

In the scene where the survivors are crawling through vent spaces, the computer monitors are shining on the raptor after them. This is usually mistaken as being the shadows from the air vents. It's the letters GATC, the four letters used to denote the components of DNA.

Brian Cox was interviewed for Muldoon

Ariana Richards' audition consisted of standing in front of a camera and screaming wildly. Director Steven Spielberg "wanted to see how she could show fear." Richards remembers, "I heard later on that Steven had watched a few girls on tape that day, and I was the only one who ended up waking his sleeping wife off the couch, and she came running through the hallway to see if the kids were all right."

'Robin Wright' (V)' was offered the role of Dr. Ellie Sattler.

Steven Spielberg considered Richard Dreyfuss for the role of Dr. Alan Grant.

The release strategy was planned 15 months before the studio had the chance to see a frame of the movie.

Steven Spielberg considered hiring Bob Gurr to do the full size dinosaurs because he was impressed with his apes in the "Kongfrontation" ride at Universal Studios.

Later in the movie, as one of the jeeps pulls up, right before they get out, the camera zooms in on the jeep door. The Jurassic Park logo is on the door, but it is covered in mud so that the only words that can be read is "ur ass Park", perhaps a subtle joke about many of the characters getting hurt or killed in the movie.

Steven Spielberg was in the very early stages of pre-production for the film "ER" (based on a Michael Crichton novel), when he heard about the "Jurassic Park" book. He subsequently dumped what he was doing to make the film. Afterwards, he returned to "ER" and helped develop it into a hit TV series (ER).

Anna Chlumsky auditioned for the role of Lex.

The company name "InGen" is the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish word for "nobody".

Was followed by two sequels. There were plans for a fourth film, but they were immediately scrapped in late 2008, after the death of Michael Crichton. However in 2012, they eventually did decide to set things into motion, and have announced a planned release date for 2014.

There are only 15 minutes of actual dinosaur footage in the film: 9 minutes are Stan Winston's animatronics, 6 minutes of it is ILM's CGI.

Much of the behavior seen in the film is based on modern wild animals, since little is known of the actual behavior of dinosaurs.

Years after this film wrapped, it was discovered due to fossil impressions of velociraptor skin that they were feathered, implying that Grant was indeed right that they evolved into birds.

Grant and Sattler unearth a velociraptor skeleton in Montana early in the film, and later encounter live velociraptors that are about the size of a full grown human. In reality, velociraptors were only about half the size of the animals seen in the film, and their remains have mainly been found in Asia, never in Montana. The species identified as velociraptor in the film is actually more consistent with Deinonychus. When Michael Crichton was doing his research, scientific thinking was that Velociraptor and Deinonychus were variations on the same species.

Steven Spielberg delayed the beginning of filming by several weeks to get the cast he wanted. First he allowed Richard Attenborough to finish post-production on his own film Chaplin before committing to the film. He also waited until Sam Neill could finish filming Family Pictures. Neill ended up only having a weekend off between finishing that film and starting this one.

Alan Grant is modeled after Paleontologist Jack Horner who, like Grant, digs and teaches in Montana, and was also a technical advisor on this film.

The guest's encounter with the sick Triceratops ends without any clear explanation as to why the animal is sick. Michael Crichton's original novel and the screenplay, however, includes an explanation: the Stegosaur/Triceratops lacked suitable teeth for grinding food and so, like birds, would swallow rocks and use them as gizzard stones. In the digestive tract, these rocks would grind the food to aid in digestion. After six weeks, the rocks would become too smooth to be useful, and the animal would regurgitate them. When finding and eating new rocks to use, the animal would also swallow West Indian Lilac berries. The fact that the berries and stones are regurgitated explains why Ellie never finds traces of them in the animal's excrement.

Jodie Foster, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ally Sheedy, Geena Davis, Daryl Hannah, Jennifer Grey, Kelly McGillis, Jamie Lee Curtis, Julia Roberts, Linda Hamilton, Sarah Jessica Parker, Bridget Fonda, Joan Cusack, and Debra Winger were all considered for the role of Dr. Ellie Sattler.

The character played by Cameron Thor is named Lewis Dodgson. Author of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," Lewis Carroll was born with the name Charles Dodgson. Since both the first and last names of the character are written with the less common spellings which Carroll used, this is a fairly obvious nod to him, although the reason for the joke is unclear. Lewis Carroll's novel is referenced again when Nedry names his program to sabotage the park security systems "White Rabbit."

The tyrannosaur paddock set was constructed both on location and as a studio set. The former was for the daytime scene in which the creature fails to appear, and the latter for its nighttime escape, in order to accommodate Stan Winston's robotic t-rex. This set required a soundstage much bigger than Universal had to offer, so it was filmed at Warner Bros.

The Tyrannosaurus' roars were a combination of dog, penguin, tiger, alligator, and elephant sounds.

Except for some very brief glimpses in the opening scene, the adult velociraptors - often cited as the most memorable dinosaurs in this film - don't make an on-screen appearance until over 103 minutes into the movie.

The film cut out many species of dinosaur that were featured in the novel for budgetary and technological reasons. One of these was a small, chicken-sized dinosaur called Procompsognathids, which later made an appearance in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Dr. Wu explains their reason for having this creature: Dinosaur excrement, he presumes, would have been bio-degradable during the Cenozoic era. However, in the modern day, bacteria have evolved to the point that it is no longer able to break down dinosaur waste, and the larger dinosaurs produce quite a lot of it. "Compys," as they are called, eat the other dinosaurs' waste and then excrete it themselves in smaller piles which are more easily broken down by present-day bacteria. The lack of compys in the film may explain the mountain of excrement that Ellie finds.

Shortly after Nedry makes his first appearance in the control room, during his argument with Hammond, you can clearly see the movie Jaws playing in a small video window on one of Nedry's computer screens. That movie was, of course, directed by Steven Speilberg.

When Hurricane Iniki hit, the cast and crew were all required to move into the ballroom of the hotel they were staying in. Richard Attenborough, however, stayed in his hotel room, and slept through the entire event. When asked how he could possibly have done this, Attenborough replied, "My dear boy, I survived the blitz!"

In the shooting script, it was written that, during the Tyrannosaur's escape, Malcolm would simply get out of the car and run away, much as Genarro had done moments before. In fact, this is how Malcolm behaves in the scene as written in the book. When the time came to film the scene, it was Jeff Goldblum's idea to make his flight more heroic, by having him distract the Tyrannosaur so Grant could save the children.

As the story takes place on an island near Costa Rica, the filmmakers originally considered filming in Costa Rica. This idea was quickly abandoned when they realized that the Costa Rican government would not allow them to build roads to get to their filming locations.

There were two animatronic Tyrannosaurus built for filming. One was the full-body version, the other only consisted of a head and was used for closeups.

The Franchi SPAS-12 shotguns used by Robert Muldoon and Alan Grant in the film have the first generation stock option. The first generation shotgun stock was designed so that a spring loaded stud mounted on the interior of the stock locked into the rear sight. By pulling this stud rearward it clears the sight and the stock can be unfolded. Muldoon can clearly be seen depressing this stud when he is hunting the Velociraptors moments before his famous "clever girl" last words.

When getting an update on a storm, Hammond says "Why didn't I build in Orlando?" The distributor, Universal Studios, has two theme parks there. One of them, Islands of Adventure has a Jurassic Park ride.

Sandra Bullock, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julianne Moore, Helen Hunt, Teri Hatcher, Elizabeth Hurley and Sherilyn Fenn tested for the role of Ellie Sattler.

When Nedry is stealing the dinosaur embryos there is one labeled a Brontosaurus. Brontosaurus was not a real dinosaur but one named by a paleontologist that had the wrong skull on his specimen. The correct skull for the animal was found by a different scientist and it was then called the Apotasaurus.

The film opened on Friday, June 11, 1993, and broke box office records its first weekend, with $47 million. It eventually went on to make more than $900 million worldwide. David Koepp remembers the day it opened: "I was in New York and I walked to the Ziegfeld [Theatre] to see how it was doing. The guy comes out and announces to the big line, 'Ladies and gentlemen, the 7 o'clock show of Jurassic Park is sold out.' And people go, 'Oooh.' And he goes, 'Also the 10 o'clock show is sold out.' And they went, 'Ooooooh.' 'And also Saturday night's 7 and 10 o'clock shows are also sold out.' And I was like, 'I'm not an expert, but I think this is very good.'"

Gerald R. Molen:  film's producer played Dr. Gerry Harding, the character who was out on the field with the sick triceratops.

Steven Spielberg:  [music] 

Steven Spielberg:  [father]  Grant hates the idea of being a father.

The ending where the T-Rex saves the day was added when Steven Spielberg decided that it was the hero of the film.

In the original script, Gennaro and Malcolm were combined into one character, and Muldoon survived in the end. In the original book, Gennaro and Muldoon both survived, and Hammond and Malcolm died (though Malcolm returned in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, explaining that "doctors did excellent work").

In the original novel, John Hammond is killed by a small dinosaur called a Procompsognathid, a species which does not appear in this film. However, this death scene was resurrected and reworked for the sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park.