Trivia for
Wonder Boys (2000) More at IMDbPro »

• The exterior of the sports shop is actually a local bowling alley; the same bowling alley that appears in the beginning of the film Kingpin (1996).
  
  
• The first sentence of the manuscript that Grady Tripp pulls from James Lear's knapsack in the auditorium is actually the opening of the novel "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" by Michael Chabon.
  
  
• James Ellroy, author of the novel L.A. Confidential (1997) ('Hanson, Curtis''s previous film), is an extra at the party in the home of the head of the English Department.
  
  
• Filmed in sequence.
  
  
• Many of the film's scenes were filmed at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
  
  
• The combination to the locked closet with the Monroe jacket is 5641. 56 games is the record number of consecutive games that 'Joe Dimaggio' recorded a hit and 41 is the year in which he accomplished it.
  
  
• James Leer's description of heaven as a greenhouse is a reference to the houses in Zardoz (1974), which features a Utopian society who wore white and lived in crystal houses.
  
  
• When Grady returns to his house to find Terry (Robert Downey Jr.) throwing a party, the song playing as he enters the house is "Waiting for the Miracle," by 'Leonard Cohen'. This same song plays over the opening credits of Natural Born Killers (1994), also starring Downey.
  
  
• At the party, James talks about the actors George Sanders's suicide. Later, George Sanders is on the television in a scene for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945).
  
  
• Books on James Leer's desk include Albert Camus's "The Plague", Truman Capote's "Answered Prayers", and Kenneth Anger's infamous "Hollywood Babylon".
  
  
• All key scenes feature a bridge in the background, either one of the bridges of Pittsburgh, or on a painting.
  
  
• The list of famous suicides is taken name-for-name from a list in Kenneth Anger's "Hollywood Babylon II", including the notorious Alan Ladd reference.
  
  
• When James names some of the movie suicides, he mentions Carole Landis taking pills, only he forgot when. Carole Landis took her own life on 5 July 1948 in the Pacific Palisades in California.
  
  
• James mentions his parents live in the town of Carvel. Carvel is the name of the fictional town where Andy Hardy and his family lived in the series of Andy Hardy films from the 1930s and 1940s.
  
  
• In between shots at the house in Beaver, PA, Michael Douglas could be seen hitting golf balls into the Ohio River.
  
  
• In the theatrical version James Leer included Alan Ladd's death in his list of celebrity suicides. After complaints from Ladd's family, Paramount removed the offending line in all future releases of the film, including home video. VHS and DVD releases carry a disclaimer, shown before the feature, warning that the film has been edited for content.
  
  
• The film was originally released in February of 2000 to almost universal praise (especially for the performance of Michael Douglas) but with very little fanfare. Paramount, the film's distributor, decided to re-release the film that November with a different marketing campaign that highlighted its strong supporting cast, and hopes that it would garner some Oscar nominations, despite Paramount Vice Chairman Rob Friedman's acknowledgment that no studio had ever successfully re-released a picture that initially flopped.
  
  
• Bearing in mind the film's interest in Marilyn Monroe, the character of Miss Antonia Sloviak - a tuba-playing transvestite - may be a nod to Monroe's film Some Like It Hot (1959), in which two men disguise themselves as women and pose as members of an all-female band. (One of the men was played by Tony Curtis, which may have been the inspiration for Antonia's real name Tony.)
  
  
• This is the first time that Tobey Maguire and Robert Downey Jr work on film and both of them would later play as the lead Marvel superheros in Spider-Man (2002) and Iron Man (2008).
  
  
• The term 'Wonder Boys', a derivative of the German 'wunderkind', refers to someone who has greatly succeeded in their profession or art at an early age.
  
  

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