Movie Moments
Kieron Connolly

Over a century of cinema, hundreds of classic moments have entered the world’s consciousness – Marilyn Monroe’s dress billowing up as she stands over an air vent, Charlton Heston falling to his knees in front of a half-buried Statue of Liberty, a house collapsing around Buster Keaton, Butch and Sundance jumping off a cliff, Hannibal Lecter hissing, Meryl Streep doing the splits to ‘Dancing Queen’ and, yes, Meg Ryan reaching that climax.

But how did these moments come to be?

Movie Moments goes behind the making of 75 of these most popular slices of cinema and tells their stories. We know that the woman shuns the guy at the end of The Third Man, but did you know that that isn’t what Graham Greene had intended in his screenplay? Or that Hitchcock had first wanted Cary Grant to be chased by a tornado, not an aeroplane, in North by Northwest? Did you know that the dole queue scene in The Full Monty was almost cut at script stage, during production and, again, before the film was released?

In conducting new interviews with film-makers and researching film archives, Kieron Connolly reveals how cinema magic – whether it’s Battleship Potemkin or Paddington – can so often be an afterthought, an improvised line or a matter of simple expedience.