There are Christmas movies, and then there are must-watch-every-year Christmas movies. For me, Home Alone is the latter, as is the sequel, which is how I found myself watching the 1990 Christmas movie recently. I can never notice enough details or learn enough about what went into the making of Home Alone, which is why I loved stumbling upon some comments Daniel Stern made about how they filmed certain hilarious scenes.
Marv really goes through it in the final act of Home Alone. And once I was old enough to appreciate the weight of adult responsibilities, the more I came to feel he deserved the karma that befell him courtesy of Kevin McCallister. I just think about what the Murphys and other victims of Marv's "wet bandit" drain-clogging shenanigans had to come home to and it's hard for me to feel bad for Marv by the end of the movie. But Daniel Stern's an actor who isn't flooding people's homes, so I do feel for what he literally faced during the filming of Home Alone, which apparently included a camera falling straight at him.
"The Making of Home Alone" featurette that comes with the digital purchase of the movie on iTunes is from years ago, but it has some great tidbits about how the movie was made. Included is Daniel Stern talking about the scene where the iron falls down the laundry chute and hits Marv in the face. I never really thought about how they got that shot, but from the way Stern describes it, it sounds like it would've been legitimately scary:
The iron, the way we shot that was interesting, because the way they did that -- obviously they shoot up, and they have an iron dropping towards the camera, but when they wanna film down looking at me, they built a rig where they put the camera on a rope and they dropped the camera at me. And the rope was supposed to POING you know, stop like right there, and I'm supposed to be looking at this 300 pound camera dropping at my face. Ok... I hope we know what we're doing
Unlike some scenes that might require the use of stunt people to literally take the fall for the actors in a scene, the iron drop works so well because we see the look on Marv's face right before it hits him. And it's a moving shot, which gives us the vantage point of the iron for a few seconds before we actually see it hit his face. So I can understand why they filmed it that way. But I can also easily understand Stern's apprehension as he stared up at a very heavy piece of filming equipment falling straight toward him.
Shooting this scene is also referenced in the Movies That Made Us "Home Alone" episode on Netflix, and though it doesn't get into Stern's specific experiences with the scene, cinematographer Julio Macat does note that this was one of the shots where they used what he referred to as the "bonus cam" to capture. From his explanation in the episode, the bonus cam was a camera they used to get additional footage of some of the stunts throughout filming, and it sounds like it really paid off.
Given just how funny so many of these stunts were on screen, my appreciation for what went into making the movie only grows with every tidbit I learn about it.
Also, that iron wasn't the only scary thing Daniel Stern faced while filming the movie. In the same Making Of featurette, he also talks about how they had to use a real tarantula during the scene near the attic stairs. Yikes!
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