Where to watch Men in Black (1997)

Trivia & production notes

• Barry Sonnenfeld was initially unavailable to direct because he was attached to Get Shorty, leading producers to approach Les Mayfield and later ask John Landis and Quentin Tarantino before Sonnenfeld became available for the project.
• Sonnenfeld relocated the story from underground settings spanning Kansas, Washington D.C., and Nevada to New York City, drawn to how New Yorkers would accept oddly-behaving aliens and how the city's architecture resembled spacecraft.
• A ventilation structure for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel served as the exterior of the MIB headquarters.
• An alien chase scene was moved from Lincoln Center to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum after the New York Philharmonic demanded payment for using their building.
• Five months into shooting, Sonnenfeld scrapped the original ending featuring a philosophical debate between Agent J and the Bug, replacing it with an action sequence that cost an additional $4.5 million.
• The final Bug was rendered as computer-generated imagery resembling a cockroach instead of using Rick Baker's animatronic design.
• The Baltians were removed from the final film during post-production in the last two weeks by altering subtitles, computer imagery, and dialogue, though they remain in the novelization.
• Rick Baker described Men in Black as the most complex production of his career, requiring more design sketches than all his previous films combined.
• Danny Elfman was hired to compose the score after Vincent D'Onofrio invited him to the set to watch a scene being filmed, with the job offer coming via his agent on the drive home.
• Elfman received a nomination for Best Original Musical or Comedy Score at the 70th Academy Awards but lost to The Full Monty.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Men in Black (1997 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.