The American President

Before the movie started shooting, Michael J. Fox was still keeping his Parkinson's disease a secret. He felt he would lose the role if Rob Reiner found out. During a basic and routine fitness screening, Fox was terrified that clinicians would detect the periodic shaking in his left hand and eventually connect it to Parkinson's. Fortunately for Fox, he took his medication in time to quell the shaking and the test amounted to nothing more than checking heart rate and blood pressure.

After the President's big speech at the end of the movie, staff members are walking quickly back to re-write the State of the Union address. After Leon says "Well, you don't see that every day," Louis says "Yeah - he's got the members of the press corps asking each other how to spell 'erudite.'" Although the president never uses the word 'erudite' in his speech, erudite is an apt description of his demeanor during the speech. This was a reference to his demeanor, not a reference to something he said.

Company logos change between versions. For example, on the laserdisc, the movie starts with a 20-second silent Columbia logo (before the Castle Rock logo), and the end credits crawl includes (after the title of the movie has gone onscreen) a line-art logo "Released by Columbia Pictures/A Sony Pictures Entertainment company" that crawls up and stops, over the end of the music. On the international prints, the 1990-1997 Universal logo was played and it was also silent. The 1999 WB DVD skips the opening logo, starting with the Castle Rock logo instead, and where the Columbia logo at the end should appear as the music ends, a still clouds-and-shield WB logo appears instead (Distributed by WB/A Warner Communications Company). The Columbia versions are probably truer to the original theatrical release. See also The Shawshank Redemption.

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