The Fart That Almost Ruined Weird Science

There’s a lot of madcap stuff going down in the climactic party scene of John Hughes’ classic sci-fi comedy Weird Science, as nerdy teen Frankensteins Gary (Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) finally pay the price of their hubris after creating a beautiful, wish-granting woman (Kelly LeBrock) using their computer.

Wyatt’s grandparents arrive and get frozen in time, a gang of mutant bikers crashes the festivities, and their would-be girlfriends get taken hostage, but the party truly takes a wild turn when Gary and Wyatt attempt to produce another woman to impress their bullies, Max and Ian.

Unfortunately, after once again strapping bras to their heads (hey, it worked the first time), they miss one key step in their experiment: they forget to hook a doll up to their electrodes. Now resting on a magazine featuring a Pershing II medium-range ballistic missile, the electrodes conjure up a real-life nuclear missile, which smashes through their house from the bottom floor all the way to the roof.

The Weird Science house set was built over a couple of floors at Universal, and could separate into two parts. It had taken a lot of time and effort to create. There was no coming back from destroying it when they finally filmed the expensive missile sequence. So, you can imagine the panic behind the scenes when the whole thing was almost ruined by a fart.

Robert Rusler, who played one half of bully duo Max and Ian alongside Robert Downey Jr. in the film, has revealed the chaos that ensued when someone decided to squeeze cheese during such a pivotal moment, ruining everyone’s concentration and performance.

“This actual shell of a rocket was built under Stage 26 at Universal to come up hydraulically and pierce the actual floor of the set of the house, and it was a one-time shot,” he said during an interview for the CreatorVC documentary, In Search of Tomorrow. “Big deal, this scene! Right when John calls ‘Action!’, Anthony Michael Hall farts a silent-but-deadly. It had to be a several hundred thousand dollar moment that got ruined by a fart.”

With no money or time to redo the shot, director Hughes and the rest of the team had to work fast and smart to come up with a solution, and finally figured out a way to mitigate Hall’s devastating air biscuit by doing everything in reverse. “If you watch the movie real closely, we did the scene again, and they lowered the rocket, and we had to do all of our action backwards, and then they ran it backwards for the final cut.”

Having saved the day, it was almost time to move on from the whirlwind production. Hughes had to finish The Breakfast Club, and on the last day of filming, Rusler also had to try out for the role of Ron Grady in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Luckily, Downey Jr. agreed to drive him to the audition and he got the part.

The pair created their own brand of chaos of during production on Weird Science, regularly joking that they were shitting in other people’s trailers. Downey Jr. admitted to Howard Stern in 2014 that he did in fact shit on a chair in an actress’ trailer in an effort to prove how outrageous he was. Weird Science producer Joel Silver had lined everyone up on set and demanded to know who did it. Downey Jr. denied it at the time, with the truth only emerging after he’d mended his ways.