17 Thing You May Not Have Known About THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER

We LOVE the HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. It has espionage, submarines and Sean Connery. Can you ask for anything more. We love lists... as you know. We love to collect knowledge. So here is a little knowledge we collected from IMDB.com. Here are 17 things you may not have known about THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER

• After being faxed the script, Sean Connery initially turned the role down on the basis of the plot being unrealistic for the post-Cold War era. Whoever sent the fax neglected to include the foreword explaining the movie as historical; once he received the foreword, Connery accepted the role.
  
  
• Kevin Costner was originally cast as Jack Ryan.
  
  
• $20,000 was spent on Sean Connery's hairpiece.
  
  
• During filming, several of the actors portraying USS Dallas crewmen took a cruise on a real submarine. To train for his role as the Dallas' commander, Scott Glenn was installed as the "commander" of the real sub and gave orders to the crewmen as the real captain would.
  
  
• The crew of the U.S.S. Dallas adopted the tagline "The Hunt Is On" as an unofficial ship's motto.
  
  
• The dual-beeping sound effect of the Red October moving on the USS Dallas' sonar screen was also used in Patriot Games (1992) as the sound of Jack Ryan's EKG.
  
  
• The underwater model of the Red October has never been in the water. This effect was achieved using smoke on the 'underwater' set and a few digital touch-ups. The sub was hung by 12 wires from an overhead grid which gave the ability to tilt and turn the model as needed.
  
  
• For the purposes of filming the underwater model of the Red October, only the left side of the sub was detailed to appear as an authentic submarine. The effect of showing the right side of the boat was achieved by simply turning the frame and reversing the image.
  
  
• Most of Gates McFadden's role as Cathy Ryan was deleted from the final print.
  
  
• Due to his obligation to this film, director John McTiernan had to pass up the opportunity to direct Die Hard 2 (1990), the sequel to his big hit Die Hard (1988).
  
  
• The Hunt for Red October (1990) was released in March 1990, just as Major League Baseball was entering spring training. Lou Pinella and the rest of the Cincinnati Reds used this movie all season for motivation and swept the Oakland A's in the World Series that October
  
  
• It is a manly film: Gates McFadden with Louise Borras (as Jack Ryan's wife and daughter) and Denise E. James as a flight attendant have the only credited female speaking roles, and all of their dialog scenes are over before the end of the opening credits. There is an uncredited female engineer speaking in the background at Skip Tyler's dry dock and another (non-speaking) flight attendant appears at the end, but apart from that there are no other women in the film.
  
  
• The name of the frigate that rescues the Red October's crew, the Reuben James, is from another of Tom Clancy's novels, ‘Red Storm Rising’.
  
  
• The body count of this movie is debatable because of the sinking of the V. K. Konovalov - the Alpha class submarine was intended to be operated by a crew of only 16-18 officers but in actual deployment would mostly have some 23-24 officers, as well as 4 petty officers and a cook on board. Apart from the crewmen of the Konovalov, the count is five: - Victor Putin, the political officer, the pilot and navigator of the F-14 crashing onto the Enterprise, Red October XO Vasilij Borodin, and cooks assistant/saboteur Loginov
  
  
• Navy recruiters set up booths in some theater lobbies for people to sign up to join the service, or to at least look into it.
  
  
• Jack Ryan mentions that he wrote a book about Adm. William F. Halsey. This is appropriate, as Ryan is also a professor of military history at the U.S. Naval Academy, as shown in Patriot Games (1992).
  
  
• Alec Baldwin accepted the role of Jack Ryan because Harrison Ford turned it down. Cast member Sam Neill also benefited from Ford's refusal three years later, by being cast in the lead role of Jurassic Park (1993).