A HINDSIGHT LOOK AT OUTTAKES

Things we did double takes on:

Don Johnson on every cover--even New Age: “Making Sobriety Sexy.”

A KTTV Channel 5 ad for “The Fly”--followed by a pesticide commercial.

Name (registered with the Department of Agriculture) for a tough new strain of wheat: Rambo.

Tom Cruise’s smile count in “Top Gun”: 38 grins, 49 outright, pearly-white smiles.

Most pungent analogy: Daily Variety’s Jim Harwood’s surmise of “Hamburger: The Motion Picture”: “To judge ‘Hamburger’ fairly requires certain relative standards of the filmgoing experience. If, for example, the theater were captured by terrorists and a member of the audience killed every 20 minutes for eight days, that would be a bad filmgoing experience. Without the terrorists, ‘Hamburger’ is merely a poor filmgoing experience.”

Cost of colorizing “Night of the Living Dead”: $250,000. Cost of the original 1968 cult classic: $114,000.

Addendum sections at the end of Mark Bego’s “Cher!” bio: “Discography” . . . “Filmography” . . . “Boyfriendography.”

Things people said that required double takes:

Mamie Van Doren on Mamie Van Doren: “I’d like to play something more natural. I wouldn’t even mind taking my makeup off and doing the kind of roles Jessica Lange does. . . . It would be easy for me.”

Steven Spielberg on what attracted him to Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple”: “. . . the reason I read it is because it’s thin.”

Katt Shea Ruben on her “Psycho III” death scene: “I wasn’t allowed to choke, just gurgle a little. Being dead is a real challenge.”

A South African Broadcasting rep on why “Cosby” airs in the land of apartheid: “(Because of its high economic and social standing), the Cosby family would not be regarded here as a black American family.”

Exec producer of the (short-lived) CBS series “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”: “It’ll be just like the movie, except it makes no reference to sex or drugs.”

A startled Edward Vaughan, producer of the NBC series “Stingray,” when asked about the, uh, missing body parts of the Vitruvian man (which, uh, flashed by in the credit sequence): “You’re right--it’s not there!”

A Warner Bros. publicist on why trailers for “Under the Cherry Moon” were attached to prints of “Cobra”: “ ‘Cobra’ plays to young males and females, the same group Prince appeals to. It couldn’t be a better pairing.”

But . . . a California film exhibitor thought otherwise: “You’ve got macho beer-drinking Sly (Stallone) fans who see Prince wearing his flamenco-dancer outfit and they want to tear down the screen.”

Some of our headlines said it all:

On scene-stealer Mike the Dog:

PUP PONDERS MULTI-PIC PAC . . .

MARVY MUTT MAKES MAX MEDIA BLITZ . . .

IT’S GRAVY TRAIN FOR MIKE . . .

MIKE THE DOG--NABBING NIFTY NOTICES

Reviews of “The Money Pit”:

THE PITS On the Norwegian locales used in “Revolution”:

HAVE YOU SPOTTED A FIORD LATELY?

Reviews of “Howard the Duck”

DUCK DROPPINGS