Production
During the opening sequence, Bart originally wrote "butt.com" on the chalkboard, however, it was modified to butt.butt, due to butt.com being a real website. The storyline of famous celebrities moving to Springfield was pitched by Mike Scully; Scully originally pitched Bruce Springsteen as the celebrity to move to town, however, Springsteen turned down the opportunity to appear. Richard Appel then offered the guest appearance opportunity to Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, but they too turned down the offer. Appel then offered Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger the opportunity to provide their voices, and they agreed to guest star in the episode. The episode was originally intended to be directed by Mike B. Anderson, but it was held over from season 9 and Pete Michels directed it.
In a 2008 interview, Ron Howard commented that guest voicing himself "was an honor. Probably, from my kids' perspective, my coolest turn." Howard once again guest starred on The Simpsons as himself in the season eleven episode "Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder" (1999). The author of the 2003 book Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon… and Beyond, Beverly Gray, noted that by playing himself in these episodes, "Howard showed once again that he could laugh at his own public persona. His appearances on The Simpsons also suggest how much he remains an American icon, long after the end of his acting career. It's rare indeed for a director or producer to be as instantly recognizable as most Hollywood stars."
Read more about this topic: When You Dish Upon A Star
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“It is part of the educator’s responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas. The new facts and new ideas thus obtained become the ground for further experiences in which new problems are presented.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)