“How’s this for a mark?”: the tear-jerking Oscar winner plagued by cinema’s pettiest farts
It should hopefully go without saying that Oscar-winning movies don’t tend to be associated with a rampant case of farting, which is more attuned to gross-out comedy and lowbrow schlock. However, so much gas was passed during the production of a tear-jerking classic that two of its most celebrated stars were almost at each other’s throats.
The film is widely regarded as one of the most emotionally destructive and heart-wrenching tales ever told on the silver screen and a masterclass in how to ride a wave of critical acclaim and audience adulation all the way to awards season glory. And yet, when the cameras weren’t rolling, farts were being deployed in a matter not unlike a wild animal marking its territory.
The winner of Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, ‘Best Actress’, and ‘Best Supporting Actor’, James L Brooks’ Terms of Endearment put viewers through the wringer as it chronicled a turbulent three decades in the relationship between Shirley MacLaine’s Aurora Greenway and Debra Winger’s Emma Greenway-Horton.
It’s a movie that doesn’t so much tug at the heartstrings as reach right into the chest cavity and ruthlessly yank them out, with cinema workers probably having to get out the mops to clean up the tears after every screening, especially when Terms of Endearment soared past $165million at the global box office, emotionally eviscerating ticket-buying patrons the world over.
MacLaine and Winger were in imperious form as the mother-daughter duo driving the narrative forward, but they didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye during their downtime. The former was an established and decorated veteran, and the latter was one of Hollywood’s fastest-growing new talents, who quickly devolved into outright pettiness.
Things reached a head quite literally after emanating from an arse, with MacLaine revealing in her autobiography that when she demanded Winger hit her marks on set, her younger co-star responded by blasting a wave of hot air from her rear end directly into her visage.
“‘I heard you’, I said. ‘I know marks when I see them,'” MacLaine wrote. “‘Good’, she said. ‘How’s this for a mark?’ She turned around, walked away from me, lifted her skirt slightly, looked over her shoulder, bent over, and farted in my face.”
Plenty of sets have been plagued by dissent between two principal cast members, but one farting in another’s face is a different kind of unprofessional. Having successfully crop-dusted the immediate vicinity, Winger walked away to leave MacLaine shocked and indignant that she’d become the victim of an assault that wasn’t quite silent but deadly but bad enough to drive an even bigger wedge between them.
Both of them were in the running for ‘Best Actress’ at the Oscars for their work in Terms of Endearment, but when MacLaine’s name was read out, and she took to the stage and told the world she deserved it, it would have been Winger left feeling as though she was the one being farted on.
