It’s hard to believe that Real Genius will turn 40 in August of this year. The 1985 Martha Coolidge-directed college comedy classic starring Val Kilmer in just his second movie (and still one of Kilmer’s best roles) wasn’t a huge box office hit, and it’s often forgotten about these days, but it became a staple of cable TV in the mid-’80s. A generation of kids raised on HBO and Cinemax has made it a beloved cult classic.
The movie follows the hijinks of a group of “nerds” at a fictional university (based loosely on Cal Tech) as they build a skating rink in the dorm, mess with the bully Kent (Robert Prescott), chase the mysterious Hollyfeld (played by The White Lotus cast member Jon Gries) down into the steam tunnels, and, in the grand finale, destroy their professor’s house by redirecting a military laser into his entryway and pop a giant vat of popcorn. The popcorn literally pushes through the windows and ultimately knocks down the walls as it expands. It’s an incredible scene, and I still love to rewatch it all these years later. What I never knew until I wondered about it recently was how the stunt was pulled off in an age before CGI. Well, now I know.
Yes, The Popcorn Was Real
According to the great William Atherton, who played the hated Professor Jerry Hathaway (and was literally everywhere in the 1980s), the crew was literally popping the corn for months during production. In an interview with AV Club in 2010, he revealed,
They popped the popcorn for three months. There was a machine in the studio that did nothing all day long but pop popcorn.
But that wasn’t all. Having a massive amount of popcorn flowing out into the street of the neighborhood where the set was built would be a problem for wildlife, especially as it was chemically treated to keep it from catching fire. Atherton explains,
Then they had to worry, because they had to be careful that the birds didn’t eat it, because the popcorn had to be treated so it wouldn’t combust. So there was fire retardant on it, so you didn’t want the birds to die or get high or something.
Because they had to use practical effects, they made the scene and spectacle really come alive. The mountains of popcorn flowing out of the house is an unforgettable moment and a brilliant, hilarious ending for the movie. Atherton explained just how much went into the stunt,
It was real old-fashioned stuff. Now they’d do it digitally, I guess, but in those days, you had to pop the dang popcorn and put it in a truck and schlep it out to the valley.
The Laser Effect Isn’t Possible
When I went to rewatch the scene recently, I was reminded of an old episode of Mythbusters when they tackled the question of whether it was possible to pop popcorn using a laser and just how much and how fast it could be done. While they proved that a laser could heat a kernel up enough to pop, the rapidly expanding popcorn didn’t have enough force to break through windows or walls, as seen in the movie. Plus, there isn’t a laser large enough to pop that much corn that quickly.
In the end, though, it doesn’t matter to me; the scene stands on its own as one of the best finales to any ‘80s comedy, ever. Right up there with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters and the one-ski ski race at the end of Better Off Dead. Real Genius is a true classic, and they just don’t make movies like it anymore.