13 Movies That Only Exist Because Of Brazen Acts Of Subterfuge

Getting on the wrong side of Disney is notoriously dangerous, but that didn’t deter director Randy Moore when he set out to make his debut feature. Escape from Tomorrow is not only a sickening takedown of the company but a movie that was illicitly filmed at DisneyWorld and Disneyland. The story centers on a father (played by Roy Abramsohn) who learns that he’s lost his job right before he goes to the theme park with his wife and kids. The crowds, rides, and costumed employees become a surreal and menacing spectacle that spurs an existential crisis. Plagued by hallucinations and an increasingly irate spouse, he stumbles upon a conspiracy at the heart of the Disney corporation that upends his understanding of the company and its motives. Moore and his crew snuck into the parks under the guise of tourists and filmed on DSLR cameras. Disney iconography features heavily, and not in a good way. Costume-wearing employees turn out to be anything but child-friendly, and the rides are instruments of murder. There’s even a jab at one of the park’s most prominent financial backers, Siemens. Long before shooting began, Moore was aware that copyright issues might keep the film from ever being seen, but told Abramsohn that he would drive around in a van projecting it on walls if he had to. To his surprise, it got into the Sundance Film Festival and became a hot ticket when attendees learned it might never get released. The film’s producers decided to screen it for the press before showing it to potential distributors, hoping that media attention might prevent the company from blocking it, and their strategy paid off. A Columbia University law professor penned an article in The New Yorker explaining why it fell under fair use laws, and a preeminent entertainment lawyer helped lead the movie to its legally secure release. Under the concept of fair use, copyrighted material can be used without permission if it is substantially altered, such as through parody. Escape from Tomorrow falls squarely within that category. Although the director reportedly lost nearly 50 pounds due to the stress of filming in secret, he would not have been able to make a movie that portrays Disney in such a grim and disturbing light unless he had done so without the company's knowledge. Without his guerilla approach to making the movie, it likely wouldn’t exist.

For a movie that launched a decade-spanning, multi-million dollar franchise, Mad Max got off to a messy start. Helmed by an emergency room doctor and featuring real-life criminals, the production was anything but ordinary, and the $200,000 budget necessitated some law-breaking shortcuts. Director George Miller conceived of Mad Max in part because of the car accident victims he saw as an ER doctor. Set in a barren near-future Australia where oil shortages and financial unrest have caused violent societal breakdown, the movie stars Mel Gibson as "Mad" Max Rockatansky, a renegade police officer who takes justice into his own hands when a motorcycle gang murders his family. The production was almost as anarchic as the world it depicted. Miller used real members of the Hell’s Angels and another biker gang called the Vigilantes to play Max’s enemies in some sequences. Art director Jon Dowding stole props from a local store to use in one scene. And they closed roads without permission so they could shoot the crash sequences. According to Miller, they had help from off-duty police officers who had grown interested in the film and wanted to be part of the production, but they never went through the proper permitting process because there was no legal way to do it. “No one had made these kind of movies at the time,” he remembered. “So there was no one to go to really get a permit.” Much of the success of the movie and the franchise it spawned can be attributed to Miller’s dedication to heart-stopping action sequences despite a limited budget. Since there was so little oversight, the director and his crew could go all-in on stunt work, which resulted in at least one world record when stuntman Gerry Gauslaa rode a four-cylinder bike more than 28 meters and jumped off it in mid-air. When Mad Max was released in 1979, it made close to $100 million worldwide. Until The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999, it held the Guinness World Record for the most profitable movie of all time. Miller would go on to direct high-budget movies, but even when he had $150 million for Mad Max: Fury Road, he used minimal CGI, opting for the real-life action set-pieces that made his first film so successful.

First-time filmmakers invest a lot of themselves in their debut features, but Cameron Crowe showed extreme dedication for his first movie, the cult stoner classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High. In 1979, Crowe was a writer for Rolling Stone who wanted to write a book about high school. Realizing he’d lost touch with the subject matter in the seven years since he graduated, Crowe decided to go back. Under the pseudonym Dave Cameron, he passed himself off as a senior at a high school in California for an entire year (with the permission of the principal). There, he insinuated himself into various social circles and came away with all the intel he needed to write a comedic story about casual drug use, non-committal relationships, and the highs and lows of first-time car ownership. Crowe says that the experience was invaluable. “I thought these kids were a lot smarter than they were being given credit for,” he said, “They're anonymous Joes who are not unwed mothers or angel dust cases; they're just average kids slugging through life. When I saw the inner trauma in these kids' lives, I started getting excited.” His undercover operation led to a book that he repurposed into a screenplay for a hit film. Directed by Amy Heckerling, Fast Times at Ridgemont High follows a year in the lives of an assortment of high school students, from a 15-year-old trying to lose her virginity to a guy trying to dump his girlfriend so he can make the most of senior year. Its cast is a who’s-who of future Hollywood stars, with debut appearances from future Oscar winners Nicolas Cage and Forest Whitaker, and a starring role for a baby-faced Jennifer Jason Leigh. There's also Sean Penn as the high-as-a-kite surfer bro Jeff Spicoli, whose run-ins with the history teacher Mr. Hand rival Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for most memorable cinematic depictions of high school academia. The movie made more than six times its $4.5 million budget at the box office, but the success of its theatrical run was nothing compared to the legacy it developed in the ensuing years. Thanks to Crowe’s first-person perspective, Fast Times at Ridgemont High broke through the noise of nostalgic recreations of high school shown in other ‘70s and early ’80s movies like American Graffiti and Fame. By embracing boredom and indifference alongside drama and heartbreak, it got to the heart of the teenage experience and became “one of the most influential high-school movies ever made.”

F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent movie Nosferatu is one of the most influential horror movies ever made and a pioneer of German Expressionism, but it was almost destroyed before its legacy began. Producer Albin Grau wanted to make a movie based on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, but the author’s widow refused him the rights to the story. He decided to do it anyway, changing names and locations, most notably replacing Count Dracula with Count Orlok. Played by Max Schrek, the Count is a hideous monster. Fangs jut from the front of his mouth like rodent teeth, his nails are gnarled and bestial, and his bare skull, which seems abnormally large, is emphasized with pointed ears and a chalk-white cast. Names and physical characteristics aside, the movie adheres closely to Stoker’s novel. Grau’s production company admitted as much in its program for the movie’s German premiere, saying it was “freely adapted” from Dracula. This revelation did not go down well with Stoker’s widow and nearly cost the movie its continued existence. Florence Stoker had inherited the rights to Dracula upon her husband’s death and was living almost solely off its profits. When she discovered the story had been blatantly (and admittedly) plagiarized, she brought a lawsuit against Grau. After years of legal fights, she won the rights to the film and $5,000 in damages, but was stymied by appeals and burgeoning legal fees. She finally gave up on the financial incentive and requested instead that every last copy of the film be burned. The judge hearing the case seemed to think this was a reasonable compromise, and the systematic destruction of a cinematic masterpiece began. Luckily for future filmmakers and audiences, a few copies survived. Florence Stoker eventually got the money she was hoping for by selling the rights to Universal Pictures, but although Bela Lugosi’s seductive Count Dracula became the basis for future cinematic vampires, Schreck’s brutish Count Orlok endures. According to one critic writing nearly a century after the film’s release, “There is scarcely a horror film that exists that doesn’t seem impacted by Nosferatu in some way.” It may have been the result of a brazen breach of copyright law, but the movie has more than made up for its illicit origins.

The illegal ivory trade is a lucrative industry with deep ties to corrupt government officials and law enforcement in Africa and Asia. To get below the surface and expose the extent to which elephants are being killed for their valuable tusks, filmmakers Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani decided to go undercover. Their 2016 documentary, The Ivory Game, was filmed over 16 months and chronicles the efforts of a handful of journalists, anti-poaching enforcers, and conservationists to uncover the vast criminal network that traffics ivory from Africa to China. Davidson and Ladkani knew the risks. The mafia and global crime syndicates are involved in the trade, and have assassinated people who stood up to them. “It wasn’t as easy as just saying, ‘Let’s do this,’” Ladkani said, “It was a super dangerous thing [...] We asked ourselves, ‘Do we really want to get involved in this?’ But after quite a few discussions, the decision was ‘Yes.’” The precarious situations they faced included a midnight raid on a compound in Tanzania thought to be sheltering a notorious poacher nicknamed “The Devil” who was responsible for the killing of at least 10,000 elephants. They also captured incriminating audio from an illegal ivory shop via a camera the size of a button, and interviewed members of an anti-poaching task force in Tanzania that had been secret up to that point. Their risky approach led to footage that was impressive enough to attract the interest of Leonardo DiCaprio, who signed on as executive producer after seeing an early cut of the film.

Terry Gilliam’s 1985 sci-fi drama Brazil is set in a dystopian future where daily life is bogged down by bureaucracy and surveillance. Despite the overwhelming pressure to conform, one man (played by Jonathan Pryce) tries to buck the system and gain some semblance of individuality. Life imitated art when the director found himself in a battle with Universal Studios over the US release of the film. Even though it had already been distributed in Europe through 20th Century Fox, Universal wanted a shorter version with a more predictable ending. Gilliam wouldn’t budge. “Listen, Sid,” he reportedly told Sidney Sheinberg, the head of the studio’s parent company. “The film we made is the film we all agreed to make. If you want to make another film, you have my support. Just put your name on it.” This line of reasoning did not go over well, and Gilliam decided to break the ensuing stalemate with drastic (and illegal) measures. His first line of attack was to go public, telling any journalist who would listen that the studio was burying his movie. He even took out an ad in Variety that asked Sheinberg when he was going to release it. Both these actions violated an unusual gag order in his contract with the studio that forbade him from speaking critically about their business dealings. But he went further, showing the movie in clandestine screenings that violated Universal’s right to sole distribution. He and his producer even considered renting theaters in Mexico and busing Americans across the border. Fortunately for Gilliam, the covert screenings hosted by unnamed supporters and attended by movie critics turned the tide. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association named Brazil the best picture of the year, and the equivalent organizations in New York, Washington, Boston, and Chicago followed suit. Universal relented, and the movie was finally released. It earned two Oscar nominations, won two BAFTAs, and is frequently listed as one of the best sci-fi movies of all time. Without Gilliam’s decision to break his contract, the movie he envisioned may never have been released in the US.

Director Jafar Panahi’s 2011 movie This Is Not a Film was, by its very existence, illegal. A year before, the Iranian director was sentenced to six years in prison for crimes against national security due to his support of pro-democracy protests. On top of his sentence, the internationally renowned director, whose movies The White Balloon, Offside, and Crimson Gold won major awards at festivals like Cannes and Venice, was banned from making movies for 20 years and forbidden from leaving the country. During a period of house arrest while he awaited the outcome of his appeal, he and fellow filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahasebi defied the ban by making a movie over the course of 10 days in his Tehran apartment. This Is Not a Film follows a day in Panahi’s life as he maps out scenes from movies he plans to make, feeds his daughter’s dog-sized iguana, and chats with neighbors. The act of filming was brazen, but his strategy for getting the movie out of Iran and onto international screens was the stuff of Hollywood thrillers. Mirtahasebi traveled to Cannes to present the film as its nominal director. To avoid detection, the movie was delivered separately on a USB drive hidden in a cake mailed from Tehran to Paris, and its premiere was announced at the last minute. During press conferences at the festival, Mirtahasebi had to choose his words carefully to ensure his safe return to Iran, even declining to divulge the type of cake that was used to smuggle the flash drive. Panahi, meanwhile, watched the screening of his film via a Skype link, but was forced to remain silent. "We have decided to take the risks of what we're doing,” Mirtahasebi said, “Step by step, we are trying to fight. This has a price. But we wanted to use that energy that is not being used in filmmaking. We didn't want to give up." Panahi went on to direct more films, including Taxi in 2015 and 3 Faces in 2018, the latter of which won the award for best screenplay at Cannes. In 2022, he was ordered to serve the six-year prison sentence that had been handed down in 2010.

Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 sci-fi movie Under the Skin stars Scarlett Johansson as an extraterrestrial creature in a woman’s body who roams the streets of Glasgow luring unsuspecting men to a horrifying end. Such an otherworldly premise doesn’t seem suited to documentary-style filmmaking, but Glazer shot much of the movie with hidden cameras using unsuspecting bystanders as subjects. As Johansson’s character drives through the streets of the city looking for prey, many of her interactions are with non-actors who didn’t know they were being filmed. The director explained that the process was necessary to create a sense of invasion. Johansson’s character is a malevolent extraterrestrial infiltrating the real world, and by filming the actress’s interactions in secret, the audience feels that they’re complicit in something underhanded. “It feels like she shouldn't be there and we shouldn't be there,” Glazer explained, “I think that all plays into the atmosphere.” To achieve complete anonymity, the film crew invented a camera the size of a matchbox. They constructed 10 of them to install in strategic locations based on where filming was taking place, such as on outdoor furniture or above storefronts, and even behind shop windows. Eight cameras were built into the van that Johansson’s character drives. Glazer sat in the back with members of the sound and camera crew while another van followed close behind. After they finished filming an interaction, production assistants emerged from the second van to get consent forms from the people they had just filmed. According to the director, nearly everyone allowed them to use the footage except for a couple who happened to be breaking up while they were being filmed. Glazer and his team captured 16 hours of footage per day, which contributed to the torturous two-year editing process that ensued. When the movie was finally released, however, it was hailed as a “chilling masterpiece,” with critics marveling over how the incorporation of documentary footage into a sci-fi movie “has a surprising way of evoking what it is to be human."

Silent film director Abel Gance has been called “one of the giants of the cinema,” and a visionary director who “made a fuller use of the medium than anyone before or since.” He was also an exacting and tortured craftsman who spent years and millions of dollars trying to bring his mammoth ideas to the screen. In the case of his groundbreaking anti-war movie J’Accuse, his painstaking process involved a daring attempt to make the realities of war as immediate as possible. The film follows a love triangle between two French soldiers and a woman they’re both involved with. Though much of the action takes away from the front line, Gance filmed a few key scenes on real battlefields with real soldiers. World War I was ongoing at the time Gance filmed J’Accuse. The director’s ill health prevented him from serving in combat, but he enlisted and was tasked with loading ammunition and working in a poison gas factory. When he began production of the movie in 1917, he asked to be reassigned to the film division of the army to shoot battle scenes on the front line. He joined French and American troops in the Battle of St. Mihiel and used the footage in the main war sequence of the movie. Perhaps Gance’s most provocative and powerful showcase of real-life suffering was his use of actual soldiers. During their eight-day breaks from the front, they played soldiers and, eerily, dead bodies strewn across former battlefields where many of them had already fought. “These men had come straight from the front,” Gance recalled. “They had seen it all, and now they played the dead knowing they would probably die themselves. In a few weeks or months, 80 percent of them would disappear. I knew it and so did they.” One of their appearances was for the opening credits in which an aerial shot shows soldiers forming the title of the movie, “J’accuse” (“I accuse”), an indictment of those responsible for the senseless bloodshed of “the war to end all wars.” Gance’s use of live battle footage prevented the usual cinematic pitfall of glamorizing war through careful staging, and gave those scenes in the movie a haunting documentary quality.

When director Albert Pyun’s post-apocalyptic action movie Cyborg was released in 1989, Richard Harrington from The Washington Post called it “just another martial arts film.” Though his disdain for the film was shared by fellow moviegoers, he could not have been further from the truth with his assessment that it was a run-of-the-mill action flick. The production of Cyborg was an exercise in filmmaking efficiency that turned two failed movies into two other movies, a feat that involved a secret simultaneous filming schedule that was anything but standard practice. Pyun had signed on to make two superhero movies in 1988, Spider-Man and a sequel to He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. But both projects imploded at the eleventh hour and he was left with two movies’ worth of costumes and sets. He decided to turn these into a third movie, Cyborg, a Jean-Claude van Damme vehicle about a martial artist who’s hired to escort a cyborg to Atlanta, where scientists are trying to find a cure to a world-ravaging virus. When Van Damme and the studio balked at his ultra-violent cut of the film, Pyun was ordered to do reshoots. Furious, he resolved to make the most of the situation by simultaneously filming another movie in secret - one that was more aligned with his artistic sensibilities. Deceit follows two aliens who visit Earth and find themselves in a deadly struggle with a human sex worker. Pyun filmed it the weekend after Cyborg wrapped so that he could return the equipment by Monday without the studio knowing. During the final days of the Cyborg shoot, he had his crew rig lights and sets that could be used for both movies, and later recalled that Van Damme and his producer occasionally wondered about the strange choice of rigging. “[Deceit] cost $22,000,” he told an interviewer decades later. “It was shot with only one take for each shot because I had less than 13,000 feet of film and the final film was 10,000 feet long. No margin for error and the actors were perfect.” Although it never became one of his most well-known films, Pyun said it was one of his “most perfectly realized pictures” and his “best and proudest work.”

The 2016 indie thriller Operation Avalanche retells an old conspiracy theory. Directed by Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson, it tells the story of a group of young CIA agents in 1967 who enter NASA pretending to be documentary filmmakers to identify a Soviet mole, only to discover that NASA “doesn’t have the technology” to land on the moon. The agents decide they can use the techniques of their filmmaking hero, Stanley Kubrick, to fake the moon landing and hoodwink not only the world, but the NASA scientists working on the project. It’s an absurd premise told with enough humor to avoid excessive scrutiny, but the audacity of Johnson and his crew extended beyond the content of the narrative and into their method of capturing footage. Wanting to create a convincing movie set at NASA, they lifted a page out of their own script and told the Johnson Space Center in Houston that they were students filming a documentary about the 1960s. Johnson has been careful to emphasize the legality of the subterfuge and even thanked his lawyer after the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The movie got around the thorny issues of filming under false pretenses and using copyrighted images with the legal doctrine of fair use. Under the loophole, they were allowed to include copyrighted imagery because they had transformed the source material, used it sparingly, and weren’t adversely impacting the market for the original work. “As soon as we knew the door had a crack in it we were like, 'Oh, wicked! We’re going to make the most illegal movie ever,’” Johnson said. While Operation Avalanche is driven by a peppy narrative, it’s difficult to imagine a version without its illicit footage. The movie hinges on its clever recycling of familiar images such as the moon landing and Kubrick on set, and many of its positive reviews acknowledge that the inventiveness of the filmmaking is more successful than the story.

Before the Fast and Furious franchise became a box office juggernaut, its stars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker walked out, leaving a vacuum at the center of the third movie. Starring a host of unfamiliar faces and helmed by a new director, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift follows an Alabama teen (Lucas Black) who’s banished to Tokyo after getting into a high-speed altercation with a romantic rival. There, he becomes involved with the local drifting scene and befriends one of its most respected drivers (Sung Kang). It was panned by critics when it was released in 2006 and appeared to be a death knell to the franchise, but in later years, it gained status as a cult favorite. This legacy has been attributed to director Justin Lin’s dedication to bringing the streets of Tokyo to life, which it turns out involved some unlawful tactics. According to the director, the Japanese authorities refused to grant them permits to shoot in the bustling Shibuya district of Tokyo, so he relied on the politeness of the police officers to give them time. He calculated that he had about 10 minutes to film before they would step in and shut it down, but didn’t anticipate that they intended to arrest him. Luckily for Lin, one of his crew members took the fall. When the police arrived, he stepped forward and claimed to be the director. “He went to jail for the night and I’m forever grateful,” said Lin, claiming that the same thing happened six times before they got the footage they needed. This rebellious style of filmmaking was made possible in part by Universal Pictures’ apparent disinterest in the project. Without major stars involved and the studio head Stacey Snider distracted by her transition to DreamWorks, Lin had more creative freedom than most directors helming studio productions. He later called Tokyo Drift an “$80 million indie movie.”

Sacha Baron Cohen has made a career out of pranking people. Under various alter-egos, he’s performed a series of incendiary stunts, from singing a fictional Kazakhstan national anthem at a Virginia rodeo to convincing singer Paula Abdul to sit on “Mexican chair-people.” Some of his most outrageous antics took place during the production of his 2009 mockumentary, Brüno, in which he plays a gay Austrian fashionista who moves to Los Angeles after being blacklisted by the fashion world. Some of his hoaxes in the movie include interviewing parents of child models to see if they’d let their kids be strung up on crosses or undergo liposuction, and kissing his opponent during a cage fight in Arkansas, which almost got him killed. But none of these stunts would have happened if Brüno hadn’t been excommunicated from the church of fashion following an unfortunate incident at Milan Fashion Week. At the beginning of the movie, he travels to the mecca of haute couture as a reporter, only to cause mayhem when his “prototype” Velcro suit clings to everything he touches and sends him stumbling onto the runway covered in fabric. Cohen and his crew crashed Fashion Week to film the scene, and created an uproar. Their first attempt to film the scene was at the Versace show, but bystanders caught on to their motives and the authorities threw them out. The Italian Chamber of Fashion warned designers of Cohen’s presence and told them to keep him and his crew out of their events. But despite being publicly outed, the Brüno production team managed to slip through the cracks of the Agatha Ruiz de la Prada show, and Cohen crashed onto the runway draped in fabric and cloth bags as models strutted by. The audience booed, and security tried to remove him. Eventually, the lights were dimmed and Cohen was arrested. A spokesperson for the police told the press that the actor “was actually very funny,” and had asked for a phone call. He was released without charge shortly thereafter. The Milan incident was a crucial component of the film and, it turns out, a stroke of luck. When the Brüno crew tried to recreate the scene at Paris Fashion Week, they were warmly welcomed, rendering the footage unusable.