Facts machine

Isn't life beautiful? Think about how lucky you were to be the one sperm out of millions to actually reach the egg and fertilize it. If it weren't for your passion, talent and strength, you wouldn't be here right now.

Let's just pretend for a moment that Hollywood is this giant egg and all the actors in the field are a bunch of random sperms looking to combine with the egg and give birth to a film (humor me for a sec, this is actually going somewhere). Well, using this analogy, how many films would have been different if the alternate "sperm" hooked up with the "egg"?

It just so happens that there have been numerous cases where a role was said to be offered to an actor who, for one reason or another, decided not to go through with it, similar to the sperm next to you that couldn't get inside the egg.

Imagine what the '80s would have been like without Michael J. Fox as our teen icon from those ever-so-popular "Back to the Future" movies. Believe it or not, the role was originally offered to Eric Stoltz. How different would Fox's career have been, or Stoltz's, even?

Remember "American Gigolo?" Full frontal nudity of Richard Gere? It could have been John Travolta, if he would have agreed to it. I don't think we would have ever looked at him the same, though.

At the time of Madonna's short lived romantic comedy film career, she was offered the lead role in the movie "Blind Date." However, she soon backed out of the part when she found out that her co-star was going to be a B-List television detective from the series "Moonlighting" named Bruce Willis instead of her beau, Sean Penn. Kim Basinger played the role and the movie was a moderate hit.

We all know how different Warren Beatty's career would have been (he might have actually had longer one) if he hadn't turned down the role of Sundance in the 1969 hit film "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." And Michael Keaton was up for the lead male role in Woody Allen's "Purple Rose of Cairo," but Jeff Daniels wound up as Mia Farrow's celluloid lover.

Meg Ryan was supposed to have the part of Annabelle co-starring with Mel Gibson in the movie "Maverick," but one has to wonder if that film would have had the same comedic flare and on screen chemistry if Ryan had taken the part. Jodie Foster was definitely the best choice.

Those are just a few examples where the casting process worked out for the best, whether due to talent conflicts, common sense or the genius of casting agents. One has to wonder how many other films could benefit from placing the right person into the right roles. Maybe then we'd get Jim Carrey out of the title role in "The Andy Kaufman Story." - biray alsac