Paper or Plastic?

Igby Goes Down

Igby Goes Down: This 2002 indie favorite opens with a shot of teenager Jason "Igby" Slocumb Jr. attempting to suffocate his mother, Mimi, with a plastic bag. Here's an interesting piece of movie trivia: In the film's original script, penned in 1923 by famed German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck, Mimi attempts to suffocate a plastic bag with her son, Igby, who is wearing a coat made of fish. Igby Abwärts Gehen wins the Sergei Eisenstein Best Original Screenplay Award at that year's inaugural Soviet Union People's Exemplary Film Festival and Plow Exhibition. For his achievement, Huelsenbeck is sentenced to three years' hard labor in a Siberian gulag.

Parenthood: Joaquin Phoenix plays a depressed teenager carrying around a paper bag full of pornography in this 1989 Ron Howard film. An "anti-smut" boycott organized jointly by Pat Robertson's newly formed Christian Coalition and the Paper Bag Manufacturers Anti-Defamation Council of America fails to ignite the public's imagination, and the movie goes on to gross $126 million worldwide.

Billy Madison: Rumor has it that production on this Adam Sandler comedy was nearly derailed when screenwriter Tim Herlihy got in a heated argument with his co-writer, Toni Morrison, over the direction of the now-famous "flaming-bag-of-poop" scene, resulting in Morrison's walking off the set and having her name removed from the film. According to sources, Morrison thought two flaming bags of poop would be funnier than just one, an opinion later validated by the critical and commercial success of her 1997 novel, Paradise.

American Beauty: Wes Bentley's creepy Ricky Fitts is driven to tears by a floating plastic bag, making it impossible for anyone anywhere to ever find anything beautiful again without sounding like a pompous jackass.