Terms Of Endearment (1983)
Aurora and Emma are mother and daughter who march to different drummers. Beginning with Emma's marriage, Aurora shows how difficult and loving she can be. The movie covers several years of their lives as each finds different reasons to go on living and find joy. Aurora's interludes with Garrett Breedlove, retired astronaut and next door neighbor are quite striking. In the end, different people show their love in very different ways.
Come to Laugh, Come to Cry, Come to Care, Come to Terms.
[Lying in the surf after being thrown from the car]
Garrett Breedlove: If you wanted to get me on my back, all you had to do was ask me.
1148 Heights Blvd., Houston, Texas, USA
(Garage apartment where Emma and Flap lived)
3060 Locke Lane, Houston, Texas, USA
(home where Aurora lived)
Brennan's Restaurant - 3300 Smith Street, Houston, Texas, USA
(lunch scene with Aurora and Garrett)
Houston, Texas, USA
Junction City, Kansas, USA
Kearney, Nebraska, USA
Lincoln, Nebraska, USA
New York City, New York, USA
River Oaks, Houston, Texas, USA
Texas City, Texas, USA
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA
Debra Winger behaved erratically on the set because she was fighting severe cocaine addiction. At one point, she and Shirley MacLaine got into a shoving match.
Shirley MacLaine said Jack Nicholson would do crazy things on the set like show up practically naked, and that a lot of their scenes were improvised.
At the end of production, to congratulate him for completing his first movie, James L. Brooks received a book of "Life in Hell" cartoons, drawn by Matt Groening. Brooks was so impressed that he asked Groening to create cartoon shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show (1987), which led to The Simpsons (1989).
John Lithgow was called in to replace another actor. His part was filmed in three days, during a break from filming Footloose (1984).
Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger were both nominated for 1983's Best Actress Oscar, which went to MacLaine. On her way to the podium, she reportedly whispered to Winger, "Half of this belongs to you," to which Winger reportedly replied, "I'll take half."
Continuity
About 20 minutes into the movie, Jack Nicholson falls out of the car, drunk, on the right side of his face. When he gets up, a wound is on the left side of his face.
When Emma, Flap, and the children arrive in Iowa, they get out of their car and step onto the front porch of their new home. In the background, a very tall weed grows right next to their neighbor's house. A few years later, they step out on the porch again, and the same weed is growing in the same spot.
When Aurora walks up to the hotel desk after leaving Emma's hospital room, she is wearing a skirt. When she walks through the lobby into the pool area, where Tommy and Teddy threaten to get her wet, her skirt is different.
After Patsy applies Emma's makeup in the hospital, Emma hugs and kisses her before she leaves to get the boys, leaving a noticeable lipstick mark on Patsy's right cheek. It's gone in the next shot.
When Emma and Patsy are talking outside after the lunch in New York with Patsy's friends, the clouds shrouding the World Trade Center towers in the background change between shots.
Revealing mistakes
When Emma gives Flap a tie, a purple tag is hanging from the sleeve of her blouse.
When Emma is standing outside the restaurant in front of the Statue of Liberty, the city background is very distorted.
Anachronisms
During the opening credits, set in the 1950s, a 1980s station wagon is parked in a driveway in the background.
Errors in geography
While traveling in the car in Texas, the background shows warehouses from Miller & Paine, a department store in Lincoln, Nebraska (where the scene was filmed) that didn't exist in Texas.
As the Horton family drives to Iowa, a plain road sign amid open flat fields of waiving grain indicates that they are leaving Texas. Any highway trip from Texas to Iowa would require crossing a substantial bridge over the Red River into Oklahoma.
On Aurora and Garrett's first date, they drive along the coast before lunch. They live in the River Oaks area of Houston, 50 miles from the coast. They eat lunch at Brennan's, about 3 miles from River Oaks.