May 14, 1999 –
A lavish rendition of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Michael Hoffman, and starring Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci, Calista Flockhart, Anna Friel, Christian Bale, and Dominic West, opened on this date.
Although it appears to be an idyllic location, the shoot was anything but. Five weeks of filming almost completely at night quickly took its toll on an increasingly unhinged cast and crew, whilst all the lush greenery ultimately became poisonous (the studio set was in an aircraft-sized hangar where the plants all started decaying, releasing all sorts of noxious gases into the atmosphere) under the hot studio lights.
The Haus of Dcaligari 