Little Man Tate

Jodie Foster remembered David Hyde Pierce from university and wanted him for a role in the film. Both attended Yale University.

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Like the main character, both Jodie Foster and Harry Connick Jr. were regarded as child prodigies.

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It was Jodie Foster's first directorial feature.

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Most of the school scenes were shot at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity house served as the home and office of Jane Grierson (Dianne Wiest).

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Jodie Foster took over as director after Joe Dante left the project over creative differences.

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The scenes in Eddie's apartment and the interior of the Tates' apartment were shot at the Roanoke Apartments in the Clifton neighborhood of Cincinnati. More than 100 years old, the building was considered a classic example of mid-1800s architecture in Cincinnati. During filming there was talk of Burger King buying the building and demolishing it to build a fast food restaurant. The publicity surrounding the shoot raised the building's public profile enough that Burger King dropped the plan.

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It was one of two films Orion Pictures planned to release in the last quarter of 1991, the other being Blue Sky (1994). Because of financial difficulties the studio could not afford to release both, so it was decided to release this one, since Orion wanted to promote Jodie Foster as an Oscar nominee for The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Blue Sky (1994) went unreleased for another three years. Rather than competing with each other, Foster and Jessica Lange each won Best Actress awards.

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Jodie Foster says Adam Hann-Byrd had a terrible allergy to horses and had to take something like Benadryl during filming so he could be near them, but it left him unable to sleep.

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Jodie Foster had made her directorial debut three years earlier with the episode Don't Open This Box (1988) of Tales from the Darkside (1983), written by Bob Balaban. Bob Balaban did not star as the Quiz Master in this film.

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In one scene Debi Mazar's character jokes about being compared to Madonna. Mazar was in fact a good friend of the singer and appeared in several of her music videos, including Madonna: True Blue (1986) and Madonna: Papa Don't Preach (1986).

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The poem Fred reads in class is "Death" by Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Uncollected Poems."

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Despite Jodie Foster's evident excitement about directing her first film, there was tension on set. Dianne Wiest voiced her dissatisfaction with Foster's direction to a guest reporter from Premiere Magazine; that same visit was also when Foster made mocking remarks about a female director she had previously worked with and later had to write a note of apology. Producer Scott Rudin was unhappy about many things, most likely the production's progress, and in a fit of rage threw a portable phone into someone's car, shattering the windshield.

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It was the first film in which Adam Hann-Byrd played the role of "Fred Tate."

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Jodie Foster and Harry Connick Jr. competed on the same celebrity episode of Jeopardy! (1984) in 2001. Foster won $21,600 for charity and Connick $10,000.

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Johannes Brahms's "Liebeslieder Waltzes" is a collection of love songs for voices and piano four hands. There is speculation that Brahms's inspiration for the songs was his frustrated love for the pianist Clara Schumann, wife of the composer Robert Schumann.

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Joe Dante was also briefly attached to the project before Jodie Foster took over as director.

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Filming was completed in September 1990, and Orion Pictures hoped to release the film in late spring to early summer of 1991, but they wanted to honor Jodie Foster as a Best Actress contender for her role in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which Orion released in February, and felt that releasing her directorial debut in the second half of the year might help Academy voters remember Foster for her Silence performance at Oscar time. It worked, as Foster was nominated and won her second Best Actress Oscar, and the film, though not a huge box office success, proved to be one of the few Orion released that actually turned a profit for the studio during its bankruptcy.

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David Hyde Pierce and George Plimpton later appeared together in Nixon (1995) as Richard Nixon's lawyers.

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George Plimpton also appeared in Good Will Hunting (1997), another film about a young working-class genius trying to fit in. Winston Bruckner and his program Live Wire are a reference to William F. Buckley and his long-running program Firing Line (1966).

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Critics praised Jodie Foster's direction, Scott Frank's screenplay and the cast's performances. The film grossed 25 million dollars domestically on a budget of 10 million dollars.

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Much of the film was shot on the Rhine River and in downtown Cincinnati. Other locations included the Cincinnati neighborhood of Clifton; the Village of Indian Hill; McMicken Hall at the University of Cincinnati; Alumni Hall, Upham Hall, Hall Auditorium and the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity house at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; and the Wexner Center and the Ohio Theatre in Columbus, Ohio.

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Little Man Tate (1991) is an American drama film directed by Jodie Foster from a screenplay written by Scott Frank. In the film, Adam Hann-Byrd plays Fred Tate, a seven-year-old child prodigy trying to find himself in social and psychological environments where he largely fails to fit in with his intelligence. Foster, Dianne Wiest, Harry Connick Jr., David Hyde Pierce, Debi Mazar and P. J. Ochlan also star.

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Adam Hann-Byrd genuinely looked as though he could be Jodie Foster's son.

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