58 Fun Facts About Dances with Wolves

Dances with Wolves opened in 1990, the same year as which film?

Goodfellas. Scorsese's gangster film opened that September and was up for the same Best Picture Oscar, which went to Costner's three-hour Western.

What is the surname of the Union lieutenant Kevin Costner plays in Dances with Wolves?

Dunbar. Decorated for a reckless charge and offered any posting he liked, the lieutenant asked for the western frontier, wanting to see it before it was gone.

Who wrote both the novel Dances with Wolves and the Oscar-winning screenplay adapted from it?

Michael Blake. He was penniless and had no home of his own while writing the novel in 1986, living on friends' hospitality; five years later the screenplay won him an Oscar.

Much of the dialogue in Dances with Wolves is spoken, with English subtitles, in which language?

Lakota. About a third of the dialogue is in it, and Costner built three weeks of rehearsal into the schedule so that his cast could learn their lines before shooting began.

In the novel Dances with Wolves, the lieutenant settles among which people, a detail the film changed?

Comanche. The film gave him different hosts, but the author's sequel novel stayed with the book and made its hero a full Comanche warrior.

What is the name of the horse the lieutenant rides in his suicide charge and is later awarded?

Cisco. Sioux raiders rope the buckskin and ride off with him, but he breaks loose and gallops straight back to the lieutenant's fort.

What does the lieutenant name the wolf that visits his fort?

Two Socks. The lieutenant's first instinct is to reach for his rifle; he lowers it, and the wolf with the white forepaws becomes his daily company at the lonely fort.

What are the Sioux watching the lieutenant do when they decide on the name Dances With Wolves?

Playing chase with a wolf. Riders on a ridge see him trying to shoo the animal home, the two of them running circles in the grass, and soon he is greeted by the new name.

Which actress plays Stands With A Fist and earned an Oscar nomination for it?

Mary McDonnell. A New York stage actress, she arrived on location a month before her first scene and was tutored for hours each day in her character's language.

Which Canadian actor plays Kicking Bird?

Graham Greene. An Oneida from Ontario's Six Nations Reserve, he was working as a sound technician for rock bands when he drifted into acting; this part brought him an Oscar nomination.

Which Sioux warrior calls out, as the lieutenant rides away at the end, that he will always be his friend?

Wind In His Hair. At their first meeting he had galloped up to the lieutenant shouting that he was not afraid of him; his farewell turns the same cry into a pledge of friendship.

Which singer, later Uncle Ray on Walker, Texas Ranger, plays Chief Ten Bears?

Floyd Westerman. Sent as a boy to a boarding school that forbade his language, the Sioux singer made the album Custer Died for Your Sins and took up film acting only in his fifties.

Wes Studi plays a warrior from which tribe, the antagonists of Dances with Wolves?

Pawnee. Studi's raider is credited only as Toughest Pawnee; early in the film he kills and scalps the mule driver who had taken the lieutenant west.

What happens to Major Fambrough, the fort commander who posts the lieutenant to the frontier?

He kills himself. Soon after signing the lieutenant's orders the unstable major toasts him from a window and shoots himself, so nobody at headquarters knows a man was sent out.

What is the lieutenant doing when Kicking Bird first sets eyes on him?

Walking naked from the river. He has been washing when he finds a stranger eyeing his horse at the fort, and it is the startled visitor who turns and flees.

What is the name of the deserted frontier outpost the lieutenant rebuilds alone?

Fort Sedgwick. He finds the post abandoned and falling apart, its water fouled with dead animals, and assigns himself clean-up duty alone.

At which Kansas fort, the namesake of a state university, does the lieutenant report before being sent farther west?

Hays. The film bends history a little: the real Kansas post was founded only in 1865, as Fort Fletcher, and took the name Hays a year later.

Which drink does the lieutenant serve Kicking Bird when the Sioux come visiting at his fort?

Coffee. He grinds the beans in front of his puzzled guests, who warm to the brew only once he adds sugar, and he sends them home with presents of both.

Where do the rifles come from that let the Sioux village beat off a raiding war party?

The lieutenant's buried cache. Afraid the fort's spare guns would fall into the wrong hands, he had hidden them under the sod; later he digs them up to arm his new neighbours.

The author said Stands With A Fist was based on which real woman, captured as a girl by a Plains tribe?

Cynthia Ann Parker. Seized by Texas Rangers after almost 25 years with her adoptive people, the mother of Quanah Parker never settled among her white relatives and kept trying to flee back.

What is Kicking Bird's role within the tribe?

Medicine man. Kicking Bird, the band's spiritual guide, is the first Sioux to inspect the lieutenant's fort, and it was he who took in Stands With A Fist as a child after a raid orphaned her.

Why has Stands With A Fist cut herself when the lieutenant first finds her?

She is mourning her dead husband. The lieutenant carries the bleeding widow back to her people, which makes for his first, tense visit to the Sioux village.

How does the lieutenant win the tribe's acceptance?

He helps them find and hunt a buffalo herd. Woken by the stampede passing his fort, he rides to the village by night with the news, and by the next day he is, in his own words, a celebrity.

What do the soldiers who reoccupy the fort steal, leaving the lieutenant unable to prove his identity?

His diary. He had ridden back for it because its pages could lead the army to the Sioux; with it gone, the officers have only his word that he is a soldier at all.

What happens to the wolf that follows the army convoy?

Soldiers shoot him for target practice. The troopers squabble over whose shot it is while their chained prisoner fights to stop them, until one of the bullets finds the animal.

What fate does a guard say awaits the captured lieutenant once the wagons reach headquarters?

A hanging. Branded a traitor, he refuses to guide the army to the Sioux camps and is hauled away in chains, until his friends ambush the convoy at a river crossing.

The closing text of Dances with Wolves says the last free Sioux submitted to white authority at which Nebraska fort?

Robinson. The text jumps thirteen years ahead; in history Crazy Horse led his band into the Nebraska post in May 1877 and was killed there four months later.

Costner won two Oscars for Dances with Wolves, but which actor beat him to the Best Actor award?

Jeremy Irons. He won as Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune, and in his speech he thanked David Cronenberg, the director of his earlier film Dead Ringers, adding that some would understand why.

Which studio released Dances with Wolves in North America?

Orion Pictures. The film passed Platoon as the studio's top earner, yet the windfall came too late: Orion filed for bankruptcy protection in December 1991.

Costner turned down playing Jack Ryan in which film to make Dances with Wolves?

The Hunt for Red October. Its makers wanted him as Jack Ryan, but he was committed to his Western, so the part went to Alec Baldwin and opened a long-running film series.

Most of Dances with Wolves was shot on private ranches in which state?

South Dakota. Beyond the leads, most of the Sioux on screen are local people, many of them hired as extras from the state's Rosebud Reservation.

Which media mogul later bought the Triple U, the ranch where much of Dances with Wolves was shot?

Ted Turner. The CNN founder, one of America's largest private landowners, added it to his chain of western ranches, where it is listed as Standing Butte Ranch.

Who translated the script of Dances with Wolves and plays Ten Bears' wife in it?

Doris Leader Charge. She drilled the actors for hours a day in a three-week crash course, then stayed at Costner's side as his adviser on everything from pitching tepees to camp etiquette.

Which actor had, a decade before Costner did it with Dances with Wolves, also won Best Director for a directing debut?

Robert Redford. He won for Ordinary People without appearing in it; Costner, the fifth debut director to take the prize, starred in his film as well and was nominated for that too.

Dances with Wolves was the first Western to win Best Picture since which 1931 film?

Cimarron. In the six decades between, famous Westerns such as Stagecoach, High Noon and Shane were all nominated for Best Picture and all went home without it.

Who composed the Oscar- and Grammy-winning score for Dances with Wolves?

John Barry. The composer of eleven James Bond scores had been laid low in the late 1980s by a ruptured oesophagus; back at work, he won his fifth Oscar for this film.

Dean Semler, who won the cinematography Oscar for Dances with Wolves, first made his name shooting which Australian film?

Mad Max 2. George Miller's outback action film was the break for a cameraman who had first learned to shoot film covering news for an Adelaide television station.

What did Costner do with most of his $3 million salary for Dances with Wolves?

Put it back into the budget. Three financing deals had collapsed, and by his own account he returned $2.5 million of the fee to keep the three-hour film alive.

Which city hosted the Dances with Wolves premiere, a benefit for an American Indian museum?

Washington, D.C. Sioux who had worked on the film flew in to join Costner at the Uptown Theater, and the night raised money for the future National Museum of the American Indian.

Which firm's opening-night audience polls gave Dances with Wolves a rare A+?

CinemaScore. Its A+ usually signals a long run, and the three-hour Western duly kept playing for months, taking $184 million in North America alone.

Why did Costner's team say they made the four-hour Special Edition of Dances with Wolves?

Fans kept asking for a sequel. That was one of two reasons they gave British critics, the other being that the 52 extra minutes had been hard to cut; the long version opened in a single London cinema.

What is the title of the 2001 novel that continues the story of Dances with Wolves?

The Holy Road. Set eleven years on, it has white rangers seize Stands With A Fist and her daughter; a film version was long discussed, but Costner has said he will never make a sequel.

At which European film festival did Costner receive a special Silver Bear for Dances with Wolves?

Berlin. The festival's trophies are bears because a bear is the animal on the city's coat of arms; its jury gave Costner a Silver Bear for an outstanding single achievement.

Russell Means mockingly compared Dances with Wolves to which epic, calling it a version set on the Plains?

Lawrence of Arabia. 'That was Lawrence of the Plains,' the Oglala activist and actor said in 2009, adding that he and friends had laughed at hearing male characters use women's speech forms.

Which institution added Dances with Wolves to its National Film Registry?

Library of Congress. Its 2007 citation said the film had disproved the idea that Westerns were money-losers, and it joined the registry alongside Back to the Future and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The over-schedule shoot of Dances with Wolves was mockingly nicknamed after which notorious Western flop?

Heaven's Gate. Insiders dubbed the production 'Kevin's Gate' after Michael Cimino's epic, which earned back only a sliver of its cost and was pulled from cinemas by United Artists.

What did Sioux elder Albert Whitehat do for Costner on the day Dances with Wolves premiered?

Adopted him into his family. Two other families took in the leading lady and producer Jim Wilson at the same outdoor ceremony, held hours before the first screening.

Which gambling film was the Dances with Wolves writer's only earlier produced script?

Stacy's Knights. Jim Wilson directed it and Costner took the lead, so the future producer, writer and star of the Western had all worked together years before.

The screenwriter of Dances with Wolves was scraping by in Arizona doing what when Costner asked him to adapt his novel?

Washing dishes. After some 15 unsold scripts he had lived for a time in his car; it was Costner who told him to write the story as a book, then summoned him back to script it.

How was pre-production of Dances with Wolves funded after Hollywood studios passed?

By selling foreign rights in several countries. Those advance sales raised about $9 million, enough to start work before an American distributor finally signed on.

What operation does the wounded lieutenant escape by riding out in front of the enemy guns?

Amputation of his foot. He drags his boot back on and rides out expecting to die; instead a general who saw the charge promises he will keep the foot and sends for his own surgeon.

What is the name of the foul-mouthed mule driver who carts the lieutenant to his frontier post?

Timmons. The lieutenant privately rates him quite possibly the foulest man he has ever met; raiders kill him on his way back, before he can tell anyone where his passenger is.

Which young Sioux hands the departing lieutenant something he thought the soldiers had taken for good?

Smiles A Lot. The boy who once tried to make off with the lieutenant's horse comes of age in the rescue at the river, and it is there that he recovers the lost item.

How did Stands With A Fist earn her Sioux name as a girl?

She floored a bullying woman. Put to hard work as a captive child and called names once too often, she knocked her tormentor flat and stood over her; nobody bothered her again.

Which fast-food chain ran a 1992 promotion offering VHS copies of Dances with Wolves with food purchases?

McDonald's. Customers could add the tape to a meal for $7.99, a bargain that stunned video retailers, whose trade group went to court over the deal.

At a night of feasting in the Sioux camp, what does a warrior trade for the lieutenant's army tunic?

His bone breastplate. The lieutenant protests that it is too much, but for his host the trade is already made, and he wears the gift from then on.

Costner was already on set playing which hero when Dances with Wolves opened in cinemas?

Robin Hood. He gave interviews about his Western from the English set of Prince of Thieves, whose director, Kevin Reynolds, was the friend who had shot second-unit footage for it.

Which billionaire's son Peter composed the music for the 'Fire Dance' scene in Dances with Wolves?

Warren Buffett. His youngest son Peter was writing music for commercials when he scored the short scene of the lieutenant dancing round his fire; it became his break as a film composer.