Link: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/154/valeriagolinobf6.jpg/

Valeria Golino claims the scene in which she catches an olive popped out of her bellybutton was accomplished without trick photography.
Source: The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102059/trivia?tr=tr0784944

Update: Tuesday, February 6, 2024
In regards to the olive trick, Charlie Sheen says a prosthetic torso with a pressure hose in the belly button was used to do the scene.[1] Valeria Golino does admit part of the scene was her belly and that it only took her two takes to catch the olive.[2]
References:
[1] Bland, Simon. "Charlie Sheen talks 'Hot Shots!' at 30: I borrowed everything from Leslie Nielsen." Yahoo Entertainment, 28 Jul. 2021, https://www.yahoo.com/movies/charlie-sheen-hot-shots-leslie-nielsen-093819495.html. Accessed date 6 Feb. 2024
[2] Mead, Rebecca. "Navel Maneuvers." New York Magazine, 12 Aug. 1991, https://books.google.com/books?id=E-kCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA22#v=onepage&q&f=false. Accessed date 6 Feb. 2024
-End of Update-

Update: Tuesday, October 21, 2014
One of the best-remembered parts of the film is a scene in which Valeria Golino catches an olive in her mouth that has been popped out of her navel (parodying a scene in 9½ Weeks). According to Golino (interviewed in a behind-the-scenes featurette for the sequel), this scene was filmed without special effects.
Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Shots!#Trivia
-End of Update-

Revealing: When Topper launches the olive off her belly button in the romance scene, her entire chest moves, showing that it's obviously not her chest.
Source: Movie mistakes, http://www.moviemistakes.com/film631

Update: Friday, March 13, 2015

Valeria Golino interview in behind-the-scenes featurette for Hot Shots! Part Deux

-End of update-

Links:
IMDb: Hot Shots! (1991)
All Movie Guide: Hot Shots!

Download:
RapidShare: http://rapidshare.com/files/11956334/Hot_Shots_1_-__Valeria_Golino.avi.html | 12889 KB

Articles:

Navel Maneuvers

Phoebe Hoban Edited by Chris Smith
New York (magazine)
August 12, 1991, Vol. 24, No. 31, Page 22

With her sultry looks, husky voice, and sensuous Italian accent, it's not surprising that actress Valeria Golino has had some memorable love scenes. As Tom Cruise's girlfriend in Rain Man, she gives Dustin Hoffman his first kiss. Her three-minute make-out with pre-arrest Pee-wee Herman (in Big Top Pee-wee) may now be a piece of motion-picture history. But nothing could have prepared audiences for her adroit moves with an olive in Hot Shots!

The new film spoofs blockbusters from Top Gun to Dances With Wolves. In a scene that makes mincemeat of the food fetishism in 9½ Weeks, Charlie Sheen raids Golino's refrigerator, then pops an olive into her navel and gives it a playful flick. With the agility of a trained seal, Golino snaps it up. By the scene's climax, Sheen's fixing breakfast—bacon and eggs—on her sizzling belly. "Part of it was my belly and part of it was a body double, to fry the eggs," Golino says—but she's justly proud of having performed every instant of the olive stunt. "We worked on tossing olives two days in advance, but when it came time to do it, it just took two takes," she says. "At that point I could have done it with closed eyes. You could send me three olives at a time, you know."

Golino's parents—her father is a literary critic; her mother used to be a painter—may have had loftier artistic goals in mind for Valeria when she was born on Naples. But Golino started developing a taste for the absurd in her first movie role, when Linda Wertmüller, a friend of her uncle's, cast her in A Joke of Destiny, a political farce.

Golino, 24, recently moved to the Hollywood Hills, and her American career is beginning to take off. This fall, she's an earthy Mexican Housewife in Sean Penn's directorial debut, The Indian Runner, and an Italian femme fatale in John Frankenheimer's political thriller The Year of the Gun.

But one of the most difficult scenes she's played was the Hot Shots! send-up of The Fabulous Baker Boys. Belting out of torch song atop a piano, Golino fought a losing battle against her false nails. "They kept falling off," she says. "Half the crew was on the floor searching for them. You had to be funny, sexy, and precise." And she is.

Link: http://books.google.com/books?id=E-kCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA22#v=onepage&q&f=false

Front page of New York (magazine)

Page 22 of New York (magazine)

Full content for this article includes illustration and photograph.

Source: Cosmopolitan, Jan 1992 v212 n1 p60(1).

Title: Red hot right now: Valeria Golino.
Author: Tom Green

Abstract: Italian actress Valeria Golino's life and acting career is
examined. Golino is attempting to break into the American motion picture
industry and has had some success with her last two films, Big Top Pee-wee and
Rain Man.

Subjects: Actresses - Conduct of life
People: Golino, Valeria - Biography

Magazine Collection: 62L2225
Electronic Collection: A11708917
RN: A11708917

Full Text COPYRIGHT The Hearst Corp. 1992

For Valeria Golino, the Italian beauty who sooched her way to American stardom
with Pee-wee Herman in Big Top Pee-wee and Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, and
then pulled off a startling stunt in Hot Shots!--she popped an olive from her
navel to her mouth ("I really did it!")--life would seem to be going very
well. It isn't.

Recent weeks have been upsetting. A long romance has just shattered, and
she's feeling stressed. "I'm waiting for it to pass," she says, her
gray-green eyes flashing pain. "I am . . .," she begins, then searches her
impressive English vocabulary for exactly the right word, ". . .
convalescent."

Three days earlier, the twenty-five-year-old quit smoking--part of a personal
housecleaning begun when her romance collapsed--and it's not helping. "right
now, I'd smoke in a second," she says. But I want to get rid of all my bad
habits at once."

The next few weeks could get tough. She has no work lined up, although two
other projects are completed. She plays an earthy wife of Mexican-American
descent in The Indian Runner, Sean Penn's directorial debut film; and in The
Year of the Gun, John Frankenheimer's political thriller, she portrays a rich
woman pretending to be someone she isn't.

If Golino's luck runs true to form, however, she'll make it through. Her
parents divorced when she was a child, and her life was divided between her
intellectual journalist father in Italy and her artistically creative mother
in Greece. "Living in two different realities was very useful," she says.
"It let me be independent."

By age sixteen, Golino was modeling, but one night, while at her uncle's home
in Rome, her aunt received a telephone call from good friend Lina Wertmuller.
The director was lamenting that she couldn't find a girl for her movie. A
Joke of Destiny. Golino's aunt suggested her niece, and an acting career was
launched.

A dozen European films and an imposing collection of festival honors later
(including the Best Actress award from the Italian Film Festival for My Son,
Infinitely Beloved), she had become an important Italian star and was ready to
take a shot at Hollywood. Her break came when she played trapeze artist Gina
Piccolapupula in Big Top Pee-wee. But when she won the part of Susanna, the
girl who helps connect the brothers played by Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in
Rain Man, she really captured the industry's eye.

The actress is pleased with the progress of her American career--with
reservations: "I realize I'm lucky," she states. "I'm working in a language
that is not mine, in a country that is not very open to foreign artists. And
I've been embraced. I understand this is almost a privilage."

Golino is different from most Italian actresses who've scored big in America.
Yes, she's warm and sensual, and speaks with a slightly husky voice, but she's
far more energetic a personality than her predecessors, Sophia and Gina, and
she's also physically slighter.

"You mean I have less bosom?" she laughs. "I guess if I had come here in the
fifties, they wouldn't have even hired me as an extra. Fortunately, the
concept of beauty has changed."

One day, she thinks, she'll be able to play an American successfully. Though
her accent is pronounced, her English is exceptional. At age twelve, she
traveled from Italy to Chicago to undergo surgery for a curvature of the
spine--that's when she was forced to begin speaking her new language. Later,
she made two European coproductions filmed in English. Now, having lived in
the L.A. area for three years, she works with a coach when she's shooting a
film.

Although Golino is currently committed to establishing her American career,
she wants to go back and work in Europe, where she's known as an actress in
films that are critically recognized but not big money-makers. It's easier to
find better roles for women over there. Besides, in America, parts don't come
easily.

"Good roles go to American actresses first. I have to fight doubly hard to
get a part that I think is interesting. I usually don't get the roles I
really try for. . . ."

With a break in both her personal life and her career, Golino has turned to
some domestic tasks. She's just bought a home in the Hollywood hills, and is
in the process of fixing it up. Although she swims regularly, it's just
something she enjoys doing. She has no beauty regimen--"I eat everything."

In time, the actress wants to have babies and admits that she's already
started to feel her maternal instincts. Her career might even be put aside if
she were "in the right situation with the right person for a year or two. . .
."

She can't pinpoint what attracts her to a man--in each relationship it's
something different.

"My ex-boyfriend was very reassuring and protective--I was attracted to his
tenderness. I was involved with another man for three years who was the
opposite. It was his wildness, the unpredictability and physicality of him
that attracted me."

The trick is finding somebody who will be there forever, she says. But for
the moment, it's just getting through a tough separation.
"Maybe in four months I'll be okay," she says. "I hope so."

-- End --

Link: http://www.valeriagolino.org/articles/intervista.html

UP AND COMING: Valeria Golino; She Made Her Name Popping an Olive

By RICK MARIN;
Published: June 6, 1993

Valeria Golino was 55 minutes late for lunch, but who's counting? That's the thing about these charmingly accented Italian actresses. They can be an hour late, and you're just glad they came at all.

"I'm so sorry," Ms. Golino said, sweeping into an Upper East Side bistro in a green pin-striped suit. Her entrance was not quiet.

"What can I say?" she implored in the elongated vowels of her native land. "What can I say to make it up?"

The answer, according to her legion of fans, is that as long as she keeps starring in "Hot Shots!" spoofs and talking that beguilingly inflected Mediterranean talk, she can say anything she wants.

Her new movie, "Hot Shots! Part Deux," earned $18 million its first two weekends. Reprising her role in "Hot Shots!" the popular 1991 take-off on "Top Gun," she plays Charlie Sheen's deeply dumb but adorable love interest, Ramada Rodham Hayman. The new film includes spoofs of such diverse classics as "Rambo," "Casablanca" and "Lady and the Tramp."

"The movie is what it wants to be," she said, "which is funny and nothing else."

The 26-year-old actress, who has a house in Los Angeles and an actor boyfriend in Rome, has been appearing in films in Italy and America for a decade, starting with Lina Wertmuller's "Joke of Destiny." But the Wertmuller film did not make her a reputation. Popping an olive from her navel into her mouth during a love scene with Mr. Sheen in "Hot Shots!" did. Janet Maslin, reviewing the film in The New York Times, found the actress "slyly comic and a very good sport."
"Movie Review - Hot Shots! (1991) - Review/Film; Pilots in 'Hot Shots!' Shoot Down 'Top Gun' In a Hail of Parody," Janet Maslin, The New York Times, July 31, 1991

"I really catched it," she said.

How many takes?

"Two takes. I promise you."

Her large gray eyes do not lie. The film grossed $200 million worldwide.

Ms. Golino's mother is Greek, her father is Italian. One grandmother was Egyptian-French. The actress grew up in Naples, speaking four languages, and was working as a model when an aunt recommended her to Ms. Wertmuller. That association led to a slew of "Italian movies you've never heard of," Ms. Golino said. Nevertheless, she has won several European prizes for her work, most notably the best actress award at the 1986 Venice Film Festival for her role as a cleaning woman in the Italian film, "Love Story."

In her American roles, Ms. Galino hung from a trapeze in "Big Top Pee-wee," romanced both Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man," took direction from Sean Penn in "Indian Runner" and survived a co-star named Sharon Stone in "The Year of the Gun."

In "Hot Shots! Part Deux" she kickboxes and delivers deadpan lines like, "I'm not joking. If I was joking I'd say . . . 'A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, "Why the long face?" ' "

Jim Abrahams, the director, says he auditioned more than 100 actresses for the part: "Ms. Golino was the one who made us laugh."

Her next movie is another comedy, this time romantic, called "Clean Slate," directed by Mick Jackson (who made "The Bodyguard") and starring Dana Carvey and James Earl Jones. Ms. Golino plays a woman who "says she's somebody but really she's somebody else."

Surprisingly, Ms. Golino does not consider comedy her forte. Experts disagree: "She's got the driest, weirdest sense of humor," Mr. Carvey said. When they first met, he recalls, she told him flatly, "We have no chemistry, baby."

Chemistry has played a pivotal part in Ms. Golino's career. Her lips have locked with leading men like Pee-wee Herman, Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise and Charlie Sheen. So, the obvious question: Who was the best kisser?

"I'm not going to answer," Ms. Golino protested. "I can only tell you that Charlie is a very, very good kisser. I'm not saying that he's better, but he was surprisingly pleasant."

Mr. Sheen, in Vienna making his next movie, could not be reached for comment.

Rick Marin writes about the arts for Vogue and TV Guide.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/06/movies/up-and-coming-valeria-golino-she-made-her-name-popping-an-olive.html

This article also appeared on page 7C of The Ledger on Wednesday, June 15, 1993 under the headline "Who is Valeria Golino?; The olive popper", page D7 of The Vindicator on Wednesday, June 9, 1993 under the headline "Profile: Valeria Golino; She'll 'Deux' what she can to make us laugh," and Los Angeles Daily News on Monday, June 6, 1993 under the headline "AN INTERNATIONAL STAR, ER, COMEDIAN"

Front page of The Ledger

Page 7C of The Ledger

Front page of The Vindicator

Page D7 of The Vindicator

Update: Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Passing The Chemistry Test Golino Makes Things Click In `Clean Slate'

May 07, 1994 | by AMY LONGSDORF (A free-lance story for The Morning Call)

Valeria Golino had her work cut out for her on the set of "Clean Slate." Not only did she have to emote opposite a scene-stealing pooch named Barkley, but she had to put up with co-star Dana Carvey's constant imitations of her.

"He can do me better than I can do myself," she says, bemused. "He's amazing."

In the film, which opened yesterday in area theaters, Carvey plays a cop-turned-private-eye suffering from a rare form of amnesia called Korsakoff's Syndrome. Every time he goes to sleep, his memory is wiped clean. Golino plays a glamorous woman with a shady past.

"The way my character comes into Dana's life is such a movie cliche," notes Golino over the telephone from Toronto. "My first line was, `They want to kill me.' How could I make this believable? I didn't want to make a caricature out of her. I could get away with that in `Hot Shots!' but this is not slapstick. It was hard to be serious, but not too serious; realistic, but not dramatic. Thank God I had Dana to react to. He gave the scenes a rhythm."

Initially, though, Golino was afraid that she and Carvey wouldn't pass the chemistry test. "He just laughed when I told him that," she notes. "He thought it was so funny that I would come right out and say that."

But a couple of days into shooting, Golino began to get used to Carvey's sense of humor. "He's so wild in what he does. And he changes so fast. It's like, boom, boom, boom. He's always firing off one joke after another. In the beginning, I was puzzled by that. But after a month, I got used to it. Even before I saw him, I would laugh. He trained me to laugh at his jokes."

In her native Italy, Golino isn't known for her sense of humor. She was discovered when she was 17 years old by Lina Wertmuller, the Oscar-nominated director of "Swept Away" and "Seven Beauties." A friend of Golino's family, Wertmuller cast the actress in "A Joke of Destiny." Afterward, Golino described the experience as the most grueling of her life.

"I still say that," states Golino, 27. "I could work with her now because I'm older and I can deal with her. Then, it was traumatic. She's tough and intolerant. She's very affectionate outside of the set, very maternal. But when it comes to the work, she doesn't like to lose time. She doesn't like actors to be anything except exactly what she wants at that moment."

Golino went on to star opposite Ben Gazzara in "My Son, Infinitely Beloved." She won a Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival for Francesco Maselli's "Love Story" and a Golden Globe award for her work in Peter Del Monte's "Little Flames."

In 1988, Golino came to America to make "Big Top Pee Wee," the sequel to "Pee Wee's Big Adventure." She has fond memories of working with Paul Reubens, who played Pee Wee Herman, but the movie failed to capture the goofy spirit of the original.

"Pee Wee is an extreme character," says Golino, "And in his first movie, he was working with Tim Burton, a very extreme director. In our movie, it was Randall Kleiser directing. Not to take anything away from Randall, but he's not an extreme person. And, also, Pee Wee had to fall in love with me. And Pee Wee in love is not Pee Wee anymore. In order to act with me and the other actors, he had to become more normal, and I think that was the problem with our movie."

Golino is still friends with Reubens, who was arrested a few years ago for exposing himself in an adult movie theater. The actor, who also appeared in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," is reportedly set to marry "L.A. Law" star Debi Mazer next month.

"I don't know about that," quips Golino. "But he went through hell a few years ago and he didn't deserve it. It's pitiful. But he's so talented that he's going to come up with many other things."

In 1988, Golino taught Dustin Hoffman how to kiss in "Rain Man," and then allowed Charlie Sheen to suck her nose in "Hot Shots! Part Deux," last year's sequel to "Hot Shots!"

"Every time we would have a scene in the `Hot Shots!' movies, it would be something unbelievably uncomfortable or weird or grotesque," she laughs. "By the time Charlie put his mouth on my nose, it was, like, so what."

Nothing shocks Golino, not even her manager's suggestion that she wasn't attractive enough for a career in Hollywood movies. "I did nine movies in Italy with crooked teeth. No problem. After `Big Top Pee Wee' and `Rain Man,' my manager said, `I think you have to put braces on.' He was right. In America, crooked teeth are no good on-screen."

Though Golino did some of her best work in two dramas, Sean Penn's "The Indian Runner" and John Frankenheimer's "Year of the Gun," she continues to be cast in one comedy after another.

"Because I'm a foreigner and I have an accent, it's easier to place me in comedies because they don't have to justify why I have an accent. But now I'm planning not to do any more comedies for awhile."

Recently, Golino completed filming a drama in Greece about a deaf mute battered by her husband. This summer, she will begin shooting a film in Russia.

"I haven't made a movie in Hollywood that makes me proud as far as my role is concerned," she says. "I'm proud of the movies I've done. In their own genre, they've been pretty good movies. But I'm not proud of my roles."

Golino lives in Los Angeles but spends half her time in Rome. "In Italy, there's a certain mystique about actors who work in America," she says. "And at the same time, an irritation ... Some people say, `She went to America and sold out.' I want to say to these people, `You go to America and see what you can do with what's given to you.' "

Link: http://articles.mcall.com/1994-05-07/entertainment/2978733_1_pee-wee-herman-valeria-golino-dana-carvey

-End of Update-

The best eggs in movies: Film fight club

Easter may be over but you’re bound to have a few eggs lying around that you haven’t quaffed yet. No? Oh, well, too late. To keep you in the mood, here is Ross McG from www.rossvross.com with the greatest bunch of eggs in cinema.

By Ann Lee - 10th April, 2012

Metro (British newspaper)

Hot Shots!

Scene: Is this from a spoof movie or a documentary? Charlie Sheen cooking eggs and bacon on a nubile female during a canoodling session somehow doesn’t seem far beyond the realms of possibility. A bit like Sigourney Weaver’s kitchen table top surface then, except in this case the table top surface is a living woman. The woman from Rain Man.

How do you like your eggs? Fried. On Valeria Golino’s tummy.

Hot Shots! Trailer - YouTube