Planes, Trains and Automobiles was, aptly, a giant road trip of a production, shooting in New York, Chicago, L.A., and all over the Midwest from February to May, 1987. Also aptly, it was a race against time. Just as in the story Neal and Del are speeding across the country to get home for Thanksgiving, so, with a release date of November 25, the production was racing to get into theaters for actual Thanksgiving. Not helping matters was Hughess insistence on shooting every detail of his mammoth screenplay of an extra in the back of a shot holding a shoebox with white mice in it, the director said, I thought itd be funny, maybe youre watching it for the third or fourth time on cable somewhere, your mind wanders away from the main activity in the scene, and … Are those mice? and the fact that they had to keep relocating to find fresh snow. One actor, cast as a truck driver with a single line of dialogue, was kept on standby for so many days because of the weather that he was able to make the down payment on a house.