Category: Crime

Twilight Zone: “The Rip Van Winkle Caper” [Season 2, Episode 24] / Z-View

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Twilight Zone: “The Rip Van Winkle Caper” [Season 2, Episode 24]
Original Air Date: April 21, 1961

Director: Justus Addiss

Writer: Rod Serling

Starring:  Simon Oakland, Oscar Beregi Jr., Lew Gallo and John Mitchum.

The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…

Four thieves steal a million dollars in gold.  Their plan is to sleep in suspended animation for 100 years and be rich when they wake up.  Of course they forgot to take into account mechanical malfunction, human greed and that they are in the Twilight Zone.

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13 Mysterious Facts About “The Maltese Falcon”

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Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 13 Mysterious Facts About The Maltese Falcon.  Here are three of my favorites…

2. IT WOULDN’T EXIST IF HIGH SIERRA HADN’T BEEN A HIT.
John Huston, son of popular stage and screen actor Walter Huston, was a successful scriptwriter for Warner Bros. in the late 1930s, earning Oscar nominations for Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) and Sergeant York (1941). When he asked the Warners for a shot at directing, they agreed (and even let him choose the project himself), but only if his next script was a hit. That was High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart, directed by Raoul Walsh, and released in January 1941. Fortunately for Huston, it was a success, and the Warners kept their word. The Maltese Falcon, also starring Bogart, was shot that summer and released in the fall. It was the first of five movies Huston and Bogart would make together.

4. HUMPHREY BOGART’S ICONIC RAPID-FIRE DELIVERY WAS THE RESULT OF A STUDIO NOTE.
Detective Sam Spade had a lot of speeches, which the Warners felt tended to slow things down. They asked Huston to pick up the pace by having Bogart (and the others) talk faster. Huston, eager to please on his first film, took the note to heart and instructed everyone accordingly. When the film was a hit, the rat-a-tat pace became one of the hallmarks of film noir.

5. IT GOT AWAY WITH USING AN OBJECTIONABLE WORD, PROBABLY BECAUSE THE CENSORS WEREN’T COOL ENOUGH TO KNOW IT.
Sam Spade uses the word “gunsel” three times in reference to Wilmer, the hitman who works for Kasper Gutman, a.k.a. the Fat Man. Hammett used the same word in his novel, but only after his editor objected to the word he used first: “catamite,” which is a young man kept by an older man for sexual purposes. While Hammett’s novel identified Cairo (Peter Lorre’s character) as a homosexual and hinted at it for Wilmer and Gutman, this term was considered too explicit. Hammett replaced it with “gunsel,” which his editor assumed meant “gunslinger” or some such. But it didn’t. Gunsel—from the Yiddish word for “little goose,” and passed along in American hobo culture—was merely a synonym for “catamite,” but was too new to be familiar. Hammett got away with it in the book, and it slipped past the Production Code censors when it popped up in the screenplay. Because of Hammett’s usage, the word came to take on “gunman” as a secondary meaning. But make no mistake, it wasn’t Wilmer’s possession of a firearm that Sam Spade was referring to.

15 Incorruptible Facts About “The Shield”

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Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 15 Incorruptible Facts About The Shield.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. THE CO-CREATOR OF LOST THOUGHT THE NETWORK WOULD CHANGE THE PILOT.
Damon Lindelof, co-creator of Lost and The Leftovers, remembered reading Shawn Ryan’s pilot script for The Shield and always waiting for Vic Mackey to become an Andy Sipowicz-type, or “a good guy despite his gruff exterior.” Instead, he read the ending where Mackey murdered an Internal Affairs rat in cold blood. “And when I read that, I thought to myself, ‘Shawn Ryan will never get this ending on the air,’” Lindelof recalled to the Chicago Tribune in 2008. (Spoiler alert: Lindelof was wrong.)

4. ERIC STOLTZ WAS OFFERED THE LEAD.
Eric Stoltz was offered the lead role and—and almost took it.

5. FX EXECUTIVES WERE NOT SOLD ON MICHAEL CHIKLIS.
The network knew Chiklis for his even-tempered roles in The Commish (1991-1995) andDaddio (2000). Against his agents’ advice, Chiklis took six months off from acting and lost 57 pounds. For his The Shield audition, he shaved his head. “When I heard his name mentioned, I thought he was wrong for the role,” Kevin Reilly, FX’s then-president of entertainment told The New York Times. “I knew him as a soft, cuddly guy physically and emotionally. He came in with this shaved head and his biceps, and he just chewed through the scene. He blew us away.’

13 Riotous Facts About “V for Vendetta”

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Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 13 Riotous Facts About V for Vendetta.  Here are three of my favorites…

3. ANDY AND LANA WACHOWSKI WROTE A SCRIPT FOR V FOR VENDETTA BEFORE THEY WORKED ON THE MATRIX TRILOGY.
The Wachowskis acquired the rights to V for Vendetta in the mid-1990s, then promptly wrote their own screenplay. After directing the three Matrix films, the Wachowskis weren’t interested in returning to directing right away, but they did make alterations to their Vendetta script, including moving the story forward in time and making Evey older.

5. ALAN MOORE DECLINED TO WATCH THE FILM, OR BE CREDITED ON IT.
Moore had read the screenplay and considered it “rubbish.” Moore believed DC Comics and the film industry had knowingly stolen from him. Conversely, David Lloyd praised the movie moments after he had seen it for the first time, declaring it a “fantastic representation” of the work they did, according to McTeigue.

4. IT WAS JAMES MCTEIGUE’S DIRECTORIAL DEBUT.
James McTeigue was first assistant director on the Matrix movies, as well as on Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), and was picked by the Wachowskis to take charge. “A lot of the filmmaking process is about trust, and at the point that those guys said, ‘We want you to direct it,’ they were about trusting me to go off and give it the vision it needed to be directed with, so they kind of left me alone,” said McTeigue. “They were there if I needed them, and sometimes I’d go, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ and they’d put their two cents worth in, and I could either take it on board or leave it at the door.”

20 Things We Learned from the “Street Kings” Commentary

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Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 20 Things We Learned from the Street Kings Commentary.  Here are three of my favorites…

5.  Keanu Reeves did all of his own stunts.

11. He [Director David Ayer] recalls reading the script and being happily surprised by the turn where Ludlow’s vengeance mission against Det. Washington (Terry Crews) is interrupted by the two shooters sent to kill him. “I was caught unawares, and as a writer I’m supposed to catch this stuff ahead of time.”

16. The foot chase was filmed in a gang area, but they never had any problems during the shoot. “We were really open with the community, and we had an open set. We didn’t have security guards telling people to keep away. We let the kids in the neighborhood sort of walk through the set and look at the equipment and let people talk to us, and Keanu’s really open and really gracious and likes to hang out and talk to people. He’s not one of those guys who hides out in his trailer between takes.”

11 Lucky Facts About “Dirty Harry”

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Matthew Jackson and Mental_Floss present 11 Lucky Facts About Dirty Harry.  Here are three of my favorites…

2. FRANK SINATRA WAS SET TO STAR.
The idea that anyone but Clint Eastwood could play Harry Callahan seems strange, but a number of other stars were considered for the title role first, among them Steve McQueen, Robert Mitchum, and Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was actually attached to the film at one point, but pulled out because of an injury to his hand. So Eastwood stepped in, and the rest is history.

7. EASTWOOD DID HIS OWN STUNTS.
For the scene in which Harry chases down Scorpio, who has kidnapped a busload of children, the character is required to leap from a trestle bridge onto the top of the moving bus. If you watch the scene carefully, you’ll notice that it’s not a stuntman making the leap. Eastwood did it himself.

8. EASTWOOD DIRECTED ONE SCENE HIMSELF.
During one night of shooting, Siegel had to miss work because of the flu, leaving the production without a director. So Eastwood took over. The scene in which Harry confronts a suicidal man on the roof of a building was directed by Eastwood.

Z-View Twilight Zone: “Back There” [Season 2, Episode 13]

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Twilight Zone: “Back There” [Season 2, Episode 13]
Original Air Date: January 13, 1961

Director: David Orrick McDearmon

Writer: Rod Serling

Starring: Russell Johnson and Paul Hartman.

The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…

Pete Corrigan [Russell Johnson of Gilligan’s Island fame] spends the evening debating the possibility of time travel to the past to change events.  When he walks outside that evening Corrigan finds himself transported back in time to the evening that President Lincoln was assassinated.  With little time to spare, can Corrigan change history?

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Z-View Twilight Zone: “A Most Unusual Camera” [Season 2, Episode 10]

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Twilight Zone: “A Most Unusual Camera” [Season 2, Episode 10]
Original Air Date: December 16, 1960

Director: John Rich

Writer: Rod Serling

Starring: Fred Clark, Jean Carson and Adam Williams.

The Overview:  Beware of Spoilers…

When a husband and wife team who are small time hustlers get their hands on a camera that takes photos that are five minutes in the future, they head to the race track to get rich. All is good until the brother-in-law shows up.

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18 Fascinating Facts About “The Crow”

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Erin McCarthy and Mental_Floss present 18 Fascinating Facts About The Crow.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. IT’S BASED ON A COMIC BOOK, WHICH WAS INSPIRED BY TWO TRAGEDIES.
In 1981, 21-year-old James O’Barr was drawing combat manuals in the Marines when he decided to start The Crow. He hoped it would be a healthy way of dealing with the death of his fiancée, who had been killed by a drunk driver. “I tried all the typical angst-ridden outlets, like substance abuse and going to clubs or parties every night and just basically trying to keep yourself numb for as long a period of time as possible,” O’Barr told The Baltimore Sun in 1994. “Eventually I was smart enough to realize that that was a dead end, and so I thought perhaps putting something down on paper I could exorcise some of that anger.”

Pivotal to his comic book’s plotline was another tragedy O’Barr heard about: A couple killed over an engagement ring. “I thought it was outlandish, a $30 ring, two lives wasted,” he said in a book about the production called The Crow: The Movie. “That became the beginning of the focal point, and the idea that there could be a love so strong that it could transcend death, that it could refuse death, and this soul would not rest until it could set things right.”

 

4. THE PRODUCERS KNEW WHO THEY WANTED TO DIRECT AND STAR.
Pressman had Alex Proyas, an Australian director who at that point had helmed music videos and commercials, but no features, in mind to direct The Crow. Though Proyas was very much in demand in Hollywood, he was waiting for the right project—and The Crow was it. He signed on in 1991.

The producers first looked at musicians to fill the role of Eric Draven, among them Charlie Sexton, a rocker from Texas. But ultimately, their first choice was Brandon Lee. At that point, Lee—son of famed actor/martial artist Bruce Lee—had appeared in a few films, but hadn’t had a breakout role yet. “We had considered some more established actors and we were concerned that certain of these actors did not have the athletic ability,” Pressman said in The Crow: The Movie. “Other people had the athletic ability but not the acting talents. Brandon combined it all. When Brandon walked into this office, it was an immediate flash. We knew we had our Eric Draven that instant.”

17. O’BARR DONATED MOST OF HIS PROFITS FROM THE FILM TO CHARITY.
O’Barr bought his mom a car, and a surround system for himself, then donated the rest. “I was really good friends with Brandon, so it just felt like blood money to me,” he said at a comics convention in 2009. “I didn’t want to profit at his expense. And I kept that secret for as long as I could. It’s not charity if you get credit for it.”

Z-View Twilight Zone: “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room” [Season 2, Episode 3]

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Twilight Zone: “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room” [Season 2, Episode 3]
Original Air Date: October 14, 1960

Director: Douglas Hayes

Writer: Rod Serling

Starring: Joe Mantell and William D. Gordon.

The Overview:  Beware of Spoilers…

Jackie Rhoades [Mantell] is a cheap hood nervously waiting in a flop house hotel room for his next job. His boss [Gordon] shows up with the job — to murder a bar owner refusing to pay his debts.

Rhoades argues that he’s not a killer, but the boss gives him no choice and leaves.  Rhoades begins to talk to himself in the mirror looking for a way out… suddenly his reflection begins to talk back to him and may have an idea!

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