Category: Trivia

14 Colorful Facts About “Reservoir Dogs”

Posted on by

Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 14 Colorful Facts About Reservoir Dogs.  Here are three of my favorites…

11. A MISTAKE LED TO ONE OF THE FILM’S MYSTERIES.
In the climactic showdown, Joe’s pointing a gun at Mr. Orange (on the floor, already dying), Mr. White is pointing a gun at Joe, and Nice Guy Eddie (Joe’s son, played by Chris Penn) is pointing a gun at Mr. White. Joe shoots Orange, White shoots Joe, Eddie shoots White … butfour gunshots are heard, and everyone who wasn’t already on the ground ends up that way. So who shot Nice Guy Eddie? (You can find T-shirts asking that question.) The only logical answer, and the way it was supposed to have played out, is that Mr. White did. He shot Joe, then shot Eddie at the same time Eddie was shooting him. But according to Chris Penn, when they filmed it, the squib on Keitel’s (Mr. White’s) body went off slightly prematurely, Keitel went down as he fired his second shot (which looks like it’s still aimed at Joe), and then Penn’s squib exploded as planned. Penn noticed right away that it was ambiguous, but Tarantino decided to leave it that way.

4. IT WENT THROUGH SEVERAL CASTING PERMUTATIONS.
In the early stages, Tarantino was going to play Mr. Pink himself, with producer Lawrence Bender as Nice Guy Eddie. Steve Buscemi was later considered for Nice Guy Eddie, but ended up playing Mr. Pink, a role for which Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde) auditioned. Samuel L. Jackson and Ving Rhames both almost played Holdaway (the cop Tim Roth works with in flashbacks). Robert Forster, who later appeared in QT’s Jackie Brown, auditioned for the part of Joe, which went to Lawrence Tierney.

5. THERE WERE SOME UNUSUAL OFFERS FROM PRODUCERS.
While searching for producers to finance the film and save them from having to make it themselves on a minuscule budget, Tarantino and Bender fielded several offers that sounded good but had a catch to them. One producer offered $1.6 million, but only if the ending was changed so that everyone who was dead came back to life, the whole thing having been a hoax or a con of some kind. Another offered $500,000 … but only if his girlfriend could play Mr. Blonde. (Bender said it was such a bizarre idea that he and Tarantino actually considered it.)

Good Grief! 18 Beloved Facts About Peanuts

Posted on by

Shaunacy Ferro and Mental_Floss present Good Grief! 18 Beloved Facts About Peanuts.  Here are three of my favorites…

2. THERE ARE 17,897 STRIPS. 
They ran between 1950 and 2000, each one drawn by Schulz. Schulz died from colon cancer at age 77, the day before the last original strip ran.

3. SCHULZ DIDN’T CHOOSE THE NAME.
Charlie Brown first appeared as a character in a comic strip called Li’l Folks, but when Schulz approached the United Feature Syndicate about a publishing deal in 1950, the syndication service thought the name was too close to two other comics it ran at the time, and changed itto Peanuts. Schulz never liked the new moniker; he thought it “made it sound too insignificant.”

14. CHARLIE BROWN’S HEAD IS REALLY HARD TO DRAW.
When asked about the hardest character trait to ink, Paige Braddock, the creative director of Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates, admitted that Charlie Brown’s noggin is the most complicated piece to pull off. “It is nearly impossible to get right when you first start working with the characters, and if it is off in the least, it really stands out,” she says in The Art and Making of the Peanuts Movie. Braddock is currently responsible for the look of all Peanuts-related products.

10 Operatic Facts About “Bohemian Rhapsody”

Posted on by

Kara Kovalchik and Mental_Floss present 10 Operatic Facts About Bohemian Rhapsody.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. FREDDIE MERCURY STARTED WRITING IT IN 1968.
“Bohemian Rhapsody”, or “Bo Rhap” as it is known by Queen fans, had its beginnings in 1968 when Freddie Mercury was a student at London’s Ealing Art College. He’d come up with an opening line—“Mama, just killed a man”—but no melody. Because of the Old West feel (in his mind) to the lyric, he referred to his work in progress as “The Cowboy Song.”

6. PROMOTING THE SONG PROVED PROBLEMATIC.
After it was decided to release “Bohemian Rhapsody” as a single, the band was faced with a bit of a dilemma: At the time in England, it was traditional for bands to appear on shows like Top of the Pops to promote their latest hits. But Queen was scheduled to begin a tour soon, plus (as Brian May admitted) they’d feel self-conscious miming to the operatic section. They solved the problem by filming a promotional film, or “pop promo” as it was called in the industry lingo of the time, that could be shown not only on UK music shows, but also around the world in other markets, such as American Bandstand.

10. A BLUE VINYL PRESSING OF THE SONG IS WORTH MORE THAN $5000.
The Holy Grail in terms of Queen collectibles is a 7-inch limited edition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that was pressed in blue vinyl. In the summer of 1978, EMI Records won the Queen’s Award To Industry For Export Achievement (that’s “Queen” as in Her Majesty Elizabeth II). The label’s primary reason for sales in far-reaching territories that lacked manufacturing facilities was Queen, as in the band. To celebrate their prestigious award, EMI pressed 200 copies of “Bohemian Rhapsody” in blue vinyl, each of which was hand-numbered. Numbers one through four went to the band members, of course, while other low-numbered copies were given to friends and family members. Bona fide copies from this original pressing currently sell for upwards of $5000.

The Best Cities for Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

Posted on by

Ok, so the zombie apocalypse breaks out… where do you go?

Kiona Smith-Strickland and Gizmodo might have the answers in These Are the Best Cities for Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse.  The worst cities are also listed.

Neither my home town [Port Orange, Florida] nor my birth town [Terre Haute, Ind.] made the best cities for survival list.  Of course they also managed to stay off the worst cities list as well.  So I do have that going for me.

7 of the Creepiest Coincidences in Movie History

Posted on by

Hollywood.com provides us with 7 of the Creepiest Coincidences in Movie History.  I thought this was the creepiest of the bunch…

3. Poltergeist
In the classic horror film, Poltergeist, there’s a poster hanging above Robbie’s bed that reads “1988 Superbowl XXII”

You’d expect a little kid to a have a football poster up in his room, but what makes this weird is the fact Poltergeist was released in 1982, but Superbowl XXII wouldn’t be played for another six years.

So why did they use a poster from a future game? Well, no one really knows, but on January 31, 1988, the day Superbowl XXII was held, Heather O’Rourke (the actress who played Robbie’s younger sister) became violently ill. She passed away the next day at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, less than five miles away from Jack Murphy Stadium where Super Bowl XXII was played.

12 Fiendishly Fun Facts About “The Munsters”

Posted on by

Kara Kovalchik and Mental_Floss present 12 Fiendishly Fun Facts About The Munsters.  Here are three of my favorites…

2. THE CHOICE OF MONSTER CHARACTERS WAS STRICTLY INTENTIONAL (AND ROYALTY-FREE).
Universal Studios owned Universal Television, which owned The Munsters. Universal Studios also owned the copyrights to most of the classic monsters, including Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein’s monster. The studio had been running their old classic horror films on television since the 1950s and found that there was still an impressive audience for these decades-old monster movies. When Connelly and Mosher pitched their series idea, CBS executives knew that they had one advantage that ABC lacked with The Addams Family: the ability to use the Universal monster characters. The Munsters regularly topped The Addams Family in the ratings, mainly because of the instant identifiability of (and built-in fan base for) Dracula, Frankenstein’s bride, et al.

10. HERMAN’S COSTUME WAS A PERSONAL TORTURE CHAMBER FOR FRED GWYNNE.
Even though Gwynne would eventually reminisce that Herman was one of his favorite characters, the time he spent on The Munsters set was often fairly miserable, thanks to the various devices necessary to transform him into the lovable Frankenstein monster. On his feet he wore asphalt paver’s boots with four-inch soles, and his thighs, arms, and torso were covered in 40 pounds of foam rubber padding. He contended with back pain daily caused by the weight of the suit and inflexibility of the shoes. His head was fitted with a foam latex piece to flatten the top of his head and then he had to endure two hours in the makeup chair. He perspired freely under the heavy costume and hot studio lights and lost 10 pounds in one month despite consuming gallons of lemonade between takes. The producers eventually rented a compressed air tank and would poke the nozzle inside Gwynne’s collar to blow cool air on him.

11. THE COSTUME HAD ONE BENEFIT: IT EXCUSED GWYNNE FROM PERSONAL APPEARANCES.
As The Munsters gained popularity, its stars received more and more requests to appear at various functions. The producers, of course, sent the actors out as often as possible since such appearances not only promoted the show, they also propelled the sales of the variousMunsters merchandise that saturated the market at the time. Only Fred Gwynne was able to relax on his days off (for the most part), since the time and expense required to get him into character outweighed the publicity value of cutting ribbons at supermarket openings. One of the rare times he played Herman in public was alongside Al Lewis in the 1964 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Gwynne confessed to TV Guide that he’d been taking slugs from a bottle of whiskey the entire time, because he “had to get bombed so I could say ‘hello’ to the little kiddies for 40 blocks.”

13 Foreboding Facts About “The Omen”

Posted on by

Stacy Conradt and Mental_Floss present 13 Foreboding Facts About The Omen.  Here are three of my favorites…

9. GREGORY PECK AND RICHARD DONNER HAD ONE ARGUMENT DURING FILMING.
Peck wanted to angrily smash a bunch of stuff during the scene where Robert finds out his wife has died. Donner disagreed; he wanted to cut in on Thorn well after the discovery, not in the moment. According to Donner, he and Peck argued about the scene for an entire day before Peck told him, “You’re wrong. I’m right. But you’re the director, and therefore I have to do it your way.” After the scene was shot, Peck reviewed the dailies and conceded that Donner had been right about how to film Thorn’s reaction.

11. THE MOVIE CAME WITH A TERRIFYING AD CAMPAIGN.
To promote the movie, gloom-and-doom posters and promotional materials went up all over the U.S. They contained uplifting messages such as:

  • “Good morning. You are one day closer to the end of the world.”
  • “Remember … you have been warned.”
  • “It is a warning foretold for thousands of years. It is our final warning. It is The Omen.

 

12. THE PRODUCTION MAY HAVE BEEN CURSED.
Like many other horror movies, some spooky things happened to the cast and crew that made them wonder if they had angered some higher power. Here are just a few of the incidents:

  • Peck, writer David Seltzer, and executive producer Mace Neufeld were on planes that were struck by lightning or had a near-miss.

  • The crew had planned to charter a plane to get some aerial shots, but had to switch at the last minute due to a scheduling conflict. The original plane ended up crashing, killing everyone on it.

  • Director Richard Donner’s hotel was bombed by the IRA the day after they shot the safari park scene.

  • A zookeeper at the safari park was killed in the lion area, which also happened the day after filming.

  • The stuntman standing in for Peck was attacked by Rottweilers during the graveyard scene; they managed to bite through the protective gear he was wearing.

  • After the film wrapped, special effects director John Richardson and his assistant, Liz Moore, moved on to the film A Bridge Too Far. While filming in the Netherlands, the duo was in a serious car accident. Richardson survived, but Moore was decapitated. This was especially eerie since Richardson was responsible for the infamous decapitation scene in The Omen.

10 Things You May Not Know About Teddy Roosevelt

Posted on by

Christopher Klein and History.com present 10 Things You May Not Know About Teddy Roosevelt.  Here are three of my favorites…

His mother and his first wife died on the same day.

On Valentine’s Day in 1884, Roosevelt’s mother passed away from typhoid fever. One floor above in the same house, his first wife, Alice, died less than 12 hours later from Bright’s disease and complications from giving birth to the couple’s first child just two days before. “The light has gone out of my life,” Roosevelt wrote in his diary that night.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The man famed for his exploits at San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War and “Big Stick” diplomacy captured the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in mediating the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese War. Roosevelt was the first American to capture the award, and he used the prize money to fund a trust to promote industrial peace.

A boxing accident left him virtually blind in one eye.

Roosevelt boxed for Harvard University’s intramural lightweight championship and continued to spar recreationally during his political career. During his days in the White House, he regularly put up his dukes against former professional boxers and other sparring partners until a punch from a young artillery officer smashed a blood vessel and left him nearly blind in his left eye.

15 Rapid Facts About “Speed”

Posted on by

Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 15 Rapid Facts About Speed.  Here are three of my favorites…

4. STEPHEN BALDWIN TURNED DOWN PLAYING JACK.
In addition to that Baldwin brother, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Wesley Snipes, and Woody Harrelson were all approached to play the lead. Director Jan de Bont thought Keanu Reeves was a great fit after seeing him in Point Break.

5. HALLE BERRY TURNED DOWN PLAYING ANNIE.
Berry wasn’t interested, nor were Meryl Streep or Kim Basinger. Yost wanted Ellen DeGeneres for the role (DeGeneres recently claimed she was never officially asked.) Demolition Man star Sandra Bullock won the role, and was paid $200,000.

13. IT TESTED THROUGH THE ROOF.
At a test screening, some audience members walked up the aisles backward so that they would miss as little of the movie as possible before going to the bathroom. It helped convince 20th Century Fox to move up the release date from August to June.

16 Repeatable Facts About “Groundhog Day”

Posted on by

Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 16 Repeatable Facts About Groundhog Day.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. TOM HANKS AND MICHAEL KEATON TURNED DOWN PLAYING PHIL.
Hanks was busy, and figured if he starred in the film audiences would just expect him to become nice because he’s always nice anyway. Keaton didn’t understand the script. He admitted to regretting the decision.

13. NOBODY REALLY KNOWS HOW LONG MURRAY WAS STUCK IN THE SAME DAY.
Ramis refuted an earlier estimate of 10 years, guessing in 2009 it was more like “30 to 40 years.” In Rubin’s original script, Murray was looping for 10,000 years, and he marked the time by reading one page in one of the B&B’s library books every day.

16. MURRAY AND RAMIS’ FRIENDSHIP FELL APART ONCE FILMING ENDED.
Ramis admitted that his old friend and fellow Stripes and Ghostbusters star was “really irrationally mean and unavailable” at times, and often late to set, though he attributed the behavior to a divorce Murray was going through at the time. Outside of a few words at one wake and one bar mitzvah, Murray stopped speaking entirely to Ramis for 20 years, only to finally bury the hatchet on Ramis’ death bed before he passed away from complications due to autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis in 2014.

9 Mournful Facts About Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”

Posted on by

Joy Lanzendorfer and Mental_Floss present 9 Mournful Facts About Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. AS POE WAS WRITING THE POEM, HIS WIFE WAS DEATHLY ILL. 
When Poe was writing “The Raven,” his wife, Virginia, was suffering from tuberculosis. It was a weird marriage—Virginia was Poe’s first cousin and only 13 years old when they married—but there’s no doubt that Poe loved her deeply. Having lost his mother, brother, and foster mother to tuberculosis, he knew the toll the disease would take. “The Raven” is a poem written by a man who’d lost many loved ones, and was soon expecting to lose one more.

6. “THE RAVEN” WAS AN IMMEDIATE HIT.
After Graham’s Magazine rejected the poem, Poe published it in The American Review under the pseudonym “Quarles.” In January 1845, it came out in The New York Mirror under Poe’s real name. Around the country, it was reprinted, reviewed, and otherwise immortalized. It soon became so ubiquitous, it was used in advertising.

And then there were the parodies. Within a month after “The Raven” came out, there was a parody poem, “The Owl,” written by “Sarles.” Others soon followed, including “The Whippoorwill,” “The Turkey,” “The Gazelle,” and “The Parrot.” You can read many of themhere. Abraham Lincoln found one parody, “The Polecat,” so hilarious that he decided to look up “The Raven.” He ended up memorizing the poem.

7. “THE RAVEN” MADE POE INTO A CELEBRITY …
Poe was soon so recognizable that children followed him in the street, flapping their arms and cawing. Then he’d turn around and say, “nevermore!” and they would run away, shrieking. Trying to capitalize off this fame, he gave lectures that included dramatic readings of the poem. They were apparently something to see. His lecture was “a rhapsody of the most intense brilliancy … He kept us entranced for two hours and a half,” said one attendee. Yet another said that Poe would turn down the lamps and recite “those wonderful lines in the most melodious of voice.” Another said, “To hear him repeat ‘The Raven,’ which he does very quietly, is an event in one’s life.”

The 100 Greatest Horror Movies of All Time

Posted on by

Hitfix polled more than 100 luminaries for the world of horror to come up with their list of The 100 Greatest Horror Movies of All Time. 

Here’s their top ten and my comments on each…

1. “The Exorcist” (1973; d. William Friedkin):  While it’s hard to argue with the popularity of The Exorcist as the greatest horror movie of all time – it is arguably the scariest – I’d put Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in the number one spot.

2. “The Shining” (1980; d. Stanley Kubrick): I like Kubrick’s take on Stephen King’s novel [even if King doesn’t] but it wouldn’t make my top ten.

3. “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974; d. Tobe Hooper): Texas Chainsaw Massacre wouldn’t make my top ten… or top 50.

4. “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968; d. Roman Polanski): I’d like to see this one again.  I liked it when I saw it, but the last time was years ago.  I wonder if it would hold up.  The fact that it placed so high on the list indicates it would.

5. “Alien” (1979; d. Ridley Scott): I prefer Aliens.

6. “The Thing” (1982; d. John Carpenter): Yeah, I love that people are coming around to love this film.  It was ahead of its time.

7. “Halloween” (1978; d. John Carpenter): Love the love that John Carpenter received on this list!

8. “Psycho” (1960; d. Alfred Hitchcock): A classic!

9. “Night of the Living Dead” (1968; d. George A. Romero): You know I love this movie!

10. “Jaws” (1975; d. Steven Spielberg): Jaws is a great film but I always have a bit of trouble placing it in the horror category.

25 “Titanic” Facts You Never Knew

Posted on by

Hollywood.com presents 25 Titanic Facts You Never Knew.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. The movie features 2 hours and 40 minutes of scenes set in 1912. This is the exact amount of time the Titanic took to sink.

GIPHY/Peculiargroove.Tumblr.Com

The film also has 37 seconds between the iceberg warning and the actual collision, which is the same amount of time that transpired in real life.

3. It was the first movie to receive two Academy Award nominations for the same character.

GIPHY/Fyeah80s-90s.Tumblr.Com

Both Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart were nominated (Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively) for playing the role of Rose. The next time two actors were nominated for playing the same role was 2001’s Iris, also starring Winslet.

8. And Jack’s ice-fishing story is a Titanic survivor’s quote about the North Atlantic water.

Secretwithinsecrets.Tumblr.Com

He was dissuading Rose not to jump off the back of the boat, in the scene where they meet.

40 Fascinating Facts About Your Favorite Horror Movies

Posted on by

Mental_Floss presents 40 Fascinating Facts About Your Favorite Horror Movies.  Here are three of my favorites…

5. STEPHEN KING WASN’T A FAN OF THE SHINING.
In 1983, Stephen King told Playboy, “I’d admired [Stanley] Kubrick for a long time and had great expectations for the project, but I was deeply disappointed in the end result. Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fell flat.”

King didn’t like the casting of Jack Nicholson either, claiming, “Jack Nicholson, though a fine actor, was all wrong for the part. His last big role had been in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and between that and the manic grin, the audience automatically identified him as a loony from the first scene. But the book is about Jack Torrance’s gradual descent into madness through the malign influence of the Overlook—if the guy is nuts to begin with, then the entire tragedy of his downfall is wasted.”

24. GENE HACKMAN WAS SLATED TO STAR IN—AND DIRECT—THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.
Gene Hackman and Orion Pictures split the $500,000 needed for the movie rights to the book. But Hackman dropped out days after he watched clips of himself at the 1989 Oscars as FBI Agent Alan Parker in the violent Mississippi Burning, deciding not to follow up a dark role with an even more unlikeable character.

38. SISSY SPACEK WAS ADAMANT THAT HER OWN HAND APPEAR INCARRIE’S FINAL SCENE.
Though Brian De Palma wanted to get a stunt person for the final scene, where Sue Snell visits Carrie’s grave, Spacek insisted that it needed to be her hand that was shown, which required her to be buried in the ground. “I laughed about that,” Spacek told NPR. “I do all my own foot and hand work, and always have.”

10 Aquatic Facts About “Creature from the Black Lagoon”

Posted on by

Mark Mancini and Mental_Floss present 10 Aquatic Facts About Creature from the Black Lagoon.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. THE MOVIE’S CONCEPT WAS CONCEIVED AT A CITIZEN KANE DINNER PARTY.
One night during filming of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles invited one of the movie’s actors, William Alland, over for dinner along with a cinematographer named Gabriel Figueroa. While there, Figueroa shared a story he had heard during his travels of a race of amphibious beasts—half man, half reptile—that stalked the Amazon River. More than a decade later, still intrigued by the concept, Alland dramatized it by producing Creature from the Black Lagoon.

4. A FORMER FRANKENSTEIN ACTOR TURNED DOWN THE MAIN ROLE.
When Boris Karloff retired from playing Mary Shelley’s reanimated monster, Glenn Strange took over. From 1944 to 1948, Strange terrified audiences in Universal’s House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. Years later, the studio tapped him to play their web-footed “Gillman” in Creature from the Black Lagoon, but because swimming wasn’t his forte, Strange declined the part.

9. ITS 1955 SEQUEL WAS CLINT EASTWOOD’S FIRST MOVIE.  
Pleased by the box office success of the original film, Universal rushed a sequel production.  Revenge of the Creature premiered in Denver on March 23, 1955. At one point, audiences got to see future star Clint Eastwood portraying a lab assistant. Though his appearance was uncredited, it hardly went unnoticed when the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed  Revenge of the Creature in a 1997 episode:

For Revenge of the Creature, Arnold resumed directing duties and he didn’t care for the young Eastwood’s bit, telling Alland, “I told you I don’t want to do that ******* scene!” Eventually, he relented and the footage stayed in. Eastwood never forgot the experience. As he told The Telegraph, “It was a hell of a way to start your acting career: walk on a set and you know that the director hates the scene. Therefore you know he hates you.”