12 Nosy Facts About “Chinatown”

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Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 12 Nosy Facts About Chinatown.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. IT WOULDN’T EXIST IF ROBERT TOWNE HADN’T BEEN FRIENDS WITH JACK NICHOLSON. 
The screenwriter and the actor were good friends, even roommates at one point, and they’d studied acting together. Towne has said repeatedly that he wrote the lead role specifically for Nicholson: “I could not have written that character without knowing Jack.” Furthermore, it was while visiting Nicholson in Oregon, where he was directing Drive, He Said, that Towne started reading Raymond Chandler detective novels and a book about the history of California water rights, all of which led to Chinatown.

9. WE DON’T KNOW ANYTHING THAT J.J. GITTES DOESN’T KNOW. 
This is the sort of detail that’s either “well, duh” obvious, or that blows your mind a little when you realize it. The film is entirely from Gittes’ point of view: he’s in every scene, and there’s no information that we learn before he does. When he gets a phone call, we hear the voice but don’t see the person at the other end. When he gets knocked unconscious in the orange grove, the movie fades with him, fading back in when he wakes up. To emphasize the point that we’re seeing everything from Gittes’ perspective, Polanski often put the camera behind Nicholson, so we see his back and shoulders. Watch for it.

12. THERE’S A RECURRING VISUAL MOTIF THAT SHOWS UP OVER AND OVER—AND IT’S THERE ACCIDENTALLY.
Chinatown frequently shows us images of two things that are identical, except that one is flawed: Two pocket watches side by side, one broken. A pair of eyeglasses, one lens cracked. Gittes’ nostrils, one sliced. Gittes smashes one taillight on Evelyn’s car. He loses one shoe in the reservoir. Evelyn has a flaw in one of her irises. Katherine looks like a duplicate of Evelyn, but is the product of incest. The list goes on. But when Towne is asked about this on the DVD commentary, he says it was totally unintentional; he and Polanski never discussed using such images as a recurring theme. Whatever meaning we may ascribe to the symbolism, the filmmakers didn’t put it there on purpose.

15 Fab Facts About “Help!”

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Sarene Leeds and Mental_Floss present 15 Fab Facts About Help!  Here are three of my favorites…

1. HELP! WAS ALMOST CALLED EIGHT ARMS TO HOLD YOU.
At first listen, “Eight Arms to Hold You” sounds like a nice idea: who wouldn’t want to be held by all four Beatles, right? But when Lester reveals that the Ringo Starr-suggested title was in fact a reference to the multi-armed statue of Kaili that appears in the film, and not a teenage girl’s fantasy of being cradled by The Fab Four, much of the romantic element fades away. In the book accompanying the film’s 2007 DVD re-release, Lester claims that he had wanted to call the movie Help from the get-go, but the title had already been registered. Luckily, thanks to The Beatles’ lack of enthusiasm to write a song called “Eight Arms to Hold You” and a legal loophole involving an exclamation point, the film was able to proceed as Help!

3. THE MOVIE’S INTERNATIONAL LOCALES WERE REALLY JUST AN EXCUSE FOR THE BEATLES TO TRAVEL.
While A Hard Day’s Night stuck to the familiarity of London, Help! was a veritable travelogue, sending The Beatles to such far-flung destinations as the Bahamas and the Austrian Alps in their attempts to evade the evil Clang (Leo McKern) and his cult of Eastern sycophants. But as Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr revealed in Anthology interviews, the film’s travel budget was increased mainly because they wanted to go to the aforementioned locales. McCartney recalled how they would say to the writers, “We’ve never been to the Bahamas—could you write that in?” and “I’ve never been skiing. I wonder if you could write in a scene with skiing?”

But The Beatles learned the consequences of their actions the hard way: the weather in the Bahamas was freezing at the time (“It was absolutely bloody cold,” said Starr), and their crash course in skiing consisted of, according to the drummer, little more than being “edged down the mountain.”

10. THE MUSICAL NOTES IN THE “TICKET TO RIDE” SEQUENCE WERE PRODUCED OUT OF NECESSITY RATHER THAN CREATIVITY.

There’s a cute moment in the “Ticket to Ride” sequence where The Beatles are skiing in the Austrian Alps and they appear to ski right underneath part of the song’s musical score (it starts at around 1:27 in the above video). But as Lester explained in the 2007 documentary that accompanied the film’s DVD release, the decision to add musical notes came from the fact that the lads were skiing under some unsightly “telegraph wires” (Lester’s words; for all we know they could’ve been telephone wires). Since he couldn’t remove the wires digitally—this was the pre-CGI era, after all—he figured they’d make an ideal musical staff instead!

22 Fresh Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”

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Hollywood.com presents 22 Fresh Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.   Here are three of my favorites…

1.  The show was nearly canceled after the fourth season.  During the season finale, Will returns to Philly with the Banks to visit his mom and he decides to stay. Fresh Prince fans were so outraged by the show’s cancellation that NBC brought it back for two additional seasons.

7. Will Smith would memorize and mouth the other actors’ lines so that he could remember his own. If you look closely you can see him doing this in various episodes.

12. Alfonso Ribero who plays Carlton Banks in the series credits Eddie Murphy’s “white man dance” in Delirious and Courteney Cox in Bruce Spingsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” video for his iconic Carlton Dance.

Big Beatty, Mitch Hyman and the Infinity Toy and Comic Show

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I spent the day yesterday with my buddy, John Beatty at the Infinity Toy and Comic Show in Orlando, Florida.  When Big John wasn’t selling prints of his art or signing autographs for fans, much of the day was spent conversing with Mitch Hyman [in the photo above].  I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much.

The Infinity Toy and Comic Show had a nice turnout and some surprisingly great cosplayers [for such a small show].  The show was big enough that it took up three hotel meeting rooms — and that may have been the biggest downside.  I generally prefer one room for shows and my guess is most folks do as well.  That aside (and it is a small quibble), the Infinity Toy and Comic Show made for a fun day.  Of course hanging with Beatty and Hyman didn’t hurt either.

15 Fiery Facts About “Barton Fink”

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Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 15 Fiery Facts About Barton Fink.

1. THE COEN BROTHERS WROTE IT WHILE STUCK ON MILLER’S CROSSING.
Writer-director siblings Joel and Ethan found themselves struggling with the script for their next project, 1990’s Miller’s Crossing, so spent three weeks writing a movie about a screenwriter with writer’s block. From the beginning, they knew that they wanted John Turturro involved in Barton Fink, and they planned to feature the concept of a “huge abandoned hotel.”

14. IT FORCED THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL TO CHANGE THEIR RULES.
Barton Fink won the Palme d’Or, Best Director, and Best Actor honors at Cannes. Because of the hat trick, the rules were changed so that no movie could ever win all three awards again.

15. THERE MIGHT BE A SEQUEL.
Joel said it would be called Old Fink, and they’re waiting for Turturro to be old enough to play Fink in 1967, after turning friends over to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

“The Six” by George Pelecanos & Andrew Ewington and Mack Chater

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I am going to be all over this one.

From master author George Pelecanos, (HBO’s The Wire, The Pacific, Treme), comes a searing tale of warfare at its worst and fighting soldiers at their best. When the wife of a former Marine buddy finds herself a target of a vicious Mexican cartel, she ends up turning to her husband’s old squad for help. Sergeant James McQuade and five former members of the Five-One Sand Scorpions find themselves outnumbered and outgunned against the most lethal and unpredictable enemy they ever went head-to-head with.  It was someone else’s war but it was their fight.  Just the way they like it.

The Six, written by George Pelecanos with Andrew Ewington, art by Mack Chater  from Michael Bay‘s 451 Media Group this November.

Source: Bleeding Cool.

21 True Facts About “The Matrix”

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Who besides my wife doesn’t love The Matrix?

Hollywood.com presents 21 True Facts About The Matrix.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. The Wachowskis risked the film’s entire budget just to make it the way they wanted. 

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The original budget that the Wachowskis pitched Warner Bros. was over $80 million. Warner gave them $10 million, so they used all of it on the opening sequence with Trinity. The opening scene impressed executives at Warner so much when they showed it, they green-lit the original budget.

2. The film differentiates the Matrix and the real world through color.

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The scenes that take place within the Matrix are tinted green; those that happen in the real world have more of a normal coloring. The fight scene between Neo and Morpheus has a yellow tint, since it takes place in neither.

12. Other actors considered to play Neo were Nicolas Cage, Tom Cruise, and Leonardo DiCaprio.

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Thankfully, Keanu won out. He’s really the only Neo we can imagine. #canttouchthis