Hey, wanna take a look inside the prop house at Universal Studios? You won’t believe all the stuff they have stuffed away to use in movies! Unreality magazine has a gallery of photos from the warehouse. Some of it is real, some is made just for the movies, but if they do their job right, you’ll never know which is which! Link

Most people are probably too distracted by one of the finest opening shots in film to actually contemplate how it was achieved.

After all, it’s an impressive special effect for 1979. How did they go about making it look like a huge section of forest had been burned to the ground?

Surprise! They did it by actually burning a huge section of forest to the ground.

That’s pretty much it. Around 1,200 gallons of gasoline were poured over the splendid palm trees and then set alight. Tires were also burned to generate more smoke for the shot, while canisters were dropped onto the area to look like falling napalm. Acres of the forest were destroyed in a matter of seconds. Fitting, for a shot that was supposed to visually demonstrate the mindless, indiscriminate destruction of war.

But that’s just the beginning. Read stories of four other disturbing movie shoots at Cracked. Link

The camera was refurbished back to its original state, was said to be in full working order, and now the new owner can get to work filming Episode 4 all over again! Just kidding, but wouldn’t it be hilarious if someone bought the camera then remade such a beloved movie?

Link

No matter how much you love or hate these celebrities, you never want to see them this close up, believe me.

Some of the images in this gallery will give you a good laugh, others are the stuff nightmares are made of (Iggy Pop). Check out the rest of the gallery at the link below. I didn’t realize that Zooey Deschanel is so fuzzy!

Link

The newspapers never questioned Delmont’s version of events, and they kept flogging Arbuckle. His reputation was in a shambles, even after his friends Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin vouched for his character.

But Arbuckle’s lawyers introduced medical evidence showing that Rappe had had a chronic bladder condition, and her autopsy concluded that there “were no marks of violence on the body, no signs that the girl had been attacked in any way.” (The defense also had witnesses with damaging information about Rappe’s past, but Arbuckle wouldn’t let them testify, he said, out of respect for the dead.) The doctor who treated Rappe at the hotel testified that she had told him Arbuckle did not try to sexually assault her, but the prosecutor got the point dismissed as hearsay.

No matter what happened in court, Arbuckle also went through “trial by newspaper.” Find out what happened to Fatty Arbuckle, legally and professionally, at Past Imperfect. Link

This funky Frankenstein sculpture looks good enough to eat! Created as part of the It’s Alive Project, this is one of 80 busts created by different artists striving to show the monster in a different light. Look out for the FrankenBieber, and the hilarious FrankenSpock!

Link

A few years ago one of our BRI writers saw the classic 1931 horror film Dracula for the first time …and thought it was terrible. He never knew there was a story behind why the film had so many problems -or even that other people agreed with him that this Hollywood classic was flawed- until he came across this story in a book called Hollywood Gothic by David J. Skal, a leading authority on the history of monster movies.

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

One of the nice things about silent films is that everyone can understand them, regardless of what language they speak. Of course, they needed title cards to help explain the plot, but it was easy -and cheap- to write new cards for each foreign market.

As a result American films found their way into countries all over the world, and silent films became a truly universal art form: American studios made half of their revenues from foreign film sales; silent screen stars like Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan became the most recognized human beings on the face of the earth.

SILENT TREATMENT

But the advent of talking pictures changed everything -and not just for silent-screen stars whose thick accents quickly consigned them to the Hollywood scrap heap. Suddenly, American films became incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t speak English. American film studios faced the prospect of losing up to half of their business overnight.

Bela Lugosi

Foreign countries that had become used to a steady stream of Hollywood films found themselves left out in the cold; some threatened to retaliate by slapping tariffs on films with dialogue in English, or by boycotting American films entirely.

Making matters worse, sound recording and synchronization technology was still very primitive, and dubbing foreign-language dialogue onto English-language films was all but impossible. Besides, one of the things that attracted audiences to the first “talkies” was the thrill of hearing their favorite actors speak for the very first time. Even if dubbing had been practical, it might not have been very popular. There was no easy solution to the problem, and as a result many foreign language markets were left out of the early years of the talkie era -except for the Spanish-language market. Spanish was too popular, and Mexico, Central, and South America were too close for Hollywood to ignore.

THE DOPPELGÄNGER ERA

No film crew works 24 hours a day. At some point everyone goes home, leaving the soundstage and the expensive sets unused until morning. So, reasoned Hollywood studios, why not bring in a second cast and crew at night to film foreign-language versions of the same films that were being made in English during the day?

Because the sets had already been constructed and second-string actors and crews could be hired for much less money than Hollywood stars, a film like Dracula that had cost nearly $450,000 to film in English during the day could be remade in Spanish at night for as little as $40,000. By 1930, nearly all of the major studios had begun filming Spanish “doppelgänger” films at night.

GRAVEYARD SHIFT

Lupita Tovar

Universal Pictures was one of the last major studios to adopt the idea, when it filmed Spanish and English versions of the film The Cat Creeps in 1930. Dracula was slated to be only the studios second Spanish-language film.

Paul Kohner, Universal’s head of foreign production, hired director George Melford, who’d worked with Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, and cinematographer George Robinson. A 38-year-old Spanish actor named Carlos Villarias was cast as Dracula, and a multilingual actor named Barry Norton was hired to play “Juan Harker.” A 17-year-old Mexican actress named Lupita Tovar was hired to play Harker’s fiance Eva, who was known as Mina in the English version.

“The American crew left at 6:00 PM and we were ready,” Tovar recalled. “We started shooting at eight. At midnight, they would call for dinner… They didn’t pay us much, but we didn’t complain. We were happy to have some money -most actors were starving.”

FIRST RATE

Since they were using a second-rate cast and crew after Hollywood’s finest had gone home for the day, the assumption was that the film made at night would be inferior to the original. That may have been true in most cases …but not in the case of Dracula.

For all of its popularity and accomplishments as Hollywood’s first vampire film, on a technical level, the English-language Dracula is considered a very poorly made film. A lot of the blame for this goes to director Tod Browning, a hard-drinking recluse with a reputation as a troublemaker. Browning had been fired from at least one studio for his drinking, and was blacklisted from the entire industry for two years in the early 1920s. Making matters worse, Browning had directed nine films starring horror superstar Lon Chaney, Sr. when both men worked for MGM, and he was still reeling from Chaney’s recent death from throat cancer.

Browning’s myriad personal problems found their way into the finished film. “In scene after scene,” Skal writes, “the script demonstrates just how much Browning cut, trimmed, ignored, and generally sabotaged the screenplay’s visual potentials, insisting on static camera setups, eliminating reaction shots and special effects, and generally taking the lazy way out at every opportunity.” In one scene, a piece of cardboard the crew used to reduce the glare of a lamp takes up nearly a quarter of the entire screen, and in the film’s climax, Dracula’s death isn’t even shown on film; moviegoers had to settle for the sound of Lugosi groaning offscreen.

ON PURPOSE

Legend has it that cinematographer Karl Freund got so exasperated with Browning’s slipshod style that he just turned the camera on and let it run unattended, Skal writes:

Indeed, there is one endless take in the finished film featuring Manners (who played Jonathon Harker), Chandler (Mina Murray), and Van Sloan (Dr. Van Helsing) that runs 251 feet, nearly three minutes without a cut that was clearly meant to be broken up with close-ups and reaction shots. At one point Chandler tells Manners, “Oh, no -don’t look at me like that,” in an apparent reference to a dramatic change in his expression. The two-shot, however, shows Manners as motionless as a wax dummy -as if oblivious that the camera is even catching his face.

As if that isn’t sloppy enough, in the final credits, Universal President Carl Laemmle’s title is misspelled as “Presient.”

¡EL VAMPIRO!

The film crew on the Spanish Dracula was another story.

Kohner, who had produced the Spanish version of The Cat Creeps, was headstrong and ambitious -and not above second-guessing the English-language unit, trying to improve upon their work. On The Cat Creeps, he watched the daily footage produced by Robert Julian, the director of the English version, and found the scenes to be poorly lit and uninspiring. So when filming the same scenes for the Spanish film, Kohner relit every set and filled them with atmosphere-creating candles, cobwebs, and shadows that had been missing in the English version. Universal Pictures head Carl Laemmle, Jr. was so impressed with Kohner’s work that he ordered Julian to refilm his own footage, this time using Kohner as his artistic advisor.

Kohner did the same thing during the making of the Spanish version of Dracula. Using a moviola machine that was kept on the set, they watched the daily footage, or “dailies” that had been shot for the English-language version, made notes of the sloppiness and mistakes, and then made sure that their own scenes were better.

One thing they didn’t try to improve on was Bela Lugosi’s masterful performance as Count Dracula. Instead, Kohner insisted that Carlos Villarias imitate Lugosi as closely as possible, and he alone among the actors was allowed to watch the English-language dailies to make sure he got it right. They even let him wear Lugosi’s hairpiece, although it’s unclear whether Lugosi ever knew about it.

Carlos Villarias as Count Dracula

Now You See Him, Now You Don’t

Perhaps the most notable difference between the two films is their use -or lack thereof- of special effects. In scenes showing Dracula climbing out of his coffin, for example, the Spanish version uses a double exposure to show a cloud of mist rising out ofthe coffin and turning into Dracula.

In the English version, the coffin lid starts to tremble, the camera turns away from the coffin and points at a wall …and by the time it returns, Bela Lugosi is already out of the coffin.

NUMERO UNO

When completed, the Spanish version of Dracula cost just over $66,000 to make and only took 22 nights to film, compared to the seven weeks and $450,000 it took to film the English version. In fact, the Spanish crew shot the film so fast that they ended up shooting some of their scenes on sets that weren’t completely finished. Rather than wait for them to be finished, the filmmakers compensated for the empty sets with clever lighting.

The first preview was held in early 1931, before the original Dracula was even finished, and the reviewers who saw the Spanish version were impressed. “If the English version of Dracula, directed by Tod Browning, is as good as the Spanish version,” Hollywood Filmograph magazine wrote, “why, the big U (Universal) hasn’t a thing in the world to worry about.”

Villarias and Tovar

The only problem, of course, was that the English version wasn’t as good, as Filmograph reported a few weeks later. The first few minutes of the film were enthralling, the magazine wrote, but quickly deteriorated after that. “Tod Browning directed, although we cannot believe that the same man was responsible for both the first and later parts of the picture. Had the rest of the picture lived up to the first sequence in the ruined castle Transylvania, Dracula would have been a horror and thrill classic long remembered.”

INTO THIN AIR

Dracula was one of the last foreign-language films produced in Hollywood. By 1931 the Great Depressions was in full swing, and American film studios, desperate to cut costs whenever possible, abandoned Spanish-language markets almost entirely. Universal never even bothered to register the copyright on the film and never had preservation copies made so that new prints could be made when the originals wore out.

The Spanish Dracula made the rounds of Spanish-language countries into the 1950s, then gradually disappeared.

Life After Death

It was thought to be lost entirely until the late 1970s, when an incomplete negative was found in a warehouse in New Jersey. Then, in 1989, a complete version of the film was found in the Cuban Film Archives in Havana. In the late 1990s, Universal and the UCLA Film Archives restored the film and released it to cable and video markets, where it is developing a new following and has finally received the recognition it deserves.

Here is the complete movie for your enjoyment.

(YouTube link)

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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader.

The 13th book in the series by the Bathroom Reader’s Institute has 504 pages crammed with fun facts, including articles on the biggest movie bombs ever, the origin and unintended use of I.Q. test, and more.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

Visitors at Stefan Da Costa Gomez’s gallery show viewed acrylic paintings of Bogey and other classic Hollywood stars through 3D glasses. He achieves the effect with anaglyphic layering, a technique placing contrasting colors on top of each other to make an image pop.

Link -via Colossal

And that’s just one of the dirty little movie-making secrets the industry doesn’t want you to know about. Find out more over at Film School Rejects.

Link

If you want to make a war film and need a fleet of F-22s, a crowd of Marines, or a Navy aircraft carrier, just call up the Department of Defense’s entertainment media office and they’ll tell you if the Army can spare that M1A1 Abrams tank you’ve always wanted for a day or two of filming.

“The scripts we get are only the writer’s idea of how the Department of Defense operates,” Vince Ogilvie, deputy director of the Defense Department’s entertainment liaison office, told Danger Room. “We make sure the Department and facilities and people are portrayed in the most accurate and positive light possible.”

Dialogue from the XtraNormal video featured on Wired explains things a bit differently:

Secret Agent Woman: “I’m glad you’re going to make a movie about how awesome the Central Intelligence Agency is. Everybody that works here is very smart and we never mess up and most people are extremely good-looking too.”
Michael Bay: “I agree because I want you to help me. Kaboom!”

Link | Image: XtraNormal Video

Behind-the-scenes footage of anything is usually interesting (if you’re interested in that sort of thing), but these screen tests from classic movies are more fun than most. Above, a probably-intoxicated Judy Garland testing for the role of Helen Lawson in Valley of the Dolls. She won the role, but was replaced by Susan Hayward after coming to the set drunk. Check out nine more on Flavorwire. Link

Ask any film buff to name the worst directors of all-time, and you can be sure Ed Wood’s name will come up. He’s become a legend for films like Plan 9 From Outer Space -a movie so bad it needs to be seen just to be believed. This piece was written by someone who knew him -in fact, the reluctant star of Plan 9, Gregory Walcott.

The Connection

Early in our marriage, Barbara and I lived in a cottage just across the street from the First Baptist Church of Beverly Hills. Ed Reynolds, a chubby little man who attended the church, had come out to Hollywood from Alabama to make Biblical films. He talked to me occasionally, knowing I was in the movie industry, about his “calling” to produce religious movies with life-embracing themes. I tried not to encourage him, knowing he had no background in film production. Naive individuals like Reynolds are easy bait for Hollywood hucksters.

Reynolds’ Big Break

About a year later, Reynolds came to me and said he was going to finance a film starring Bela Lugosi. He wanted me to play the young romantic lead. I said to him, “But Ed, Bela Lugosi is DEAD!”

Reynolds said, “Well, that’s not a problem. There’s a very ingenious director, Ed Wood, who has some excellent footage of Lugosi, and he has written a very clever screenplay around that film.”

“But Ed, I thought you wanted to make religious pictures!”

Ed Wood

“Yes! That’s the ultimate plan. But Biblical pictures with big sets, large casts and costumes are very expensive. This fellow, Wood, has convinced me that by making a few exploitation films, I can build up my bankroll to where I can then make big budget Biblical films.”

I had never heard of Ed Wood, so I asked to see the script. It was the most atrocious piece of writing I had ever seen. A child could have written better dialog. I said, “Ed, this is a terrible script, and I hate to see you get involved in this project and lose your money.”

“No, no! I want you to meet the director,” he insisted. “I’ll arrange a luncheon.”

Reynolds was dazzled by Hollywood and couldn’t be dissuaded.

Before the meeting, I looked into Wood’s background, and discovered he had done a few cheesy low-budget pictures. It was incongruous that sweet, sincere Reynolds, who wanted to produce inspirational Biblical motion pictures, would be connected with Wood, whose movies could only be booked in fleabag theaters on back streets.

Meeting the Auteur

At the luncheon, I found Wood to be a charmingly handsome man, who gushed about how perfect I would be working with a top-notch Hollywood crew and a good cast.

Wood resembled Errol Flynn, and was clearly a smooth promoter. In fact, he started attending Reynolds’ church and showed an interest in becoming a convert to the faith. This pleased Reynolds, convincing him that Wood was sincere and a godsend. I was there the night Wood was baptized. He stood in the pool, resplendent in a white robe. His boyish face had the look of an angel. As he was immersed in the baptismal waters of the church, Ed Reynolds beamed in satisfaction and said stoutly, “Amen!”

Taking the Plunge

Greg Walcott in Plan 9

I reluctantly agreed to do the film, Plan 9 From Outer Space, as a favor to Ed Reynolds, working at scale wages on a four-day schedule.

The first day I reported to work on a tiny sound stage-behind a sleazy bar and a disreputable hotel. I knew right away that I had made a mistake. The sets looked like something a 6th grade class has hastily put together. The crew seemed fairly normal, but the cast members were a bizarre assemblage of Wood’s cronies: hopeful actors, former wives, an astrologer, an over-the-hill wrestler, a few cross-dressers, and his chiropractor.

The set had an ambiance of an old-time carny side-show, not a professional movie sound stage. I went home that first day, and I remember distinctly saying to my wife, “Honey, this has got to be the worst film ever made.”

Unfortunately my assessment was prophetic, and the movie turned out to be a debacle. Poor Ed Reynolds could get no distributor to release the picture, and he lost his investment. A couple of years later he died, a broken man at the early age of 52.

A Cult Film

Johnny Depp as Ed Wood

The film was eventually released to television and shown during late-night ghetto hours. Amazingly enough, it picked up an audience; it was so shockingly bad that it was actually funny.

A freaky Edward D. Wood phenomenon began. Even Tim Burton, director of the Batman mega hits was so fascinated by the quirky auteur that he made a movie of his life story in 1994. The film, Ed Wood, received favorable reviews but limited box office success. It did, however, add to Ed Wood’s growing international fame.

But Why?

I am still puzzled as to why people are attracted to Ed Wood’s ghastly legacy and his ludicrously inept films. Perhaps it’s like the fascination one finds looking at a macabre auto wreck. Perhaps Wood appeals to people who feel lost, or who rebel against society’s stereotypes.

I think my son, Todd, may have hit upon the real reason: “It’s that thing we fear, in ourselves, that we, too, are not really talented, and in time that truth will be revealed.”

I do say, I have to admire Wood for his flint-faced determination to do the thing he loved the most, making movies, and his uncanny ability to complete the projects, no matter how tasteless and poorly made. Who knows, maybe effort should be recognized as well as art.

R.I.P.

In his later years, Wood dashed off dirty magazine stories to survive and drank heavily. Evicted from his rat-hole apartment, he moved in with a friend in whose bed the 54-year-old Wood died quietly and unexpectedly in December 1978. His ashes were scattered in the ocean off the coast of Southern California.

As a followup to Greg Walcott’s piece, we thought we’d include a few comments from critics about Plan 9 From Outer Space.

ONLY HUBCAPS

“Some say [Plan 9 From Outer Space] is the worst movie anyone ever made. Certainly it’s the worst movie Ed Wood ever made. And nobody but Wood could have made it. The lunacy begins with a portentous introduction from our old friend Criswell, the clairvoyant. ‘Greetings my friends,’ Criswell reads from his cue card. ‘We are all interested in the future because that’s where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.’ While we’re still mulling over the meaning of that statement, Wood hits us with the heavy-duty special effects -UFOs flying over Hollywood Boulevard. Actually, they’re only hubcaps, superimposed on a pseudo-sky.”

-The Worst Movies of All Time, by Michael Sauter

ATTACK OF THE UNDEAD

Bela Lugosi in Plan 9

“God knows what the first eight “Plans” were, but Plan 9 is a doozy… Aliens Dudley Manlove and Joanna Lee (today a successful scriptwriter) were sent by The Ruler to raise the dead so that they’d attack the living. That’s just about what Wood tried to do with his dead friend Bela Lugosi, billed as the star of the film although he died prior to production. Wood had a couple of minutes of footage of Lugosi from an aborted project, so he simply inserted the snippets into the film and repeated them over and over so that Lugosi had adequate screen time. Lugosi’s character -The Ghoul Man- was played in the rest of the movie by a chiropractor, an extremely tall fellow who spends his screen time with a cape covering his face so we won’t know he’s an impostor. The ruse doesn’t work, but I don’t think Wood really cared.”

-Guide for the Film Fanatic, by Danny Peary

BEYOND RIDICULE

Lee and Manlove as the aliens

“Words such as amateurish, crude, tedious, and aaarrrggghhhh can’t begin to describe this Edward D. Wood film with Bela Lugosi in graveyard scenes made shortly before his death….

The unplotted plot by Wood has San Fernando Valley residents troubled by UFOs of the worst encounter. Humanoid aliens Dudley Manlove and Joanna Lee land their cardboard ship with a ninth plan to conquer the world (the first eight failed, you see). They resurrect corpses, including Vampira, Tor Johnson and Lugosi’s double. The results are unviewable except for masochists who enjoy a good laugh derived from watching folks make fools of themselves.”

-Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again, by John Stanley

MASTERFUL SPECIAL EFFECTS

“The graveyard set provides the film with many of its eerie moments, thanks to a number of dead tree branches and cardboard tombstones; in one scene a policeman accidentally kicks over one of the featherweight grave markers.

Despite the resourcefulness of the director, there are slight technical shortcomings in the final version of Plan 9. Even Wood’s staunchest defenders will admit that the Old Master seemed to have a tough time with lighting. In one scene, as Mona McKinnon runs in horror from Bela Lugosi’s double, she goes directly from a graveyard at midnight to a nearby highway at high noon. This same confusion between night and day occurs several times in the course of the film.”

-The Golden Turkey Awards, by Harry and Michael Medved

CHEAP, CHEAP, CHEAP

“Money was always a problem for Wood. Budgets were routinely nonexistent, forcing him to film on the cheap, scrimping…as best he could… How cheap was Plan 9? The flying saucers are hubcaps suspended by wires. In several scenes the movie jumps from daylight to nighttime and back. And outdoor lawn furniture doubles as bedroom furniture…In all of the literature about Plan 9 (and there’s reams of the stuff) one question about the movie has never been answered. If Plan 9 was to revive the dead, what were the other eight plans?”

-Why the People of Earth are “Stupid,” by Tom Mason

(YouTube link)

See also: Robot Monster: The Ultimate Golden Turkey and The Worst Movie of All Time?

______________________________

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Great Big Bathroom Reader.

The book is a compendium of entertaining information chock-full of facts on a plethora of topics. Highly recommended!

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute

If you’ve ever wondered where all those cat videos came from, now you know. Here’s a look behind the scenes at the magic of Kittywood Studios. -via Metafilter

Kid Casting is a blog that looks at adult movie and TV characters and the children who play those same characters as youngsters, whether in flashbacks or in earlier parts of the narrative. Oddee has collected the best examples of well-done kid casting in their latest list. Shown here are the characters of George Bailey and Mary Hatch from the movie It’s A Wonderful Life as both kids and adults. Link

After World War II, the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in a “cold” war: an ideological conflict that was waged through political rhetoric, military posturing, espionage, and an arms race. Would it lead to WWIII? It didn’t, but at the time, people weren’t so sure. Here’s an incredible story from that era.

THE PEACE CONFERENCE

In the late 1940s, Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union, ordered a prominent Russian film director named Sergei Gerasimov to go to New York to attend a left-wing gathering called the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace.

Gerasimov dutifully attended the conference, and that’s pretty much all there was to the story for the next 50 years. Then in 2003, British film critic Michael Munn wrote a book entitled John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, in which he tells a more sinister tale of Gerasimov’s trip to the United States and its aftermath. Munn says he got the story from actor/director Orson Welles, who heard it through contacts in the Soviet film industry.

MARKED MAN

According to Munn, while Gerasimov was in New York he learned of the leadership role that John Wayne, one of America’s biggest movie stars, was playing in driving communists out of Hollywood. Wayne was the president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a right-wing group dedicated to compiling a “blacklist” of communists working in the film industry. The blacklist was used to destroy the careers of hundreds of actors, screenwriters, and directors, either because of alleged communist sympathies or simply because they refused to testify before Congressional investigating committees.

When Gerasimov returned home and reported the havoc that Wayne was wreaking on communist efforts to infiltrate the film industry, Munn’s story goes, Staling became so angry that he dispatched a team of KGB hit men to California. Their orders: kill John Wayne.

BACKLOT JUSTICE

The KGB killers really did come to California, Munn writes, and they even made it onto the Warner Brothers lot, where “Duke” Wayne had an office. Disguised as FBI agents, they checked in at the front gate and were given directions to Wayne’s office. (This part of the story, says Munn, was told to him by Yakina Canutt, a Hollywood stuntman and one of Wayne’s closest friends.)

Luckily for the Duke, FBI informants had already learned of the plot. As the fake FBI agents made their way across the studio lot, real FBI agents hid in the back rooms of Wayne’s office whle he and a screenwriter named James Grant sat in the front room, pretending to be working. When the hit men entered, the FBI agents pounced, disarming and handcuffing the killers before they could harm Wayne.

Those G-men must have been big John Wayne fans, because they let him deal with the killers his own way: at Wayne’s direction, the FBI men loaded the KGB agents into cars and drove them to a secluded beach north of Los Angeles. At the beach the KGB men, still handcuffed, were marched down to the surf and were made to kneel in wet sand. Then as the FBI agents looked on approvingly, Wayne and Grant drew pistols and aimed them at the heads of the KGB men. “On the count of three,” Wayne told Grant. “One…two…THREE!”

HOLLYWOOD ENDING

Both Wayne and Grant fired their guns, but the KGB men didn’t die. It took a moment for them to realize they were still alive; when they opened their eyes, Wayne held up his gun and exclaimed, “Blanks!” The Duke had never killed a man (except in the movies), and he wasn’t about to start now. “I just wanted to scare the living s*** out of them,” Munn says Wayne told him.

The KGB men’s lives were spared, but probably not for long, and they knew it: if the FBI deported them back to the U.S.S.R., Stalin would surely have them executed. The KGB men decided to defect to the United States right then and there, and tell the FBI everything they knew. “Welcome to the land of the free,” Wayne told them. Then he and Grant got into their car and drove off.

Yakima Canutt

Wayne was safe, but would the commies try again? To guard against future attempts on Wayne’s life, Yakima Canutt and his stuntmen friends organized themselves into a private intelligence gathering force for Wayne and began infiltrating communist cells operating in southern California. On the basis of the information they gathered, Munn writes, the stuntmen were able to break up at least two more attempts on Wayne’s life, the first one in the summer of 1953, while Wayne was in Mexico filming Hondo. They thwarted a second attempt in 1955 by storming the communists’ hideout in the back room of a Burbank printing company and beating them to a bloody pulp.

Those would-be assassins didn’t fare as well as the two that Wayne and Grant “killed” on the beach after the first attempt, Munn writes: The stuntmen bought them tickets on the next plane to Russia… and they were never seen or heard from again.

A DICTATOR MEETS THE DUKE

Wayne didn’t learn that the threat to his life had been abated until 1959, when Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, visited the United States. (Stalin died in 1953.) The Duke met him at the reception hosted by Twentieth-Century Fox It was there, according to Munn, that Wayne pulled Khrushchev aside during a quiet moment and asked him through an interpreter why the Soviets were trying to kill him. “That was the decision of Stalin during his last five mad years,” Khrushchev supposedly told the Duke. “When Stalin died, I rescinded the order.”

That took care of the threat posed by Soviet communists, but Khrushchev warned him that Mao Zedong, leader of Communist China, had been in on the plot to assassinate him, and was likely still trying to do so.

ONE LAST TRY

Wayne learned how serious Mao’s threat was when he made a three-week goodwill tour of Vietnam in the summer of 1966. Munn claims that during a visit to one village, Wayne was nearly shot by a sniper, who was later caught by U.S. troops. The sniper wasn’t Vietnamese, he was Chinese- and he said he’d been sent to the village on Mao’s orders, specifically to kill John Wayne.

STRANGER THAN FICTION

The tale that Michael Munn tells in his book John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth is more exciting than the plots of many of Duke Wayne’s own films.And it raises some interesting questions. Did Stalin really send agents to kill Hollywood’s most outspoken enemy of communism? And if so, how did the Duke’s other biographers miss the story?

One thing that makes Munn’s story difficult to verify is the fact that it’s based entirely on circumstantial evidence. Wayne died in 1979, a quarter century before Munn’s book was published, so he can’t vouch for any of the things that Munn claims he said and did. All the other firsthand witnesses to the events described -Orson Welles, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, stuntman Yakima Canutt, and others- have been gone for many years as well. Another problem: Wayne’s 48-page FBI file, made public as a result of the Freedom of Information Act, makes no mention of any communist conspiracies against him, let alone a KGB hit ordered by Stalin and thwarted by FBI agents.

THE DICTATOR

Munn’s story does seem to fit with what historians know about Joseph Stalin’s personality, his interests, and the bizarre way he ruled the Soviet Union after World War II. Stalin turned 70 in 1948, and although Soviet propaganda still presented him as a vigorous man with an iron constitution, his health was failing and he had just five more years to live. He never really recovered from the strain of waging war against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, and within weeks of the war’s wend he suffered what was either a heart attack or a stroke. More attacks soon followed, and by 1948 visitors to the Kremlin began to notice what one described as “conspicuous signs of his senility.” By then, Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, the Soviet government had “virtually ceased to function” at the highest level as the failing Stalin lost interest in the day-to-day business of governing. He almost never convened meetings of the Politburo, the Central Committee, or other formal organs of government. Instead, Stalin hosted informal gatherings of his cronies several nights a week in the Kremlin movie theater.

SHOWTIME

Movies, not affairs of state, were the first order of business at these gatherings. What little work that could be done had to be done between the film screenings, or at the drunken dinners Stalin hosted at his country house after the movies were over.

Stalin liked Soviet films and had a large collection of European and American films, many of which were seized from the collection of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels at the end of WWII. Among his favorites: detective films, boxing films, and any Charlie Chaplin comedy (except The Great Dictator, which he despised). He also liked Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, and was a big fan of James Cagney gangster movies.

But most of all, said Khrushchev, Stalin liked cowboy movies. “He used to curse them and give them a proper ideological evaluation and then immediately order new ones.” Stalin especially liked Westerns by director John Ford, who gave John Wayne his breakthrough role in 1939′s Stagecoach. Ford cast Wayne in more than 20 films, eight of which were released during Stalin’s lifetime, and though few records of the Kremlin’s screenings survive, it’s a pretty safe bet he’d seen at least a few of the Duke’s films and knew who he was.

NO WONDER THEY CALL HIM MARSHAL

Stalin identified with the characters in Western films. He saw himself as the Soviet equivalent of a town sheriff or U.S. Marshal, biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. “Stalin regarded himself as history’s lone knight, riding out, with weary resignation, on another noble mission, the Bolshevik version of the mysterious cowboy arriving in a corrupt frontier town.”

Stalin’s contemporaries reported that he had trouble distinguishing between reality and life as it was depicted in the movies. Soviet filmmaker Grigori Kozintsev learned this when he was invited to a Kremlin screening in the 1930s: “Stalin didn’t watch movies as works of art,” he wrote in Sight and Sound magazine, “he watched them as though they were real events taking place before his eyes, the real actions of people -beneficial or destructive- and he immediately gave vent to his irritation if the people on the screen didn’t work well, and praised them when they acted correctly.”

CECIL B. DE STALIN

For years, Stalin had been, in all but name, the head of the entire Soviet film industry as well as its chief censor. He personally assigned film projects to directors and actors, instructed screenwriters on the ideologically “correct” means of presenting historical events, made editorial changes to screenplays, and even composed lyrics for songs used in films. He had the final say on everything. If there was something he didn’t like about a film, it was done over. Period. No film was released to the public without Stalin’s personal approval.

Even foreign films -which were almost never shown outside of the Kremlin walls- had to meet Stalin’s approval: Once when Minister of Cinema Ivan Bolshakov showed a foreign film containing a brief nude scene, Stalin pounded the table and yelled, “Are you making a brothel here, Bolshakov?” then stomped out of the the theater. Bolshakov was luckier than his two predecessors- when they displeased Stalin, they were taken away and executed. (Bolshakov never showed Stalin a nude scene again. From then on, he previewed every film before showing it to Stalin and cut out any scene containing even a hint of nudity.)

WHITE HATS VS. RED HATS

It’s conceivable that Stalin could have ordered John Wayne killed. After all, Stalin was nuts -”not quite right in the head,” as Khrushchev put it. He certainly had no hesitation when it came  to killing people: Stalin is believed to have murdered as many as 20 million of his fellow citizens during his 30 years in power, and he wasn’t shy about reaching beyond the borders of the Soviet Union to kill them, either. In 1940, for example, Stalin dispatched KGB agents to kill his rival Leon Trotsky in Mexico.

John Wayne was one of the most popular film stars in Hollywood, but he was an outspoken opponent of communism -an anticommunist cowboy who publicly and vehemently opposed everything that Stalin stood for. He was someone Stalin could not control -a “black hat” or villain, perhaps, in the crazy Western movie that was playing in Stalin’s failing, paranoid mind. And what does a sheriff do when a villain arrives in town? It’s conceivable that U.S. (S.R.) Marshal Joe Stalin could have decided, as the Western cliche goes, that “this town ain’t big enough for the both of us” and ordered John Wayne killed.

STAR TREATMENT

The pieces might seem to fit… until you learn more about Michael Munn, who turns out to be the weakest link in his own chain. Had Munn stopped with the Wayne biography in 2003, he might have retained the credibility he had when the book was first published. But he didn’t stop: In 2008 he wrote a biography of actor Richard Burton, and it, too, is filled with claims that are hard to believe and harder to prove. Munn writes, for example, that Burton had affairs with Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe (he’d never been linked to them before) and was once caught in a brothel with actor Errol Flynn. (“Sensationalist nonsense,” a Burton family member told the South Wales Evening Post. “We’ve read his diaries and he never mentions Errol Flynn. I don’t think they met.”)

Then in 2009, Munn published a biography of British actor David Niven. In it, Munn claimed he was at the dying actor’s bedside in 1982 when Niven confessed to attempting suicide after his first wife died in a freak accident. Munn says Niven also confessed to having affairs with Grace Kelly and Princess Margaret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth II. As if that were not enough, he says Niven also claimed that his second wife contracted a venereal disease after sleeping with John F. Kennedy.

HERE COME THE SONS

Niven’ sons had never heard any of these stories before, and they’d never heard of Munn, either, even though Munn billed himself as an intimate family friend. Even more puzzling: Niven’s sons couldn’t figure out how Niven could have even been able to tell Munn any of these stories. Niven died from Lou Gehrig’s disease, which by 1982 had robbed him of the ability to speak -and that would have made such “confessions” very difficult. (Munn says he taped his conversations with David Niven. So why doesn’t he just produce the tapes and put the controversy to rest once and for all? Because, he says, the tapes got “chewed up” by his tape recorder and he threw them all away.)

So why would Munn wait until 2009 to publish things that Niven had supposedly told him 25 years earlier? Niven’s son, David, Jr. has a theory that could apply to all three of Munn’s biographies: “Everyone featured in these stories is rather conveniently dead, so we can’t ask them to verify them,” he says.

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The article above was reprinted with permission from the Bathroom Institute’s newest book, Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

We are all familiar with the classics like Snow White and Hansel and Gretel but what are some of the original Grimm Fairy Tales that would make great (Non Disney) movies? My favorite from the title alone is “The Devil’s Smelly Brother.” Link

If your movie pitch got rejected, perhaps you weren’t using the right buzzwords. Mike Jacobsen of See Mike Draw explains the secret of pitching a blockbuster to Hollywood: Link

See also Mike Jacobsen’s T-Shirt designs at the NeatoShop

Niven, who was himself a man of preternatural charm and roguish tendencies, recognised a kindred spirit, and his account of Mike is notable for its penetrating insights. For Niven, the root of Prince’s unquestionable likeability was a humorous talent for the not-quite-plausible improvisation, the half-truth and the flamboyant gesture. When the British actor left Hollywood for Britain in 1939 to fight Hitler, Mike delighted in discussing his own alleged experiences of war, making him a present of a hand-knitted balaclava helmet (“Saved me near St Petersburg, old boy”) and a large blue and white spotted scarf with a burn in the centre (“mustard gas… Cambrai… silk is the only thing against it.”) The balaclava helmet Niven lost, but the scarf he kept long enough to consult a laundress about the mysterious mark of mustard gas it bore. “She told me that careless ironing was responsible for the burn.” [Niven p.154]

Eventually Romanov went legit and opened a restaurant in Beverly Hills that catered to his famous friends, many of whom invested in the business. How Romanoff achieved such acclaim is a fascinating story. Link

Deviant Art member Joep Gerrits created 100 simplified but clever renderings of movie characters from 68 classic films. Can you name them? See all 100 and a list of movies at the gallery. Link -via Gorilla Mask

She was allegedly warned against doing the Hollywood thing by Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (who had his own failure with Alien: Resurrection) and even seemed to obey him for a while there. But five years after winning the hearts of film geeks the world over, she cashed in big time by starring opposite none other than Tom Hanks in one of the most anticipated films of the decade, The Da Vinci Code. The mainstream audiences didn’t fall as hard for her in that, but she doesn’t seem to mind, preferring to maintain permanent residence in Paris while at least being a member of the Academy.

Four similar examples at the link, including Franke Potente and Monica Belluci. These girls are great actresses, so why don’t they make a splash with American audiences?

Link

With 221 episodes filmed over more than two decades, Our Gang/Little Rascals is the most successful, longest-running film series in Hollywood history. Here’s how the Little Rascals found their way onto the silver screen.

STICKS AND STONES

One day in 1921, a Hollywood producer named Hal Roach spent a frustrating morning auditioning girls for a part in one of his movies. It wasn’t going well-the kids sounded too rehearsed and their stage makeup made them look like little grown-ups. In those days child actors were supposed to act like adults, not like normal kids. They were usually well scrubbed and well behaved, and because the adult characters were almost always the center of the story, the kids interacted with the grown-ups more than they did with each othr. They were often little more than props.

That afternoon when the auditions ended, Roach sat in his office and stared at the lumberyard across the street. He noticed a group of kids that had snatched a few sticks to play with, and were now arguing over them-the smallest kid had grabbed the largest stick, and the biggest kid wanted it.

Roach was fascinated. “I knew they would probably throw away the sticks as soon as they walked around the block,” he recalled more than 60 years later, “but the most important thing in the world right then was who would have which stick. All of a sudden I realized I had been watching this silly argument for over fifteen minutes because they were real kids.”

FORMING THE GANG

Roach thought movies about “kids doing the things that kids do” might make interesting viewing. As he told Leonard Maltin in The Life and Times of the Little Rascals: Our Gang, “I thought if I could find some clever street kids to just play themselves in films and show life from a kid’s angle, maybe I could make a dozen of these things before I wear out the idea.”

Roach started putting together a cast of archtypical kids that audiences would be able to relate to: the leader of the pack, the pretty girl who gets teased by the boys, the tomboy, the nerdy smart kid, the chubby kid, the spoiled rich kid, etc.

Roach also decided to cast black kids in some of the parts. That may not sound like a big deal, but in the 1920s it was unheard of. In fact, he was the first Hollywood filmmaker to depict black kids and white kids playing together, treating each other as equals, even going to the same schools. (The integrated school scenes were cut whenever the films played in the South.)

Characters like Farina, Stymie, and Buckwheat have since been criticized for perpetuating ethnic stereotypes, and ethnic humor was common in the series, especially in the early days. But the fact that the cast was integrated at all was a milestone. Hollywood films of the 1920s never portrayed blacks and whites as social peers, and wouldn’t for years to come. But Roach was determined that his kids would be peers.

Casting that first group of little kids was a snap-Roach just asked around the studio lot. Everybody, it seemed, either had a kid or knew one that would be good for a part. An eight-year-old black child actor named Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison was already appearing in Roach comedies, and his family knew of a one-year-old named Allen Hoskins. (Allen, better known as “Farina”, would go on to appear in 105 Our Gang comedies-more than any other kid) Photographer Gene Kornman’s five-year-old daughter Mary was interested; so was her friend Mickey Daniels. Roach also hired a six-year-old child actor named Jack Davis, a three-year-old named Jackie Condon, a chubby four-year-old named Joe Cobb, and a few other kids as well.

TESTING THE WATERS

The very first film, titled Our Gang, was shot twice with a different director each time because Roach didn’t think the first version was funny enough. The second film, a 20-minute silent short, directed by an ex-fireman named Bob McGowan, was a hit with test audiences, critics, and movie exhibitors alike. When Roach received repeated requests for more of those “Our Gang comedies,” he decide that would be the name for his series. The kids themselves were billed as “Hal Roach’s Rascals”; the name “Little Rascals” came much later.

The fourth Our Gang movie to be filmed, One Terrible Day, was actually the first one released to the public; it hit theaters in September 1922. Our Gang (the first film) was released two months later.

These films were unlike any that audiences had seen before. Kids were the stars, but the films were designed to appeal to people of all ages. And they were a hit from the start-kid actors were acting like real kids, arguing, getting dirty, and getting into all kinds of mischief. The acting was so natural that audiences forgot they were watching a movie.

ACT NATURALLY

How was Our Gang director Bob McGowan able to coach such authentic performances out of actors as young as two years of age? He didn’t have many options-reading scripts and memorizing lines was out, since many kids were too young to read. So McGowan made acting a game: he explained the scenes to the kids as carefully as he could, then he filmed them as they play-acted their parts. (One unintended consequence: as the kids grew older and became more aware of themselves as actors, their acting style sometimes became less natural.)

Because the Our Gang films were so successful, it wasn’t long before every child star in Hollywood-not to mention thousands of aspiring kid stars all over the country-started clamoring for a part in the series. Mickey Rooney came to Hollywood just to audition for Our Gang. He didn’t make the cut, and neither did the biggest child star in Hollywood history, Shirley Temple.

SHOW BUSINESS

*A kid could be cast in an Our Gang film as young as two or three years of age (infants and toddlers were sometimes used as extras), and the average age was around seven. Most started out as supporting players and were promoted to more central roles as they got older. Spanky was a notable exception-he was cast in starring roles from the very beginning.

* The youngest actors weren’t allowed to be on the lot more than six hours a day, and they spent at least half that time playing off camera, not working on the films. Once actors reached the age of six, however, they were expected to put in a full nine-hour shift (five hours of acting, three hours of school, and one for lunch).

* By the time most of the actors hit 11 or 12, they were starting to look too old for the series, so they were phased out. Kids who matured early had to leave sooner than that.

MAKING NOISE

The Hal Roach Studios shot 88 silent Our Gang films between 1922 and 1929. In 1928 they started releasing their films with phonograph records containing music and sound effects that were synchronized with the films-but no dialog. The first real “talkies” followed a year later. Then from 1929 to 1937 Roach made another 73 Our Gang shorts. Most film buffs consider these later years to be the best of the series, with the most popular characters-Farina, Jackie, Chubby, Spanky, Buckwheat, Darla, and Alfalfa-delivering their best performances.

DOUBLE TROUBLE

Our Gang films were 20 minutes long until 1936. Around then, theater owners started to drop short-subject comedies from their schedules to make room for double features. In addition, the big Hollywood studios like Columbia, Warner Brothers, and MGM were bundling their own short-subject films with their feature films and forcing theater owners to take them as a package-if an owner wanted to show an MGM blockbuster like Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), he had to show the MGM shorts with it.

The future for independent short-subject producers like Hal Roach looked grim, so Roach switched gears and started making feature-length films. Any short-subject that didn’t work as a feature was discarded, and soon the Our Gang series was the only one left at the studio. Roach ordered up a feature-length Our Gang film called General Spanky. When it died at the box office, the fate of the Our Gang series was sealed …or was it?

It turned out that Louie B. Mayer, the head of MGM, was an Our Gang fan, and he thought there was still a lot of demand for the films. Mayer promised Roach that if he cut the films down to 10 minutes in length, he’d see to it that they got distribution. Roach agreed and made another 23 shorts over the next two years. But even with MGM’s support, demand for short comedies kept falling, and so did the profits. In 1938 Roach sold the Our Gang unit to MGM, including all of the films made between 1927 and 1938.

THE SHOW’S OVER

The quality of the Our Gang series suffered terribly at MGM. Instead of assigning a single top-notch director to film the shorts, the studio used the series to prepare inexperienced directors for feature film work. As Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann wrote in The Life and Times of the Little Rascals: Our Gang, “Hal Roach Studios was geared to making nothing but good comedy shorts, while MGM was geared to make everything but. The result was a strictly-for-kids mixture of ten-minute morality plays and pep talks pushing American virtues during wartime.”

As the quality deteriorated so did audience interest; after 16 years of solid profits the films started losing money. MGM ended production in 1944; the last original Our Gang film, Tale of a Dog, was released in April 1944.

Birthday Blues (1932)

(YouTube link)

LIVING ON

The era of first-run Our Gang shorts may have ended, but the age of reruns was just around the corner. In 1949 Hal Roach bought back the right to his Our Gang shorts and began licensing them for television (MGM kept the rights to the ones they made). The only problem: MGM kept the right to the Our Gang name in case they ever decided to make more films, Roach had to come up with another name for his films. Since the kids were already known as “Hal Roach’s Rascals”, he decided to name the series The Little Rascals for television.

Thanks to TV, by the mid-1950s the classic films were more popular than they’d ever been, entertaining a new generation of kids and bringing back fond memories for people old enough to remember them from the first time around. The Little Rascals has been airing almost continuously since then and is now available on video as well.

Our Gang Follies of 1936

(YouTube link)

Do you have a favorite Little Rascals character? Stay tuned for further posts on the Little Rascals, from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.

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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho is a behind-the-scenes look inside the classic suspense shocker—and the creative genius who revolutionized filmmaking.

Author Stephen Rebello explores the creation of one of Hollywood’s most iconic films, from the story of Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for the character of Norman Bates, to Hitchcock’s groundbreaking achievements in cinematography, sound, editing, and promotion. Filled with insights from the film’s stars, writers, and crewmembers, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho is a riveting and definitive history of a signature Hitchcock cinematic masterpiece.

The ebook (available now) covers every step of the story of Psycho, from the crime that inspired the novel and then the movie, financing, casting, filming, special effects, trivia, to the reception the public gave the film. Read about the many versions of the story Hitchcock rejected and the writers tweaked, the careful planning that allowed shooting to be completed in just a month, and the trademark suspense Hitchcock used to hype the unveiling of the finished product.

Reprinted here with permission is the very first chapter, the story of murderer Ed Gein, which inspired novelist Robert Bloch to write the story that became the movie Psycho.

THE AWFUL TRUTH

There was a young man named Ed
Who would not take a woman to bed
When he wanted to diddle,
He cut out the middle
And hung the rest in a shed.
ANONYMOUS, 1957

In late November 1957, no one would have marked Plainfield as unlike any other hardscrabble, rawboned Wisconsin farm hamlet. That winter was especially raw. Ask any of the friendly townies of third- and fourth-generation German and French stock. In flat, laconic tones, they recite litanies of burst water mains and permafrost; of nights spent hunkering down against slashing winds and rains that blew east along Canada’s border. But that November also saw Plainfield mentioned in newspapers across the country. Remind these dairyland types about that little bit of business and their open faces wall up. They begin to study their shoes or make excuses before they beg off. That month, in 1957, Plainfield police smoked out an oafish fifty-one-year-old, odd-job-and-errands-man named Ed Gein (rhymes with mean) as one of the grisliest mass murderers America ever spawned.

Long before the headlines were to brand Gein as a bogeyman, his rural, God-fearing community of seven hundred had chalked him off as a crank. A perpetually grinning, unmarried recluse, Gein rambled over 160 ruined acres once farmed by his parents and brother. Even locals who never gave a second thought to hiring Gein for errands or baby-sitting had wearied of his harebrained theories. He liked to rag on the whys and wherefores of criminals who fouled up, or yammer endlessly, and pitifully, about women. Plainfield-ers recall his clinical obsession with anatomy and with the sex-change operation of Christine Jorgensen. But there was more to Gein than loony talk. That came home with a vengeance with the discovery of bloodstains on the floor of Bernice Worden’s general store on November 16.

Customers had marked it as odd that Worden’s store had been closed since before noon that Saturday, her busiest day. No one had seen the steady, well-liked storekeeper since the previous day. Her pickup truck was missing from its usual spot. Concerned, Worden’s deputy sheriff son, Frank, let himself into the store. A late entry in Worden’s sales book (“1/2 gall, antifreeze”) triggered Frank’s recollection of Ed Gein’s loafing about the store the previous week. Gein had asked whether Frank would be out deer hunting on Saturday. When Frank answered that he would, Gein casually mentioned he might be back for a can of antifreeze.

On Frank Worden’s tip, Sheriff Art Schley and Captain Lloyd Schoephoerster made tracks for Gein’s lonesome, decaying hermitage. The hand of death had first passed over the stark farmland when Gein’s father succumbed to a stroke in 1940. Four years later, a fire claimed the life of Ed’s older brother, Henry, and, the following year, Gein’s hellfire-and-brimstone-spouting mother met her maker, too. Now, Gein lived alone—or so it had seemed.

Gein was elsewhere when the law came to call. Schley and his officers lighted the way with kerosene lamps and flashlights; the old house was only partly jerry-wired for electricity. The lawmen picked their way through a rat’s nest of browning newspapers, pulp magazines, anatomy books, embalming supplies, food cartons, tin cans, and random debris. Upstairs, five empty, unused rooms slept under blankets of dust; by contrast, the bedroom of Gein’s late mother and a living room, both nailed shut, were kept pristine.

Raking the rubble of Gein’s kitchen and bedroom, the officers uncovered sights for which no highway wreck or Saturday night special shoot-’em-up had prepared them. Grinning, loose-toothed Ed Gein did not live alone, after all. Sharing his abode were two shin bones. Two pairs of human lips on a string. A cupful of human noses that sat on the kitchen table. A human skin purse and bracelets. Four flesh-upholstered chairs. A tidy row of ten grimacing human skulls. A tom-tom rigged from a quart can with skin stretched across the top and bottom. A soup bowl fashioned from an inverted human half-skull. The eviscerated skins of four women’s faces, rouged, made-up, and thumbtacked to the wall at eye level. Five “re-placement” faces secured in plastic bags. Ten female heads, hacked off at the eyebrow. A rolled-up pair of leggings and skin “vest,” including the mammaries, severed from another unfortunate.

In the adjacent smokehouse shed, police found what they would later identify as having once been Bernice Worden. Nude, headless, dangling by the heels, she had been disemboweled like a steer. Sitting atop a pot-bellied stove in the adjacent kitchen was a pan of water in which floated a human heart. The freezer compartment of the refrigerator was stocked with carefully wrapped human organs.

“I didn’t have anything to do with it. I just heard about it while I was eating supper,” mumbled Gein when Frank Worden located and confronted him about the discovery of Bernice’s corpse. Worden arrested Gein on the spot. In no time flat, Plainfield’s Caspar Milquetoast underwent a lie detector test, a murder charge, and psychiatric examinations at Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Until then, no one had credited the mutterings of a shiftless crank about his “collection of shrunken heads.” No one paid any mind to his inside knowledge of the area’s many unsolved disappearances of women. The Gein farmhouse offered testimony not only to man’s fathomless capacity for the barbaric, but also to the ability of an entire community to deny its very existence. “It can’t happen here,” insists the satiric lyric of a Frank Zappa song, “Help I’m a Rock.” The “here” in question is the human heart and mind.

Gein met the probing of his examiners with barely audible, monotone ramblings. His memory was murky. He admitted to only two murders, claiming he was “in a daze” during both. No law officer, psychiatrist, or court examiner could penetrate Gein’s motivations. Yes, he admitted to dismantling Bernice Worden’s cash register and removing $41. Yes, he had also exhumed his first cadaver with a farmer crony, Gus. Yet his rationale for both was identical: He liked “taking things apart” to see “how things work.”

Deep in the night, while his hard-working neighbors made love, snored, studied the Good Book, and fretted over bills, bland, simple Ed Gein delved into the mystery of “how things worked” by traipsing around the farm with the skin, hair, and face mask of newly exhumed corpses strapped to his naked body. Authorities discovered that Gein’s first graveyard visit led to forty-odd other digs—always graves of females—often just a stone’s throw from the final resting place of his mother. He told his examiners that he and Gus (who had died several years earlier of natural causes) buried the bones and incinerated less-interesting body parts in the Gein stove. When newspapers reported that Gein claimed “I never shot a deer,” how many locals shuddered at the memory of plastic bags packed with tasty “venison” given them by Gein?

Gein made his first kill in 1955 when, late one bitter winter night, his .32 rifle drew a bead on a bosomy, fifty-one-year-old, divorced tavern owner. Using a sled, Gein dragged the body of Mary Hogan to his “summer kitchen” shed. Police suspected Gein of torturing and murdering at least ten other victims between Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden. He never owned up to them before being judged criminally insane and sentenced to life at Central State Hospital.

Local newspapers, some of which dubbed Gein “the mad butcher,” reported only his murders and alleged cannibalism. Transvestism, grave robbing, and, as some speculated, an incestuous relationship with Mom apparently went beyond the limits of even big-city reportage of the 1950s. For “America’s dairyland,” such topics were literally unspeakable. But what the newspapers suppressed, back-fence rumors and sick jokes spelled out. The press and the ambulance chasers attached themselves to Plainfield like piranha on a drowning sumo wrestler. Cars packed with the curious drove miles to aim Brownie cameras and to stone Gein’s “murder house.” Outraged locals circled the wagons and closed their minds. Yet many natives were known to drive miles out of their way to bypass the Gein farm. Inevitably, there were cracks in the wall of denial. Physicians throughout the state found their offices packed with patients complaining of gastrointestinal symptoms. Local psychiatrists treated many ids scrambled by Gein’s penchant for “spare parts.”

Sick jokes, “Gein-ers” the locals called them, ran rampant. Setup: “How were Ed Gein’s folks?” Payoff: “Delicious,” Or “What’s Ed Gein’s phone number?,” which drew the response: “O-I-C-U-8-1-2.” And this to defuse another unspoken terror: “Why could no one ever keep Gein in jail?” Punchline: “Because he’d just draw a picture of a woman on the wall and eat his way out” Bar hounds roused boozy yuks by ordering Gein Beer (“Lots of body, but no head”), and corn-fed tykes with faces like Campbell’s Soup can kids jumped rope, chanting:

’Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the school,
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a mule.
The teachers were hung
From the ceiling with care
In hope that Ed Gein
Soon would be there.

To the day of Gein’s quiet, uneventful death on July 26, 1984 in the asylum, hospital workers described him as “tractable,” “harmless.” His awareness of the outside world was minimal. Of his crimes he was virtually an amnesiac. Perhaps hoping to purge Plainfield of the Gein legacy, unknown persons torched the farm over two decades ago. To this day, the morbid, the crime buffs, the thrill seekers, and the marginals make pilgrimages to the ruins. And locals admit a Yuletide never passes without some child’s warbling, “Deck the halls with limbs of Mollie.”

No one can measure the shock waves unleashed by Ed Gein’s monstrous acts or the anguish he inflicted upon his victims or their survivorso In 1957, most Americans preferred to perceive themselves as God-fearing, clean-living men in gray flannel suits, or perfectly perfect Doris Day wives, or wholesome kids next door like Shirley Jones and Pat Boone in April Love. We elected a president named Eisenhower, twirled hula hoops, and watched “Ozzie and Harriet.” But in a town less than forty miles from Plainfield, at least one man stared hard into the bathroom mirror while shaving. He brooded over Gein, thought of himself, and shuddered.

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Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello was first published in hardback in 1990. A film adaptation of the reference work is now in development, with Rebello as screenwriter. You can download and enjoy the new ebook version at a fraction of the original hardback price at the Sony Reader Store.

Flickr user Ambrosia Voyeur found a fascinating map published in 1927 that Hollywood studios used to find relatively nearby locations to film far-away places. As you can see, certain spots in California were considered good for filming places like Siberia, Sherwood Forest, the Sahara Desert, and other movie settings. The source is The American Film Industry by Tino Balio. According to the book, the variety of available geography in southern California is one of the reasons Hollywood became the center of the film industry. Link to image. Link to book. -via Buzzfeed

He Had Exceptionally Humble Beginnings

Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in London to two music hall actor/vocalists on April 16, 1889. His parents separated when he was only three and he lived with his mother and younger brother.

When Charlie was only five, he got his first taste of acting when he had to take stage to fill in for his mother, Hannah Chaplin, after her voice went out in the middle of a show. Throughout his childhood, he had to help his mother scrimp and save, particularly when she started losing her voice and increasingly began suffering from mental illness. The family was so poor, Hannah even pawned off her children’s spare clothing just to help make ends meet. By the time Charlie was seven, the family was forced to go to a workhouse and after only a few weeks, Charlie and his brother were sent to an orphanage. Hannah regained control of the boys soon after, but when she suffered from a serious mental breakdown, they were forced to live with their father and his mistress for a while.

This was when Charlie joined up with his first acting troupe, the Lancashire Lads. Only a few years later, his father died of cirrhosis of the liver. By 1910, Charlie had established a strong reputation in the local acting scene and he was able to tour the U.S. as a featured player in the Fred Karno Repertoire Company.

The American Dream

Upon traveling to America, he quickly became a favorite performer in the troupe. He returned home to England for a short while before touring America a second time in 1912. This was where Charlie got his big break. When the troupe was seen performing by director Mack Sennett and actors Mabel Normand, Minta Durfee and Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie was spotted and offered a contract with the Keystone Film Company.

Funny enough, one of the biggest names of film history actually had a hard time adjusting his acting methods to translate to film. Originally, Sennett thought he had made a big mistake after working with Charlie on his first film, Making a Living. Fortunately, Mabel Normand convinced the director to give Chaplin another chance and soon enough, a star was born.

The Gentleman Meets The Tramp

Charlie’s best known role was as the iconic “Tramp” character, which he portrayed in a number of films throughout the silent era of film and even in a few pictures after “talkies.” He first developed the character for his second movie role in Mabel’s Strange Predicament.

Mack Sennett had told Charlie “get into a comedy make-up,” but Chaplin didn’t really know what that meant, so he freestyled it. Charlie put together a cane, baggy pants, a tight coat, huge shoes and a small derby hat. Because his character in the movie was supposed to be old, he added a small mustache so he could look older by still show expressions. Charlie said the character of the Tramp came as soon as he was dressed:

“the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born.”

If you’re wondering just where Charlie got the Tramp’s clothing, you have his friends on the movie set to thank. Fatty Arbuckle provided the pants and the hat was Fatty’s father-in-law’s. Chester Conklin gave him the coat and the shoes belonged to Ford Sterling. The shoes were so large that Charlie had to wear them on the wrong feet just so they would stay on.

Interestingly, Charlie’s first movie featuring the Tramp character wasn’t the first one released to the public. Instead, it was his second film, Kid Auto Races at Venice. Also interesting, the Tramp was in the first ever movie trailer shown in an American theater.

But What He Really Wanted Was To Direct, And Produce, And Compose…

Charlie’s sense of humor and immaculate comedic timing led to his quickly being trusted to direct and edit his own films at Keystone. In his first (and only) year with the company, Chaplin made 34 shorts and a feature film.

In 1915, signed with Esseney Studios where he was also able to direct his own pictures, but he left their company within a year to begin working with the Mutual Film Corporation who gave him an even larger salary and nearly complete creative control. He started producing films in 1916 and when he started working with First National in 1917, he was given complete control of all of his projects.

He was a self-taught musician and played the cello and violin and even started composing the music to his films in 1918.

In 1919, Chaplin decided he had enough of the existing Hollywood studios and he co-founded United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith. This allowed him complete creative control on all of his projects for the rest of his life.

In July of 1925, Charlie was the first actor to be featured on “Time Magazine.”

Silence in the Era of Talkies

One of the reasons Charlie’s Tramp character did so well was that it was able to transcend language barriers and cultural differences. People from all over the world could view a Chaplin film and identify with the gentlemanly vagrant and laugh at the bumbling authority figures.

Charlie was so good at filming silent pictures that he continued to do so for years after the public demanded movies with dialogue from all of his peers. Some of his best known silent classics, including The Circus and Modern Times, were actually made after talking became commonplace in movies.

Modern Times even does contain talking, although it is still considered a silent movie. It’s just that the only things that really talk are inanimate objects like radios. At the very end, audiences were able to hear Chaplin’s voice on film for the first time, while he sang gibberish lyrics. This was the last film Charlie made with the Tramp and it let the character take a quick step into modern movie history while staying true to his silent roots.

A Perfectionist That Hated Commitments

Charlie was considered a difficult director to work with because he was so intent on ensuring everything looked perfect on the film. He was notorious for shooting several takes of every scene during the silent films era, a time period where it was rare to reshoot even one scene. Some people even said that he was willing to shoot the same scene more than one hundred times until he was satisfied. He was known to get so upset about the wasted time and film that he would lash out at his actors and crew members and often would shut down production in a fury.

At the same time though, Charlie almost never used scripts until he started working on talking pictures in 1940. He developed a method where he would start with a vague premise and then build a set and start working on gags and plot devices. He often would work out the ideas on film and then end up having to redo whole scenes because the narrative structure ended up making a scene no longer make sense in the context of the story.

Strangely, no one in the general public knew about his filming techniques until after he died and the film Unknown Chaplin was released with outtakes and cut sequences showing his filming style.

A Daring Political Stance

While The Great Dictator is considered a classic these days, it was somewhat controversial when it came out in 1940 because the U.S. was still following a policy of pacifism. Chaplin’s Adenoid Hynkel infuriated the person it was based on, Adolf Hitler, and, unsurprisingly, the film was banned in Germany. While the movie was nominated for Academy Awards in the Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor categories, it did not bring home any awards, which many people believe had more to do with the politics of the film than its actual timing.

Being Persecuted By The Mann

Although Chaplin was obviously against Hitler and was encouraging the U.S. to join the war long before Pearl Harbor, he was still the subject of public anger when he declined to support the war effort once it did get started.

The biggest reason he did not help drive the sales of bonds, like he had in the first World War, was that he was in the middle of a political scandal that involved both civil and criminal charges. In 1942, he had a brief affair with a young actress named Joan Barry, and at one point, he may have paid for her to go to New York City, where they shared a hotel room together.

Unfortunately, Joan got pregnant in the next year or so and publicly claimed that the child was Chaplin’s (it wasn’t). When the news went public, it meant that Charlie had to go to court for child support hearings and it meant that federal investigators could chose to try him under the Mann act.

The Mann Act made it a crime to transport a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. While it was created to prevent prostitution, it ended up being used as a way to prosecute people who were seen as immoral.

Charlie beat the criminal charges, but he lost at the civil trial and was forced to pay child support even though a blood test proved that the child wasn’t his. This case was largely responsible for a change in California law stating that blood tests could be used as evidence in civil trials. Even if he had won though, the damage to his reputation could never be removed.

He Had A Thing For Younger Ladies

Speaking of Charlie’s love life, he was always attracted to women who were far younger than he was. When he spent the night with 22 year old Joan, Chaplin was 53, and that wasn’t the largest age gap of his relationships. In fact, biographer Joyce Milton claims that Charlie was the inspiration for the book Lolita.

His first marriage was to a 16 year-old actress, Mildred Harris (seen above), and took place when Charlie was already 29. Chaplin’s next wife was also 16 when they started dating, only at this point, he was 35. When he was 43, he started dating his next wife, 22 year old Paulette Goddard. The worst age difference though was between Chaplin and the wife he stayed with until death, Oona O’Neil. Charlie was 54 years old at the time of the wedding, while the bride had just turned 18.

McCarthyism Crushes An American Success Story

Modern Times was considered to be a bit critical of capitalism and when Charlie urged America to set up a second European front to support Russia, it was more than enough to convince J. Edgar Hoover (seen above) that Chaplin was a communist. The fact that he married two 16 year old girls by this time hadn’t helped improve his image with the feds.

Hoover ordered the FBI to keep detailed reports on him and tried to end his U.S. residency. At one point, congress tried to bring him in as a witness during the McCarthy hearings, but they kept pushing the date back and eventually canceled the order.

In 1952 though, Chaplin visited the U.K. to help push his newest film, Lamplight, and Hoover took the opportunity to exile him for good. He was able to pull some strings and get Charlie’s re-entry permit denied so he could not return to America. Rather than fight the decision, he got fed up and decided to instead move to Switzerland, saying:

“Since the end of the last world war, I have been the object of lies and propaganda by powerful reactionary groups who, by their influence and by the aid of America’s yellow press, have created an unhealthy atmosphere in which liberal-minded individuals can be singled out and persecuted. Under these conditions I find it virtually impossible to continue my motion-picture work, and I have therefore given up my residence in the United States.”

Keeping Hope Alive

Chaplin didn’t let a little thing like relocation stand in the way of his work though, he instead started making films in Europe instead. Unsurprisingly, his first of these movies, A King in New York, was a satire of the political prosecution he had recently undergone.

Ten years later, he made his final film, A Countess from Hong Kong, which starred Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando. Charlie’s only appearance in the film was a brief cameo where he played a seasick man. He also composed the music for this film and the theme became a number one hit in the U.K.

His health started to fade around this point and he then started writing his autobiography, which was published in 1964. Next, he worked on composing original scores for his early silent pictures and re-released them. He also created a pictorial autobiography that was published in 1974.

Delayed Recognitions

Charlie was first suggested for knighthood in the thirties, but he was never actually knighted until 1975, when he was 85 years old. He also was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1970 after many people were angered that he was not one of the people originally honored in 1961. Funny enough, he had his handprints and footprints immortalized in the cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater, but after all the scandals, the section of cement was removed and now many believe it is lost.

Although Chaplin won one Academy Award at the first ceremony in 1929, he never one another until 1972 when he was awarded an Honorary Award. It was his first visit to the U.S. since he was denied re-entry and he received the longest standing ovation in the award show’s history.

Death And Travel

In the late 60’s, Chaplin’s health began to deteriorate and he eventually died on Christmas Day 1977 at the age of 88. All in all, his entertainment career lasted over 75 years.

Unfortunately, his trip underground wasn’t the last of his travels. His body was stolen in 1978 in an attempt to extort money from his family. After the robbers were captured, Charlie was buried under 6 feet of concrete to ensure this never would happen again.

Sources: Trivia Library, Wikipedia #1, #2, Time, BBC #1, #2, CharlieChaplin.com, Biography, Herald Sun, and IMDB.

Some actors appear to be underplaying their characters, consciously making them cool, without affect. If you can’t move your face, why not create an undemonstrative character? Others have taken the opposite approach: On two cable dramas starring actresses of a certain age, the heroines are brassy and expansive, with a tendency to shout and act out, yet somehow their placid foreheads are never called into play. Usually, when a person reenacts a stabbing or smashes a car with a baseball bat, some part of the face is going to crease or bunch up. Not so with these women. As though to compensate for their facial inertia, both perform with stagy vigor, attempting broad looks of surprise or disappointment, gesticulating and bellowing. If you can’t frown with your mouth, they seem intent on proving, you can try to frown with your voice.

The bright side is that public opinion may eventually turn to a preference for naturally aged thespians. Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Hannah Whitaker)

The music, East Hastings by Goodpseed You! Black Emperor, certainly contributed much to the awesomeness of the clip.

I’m glad that Kathy Bates’ character Annie Wilkes from the movie Misery made the list. Who do you think is the best Hollywood villain?

Link [embedded YouTube clip]

Let Hollywood Saloon take you back to a time before Stanley Kubrick was "Stanley Kubrick", before Spielberg was "Spielberg" and Scorsese was "Scorsese".

The folks at Hollywood Saloon have gathered together the early directorial efforts of some of cinema’s biggest and most acclaimed names, ranging from Stanley Kubrick and James Cameron to Paul Thomas Anderson.

These early works, consisting of 16mm student productions, Super 8 and VHS films, give us a glimpse of the youthful talent that would go on to produce some of the most important films of the 20th century.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

Cineleet has an interesting post about movies that depict mentally challenged characters, from those who suffer from mental retardation, savant syndrome, to plain ol’ derangement, and analyzed what made these movies so great:

The 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder highlights an inconvenient Hollywood truth: Oscar loves mental disabilities. In the film, Ben Stiller’s action hero character, Tugg Speedman, wishing to expand beyond his stereotype, attempts to court Oscar sympathies by playing a mentally challenged farmhand. It ends up being a critical failure. This is because, as Tugg’s co-star Robert Downey, Jr warns him, “You never go full retard”. And he has a point.

The most critically acclaimed performances by characters with disabilities still retained something the audience could emotionally relate to.

For instance, take Dustin Hoffman’s award-winning portrayal of the "idiot savant" Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man (1988):

Character: Raymond Babbitt as played by Dustin Hoffman

Mental Disability: Autism / Savant Syndrome
Barry Levinson’s film features Hoffman as an “idiot savant” who possesses a phenomenal capacity to count toothpicks and cheese balls (and later, cards in Vegas). Hoffman’s performance arguably is one of the most ‘affected’ of all the characters on this list, and as such, the hardest to emotionally connect with, particularly for his brother (Tom Cruise), who’s self-centered and primarily interested in the estate their father left Raymond. But in the midst of his worst autistic episodes, Raymond’s primal instinct to care for his younger brother is the touchstone that makes this performance resonate.

What the Critics Thought: The Los Angeles Times called Hoffman’s performance made the film “hypnotically interesting”, and Newsweek’s David Ansen said the film was “made with care, smarts, and a refreshing refusal to settle for the unexpected”.

How it Paid Off: It took home four Oscars that year, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Hoffman.

Link – Thanks Warren!

The following is reprinted from The Best of The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. From Hollywood's earliest days, directors have sought to leave their individual marks on their films. Some have devised small "signatures" that identify a film as their work. Can you spot them? MAKING THEIR MARK The French have a word for it: auteur (author). It's the name for a theory of filmmaking - the idea that a film director is like a book's author and is responsible for the film's vision, form, and content. Many director's films are easily recognizable as theirs, based on the themes and style that recur in their movies. But some directors also add small signature touches or in-jokes that - if you recognize them - add to the audience's enjoyment. FRANK CAPRA Capra had a pet raven named Jimmy, and he found a place for him in several of his movies, starting with You Can't Take It With You (1938). In the Christmas classic, It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Jimmy the raven sits on Uncle Billy's desk in the Bailey Building and Loan.   ALFRED HITCHCOCK Probably the best-known of all director signatures, Hitchcock famously placed himself in many of his films - his unmistakable profile appears briefly in 37 out of 54 of them. To help you out, we've sniffed out Hitchcock sightings in some of his most familiar films. Psycho: About four minutes into the film, Marion (Janet Leigh) returns to her office. You can glimpse Hitchcock, wearing a cowboy hat, through the window. Don't blink or you'll miss him - he's only on-screen for a few seconds. Rear Window: About 30 minutes into the film, Hitchcock is winding a clock in the songwriter's apartment. Dial M for Murder: This one is of Sir Alfred's trickier cameos. Roughly 13 minutes into the film, a class reunion photo is shown. That's him on the left of the picture. Strangers on a Train: Right at the start of the movie, Hitchcock can be seen boarding the train, carrying a double bass. Lifeboat: Hitchcock appears briefly as the "before" and "after" pictures in a newspaper ad for weight-loss program. Around the time of this movie's filming, Hitchcock had crash dieted and dropped 100 pounds. QUENTIN TARANTINO Tarantino is best known for violent films with a healthy dose of black humor. And there are several signatures to watch for: Each movie contain a "trunk shot," during which the camera is set deep in the trunk of a car so it can capture the actors as they lean in and over it. Each also has an ad for Red Apple cigarettes (a fictional brand.) Tarantino almost always has one or more of his characters barefoot - it's Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill movies. MARTIN SCORSESE Taking a leaf from Alfred Hitchcock's book, Scorsese appears in cameos in almost all his films. Going Hitchcock one better, Scorsese also puts many members of his family in small roles. Cape Fear: Scorsese's mother plays a customer at the fruit stand. The Color of Money: Scorsese is walking a dog in the casino scene. The dog was actually his own dog, and received a credit as Dog Walkby. Goodfellas: Scorsese's mother plays Tommy's mother. The director let her ad-lib her entire scene. His father plays the prisoner who put too many onions in the "gravy" (tomato sauce). Raging Bull: Scorsese can be seen asking Jack to go onstage. Also in Raging Bull, Scorsese's father is part of a mob at the Copa Nightclub. Taxi Driver: Scorsese is sitting in the background of the campaign headquarters as Cybill Sphepherd walks in.

The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of the Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. The Bathroom Reader Institute handpicked the most eye-opening, rib-tickling, and mind-boggling articles from everything they have written over the last ten years and carefully crammed them into 576 pages of the book. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.

Previously on Neatorama: Stories Behind Hollywood Studio Logos

The movie is about a ten year old Indian boy named Hari Prasad Dhoonda, nicknamed Hari Puttar (Puttar means "son" in Punjabi), who was left home when his parents go on vacation. Just like Home Alone, Hari soon has to face burglars who wanted to steal his father’s secret formula.

Given the similarity to its movies, Warner Bros. decided to sue but the case was thrown out by Indian courts on the grounds that the public would be able to tell the difference and Warner had waited too long to file their case.

Hari Puttar’s official website | Trailer of the movie at Clipser: Link

You see these opening logos every time you go to the movies, but have you ever wondered who is the boy on the moon in the DreamWorks logo? Or which mountain inspired the Paramount logo? Or who was the Columbia Torch Lady? Let's find out:

1. DreamWorks SKG: Boy on the Moon

In 1994, director Steven Spielberg, Disney studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, and record producer David Geffen (yes, they make the initial SKG on the bottom of the logo) got together to found a new studio called DreamWorks.

Spielberg wanted the logo for DreamWorks to be reminiscent of Hollywood's golden age. The logo was to be a computer generated image of a man on the moon, fishing, but Visual Effects Supervisor Dennis Muren of Industrial Light and Magic, who has worked on many of Spielberg's films, suggested that a hand-painted logo might look better. Muren asked his friend, artist Robert Hunt to paint it.

Hunt also sent along an alternative version of the logo, which included a young boy on a crescent moon, fishing. Spielberg liked this version better, and the rest is history. Oh, and that boy? It was Hunt's son, William.

The DreamWorks logo that you see in the movies was made at ILM from paintings by Robert Hunt, in collaboration with Kaleidoscope Films (designers of the original storyboards), Dave Carson (director), and Clint Goldman (producer) at ILM.

Photo courtesy of Robert Hunt - Thanks for the neat story, Robert!

2. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM): Leo The Lion

In 1924, studio publicist Howard Dietz designed the "Leo The Lion" logo for Samuel Goldwyn's Goldwyn Picture Corporation. He based it on the athletic team of his alma mater Columbia University, the Lions. When Goldwyn Pictures merged with Metro Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer Pictures, the newly formed MGM retained the logo.

Since then, there have been five lions playing the role of "Leo The Lion". The first was Slats, who graced the openings of MGM's silent films from 1924 to 1928. The next lion, Jackie, was the first MGM lion whose roar was heard by the audience. Though the movies were silent, Jackie's famous growl-roar-growl sequence was played over the phonograph as the logo appeared on screen. He was also the first lion to appear in Technicolor in 1932.

The third lion and probably most famous was Tanner (though at the time Jackie was still used concurrently for MGM's black and white films). After a brief use of an unnamed (and very mane-y) fourth lion, MGM settled on Leo, which the studio has used since 1957.

The company motto "Ars Gratia Artis" means "Art for Art's Sake."

Sources: MGM Media Center | Wikipedia entry on "Leo The Lion"

3. 20th Century Fox: The Searchlight Logo

In 1935, Twentieth Century Pictures and Fox Film Company (back then mainly a theater-chain company) merged to create Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation (they later dropped the hyphen).

The original Twentieth Century Pictures logo was created in 1933 by famed landscape artist Emil Kosa, Jr. After the merger, Kosa simply replaced "Pictures, Inc." with "Fox" to make the current logo. Besides this logo, Kosa was also famous for his matte painting of the Statue of Liberty ruin at the end of the Planet of the Apes (1968) movie, and others.

Perhaps just as famous as the logo is the "20th Century Fanfare", composed by Alfred Newman, then musical director for United Artists.

4. Paramount: The Majestic Mountain

Paramount Pictures Corporation was founded in 1912 as Famous Players Film Company by Adolph Zukor, and the theater moguls the Frohman brothers, Daniel and Charles.

The Paramount "Majestic Mountain" logo was first drawn as a doodle by W.W. Hodkinson during a meeting with Zukor, based on the Ben Lomond Mountain from his childhood in Utah (the live action logo made later is probably Peru's Artesonraju). It is the oldest surviving Hollywood film logo.

The original logo has 24 stars, which symbolized Paramount's then 24 contracted movie stars (it's now 22 stars, though no one could tell me why they reduced the number of stars). The original matte painting has also been replaced with a computer generated mountain and stars.

Paramount logo history, for more details, see: CLG Wiki

5. Warner Bros.: The WB Shield

Warner Bros. (yes, that's legally "Bros." not "Brothers") was founded by four Jewish brothers who emigrated from Poland: Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner. Actually, those aren't the names that they were born with. Harry was born "Hirsz," Albert was "Aaron," Sam was "Szmul," and Jack was "Itzhak." Their original surname is also unknown - some people said that it is "Wonsal," "Wonskolaser" or even Eichelbaum, before it was changed to "Warner." (Sources: Doug Sinclair | Tody Nudo's Hollywood Legends)

In the beginning, Warner Bros. had trouble attracting top talents. In 1925, at the urging of Sam, Warner Bros. made the first feature-length "talking pictures" (When he heard of Sam's idea, Harry famously said "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"). That got the ball rolling for the studio and made Warner Bros. famous.

The Warner Bros. logo, the WB Shield, has actually gone many revisions. Jason Jones and Matt Williams of CLG Wiki have the details:

Warner Bros. Logo History - see the full details at CLG Wiki

If you're interested in WB cartoons, you can't go wrong with Dave Mackey's Field guide: Link

6. Columbia Pictures: The Torch Lady

Columbia Pictures was founded in 1919 by the brothers Harry and Jack Cohn, and Joe Brandt as Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Film Sales. Many of the studio's early productions were low-budget affairs, so it got nicknamed "Corned Beef and Cabbage." In 1924, the brothers Cohn bought out Brandt and renamed their studio Columbia Pictures Corporation in effort to improve its image.

Vintage Columbia Pictures Logo (Source: Reel Classics)

The studio's logo is Columbia, the female personification of America. It was designed in 1924 and the identity of the "Torch Lady" model was never conclusively determined (though more than a dozen women had claimed to be "it.")

In her 1962 autobiography, Bette Davis claimed that Claudia Dell was the model, whereas in 1987 People Magazine named model and Columbia bit-actress Amelia Batchler as the girl. In 2001, the Chicago Sun-Times named a local woman who worked as an extra at Columbia named Jane Bartholomew as the model. Given how the logo has changed over the years, it may just be that all three were right! (Source)

The current Torch Lady logo was designed in 1993 by Michael J. Deas, who was commissioned by Sony Pictures Entertainment to return the lady to her "classic" look.

Though people thought that actress Annette Bening was the model, it was actually a Louisiana homemaker and muralist named Jenny Joseph that modeled the Torch Lady for Deas. Rather than use her face, however, Deas drew a composite face made from several computer-generated features (Source: Roger Ebert, Photo: Kathy Anderson)

Obviously, we're missing the stories of the logos of many other film studios. We'd love to hear from you if you know any! Please tell us in the comment section.

If you like this article, please check out Neatorama's articles on logos:

• The Evolution of Tech Logos
• Evolution of Car Logos
• Who Owns What on Television?