Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

The year was 1931 and the four Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo) had by now had three hit Broadway shows and two smash movies: The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930)- behind them. Both The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers were simply filmed versions of their Broadway shows. Both films had been shot in nearby Astoria Studios in Long Island, New York.

The Marxes, now being official 24-karat movie stars, decided to pull up stakes and move to the only residence befitting motion picture celebrities- Hollywood. Their third film would be their first with an official Hollywood screenplay.

The working title of their tertiary film was Pineapples, but was soon changed to Monkey Business. Written by S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone with a screenplay by Arthur Sheekman, Monkey Business was directed by Norman Z. McLeod

Monkey Business was to be the only Marx Brothers film in which none of the brothers have a character name. Because they played four stowaways on a passenger ship, they were simply referred to as "the stowaways." (in the film's end credits, they are credited by their names, i.e. Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo Marx.)

What little plot there is involves the boys stowing away on a ship, being pursued by the captain of the ship and his underlings, meeting rival gangsters on board and getting involved with them, leaving the ship and thwarting an attempted kidnapping of one of the gangster's daughters.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

In January of 1964, the Beatles were in Paris, staying at the five-star hotel, the famous Georges V. They were staying there during the 18 days of concerts they were giving at Paris' Olympia Theater. This was to be the last concert residency of the Beatles before they made their legendary first trip to America to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show in early February.

John and Paul had an upright piano sent up to their room for them compose new songs on. In these early days of Beatlemania, John and Paul still pretty much composed together. "Eyeball to eyeball, nose to nose"-type composing, as John would later call it.

But the new song the two composers came up with was not to be the usual Lennon-McCartney collaboration. This was no joint effort, this song was Paul's baby. It would also become one of the first McCartney "classics." It was to be very rare in the early canon of Beatle records, in that it is completely sung by just one person- none of the legendary "Beatle harmonies" or any background vocals whatsoever. No, this one was Paul's and Paul's alone.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

The talkie revolution had been steadily rising in motion pictures since the late 1920's. Charlie Chaplin, the world's most famous and beloved movie figure, had resisted joining the growing revolution with his most recent film City Lights in 1931.

Chaplin's follow-up film, Modern Times, was originally planned and scheduled to be Chaplin's first full-length talkie. Charlie had written an entire sound script and it looked like Chaplin's world famous persona, "the little tramp," would finally be speaking in a movie, in this, Chaplin's 77th motion picture. But after giving the idea second thoughts, Chaplin shifted gears and decided to go back to the idea of a silent film. The little tramp, he reasoned, was a universal figure, and with the first words he spoke, he would lose much of his worldwide audience.

Production on Modern Times (the film's working title was The Masses) began on October 11, 1934. Modern Times would tell the story of Chaplin's tramp being caught up in the ever-growing industrial world and how he coped with it.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

Callie Khouri, a 30-year-old music-video line producer, was driving home to her apartment in Santa Monica on a spring day in Los Angeles in 1988. She didn't realize it at the time, but during this seemingly routine drive back to her home, Callie was about to experience an epiphany. The words came to her and hit her like a bolt from the blue: Two women go on a crime spree.

"That one sentence!" Callie recalled, "I felt the character arcs- I saw the whole movie."

Unlike so many others in Hollywood, Callie had never even tried to write a screenplay before, but thoughts and ideas kept flooding into her mind. "I saw, in a flash, where those two women started and where they ended up. Through a series of accidents, they would go from being invisible to being too big for their world to contain," she added.

Furiously inspired, Callie began writing, in longhand, and kept going, adding more whenever she had spare time, for the next six months. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, more and more of the story came together for her. She would write whenever possible, at odd, free hours, then type out what she had written on her office computer.

The story gradually fleshed out- two women from Arkansas, one older than the other, one a waitress, one a housewife, both in mediocre relationships, one married, one not. The two women want to escape and go off to a borrowed fishing cabin, have some fun, a few laughs, and maybe find a little adventure and excitement to spice up their fairly tedious, drab lives. On the drive to the cabin they decide to stop off at a roadside cafe and have a drink or two.

But things go off the rails at the cafe, one of the women has a few drinks and a guy she had been innocently dancing with tries to rape her. In what would quickly become a nightmare scenario, her friend sees the attempt and fatally shoots the man. The planned fun but innocent weekend escalates into full scale getaway from increasing numbers of various and sundry lovers, strangers, police and G-men.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

In 1968, Groucho Marx signed on for the final movie role in his legendary career. Groucho agreed to play a mobster called "God" in a terrible movie called Skidoo, directed by famed director Otto Preminger. The film starred Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing.

It also featured an all-star (and eclectic) cast including Mickey Rooney, Burgess Meredith, Cesar Romero, Frank Gorshin, Peter Lawford, George Raft, and Frankie Avalon. The fact of Gorshin, Romero, and Meredith all appearing  would indicate some kind of Batman love by either the film's writer or someone behind the scenes. The three actors had famously played the three most popular guest villains on the show i.e. the Riddler, the Joker and the Penguin. That, plus the fact that Otto Preminger himself had played Mr. Freeze on the series, too.

With such an intriguing cast, all systems were go for the filming on location in San Francisco (Interestingly, John Wayne had donated the use of his personal yacht to be used as Groucho's yacht in the film.)

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

 Jerry Lewis had just wrapped up filming his latest movie Cinderfella in December of 1959. Everything was fine and dandy until Paramount executives informed Jerry that they wanted Cinderfella to be Jerry's annual summer release. Jerry disagreed and wanted Cinderfella, a fantasy film based on Jerry Lewis playing a male version of cinderella, to be put on hold. Jerry figured Cinderfella was more a film for the holiday season and wanted it released at Christmas time.

Fair enough, said Paramount, but we still will need our Jerry Lewis summer film to placate the kids who are out of school. Jerry promised Paramount head Barney Balaban that he would deliver a replacement film for Cinderfella, a film that would be all ready for the kiddies to view during the summer months.

Jerry was performing at the Fontainbleau Hotel in Miami at the time. While performing two shows a night, Jerry still managed to churn out a whopper of a script. The original script, which Jerry called The Bellboy, was 165 pages (enough for a two hour movie). It took Jerry eight days to write.

The filming would take place while Jerry was performing his two shows nightly at the Fontainbleu. Jerry (God only knows how) would perform nightly and shoot The Bellboy during the daytime hours. No word on just how he managed to get sleep, or how much sleep Jerry got, during this must-have-been-hectic period.

Perhaps to cut costs, or maybe because of the time factor, most of the other actors in the film were actually performers who happened to be appearing in Miami at the same time as Jerry. The Bellboy began production on February 8, 1960.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

"You may or may not ever see a male nude centerfold in Cosmopolitan, but I hope you do." 

-Helen Gurley Brown to female
Cosmopolitan staffers, 1971.

In 1972, after a decade and a half in the business, Burt Reynolds was finally on the brink of stardom. Now 36, Burt had been an actor since the late 1950's.

His first movie was Angel Baby in 1961. Since then, he had appeared in several mediocre to bad films (usually typecast as a Native American) and had either starred or had recurring roles in three TV series- Gunsmoke, Dan August and Hawk. Burt claims he was "the first actor in history to be in a cancelled TV series on each of the three networks" (CBS, ABC and NBC).

But the sweet smell of success seemed to finally be wafting Burt's way. He had just wrapped on the film version of James Dickey's powerful novel Deliverance. Burt was heavily counting on this major release (co-starring Academy Award nominee Jon Voight) to finally put him over into "grade A" films and roles. He knew he had done his finest acting to date in Deliverance.

Burt Reynolds was also by this time gaining a reputation as "a personality." He enjoyed making the rounds of the TV talk shows, especially The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

Unlike many good-looking actors, Burt displayed a quick wit and a very keen sense of humor. Because he was so naturally funny and quick on his feet, Burt became the first non-comedian Johnny Carson ever asked to host The Tonight Show in his absence.

One night early in 1972, after he had finished filming Deliverance and was awaiting its release, he was hosting The Tonight Show. Appearing with him on the show was Helen Gurley Brown, editor of the popular women's magazine Cosmopolitan and author of the best-selling book Sex and the Single Girl. On the show, he and Helen started bantering back and forth.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

In the early 1970s, the Zucker brothers, David and Jerry, and their creative partner Jim Abrahams, were performing in a comedy and improv theater group called Kentucky Fried Theater. During nights while the three slept, they had a habit of taping the television shows that ran into the early hours of the morning. They used this procedure to try and find TV commercials which they could satirize in their comedy routines. One night, completely by accident, they happened to record an obscure 1957 movie called Zero Hour!

Zero Hour! was an oh-so-serious drama starring Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell and Sterling Hayden. The plot of Zero Hour! involved a commercial plane flight, during which the pilots and some of the passengers get food poisoning, which causes one of the passengers, an ex-World War II fighter pilot, to try and land the airplane in a heavy fog. The Zuckers and Abrahams watched the film and found its extreme seriousness highly amusing. It contained lines like: "We have to find someone who can not only fly the plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner."

The trio of young writers eagerly wrote a satirical script, mainly using things from Zero Hour! and adding several satirical commercials. They called this original script The Late Show. This script was later changed and the idea of the satirical commercials was eventually dropped from it. The basic premise of satirizing Zero Hour! remained, but instead of the commercial satirization, the boys threw in scores of crazy puns, bizarre sight gags, wild slapstick and hilarious dialogue.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

Bess Flowers was born in Sherman, Texas, on November 23, 1898. While growing up, her father was extremely strict. When Bess dated boys, her father would always bawl them out, much to Bess's consternation. She finally grew tired of her dad's boorish behavior, and "borrowing" the extra money her mother kept stashed in the family sugar bowl, she decided to leave home and head for New York. "I was going to New York because I wanted to be an actress," she was to recall.

But at the train station, Bess spotted a poster with oranges on it, advertising another destination. "What the devil," she impulsively decided, "I'll go to California and get into pictures." Little did she know that not only would she "get into pictures," she would become the most prolific actress (or actor, for that matter) in the history of motion pictures.

Bess actually could never remember the name of the first movie she appeared in, but she did recall it was at Metro in 1922. "I got a job the first day I went on an interview," she remembered. In 1923, Bess made her first known and documented movie appearance, as an un-credited extra in the silent film Hollywood. She appeared in two more films in 1923, then took the next two years off (for whatever unknown reason) before beginning her amazing career as an extra in earnest.

For the next 38 years, beginning in 1926, Bess Flowers was to be an "uncredited extra" in over 350 feature films, not counting many comedy shorts. She is generally accepted by most sources as the performer who appeared in the most movies.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

Rodney Dangerfield was one of the funniest stand-up comedians in the history of the field. Rodney's wonderful movies, plus his always hilarious TV appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Dean Martin Show, Saturday Night Live, and so many others, kept us all in stitches. His put upon, constantly harassed character who "got no respect" struck a chord with all of us.

Sadly, the hilarious comic suffered a lifelong struggle battling depression (he kept his depression a secret until the 1990's, then he was actually quite open about it). We thank Rodney for the countless laughs he gave us. Now let's take a look at the brilliantly talented and quite fascinating man.

1. Rodney was born Jacob Cohen on November 22, 1921, in Long Island, New York. As a teenager, he helped support his family by selling newspapers and ice cream on the beach, he also delivered groceries.

2. He was writing jokes by age 15. At 19, he decided to try being a stand-up comic. He took on the stage name of "Jack Roy" and performed under this name for ten years. Although he was to later become world famous as Rodney Dangerfield, Jack Roy remained his legal name for the rest of his life.

3. He performed as a stand-up comic until the 1950s. He was heavily in debt when he quit. Before he officially left show business, he worked as a singing waiter (he was fired) and a performed as an acrobatic diver.

4. Rodney spent the '50's as an aluminum siding salesman in New Jersey. He also worked as a truck driver.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

"I was born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg"

-John Lennon

In August of 1960, a young and struggling group of teenage musicians from Liverpool often hung out, and played occasional gigs, at a club called the Jacaranda. By this time, after many changes, the group had finally decided to call themselves "the Beatles." The Jacaranda was run by a small-time promoter and hustler named Allan Williams. The Jac, as it was known, was actually the hangout of several Liverpool bands, all hanging around, waiting for their "big break."

In the early months of 1960, Williams had sent one of these local bands to Hamburg, Germany, to play. This first group was Derry and the Seniors, one of the hundreds of Liverpool bands which existed at the time. This experiment had proven successful and now, an "entrepreneur" in Hamburg, Bruno Koschmider, was asking for a second band to come over and play for his nightclub customers.
 
Williams's first choice was a top-rate local band called Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, which featured a flashy drummer named Richard "Ringo Starr" Starkey. But Rory and his boys were booked up, at the time committed to playing the summer at Butlin's Holiday Camp. Williams also tried to get Gerry and the Pacemakers, but they too declined.

Hard up to find a group, Williams next asked the Beatles, who happily accepted.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

"It'll make a helluva story. Is it true?" 

-Steven Spielberg after reading Schindler's Ark

The film Schindler's List was based on a 1982 "nonfiction novel" written by Thomas Keneally called Schindler's Ark, about Oskar Schindler, a Nazi industrialist who spent his accumulated fortune to save his Jewish workers from the Shoah.

Steven Spielberg, who was eventually to direct the film, explained: "I was drawn to it because of the paradoxical nature of the character. It wasn't about a Jew saving Jews, or a neutral person from Sweden or Switzerland saving Jews. It was about a Nazi saving Jews. What would drive a man like this to suddenly take everything he had earned and put it all in the service of saving these lives?"

Spielberg did not commit to directing the film in 1982, but showed enough interest for Universal Studios to buy the book's rights. In 1983, Poldek Pfefferberg, one of the hundreds of "Schindlerjuden" ("Schindler's Jews," or Jews who were saved by Oskar Schindler) met with Spielberg and asked him about the film. "Please," asked Pfefferberg, "When are you starting?"

"Ten years from now," Spielberg replied. At the age of 36, Spielberg did not think he was mature enough to take on a film about the Holocaust.

Spielberg was motivated by several factors to get started on filming Schindler's List a decade later. Among these were the rise of antisemitism in Europe at the time. Also, Holocaust "deniers" (those who claimed the Holocaust never took place) were being given time on the news and in the press.

Other world events played a part in Spielberg's decision. Spielberg: "There was CNN reporting every day on the equivalent to the Nazi death camps in Bosnia, the atrocities against the Muslims- and then the horrible word(s) 'ethnic cleansing,' cousin to the 'Final Solution.' I thought: my God this is happening again." Another contributing factor for Spielberg was the studio executives, who asked him why he didn't just make a donation of some form, instead of wasting everyone's time and money on a "depressing film."

While working on the movie Hook (1991), Spielberg picked up the Schindler's List script ("I hadn't read it for a year") and was leafing through it. "And I suddenly turned to Kate, who was half asleep, and I said, 'I'm doing Schindler's List as my next film.'"

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

All of us were raised in a generation of cat-and-mouse cartoons. Natural enemies, I guess cats and mice make a great adversarial team, being much more common animated foes than, say, dogs and cats. These classic cartoons have given forth many mouse stereotypes.

First off, cats don't chase mice using brooms to swat them, with both characters running upright on their hind legs. And in spite of these oft-seen stereotypes, most of us still know and realize that most mice do not wear white gloves, or vests, or bow ties. And most mice do not sleep in made-up little matchbooks or hibernate in holes in the wall with perfect semi-circular entrances.

But we've also all seen the cute cartoons of mice chewing away on a big, delicious hunk of cheese. Somehow this one seems to persist, and is still widely believed.

In 2006, Dr. David Holmes, an animal behaviorist in Britain's Manchester Metropolitan University, shocked the world when he announced: "No, mice really don't like cheese."

(Image credit: Adam Kofird at the NeatoShop)

Every year, Neatorama posts almost 6,000 items for your edification and entertainment. Those include feature articles, Neatorama exclusives, videos, links, neat pictures, and webcomics. Some posts do well, some not so well, and a few rise above the others and go viral. Here are Neatorama's top ten posts for 2017. Click the numbered titles to go to the original posts.  

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

"Screw you. I'll make an album you'll wish you'd been on."

-Paul McCartney

It was 1973 and Paul McCartney had by now been a solo artist (ex-Beatle) for four full years. He had released four albums since the Fab Four's split, two solo and two with his band Wings. His four albums McCartney, Ram, Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway had each sold well, even reaching high spots on the Billboard charts, but had mainly been considered disappointing, from a critical viewpoint, at least.

In a fairly general consensus, since leaving the Beatles, Paul had "lost it;" he didn't have that sharp edge he had when he was writing songs with John Lennon. Not to mention in the eyes of the three people whose opinions Paul considered most important.

About Paul's first solo album McCartney, George Harrison opined: Paul has "isolated" himself, so that "The only person he's got to tell him if a song is good or bad is (his wife) Linda." John called Ram, Paul's follow-up album, "Paul's granny music," and describing it as "awful." Even the mild-mannered Ringo chimed in on Ram: "I don't think there's a tune on it."

But the worst of all was John's vicious 1971 song "How Do You Sleep?" a merciless attack on his ex-writing partner, motivated by a few subtle jibes Paul had put in on a few of his songs. Describing Paul's post-Beatles output as "Muzak in my ears" and saying "Those freaks was right when they said you was dead," "A pretty face may last a year or two," and "The only thing you done was 'Yesterday,'" John proceeded to tear Paul apart, in a song.