The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader.

When directors finish a movie and hate it (because the studio interfered or they’re embarrassed by it), they don’t want their names on it. So what do they do? Until a few years ago, orphaned films were credited to “Alan Smithee.”

THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE

Until 1968, the Directors Guild of America required mainstream movie directors to use their real names on films, based on the concept that a director is the main creative force or “author” behind a film. (In the film world, this is called auteur theory— auteur is French for “author.”) The rule also prevented studios and producers from failing to credit a director that they didn’t get along with. But until 2000, the DGA had one exception to the rule: They allowed unhappy directors to use a pseudonym— the same pseudonym— Alan Smithee. Why “Alan Smithee”? DGA brass wanted a name that sounded generic or common (like Smith), but tweaked just a bit so that it wasn’t anybody’s actual name (like Smithee).

Directors now had a powerful tool at their disposal. If they could prove to the DGA that producers or a studio had taken away their creative control, they could un-credit themselves from a film and attribute it to “Alan Smithee.” The only stipulation: If they used the pseudonym, they could never publicly discuss having worked on the film in question or the fallout that ensued. Here are some films that were directed by “Alan Smithee”… and who really made them.

Movie: Death of a Gunfighter (1969)

Directors: Robert Totten, Don Siegel

Story: As the Western genre started to lose relevance, along came this movie, a Western about the end of the Wild West era as modern society encroaches, leaving behind a traditional, iron-fisted sheriff of a small dusty town, portrayed by veteran actor Richard Widmark. The shoot dragged on for almost a year, plagued by disagreements between Widmark and 32-year-old Totten, a director who had directed more than 40 episodes of TV Westerns like Gunsmoke and Bonanza. Widmark eventually won.

This #marsattack video has been enjoying some viral hits the last few days on #Facebook

A video posted by Make up Artist MMG (@mariamalone1122) on Jun 2, 2015 at 4:57pm PDT

What is going on here? Can this really be face paint, or is it a mask, or some kind of combination paint and mask? Watch the video and see. Makeup artist Maria Malone is responsible for this disturbing yet oh-so-cool display of facial transformation from the movie Mars Attacks!  -via Geeks Are Sexy

This gorgeous and intricate wedding cake was produced by the bakery Cupcakes by SJ in London, England. The Facebook post said,

My talented Father does it again with a special creation for my cousins wedding, though I did make the edible Lego bricks

That's one lucky cousin! You can make your own edible LEGO bricks from gummy candy, but these look more like fondant or some kind of sugar -and more like the real bricks. It must have taken some time! Notice how the little minifig bakers and construction workers are busy “icing” the cake! -via Buzzfeed

In tribute to Sir Christopher Lee, whose death at age 93 was announced today, it is only fitting to look back at his career that included hundreds of movies. Lee often played the villain, from Count Dracula to Count Dooku, from Rasputin to Saruman. And since the bad guy usually dies on film, Lee racked up at least 60 deaths in cinema. Here’s a supercut of his death scenes. Some are pretty gruesome.

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You didn’t realize how many movies you’d seen him in until you saw this, right? -via Uproxx

Can a woman play a soldier in a Civil War reenactment? J.R. Hardman was always interested in the Civil War, but when she asked about joining in an reenactment, she was steered toward the hoop skirts. But she wanted to be a soldier. Every group of historical reenactors has their own rules, and some are more inclusive than others. After all, which is more important: historical accuracy or inclusiveness? Hardeman found a place as a Civil War soldier, a role that is based on actual history.    

There is historical authenticity in the idea that Hardman must dress and act as a man in order to fit into contemporary re-creations of Civil War life.

After all, the small number of women — perhaps several hundred — who fought in the real Civil War did so disguised as men. Some fought to be near loved ones; others for better pay; still others for ideological reasons. Those dressed-as-men combatants are beacons to Hardman.

Hardeman’s experience inspired her to produce a documentary about women in the Civil War and in modern reenactments with the working title Reenactress. Read about Hardeman and several of the women who fought in the Civil War disguised as men, at NPR. -via Daily of the Day

(Image credit: O.K. Keyes/Reanactress)

Every facet of the modern airport is designed with a goal in mind: to maximize efficiency, reduce problems, and to make you spend more money. Even the smallest detail is based on research to maximize these goals.

4. They herd you with art

That big sculpture in your terminal isn’t just there to look pretty. It’s another tool to help travelers navigate. “We like to use things like artwork as kind of placemakers that create points of reference through an airport terminal,” says [consulting firm executive Stanis] Smith. “For example, in Vancouver International Airport we have a spectacular 16-foot high sculpture at the center of the pre-security retail area. People say, ‘Meet you at the sculpture.’ It acts as a point of orientation.”

Art also serves to create a sense of place, transforming the airport from a sterile people-mover to a unique atmosphere where people want to spend time (and money!). In one survey, 56% of participants said “a more culturally sensitive and authentic experience tied to the location” is something they’d like to see more in airports by 2025.

5. They use carpeting

In many airports, the long walk from check-in to gate is paved in linoleum (or some other hard-surface). But you’ll notice that the gate waiting area is carpeted. This is an attempt to make holding areas more relaxing by giving them a soft, cozy feeling, like you might find in your own living room. Happy, relaxed travelers spend 7% more money on average on retail and 10% more on Duty Free items. And it doesn’t stop with a layer of carpeting. Yoga rooms, spas, and even airport therapy dogs are becoming more common as airports look for new ways to relax travelers and encourage spending.

There’s more about airport design, with a reason behind everything from the sign fonts to TSA chat, at mental_floss. 

Back in December, we posted a Lunarbaboon comic that promised a new character coming in June. Now it’s June and Chris just posted a new comic featuring a new character -his daughter! But it’s mainly about the admiration he has for Mrs. Lunarbaboon. Congratulations to the whole family! You can leave a message at the comic's Facebook post. 

Artist Kelsey Wailes (previously at Neatorama) modded some My Little Ponies into characters from the movie Mad Max: Fury Road! The limited edition ponies presumable sold out at AwesomeCon last weekend, because they are not available at her Etsy Shop. However, you can get a closer look at My Little Nux, My Little Mad Max, My Little Furiosa, and My Little Immortan Joe at Wailes' DeviantART gallery, and see them all together at her blog Borderline Artistic. -via Buzzfeed

Legendary actor Christopher Lee died Sunday at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. His family delayed the news until today so that all family members could be notified first. Known to a younger generation as the actor who played Saruman in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, Christopher Lee had a career in film that spanned almost 70 years. IMDb lists 281 TV and film credits.

His film career started in 1947 with a role in gothic romance Corridor of Mirrors but it wasn’t until the late 50s, when Lee worked with Hammer, that he started gaining fame. His first role with the studio was The Curse of Frankenstein and it was the first of 20 films that he made with Peter Cushing.

Lee’s most famous role for Hammer was playing Dracula, a role which became one of his most widely recognised although the actor wasn’t pleased with how the character was treated. “They gave me nothing to do!” he told Total Film in 2005. “I pleaded with Hammer to let me use some of the lines that Bram Stoker had written. Occasionally, I sneaked one in. Eventually I told them that I wasn’t going to play Dracula any more. All hell broke loose.”

In the 70s, Lee continued to gain fame in the horror genre with a role in The Wicker Man, a film which he considered to be his best. He went on to play a Bond villain in 1974’s The Man with the Golden Gun and turned down a role in Halloween, which he later said was one of biggest career regrets.

Lee also released a series of heavy metal albums late in life. The actor was 93 years old. -via reddit

Like many folks, I joined the Columbia Record Club in high school, and immediately got a dozen of the hottest vinyl LPs for a penny (and many years later for DVDs). Millions of Americans did, but the real heyday of the business was in the ‘90s when everyone was buying CDs. The A.V. Club interviewed eight former employees of Columbia House for an oral history of the business model of selling music through the club.   

SFJ: The negative option—that’s what we called it, right?

CW: The whole business was premised on this concept called negative option. Which just sounds so creepy and draconian and weird, but the idea that if you don’t say no, we’re going to send you shit. It’s going to fill your mailbox, and we’re going to keep sending it unless you panic and beat us back. That was how the money was getting generated.

SFJ: Most times when you’re trying to get somebody to buy something, you are actively trying to get them to go and buy the thing, even if now it’s clicking or subscribing and subscription. Columbia House had this brilliant, perverse method which was [that] you sign up and then all you have to do is tell us not to send you things, and if you don’t remember that, we are going to sell you something and you have to pay for. And enough people will like that? Okay. And it was a profitable business. Could you ever get anyone to do that again?

PO: You can get a free trial of software, and if you don’t deal with turning it off, you’re going to get billed for $49. Again, all these things are precursors to how business is being done on the internet.

CW: You guys remember how mind-numbingly complicated the deals were? And they were always [trying to] squeeze an extra dollar out of everyone. It would be like, “2 for $3.99 gets you 4 for $4.99 and then a free CD on top of your $8.99.” You would look at these things, and nobody could rationally decode these deals. They were so gothic and complicated.

One thing in the article that stuck with me was that Columbia House was making so much profit that they could hire people who needed jobs -musicians between tours and their crews- to do very little work. At the time, that seemed like an incredible waste of money, but now it looks like a wonderfully egalitarian idea to reinvest profits in jobs instead of sending all the outrageous profits to CEOs and stockholders -although I'm sure those folks did alright. Read a lot more about the business of selling records through the Columbia Record Club at the A.V. Club. The article also contains the full-length documentary The Target Shoots First, about the inner workings of Columbia House.

(Image credit: Wellcome Images via Wikimedia Commons)

A brash adventurer, a mysterious skull, and the debate that divided archaeology.

Ephraim George Squier was a year into his journey across Peru when he reached the city of Cuzco. Evidence of his trek clung to his body: skin tattooed with mud, armpits ripe from the humidity, clothes so soiled their original color was obscured. It was 1864, and the 42-year-old American was hell-bent on finding something that would make him a legend among archaeologists.

What lured Squier to Cuzco is still a mystery—an invitation, a tip, instinct? But after months in the wilderness, the city must have beckoned to him. Squier compared the sight of the city’s palace to the decadent houses on the Grand Canal in Venice. Inside, amid the usual trappings of wealth, the walls were lined with statues, weapons, pottery. Squier had collected similar items in the jungle. But now he had stumbled into an abundance.

The head of the house, Señora Zentino, dressed the part: formal gowns, often augmented with a Peruvian scarf or, given her love of antiques, a necklace of Incan tokens. Next to such finery, the skull she cradled should have startled Squier.

(Image credit: Owen Freeman)

The whole thing sounds like a fable: a wandering adventurer, a mysterious, aging beauty in a jungle palace, a stolen head. In a pulp novel, a skull such as this would have been cursed. But as Squier turned it over in his hands like a diamond in the sunlight, he marveled at its defining feature—a square-shaped hole on its top left side.

Archaeologists across the world had unearthed skulls with holes before, in quarries or mass graves. Some argued that ancient tribes had mutilated them postmortem, perhaps to make drinking vessels or amulets. Most academics simply dismissed the marks as the results of infections, birth defects, or animal bites.

But as Squier looked closer, he became convinced this hole was not natural: Nature doesn’t work in right angles. Peering at the squarish 15-by-17-millimeter hole, he could see healing scars and signs of new bone growth. This person had not only been alive during the cutting—he or she had survived. A startling idea occurred to Squier: Could this be evidence of ancient neurosurgery?

San Francisco is spread over a bunch of hillsides that can be pretty steep. Ross Ching and Karen X. Cheng (previously at Neatorama) decided to see what fun they could have by aligning a camera with the street instead of aligning it with the direction of gravity.  

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That honestly does look like it was a lot of fun to make! The music is “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’” by Scissor Sisters.

Comic book artist Tyler Kirkham is a big fan of the game Elder Scrolls. He was inspired to recreate that world in the basement of his home in Salt Lake City. Over time, he’s spent $50,000 to make it perfect.

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Despite wife Jill’s dreams of a swimming pool in the garden, Tyler Kirkham, 32, couldn’t be swayed from his vision based on The Elder Scrolls series of fantasy games, which features a $15,000 bathroom with its own waterfall and a secret door resembling a bookcase, activated by pulling one of the books. Alongside suits of armour, a crossbow and an alchemy lab full of medieval potions, the space features a $15,000 bathroom with its own waterfall and ivy-covered rock-face. He also fitted a $250 Italian crossbow, $8,000-worth of stone and masonry, stained flooring costing $3,000, suits of armour, an alchemy lab full of medieval potions, a medieval helmet worth $100 and a $20,000 home cinema for playing the games on a large screen.

I can see the future news stories now: “Neither Tyler nor his brother were ever seen again.” But can you blame them for wanting to stay down there?  -via Geeks Are Sexy

What’s not to love about Pyrex? The cookware is tough, versatile, easy-to-clean, and you can see through it! Pyrex cookware turns 100 years old this year. And Corning didn’t even invent Pyrex to cook in; tempered glass was developed for industrial uses, such as railroad lamps.  

“The story is that Dr. Jesse Littleton was discussing it over dinner with a colleague and with his wife, Bessie, who suggested that maybe this glass could be used for bakeware,” says Brumagen. “One of Bessie’s earthenware casserole dishes had just shattered in the oven, and she was annoyed because it was only the second time she had used it. So Dr. Littleton brought a sawed-off piece of a Nonex battery jar and Bessie made sponge cake in it. She ended up making custards in lamp chimneys and lots of other things to test them out for the company.”

Bessie’s experiments revealed that the borosilicate glassware heated quickly and evenly, its transparency made it easier to monitor the progress of a dish while baking, and it was easy to clean. The company soon created a new division focused on consumer products and launched its Pyrex line with 12 clear ovenware dishes in 1915. “It was a challenge to convince people to use Pyrex,” says Brumagen. “All the early ads say things like, ‘Yes, you can cook in it!’ or ‘Bake in glass!’ It was just a foreign concept to consumers, so Corning had to do some persuading.” In its early Pyrex marketing, the company purposefully used the jarring imagery of open flames visible through the clear glass to convey the potential of its new products.

The brand’s scientific-sounding name was chosen to fit with the company’s industrial lines, as several already ended in “ex.” “When they developed the Pyrex formula, the first dish they made was a pie plate,” says Brumagen. “I think it was Dr. Sullivan who wanted to call it ‘Pierite’ but was eventually overruled, and it became Pyrex since that fit with the family of products they already had—and, of course, ‘pyr’ is the prefix meaning ‘fire.’ The first ads had a little tag line underneath in quotations that said ‘fire glass,’ but they dropped that pretty fast.”

It’s hard to put yourself into the shoes of someone encountering a new product 100 years ago, but imagine someone trying to tell you that you could drop a glass dish on the floor without breaking it or even put it in the oven! Corning came up with a novel way to sell Pyrex cookware: employing women to develop products that were actually useful. What a concept! Read the story of Pyrex at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: the Corning Museum of Glass)

In case you want to refresh yourself on the original before you go see Jurassic World this weekend, but you don’t have a couple of hours to sit through the movie, we’ve got the short version for you.

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From Cinefix, here is the Jurassic Park entry in the 8-bit Cinema series, with all the bells and whistles of a retro video game. -Thanks, Daniel!