The 1972 film The Godfather was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won three. It made stars out of several actors who were barely into their careers at the time. But it wasn't an easy movie to make. The studio didn't really want to invest much into it. Paramount had bought the rights to the book before it was even written, and when it became a hit, they didn't think they could do it justice. The casting was a mess and took forever. And the Mafia didn't like the whole idea.

Paramount promoted The Godfather as the first Italian mob drama made by Italians, but some Italians were offended. Italian-Americans were continually portrayed as criminals in the movies and they were fed up. Joseph Colombo, of the crime family that bore his name, formed The Italian-American Civil Rights League in 1969. They demanded the words "mafia" and "Cosa Nostra" get pulled from the script and that all the money the movie made at its premier get donated to their fund to build a new hospital.

Colombo didn’t just see The Godfather as good excuse to squeeze money from the studio, it was as personal as it was business. The Colombo Family used to be called the Profaci Family, one of the first families of the Five Families that ruled the Commission. All that talk at the center of the book about “sleeping with the fishes” and “going to the mattresses” came from the Gallo-Profaci wars that rocked the early sixties.

The story of The Godfather includes a short history of that mob war, and how the real-life mobsters came around to the movie so much that several got roles in it. Read about the making of The Godfather at Den of Geek.

Sometimes the secret to success is to recognize a failure and turn it around to serve a totally different purpose. Such was the case of the monks of the the Santa Maria Novella monastery, established in 1221 in Italy. They studied plants to develop natural medicines and remedies for various maladies, and had some success, but that's not what they became known for. Today their company the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella is a world-renowned source for natural skin care products.

Gianluca Foà, the modern company’s Chief Commercial Officer, explains that two pivotal events changed the destiny of Santa Maria Novella’s little pharmacy. “First, in 1348, as soon as the plague epidemic came to Florence, the monks started trying to make something to fight this disease by turning to nature,” Foà says. Despite various attempts to combat the illness, more than half of Florence’s population was killed by the Black Death within a few years of the initial outbreak.

In 1353, as the city was reeling in the wake of this tragedy, Giovanni Boccacio wrote his famous book The Decameron, a collection of stories narrated by a group of young Italians sequestered from the sinister plague in a hillside villa outside of Florence. Isolation was the only reliable method for avoiding the Black Death, explains Diana Stefani, one of the current co-owners of the Santa Maria Novella cosmetics company. “In the monks’ book of recipes, one of the best recipes was to go and live on the hills,” Stefani says. “They also gave advice on changing the air in the rooms and carrying objects soaked with strong perfume,” the idea being that if you didn’t smell the plague, you wouldn’t get sick.

At some point in their studies, the friars noticed that rose petals were resistant to certain pests, and concluded that distilling the petals would create a disinfectant that could prevent humans from catching the bubonic plague. “It didn’t work at all,” Foà says, “but by 1380, they had created this rosewater tonic, which is still one of our bestsellers.” Today, the company’s rosewater products based on this original recipe are sold as skin toner.

The monks developed some important innovations in perfumes and liqueurs, which added to their fame. Read the story of the little church pharmaceutical lab that became a cosmetics giant, at Collectors Weekly.

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You might know something about makeup, but what do you know about its history? To develop the beauty enhancements we have today, early users put their lives, or at least their health, at stake, even if they didn't know it. Other early versions makeup were just plain gross. The things we go through to be beautiful! Learn more in the latest episode of the mental_floss List Show. The FDA makeup horror stories John Green refers to are found here.  

Oh yeah, it's easy to tie your yoyo string in knots. The real challenge is to get it untangled without dropping the beat! The European Yoyo Championship was held over the weekend in Bratislava, Slovakia. American Evan Nagao took first place in the open finals division, and deservedly so.

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We might not know exactly how intricate these tricks are, but the crowd is full of yoyo experts and fans, and listen to how impressed they are! -via Tastefully Offensive

Remember last year when Brian Kane installed Alexa in his Billy Bass? Mike McGurrin has taken that idea one step further -and creepier- by using a Halloween decoration skull with a moving mouth to be the face of th internet-enabled personal assistant Alexa.

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If The Addams Family were a sitcom today, this would be their household assistant instead of Thing, who had no voice. In this followup video, McGurrin tries to trip his skull up, but she's always a step ahead.   

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Read how McGurrin did it at his website. -via Laughing Squid

In 1774, 25-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published a novel called The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werther). He called his experience of writing the story of romantic heartbreak therapeutic, as he struggled with thoughts of suicide.

Inspired in part by the young Goethe’s sorrow over losing Charlotte Buff, an acquaintance who spurned him in favor of another man, Young Werther, written almost entirely in letters, traces the tragic infatuation the protagonist forms for his own unattainable woman, also known as Charlotte (love needs no pseudonym!). After months of agony, the story, and Werther, end when the brokenhearted lover pulls the trigger at midnight on Christmas Eve, proclaiming, “Charlotte, Charlotte! Farewell, farewell!” before committing what Germans sometimes call Liebestod (love-death).

The book was a best seller, sometimes referred to as the beginning of the Romantic movement. Over the next few decades it spawned merchandising opportunities, as young adult readers wanted to identify with Werther and his heartbreak. Sadly, that included some who took it far enough to commit suicide. But it's hard to know how many were triggered by the novel, how many would have taken their own lives anyway, or ultimately how many of these suicides there actually were. Goethe himself lived to the age of 82. Read about The Sorrows of Young Werther at Ozy. 

It's a sign of success when your movie, or film franchise, gets poked fun at. No one does that for movies that aren't widely seen, because who would get the joke? Well yeah, people do make jokes about lesser movies, but they don't get much traction or go viral if half the audience needs it explained. Not so with Wolverine. With the success of the latest movie Logan, the internet is full of Wolverine jokes and memes, whether they involve the comic book character or Hugh Jackman in his many incarnations. Check out a selection of Wolverine image macros and jokes at TVOM.

Just ahead of the release of Disney's live-action Beauty and the Beast remake this weekend, Screen Junkies takes a close look at the 1991 animated feature film. They explain how this children's movie shows young girls the very worst way to fall in love, plus why no one in this movie is at all likable and the plot makes no sense. While the movie may have been for children, the Honest Trailer is not.

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I guess the movie was okay as long as you never, ever believe that the bad boy you find so appealing will change for the better just because of the magic of a woman's love.

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

Johann Peter Weissmuller, the son of Peter and Elisabeth Weissmuller, was born on June 2, 1904, in Freidorf, Austro-Hungarian Empire (present day Timisoara, Romania). Johann and his parents immigrated to the United States in 1905, before he was even a year old. The three Weissmullers were steerage passengers on the boat to Ellis Island and were listed as "Germans." (Although there is some dispute about Johann's exact place of birth, his birth date seems to be mutually agreed upon by all sources.)

The family settled in a town called Windber, Pennsylvania, where Peter found work as a miner. Another Weissmuller son, Peter Jr., was born in 1905. By 1910, the family had moved and settled in Chicago.

At the age of nine, Johann contracted polio. His doctor recommended he take up swimming to battle the disease. Johann took to the new activity like a fish to water (sorry) and soon had a spot on the local YMCA swim team.

He had been a student at the Lane Technical College prep school, but soon dropped out and found work as a lifeguard at Lake Michigan Beach. Johann had several odd jobs during this period, including working as both a bellboy and an elevator operator at the Illinois Athletic Club.

A swim coach named William Bachrach spotted and was impressed by Johann's aquatic prowess and became his trainer in August of 1921. Soon, Johann had won two national swimming championships.

It was during this period, that Johann adopted the more Americanized named of "Johnny Weissmuller." He also took on the birth date of his younger brother (November 5, 1905) and "adopted" a new birthplace- Tanneryville, Pennsylvania. These factors were necessary when he needed an American passport to be able to compete in the 1924 Olympics. His younger brother's Pennsylvania baptism record was enough to convince authorities. The whole new identity scheme for Weissmuller was supposedly cooked up by his mother.

Math whiz Vi Hart makes a pie for Pi Day, even though she doesn't like pi, finds it boring, and prefers tau. But she likes to cook. This year, she's been thinking about Venn diagrams, so she made a Venn "pieagram."

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Okay, she started out to make a fruit pie, and ended up with a fish pizza. Read the chain of thought that led Hart to make this pie at her blog. -via Boing Boing

See more videos from Vi Hart.

Canine Freestyle Dancing has come a long way since we last posted a routine. At the Cruft's Dog Show over the weekend, Lucy Creek and her dog Skiffle King performed a spooky little act to "Danse Macabre" flawlessly. Skiffle not only dances, but sets up the props, too!

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Creek and Skiffle King took top honors in the Freestyle Heelwork To Music competition. And then there's Flyball, a competition that's new to me. It's competitive relay fetch with hurdles! Here are the final four teams competing at Cruft's; skip to about 5:30 to watch the dogs fly.

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That's a bunch of good dogs! -via Metafilter

Jane Fonda opened up a big can of worms when her workout videos became such big hits in the 1980s. Suddenly celebrities of all kinds were releasing their own workout videos, and it didn't matter what was in them as long as the star on the cover had fans who would buy them. A gallery of those workout video covers might make you feel nostalgic, but more likely will just give you a laugh. Remember Marky Mark? He and his group The Funky Bunch entered the hip hop music industry in 1991 on the coattails of his big brother, Donnie, who was a member of New Kids on the Block. Marky Mark was known for performing in his tighty whities. Young people probably know him better as actor Mark Wahlberg. See the collection of superstar workout videos at TVOM. 

A guy invents a way to travel through time and doesn't consider all the ways it could go wrong before he jumps into history to make some changes. No, it's not about a timeline paradox, this is about more immediate, practical considerations you should work out before you even start.

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This video from Tom Ska does have some mildly NSFW language. And an unbelievable amount of "not thinking ahead." -via Geeks Are Sexy

Happy Pi Day! Don't forget to wear your Pi Day t-shirt! March 14 is celebrated as Pi Day because the date, 3/14, is the first three digits of pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to it diameter. Of course, the number is not "round" at all, and the digits go on to infinity. In that long sequence of numbers, you'll eventually find any other sequence of numbers, like your birthday. Time made a handy calculator to find where your birth date falls in the pi sequence. Mine starts at digit 977.

That's pretty far in, but yours may go further. Albert Einstein's birthday starts at the very first digit of pi, because he was born on March 14, 1879. Einstein's birthday gives math and science nerds another reason to celebrate Pi Day, traditionally by eating pie. Pizza pie is included. Some restaurants and other businesses are offering special deals for Pi Day.

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High school hockey players across the state of Minnesota spend months getting their hair in shape for a unique competition, including practicing their hair toss for the camera. John King, who posts as Game On! Minnesota has unveiled his annual Minnesota State High School All Hockey Hair Team.

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Nothing says "I play high school hockey in Minnesota!" like a beautiful head of long flowing hair. The video also contains musings on New York, poetry, and Justin Trudeau. -via Digg

See also: The 2016 All Hockey Hair Team.