After the deaths of both Walt and Roy Disney, the movie studio they founded was in a bit of flux. They couldn't determine where film trends were going, and the wholesome live-action movies they produced in the early 1970s didn't see the success that type of movie had in the '60s. Then George Lucas approached Disney about his project called Star Wars, and they turned him down, because it appeared to be science fiction, and everyone knew that wouldn't fly. At the same time, studio executives wanted to court the lucrative teen market. That led them to produce a string of darker, more dangerous films over the next few years.

To this end, Disney began work on the most expensive movie in its history: The Black Hole. Work on the sci-fi adventure had begun in the mid-70s, where it began as an unpublished story called Space Station-One. For years, the project floated around Disney's offices, with writers coming and going and the name changing first to Probe One and then finally to The Black Hole. It wasn't until January 1978 that pre-production began in earnest, and by this point, Star Wars had punched a planet-sized hole through public consciousness, and sci-fi was suddenly the hot genre.

The Black Hole's then-huge $20 million budget wasn't the only precedent the movie would set: it was to be the first Disney production to carry a PG rating. This might not sound like a big deal today, but at the time, it was quite a departure; traditionally, Disney had a policy of only releasing G-rated movies, which it stuck to rigidly - when the company's 1950 film Treasure Island was reissued in 1975, a brief shot of a bullet wound was snipped out to avoid a PG rating from the MPAA.

Other movies followed: The Watcher In The Woods, Dragonslayer, The Devil And Max Devlin, Tron, and others. They were such a departure from the House of Mouse we knew, that they don't even seem like Disney films now. Read about what Disney was thinking with each of them at Den of Geek.

The 1987 movie Wall Street, starring Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen, illustrated the world of finance in the '80s so well that those of us on the outside were both shocked and creeped out. Thirty years later, the drive and greed shown by characters no longer surprises us. Maybe that's why the sequel released in 2010 didn't do so well. But the original Wall Street was a hit, and won Michael Douglas an Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of corporate raider Gordon Gekko. Let's learn a little more about Wall Street.

10. It’s the first feature to show a mobile cell phone.

The cordless mobile phone that can be seen in this film was the first of its kind to be shown in any movie.

9. Michael Douglas had to work with a speech instructor.

This was to keep pace with the rapid-fire dialogue that had to take place during the movie so that it was understood that the life of a stockbroker was fast-paced and didn’t allow for much spare time.

There's more movie trivia about Wall Street at TVOM.

Redditor AnarchoCapitalist caught a great picture of himself and his kids following behind (only the first two are his). Only in hindsight did he consider what could possibly go wrong. If he had lost the grip on his phone, would it have hit the child behind him? Or would it have flown away from the ride and injured someone else? In any case, it would have been a disaster because the phone isn't yet completely paid for. But you have to admit, it's a great image. And probably the last chance to get it, since he doesn't ever want to ride this ride again. -via reddit

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.'"

This contains big spoilers for The Last Jedi. Watch at your own peril. In fact, I'm going to put it behind a page jump so you can't blame me if you see anything accidentally. However, if you've already seen The Last Jedi, you'll want to see a significant climactic scene rendered in arcade-style animation just as it happened in the theater.

Electric trams don't make a lot of noise, but they are still pretty big and fairly easy to see if you look. And you're supposed to look to make sure the next lane is clear before you move to it! It's a wonder how these folks ever got driver's licenses.

(YouTube link)

From the tram operators' reactions, or lack thereof, you get the idea that they encounter this sort of thing every day. After all, they stayed on their tracks and can't really do anything about drivers who insist on being hit. The only real reactions are when a pedestrian walks into the path of an oncoming tram. -via reddit

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

(Image credit: Astronautilus)

Research About the Only-Partially-Burnt Remnants of Smoked Cigarettes
compiled by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

Cigarette Butt Odor in the Headspace
“Odor Analysis of Cigarette Butts by a Headspace Technique,” Katsuya Fukuhara, Takeshi Sakaki, Hirohiko Sakuma, and Shiro Sugawara, Agricultural and Biological Chemistry, vol. 49, no. 7, 1985, pp. 2177-2179. The authors, at the Central Research Institute of Japan Tobacco Inc., report:

The odor of cigarette butts is rather more unpleasant than that of the cigarette smoke. A study of the odor of cigar butts has been done [“Preliminary Study of Cigar Butt Headspace Vapors,” R.L. Peck, S.F. Osman, and J.L. Barson, Tobacco Science, vol. 13, 1969, pp. 38- 39], but no reports on the odor of cigarette butts have been found. In this paper... Unblended cigarette samples, namely flue-cured, Burley and Turkish, were smoked under standard conditions. Five mm lengths of the charred side of butts were cut off leaving 25 mm pieces. Two butts were placed in a vessel... and helium gas (20 ml/min) was passed through it for five minutes. The headspace volatiles of the butts... were analysed by gas chromatography according to a method previously reported.

Introducing Cigarette Butts Into Bricks

Baker Island is an uninhabited US territory in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You need special permits to even visit the atoll, which has an area of less than a square mile. But it is geographically unique. Baker Island and nearby Howland Island are the only pieces of land in the UTC-12:00 time zone, just east of westernmost part of the International Date Line. That means it is the last place on earth! The last to see a new day on the clock, that is. That unique feature makes Baker Island the coveted destination for some ham radio operators who will visit in the summer of 2018.

Amateur or “ham” radio had its heyday in the early 20th century, when interested hobbyists began putting together their own wireless communication systems and taking to the airwaves to beam messages to their friends. “We were the original Facebook,” says Don Greenbaum, one of the leaders of the Baker Island team, who has been involved with the ham radio community for about 50 years.

“There are millions of hams out there still,” he continues, courtesy of enthusiasts who build radio towers in their backyards and call up their peers overseas. Some compete to see how many contacts they can make in a given weekend. Others plan involved trips, known as DX-peditions, centered around communicating from ever-more remote places. (“DX” is radio shorthand for “distant.”) Small groups of people make these trips, and tons of others take the opportunity to call them up, crossing another location off of their wireless bucket list.

Read more about Baker Island and the planned expedition at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Joann94024)

Director Ridley Scott had the movie All the Money in the World ready to go. Then in late October, Kevin Spacey, who played J. Paul Getty in the film, became persona non grata under numerous accusations of sexual assault against minors. What to do? If the movie missed its release date, it wouldn't be eligible for the Oscars. And a miniseries on FX was planning to tell the same story on TV soon. Scott called in the lead actors and 88-year-old Christopher Plummer to reshoot all of Spacey's scenes Thanksgiving week, and then a kamikaze editing session remade the movie in time for its December theatrical release (although it was moved three days to avoid competing with some other big films' opening dates). Vulture talked to Scott about the gambit.    

You’re known as a fast filmmaker. But I would imagine that for these reshoots, you had to work even faster.
Oh, yeah. Easy. The Martian I did in 72 days. Normally, that would be 100.

How do you do it?
You plan, you know exactly what it will look like, and I think it helps me enormously that I still do something as basic as storyboard my own stuff. It forces me, on paper, to make decisions. My boards are now insured for $6 million! I literally draw “wide shot,” “medium cross,” “long shot,” in detail. I’ll get a great frame, snap my fingers, and move on to the next one. You’re filming on paper before you even begin, so when I walk on set, I know exactly what I’m going to do. That gives me a confidence with the actors, and the actors smell it.

Read the rest of the interview here. -via Digg

Fake news on Facebook drew the attention of the world in 2017. You might think that fake Facebook stories were all about politics, but no. As you can see from the picture, the stories that drew the most "engagement" (shares, reactions, and comments) on Facebook are sensational and salacious stories of everyday people committing crimes that would take longer to debunk. There was a lot of headlines among the top fake stories that included the words "penis" and "vagina," because the publishers know what they are doing. Their business is translating social media engagement into money. After crime, politics was the second-biggest category of fake news, followed by medicine. Facebook launched a fact-check project in 2017. While it identified a lot of hoax stories, the debunking of such stories didn't get the same attention from Facebook users.

Additional analysis reveals a massive Facebook engagement gap between the top fake news stories and their corresponding fact checks. Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and ABC News were the initial US participants in Facebook’s fact-checking program, and together they produced at least one fact check for 31 of the 50 top stories in the data. Their debunkings generated a total of 127,543 engagements on Facebook — just .5% of the engagements generated by the hoaxes.

That's akin to newspapers, in that an erroneous front page headline would be corrected in small print on page ten the next day. People remember the headline, not the correction. Now imagine if the front page of your newspaper were written by advertisers instead of journalists. Read more about fake news on Facebook at Buzzfeed.

The 1990 film La Femme Nikita is about a woman, played by Anne Parillaud, who breaks bad in so many ways. She's a juvenile delinquent, junkie, thief, murderer, inmate, spy, and assassin. Hoo boy! The French-Italian film was remade under different names in Hollywood and Hong Kong, and it spawned two TV series so far. If you recall La Femme Nikita, you may want to learn more about what went on behind the cameras.

8. Parillaud was pulled over by police for unloading and loading a gun for practice.

This happened when she was caught in plain sight by police unloading and loading her practice guns. They thought the weapons were real.

7.  The Mercedes driven by Victor belongs to the Australian embassy.

If you look at the plates in the film the identification is pretty clear.

There's more trivia about La Femme Nikita at TVOM.

She has spoken. And thus it will ever be, because when Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. Besides, it's a holiday and it's cold outside. The chores can wait until next weekend. Since everyone has to go back to school or work tomorrow -or maybe another day this week- let's take some time to relax and enjoy doing nothing with our loved ones today. This comic is from Lunarbaboon. Happy New Year!

Tom has been gone for ten months. My guess is that he was away at school. When he finally returned home, the two family dogs got a bit excited to see him. You know the phrase "love you to death"? That's what this looks like, as they knock him down completely, and almost suffocate him with affection.

(YouTube link)

Even afterward, the two dogs keep pouncing on him in tender places. Tom's father can't stop laughing long enough to frame the event correctly. Poor Tom -at least the dogs are happy! -via Digg

The winners have been announced for the 2017 Nature Photographer of the Year competition. The winner is Jayaprakash Joghee Bojan, who took this photograph of an orangutan in Borneo. The caption says,

A male orangutan peers from behind a tree while crossing a river in Borneo, Indonesia. Rampant palm oil cultivation threatens this critically endangered ape, forcing the normally arboreal species to resort to unusual behavior—such as wading through crocodile-infested rivers—in order to survive.

Look at the expression on his face -no wonder they named this species "man of the forest." Bojan's picture also won the wildlife category. You can see the other category winners: landscapes, aerials, and underwater, plus the weekly winners in a gallery at NatGeo. See a lioness stare down a pack of hyenas, a sneezing iguana, and a Scandinavian bird snatching a fish from the water. -via Metafilter

The following is an article from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy.

Remember back on January 1, 2000, when a computer programming error turned the world into a backwoods wasteland of financial ruin?

WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE…EVENTUALLY!

In 1958 a computer programmer named Bob Bemer noticed a potentially catastrophic problem: The punch cards that were currently in use for programming only allotted two digits to represent the year, so it showed up as “58” rather than “1958.” Bemer was concerned that in the year 2000, as the numbers rolled over from “99” to “00,” computers either wouldn’t know how to handle double zeros, or they’d interpret it as the year 1900…and erase all of the data because it “hadn’t happened yet.” Even after Bemer lobbied his fellow programmers, IBM, and the U.S. government, none of them seemed too concerned about it. Surely by the year 2000, they figured, computers would be so advanced that the two-digit system would be replaced, wouldn’t it?