The Last House on the Left (1972), was advertised with the line, “To avoid fainting, keep repeating: “It’s only a movie, It’s only a movie”.
The studio was fined $25,000 if a movie did not meet with the requirements of the Hays Code. It might also be condemned by the Legion of Decency or boycotted. The Motion Picture Production Code (nicknamed the Hays Code for the first director of the Motion Picture Association of America [MPAA], Will H. Hays) was … Read more
Nine people were in the lifeboat in the movie Lifeboat (1943). The actors playing them were Heather Angel, Mary Anderson, Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, Hume Cronyn, John Hodiak, Henry Hull, Canada Lee, and Walter Slezak.
Making their debut in Soup to Nuts (1930), the Three Stooges were Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and a string of actors in the third role: Shemp Howard, Jerry “Curly” Howard, Joe Besser, and Joe De Rita.
Charles Laughton played Captain Kidd twice, in Captain Kidd (1945) and in Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952).
The twelve jurors in the 12 Angry Men were played by: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, E. G. Marshall, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, Jack Klugman, Edward Binns, Joseph Sweeney, George Voskovec, and Robert Webber.
Humphrey Bogart won one Oscar, as Best Actor for his role as Charlie Allnut in The African Queen (1951).
Walter Brennan asked, “Was you ever bit by a dead bee” nearly everyone he met in To Have and Have Not (1944).
Jean-Pierre Leaud played Antoine Doinel in director Francois Truffaut’s autobiographical series. The series consisted of: The 400 Blows (1959), Love at Twenty (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), and Love on the Run (1979).
One critic called the haircut of Samson (Victor Mature) by Delilah (Hedy Lamarr) in the $3 million 1949 Cecil B. DeMille epic Samson and Delilah, “the most expensive haircut in history”.
The General Died at Dawn (1936) was the first movie to feature the line “We could have made beautiful music together”. Gary Cooper says it to Madeleine Carroll.
All About Eve (1950) received the most Oscar nominations, with fourteen.
D. W. Griffith paid $2,500 for the rights to Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s The Klansman, the book on which The Birth of a Nation (1915) was based. Dixon also received a twenty-five percent interest on the picture, which brought him several million dollars. The Birth of a Nation also drew on Dixon’s novel The Leopard’s Spots.
The Invisible Man (1933) was Claude Rains’s American film debut. As the title character, Jack Griffin, Rains was never visible until the last shot, but his voice was heard throughout.
Andy Garcia’s real name is Andres Arturo Garci-Menendez. He was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1956.
Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) was the last sequel to Planet of the Apes (1968).
Bette Davis says, “What a dump!” in the movie Beyond the Forest (1949).
Professor Julius Ferris Kelp was the nutty professor. Buddy Love was his suave, lounge-singing alter ego in the movie.
According to Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) in The Godfather, Part II (1974), the one thing that history has taught us is “That you can kill anybody.”
In 1938, MGM had about 120 stars and featured players under contract.
The seven Pontabee brothers in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) were: Adam (Howard Keel) Benjamin (Jeff Richards) Gideon (Russ Tanriblyn) Frank (Tommy Rall) Daniel (Marc Platt) Caleb (Matt Mattox) Ephraim (Jacques d’Amboise) The seven brides were: Milly (Jane Powell) Liza (Virginia Gibson) Dorcas (Julie Newmeyer [Newmar]) Alice (Nancy Kilgas) Sarah (Betty Can) Ruth (Ruta … Read more
There were four Jaws movies: Jaws (1975) Jaws 11 (1978) Jaws 3-D (1983) Jaws: The Revenge (1987) The third Jaws movie starred Dennis Quaid, Jaws 3-D (1983). The fourth and last, Jaws: The Revenge (1987) starred Michael Caine.
Anna Christie (1930), Greta Garbo’s first sound film was advertised with the slogan “Garbo Talks”.
Special effects man Eiji Tsuburaya designed the title character in Godzilla (1954).
Jessie Royce Landis, who played Grace Kelly’s mother in To Catch a Thief (1955), extinguishes a cigarette on a plateful of eggs.
The Black Cat (1934) was the first film to pair Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
Jean Harlow was working on the film Saratoga (1937) when she died.
New York City policeman Eddie Egan was the inspiration for Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in the movie The French Connection.
The story of Baron Munchausen has been filmed three times, with these actors starring as the Baron: Baron Miienchhausen (1943, Germany) Hans Albers The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1961, Czechoslovakia) Milos Kopecky The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989) John Neville
The practice of movie stars’ placing their footprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was an accident at first. It started when Sid Grauman put his footprints into unset concrete outside his own theater in 1927.
Mae Murray played the title role in The Merry Widow (1925) directed by Erich von Stroheim. Her character, Sally O’Hara, was the widow of Baron Sadoja (Tully Marshall).
Simon Oakland played Dr. Richmond, the psychiatrist who tries to explain Norman Bates’s actions at the end of Psycho (1960).
Franz Waxman wrote the music for Universal’s Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials in the 1930s. It is actually the same score he wrote for The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), often recycled in low-budget Universal productions.
There were four brothers who started the studio named Warner Brothers: Harry (1881-1958), Albert (1884-1967), Sam (1888-1927), and Jack (1892-1978). They were the children of Jewish immigrants from Poland. They founded the studio in 1923.
Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field (1963), was the first black man to win an Oscar for Best Actor.
Schlockthropus was the name of the prehuman species resurrected in Schlock (1973). The Schlockthropus is played by twenty-two-year-old John Landis in his directorial debut. The film is also known as The Banana Monster.
Director Michael Curtiz said “The next time I send a damn fool for something, I go myself” in disgust at a building prop person.
Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch were credited with the screenplay for Casablanca (1942).
Hatari is Swahili for “danger.” Hatari! was a 1962 film starring John Wayne and Elsa Martinelli.
The names of the Ghostbusters in the movie were Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Dr. Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Dr. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), and Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson).
The name of the piano player Hoagy Carmichael portrayed in To Have and Have Not (1944) was Cricket.
Alone or in collaboration, Ben Hecht (1893-1964) wrote about seventy credited stories and scripts. He worked on many more without credit. The last film he worked on, Casino Royale (1967), was such a film.
Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck appeared together in three movies: His Brother’s Wife (1936), This Is My Affair (1937), and The Night Walker (1965). The two were married in 1939 and divorced in 1952.
The name of the Broadway play in The Producers was Springtime for Hitler. Nazi refugee Franz Liebkind, played by Kenneth Mars, was the play’s author.
“D. W.” in director D. W. Griffith’s name stands for David Wark (1874-1948).
Ish Kabibble’s real name was Merwyn A. Bogue. As “Ish,” the man with the Moe Howard haircut, he did comedy with Kay Kyser and appeared in such Kyser vehicles as Carolina Blues (1944).
The movie Airport (1970) had three sequels: Airport 1975 (1974); Airport ’77 (1977); and The Concorde, Airport ’79 (1979), also known as just plain Airport ’79. All of them featured George Kennedy.
Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner were married from 1984 until her death from cancer in 1989.
Raymond Chandler thought Dick Powell, in Murder, My Sweet (1945), gave the best performance as Detective Philip Marlowe.
Marty, played by Ernest Borgnine, was a butcher in the Bronx in the 1955 movie.
Marilyn Monroe was thirty-six when she died. She was born on June 1, 1926, and died of a sleeping pill overdose on August 5, 1962.
Emily Torchia, an MGM publicist in the Culver City office, came up with the slogan “Gable’s Back and Garson’s Got Him”. The slogan referred to Adventure (1945), Clark Gable’s first movie after his discharge from the army during World War II. The movie also starred Greer Gar-son. Torchia won a bonus of $250 for the … Read more
The Brass Bottle (1964), starring Tony Randall, was about a genie and featured Barbara Eden. Eden played not the genie but Randall’s girlfriend Sylvia. Burl Ives played Fakrash, the genie.
Julia Roberts and Eric Roberts are brother and sister. Eric Roberts is eleven years older.
No, Krakatoa is not east of Java. The volcanic island of Krakatoa is in the Sunda Strait west of Java, making the title of the 1969 movie (Krakatoa, East of Java) incorrect.
The submarine injected into the scientist’s body in Fantastic Voyage (1966) was The Proteus.
The silent vamp, Theda Bara’s name was an anagram for “Arab Death.” She was born Theodosia Goodman.
A Family Affair (1937), with Lionel Barrymore as Judge Hardy and Mickey Rooney as his son Andy, was the first film in which Andy Hardy appeared. The Andy Hardy series began officially, however, with You’re Only Young Once (1938), with Lewis Stone as Judge James Hardy. George B. Seitz directed most of the Andy Hardy … Read more
Marcus Loew (1870-1927), the New York, born son of Jewish immigrants from Austria is the Loew behind Loew’s Theaters. Beginning in 1905 with penny arcades in New York and Cincinnati, Loew’s, Inc., became one of the mightiest exhibition companies.
Louis B. Mayer’s first film star was Anita Stewart. She starred in Virtuous Wives (1918), the first film made by Mayer’s production company, Alco (later Metro).
Arsene Lupin (1932), a detective story set in Paris, was the first movie featuring both John Barry-more and Lionel Barrymore.
Blackboard Jungle (1955) was the first film to feature rock music. Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” played over the opening credits.
Tom Hanks sang “The Way We Were” to his mother (Mercedes Ruehl) as proof her son was alive in Big (1988).
The Wings of Eagles was based on World War I aviator Frank “Spig” Wead, who after a debilitating accident, became a screenwriter. The screenplays he wrote included Air Mail (1932), The Citadel (1938), and They Were Expendable (1945).
Lock Martin played Gort, the giant robot, in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), then the doorman at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Director Robert Wise gave him the job because he was the tallest man he knew.
House of Usher (1960; aka The Fall of the House of Usher). Like most of the films in the series, which also included The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), it starred Vincent Price.
Window washer Morse conquered the Worldwide Wicket Co., owned by Rudy Vallee in the movie How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
The first movie Gene Wilder directed was The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975). He also wrote the screenplay and starred as Sigerson Holmes.
Roman Polanski played a spoons player in his film Repulsion (1965). Polanski also played the man with the knife who cuts Jack Nicholson’s nostril in his film Chinatown (1974).
The Virginian (1929) introduced the line, “If you want to call me that, smile”. Gary Cooper said it. Owen Wister, author of the novel The Virginian, phrased it as “When you call me that, smile!”
Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles were credited with the screenplay for Citizen Kane (1940).
Monsieur Hulot’ s Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967), and Traffic (1971) were the four “Monsieur Hulot” movies. Monsieur Hulot was played in all four by Jacques Tati.
Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet star together in two movies, The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Across the Pacific (1942). Both were directed by John Huston.
The name of the woman who appeared on behalf of Marlon Brando at the 1972 Oscar telecast was given as Sacheen Littlefeather, an “Apache,” and “president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee.” On behalf of Brando, she refused his Oscar for The Godfather (1972). It later turned out that Littlefeather was actually an … Read more
No. W. C. Fields’s gravestone does not read, “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia” In the first place, he isn’t in a grave: his ashes are housed in a vault. Second, the epitaph doesn’t appear there. Third, it wasn’t his joke. The line first appeared in the magazine Vanity Fair in the 1920s. … Read more
Marni Nixon’s only film appearance was as a nun in The Sound of Music (1965). Nixon is better known for dubbing other people’s singing, such as Deborah Kerr’s in The King and I (1956), Natalie Wood’s in West Side Story (1961), and Audrey Hepburn’s in My Fair Lady (1964).
Walter Brooke tells Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967) the one word: “Plastics”.
Doris Day first sang, “Que Sera, Sera” in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The song, written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, won an Oscar for Best Song.
The symbol for Paramount originally represented a mountain from the Wasatch Range of Utah. This was the home state of W. W. Hodkinson, the businessman who helped found the company in 1914.
The name of the United States president in Dr. Strangelove was Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers). The president’s name in Seven Days in May ( 1964 ) was Jordan Lyman (Fredric March). The president’s name in The Man (1972) was Douglas Dilman (James Earl Jones).
Errol Flynn was charged with statutory rape in 1942. He was accused of the statutory rape of two teenage girls on his yacht. He was acquitted.
Only Roger Corman was billed as director for The Terror, but several uncredited “assistants” helped out. Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, Dennis Jacob, and Jack Nicholson assisted with directing the 1963 movie.
Lakota, the language of the Sioux is the Indian language spoken in Dances With Wolves (1990).
Ralph Byrd played the part in the Republic (and later RKO) series beginning with Dick Tracy (1937). Morgan Conway played the police detective in two RKO films, beginning with Dick Tracy (1945).
In Body Heat (1981), Ned Racine (William Hurt) uses the Wheaton High School yearbook to learn that Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) is guilty of murder.
The New York Film Critics, established 1935, was established before the National Society of Film Critics. The National Society of Film Critics, considered more avant-garde than the older group, was founded in 1966. Both give annual recognition to the best work in films.
Two Women (1961) was the movie that made Sophia Loren famous, for which she won an Oscar. She was also awarded a special Oscar in 1990.
