Intellect PlusFilm and television
709 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 12.
An idea Disney passed on became DreamWorks' first hand-drawn featureJeffrey Katzenberg kept pitching an animated version of The Ten Commandments while at Disney. Once he co-founded DreamWorks in 1994, he made it himself. The Prince of Egypt, the s…
Before it was The Lion King, Disney's hit was nearly King of the KalahariDisney's 1994 lion story began life as a nature-documentary idea and went through a string of working titles before becoming a musical borrowing from Hamlet. It finished as the ye…- The 2019 Lion King was shot with virtual reality on a Los Angeles stageJon Favreau's remake looks like a wildlife documentary, yet every animal is computer animation, filmed with virtual reality tools on a blue screen stage. Critics called it a near …
An anti-pollution fable, The Lorax still ended up selling SUVs and diapersDr. Seuss wrote The Lorax in 1971 as a warning about greed and pollution. Illumination's 2012 film version signed more than 70 product tie-ins, including a Mazda SUV advert featur…
Two brothers, one Chevy Impala, fifteen seasons, and eventually a war against GodSupernatural began in 2005 as a road-trip monster show about Sam and Dean Winchester. By its finale in November 2020 the brothers had battled angels, Lucifer and finally God himse…
Taraji P. Henson once waited tables on a cruise ship to pay for drama schoolBefore Cookie Lyon made her a household name, Taraji P. Henson was a Washington kid working mornings as a Pentagon secretary and evenings as a singing waitress. She went on to an …
The Dark Knight flipped a real 18-wheel truck rather than faking itChristopher Nolan's 2008 Batman sequel was shot partly on high-resolution IMAX cameras, a first for a major feature, and leaned on practical stunts over computer graphics. It beca…
George Lucas bet his own Star Wars fortune on The Empire Strikes BackCritics were lukewarm in 1980 and fans found it too dark. Yet the second Star Wars film, which George Lucas financed largely himself with a bank loan, is now often called the best…
The Godfather Part II was the first sequel ever to win Best PictureFrancis Ford Coppola refused to simply remake his hit. His 1974 follow-up runs two stories side by side: young Vito Corleone rising in immigrant New York, and his son Michael holl…
HBO's The Last of Us drew almost 40 million viewers to its premiereA fungus called Cordyceps turns people into zombie-like hosts, and a smuggler must escort the one girl who might be immune. Adapted from Naughty Dog's games by Craig Mazin and Nei…- George Lucas paid for The Clone Wars himself before any network wanted itLucas financed an animated Clone Wars series out of his own pocket and made 22 episodes before pitching it. Fox passed and Cartoon Network hesitated. Only a hastily assembled cine…
Steampunk got its name from a joke letter to a magazine in 1987Science fiction writer K. W. Jeter wanted a collective label for the Victorian fantasies he, Tim Powers and James Blaylock were writing. In a letter printed in Locus in April 1987…
Rebecca Sugar named a Cartoon Network hero after her little brotherSteven Universe is loosely based on Steven Sugar, younger brother of creator Rebecca Sugar, who also worked on the show as a background designer. Her gentle cartoon about a half-a…
Saturday Night Live nearly got cancelled in 1981, then Eddie Murphy happenedWhen NBC's Saturday Night first aired on October 11, 1975, with George Carlin hosting, it could not even use its famous name: ABC already had a Howard Cosell show called that. Fiv…
An Oscar-nominated feature film where nobody speaks a single wordAardman's 2015 Shaun the Sheep Movie tells an 84-minute story about a flock rescuing their memory-wiped farmer from the city, using only bleats, sound effects and sight gags. Crit…
Shrek was nearly voiced by Chris Farley and made with motion captureBefore Mike Myers gave the ogre his Scottish accent, Chris Farley had recorded most of Shrek's lines, and the studio planned to animate the film through motion capture. Both plans…
Ryan Coogler's vampire blues film won him ownership of it after 25 yearsTo win Sinners, Warner Bros. accepted Ryan Coogler's unusual terms: first-dollar gross, final cut, and the film reverting to him twenty-five years after release. The 1932 Mississi…
South Park began as a construction-paper Christmas card that went viralTwo University of Colorado film students animated paper cutouts into a short called The Spirit of Christmas. A Fox executive paid for a sequel as a video greeting card, copies spr…
Italy made nearly five hundred Westerns, many filmed in a Spanish desertBetween 1960 and 1978 Europe turned out more than six hundred Westerns, and Italy produced nearly five hundred of them. At their 1968 peak they made up a third of all Italian film…
The Spider-Man film that almost never happened grossed $1.921 billionIn August 2019 Marvel Studios walked away from Sony's Spider-Man films after contract talks broke down. Fans were furious, and within a month the two companies had a new deal. The…
Requiem for a Dream packs over 2,000 cuts into one filmA typical 100-minute feature has 600 to 700 edits. Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream has more than 2,000, many of them flash-quick montages that mimic a drug hit. The 2000 fi…
Reservoir Dogs is a heist film that never shows the heistQuentin Tarantino's 1992 debut skips the jewellery robbery entirely, leaving the crooks to argue about what went wrong in a warehouse. Its odd title came from a video-store custom…
Withnail's star cannot actually drink alcoholRichard E. Grant made his screen debut as Withnail, one of cinema's most famous drunks, despite an alcohol intolerance that keeps him teetotal. Director Bruce Robinson made him ge…
After her Oscar, Rita Moreno waited seven years for another filmRita Moreno became the first Hispanic woman to win an Academy Award, for playing Anita in West Side Story. Hollywood's response was more stereotyped parts, so she stayed away from…
Stallone refused a six-figure offer unless he could play Rocky himselfSylvester Stallone drafted Rocky in about three and a half days after watching an underdog last fifteen rounds against Muhammad Ali. Studios wanted a star such as Robert Redford i…
The child star of Lassie grew up to be Planet of the Apes' CorneliusRoddy McDowall did what few child actors manage: he kept working as an adult, for more than 60 years and over 270 roles. The London boy from How Green Was My Valley later won a To…
The romcom's family tree runs back to Greek fertility ritesThe lighthearted love story with a guaranteed happy ending is older than cinema by millennia. Its roots reach through Restoration marriage-market comedies and medieval tales of kn…
Ryan Gosling copied Marlon Brando's accent because Canadian didn't sound toughAs a boy in Ontario, Ryan Gosling decided his Canadian accent lacked menace and began modelling his voice on Marlon Brando. He could not read at ten, was homeschooled by his mothe…
Kurosawa's Ran began as a what-if about three loyal sons turning badAkira Kurosawa read about a warlord famous for three devoted sons and wondered what would happen if they were rotten instead. Only later did King Lear enter the picture. The resul…
RCA was born because the US Navy feared British control of radioAfter the First World War, American naval officers worried that a British-linked company would dominate transatlantic wireless. Their solution was to press General Electric into b…
The stars on Paramount's mountain once stood for 24 actors under contractIn 1916 Adolph Zukor gave each of the 24 performers he had signed a star on the Paramount logo. The studio behind The Godfather and Titanic grew from a nickelodeon investor's hunc…
Paris, Texas never actually visits the town it is named afterA silent man stumbles out of the West Texas desert after four years missing and slowly tries to rebuild his family. Wim Wenders made Paris, Texas in about a month with an unfinish…
Paulette Goddard came within one screen test of playing Scarlett O'HaraBy December 1938 the search for Gone with the Wind's heroine was down to two women: Vivien Leigh and Paulette Goddard. Goddard lost, partly because a publicist warned she was dyna…
Peaky Blinders marches its gangsters from post-war Birmingham to the rise of MosleySteven Knight's crime saga opens in 1919, months after the First World War, with a Birmingham family of Irish Traveller and Romani descent running a street gang. Across six series…
Peggy Lee beat a rowdy Palm Springs crowd by singing more quietlyFaced with a noisy nightclub audience in 1940, a young singer from North Dakota refused to shout over them and dropped her voice instead, until the room went silent to hear her. T…
Ram Charan's box-office flop Orange slowly turned into a cult favouriteThe son of Telugu superstar Chiranjeevi, Ram Charan could have coasted on the family name. Instead his career has swung between record-breaking hits such as Magadheera and RRR and…
Paul Thomas Anderson spent two decades circling Vineland before making his Best Picture winnerOne Battle After Another began as a Thomas Pynchon novel its director loved too much to adapt. Paul Thomas Anderson set it aside, merged a car-chase idea with a story about a fema…- Nolan boasted of practical effects, yet Oppenheimer hid several hundred digital shotsChristopher Nolan's three-hour portrait of the physicist behind the atomic bomb became one of 2023's biggest hits, riding a double-bill craze with Barbie to nearly a billion dolla…
Voted the best worst band in the world, Motörhead went to number oneEarly on, NME readers crowned Motörhead the best worst band in the world, and by April 1977 two members were ready to quit. A farewell gig that never got recorded turned into a st…
MTV's moon landing ident aired 48 times a day until 1986At 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981, MTV went on air with NASA's lunar landing photos, the flag on the Moon swapped for a flickering MTV logo. Then came the Buggles and Video Killed t…
America's film archive exists partly because of a fight over colorizationIn the 1980s studios were adding colour to black-and-white classics, and directors like Frank Capra and Martin Scorsese lobbied Congress to stop the tampering. The result was the …
Evangelion's giant-robot hero keeps saying he mustn't run away. Its creator disagreesShinji Ikari tells himself again and again that he mustn't run away. Many fans took that as the show's moral. Director Hideaki Anno says otherwise: the final episodes tell Shinji …
Tarkovsky's first film abroad climaxes with a man carrying a candleIn Nostalghia a homesick Russian writer promises a strange Italian recluse he will cross an empty spa pool holding a lit candle without letting it go out. He tries again and again…- The small-town English student who became rock's most restless voiceMike Patton planned to be a writer. Then a demo tape by his teenage band reached Faith No More, who had auditioned more than fifteen singers, Chris Cornell among them, and picked …
Nobody wanted Million Dollar Baby, and then it won Best PicturePaul Haggis spent four years trying to sell his boxing script. Even with Clint Eastwood attached to star and direct, studios said no, and Warner Bros. balked at a 30 million dolla…
Chaplin wrote dialogue for Modern Times, then refused to let the Tramp talkBy 1934 sound had taken over Hollywood, and Chaplin drafted a dialogue script for his next film. His tests persuaded him the Little Tramp would lose his worldwide appeal if he spo…
Monty Hall got his name from a billboard typoMonte Halparin of Winnipeg wanted to be a doctor, but secret quotas on Jewish students kept him out of medical school. A Toronto radio station shortened his surname and misspelled…
Michael Moore funded his first documentary partly with bingo nights and a lawsuit settlementFired from Mother Jones after four months, Michael Moore sued, settled for $58,000 and poured it into a film about General Motors abandoning his hometown of Flint. Roger & Me laun…- HBO's Green Lantern show swaps cosmic battles for a small-town murder in NebraskaTwo space cops with power rings land in Rushville, Nebraska, to investigate a killing. Lanterns, HBO's take on DC's Hal Jordan and John Stewart, borrows its mood from True Detecti…
From small-town deputy to NCIS director, Lauren Holly built a career across two countriesLauren Holly met Jim Carrey at an audition she lost, then married him after they made Dumb and Dumber together; the marriage lasted under a year. Her steadier partnership was with…
Letterkenny began as two guys trading insults on YouTube and ran twelve seasonsIn a fictional Ontario farm town of 5,000, the hicks, the hockey players and the local drug schemers all talk in rapid-fire puns and surprisingly well-informed opinions. Letterken…
A sitcom about army surgeons produced the most-watched finale in American television historyM*A*S*H ran for eleven seasons, far longer than the Korean War it depicted. Set in a mobile army hospital, it lurched between slapstick and grief, quietly needled America's Cold W…- Marion Cotillard is the only actor to win an Oscar speaking FrenchPlaying Édith Piaf in La Vie en Rose earned Marion Cotillard the Academy Award for Best Actress, and no other performer has ever won an Oscar for a role delivered in French. She h…
Before its $30 billion universe, Marvel sold off its heroes to other studiosMarvel Studios built the highest-grossing film franchise ever, yet for decades the company licensed its characters away, starting with a 1944 Captain America serial that handed hi…- One point on Metacritic cost a game studio its bonusFallout: New Vegas averaged 84 on Metacritic. Its publisher had set 85 as the threshold for extra royalties, so developer Obsidian got nothing, despite five million copies sold. A…
Britain's spy agency officially did not exist until 1994MI6 was founded in 1909 and spied through two world wars, yet the British government only admitted it existed in 1994, when a new law finally gave it a legal basis. Even its famou…- Mia Farrow survived childhood polio, then became Hollywood's most haunted young motherAt nine, Mia Farrow spent three weeks in a polio isolation ward and later said it ended her childhood. By 23 she was the terrified expectant mother in Rosemary's Baby, a role that…
A lonely hitman, a twelve-year-old apprentice, and a houseplant that finally gets rootsLuc Besson's 1994 thriller put Natalie Portman on screen for the first time, playing a girl who talks her way into a killer's apartment after corrupt drug agents wipe out her fami…
The actor behind the Punisher once caught for a Russian baseball teamBefore he became television's go-to hard man, Jon Bernthal dropped out of college, moved to Moscow to study acting and spent his spare time as a catcher for a professional Russian…
Jordan Peele learned at summer camp that telling scary stories kills your own fearAs a boy, Jordan Peele told a frightening campfire tale and noticed his own fear had vanished. If you make the horror, he reasoned, you need not be scared of it. Decades later tha…