Intellect PlusFilm and television
709 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 11 of 12.
Americans once trusted Judge Judy more than the entire Supreme CourtA 2013 Reader's Digest poll found Americans had more faith in a television arbitrator than in all nine Supreme Court justices. Judith Sheindlin earned that trust the hard way, hea…
A chance chat with Richard Burton on a plane launched Kevin Costner's careerFlying home from his honeymoon in 1978, an unsure Kevin Costner walked up to Richard Burton and asked whether he should act. Burton said yes, and even told him an actor's private …
Kodachrome, the film behind Afghan Girl, was perfected by two concert musiciansThe colour film that shot Steve McCurry's 1984 Afghan Girl portrait began with two schoolboys who thought a 1917 colour movie looked awful. Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky Jr.…
HBO is filming Harry Potter again, one book per season, over a decadeForty thousand young actors auditioned before HBO chose three unknowns to play Harry, Ron and Hermione. The new series treats each of J. K. Rowling's novels as a full season, so t…
Heroes was built like a comic book, and its creator planned to keep swapping the castTim Kring meant Heroes to rotate its characters out every season. Then audiences fell for a cheerleader who heals, an office worker who bends time and a nurse who copies powers, a…
Before HD television could exist, video had to be squeezed about a hundredfoldUncompressed 1080p video needs more than a gigabit every second, far too much to store or broadcast. High definition became practical only after a compression method first propose…
Bollywood is not Indian cinema: it is only the Hindi-language slicePeople say Bollywood when they mean all Indian film, but the name covers only Hindi-language movies made in Mumbai. Even so, that slice is the biggest: of 1,986 Indian features in…
Nobody called anything a horror film until Dracula arrived in 1931In the silent era, reviewers used the word horror for war scenes, drug stories and melodramas about thieves. According to historian Gary D. Rhodes, the phrase horror film was not …
Futurama has been cancelled and revived across four different outletsMatt Groening's cartoon about a pizza boy frozen for a thousand years keeps refusing to stay dead. Fox dropped it, Adult Swim reran it, Comedy Central brought it back twice, and H…
Gary Cooper's famous stiff walk came from a botched cure for a hip injuryAt 15, Frank Cooper hurt his hip in a car crash, and a doctor prescribed horseback riding on the family ranch. The therapy left him with an off-kilter gait and a tilted seat in th…
Before ER, George Clooney failed a Reds tryout and sold women's shoesIn 1977 a teenage George Clooney tried out for the Cincinnati Reds and was cut in the first round. He dropped out of college, sold shoes and insurance, cut tobacco, and spent year…
Glee started life as a film idea and ended with 729 songsIan Brennan first imagined his show-choir story as a feature film. Reworked for Fox television with Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, Glee ran from 2009 to 2015, staged more than 729 …
Venice gave no Golden Lion at all for over a decade after 1968From 1969 to 1979 the Venice Film Festival handed out no Golden Lions. The Biennale itself explains that its awards still ran under rules written in the fascist era, and after 196…
Groucho Marx's wisecracking persona was born when audiences booed his German accentIn vaudeville, Julius Marx played a comic German with a heavy accent. After the Lusitania went down in 1915, crowds turned hostile and booed the character. He dropped the accent a…
Harrison Ford was a working carpenter when George Lucas came callingFed up with bit parts, Harrison Ford taught himself carpentry to support his wife and two sons, building for clients such as Joan Didion. He landed Han Solo almost sideways: Georg…
Forrest Gump's film version invented the leg braces and the famous runTwo of the most remembered things in Forrest Gump, the childhood leg braces and the years-long run across America, never happen in Winston Groom's novel. The 1994 film took the fi…
The Friends cast bargained as one, and pay rose to a million an episodeWarner Bros. wanted to negotiate with each Friends star separately. Before season three the six actors refused and bargained as a bloc instead. Their pay climbed from 22,500 dolla…
Come and See waited eight years for Soviet censors, then refused to compromiseElem Klimov wanted the world to know about the hundreds of Belarusian villages burned during the Nazi occupation. Soviet film bureaucrats blocked his script as too realistic for e…
The word cyberpunk was built by mixing two lists of wordsBruce Bethke wrote one list of technology words and another of troublemaker words, then spliced them until something clicked. His 1980 short story gave a name to a whole mood of s…
Demon Slayer's first draft was rejected for being too gloomyKoyoharu Gotouge's early pitch for a demon-hunting story was turned down as too dark and humourless. The editor asked for a brighter, ordinary hero instead. The result, a charcoal…
Desperate Housewives was narrated by a woman who dies in its first episodeEvery episode of Desperate Housewives was framed by the voice of Mary Alice Young, whose sudden suicide opens the pilot and sets up the first mystery. Her neighbours on Wisteria L…
Nolan's Dunkirk never shows a clear German face, and that is deliberateChristopher Nolan built his war film around a retreat, not a victory, and kept the enemy almost invisible, just as soldiers on the beach experienced it. Its three stories run on d…
Pixar's Cars began life as a script about an electric carBefore Lightning McQueen existed, a draft called The Yellow Car imagined an electric vehicle stuck in a world addicted to gasoline. The idea was reworked into a road-trip fable ab…
Cartoon Network was born to give a vast film vault somewhere to liveIn 1992 Ted Turner owned a mountain of old animation, from MGM classics to the entire Hanna-Barbera catalogue, and nowhere to show it. His answer was the first cable channel devot…- Casino Royale rebooted Bond by making him lose at cardsThe 2006 Casino Royale threw out decades of gadgets and continuity to show a rookie 007 who could be outplayed, poisoned and betrayed. Built around a poker tournament in Montenegr…
Early Christians were slow to adopt the cross as their emblemThe cross now stands for Christianity almost everywhere, yet for its first few centuries the faith used it sparingly. It recalled a deliberately agonising public execution, and op…
Hollywood fought television with a French lens nobody had wantedIn 1926 Henri Chrétien patented a lens that squeezed a wide scene onto ordinary film and stretched it out again in the projector. Studios shrugged. A quarter of a century later, w…
Brian De Palma helped rewrite the opening crawl of Star WarsBefore he was a thriller director, Brian De Palma was a physics student who built computers and won a science-fair prize for an analog machine solving differential equations. Year…
Buffy's big idea: high school really is hell, with an actual HellmouthJoss Whedon built Buffy the Vampire Slayer on one joke taken seriously. Sunnydale High sits directly above a Hellmouth, a portal to demon worlds under the library, so the horrors …
Janine's Ghostbusters accent was borrowed from a real New Yorker friendAnnie Potts gave the Ghostbusters receptionist Janine Melnitz her famous New York twang by copying a friend from the city. She has now played the part across four decades of films…
Zorba's outstretched hand came from a Los Angeles evangelist Quinn once servedAnthony Quinn, born in Mexico during the revolution, boxed and studied architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright before acting. As a boy he preached alongside Aimee Semple McPherson, …
A planned five-month shoot for Apocalypse Now stretched past a yearFrancis Ford Coppola went to the Philippines in March 1976 expecting five months of filming. Storms wrecked costly sets, Marlon Brando showed up unprepared and Martin Sheen nearly…
Liza Minnelli joined Arrested Development because Ron Howard's former babysitter said yesThe producers of Arrested Development dreamed of casting Liza Minnelli but assumed a star of her size would never agree. Ron Howard simply rang her. She had looked after him as a …
Babylon lost Paramount $87 million, then found a cult audienceDamien Chazelle's Babylon, a sprawling portrait of Hollywood lurching from silent films to talkies, took just $65 million against a budget near $80 million. Paramount wrote off an…
Bebop was jazz you weren't supposed to dance toIn the 1940s young jazz players walked away from the dance floor. Bebop swapped the big swing orchestras for small combos, sped the tempos up and piled on dissonant harmony, turni…
Blu-ray's big trick was simply a shorter-wavelength laserA Blu-ray disc is exactly the size of a DVD, yet one layer holds 25 GB. The difference is the light that reads it: a blue-violet laser at 405 nanometres, whose shorter wavelength …
Alex Trebek lost the Hockey Night in Canada job because of his mustacheIn 1971 Alex Trebek was the producer's favourite to host Hockey Night in Canada, but the job went to Dave Hodge because the producer's boss objected to a mustached presenter. Treb…
Amadeus imagined a murderous rivalry, and its own writer called it a fantasiaAmadeus presents Antonio Salieri as a jealous rival bent on destroying Mozart, but Peter Shaffer, who adapted his own stage play, framed the story as an invented fantasia on a rea…
American Dad! began as its creators' way of venting about the 2000 electionSeth MacFarlane and Matt Weitzman were so frustrated after the 2000 US presidential election that they poured it into a cartoon about a conservative spy and his left-leaning daugh…
American Horror Story resets its story every season but keeps its actorsEach season of American Horror Story is a self-contained miniseries with fresh characters and a new setting, yet the same performers keep returning in different roles. Evan Peters…
Anastasia was the first feature from Fox's own animation divisionDon Bluth and Gary Goldman's Anastasia turned the lost Romanov grand duchess into an amnesiac orphan in an alternate 1926, chasing her past to Paris. Some historians objected to t…- Aamir Khan's first film was a silent movie shot behind his parents' backsAt sixteen, Aamir Khan starred in a 40-minute silent film called Paranoia, filmed in secret because his parents wanted him to become an engineer or doctor. Decades later, five of …
Only one Best Adapted Screenplay winner has also won an acting OscarEmma Thompson, honoured for Sense and Sensibility, stands alone among winners of this category in also holding an Oscar for performing. The award has existed since the Academy's f…
Only one line among America's top 100 movie quotes belongs to a CGI characterWhen the American Film Institute ranked the 100 most memorable lines in American cinema in 2005, a jury of 1,500 artists, critics and historians put Rhett Butler's parting brush-o…
Robin Williams joined Aladdin after animators drew the Genie over his stand-upDisney's directors wrote the Genie with Robin Williams in mind, but he needed persuading. Animator Eric Goldberg drew the character acting out one of Williams's old stand-up routi…
Five bedridden years with bone tuberculosis shaped the novelist Alberto MoraviaAt nine, Alberto Pincherle caught tuberculosis of the bone and spent five years in bed, reading Dostoevsky, Joyce and Shakespeare. He later named that illness and Fascism as the t…- Fox mortgaged its studio on CinemaScope, then sold its back lot for CleopatraIn 1953, with cinema audiences halved since 1946, Twentieth Century-Fox bet its own lot on a French widescreen lens system and won. A decade later the runaway budget of Cleopatra,…
- Pixar's first feature began after Disney rejected edgier draftsTin Toy's Oscar made Disney court Pixar, yet early Toy Story reels stalled until the team rewrote around a quieter idea: toys crave being played with. That rewrite yielded the fir…
Cel animation built films one hand-drawn frame at a timeBefore computers dominated studios, classical animation meant drawing every frame by hand, then transferring art to transparent cels painted on the reverse and photographed over b…- Hitchcock's Vertigo invented the dolly zoom for acrophobiaA retired San Francisco detective with a crippling fear of heights is hired to watch a friend's wife—and the camera itself seems to fall with him. Vertigo mixed cool reviews in 19…
Paramount bought Puzo's novel cheap, then remade cinemaBefore Mario Puzo's 1969 bestseller exploded, Paramount paid eighty thousand dollars for the rights. Studio bosses struggled to hire a director until Francis Ford Coppola agreed, …
An Italian Civil War western filmed mostly in SpainSergio Leone's 1966 epic pairs Clint Eastwood's taciturn bounty hunter with Lee Van Cleef's killer-for-hire and Eli Wallach's chaotic bandit. Though financed in Italy, cameras mos…
Isolated talkie scenes ended Hollywood's silent reignAlan Crosland's 1927 Warner Bros. musical drama was the first feature with synchronized score plus lip-synced singing and speech in scattered sequences. Vitaphone sound made Jack …
A crusader plays chess with Death to buy one deedIngmar Bergman's 1957 Swedish film sends knight Antonius Block home through plague-struck Sweden after the Crusades. Facing Death, he stakes a chess match to postpone the end and …
Tracey Ullman shorts became TV's longest scripted runMatt Groening sketched a dysfunctional clan for James L. Brooks, naming them after his own relatives and swapping Bart for himself. Shorts debuted on The Tracey Ullman Show on Apr…
A Jersey boss in therapy redefined prestige TVDavid Chase's HBO drama followed Tony Soprano—James Gandolfini—through panic attacks and sessions with Dr. Jennifer Melfi. Greenlit in 1997, it ran from January 10, 1999 to June 1…
Julie Andrews fled Nazis on screen and swept OscarsRobert Wise's 1965 musical, scripted by Ernest Lehman from the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage hit, follows Maria and the von Trapp children in 1938 Salzburg. Shot in Los Angeles an…- MGM's Technicolor Oz became the most-seen filmMetro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1939 musical fantasy, chiefly directed by Victor Fleming from L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel, sent Judy Garland's Dorothy down a yellow brick road. Three-strip T…
Ozu's quiet family visit was voted cinema's greatestYasujirō Ozu's 1953 drama follows aging Shūkichi and Tomi Hirayama from Onomichi to Tokyo to see grown children too busy to host them. Exporters once called it too Japanese to sel…- Lucas built a nine-film saga after Flash Gordon rights failedBlocked from adapting Flash Gordon, George Lucas invented his own space opera. Star Wars opened on 25 May 1977, later labeled Episode IV. Two sequels, three prequels, and three Di…