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1,236 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 13 of 21.

  1. Raj Kapoor turned Chaplin's Tramp into a Hindi film star loved across continentsBorn in Peshawar in 1924, Raj Kapoor borrowed the shuffling outsider of Charlie Chaplin and made him Indian. His Tramp-like heroes filled cinemas from the Caribbean to the Soviet …
  2. Robert Bresson banned acting from his films and critics ranked him among the greatestRobert Bresson refused to use performers in the usual sense. He cast amateurs, called them models, and shot take after take until nothing theatrical survived. Over fifty years he …
  3. Roman Polanski survived the Krakow Ghetto as a boy, then fled American justice as an adultAs a child, Roman Polanski escaped the Krakow Ghetto and passed as a Catholic to stay alive. Decades later he won an Oscar for The Pianist, a film about that same catastrophe. He …
  4. The Goldwyn in MGM never owned, ran or produced anything at that studioA Warsaw boy who walked out of Poland penniless became a glove salesman in upstate New York, then helped shoot the first feature film made in Hollywood. Samuel Goldwyn's name ende…
  5. A self-taught Marseille dock worker became the father of African filmOusmane Sembène taught himself to read and write French while unloading ships in Marseille. His novels made his name, but he wanted to reach people who didn't read, so he turned t…
  6. Tarantino skipped film school, learning cinema behind a video store counterA high-school dropout who once ushered at an adult cinema spent five years recommending tapes at a Manhattan Beach video shop. Asked about film school, Quentin Tarantino says he w…
  7. Leni Riefenstahl's technical brilliance and her Nazi propaganda were never separableA dancer turned mountain-film actress became one of very few women directing in Weimar Germany. Then she made Triumph of the Will and Olympia, films still ranked among the most in…
  8. Hollywood's mightiest mogul started out pushing a junk cart in New BrunswickLouis B. Mayer left school at twelve to collect scrap metal for his struggling immigrant father. Within decades he was running MGM, the most prestigious studio in Hollywood, helpi…
  9. Luis Buñuel turned a Jesuit schooling into a lifetime of surreal cinematic revoltHe served at Mass daily as a boy, then walked away from the Church at 16. Luis Buñuel went on to make surrealist shockers with Salvador Dalí, gritty melodramas in Mexico, and late…
  10. The brothers who launched cinema called it an invention without a futureIn December 1895 about 40 people paid to sit in a Paris café basement and watch ten films, each under a minute long. That night is usually called the birth of cinema. Its makers, …
  11. An asthmatic boy barred from sports grew into Scorsese, cinema's great chroniclerAsthma kept young Martin Scorsese off the streets of Little Italy, so his family took him to the movies instead. The boy who once wanted to be a priest became a defining New Holly…
  12. Antonioni's slow, empty frames were booed at Cannes and then conquered world cinemaL'Avventura drew cheers and jeers in equal measure at Cannes in 1960. Michelangelo Antonioni had dropped conventional plot for drifting long takes and modern landscapes, and the g…
  13. A fake Martian invasion on radio handed Orson Welles the keys to HollywoodIn 1938 a 23-year-old narrated The War of the Worlds on radio so convincingly that some listeners thought Martians had landed. The uproar won Orson Welles an extraordinary Hollywo…
  14. Ingmar Bergman swapped his tin soldiers for a magic lantern at nineAs a boy in Uppsala, Ingmar Bergman gave away a set of toy soldiers to get a magic lantern, then staged Strindberg with puppets, voicing every role himself. That child became the …
  15. Doctors gave Irving Thalberg until thirty; he ran MGM at twenty-sixBorn with a heart defect that doctors expected to kill him young, Irving Thalberg answered a newspaper advert asking fifteen dollars a week for secretarial work. Within a few year…
  16. Jack Warner pawned a horse to help buy his family's first projectorLong before he ran a Hollywood studio, a teenage Jack Warner put up 150 dollars from a pawned horse so his brother Sam could buy a secondhand Kinetoscope. The Warner brothers then…
  17. James Cameron sold The Terminator script for one dollar to keep directingIn the early 1980s no studio wanted an unknown to direct his robot-assassin script, so James Cameron sold it to producer Gale Anne Hurd for a single dollar, on condition he direct…
  18. Jean Cocteau called everything he made poetry, including his filmsNovelist, playwright, painter, ballet writer and film director, Jean Cocteau refused every label but one. He sorted his output into poetry of the novel, of the theatre, of drawing…
  19. Jean-Luc Godard made films as a way of writing criticismJean-Luc Godard started out attacking French cinema in print, then picked up a camera to prove his point. Breathless, in 1960, made him a star of the New Wave. Decades later he st…
  20. Jean Renoir sold his father's paintings to pay for his flopsThe son of Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir funded his early silent films by selling off canvases he had inherited. The films lost money, but he kept going, and by 1937 he had …
  21. The first Kermit was half a ping-pong ball and Mom's old coatJim Henson built the earliest Kermit from a table tennis ball cut in two, fabric from his mother's discarded coat and a denim sleeve from old jeans. Soft, flexible puppets like th…
  22. John Ford won four directing Oscars, none of them for a WesternJohn Ford is remembered for Monument Valley vistas and John Wayne in the saddle, yet his record four Best Director Oscars went to dramas like The Grapes of Wrath and The Quiet Man…
  23. Frank Capra bluffed his way into movies with no experience at allA Sicilian immigrant who crossed the Atlantic in steerage at five, Frank Capra trained as a chemical engineer, drifted through flophouses, then lied about having film experience t…
  24. The rocket countdown clock was dreamed up for a 1929 silent filmFritz Lang's Woman in the Moon imagined a multi-stage rocket rolled slowly to an upright launch pad, with a clock ticking down to lift-off, decades before real launches looked tha…
  25. A snapped seatbelt in 1962 may be why Star Wars existsDays before finishing high school, George Lucas flipped his souped-up car into a tree; the belt broke, he was thrown clear, and he survived. The crash killed his dream of racing. …
  26. Cinema's first special effect was born when a camera jammedGeorges Méliès was a Paris stage magician when he saw the Lumière brothers' machine in 1895 and tried to buy one on the spot. Refused, he built his own. Then a jam mid-take turned…
  27. Guru Dutt's greatest flop is now one of India's great filmsIn 1959 Guru Dutt released Kaagaz Ke Phool, the first Indian film shot in CinemaScope. It bombed so badly, costing him over Rs. 17 lakh, that he never again put his name on a film…
  28. Miyazaki started out unable to draw people, so he drew battleshipsThe teenager who would make Spirited Away wanted to be a manga artist but found he could not draw human figures, so for years he sketched planes, tanks and warships instead. He al…
  29. Howard Hawks got his first film job after a crash on a racetrackTo the critic Leonard Maltin, he was America's finest director that the public never quite knew by name. Howard Hawks, heir to a Midwestern paper fortune, broke into movies after …
  30. Suspended by Warner Bros., Ida Lupino used the time to learn directingStudio suspensions were meant to punish actors who turned down roles. For Ida Lupino they became film school: stuck idle on set, she studied filming and editing, then founded her …
  31. The critic nicknamed the Gravedigger of French Cinema went on to rebuild itFrançois Truffaut was a truant who sneaked into cinemas without paying, a deserter jailed by the army, and a reviewer so savage that Cannes refused to invite him in 1958. A year l…
  32. Christopher Nolan made his first feature for about £3,000, shooting only at weekendsChristopher Nolan's debut, Following, cost roughly £3,000 and was filmed on weekends across a year with friends as cast and crew. Every scene was rehearsed so hard that the first …
  33. D. W. Griffith borrowed cross-cutting from Dickens and helped invent film grammarChallenged over cutting between two storylines, D. W. Griffith reportedly asked whether Dickens didn't write that way. He directed nearly 520 films, shot the first movie made in H…
  34. The schoolboy called a dud became Britain's only double Best Director winnerDavid Lean left school at 18 branded a dud and went to work in his father's accountancy firm. A Brownie camera and nightly cinema trips pulled him into a studio as a teaboy. He we…
  35. David Lynch started making films because he wanted his paintings to moveDavid Lynch trained as a painter and wished his canvases could move. So he bought the cheapest 16mm camera he could find and spent $150 on a looping short he summed up as growth, …
  36. Told he had no talent for acting, Elia Kazan reshaped American acting insteadWhen Elia Kazan finished an apprentice summer with the Group Theatre, its leaders told him he might have talent for something, but certainly not acting. He went on to co-found the…
  37. Federico Fellini insisted his famously autobiographical films were almost entirely inventedFederico Fellini filled his films with Rimini boyhood: a stranded sea creature, an ocean liner, school friends. Yet he rejected the autobiographical label, saying he had invented …
  38. Francis Ford Coppola got his middle name from Henry Ford's hospital and radio showCoppola was born at Henry Ford Hospital while his flautist father arranged music for a Ford-sponsored radio concert series, so his parents named him Ford. The boy who spent long s…
  39. Cecil B. DeMille shot Hollywood's first full-length feature, then ruled the box officeIn 1914 a former stage actor named Cecil B. DeMille made The Squaw Man, the first feature-length film shot in Hollywood. Its success helped turn a Los Angeles suburb into the capi…
  40. Before the Tramp, Charlie Chaplin was a workhouse boy sleeping rough in LondonCharlie Chaplin was sent to a workhouse twice before he turned nine, and at 14 he had to take his own mother to the infirmary before she returned to an asylum. Within a decade he …
  41. Before Hollywood, Billy Wilder worked as a paid dance partner in BerlinBilly Wilder was a Viennese reporter, then a taxi dancer in Berlin, then a Jewish refugee in Paris. By 1960 he had won Oscars for writing, directing and producing, finishing as on…
  42. Buster Keaton's famous stone face began as a child trick to get bigger laughsAs a toddler in his family's vaudeville act, Buster Keaton was flung across the stage by his father, with a suitcase handle sewn into his clothes. He noticed audiences laughed har…
  43. An orphan who hated his childhood filmed faces so closely they still unsettle criticsCarl Theodor Dreyer spent his first two years in orphanages and grew up with adoptive parents who made him feel like a debt. He became Denmark's great austere filmmaker, and his 1…
  44. Iran's most celebrated filmmaker once paid for art school by directing trafficAbbas Kiarostami funded his fine-arts studies in Tehran by working as a traffic policeman, then shot around 150 television adverts. His quiet films about children, villages and lo…
  45. Agnès Varda had seen about twenty films when she decided to make oneAt 25, the photographer Agnès Varda had watched perhaps 20 films, never assisted a director and never attended film school. She shot her debut anyway, planning every frame from he…
  46. Kurosawa got his first studio job with an essay mocking the questionIn 1935 a new Tokyo studio asked applicants to explain the fundamental flaws of Japanese cinema and how to fix them. A failed painter named Akira Kurosawa replied, half joking, th…
  47. The Master of Suspense blamed a prank at a police station for his fearsWhen Alfred Hitchcock was five, his father sent him to the local police station with a note, and an officer locked him in a cell for a few minutes as a lesson. Hitchcock claimed t…
  48. Tarkovsky decided to become a filmmaker while prospecting for metals in SiberiaAndrei Tarkovsky was a poor student who quit Arabic studies to join a year-long geological expedition in the Siberian taiga. Somewhere out there he chose cinema. He made only seve…
  49. Ang Lee failed university entrance twice and spent years unemployed before fameAng Lee flunked Taiwan's national university exam twice, disappointing a father who wanted a professor. After film school in New York he spent several years out of work, writing s…
  50. Jin calligrapher whose Orchid Pavilion preface became scriptureWang Xizhi (c.303–c.361), courtesy name Yishao, is traditionally crowned China’s greatest calligrapher. His Lantingji xu—Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Gathering—plus letters and …
  51. Law professor who heard colour as piano keysWassily Kandinsky (16 December 1866 – 13 December 1944) quit a Moscow law-and-economics career at thirty for Munich studios and became a pioneer of Western abstraction. He called …
  52. The Spirit’s creator who named the graphic novelWill Eisner (6 March 1917 – 3 January 2005) entered comic books at their birth and made The Spirit (1940–1952) a weekly lab for layout and mood. In 1978 A Contract with God helped…
  53. London’s engraver who turned morals into comic stripsWilliam Hogarth (10 November 1697 – 26 October 1764) made “modern moral subjects”—serialized paintings and prints such as A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress—that mass audie…
  54. Little Nemo’s draftsman who commanded a vaudeville dinosaurWinsor McCay (c.26 September 1869 – 26 July 1934) drew Little Nemo’s dream architecture and, as Silas, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. Between 1911 and 1921 he self-funded about ten a…
  55. Oran’s prodigy who put women in Le SmokingYves Saint Laurent (1 August 1936 – 1 June 2008), raised in Oran, Algeria, took over Dior at twenty-one, founded his own house in 1962, and became the last grand couturier of the …
  56. Baghdad-born Dame who bent architecture into curvesDame Zaha Hadid (31 October 1950 – 31 March 2016) was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize (2004) and took the Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011. The Guardian’s “Queen of Curve…
  57. A Ming prince who painted with one primordial lineShitao, born Zhu Ruoji about 1642 into the Ming imperial clan, survived the 1644 Manchu collapse by entering Buddhist orders as Yuan Ji. Later known as the Bitter Gourd Monk, he b…
  58. Venice’s colorist who kept reinventing for HabsburgsTiziano Vecellio—Titian—born at Pieve di Cadore about 1488–1490, died 27 August 1576 as Venice’s defining Renaissance painter. Equally fluent in portraits, myths, and altarpieces,…
  59. The artillery engineer who defined architectural beautyVitruvius, active about 80–70 BC to after 15 BC, left De architectura—the only complete architectural treatise from antiquity. He demanded firmitas, utilitas, venustas—strength, u…
  60. Bauhaus founder who turned factories into modern iconsWalter Gropius (18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) founded the Bauhaus in Weimar and ranks among modernism’s architects. From Peter Behrens’s office—alongside Mies and Le Corbusier—he and…

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