Intellect Plus

Topics

Art

1,236 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 4 of 21.

  1. One emergency room, one twelve-hour shift, a whole season in real timeThe Pitt tells each season as a single shift in a Pittsburgh emergency department, with every episode covering about one hour. The format reunited three veterans of ER, won praise…
  2. 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…
  3. 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…
  4. 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 …
  5. 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…
  6. The famous McDonald's diet film hid a secret: its star was drinking heavilyFor thirty days in 2003, Morgan Spurlock ate three McDonald's meals daily and filmed his body falling apart. Super Size Me earned an Oscar nomination and helped push the chain to …
  7. 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…
  8. 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 …
  9. 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…
  10. 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…
  11. 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…
  12. 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…
  13. 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…
  14. 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…
  15. 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…
  16. 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…
  17. 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…
  18. 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…
  19. 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…
  20. 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…
  21. 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…
  22. 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…
  23. 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…
  24. 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…
  25. 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…
  26. 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…
  27. 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…
  28. 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…
  29. 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…
  30. 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…
  31. 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…
  32. 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…
  33. 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…
  34. 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…
  35. 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…
  36. 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…
  37. 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…
  38. 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…
  39. Tarantino's favourite of his own films rewrites the summer of 1969Once Upon a Time in Hollywood follows a fading TV cowboy and his stunt double through Los Angeles in 1969, with Sharon Tate living next door and the Manson Family lurking at the e…
  40. 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…
  41. 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…
  42. Italy's biggest lake hides a fault line and a drowned Roman-era townLake Garda looks serene, but it sits in one of Italy's most earthquake-prone zones. Around the year 243 a quake apparently triggered a landslide and flood that wiped out the town …
  43. Was the Vatican's Laocoön a Michelangelo forgery? Some scholars still askDug up in Rome in 1506, the marble Laocoön has been called Western art's defining image of agony: a Trojan priest and his two sons writhing in serpent coils. Pliny praised a Laoco…
  44. Hans Hofmann's highest praise for Lee Krasner was a backhanded insultWhen her notoriously harsh teacher finally praised a Lee Krasner canvas, he said nobody would guess a woman had painted it. Krasner spent decades in the shadow of her husband Jack…
  45. Leh sits at 3,524 metres and gets barely 35 millimetres of rainHigh on the Indus in Ladakh, Leh was once a caravan stop where salt, cashmere wool, silk yarn and brocade changed hands between Tibet, Kashmir, India and China. Its 17th-century r…
  46. Kaia Gerber booked her first fashion job at ten, for Young VersaceCindy Crawford's daughter did not wait for adulthood. At ten she fronted a Young Versace campaign, at sixteen she opened Alexander Wang's show, and by 2018 the British Fashion Awa…
  47. Keith Haring treated empty subway ad panels as his personal laboratoryFrom December 1980, a young art student began chalking crawling babies and barking dogs onto the black paper covering unused advertising slots in New York's subway. Within a decad…
  48. Ken Russell fought the BBC to let actors play Edward ElgarBefore Ken Russell, a television arts programme about a composer meant photographs and archive film. His 1962 Elgar for Monitor gave a whole episode to one figure and used actors …
  49. America's moon launch site was carved out of Florida citrus grovesTo launch a 363-foot Saturn V, NASA needed far more room than Cape Canaveral offered. So from 1962 it bought up farmland on Merritt Island, much of it orange groves, letting growe…
  50. Who was Kilroy? Possibly a shipyard inspector fighting rivet fraudA bald man with a big nose peers over a wall beside three words: Kilroy was here. GIs scrawled it across the Second World War, and legend says Stalin found it in a Potsdam bathroo…
  51. Kurt Weill refused to set the Communist Manifesto to musicKurt Weill wrote Mack the Knife with Bertolt Brecht, then sued to stop a film of their Threepenny Opera and won while Brecht lost. Their partnership broke over politics in 1930, a…
  52. A laptop prize lured Liu Wen into modelling; she became China's first supermodelAt 17, Liu Wen entered a regional model contest in Hunan mostly because the prize included a new laptop. She missed the national top ten, yet within four years she walked 74 shows…
  53. Louis Vuitton's empire began with a trunk you could finally stackIn the 1850s most trunks had rounded lids so rain would run off, which meant nobody could pile them up. Louis Vuitton made his flat-topped and covered in light, airtight grey canv…
  54. Magenta has no place on the rainbow; your brain invents itNo single wavelength of light looks magenta. The colour appears when your eyes pick up strong blue and some red with little green in between, and the brain fills the gap. Its name…
  55. The Maginot Line largely did its job, and France fell anywayFrance's great concrete barrier of the 1930s was nearly impossible to break: bomb-proof, tank-proof, air-conditioned, served by underground railways. Its purpose was to steer any …
  56. A paint drip exposed Lenin inside Rockefeller Center's lobby muralIn 1933 the Rockefellers hired Diego Rivera, a known communist, to paint the lobby of the RCA Building. When a newspaper called his fresco anti-capitalist, Rivera slipped in a por…
  57. Monks spend weeks on a sand mandala, then sweep it into a riverTibetan monks trained for three to five years tap coloured grains of powdered stone from copper funnels, building a palace for a deity one blessing at a time. When the design is f…
  58. Mari was built, destroyed and rebuilt three times on the EuphratesA mound on the Euphrates near today's Abu Kamal hides a city that rose and fell repeatedly for over a thousand years. Dug up from 1933, Mari yielded more than 25,000 clay tablets …
  59. Mary Cassatt pressed her nose to a shop window and found ImpressionismIn 1875 a Pittsburgh-born painter kept returning to a Paris dealer's window to stare at pastels by Edgar Degas. It changed her life, she said. Two years later, rejected by the Sal…
  60. The comic that drew Jews as mice won a Pulitzer in 1992Art Spiegelman spent over a decade turning taped conversations with his father, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, into a comic where Jews are mice, Germans cats and Poles pigs.…

Open the feed