In 1998, as aerospace engineer Homer Hickam’s memoir Rocket Boys was being adapted for the screen, Universal Studios’ research warned that women over 30 would not see a movie with that title.
So the name was changed to October Sky — the same 10 letters in a different order.
She’s the girl that makes the thing that drills the hole that holds the spring
That drives the rod that turns the knob that works the thingumebob,
And it’s the girl that makes the thing that holds that oil that oils the ring
That works the thingumebob THAT’S GOING TO WIN THE WAR!
“I’ve Danced With a Man, Who’s Danced With a Girl, Who’s Danced With the Prince of Wales”
Dr. Polycarp was, as you all know, an unusually sallow bimetallist. ‘There,’ people of wide experience would say, ‘There goes the sallowest bimetallist in Cheshire.’
— G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 1904
In 1977 Jay Ames found he could approximate nursery rhymes using the names in the Toronto telephone directory:
Barr Barre Black Shipp
Haff Yew Anney Wool
Yetts Herr, Yetts Herr
Three Baggs Voll
Wan Farr Durr Master
Won Forder Dame
An Wun Varder Littleboys
Watt Lief Sinne Allain.
In 1963 the TV show I’ve Got A Secret searched the phone books of New York City to find residents whose names, in order, approximated the lyrics to “In the Good Old Summertime”:
A week after songwriter Jim Croce died in a plane crash in 1973, his wife, Ingrid Jacobson, received this letter:
Dear Ing,
I know I haven’t been very nice to you for some time, but I thought it might be of some comfort, Sweet Thing, to understand that you haven’t been the only recipient of JC’s manipulations. But since you can’t hear me and can’t see me, I can’t bullshit, using my sneaky logic and facial movements. I have to write it all down instead, which is lots more permanent. So it can be re-read instead of re-membered, so, it’s really right on the line.
I know that you see me for who I am, or should I say, as who I are. ‘Cause I’ve been lots of people. If Medusa had personalities or attitudes instead of snakes for her features, her name would have been Jim Croce. But that’s unfair to you and it’s also unhealthy for me. And I now want to be the oldest man around, a man with a face full of wrinkles and lots of wisdom.
So this is a birth note, Baby. And when I get back everything will be different. We’re gonna have a life together, Ing, I promise. I’m gonna concentrate on my health. I’m gonna become a public hermit. I’m gonna get my Master’s Degree. I’m gonna write short stories and movie scripts. Who knows, I might even get a tan.
Give a kiss to my little man and tell him Daddy loves him.Remember, it’s the first sixty years that count and I’ve got 30 to go.
I Love you,
Jim
(From Ingrid’s 2012 memoir, I Got a Name: The Jim Croce Story.)
The 1984 action comedy Top Secret! contains an odd sequence set in a Swedish bookstore. Val Kilmer, Lucy Gutteridge, and Peter Cushing acted the entire scene backward, and the filmmakers then reversed this performance to produce a dreamlike atmosphere in which impossible things happen.
The scene required 17 takes and four dogs, co-director Jim Abrahams told ScreenCrush. “Each dog stopped being hungry.”
In 1931, 5-year-old Mel Brooks saw Frankenstein and refused open his window on a summer night. His mother talked to him:
Let’s say you are right. That Frankenstein wants to come here and kill you and eat you. But let’s look at all the trouble he’s going to have to get to Brooklyn. First of all, he lives in Transylvania. That’s somewhere in Romania. That’s in Europe. And that’s a long, long ways away. So even if he decides to come here, he has to get a bus or a train or hitchhike to somewhere he can get a boat to go to America. Believe me, nobody is going to pick him up. So let’s say he’s lucky enough to find a boat that would take him here. Okay, so he is here in New York City, but he really doesn’t know how the subways work. When he asks people they just run away! Finally, let’s say he figures out it’s not the IRT, it’s the BMT and he gets to Brooklyn. Then he’s got to figure out how to get to 365 South Third Street. Okay, it’s going to be a long walk. So let’s say he finally gets to Williamsburg and he finally finds our tenement. But remember, all the windows at 365 are going to be wide open and he’s had a long journey, so he must be very hungry. So if he has to kill and eat somebody, he probably would go through the first-floor window and eat all the Rothsteins who are living in apartment 1A. And once he’s full, there is no reason for him to go all the way up to the fifth floor and eat you.
“The story made good sense to me. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘open the window. I’ll take a chance.'”
From his memoir, All About Me!, 2021.
Billy Wilder’s grave, Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, Los Angeles:
From the Strand, December 1901, “one of Sir John Stainer’s musical jokes, two hymns in one — in B flat or G major, according to the manner in which it is read, upside up or upside down. It was written as an autograph for a friend of his son’s.”
When James Cameron was serving as second unit director on Galaxy of Terror (1981), he was asked to film an insert of a severed arm that’s being eaten by maggots. The team made a fake arm, covered it with mealworms, lit the shot, and rolled the camera, but the mealworms didn’t move. “They looked completely inert,” Cameron said. “So I thought, well, what would happen if we put a little electrical current through these worms? Maybe they’d jump around a little more.
“So we get all ready to do the shot and two guys I knew who were producers had come up behind me to watch me work because they had heard I was doing some directing. I rolled the camera and when I said ‘Action,’ what they saw was two hundred mealworms all come to life. When I said ‘Cut,’ they stopped moving.
“This must have been tremendously impressive to two low-budget horror-movie producers. I’m sure they ratcheted up in their mind that if I could get a performance out of worms, I probably could work very well with actors.” They hired him that day to direct Piranha II.
(Robert J. Emery, The Directors: Take One, 2002.)
In 2005, Jeremy Winterson bought a bootleg copy of Revenge of the Sith in Shanghai and noticed something wrong with the English subtitles.
The movie’s dialogue had been translated mechanically into Chinese and then translated back again into English, leaving it almost incomprehensible. (A similar disaster had befallen a Portuguese-French phrasebook in 1883.)
Fans replaced the movie’s original audio dialogue with voice actors reading the mistranslated subtitles, and the result is Star War the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West (highlights above).
