To film the dramatic approach of the train in High Noon, director Fred Zinnemann and cinematographer Floyd Crosby put their camera flat on the ground between the rails a few hundred yards ahead of the station. Zinneman wanted the train to appear as a dot that grew larger as it approached.

When the signal was given to start, “It looked beautiful, moving rapidly with white smoke, which looked even better,” Zinneman wrote later. “Then it let out black smoke, which looked even better. What we didn’t know was that this was the signal that the engine’s brakes were failing.”

When Zinnemann and Crosby realized that the train wasn’t going to stop, Crosby grabbed the camera, but one of its tripod hooks caught on a rail and he lost his grip. The camera fell in front of the engine as it roared past the men. It was badly damaged, but the magazine was intact, and the footage of the train’s approach is in the final film.

(From Michael Francis Blake, Code of Honor, 2003.)

Edgar Wallace died after completing a rough draft of King Kong, and James Ashmore Creelman’s script was slow and dialogue-heavy. So Merian C. Cooper gave the job to Ruth Rose, the wife of his co-producer. Rose had never composed a script before, but she knew how to write tightly — the opening line of dialogue, “Hey! Is this the moving picture ship?”, replaces several pages of exposition with seven words. After Kong is subdued on Skull Island, she accomplishes his transfer to New York with a simple speech by filmmaker Carl Denham:

Send to the ship for anchor chains and tools. Build a raft and float him to the ship. We’ll give him more than chains. He’s always been king of his world, but we’ll teach him fear. Why, the whole world will pay to see this! We’re millionaires, boys — I’ll share it with all of you! In a few months it’ll be up in lights: ‘Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World!’

Ernest B. Schoedsack said his wife’s script was easy to shoot because “the characters are believable — I didn’t have to ask them to do anything impossible or ridiculous.” And Cooper added, “Ruth used just the kind of romantic dialogue I wanted. It was perfect.”

Accomplishments of Max Woosnam, the “greatest British sportsman”:

• Won gold and silver medals in tennis (on the same day) at the 1920 Olympics
• Won the doubles title at Wimbledon
• Compiled a maximum break of 147 in snooker
• Made a century (100 or more runs in a single innings) at Lord’s Cricket Ground
• Captained the British Davis Cup team
• Captained Manchester City Football Club to runner-up for the Football League Championship of 1920–21
• Captained the England national football team

At Cambridge he represented the university at football, cricket, lawn tennis, real tennis, and golf. He was chosen to captain the British football team at the Olympics but had to decline, as he’d already committed to the tennis team. And he once beat Charlie Chaplin at table tennis with a butter knife.

He’s not well remembered today because he never gave an interview and considered it “vulgar” to play professionally. “He achieved so much more than so many modern sportsmen without ever receiving or asking for a fraction of the praise or attention,” his daughter Penny recalls. “It would have been all too easy for him to make more of a name for himself, to seek out a place in the newspapers, but that just wasn’t him, just wasn’t what he was all about.”

Monster a Go-Go! stops rather than ends. Director Bill Rebane abandoned the science fiction horror film in 1961 after running out of money, and Herschell Gordon Lewis picked it up in 1965 to pair with one of his own movies as a double feature. By that time the original cast were unavailable to complete the filming, so Lewis had to make do with what he had, which led to some awkward moments. At the end, as scientists are closing in on the radioactive monster that has replaced astronaut Frank Douglas, it suddenly disappears and a narrator says:

As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called ‘Douglas’ to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness! With the telegram, one cloud lifts, and another descends. Astronaut Frank Douglas, rescued, alive, well, and of normal size, some 8,000 miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled? Case in point: The line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us? Or is the monster gone?

What does this mean? None of it is explained. Lewis called his film a parody, but Rebane called it “the worst picture in the world.”

Early in his dancing career, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson performed on a custom double staircase that added drama to his act, increasing his visibility to the audience while amplifying his steps. In What the Eye Hears, Brian Seibert writes, “What the stairs did for Robinson was reveal how he played with the structure of the music through how he played with the structure of the staircase.”

Robinson went through 20 to 30 pairs of clogs a year with footwork so impeccable that a listener under the stage couldn’t distinguish his right foot from his left. A less efficient dancer might have found the narrow steps daunting, but Robinson danced effortlessly “up on the toes,” keeping his feet neatly underneath him while displaying dazzling control and timing.

“As generations of imitators would learn to their grief, the properties of the staircase that magnified Robinson’s mastery equally magnify the slightest imperfection,” Seibert writes. “Dancers tell a story in which he had his musicians cut out for three and a half minutes while he continued dancing. After the allotted time, the musicians came back in, cued by a metronome that Robinson couldn’t hear. He was exactly on beat.”