The 1990 antitrust case United States v. Syufy Enterprises settled a dispute regarding monopoly among Las Vegas movie exhibitors. But it became famous for another reason: It appears that Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski hid more than 200 movie titles in his opinion. Here’s a sample (italics mine):

“Absent structural constraints that keep competition from performing its levelling function, few businesses can dictate terms to customers or suppliers with impunity. It’s risky business even to try. As Syufy learned in dealing with Orion and his other suppliers, a larger company often is more vulnerable to a squeeze play than a smaller one. It is for that reason that neither size nor market share alone suffice to establish a monopoly. Without the power to exclude competition, large companies that try to throw their weight around may find themselves sitting ducks for leaner, hungrier competitors. Or, as Syufy saw, the tactic may boomerang, causing big trouble with suppliers.”

It’s a bit hard to tell how many of these are deliberate, as they appear natural in context, and Kozinski won’t say. But working with Leonard Maltin’s TV Movies and Video Guide, the Brigham Young University Law Review found 215 titles in the opinion. You can try your own hand at it — the full text is here.

Raymond Chandler to Alfred Hitchcock, Dec. 6, 1950:

Dear Hitch,

In spite of your wide and generous disregard of my communications on the subject of the script of Strangers on a Train and your failure to make any comment on it, and in spite of not having heard a word from you since I began the writing of the actual screenplay — for all of which I might say I bear no malice, since this sort of procedure seems to be part of the standard Hollywood depravity — in spite of this and in spite of this extremely cumbersome sentence, I feel that I should, just for the record, pass you a few comments on what is termed the final script. I could understand your finding fault with my script in this or that way, thinking that such and such a scene was too long or such and such a mechanism was too awkward. I could understand you changing you mind about the things you specifically wanted, because some of such changes might have been imposed on you from without. What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write — the kind that says everything twice and leaves nothing to be implied by the actor or the camera. Of course you must have had your reasons but, to use a phrase once coined by Max Beerbohm, it would take a ‘far less brilliant mind than mine’ to guess what they were.

Regardless of whether or not my name appears on the screen among the credits, I’m not afraid that anybody will think I wrote this stuff. They’ll know damn well I didn’t. I shouldn’t have minded in the least if you had produced a better script — believe me, I shouldn’t. But if you wanted something written in skim milk, why on earth did you bother to come to me in the first place? What a waste of money! What a waste of time! It’s no answer to say that I was well paid. Nobody can be adequately paid for wasting his time.

Raymond Chandler

John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, and Dashiell Hammett had already turned down the job. When Chandler finally did hear from Hitchcock, it was to learn he’d been fired.

The Rainbow Room had a revolving floor in front of the band. [In 1934] Ray [Noble] would get up wearing white tie and tails and sit down at the piano on the revolving floor. We would go into a medley and Ray would play and talk to the people at the tables as he was being moved about. When he got about halfway around the circle he would be a half-block away from us. Claude [Thornhill] would then change keys on him. Ray would be playing ‘The Very Thought of You,’ say in E-flat, and Claude would change it to F and Ray would be stuck out there. When a half hour later the piano, moving circularly, got back to the bandstand Ray would be furious, and he would say, ‘For God’s sake, fellows, I am playing ‘The Very Thought of You’ in E-flat. What the hell are you playing?’

— Bud Freeman, Crazeology, 1995

Reviewing a play in 1917, Heywood Broun wrote that Geoffrey Steyne’s performance was “the worst to be seen in the contemporary theater.” Steyne sued him for libel, but a judge threw out the case.

In reviewing the actor’s next production, Broun wrote, “Mr. Steyne’s performance was not up to his usual standard.”

During a newspaper interview in March 1966, John Lennon said that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”

On August 13, radio station KLUE in Longview, Texas, organized a bonfire in which protesting Christians burned their Beatles records.

The following day, the station’s broadcast tower was struck by lightning, rendering the news director unconscious and knocking the station off the air.

(Thanks, Zach.)

Wonder Woman and her Lasso of Truth were created by a pioneer in lie detectors.

While a graduate student at Harvard after World War I, William Moulton Marston had developed a systolic blood pressure test to detect deception.

Twenty-five years later, while proposing a female superhero to DC Comics, he suggested a magic lasso that would force those it captured to tell the truth.

He was inspired by his wife, Elizabeth. “Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power,” he said in 1943. “The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”

Letter from Groucho Marx to the Franklin Corporation, April 24, 1961:

Dear Mr. Goodman:

I received the first annual report of the Franklin Corporation and though I am not an expert at reading balance sheets, my financial advisor (who, I assure you, knows nothing) nodded his head in satisfaction.

You wrote that you hope I am not one of those borscht circuit stockholders who get a few points’ profit and hastily scram for the hills. For your information, I bought Alleghany Preferred eleven years ago and am just now disposing of it.

As a brand new member of your family, strategically you made a ghastly mistake in sending me individual pictures of the Board of Directors. Mr. Roth, Chairman of the Board, merely looks sinister. You, the President, look like a hard worker with not too much on the ball. No one named Prosswimmer can possibly be a success. As for Samuel A. Goldblith, PhD., head of Food Technology at MIT, he looks as though he had eaten too much of the wrong kind of fodder.

At this point I would like to stop and ask you a question about Marion Harper Jr. To begin with, I immediately distrust any man who has the same name as his mother. But the thing that most disturbs me about Junior is that I don’t know what the hell he’s laughing at. Is it because he sucked me into this Corporation? This is not the kind of face that inspires confidence in a nervous and jittery stockholder.

George S. Sperti, I dismiss instantly. Any man who is the President of an outfit called Institutum Divi Thomae will certainly bear watching. Is he trying to impress stockholders with his knowledge of Latin? If so, why doesn’t he read, ‘Winnie ille Pu’? James J. Sullivan, I am convinced, is Paul E. Prosswimmer photographed from a different angle.

Offhand, I would say that I have summed up your group fairly accurately. I hope, for my sake, that I am mistaken.

In closing, I warn you, go easy with my money. I am in an extremely precarious profession whose livelihood depends upon a fickle public.

Sincerely yours,

Groucho Marx
(temporarily at liberty)

The climax of Harry Houdini’s 1919 film The Grim Game called for the hero to descend by a rope between two biplanes. During filming, the planes inadvertently collided and went plunging toward the ground (about 4:30 in the clip above).

No one was hurt, but the incident was caught on film and the story was hastily rewritten to incorporate the sequence. Ever the showman, Houdini boasted that “all the flying stunts [had been] actually performed” and offered $1,000 “to any person who can prove that the collision [shown in] the film was not genuine.”

It was genuine, all right, but the performer wasn’t Houdini — a former U.S. Air Service pilot named Robert E. Kennedy had performed the stunts, which were later intercut with closeups of Houdini.

During the accident, Houdini had been safely on the ground with his arm in a sling — he’d fallen three feet while filming a jail-cell escape.