In which we do some damage control on all the things you think you know about the Hollywood dream factory.
The word “sex” is subliminally hidden in a dust cloud in The Lion King.
The word is the similar-appearing “SFX,” inserted as a joke by the special effects (SFX) team who worked on the shot.
A whispered line in Aladdin (1992) implores “good teenagers, take off your clothes.”
The offensive moment supposedly takes place when Aladdin, dressed as Prince Ali, flies on his magic carpet to Jasmine’s balcony. When he gets there, her tiger, Rajah, tries to get rid of Aladdin and growls, prompting Aladdin to mutter, “Good teenagers, take off your clothes.” According to Disney, however, Aladdin says, “Come on good kitty, take off and go.”
“Mama” Cass Eliot of the Mamas and the Papas died from choking on a ham sandwich.
The coroner’s initial report, which was leaked to the media, noted that a ham sandwich was found near her body. There were no obstructions in her windpipe—an autopsy revealed that the singer died of a heart attack.
Woody Allen married his adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.
She’s the adopted daughter of Allen’s former partner (not spouse) Mia Farrow. The actress adopted her with her former husband, composer Andre Previn.
In the Super Mario video games, Mario jumps up and smashes blocks with his head.
He’s using his fist.
The body of Walt Disney (or maybe just his head) was cryogenically frozen, and when science develops the technology to revive dead people, he’ll come back to life.
The entertainment tycoon died from cancer in 1966. He was cremated two days after his death, but Bob Nelson of the Cryonics Society of California mentioned years later in an interview that Disney had shown interest in freezing his body…but died before he could make the plans to do so. That bit of info, combined with how Nelson’s organization happened to freeze its first body two weeks after Disney died, became “Walt Disney is cryogenically frozen.”
Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles.
By the time Yoko Ono and John Lennon found each other in 1968, the pressures of being in the biggest band in the world—and creative differences among the four strong-headed musicians—were already threatening to split the band apart. Yoko Ono just came around at a time when she could be a scapegoat for angry Beatles fans. In 1969, John Lennon told NME that he formed the Plastic Ono Band with Ono because “there isn’t enough outlet for me in the Beatles.”
The Beatles broke up in 1970 and never reunited.
After John Lennon died in 1980, George Harrison wrote a song called “All Those Years Ago,” a nostalgic tune about Beatlemania on which Paul McCartney sang backup and Ringo Starr played the drums. And in 1998, at a private memorial service for the late Linda McCartney, her husband, along with Harrison and Starr, led the congregation in the singing of “Let it Be.”
During a wedding scene in The Little Mermaid, the minister sports an erection.
The minister is very short and squat, and his knee jutting out from underneath his tunic certainly made it look like a different protuberance.
The Disney logo is Walt Disney’s handwritten signature.
The Disney corporation introduced that logo in the 1980s during a downturn, as a way to link the company back to its glory days. The “Waltograph” is a stylized, designed version of Disney’s signature, but it isn’t a facsimile.
Blowing into a video game cartridge clears out dust and helps it run better.
Dust and dirt could get inside both a Nintendo Entertainment System and around the connection ports at the bottom of the game, and players blamed that when a game didn’t work properly, so they’d remove it, blow on it, then put it back in. Blowing actually did nothing—it “worked” because of that mystifying technological phenomenon of “turning it off and turning it back on again.”
Actor Michael J. Fox has a middle name that starts with the letter “J.”
His middle name is Andrew. When he joined the Screen Actors Guild, there was already a member named Michael Fox. The Canadian didn’t want to use “A” as a middle initial because it sounded like the cliché Canadian expression “eh,” so he adopted a “J” as a tribute to one of his acting heroes, Michael J. Pollard.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his less-talented contemporary Antonio Salieri were bitter enemies, to the point where an insanely jealous Salieri killed Mozart.
Most everything we think we know about these two comes from the highly dramatized 1984 film Amadeus. Not only was Salieri a successful composer of 40 popular operas, but he and Mozart were friends and even collaborators. And Mozart died in 1791 of an illness…not murder.
Marilyn Monroe was a size 16.
Monroe did wear a size 16 in the ‘50s, but a size 16 back then isn’t the same as a size 16 today. A past 16 is equivalent to a present-day 4.
Veteran TV star Sandy Duncan—Funny Face, The Sandy Duncan Show, and The Hogan Family—has a glass eye.
In 1971, Duncan had a noncancerous tumor behind her left eye removed, but it left her blind in that eye due to a surgical complication. So while Duncan’s left eye lacks a little warmth, it’s because it doesn’t work, not because it isn’t real.
Born with the name Robert Zimmerman, Bob Dylan adopted his stage name to pay tribute to Welsh writer Dylan Thomas.
Dylan may be an artist of the highest caliber but he still loves TV like the rest of us. The “Dylan” is a conscious re-spelling of Dillon, as in Matt Dillon, a character from Gunsmoke.
Mozart wrote “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” at the age of five.
He was a child prodigy of a composer, but Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart didn’t write “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” At age 25, he composed Twelve Variations on “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman.” The basic melody was later used for “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and its countless film adaptations are about a fire-hating monster named Frankenstein, constructed out of dead body parts, and reanimated with a jolt of electricity.
The novel is more about the dangers of man “playing God” than the monster’s rampage. It’s about Frankenstein, alright—Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the guy who builds the creature. The monster is never named.
Audiences for some of the first films in the 1890s were so amazed by movies that they thought they were witnessing real events. There was even a mass panic during an 1896 showing of Arrival of a Train at La Ciotata when the filmgoers screamed and ran away, convinced the flickering two-dimensional train would burst through the screen.
People can easily differentiate fiction from reality—they’ve been watching plays for centuries. Also, early films offered very poor resolution—and in black and white, and silent—so there’s no way anybody thought that the train was real.
Music performed by a full symphonic orchestra in a concert hall is called classical music.
“Classical” is often used to describe any and all “fancy” instrumental music composed a couple of hundred years ago by the likes of Bach and Beethoven, but it technically refers only to a very specific era of music. “Classical” music dates to 1760-1820 (give or take), and covers the period in which Mozart, Hayden, and other composers toned down the grandiosity of the baroque period (1600 to 1760) so as to re-focus on melody.
Germans love David Hasselhoff.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a surprising event, made all the more unbelievable when Hasselhoff showed up among the rubble to perform his single “Looking for Freedom” to cheering Germans. That song was something of an unofficial theme song of the political upheaval that had led to the end of European communism, and it spent eight weeks at #1 in West Germany. Hasselhoff never had another huge hit in Germany, so no, Germans really only loved him for that one special moment in time. Most affection for Hasselhoff found in Germany today is of the kitschy or ironic variety.
Joanie Loves Chachi, a 1982 spinoff of Happy Days about young married couple Joanie Cunningham (Erin Moran) and Chachi Arcola (Scott Baio), flopped in the U.S., but was extraordinarily popular when it aired in Korea because “chachi” is Korean slang for “penis.”
This is a lie Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi creator Garry Marshall dropped into interviews to build up word of mouth…because there’s no better publicity than a hint of sex and scandal.
Marisa Tomei didn’t really win Best Supporting Actress at the 1993 Academy Awards for her role in My Cousin Vinny.
Tomei’s win was certainly a surprise—prognosticators thought Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives was a lock. But Tomei’s name is what came out of the mouth of 74-year-old presenter Jack Palance, who seemed a little confused and stumbled over his prepared remarks. Tomei’s shocking win, combined with Palance’s demeanor, let to a persistent rumor that Palance read the final name of the nominees on the teleprompter rather than the name of the winner in the envelope. But if there are ever errors—such as the fiasco in 2017 when La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best Picture winner—someone will step in to correct things.
Shakespeare was the most respected writer of his time.
Shakespeare’s plays were popular entertainments in the late 15th and early 16th centuries…and almost as popular as works written by contemporaries like Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe. He wasn’t regarded as the greatest writer in the English language until the early 1800s, when influential poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge re-popularized his works.
William Shakespeare willed to his wife, Anne Hathaway, little more than his “second-best bed.” That’s all he could give to the love of his life? What a jerk!
Shakespeare really did leave his wife their “second-best bed.” But the reason why is actually very sweet. In Elizabethan England, a home’s best bed was reserved for visiting guests. The marriage bed where the man and woman of the house slept was thus the second-best. Shakespeare was giving a sexy little wink to his wife in his will, remembering all the first-rate times they had together on their second-best bed.
Ernest Hemingway wrote a haunting short story consisting of just six words: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”
It’s a myth about Hemingway that originated in Papa, John deGroot’s 1996 one-man show about Hemingway.
Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the skills that made him a master blues musician.
It’s a legend, of course, but it’s been incorrectly attributed to Johnson. Another early 20th-century musician named Tommy Johnson claimed that he’s the one who made the arrangement with the devil.
Nirvana killed “hair metal” when it popularized grunge music with its 1991 single “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
The more serious hard rock of bands like Guns N’ Roses and Metallica killed hair metal in the late ‘80s, and bands like those sold millions of records well into the ‘90s, alongside grunge bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
The ghost of a teenage boy appears in the movie Three Men and a Baby. When the comedy hit VHS in 1988, people started noticing—and talking about—a figure that appears in one scene. A brunette male figure appears in the background, his facial features tough to make out, peeking from behind a curtain. That led to the urban legend that it’s the ghost of a boy who committed suicide in the house where the movie was filmed.
Ted Danson plays an actor in the movie, and in a deleted scene, the audience gets a glimpse of a cardboard cutout of him wearing a tuxedo. A crew member then stashed the fake Danson behind a curtain, and when that other scene was filmed, the cutout was barely, but spookily, visible. (And Three Men and a Baby wasn’t even filmed in a house—it was shot on a soundstage.)
The 1996 Oscar-nominated movie Fargo, the story of a kidnapping gone wrong that ends in multiple deaths and a fortune stashed in a snowbank, is based on a true story.
Writer-director team Joel and Ethan Coen put a “based on a true story” disclaimer at the beginning of the movie to make the film seem more visceral and shocking. But they made up the whole thing.
Steven Spielberg secretly directed the 1984 film Poltergeist, not credited director Tobe Hooper.
This was the first big-budget movie Hooper, who’d gotten his start on low-budget indies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was in charge of, so he needed some help here and there. Spielberg, Poltergeist’s screenwriter and producer, offered suggestions, which crew and cast members took to mean he was secretly running the show.
Actor and future president of the United States Ronald Reagan nearly played the iconic role of Rick Blaine in Casablanca.
Once he got into politics, Reagan’s movie star status became a bit overstated—he was never more than a second-tier star of B-movies like the chimp comedy Bedtime for Bonzo and the war movie Hellcats of the Navy. One little bit of fake news from the early ‘40s helped perpetuate the myth that Reagan had been a screen legend. In 1942, Warner Bros. planted a news release with The Hollywood Reporter announcing that Reagan would be starring in Casablanca—it was a ploy to keep Reagan in the gossip columns. But he never got the part, nor was he even considered for such a major movie.
Humpty Dumpty is an egg.
Nowhere in the original, four-line poem does it say that the figure who fell off a wall and couldn’t be reassembled by all the king’s horses and all the king’s men is an egg. That idea entered the collective mind when Lewis Carroll depicted Humpty Dumpty as an egg in his extremely popular 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass.
Located on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, Schwab’s was a soda fountain, restaurant, and movie industry hangout. One day in 1937, teenager Judy Turner skipped a class to grab a Coke at Schwab’s, and movie director Mervyn Le Roy was so entranced by her beauty, he offered her a screen test, and she was soon on her way to stardom as “Lana” Turner.
Turner was discovered at a different hangout called the Top Hat, and it was The Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson who spotted her, not Le Roy. When Turner became a star, the Top Hat commemorated her discovery with a plaque. The story was good for business, and so when the Top Hat closed, Schwab’s stole the story and claimed that it had happened there.
Pink Floyd made its 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon to sync up with the 1939 classic movie The Wizard of Oz.
Who knows how many listening/viewing parties this rumor inspired when it first spread in the late ‘90s? Admittedly, there are some ways the lyrics on the record line up with the images on the screen—“Brain Damage” starts when the Scarecrow starts singing “If I Only Had a Brain,” and “The Great Gig in the Sky” plays during the tornado sequence. But it’s all just a weird coincidence. MTV asked Dark Side engineer Alan Parsons about it, and he said “there simply wasn’t the mechanics” to play videotapes in the recording studio…especially since VHS cassettes didn’t exist in the early 1970s.
The 2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show was tainted by “Nipplegate”: Justin Timberlake ripped off a piece of Janet Jackson’s clothing, accidentally exposing her nipple to the world.
It was seemingly planned. Timberlake sang the lyric “gonna have you naked by the end of the song” right before he tore away Jackson’s breastplate. While most of Jackson’s breast was visible, the most offensive-to-censors part, the nipple, was covered by a pasty (which also suggests the whole bit was premeditated).
James Dean died at age 24 in 1955 after he crashed his Porsche Spyder into another car at about 90 miles per hour.
That is how he died, but the Rebel Without a Cause star wasn’t driving as recklessly as presumed. A 2005 inquest revealed that Dean was only going about 70 miles per hour, and had braked hard—not sped up—to avoid that other vehicle.
Vivien Leigh won a talent search to land the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind.
The movie was heavily anticipated and in production for three years before its release in 1939, and producer David O. Selznick publicly struggled to find the perfect actress to play O’Hara, landing on Vivien Leigh after interviewing and auditioning 1,400 women. But that was all a publicity stunt. He may have reviewed that many candidates, but he actively pursued Leigh for more than a year before she agreed to take the part.
In a classic example of “mass hysteria,” thousands of New Jersey residents fled their homes on October 30, 1938, and ran for the hills in terror when they believed that an alien invasion was underway. UFOs hadn’t really landed in the Garden State, of course. These poor fools had been duped by a radio show. For the CBS radio anthology The Mercury Theatre on the Air, Orson Wells directed and narrated an innovative adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 alien invasion novel The War of the Worlds, presented as a mock, as-it-happens, breaking news broadcast.
But did countless people really freak out? No, they most certainly did not. The C.E. Hooper company phoned 5,000 homes to conduct its night radio ratings survey. Only 2 percent said they checked out The Mercury Theatre, and a few cities (including Boston) didn’t even air the show that night, because it wasn’t a terribly popular show. The notion that some radio show caused a mass panic was falsely reported by major newspapers of the day. The reason: Radio, and radio-delivered news especially, was a threat to business. They wanted to discredit the medium as irresponsible and dangerous…so that people would keep buying newspapers.
Pong was the first video game.
While Pong was the first popular video game, hitting arcades in 1972, it wasn’t the first game, or even the first tennis-simulating video game. Back in 1958, computer think-tank Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York created Tennis for Two to show off what its machines could do.
“Lights, camera, action” is what directors say on film sets when it’s time to shoot a scene.
This comes from old movies about making movies, and it’s an over-simplification of the complicated process of setting up a shot. Lights take a long time to get right, and they’re ready to go by the time a director calls “action” as a prompt to the actors. (They never say “camera,” though.)
Elton John’s 1973 hit “Bennie and the Jets” is a live recording taken from a concert.
It’s a song about rock stars and rock concerts, but John and his band recorded it in a studio and added applause and audience noise tracks to create the feeling of a live show.
Before his notorious murder spree, Charles Manson auditioned for the Monkees.
Manson was a failed rock musician and even convinced the Beach Boys to record one of his songs, but when the open call for the Monkees went out in 1965, Manson was in jail on a forgery charge.