The running time of the average American TV sitcom, with its commercials removed, is 22 minutes.
In the 1950s, TV and film star collie Lassie’s salary was $5,000 per week.
The sci-fi flick Gog (1954), in which a nuclear "brain" takes over a secret laboratory, was the first film to have a computer appear as a main character in a movie.
In the 1970s, “Piano Man” Billy Joel appeared in a TV commercial for Bachman Pretzels.
The silent film classic Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, was banned in the state of Maryland in 1952, 37 years after its initial release, for being "morally bad and crime-inciting."
The son of a lowly bookie, Peter O'Toole attended a Catholic school where the nuns beat him to correct his left-handedness.
In the 1989 hit film When Harry Met Sally..., the coffee shop in which Billy Crystal (as Harry) and Meg Ryan (as Sally) first eat together in 1978 has a placard posted on the door for Visa. However, in 1978, the card was still known as BankAmericard.
In the 1990's, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was the unofficial "hospital to the stars." All 850 rooms at the center were private, and the 16 deluxe rooms on the hospital's 8th floor cost $1,324 per night in 1994. The deluxe rooms were not ornate, and resembled nice-but-average hotel rooms. Part of the high price ticket was the special menu for the 8th-floor patients, which included such gastronomic delights as lobster tails and salmon steaks, and, subject to doctor's approval, wine with meals. Prices for the smaller rooms on the other floors started at $864 a night, and for an additional $129 per day, included the same upscale menu offered to those on the 8th floor. The hospital has a respected reputation for its excellent medical care, which includes a 24-hour cancer treatment center set in an atrium, while providing the security needed by celebrities. Entertainers who had been treated at Cedars-Sinai included Lucille Ball, Annette Bening, George Burns, James Garner, Billy Idol, Michael Landon, and Martha Raye. Cedars-Sinai also gave free care to indigent patients, at a cost to the hospital of more than $14 million a year.
In the Abbott and Costello "Who's on First" routine, the pitcher's name was Tomorrow.
In the blockbuster comedy sci-fi hit Men in Black (1997), actor Chris O'Donnell was first offered the role of agent "J"; after O'Donnell turned it down, it was accepted by Will Smith.
In the blockbuster hit, E.T., the Extra Terrestrial (1982), Harrison Ford was cast as the school principal, but his only scene was cut. Director Steven Spielberg decided his presence in the film would be too distracting. Ford's wife Melissa Mathison wrote E.T.'s screenplay.
The story of Don Juan has been told over 35 times in the movies. The 1926 version, starring John Barrymore holds a place in movie history, as Don Juan (Barrymore) plants 191 kisses on various females during the course of the film, an average of one every 53 seconds.
The studios wanted Matthew McConaughey, the newest heartthrob in the industry, cast as hero Jack Dawson in the 1997 box office hit Titanic, but director James Cameron insisted on Leonardo DiCaprio.
The Taylor-Burton diamond is a dazzling 69.42-carat pear-shaped diamond. Cartier bought the diamond at auction. Screen actor Richard Burton bought the rare stone the very next day for his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, an avid collector of diamond jewelry.
The television show Seinfeld was set in New York City; however, the exterior that was used for Jerry Seinfeld's apartment house is actually in Los Angeles, California.
The term "spaghetti Western" originated during the 1960's. Moviemakers made low-budget films in Italy because it was cheaper to do so there than in the United States. Upon completion of a movie, English was dubbed in for the Italian actors. Struggling actor Clint Eastwood had left Hollywood for a few years and made his early Westerns in Italy with director Sergio Leone, to whom the term "spaghetti Western" is attributed. The collaboration of Eastwood and Leone included the hit film The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
In the early 1950s, Clint Eastwood signed a $75-a-week contract with Universal to do walk-ons in low-budget horror flicks like Revenge of the Creature. He was fired when studio executives decided his Adam's apple protruded too much for him to be star material. For some time, Eastwood took on odd jobs, such as digging swimming pools, to augment what little money he could make from small parts in TV series like Highway Patrol. However, once he was cast as Rowdy Yates on the TV western Rawhide in 1958, Eastwood's star began to shoot to the top.
The term “Sword and Sandal Epic” is a film industry colloquialism for an epic film with biblical or fantasy elements. The term was named for the weapons and costumes that the characters typically wear.
In the early 1960s, opinionist William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote the following about the Fab Four: "The Beatles are not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful... They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music.".
The theme played at the beginning of the "Green Hornet" series was the "Flight of the Bumble Bee" by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
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