The Extraordinary Book of Useless Information (7 page)

John Wayne played Genghis Khan in the 1956 film
The Conqueror
. His eyes were taped back at the corners and he sported a bad glue-on goatee.

Mickey Rooney portrayed a Japanese character in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. His buckteeth, near-sighted glasses, and horrible accent would be considered offensive today.

Keanu Reeves played Buddha in 1993's
Little Buddha
.

TAXING TIMES

Chris Tucker owes the Internal Revenue Service millions of dollars and has had his $6 million home foreclosed on.

Joe Francis, the
Girls Gone Wild
guy, went to jail for owing $34 million in back taxes.

In 1996, Burt Reynolds filed for bankruptcy and was $10 million in debt.

In 1998 and 2010, Toni Braxton filed for bankruptcy and had to take court-ordered financial classes.

BAD ACTS

Actor Jamie Waylett, who played the villain Crabbe in the
Harry Potter
movie series, was arrested for looting and possession of a homemade bomb, during the 2011 riots in London.

Joe Son, the martial arts expert/actor who played the character Random Task, Dr. Evil's henchman in the movie
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
, is serving a life sentence for the rape and torture of a girl in 1990. In 2011, he killed his cellmate and was moved to solitary confinement.

Cameron Douglas, the son of Oscar-winner Michael Douglas, was sent to prison for dealing drugs in 2010. Four and a half years were added to his sentence in 2011, after he was found with drugs in jail.

In 1978, Tim Allen was arrested for drug trafficking after he was found to have 650 grams of cocaine. Allen served just over two years in prison.

CRADLE ROBBERS

In 2012, eighty-six-year-old Dick Van Dyke married his forty-year-old makeup artist.

Eighty-six-year-old Hugh Hefner topped that, marrying twenty-six-year-old Playmate Crystal Harris in 2012.

Fifty-year-old Doug Hutchison, who starred in
The Green Mile
, married Courtney Stodden when she was just sixteen.

Forty-nine-year-old Linda Hogan, former wife of Hulk Hogan, dated one of her kids' high school classmates after the split with Hulk—nineteen-year-old Charley Hill.

In 1993, thirty-eight-year-old Jerry Seinfeld began dating high school senior Shoshanna Lonstein, who was seventeen at the time.

Twenty-nine-year-old Milo Ventimiglia dated
Heroes
co-star Hayden Panettiere when she was seventeen.

MAN ABOUT TOWN

Singer John Mayer is quite the ladies' man. He has dated Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Aniston, Minka Kelly, Jessica Simpson, and Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Mayer wrote the song “Your Body Is a Wonderland” about Hewitt. She is quoted as having said, “My body is more like a pawn shop.”

SCARRED FOR LIFE

Tina Fey has a scar on the left side of her face from a nasty cut she received when she was five years old.

Marilyn Monroe had a big scar on her stomach, which is the reason there are very few photographs of her midsection.

Elizabeth Taylor underwent a tracheotomy in 1960 that left a scar at the base of her throat.

Catherine Zeta-Jones, likewise, has a visible tracheotomy scar obtained in childhood.

Sharon Stone has a rope burn scar on her neck from the time she rode a horse into a clothesline.

Joaquin Phoenix has a cleft lip.

Victoria's Secret supermodel Karolína Kurková has an extraordinarily smooth belly button due to a procedure that she had as an infant.

Mary J. Blige has a scar under her left eye, and Sandra Bullock has one over her left eye.

Queen Latifah has a scar on the top of her forehead.

GOOD FENCES MAKE GROUCHY NEIGHBORS

Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne were sued in 2012 for building a fence to encompass roughly 8,500 square feet of a neighboring property's land.

THE MOUTH THAT ROARED

Rush Limbaugh has the largest listening audience on talk radio, followed by Sean Hannity and Michael Savage.

RISKY BUSINESS

Eighty percent of Hollywood movies are insured by Fireman's Fund Insurance during production, covering the actors, props, wardrobes, and equipment.

Insurance accounts for about 1 to 3 percent of a film's budget.

The more dangerous stunts involved in a movie, the more it costs to insure. The riskiest movies to insure in recent years, according to Fireman's, were
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
, because of the motorcycle chases and torture scenes;
Salt
, where Angelina Jolie did her own stunts;
Inglorious Basterds
;
2012
;
Crazy Heart
;
Nine
;
The Wrestler
; and
Into the Wild
, where props had to be flown to Alaska and bears were used.

JUST IN CASE

Over the years, celebrities have taken out insurance policies on various body parts. Singer Tom Jones once insured his chest hair for $7 million. Jennifer Lopez insured her butt for $27 million. Pittsburgh Steeler Troy Polamalu insured his long dark hair for $1 million. David Lee Roth got a policy in case one of his sperm accidentally impregnated one of his many partners. Heidi Klum insured her legs for $2.2 million, and Mariah Carey insured her gams for a whopping $1 billion!
Ugly Betty
star America Ferrera insured her smile for $10 million. Dolly Parton's assets were insured for $300,000 per boob. David Beckham insured against a career-ending injury for $151 million. Rod Stewart insured his raspy voice for $7 million. Keith Richards insured his middle finger for $1.6 million, lest he not be able to flip people off anymore.

MOVIE MAGIC

The distance shots in the tornado scene in
The Wizard of Oz
were of a real twister. The mid-range shots were created by coiling a stocking. The close-up images used a burlap bag full of dust.

The nasty boy next door in
Toy Story
had exactly 15,977 computer-generated hairs on his head. The trees had up to ten thousand leaves each.

In
Star Wars, Episode I
:
The Phantom Menace
, the communicator Qui-Gon Jinn uses is a modified Gillette for Women Sensor Excel razor.

HOME ON LOAN

The suburban Chicago Georgian-style mansion used in the filming of
Home Alone
sold in 2012 for $1.585 million. The family that owned it lived in the house during the six-month shooting of the blockbuster movie. The owner's daughter became playmates with the eight-year-old star of the flick, Macaulay Culkin.

HOT MOVIES

Early movies were shot on nitrate film base, which is extremely flammable. There were many movie house fires as a result of film igniting in the projector.

In the 1920s, Hollywood made twice as many films a year as it does today.

MISOGYNIST MOVIES

Two-thirds of speaking roles in movies go to men.

Eighty percent of Hollywood producers, directors, and writers are men.

RATINGS GAME

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) movie rating system is followed voluntarily by theater operators. There are no local, state, or federal laws governing who can see what films. The ratings are just a suggestion.

From 1970 to 1972, there were four movie ratings—G, GP, R, and X. Then from 1972 to 1984 they were—G, PG, R, and X. In 1984, there was an uproar over the PG rating of Steven Spielberg's two rather violent films
Gremlins
and
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
. Spielberg encouraged the MPAA to add a fifth rating—PG-13—for movies too intense for PG but not deserving of an R rating.

The first movie to be released with a PG-13 rating was
Red Dawn
, in 1984.

In 1990, the X rating was replaced by the NC-17 rating.
Henry & June
was the first film to get this rating.

Midnight Cowboy
was rated X when it was released in 1969. When it was re-released, unedited, in 1971, it was rated R.

The MPAA has no written rules for how to rate a movie, and ratings can seem inconsistent. Most films can use the word “fuck” up to four times in a nonsexual context and still get a PG-13 rating. The word “pussy” was even allowed in the PG-13 films
Super 8
and
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
.

PIRATE COVE

The motion picture industry sued Sony Betamax (an early video recording format) to prevent the use of their system for home recording purposes. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that it is not copyright infringement to record television shows at home for personal use.

Avatar
is the most pirated movie of all time, with 21 million illegal downloads as of 2011.
The Dark Knight
and
Transformers
tie for second place, with 19 million downloads each.

Game of Thrones
was the most illegally downloaded TV show in 2012.

WRETCHED RATCHED

Actress Louise Fletcher, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Nurse Ratched in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
, now finds her performance of the wicked RN so disturbing that she can no longer watch the movie.

BACK TO THE FRIDGE

In the first draft of the script for
Back to the Future
, the time machine was a refrigerator. Steven Spielberg changed his mind because he didn't want children climbing into refrigerators, plus the DeLorean was much cooler looking.

ALTERNATE REALITY

The Discovery Channel “reality” show
Moonshiners
was eventually revealed to be a scam. The supposed moonshiners trying to evade the Virginia authorities were not really distilling spirits in their stills. The producers duped Virginia authorities into believing they were making a documentary and thus gained their cooperation with the series.

Storage Wars
performer David Hester revealed that the producers of the show often plant interesting and valuable items for the cast to find. He also maintains the bidding that takes place on the series is rigged.

POTTER'S PLACE

In
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
, a picture of Gandalf the Grey, from
The
Lord of the Rings
, can be seen hanging on Dumbledore's wall of wizards.

Actress Shirley Henderson, who was in her late thirties at the time, played fourteen-year-old Moaning Myrtle in
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
and
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
.

The name Voldemort derives from the French, meaning “flight from death,” which is what Voldemort does in the books.

During the filming of
Chamber of Secrets
there was an infestation of lice among the child actors.

The
Harry Potter
series were the first children's books to make the
New York Times
Bestseller List since
Charlotte's Web
in 1952.

The final installment of the
Harry Potter
book series—
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
—sold 11 million copies in just twenty-four hours.

PROLIFIC PERFORMERS

Actor John Carradine holds the record for appearing in the most films, more than three hundred. The total is higher if movies he appeared uncredited in are counted.

John Wayne was the most commercially successful actor of all time and
starred
in the most movies—142.

BEAUTY AND BRAINS

The beautiful Austrian-American film star Hedy Lamarr was also a mathematical genius. During World War II, she came up with an early technique for frequency hopping and spread-spectrum communications that is still used today for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and wireless phones.

Lamarr also holds the distinction of performing the first female orgasm on screen, in the 1933 movie
Ecstasy
, and was the first to show full female frontal nudity.

MOVIE BUFFS

Artist's model Audrey Munson was the first woman to appear nude in a film. She played an artist's model in 1915's
Inspiration
.

The 1916 silent film
A Daughter of the Gods
, starring Australian swimming star Annette Kellerman, was the first movie where a major star appeared nude.

REBELS REQUIEM

The three stars of
Rebel Without a Cause
all met tragic ends in real life. James Dean died in a car wreck. Natalie Wood drowned under suspicious circumstances. Sal Mineo was stabbed in a parking area behind his West Hollywood home.

BUILDING BRIDGES

In the movie
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, the prisoners built the bridge in two months. The construction company hired to build the bridge for the film took eight months to complete the task.

In real life, some eighty thousand Asian conscripts and thirteen thousand prisoners died during the building of the bridge for the Japanese in 1943. Two bridges were built, a temporary wooden one and a permanent steel-and-concrete one.

The bridges were destroyed by Allied bombers two years later. The steel bridge has since been repaired and is still in use today.

A real bridge and train were destroyed for the movie. On the first take, the explosive charges failed to detonate and the train went over the bridge and crashed down a hill.

OUTTAKES

At least thirty-two different actresses were screen-tested for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in
Gone with the Wind
, even Lucille Ball.

In
Terminator 2
, Arnold Schwarzenegger was paid $15 million and only had seven hundred words of dialogue. That comes out to $21,429 per word.

The blue pinafore dress Judy Garland wore as Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
sold for $480,000 in 2012.

A “cold open” is when a TV show or movie jumps directly into the plot, before the opening credits roll. TV shows do this to hook the viewer before going to the first commercial break.

For the scene in the Alfred Hitchcock movie
The Birds
where Tippi Hedren is attacked, trained birds were attached to her with nylon strings. Hedren actually was cut by a bird during the filming.