My favourite actor Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde was in Death in Venice, directed by Luchino Visconti in 1971, arguably the most under-rated movie ever made. Never heard of him? I donﾴt blame you. His screen name is Dirk Bogarde.
What about Thomas Cruise Mapother IV? Or Michael Shalhoub, Alphonso Joseph dﾴAbruzzo, Issur Danielovitch Demsky, Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankesberg and Krishna Bhanji?
They are the actual names of Tom Cruise, Omar Sharif, Alan Alda, Kirk Douglas, Jane Seymour and Ben Kingsley respectively. I am not making it up. You can find it in The Moviegoerﾴs Companion, a compilation of incredible and bizarre facts of the movie world past and present.
Believe me, even if you are not a movie buff, this is one book you should not miss. It is one of the “Companion” series published by Robson Books on, among other things, wildlife, cooks, travellers, politics, literature and London. These books enlighten, amuse, even shock readers with fascinating information. The Companion on movies is compiled by Rhiannon Guy with a five-paragraph introduction by Barry Norman, a film critic with the BBC.
Who needs a long introduction for a compendium of brief but interesting items anyway?
What is the longest film ever screened? Aptly titled The Cure for Insomnia, it was made in the United States in 1987 with a screen time of 87 hours. A British film, The Longest and Most Meaningless Movie, is long but not meaningless. It is the longest movie ever produced in the country and the second longest in the world.
You have seen film stars kissing on screen, right? Well, the longest screen kiss in movie history was the one involving Jane Wyman and Regis Toomey in Youﾴre in the Navy Now. It lasted three minutes and five seconds. Hey, there are longer screen kisses, OK: In one pornographic film, the on-screen kiss lasted a full hour and a half, the length of an ordinary feature film. But you donﾴt want to know about that.
Youﾴre fully aware, of course, that our most famous film spy James Bond 007 is surrounded by girls, danger and more girls. Did you know that in the first 20 Bond films he had 58 girls? (29 of them brunettes, 22 blondes and four red-heads).
Asian stars like Datuk Michelle Yeoh came later. Bond made love 79 times, surprisingly more times under water (25) than in hotel rooms (19).
Letﾴs talk statistics. The country with the most cinemas? China with 65,500. The US comes second with 36,764 and India is third with 11,962.
But India is the biggest producer of films in a year with 839. The US produces less than half of that with 385 films. Britain stands at 11th place with 78. There are nine countries that did not produce any films at all in the 1990s: The Bahamas, Bahrain, Benin, Cambodia, Chad, Kenya, Namibia, Nicaragua and Rwanda. Just for the record, Cambodia now produces more and better movies than Malaysia.
How many people watch movies in India in a day? Thirteen million. Number of women film directors between 1949 and 1979 in Hollywood? 14. Number of men at the helm in the same period? 7,332.
Number of lines spoken by Arnold Schwarzenneger in The Terminator? 16. Number of bees used in the 1978 film The Swarm? 22 million. The number of costumes used in the film Quo Vadis produced in 1951? 32,000. The highest number of “extras” in any one film? The 1982 film Gandhi with 294,560.
Do you have any idea how much longer the film Titanic (1997) was than the actual sinking of the ship in 1917? 34 minutes.
In the days when the cost of making a movie could reach US$100 million (RM370 million) was unheard of, Clint Eastwood made one for US$117 million. He famously said: “With that kind of money, I could have invaded some country.” How true.
Todayﾴs films are made with billions at stake. And the cost is getting more ludicrous. But investors are more than willing to finance such films. Titanic was the most expensive movie ever made, at RM740 million. It became the first movie to hit a world-wide collection of US$1 billion .
A few more films have hit that mark in recent years. But the most profitable film in history is The Blair Witch Project in 1999. It made almost RM925 million but cost hardly RM129,000. A star like Tom Cruise is paid RM76 million a film. He is worth at least RM370 million as actor and producer of such fare as the Mission Impossible series.
One more thing. Elizabeth Taylor at one point was paid less than a dog. In Lassie Come Home (1943) the young Taylor was paid RM370 a week as Priscillia.
The dog named Pal who played the lead role was paid RM925 a week. The dog went on to make millions for MGM and at least a million ringgit for his “doggie biscuit fund”. But Taylor later became the first actress to be paid RM3.7 million for a film.
When I was editing a newspaper, an entertainment item in my own paper caught my attention.
It was the translation of the Chuck Norris movie, An Eye For An Eye. To my horror it came out as Bila Mata Bertentang Mata, which means one is in love with another.
You may think the film Scarface (starring Al Pacino, 1983) had the highest number of swear words (206). It was surpassed by Goodfellas in 1990 with 246 words and Pulp Fiction in 1994 with 257. But the record goes to South Park: Bigger, Louder and Uncut (1999). It includes four-letter words uttered 133 times, 128 offensive gestures and 221 acts of violence.
Need I say more? Read the book. Youﾴll be enthralled.
By: Johan Jaaffar
Source: New Straits Times Online
www.nst.com.my
