Jim Driscoll.net

It’s Halloween week and what could be more appropriate than a little scary movie trivia. The website Neatorama has an interesting series of posts about fright movies and trivia about them. The movies include Nightmare on Elm Street and Rosemary’s Baby. Here are a few facts from one of my favorites, the Shining.

• Jack Nicholson’s visitors on the London set of the Shining included Anjelica Huston, Mick Jagger, George Harrison, John Lennon and Bob Dylan.

• Other actors considered for the Jack Torrance part were Robert DeNiro, Robin Williams (can you imagine?) and Harrison Ford. Nicholson was always the first choice, though. DeNiro later said the movie gave him nightmares for a month. Stephen King didn’t like any of those choices and tried to talk Stanley Kubrick into using Jon Voight or Jack Palance.

• Jack Nicholson claims he wrote the scene where Jack Torrance writes, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” over and over and over. “That’s what I was like when I got my divorce,” he said.

• It got baaaaad reviews: Variety said it was the “biggest box office disappointment since Exorcist II”, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner said it was “completely fake and banal” and the Wall Street Journal said it failed not only as a horror movie, but as any other genre as well.

• The famous “Heeeeeeeere’s Johnny!” line was improvised.

Here’s the link to the entire post

People seem to like this little game. Recognize the future star in the photo?

Assuming she was about 12 in this photo, it was about the time that she had a regular role in the television series The Swiss Family Robinson. As a child actor, she also had appearances on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bionic Woman. Know who she is?

Answer is here

We haven’t played this for a while. The young man pictured in the handsome sombrero is currently married to the “older woman” who would be pictured in this week’s Invisible Movie bonus, if she weren’t invisible. Know who it is?

Click here for the answer

We’ve been watching Big Brother on TV and I realized that since a good bit of it takes place outside in their “backyard” I might be able to find it on the Google Maps satellite view. It took a little browsing on the web and nosing around Studio City but I found it. It’s actually not a house, of course, but a TV studio just north of Ventura Boulevard west of Colifax Ave. in Studio City. The swimming pool was the giveaway.  Here’s the link.

I was also able to use the Google Maps Street View feature to see the southern corner of the studio/house building  by peeking across the aqueduct from Colifax. Here’s what it looks like.

Here’s the link

We’re still a couple months away from season five of LOST, but the producers showed up at the Comic Con in L.A. this week for their annual preview of the upcoming season.

“When season five starts, you won’t know when or where you are. And the way we tell stories will be different too,” executive producer Damon Lindelof told the fans. “You will be rewarded for hanging on all the way to end of series six. We think that we have a lot of cool stuff from here on out.”

As usual, the fans got a chance to ask the producers questions from the floor. Here are some of the better ones courtesy TV Squad:

• Did the island travel when the hatch blew and the sky turned purple? Lindelof: “No., but something did happen.”
• Will we see Jin and Locke again? Jin will still be on the show in some form. We have not seen the last of those two. Both characters will still be on the show.
• Which is their favorite episode and season: Cuse: ‘The Constant’. Season 1. Lindelof: Season 1 finale. Season 4.
• Is the cityscape reflection in the water in ads significant. Cuse: No. Folks are reading too much into it.
  Will we see Rousseau’s flashback. Answer: We will see her “story” — they don’t want to refer to these as “flashbacks” anymore.
• They will start shooting in three weeks if a strike doesn’t get in the way. All episodes will be back-to-back, uninterrupted.
• Did the movie “Lost Horizon” influence the show? Cuse said he’d seen the movie, but he seemed strangely dismissive about whether or not it influenced the show.
• Vincent will make it to the end of the show.
• Will Kate and Jack wind up together in the end? Of course, they could not answer that.Will Kate be able to see Sawyer again? Yes.
• Will we see what happens to the five people in the zodiac boat? Yes. Interesting note: On-set, the actors call the other castaways from Flight 815, the ones roaming around the background, “socks.”
• How did Daniel know about the secondary protocol? Because it was written in his notebook. The notebook will figure prominently in season five.
• How old is Richard Alpert? Cuse: “Quite old” How many toes does he have? We will learn a lot more about his history and will see him barefoot in the very near future.

George Carlin died yesterday. While he was pretty “edgy” and in later years had some provocative political views, I always really enjoyed his earlier work. Here’s his newscast from an early album featuring with Dan Thomas, Biff Burns on sports, and, of course Al Sleet the Hippy Dippy Weatherman!

In the movie

Today

I always knew that many of the shooting locations for the movie Smokey and the Bandit were in Clayton County, but I never knew exactly where until I found that AtlantaTimeMachine.com has great “then-and-now” photos of where the movie was filmed.

It turns out that a number of the scenes were filmed along Mundy’s Mill Road, just outside our subdivision - including the famous scene where Bo (Burt Reynolds) finds Carrie (Sally Fields) in the middle of the road wearing a wedding dress. Here’s another shot from the movie. This one will be familiar to folks who travel Highway 54. That’s the old gas station at the intersection of Corinth Road.

The AtlantaTimeMachine.com has almost 50 then-and-now screenshots from Smokey and the Bandit including scenes from downtown Jonesboro, Riverdale, Snellville and the old Lakewood Fairgrounds. Find it here.

There are plenty of other great photos on the website. Here’s my post about it from last summer.

Thanks Capn’ Craig

Last night was the season 4 finale of ABC’s Lost - quite possibly the best TV show ever produced.

One of the highlights of the series over the past two years has been the appearance of Michael Emerson who plays the devious and creepy Ben Linus. I think it’s interesting that Emerson, who is such an amazing actor, worked as a teacher for years while appearing in mostly local theater productions. He didn’t get his first big break until his mid-40’s when he landed a role in the critically-acclaimed off-Broadway play, Gross Indecency: The Trials of Oscar Wilde.

Emerson has given Lost so many classic moments, and the TV Squad website has listed its Twelve classic Ben Linus moments. The written word doesn’t do it justice, but Lost fans will remember these classics. For example:

“How can you not possibly understand that you’re mine? Take as much time as you need.” (from “The Other Woman”) Ben and Juliet have a complicated history. Juliet’s recent flashback revealed a jealous, possessive side to Ben Linus that we’d never seen before. Some men send flowers to get a woman’s attention. He showed Juliet the rotting corpse of her lover, Goodwin. He responded to Juliet’s grief with the tirade of an undermedicated stalker. In a few seconds, Ben went from a jealous rage to his usual creepy, calm demeanor. The transition was priceless.

Lost fans can read the entire list here. (Posted in April, this is not a recent article, but still worth the read)

Dick Martin, of Rowen and Martin Laugh-in fame, died Saturday in Santa Monica from respiratory complications. He was 86. Here’s part of one of the news stories about it:

Martin played off straight man Dan Rowan in “Laugh-In,'’ which revolutionized the television industry. Its stars garnered laughs with one-liners and double entendres from the psychedelic joke wall, and introduced phrases into the popular lexicon such as “Here comes da judge'’ and “You bet your sweet bippy.'’ The show also featured Goldie Hawn, Lily Tomlin, Ruth Buzzi and announcer Gary Owens. Full Story

Here’s a great YouTube clip that brings back a lot of memories of Dan and Dick.

This week is the season 4 finale of ABC’s Lost, and I’ve been doing a little research into what I think is causing the various strange phenomena on the show. I am increasingly subscribing to the theory of the Vile Vortices.

Briefly, the theory holds that there are twelve roughly evenly distributed geographic areas that are alleged to have the same mysterious qualities. Five of the twelve vortices fall on a latitude close to the Tropic of Capricorn (including the area where Oceanic 815 reportedly when down), while another five fall close to the Tropic of Cancer (including, among other places, the Bermuda Triangle and Devil’s Sea). The remaining two are located on the North and South Poles.

These areas often exhibit strange sky and sea conditions, mechanical and instrument malfunctions, and mysterious disappearances and some are the sites to prehistoric advanced civilizations.

Some also suggest that the Vile Vortices could be interconnecting “portals” which could explain a lot.

In terms of Lost, think about the following…

• The polar bear on a south Pacific Island
• The polar bear remains (wearing a Dharma collar) in the desert
• Yemi’s small drug plane leaves Nigeria but somehow ends up on the island
• The Black Rock slave ship leaves west Africa but ends up on the island
• Ben somehow leaves the island (we’ll find out how later - we hope) and wakes up in Tunisia.
• Compasses, radios, and other mechanical things don’t work
• The three-toed statue

…and the the are probably many more I can’t think of.

The theory of the Vile Vortices has been around for about 40 years and while I’m not saying that it has any scientific basis, it’s possible that the producers of the show are using the theory in their plot line. And I am certainly not the first to connect the Vortices with the TV show. A number of the Lost forums have had discussions about them.

In the meantime, the two-hour season finale is this Thursday. Can’t wait.