Easter eggs in movies:
They used the name of an actual bird that occurs in California (although not restricted to Carmel, as they claimed), and even got its scientific name (Sitta pygmaea) correct in the dialogue. So at some point they must have looked up the bird and saw what it looked like. The Pygmy Nuthatch is small and drab, so probably they just wanted to use some more colorful bird. But I’m sure whoever inserted the Troupial didn’t think it was actually a Pygmy Nuthatch.
HAL stands for (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) , so it’s kind of an acronym. The play on IBM is this:
H—I
A—B
L—M
Each letter is one place before.
In the 1958 Jerry Lewis film The Geisha Boy, there is a brief scene that is a parody of the 1957 movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. I saw The Geisha Boy as a kid on TV, and I can’t remember if I recognized what they were doing or my parents had to explain it.
And, in Toy Story, there’s an appearance of a Binford Tools toolbox in Sid’s bedroom. Binford Tools was the sponsor of “Tool Time,” the show-within-a-show hosted by Tim Taylor (Tim Allen) in Home Improvement.
In “Rosemary’s Baby”, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) befriends a young woman named Terry and the two women remark how she looks “just like the actress Victoria Vetri.”
Terry was played by actress Angela Dorian, whose real name was Victoria Vetri.
In Iron Man when Tony is working on his supersuit at his house, the music is Institutionalized by Suicidal Tendencies. Before his work on that film Robert Downey was well known for his drug addiction and was once sentenced to three years in jail because of it.
Arthur C. Clarke has denied any intentional wordplay with this; he claims it’s purely coincidental.
The story is that he, too, began a new chapter of his life with a Burger King meal.
No, really.
The title of “O, Brother, Where Art Thou?” is an inside joke. It’s the name of the book in the movie “Sullivan’s Travels” that the character John L. Sullivan wants to use as the basis of a movie.
And to bring that full circle, Tony Curtis does an excellent imitation of Cary Grant, to which Lemmon says, “Nobody talks like that.”
In Sunset Boulevard, Max von Mayerling says, “There were three young directors who showed promise in those days [of silent movies]: D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Max Von Mayerling.” Von Mayerling was played by Erich von Stroheim, who certainly rated up with the other two as directors. In fact, when Norma Desmond watches one of her movies, it was from the Gloria Swanson (i.e., Norma Desmond) film, Queen Kelly, which was directed by von Stroheim.
There’s also a scene where Desmond plays cards with three other “waxworks” – has-been actors from the silent days. They are H.B. Warner, Anna Q. Nilsson, and Buster Keaton. Keaton has become a familiar face these days, but when the movie came out, he was considered as washed up as the other two.
Similarly, in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, there are clips of Bette Davis supposedly showing how bad an actress Baby Jane was as an adult. Davis was asked to pick her worst performances for the clips; she chose Parachute Jumper and
Ex-Lady. There’s also a snippet from Joan Crawford’s Sadie McKee
He claims that, but how awkward and contrived is Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer? We’ll never really know. IBM was a major consultant to the film.
IMDb says:
In My Big Fat Greek Wedding,
This is like the ONLY thing i remember from 3rd rock from the sun that actually made me laugh out loud.
In the movie version Arsenic and Old Lace, Jonathan Brewster is played by Raymond Massey. Everyone remarks how much he looks like Boris Karloff, who played the equivalent role in the stage play on which it was based.
There’s also one scene wherein one of the human women says she’s not just going to go out with just any “Tom, Dick, or Harry”, at which point the three alien characters named Tom, Dick and Harry start trying to look nonchalant, in hopes that no one notices they chose such cliched names.
Stretching the topic of the thread into TV crossovers, there is an episode of Scrubs that touches on Jan I. Tor being in The Fugitive.
I know.
What I’m flummoxed on is the actual word that describes such a configuration. I’m pretty sure there is one.
oh - and Clarke was lying.
In the 1953 film “How to Marry a Millionaire” Lauren Bacall’s character says that she is crazy about older men, such as the old guy-what’s his name- in “The African Queen”. Which was Bacall’s husband Humphrey Bogart.
Walter Lantz helped George Pal gain U.S. citizenship and in return Pal put Lantz’s creation Woody Woodpecker in many of his films as a cameo.
Billy Wilder’s “Some Like it Hot” has George Raft as a gangster boss who scolds a young mobster for constantly flipping a coin “where did you pick up a cheap stunt like that?”. One of Raft’s early break through roles was a coin flipping gangster in “Scarface”
The John Ford directed film “Wings of Eagles” has Ward Bond playing a film director named John Dodge with Ford’s mannerisms.