Got an interesting, amazing or pretty good piece of Cafe Society trivia you’d like to share?, or show off? Here’s one to start: Howard Shore - the composer of the music for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies - was the musical director of Saturday Night Live for 5 years?
Paul Schaeffer, best known as David Letterman’s long time late-night show sidekick wrote the song “It’s Raining Men.”
Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) has a house on the Isle of Man, and spends time here.
Howard Shore wrote the music for one of my favorite movies - Videodrome.
Maybe that’s something he’s trying to sweep under the rug.
Victor Fleming directed “Gone With The Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz” in the same year.
Popular soul singer Oleta Adams (“Rhythm of Life”) was discovered while singing in a bar by Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith of Tears For Fears.
The Beatles’ “Revolution 9” has its origins in the continuation of the LP version’s coda. They kept jamming on that riff, and it got wilder and wilder. Later, John and Yoko assembled the loops and contributed spoken word bits, and John took part in the mixing. George is the only other Beatle to appear on this track, in a speaking role.
I thought this thread would have lots more responses! OK, here’s another one.
The hit record “Wild Thing” by The Troggs was actually the demo of the song. Chip Taylor took it to the record company, and they wanted it out right away. He said, “No, that’s just the demo! We’ll go back and do it properly! It’s got an ocarina solo fer chrissakes!” But they disagreed. The demo had a certain je ne sais quoi that someone recognized as immediately marketable. Whoever it was, was right!
Howlett Smith (blind guy playing an electric piano at the home of Cheech and Chong in an early scene of Nice Dreams) wrote “Little Altar Boy,” performed by Karen Carpenter on one of their Christmas albums.
Some GONE WITH THE WIND trivia:
Butterfly McQueen, best known for playing the dimwitted Prissy in Gone With the Wind, was in fact an extremely intelligent woman who could converse on almost any subject due to voracious reading, who quit her acting career at the height of her success preferring to dispatch cabs rather than continue playing stupid/sly maids, was a very outspoken atheist, and died living in a house most people would refer to as a “shack” in a poor neighborhood of Augusta, Georgia even though she was by most people’s standards quite wealthy. (She was also generous to a fault; the morning she burned to death she had signed and mailed checks totalling $40,000 to various charities and in her will she bequeathed most of her many rental properties to the tenants renting them.)
Her friend, Hattie “Mammy” McDaniel, was famous for her retort to NAACP critics irritated by her willingness to play maids and slaves: “I’ve been an actress and I’ve been a maid. I’d much rather be playing somebody’s maid for $700 a week than being somebody’s maid for $7 a week.” At her zenith she earned much more than $700 per week and in fact lived in a 30 room mansion with maids of her home, though she died penniless (though at the same time financially comfortable- she sold her possessions and cashed out her accounts and donated them to the Screen Actor’s Home where she spent her final days) due to a long final illness. Nevertheless she encountered major racism throughout her life: she was not able to attend the premiere of GWTW in Atlanta because the theater did not allow blacks (Clark Gable actually started to boycott the premiere in protest but she convinced him not to) and when she won the award for Best Supporting Actress none of her opponents, including the usually very gracious Olivia DeHavilland, congratulated her. Her wish to be buried at Hollywood Memorial Cemetery was rejected due to her race, however, even though other “celebrities” buried there included Bugsy Siegel and the dogs who played Rin-Tin-Tin; she was instead buried in this modest grave at Angelus Cemetery. A few years ago Hollywood Memorial erected a large pink marble monument to her as a very belated apology.
Thomas Mitchell, who played Scarlett’s constantly galloping father Gerald O’Hara, had a phobia of horses in real life. According to one source, he actually had to get drunk before doing the scenes in the movie that require him to stand next to a horse (the riding itself was done by stuntment or on mechanical horses). He also originated the role of Detective “Just one more question…” Columbo (on stage as opposed to screen).
Leslie Howard had a secret that he kept from most directors for fear that he would no longer be cast in romantic roles with A-list actresses. Today we would assume the secret was that he was gay (which he wasn’t), but at the time things were much different- his secret was that he was a devout Jew.
Vivien Leigh, who knew as little about the details of the American Civil War as most Americans know about the details of the English Civil War, made a comment upon arriving in Atlanta for the premiere that made many locals laugh. When a local band struck up Dixie she commented “Oh that’s lovely… they learned that song from the movie!”
Barbara O’Neill, who played Scarlett’s mother, was only three years older than Vivien Leigh. (The original choice for the role was Dorothy Gish.)
Rand Brooks who played Scarlett’s first husband was the son-in-law of Stan Laurel and later left acting completely to become an extremely successful ambulance service owner.
Evelyn Keyes (Scarlett’s sister Suellen) was married to Artie Shaw and John Huston after being the live-in of Michael Todd, thus making her related by marriage to everybody in 1950s Hollywood; she was also an early Hollywood abortion rights activist due to a botched abortion of Todd’s baby that prevented her from every becoming pregnant again. She and Olivia “Melanie” DeHavilland, Ann “Careen” Rutherford, Fred “Brent Tarleton” Crane, Alicia “India Wilkes” Rhett and Cammie “Bonnie Blue” King are the cast members still alive as of this writing.
In 1974, Anthony Hopkins was making the film “The Girl From Petrovka”. During filming, he wanted to read the book it was based on, by George Fiefer. He searched bookstores in London, with no luck. While waiting for a train home, Hopkins spied a book left behind on a bench. It was “The Girl From Petrovka”, with notes in the margin. A few years later, George Fiefer met Hopkins and mentioned how he lost a copy of his own book in London years earlier. Hopkins found his own copy and showed it to Fiefer. Turns out it was the copy Fiefer lost in London years before.
While a student at Eton, one of Eric Blair’s (George Orwell) teachers was Aldous Huxley.
Ashley Judd played Wesley Crusher’s girlfriend, Ensign Robin Lefler, in the ST:TNG episodes “Darmok” and “The Game”.
Paul Winfield played the alien Captain Dathon in “Darmok”, and the human Captain Terrell of the USS Reliant in ST II: The Wrath of Khan. He also played a cop in Terminator, and a general in Mars Attacks. All of these characters were killed in a violent manner.
David Ogden Stiers, currently playing Rev. Purdy on The Dead Zone, played Lwaxana Troi’s boyfriend Dr. Timicin in the ST:TNG episode “Half a Life”.
Roxanne Dawson, who played B’Elanna Torres on Voyager, recently had a guest starring role on Without a Trace.
Lucy Liu had a bit part on X-Files. She was the sickly daughter in the episode where a Chinese gang in San Francisco was running an illegal organ harvesting operation.
Actually, he’s composed the score to every single David Cronenberg movie since 1979’s The Brood. The jagged, crashing guitars of the Crash are probably my favourite.
Tony Blair’s father in law, actor Tony Booth, is from the same acting family as John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin. The relationship irrc is x greats nephew.
Speaking of, Huxley and C.S. Lewis both continued to get offers for speaking engagements years after they died because nobody noticed their obituaries. They both died on November 22, 1963. There is a play about Kennedy, Lewis & Huxley together in Purgatory entitled Between Heaven & Hell by writer Peter Kreeft. (I’ve never read it but I’ve heard mixed reviews.)
It’s terrible.
Alice Cooper was the subject of a Salvador Dali hologram.
Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart were high school friends, and they had a band called the Soots before either was famous. A record label (can’t remember the name offhand) rejected their songs because the guitar was distorted.
Charlie Chaplin never received an Academy Award for Best Director, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, or Best Picture. His only competitive Academy Award was for Best Original Score for Limelight.
My dad was Warren Beatty’s roommate in college.
Mike Myers recently had a street named after him here in Toronto.