Pizza Hut was founded in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas by brothers Dan and Frank Carney. They opened their second location six months later, and within another six months they had 6 restaurants. The Carney brothers began franchising in 1959; later that year, the first franchise unit opened in Topeka.
As of March, 2018, Pizza Hut had 16,796 restaurants worldwide, making it the world’s largest pizza chain in terms of locations.
Cool. I’ve been to Liechtenstein, but not (yet) to Uzbekistan.
In The Godfather (1972), Lenny Montana played Luca Brasi. Montana was a professional wrestler before becoming an actor. He was so nervous delivering his lines to a legend like Marlon Brando during the scene in the Godfather’s study that he didn’t give one good take during an entire day’s shoot. Because he didn’t have time to reshoot the scene, Coppola later added a new scene of Luca Brasi rehearsing his lines before seeing the Godfather to make Montana’s bad takes seem like Brasi was simply nervous to talk to the Godfather.
Montana Jordan was selected for his first acting job from 10,000 applicants for the role of Jaden in the Jody Hill-directed film The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter, in which Josh Brolin plays his father. In March 2017, Jordan was cast as Sheldon Cooper’s older brother George “Georgie” Cooper, Jr. in The Big Bang Theory spin-off Young Sheldon. He was nominated for Best Performance in a TV Series – Supporting Teen Actor at the 39th Young Artist Awards.
In the movie, The Deer Hunter (1978), set during the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese soldiers forced their POWs to play Russian roulette for their entertainment and gambling. These Russian roulette scenes were highly controversial after the film’s release, because during the real Vietnam War there was not a single recorded case of Russian roulette.
The movie was based on a spec script called The Man Who Came to Play written by Louis Garfinkle and Quinn K. Redeker, about people who go to Las Vegas to play Russian roulette. Film producer Michael Deeley decided to adapt the script to the war, at a time when few-to-no movies were about the Vietnam War.
The movie ended up winning five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Michael Cimino, and Best Supporting Actor for Christopher Walken, and it marked Meryl Streep’s first Academy Award nomination (for Best Supporting Actress).
Some of the USA scenes were filmed in Cleveland and Steubenville and Struthers, Ohio, and also Weirton, West Virginia (gMaps Google Maps, Google Maps).
One of the iconic scenes from The Deer Hunter was the clip in which Walken and De Niro lead the gang in singing ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ while shooting pool in a bar. That song, released in 1967, earned a Grammy nomination for the artist, Frankie Valli.
You can watch the video here.
In 1976, the band Frankie Valli and Four Seasons recorded the hit single “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)”. The same year, Claude François adapted the song in French-language under the title “Cette année-là” (“That Year”). In 2000, rap singer Yannick made a partial cover of François’ version: it used almost the same music, but changed the verses. The song, a “dancing and joyful rap”, is “festive and lively”.
Statistics on hunters who racked up the 5.8 million deer harvest in the US in 2015:
From 2013 to 2015, 19 of the top 20 deer-hunting states experienced a decline in the number of deer hunted; the number 1 state, Texas, harvested 626,000 deer in 2013 and 548,000 in 2015. New York State’s average from 2012-2016 was 228,246 and its 2017 hunt total was 203,427.
The peak deer hunting season is November; December is considered late-season hunting.
The St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral, at which a wedding scene for The Deer Hunter was filmed, still stands in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, not far south of Downtown.
Petula Clark, who had been playing to her French speaking fans in small venues in Quebec when her song “Downtown” entered the US charts, swiftly cut non-English versions of the song for the markets in France, Italy and Germany; the absence in each region’s language of a two-syllable equivalent of “downtown” necessitated a radical lyric recasting for the versions aimed at France (“Dans le temps”), Italy (“Ciao Ciao”, winning the Festivalbar, a juke-box contest) and Spain (“Chao Chao”) which respectively charted at #6, #2 and – for three weeks – #1: “Dans le temps” also reaching #18 on Belgium’s French-language chart. The title and lyric “Downtown” was retained for an otherwise German version which was the most successful foreign-language version, reaching #1 in Germany, #3 in Austria, and #11 on the charts for the Flemish region of Belgium.
The Clark Bar was introduced in 1917 by David L. Clark and was popular during and after both World Wars. The bar was manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by the original family-owned business until 1955 and is now due to be produced by the Altoona-based Boyer Candy Company, which bought the rights in September 2018.
“Clark” is an occupational name, coming from the Old English ‘clerec’ or ‘clerc’ and the Old French ‘clerc’, both of which originate from the Latin ‘clericus’.
The earliest Clarks were often clerics, meaning clergymen or others in religious orders. In the Middle Ages literacy was largely confined to those in the Church, so most “clerical” work, writing and secretarial, (including recording deaths, births, taxes and wills) was done by clerics or clergy.
Cleric is the only class to be in every version of Dungeons & Dragons without a name change.
Corvettes - small escort warships - of the British Flower class during World War II were named after, um, flowers, including such macho, belligerent, foe-scaring names as HMS Azalea, Begonia, Buttercup, Candytuft and Heliotrope.
Ninja’ed!
Princess Buttercup was a leading role in the movie, The Princess Bride (1987). Other main roles were Westley / The Man in Black / The Dread Pirate Roberts, Inigo Montoya, Miracle Max, Vizzini, Fezzik, Prince Humperdink, Count Rugen, Valerie, The Grandfather, and the Wedding Priest.
To say the least.
Anybody want a peanut?
The full name of actor Cary Elwes, who starred as Westley in The Princess Bride, is Ivan Simon Cary Elwes. His great-grandfather Gervase Henry Cary-Elwes trained as a lawyer and diplomat and became a distinguished tenor. His grandfather Simon Elwes was a British war artist and portrait painter whose patrons included presidents, statesmen, and many members of the British Royal Family; he was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.
An ancestor, John Meggot, a Member of Parliament in the 1700s, was a wealthy miser who is suggested as an inspiration for Charles Dickens’s Scrooge; Meggot himself was supposedly imitating an uncle, Sir Hervey Elwes.
Cary Elwes is my 11th cousin, once removed. Our common ancestors were John Sterling and Beatrix Elphinstone, who was born in Scotland in 1540.
Cool. So, Fear Itself, how is Elwes pronounced? Is it EL-ways? Or something else?
The duel between Westley and Inigo was painstakingly researched and rehearsed. William Goldman, author of the novel, spent months researching 17th-century swordfighting manuals to craft Westley and Inigo’s duel; all the references the characters make to specific moves and styles are completely accurate. Then Elwes and Patinkin, neither of whom had much (if any) fencing experience, spent more months training to perfect it—right- and left-handed.
“I knew that my job was to become the world’s greatest sword fighter,” Patinkin recalled in Elwes’s book. "I trained for about two months in New York and then we went to London and Cary and I trained every day that we weren’t shooting for four months. There were no stuntmen involved in any of the sword fights, except for one flip in the air.” Even after months of pre-shooting training, the fencing instructors came to set and, when there were a few free minutes, would pull Elwes and Patinkin aside to work on the choreography for the scene, which was intentionally one of the last to be shot.
Benedict and Beatrix are two of Shakespeare’s “battling” couples. Both swear that they’ll never be married, but end up with each other.
Beatrix has some great lines:
“A star danced when I was born”.
When warned that if she dies unmarried she will have to lead apes into Hell:
“So deliver I up my apes and away to St Peter. For the heavens, he shows me where the bachelors sit and there live we as merry as the day is long.”
“Oh God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace!”
ETA: shamed by Beatrix, Benedict challenges Claudio to a duel.
Eggs Benedict, one of my favorite brunch dishes, consists of two halves of an English muffin topped with a poached egg, bacon or ham, and hollandaise sauce. Delmonico’s, a restaurant in Manhattan, claims to have invented the dish in 1860. But, in 1941, Lemuel Benedict, a retired Wall Street stock broker, said in a radio interview that he had wandered into the Waldorf Hotel in 1894 and, hoping to find a cure for his morning hangover, ordered “buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon, and a hooker of hollandaise”. The chef was so impressed that he put it on the menu, but substituted ham for the bacon and a toasted English muffin for the toast.