The machine the United States Golf Association uses to test clubs and balls is named “Iron Byron”, since it models the swing of onetime great Byron Nelson, who won 11 consecutive tournaments in 1945.
Boris Karloff’s last major American movie role was in Targets, written and directed by then-film-critic Peter Bogdanovich. Karloff played old-time movie star Byron Orlock, who is making a personal appearance at a drive-in to promote his latest film. A sniper start shooting at the audience, and the movie contrasts movie horror with real, everyday horror. The film at the drive-in is Karloff’s previous The Terror; Jack Nicholson can be spotted in it.
When Orson Welles was having financial problems in the early 1970’s, he stayed for a time at Peter Bogdanovich’s mansion in Bel Air.
While filming The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich fell in love with young actress Cybill Shepherd, and ended his marriage to his collaborator, Polly Platt. After his relationship with Shepherd ended, Bogdanovich fell in love with actress/Playboy model Dorothy Stratten. Stratten was murdered by her husband, and Bogdanovich went on to marry her younger sister.
The ill-tempered director Sam Peckinpaugh hated The Last Picture Show.
He said it was “artsy-craftsy, jacksy-offsky, and a real pain in the ass”
Sam Peckingpaugh appears as an actor in the SF classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers as Charlie, the meter reader.
The classic noir detective Sam Spade inspired Dixon Hill, the Thirties hardboiled detective played by Capt. Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701-D, in occasional Holodeck adventures.
The Doors covered Willie Dixon’s Back Door Man because Jim Morrison was really ito straight anal sex.
Jim Morrison was an infielder for the Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago White Sox, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers, and Atlanta Braves during a Major League Baseball career that lasted from 1977 to 1988. He is still alive, and thus not buried in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Alan Alexander “A.A” Milne’s poem “Disobedience” was set to music by the Chad Mitchell Trio as “James James Morrison Morrison”. The little boy James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree “took great care of his mother, though he was only three” and insisted that she “never go down to the end of the town if you don’t go down with me”. She does anyway, and James James enlists King John’s help in finding her.
In 1987 the Detroit Tigers traded 20-year old hometown prospect John Smoltz
to the Atlanta Braves for 35-year old vet Doyle Alexander.
Although Alexander finished out the season 9-0 for the Tigers, long-term the trade
proved to be one of the most lopsided of all time: Alexander went 20-29 in the
next two years, his last, while Smoltz was to win 213 in a career lasting until 2009.
Tippoo’s Tiger is an automaton, representing a tiger savaging a European soldier, or employee of the British East India Company. It is currently on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Back to Wiki:
The machine was captured upon the defeat of Tippoo at Seringapatam in 1792 by forces directed by Lord Charles Cornwallis, of American Revolution fame.
Despite losing the colonies, Cornwallis was knighted in 1786 and was in that year appointed governor-general and commander-in-chief of India.
Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, the last battle of the Revolution
The American forces at Yorktown were commanded by Gen. George Washington; the French forces by the Comte de Rochambeau. The two were able to develop a close working relationship, helped by the Marquis de Lafayette, who sometimes functioned as an interpreter.
Lafayette, Louisiana was founded as Vermilionville in 1821. In 1884, it was renamed for General Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette.
Morgan City, LA is home to the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, which sounds like it would make a terrible cocktail. It’s also situated directly on the Atchafalaya River, which, were it not held back by three man-made dams, would probably immediately become the main course of the Mississippi River for its final 150 mile descent to the ocean.
The male characters in the family featured in the TV drama I’ll Fly Away – about the Civil Rights era in the South – were named for Confederate cavalry leaders. The show starred Sam Waterston as Forrest Bedford (a nod to Nathan Bedford Forrest) and his two sons were Nathan and John Morgan (always referred to as such and named for John Hunt Morgan).
USAAF Bridadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest III was killed in action
while participating as an observer on a 1943 B-17 mission over Germany.
John Lithgow read the book ‘Forrest Gump’ and thought of acquiring the movie rights and starring as Forrest, but says he never got around to it.