The Broadway Smash Hit Mamma Mia! which opened at the Winter Garden threatre October 18, 2001 was the first Broadway show to open after 9/11. It has since moved to the Broadhurst Threatre, as the Winter Garden is now destined to host Rocky: The Musical (and may God help us all).
As a part of the Rocky franchise, the writers came up with an idea that Rocky had defeated his earthly foes, that his next competitor should come from outer space. That idea was rejected but the idea was spun into the movie Predator
In Rocky, the incorrect trunks on the poster was an actual mistake by the printer. Because Stallone could not get it redone, they worked the error into the movie.
The Queen’s Printer is the term for the official government printer in many Commonwealth jurisdictions, responsible for printing the statutes and other official government publications.
Queen Latifah’s older brother Lance Owens, who was a police officer, died in an accident on the motorcycle she bought for him as a present. She still wears the motorcycle key around her neck.
Ah, yes. Thanks.
Notwithstanding this meme, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is not known to have actually wished death upon any of her subjects: http://www.stuffistumbledupon.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/unimpressed-queen-queen-of-england-meme-kill-them-all-olympics_thumb.jpg
A nine-foot bronze statue of Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha Stephens riding sidesaddle on her broomstick now resides in a downtown park in Salem, Massachusetts, home to the infamous witch trials of the 17th century.
Elizabeth Montgomery was not the first choice for Samantha on Bewitched. The original choice was actress Tammy Grimes, then married to Christopher Plummer, but she reneged due to what she considered a better offer. Elizabeth, (estranged) daughter of actor Robert Montgomery and an acclaimed though not famous actress in her own right by this time, was cast mainly for convenience: she was sleeping with the show’s producer William Sparks, who was her third husband. She was pregnant during the pilot, but since it took place on Samantha’s honeymoon it was not worked into the plot; her next pregnancy was worked into the series.
Arizona State Sun Devils quarterback Jake Plummer impressed former-49ers coach Bill Walsh, so much so that Walsh dubbed him “the next Joe Montana.” Plummer was nowhere near that, but did have a halfway-decent NFL career, playing 10 seasons for the Arizona Cardinals and Denver Broncos and averaging 16 TD passes a season.
Homer Plessy, plaintiff in the pivotal “separate but equal” segregation lawsuit Plessy v. Ferguson, was of primarily European ancestry and could pass as white, one reason he was chosen to show the ridiculousness of the segregated streetcar ordinance that required him to ride the “black” streetcar. His surname was originally spelled Plessis by paternal ancestors who were Haitian planters and relatives of Jean Armand du Plessis, better known as Cardinal Richelieu.
As the film A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) progresses, the set of the Kowalski apartment is made progressively smaller to heighten the suggestion of Blanche’s increasing claustrophobia.
The Spanish film Fermat’s Room dealt with a group of mathematicians who thought they were going to a small colloquium, only to be trapped in a room that shrunk with every failure of theirs to solve a math puzzle posed by the villain, who called himself Fermat. The others go by the pseudonyms Galois, Hilbert, Pascal, and Oliva.
Evariste Galois was the first to use the word “group” as a technical term in mathematics to represent a group of permutations. A radical Republican during the monarchy of Louis Philippe in France, he died from wounds suffered in a duel under questionable circumstances at the age of twenty.
Radical Republican U.S. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens has been portrayed on screen by Lionel Barrymore and Tommy Lee Jones. Barrymore was in a wheelchair due to arthritis at the time which was synced on screen with Stevens’s real life sometime dependency on a sedan chair due to a club foot and a hip injury.
President John F. Kennedy, faced with recurring Southern intransigence over integration and civil rights a century after the Civil War, joked to a friend, “You know, there are times when I think Thaddeus Stevens had it right.”
The first name of the Chief in the Get Smart TV series was “Thaddeus.”
It is an interesting “what if”.
In play:
Bernard Koppell played similar villains on Get Smart and Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp, though he’s probably best remembered as Dr. Adam Bricker on The Love Boat. Like Bricker, he has been married several times, and can often be found at autograph shows; in an interview he said that he puts all money from autographs and personal appearances into educational trust funds for the children he fathered in his late sixties with his much younger current wife.
Two of the three producer/creators—Stan Burns and Mike Marmer—who had been writers for Get Smart, quit their jobs as head writers on *The Carol Burnett Show *to work on Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. It’s Madame Pepperwinkle’s favorite TV show, Lord help me.
Mr. Smith was a TV show in 1983 that told the story of a genius orangutan in Washington DC.
Dame Maggie Smith, who played Prof McGonagall in the Harry Potter franchise, has been in three films that have the word “secret” in their titles: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), The Secret Garden (1993) and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002).