Assorted Facts 6
Johnny Depp dropped out of school at age 15 with hopes of becoming a rock star.
Among the first films ever made was a series of shorts in the late 1870s that showed a horse galloping. Audiences were absolutely amazed.
Britney Spears' name is an anagram for "Presbyterians."
Jack Nicholson hates giving interviews so much that he has not appeared on a talk show since 1971.
It took $7,500,000 to build the Titanic, approximately 20,000,000 tons of iceberg to sink it, and $200,000,000 to make a movie about it.
In America, our films and television shows are played in NTSC format, which is 30 frames per second. In much of the rest of the world, they use PAL format, which is 24 frames per second. Our eyes see too slowly to tell the difference.
Wes Craven first proposed the script for A Nightmare on Elm Street, one of the most successful horror films of all time, in 1981, but no one was interested. It floated aimlessly until the now hugely successful New Line Cinema eventually picked it up.
A Nightmare on Elm Street was the first feature film that New Line Cinema ever produced. Prior to that, they were just a small distribution company for college campuses.
John Carpenter was a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan. Two characters in Halloween (1978), were named after characters in Hitchcock films - Tommy Doyle, from Rear Window (1954), and Sam Loomis, from Psycho (1960).
Jamie Lee Curtis made her acting debut in Halloween, and her mother, Janet Leigh, was the actress killed in the shower scene in Psycho, one of the most famous scenes in film history. Carpenter considered his casting of Curtis in Halloween to be the ultimate tribute to Hitchcock.
19 years ago today, Hollywire's own film critic (me) was in San Jose being scared out of his 10-year-old wits by the 7.1 Richter scale Bay Area earthquake.
Here's a big surprise: when Michael Jackson was informed that his Thriller co-star Ola Ray had posed nude for Playboy in June 1980, Jackson confessed that he had never heard of the magazine.
Thanks to his background as an actor, Ronald Reagan is the only U.S. President to have ever worn a Nazi uniform.
Peter Ostrum, who played Charlie Bucket in Mel Stuart's beloved Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), was offered a three-movie contract after the success of the film, but turned it down. He never acted again, and is now a veterinarian for large animals in rural New York state.
Mel Gibson is Empire magazine's 12th greatest movie star of all time and 37th sexiest movie star ever, he was chosen numerous times as one of People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People (Sexiest Man Alive in 1985), and voted one of the Greatest Movie Stars of All Time by Entertainment Weekly. Despite all this, he met his wife through a dating service.
Contrary to popular belief, Angelina Jolie is actually not that attractive.
At one point, Jim Carrey and his family lived in a car and they all worked as janitors at a factory to make a living. As a child, Jim wore tap dancing shoes to bed, just in case his parents needed cheering up in the middle of the night.
The charming metal band Cannibal Corpse appeared in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) because they are Jim Carrey's favorite band (!!).
Jim Carrey was Tupac Shakur's favorite actor. While in prison, Carrey would write letters to Tupac to help him smile and laugh.
Tupac was cast in Menace II Society (1993) but was fired after a fist-fight with the film's director, he auditioned for the part of Bubba in Forrest Gump (1994), and won a role in the film Woo (1998) but was shot and killed five days before filming began.
Brad Pitt's first job was dancing in a chicken suit to attract customers to an El Pollo Loco restaurant on Sunset Blvd.
Fade to black: On February 17, television stations will broadcast only digital signals, ending the run of the TV system used in the United States for the past 55 years.
The digital television signal can transmit pictures composed of up to 1,080 lines. That's a long way from the first TV, demonstrated by John Logie Baird in 1926. It used just 30 lines to create a coarse image.
Baird's television looked like a peep-show device, held together with scrap wood, darning needles, string, and sealing wax. His invention was partly mechanical, relying on a spinning metal disk with a spiral of holes to chop up images for transmission.
Two years later, Baird demonstrated color television, but black-and-white TV ruled for decades. People who watched such television as kids are more likely to dream in black and white than those who grew up with color TV.
Yes, it existed before Monty Python. On August 22, 1932, the BBC began regular broad-casts using the Baird system.
By 1935 there were some 2,000 Baird TVs in use. They cost ?26 each-the equivalent of $7,700 today.
The largest plasma TV now available, a 103-inch monster made by Panasonic, will set you back $70,000.
Are television execs playing with hellfire? The inventor of all-electronic TV, Philo T. Farnsworth, called television a gift from the Lord and warned that "God will hold accountable those who utilize this divine instrument."
By the age of 14, the average American child has seen 11,000 murders on TV.
The first television advertisement, broadcast in New York on July 1, 1941, was a 20-second Bulova Watch spot that aired before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. The cost for the air buy was $9.
In 2008 the average cost for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl broadcast was $2.7 million, the most expensive airtime in the world.
Still trying: Last March, 80 years and a lot of cardboard glasses after the first experiments, the BBC once again tested a 3-D TV system-this time on 200 sports fans watching a special broadcast of a live rugby match.
Bad show: In August 2006 NASA announced that it had lost all the original tapes of Apollo 11's TV transmission.
The US population discards each year 16,000,000,000 diapers, 1,600,000,000 pens, 2,000,000,000 razor blades, 220,000,000 car tires, and enough aluminum to rebuild the US commercial air fleet four times over.
Out of ever $10 spent buying things, $1 (10%) goes for packaging that is thrown away. Packaging represents about 65% of household trash.
On average, it costs $30 per ton to recycle trash, $50 to send it to the landfill, and $65 to $75 to incinerate it.
More than 20,000,000 Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of aluminum foil. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it.
Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute!
A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.
Motor oil never wears out, it just gets dirty. Oil can be recycled, re-refined and used again, reducing our reliance on imported oil.
On average, each one of us produces 4.4 pounds of solid waste each day. This adds up to almost a ton of trash per person, per year.
A typical family consumes 182 gallons of soda, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That's a lot of containers - make sure they're recycled!
Each UK household produces over 1 tonne of rubbish annually, amounting to about 31 million tonnes for the UK each year.
Glass can be recycled again and again without losing its clarity or purity source.