HIWAY AMERICA-MOJAVE PHONE BOOTH

‘Adventures With the Mojave Phone Booth’, A Book About

an Isolated Phone Booth’s Rise to Internet Fame

<iframe width=”800″ height=”600″ src=”https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mojavephoneboothbo

by EDW Lynch at 2:12 pm on September 4, 2014

Adventures with the Mojave Phone Booth is an upcoming book by Doc Daniels that tells the tale of theMojave phone booth, a phone booth in an isolated stretch of California desert that became Internet-famous in the late 1990s. Daniels propelled the phone booth to fame with the creation of the originalMojave phone booth website back in 1997. Soon fans from around the world were calling the phone booth or traveling to the Mojave National Preserve in California to visit the booth in person (and answer calls). Unfortunately for its fans, the phone booth was removed in May 2000. Daniels is raising funds for the book on Kickstarter. The book is due out in 2015. We first posted about the Mojave phone booth back in 2007.

 

photo via Doc Daniels

10 Devastating Author-To-Author Insults

STEFFANI JACOBY AUGUST 21, 2014

Throughout history, some of the most renowned authors were also the most harshly criticized—often by their equally famous peers. Some of the best-known works of literature, from Shakespeare’s plays to Hemingway’s novels, have been on the receiving end of some truly excoriating putdowns.

10George Bernard Shaw On Shakespeare

George Bernard Shaw, the only writer to receive both an Academy Award and the Nobel Prize for Literature, produced a variety of well-known (and award-winning) plays, the most famous of which was Pygmalion. Apparently, his success as a playwright led him to believe he had the credentials to make a few scathing comments about Shakespeare himself:

“With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”

Shaw wasn’t the only famous author who loved hating the Bard: Voltaire called Shakespeare a “drunken savage” who only appealed to audiences in “London and Canada.” For good measure, he also described his works as a “vast dunghill.”

9Mark Twain On Jane Austen

For many, Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) remains the quintessential American author. And apparently he harbored some strong feelings about perhaps the quintessential English novelist. In a critical essay on Jane Austen’s works, Twain remarked:

“She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.”

“Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

Twain’s talent for vitriol wasn’t limited to Austen—he also penned a hilarious essay titled “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” in which he claimed that Cooper’s The Deerslayer managed to commit “114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115 . . . its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are—oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.” Some argue that Twain addressed these jibes at other famous authors just for the fun of it.

8Charlotte Bronte On Jane Austen

Jane Austen might be known for her refined characters, but she certainly had a way of making people angry. Charlotte Bronte, a near-contemporary of Austen known to prefer passion over stolid practicalism, let loose after a cursory reading of Pride and Prejudice:

“She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her. What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study: but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores.”

Later, in a letter to a friend who had warned her not to be too melodramatic, Bronte said she couldn’t have tolerated being confined to the refined gardens and elegant society featured in Austen’s novels.

Authors and critics often base their opinion of Austen on her development of emotion (or lack thereof). Ian Watt claimed that Austen’s works appeal only to those who view logic as superior to emotion. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, valued Austen’s work, arguing that she was “mistress of greater emotion than appears on the surface.”

7Oscar Wilde On Alexander Pope

Both authors are among the most prominent in British history, among the few to be honored with memorials in Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. But it appears that Wilde wasn’t a fan of his renowned predecessor. A famously quotable author, full of flippant jabs and insults, Wilde once wrote a letter to a friend in which he observed:

“There are several ways to dislike poetry; one is to dislike it, the other is to read Alexander Pope.”

Since Pope was dead at the time, he didn’t get the chance to reply to Wilde’s putdown, but it’s a fairly safe bet that his response would have been scathing. After all, when the writer Lewis Theobald criticized his adaptations of Shakespeare, Pope responded by making him the main character of an epic, four-volume work of poetry called “The Dunciad,” in which he is supposedly the son and favorite of the goddess “Dulness.” When he later fell out with the playwright Colley Cibber, Pope rewrote the poem to make him the title character instead.

Despite his seeming disdain, critics have noted allusions to Pope’s work in Wilde’s only novel, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, where a turn of conversationstrikingly resembles a line from Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.

6Virginia Woolf On James Joyce

In a 1922 letter to T.S. Eliot, Woolf asked the poet for his sincere opinion on Joyce’s newly released book, Ulysses. That same year, she wrote to her sister, encouraging her to get to know Joyce: “I particularly want to know what he’s like.”

However, Woolf’s fascination with Joyce didn’t at all indicate that she respected his literary skills. After reading the first few hundred pages ofUlysses, she confided to her diary:

“An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating.”

Woolf wasn’t the only author who had trouble making it through Ulysses. D.H. Lawrence, often associated with Joyce as a master of the modern novel, claimed to be “one of the people who can’t read Ulysses,” although he conceded that Joyce would doubtless “look as much askance on me as I on him.”

5T.S. Eliot On Aldous Huxley

Some experts seem to think that T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley admired each other, at least to some degree. Both were members of the Bloomsbury Circle of Lady Ottoline Morrel, an artsy social group of the time, and both read the others’ work closely. Huxley’s most famous work, Brave New World, and Eliot’s The Hollow Men share many of the same ideas. But that didn’t stop Eliot from taking potshots at Huxley, once remarking:

“Huxley, who is perhaps one of those people who have to perpetrate thirty bad novels before producing a good one, has a certain natural—but little developed—aptitude for seriousness. Unfortunately, this aptitude is hampered by a talent for the rapid assimilation of all that isn’t essential.”

H.G. Wells, another author whose works centered on futuristic, often dystopian scenarios, was greatly disappointed in Huxley’s dark vision of things to come, saying that a writer of Huxley’s standing had “no right to betray the future as he did in that book.”

4William Faulkner On Ernest Hemingway

Some authors, like Huxley and Wells, fall out over philosophical differences. Faulkner’s beef with Hemingway was much more straightforward— he didn’t like his style. Of Hemingway’s characteristically brief, simple sentences, Faulkner said:

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

Faulkner’s writing style was certainly more complex than Hemingway’s—it’s not unusual to encounter page-long sentences in his works. Those prolix sentences weren’t an accident; they were part of his writing philosophy. In an interview, Faulkner said he wanted “to put the whole history of the human heart on the head of a pin . . . the long sentence is an attempt to get [a character’s] past and possibly his future into the instant in which he does something.”

And forget using a dictionary to look up words—some of Faulkner’s fabricated portmanteau words, including “allknowledgeable,” “droopeared,” and “fecundmellow,” wouldn’t be found in even the most exhaustive reference works.

3Ernest Hemingway On William Faulkner

Of course, as a man who once responded to an insult by punching Orson Welles, Hemingway wasn’t about to back down from a fight. In response to Faulkner’s “dictionary” quip, Hemingway sneered:

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

Hemingway believed that writing should be clear and straightforward enough that readers wouldn’t have to hunt down a reference book to decipher an idea. The best writers don’t need to consult dictionaries, he maintained.

Ironically, some of Hemingway’s works are riddled with foreign words and phrases, which can be tricky for a monolingual English-speaker to understand. Apparently, sending readers to a dictionary was only a problem for Hemingway when an English dictionary was required.

If you want to copy Hemingway’s style, the ever-helpful Hemingway App can assist you by highlighting sentences that need to be simplified and adverbs that need to be deleted. If, on the other hand, you prefer to adopt Faulkner’s style, you might want to sit down with an unabridged Oxford English Dictionary and start reading and randomly combining words.

2W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot On Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the great writers of the 19th century. Many call him the inventor of the murder mystery, and he was certainly a dark, brooding predecessor to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Poe also won worldwide acclaim (mostly posthumously) for his lyric poetry, which often focuses on death or loss.

But not everyone approved of Poe’s macabre tales and melodramatic, depressed style. The poet W.H. Auden was less than complimentary, calling Poe:

“An unmanly sort of man whose love-life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.”

T.S. Eliot, slightly more politely, attributed to Poe: “the intellect of a highly gifted person before puberty.”

Poe’s life was almost as rocky as his dark stories and poems. After dropping out of school because of financial trouble, finding out his sweetheart had become engaged to another man, and going to visit his mother only to find that she had died, he set out on a quest for fame.

When he was 27, he married 13-year-old Virginia Clemm, who died of tuberculosis a short time later. Poe ultimately expired in a manner as mysterious as his own macabre stories—he was found dead in a public house after disappearing in Baltimore for five days. Today, Poe is either hailed as a literary mastermind or reviled as a pedophile with a fetish for blackbirds.

1Martin Amis On Miguel de Cervantes

We all have them—those family members or friends whose visits only serve to convince us that they’ve completely lost their minds. Martin Amis, an English novelist most famous for the cult classics Money and London Fields, seems to think Miguel de Cervantes’s famous 17th-century masterpiece embodies that eccentric, ever-inappropriate relative:

“Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies.”

Though Don Quixote met with a mixed reception on its release, many now hail it as the first real modern novel. Harold Bloom, well-respected literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, only has scintillating things to say about Cervantes’ landmark novel:

“Cervantes and Shakespeare, who died almost simultaneously, are the central western authors, at least since Dante, and no writer since has matched them, not Tolstoy or Goethe, Dickens, Proust, Joyce.”

In the same article, Bloom makes an interesting point: “Cervantes inhabits his great book so pervasively that we need to see that it has three unique personalities: the knight, Sancho, and Cervantes.” If that’s true, maybe Cervantes himself is the personification of that “impossible senior relative” we all know.

Steffani is a freelance writer and coffee addict living on the island of Guam. She’s also a scuba diver, a knitter, and an E.A. Poe aficionado who often gets segments of “The Raven” stuck in her head on repeat. Steffani blogs about life in Guam atOriginalFootprints.com.

HIWAY AMERICA – THE GREAT AMERICAN AMUSEMENT PARK

 

 

Permanent outdoor recreation areas have been around at least as long as written history. Public areas are among the essential amenities any society develops, and their improvement is relatively cheap advertising for the local monarch (large statues make great decorations). But public resort areas with amusement facilities did not appear in Europe until the Renaissance. In England, they were called “pleasure gardens,” and they flourished from about 1550 to 1700. They first appeared in the form of resort grounds operated by inns and taverns. They quickly proved good for  business, and became more elaborate. Vauxhall Gardens opened in  London in 1661 covering 12 acres, and admission was free. Entertainment was provided: acrobatic acts, fireworks, music — Mozart performed there as an 8-year-old prodigy in 1764. Professional showmen saw the money-making potential of the concept, and began operating them for profit.

In early America, amusement parks began as picnic grounds. Some were built by local breweries (there’s much more profit when you can sell your beer directly, rather than through middlemen). These “beer gardens” offered the working man an inexpensive day’s relaxation for the family, including plenty of open space, concerts, sometimes bathing, and always beer and food. Attendance was promoted by streetcar companies and local railroad and excursion boat operators. Many parks were developed by trolley companies. They bought their electricity at a flat monthly rate — build amusement parks at the end of the line and you boosted weekend use at little added expense! Before long, hundreds of such parks were built all over the country.

Expositions, particularly the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, provided another model for American amusement parks. The Chicago event was the first to concentrate rides, shows and concessions in a separate “midway.” As discussed in a previous chapter, these expositions attracted teeming crowds with a multitude of lures: entertainment, education, recreation, and trade. Entrepreneurs soon learned that each attraction could boost its attendance by virtue of its proximity to every other popular feature, and that all of them together could turn profits that could never be realized by stand-alone attractions.

The story of amusement parks is largely the story of George C. Tilyou, a masterful entrepreneur whose vision created the amusement park in a form that remained unchanged until Disney created theme parks.

Coney Island

New York City had the money and the crowds: finances to build parks and a huge pool of working-class families looking for close and affordable relief from the grim realities of daily life. Coney Island, a five-mile stretch of beach at the entrance to New York Harbor where Brooklyn meets the sea, was already a popular seaside resort for the city and environs. A pleasant and largely undeveloped spot so close to a huge population in need of close and cheap recreation, it was destined to become home to a succession of wonderful parks.

The first attractions on Coney Island were racetracks built for wealthy vacationers in 1880. A collection of attractions suited to more moderate incomes followed. Amusement rides were popular. In 1884, Lamarcus Thompson built the first amusement railroad in the world, the “Switchback Railroad.” Its two wooden undulating tracks started ran down a 600-foot structure. It cost Thompson $1600 to build, but at 10¢ per ride, it took in $600-700 per day.

Young George Tilyou, owner of an array of single rides scattered around the island, saw the gigantic 250′ Ferris wheel at the 1893 Chicago exposition. Unable to buy it (it had already been sold), he had his own 125-foot version built. It was the most popular single attraction on Coney Island until Captain Paul Boyton came to town.

Hugely famous for daredevil swimming feats performed in an inflatable, rubberized suit of his own invention, Boyton had opened Chutes Park in Chicago the previous year to take advantage of the crowds visiting the World’s Columbian Exposition. On Coney Island, Boyton opened Sea Lion Park in 1895,enclosed by a fence and featuring a one-price admission that entitled the visitor to enjoy all the attractions, including the spectacular “Shoot-the-Chutes” (a water-flume ride) and the Captain’s own swimming exhibitions.

Once Tilyou understood the idea, he ran with it. He bought and improved an 1100-foot gravity-driven mechanical ride, the “Steeplechase Horses,” and opened Steeplechase Park on 15 ocean-front acres the next year. In 1902 he hired a huge illusion ride, Frederic Thompson’s “A Trip to the Moon,” that he had seen at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. The next year, Thompson took the ride away to open competing Luna Park with Elmer Dundy.

Boyton’s early success, without significant competition (at first), made him reluctant to tamper with a successful and imperfectly-understood formula. With his “it ain’t broke so don’t fix it” attitude, he failed to add or improve attractions. However, Tilyou’s changing array of attractions at Steeplechase Park, each more spectacular than the last, followed the public taste for the new and different, a taste that turned quickly into a distinct preference, then a demand. What pleased the paying public one year was old-hat the next. Sea Lion Park, hopelessly out of date, fell out of favor and closed. Its 22 acres were purchased by Thompson and Dundy, who retained only the “Chute the Chutes” from Sea Lion and opened Luna Park on the site in 1903. 

Luna Park featured hundreds of thousands of electric lights (the technological sensation of the time), including nightly displays by huge searchlights mounted in its central tower, illuminating the dozens of other fanciful towers and minarets. The influence of the Chicago fair is reflected in the names of many of Luna’s attractions: “The Canals of Venice,” “Eskimo Village,” “A Trip to the North Pole.” There was a $1.95 one-price admission available, but most visitors opted to pay 10¢ for most attractions, 25¢ for the spectacular ones. Luna Park repaid its entire $700,000 cost in just six weeks.

The next season, Luna was rivaled by Dreamland, whose policy seemed to be to do everything twice as big as its competitors. Attractions included a copy of the “Shoot the Chutes,” “Fighting the Flames,” a show in which firefighters demonstrated rescues from a six-story blazing building (two stories higher than the one premiered by Luna, and later expanded to an entire burning city block). Dreamland affected a higher tone than its competitors, presenting attractions with cultural and even biblical themes. Dr. Martin Couney’s “Infant Incubator” displayed premature infants and the scientific wonders developed to help them live (of the 8,000 babies brought to Dr. Couney during his residence at Dreamland, 7500 survived).

 All three parks were built in the same style, white plaster fantasies similar to those already familiar to the public from the World’s Columbian Exposition.

See 1903 Edison film of Luna Park and Steeplechase Park

THESE LINKS DON’T WORK IN THE SAMPLE PAGE,
BUT ON THE DISK THEY LEAD TO 12 MINUTES OF RARE FILM

See a 1940 sound film of Coney Island

Samuel W. Gumpertz came to Dreamland to build “Lilliputia,” a midget city where he housed 300 midgets for the 1904 opening season. The background midi for this page is the sweet waltz “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” written for that inaugural season. Gumpertz scoured the world for freaks, visiting Egypt, Asia and Africa five times each (including two trips to Africa’s unexplored center) and dozens of trips to Europe. Besides freaks, he imported exotic humans: Filipino blowgun shooters, Algerian horsemen, Somali warriors, “Wild Men from Borneo” who really were from Borneo and plate-lipped Ubangi women. Never as popular as its competitors, Dreamland burned to the ground in 1911. Gumpertz’s Dreamland Circus Sideshow prospered for years thereafter in another location. Its success brought copiers, like the World Circus Freak Show opened in 1922, followed by Hubert’s Museum, the Palace of Wonders Freak Show and more. All had fat ladies, seal boys, pinheads, electric girls, dog-faced boys and on and on. Gumpertz left Coney Island in 1929 to manage the Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Steeplechase, “The Funny Place,” was every bit as good as its nickname. With rides and attractions updated every year, the public could count on novelty, thrills, and the delight of seeing other people have fun. Involvement was the name of the game at Steeplechase. At every turn (beginning with the entrance) customers were tricked into pratfalls and comic indignities, then allowed to recover with a laugh as they viewed others suffering the same treatment. At the “Blowhole Theater,” you could watch as patrons exiting the Steeplechase ride passed a dwarf clown who would control air jets to blow men’s hats off and ladies’ dresses upward. The spills and the thrills were all designed to allow the odd moment of “I couldn’t help it” contact with one’s pretty date … a ride on the double-saddled Steeplechase Horses wasn’t safe without a firm hug, and a tumble on the Human Roulette Wheel often brought a flash of ankle and a friendly pile-up. Especially popular was the El Dorado carousel, restored from the Dreamland fire and restored to its full glory of 42 feet high and lit with 6000 lamps over three platforms in ascending tiers, each revolving at a different speed.

Built of wood and plaster, the grand old parks were like well-laid fires ready to burn. And burn they did, some repeatedly. Things were never quite the same after the beginning of the Great War (WWI). Faced with unprecedented horrors in real life, many patrons lost the taste for freaks, mock battles and burning blocks of buildings. Then the subway to the city opened, and paradoxically, it only hastened the decline in “business as usual.” It brought millions of people to the resort, but few of them had much money to spend. They crowded out the beaches, and their lower-class manners made former patrons, people with a little more couth and a little more money, uncomfortable. The people with enough money to go elsewhere went elsewhere and took their money with them. Attractions that had prospered when patronized by the middle class went bankrupt trying to lower prices and deliver the same services to the poor.  

The Depression finished the job for most of the parks. The 1939-40 World’s Fair stole away many paying customers. The sideshows were hit hard by a late 1930s ban on outside ballys. New York’s notoriously hard-on-business regulations had not helped businesses weakened by years of falling attendance and neglect, followed by a “clean up the decaying area” campaign that was just a thinly-disguised attempt to make way for profitable redevelopment. Steeplechase, the first to prosper, was the last to close. Tilyou’s grand vision, by then only a shadow of its former grandeur, wheezed to a halt in 1964, a victim of changing times and urban decay. Its few remaining buildings were quickly bulldozed by the land’s new owner before the city could declare it a historic landmark.

Today, the island is still home to beach and boardwalk, but there is nothing as spectacular as the early amusement parks. The New York Aquarium now stands on Dreamland’s site. Steeplechase’s famed 250-foot Parachute Tower is the sole standing reminder of the glorious past. Ironically, the forces that killed the freak shows support one as a curiosity: “Coney Island USA” operates “Sideshows by the Seashore”, partially funded by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

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Atlantic City

    

Atlantic City, New Jersey, was a seaside resort, the eastern terminus of a railroad which helped develop the resort. Its boardwalk dates from 1870. Starting in 1882, a series of piers were built out over the ocean, offering all types of entertainment for a single admission price. In 1898 the 2,000-foot Steel Pier was built, followed in 1902 by the Million Dollar Pier, from which  Houdini dove shackled into the ocean, and on which Teddy Roosevelt campaigned for his Bull Moose party. Top bands and entertainers attracted visitors. In the summer, famous acts like Steel Pier’s Diving Horse and a high-wire motorcycle act swelled attendance. H.J. Heinz was so taken with the sheer numbers of people coming to Atlantic City, people on whom advertising impressions could be made, that in 1898 he opened Heinz Pier. The pier’s unusual premise was peace and quiet, a place to get away from the crowds. There was a sun parlor with reclining chairs and writing desks, free food samples (Heinz products, of course), and a Heinz pickle pin as a parting gift. Coney Island impresario George Tilyou built a branch of his Steeplechase Park here in Atlantic City in 1908, calling it Steeplechase Pier, where the amusements included the Sugar Bowl Slide, the Mexican Hat Bowl, and Flying Chairs that swung riders out over the ocean. Like Coney Island, Atlantic City enjoyed a sparkling heyday and a long decline, until legalized gambling revitalized at least part of its tourist trade.

Other parks all over the country went through charming beginnings and fantastic developments. Some have prospered continuously, others flickered and died.

Starting in 1915, new diversions (motion pictures) and new mobility (the automobile) made their mark. Many parks closed, and the Depression that began in 1929 forced the closing of many others. 2000 parks had flourished in the U.S. in 1910, but by 1934 there were fewer than 500. The same economic changes that forced circuses to adapt or die caused the park business to decline throughout World War II. Some parks failed because they did not learn what George Tilyou had always understood, and Captain Paul Boyton did not: no matter what wonders you have created, the public demands something better every year. Other parks had no room to change — the automobile would bring a vast influx of customers from greater distances, but only if they could get there on good roads and only if they found room to park. The rising value of real estate demanded more intensely profitable use of every acre in developing areas, a factor that also hit drive-in movie theaters. The postwar prosperity and the “Baby Boom” injected a little new life into a moribund industry, helped by the introduction of children’s areas, “Kiddielands,” spearheaded by Kennywood near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 

Disneyland and after

In 1955, Walt Disney, already a wildly successful maker of family movies and television, marshalled his already-considerable resources: universal brand name recognition, an established stable of instantly recognizable characters, a weekly nationwide television audience, and a large parcel of unused land in Anaheim, California. He invented the “theme park,” though the term was not used then: Disneyland, an environment completely under control with every element approved by the family-friendly and trusted Disney, designed for the whole family. And it was designed to be more than just a local attraction; it was meant as a destination for vacationers nationwide.

Disney was always a canny businessman. He had no need to pay for advertising … his hour-long promotional “documentaries” on Disneyland’s opening aired as profitable program material!

Disneyland’s image, like the rest of the Disney image, was squeaky-clean. Everything was guaranteed to be safe, spotless, entertaining and profitable. All was made in the Disney image, owned and operated without middlemen. Gone were the carnival’s tawdry games, the questionable food stands, the itinerant performers. In their place were the very same hard-to-win games run by the company and staffed by earnest teenagers on summer break, and food stands run by the company. The shows were all family-friendly, with well-scrubbed college-age performers working for low wages on the premise that this experience would be good training for their future entertainment careers. The hot-to-trot girl shows remained only as a sanitized pastiche, as fresh-faced college girls performed hourly musical revues in Disney-studio costumes. The sole reminder of the ten-in-one talker was the scripted “hurry, hurry, hurry” of the youthful trained announcer twirling his fake mustache and calling everyone to his attraction — not a “Museum of Oddities” or a “Gallery of Freaks,” but a barbershop quartet or a banjo band. There were no more freaks … well, there was this really big mouse. Disneyland, and later Disney World in Orlando, Florida, still attract families on the strength of an image the rest of the Disney operation seems to have abandoned (that sound you hear is Walt spinning in his grave as the next episode of Disney-distributedEllen or one of its successors airs).

Several companies tried to copy Disneyland’s success, but none had Disney’s pre-sold combination of name recognition and (essentially free) nationwide advertising on the weekly Disney television show. In 1961, Six Flags Over Texas opened, followed by several other Six Flags parks across the nation, successfully establishing themselves as regional, not national, destination parks.

Walt Disney World, which opened in 1971, is still the largest theme park ever built. The park turned into a multi-attraction complex with the (self-styled) “visionary” EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) Center, recalling the corporate advertising of a world’s fair, in 1982. Subsequent additions to the complex include the world’s biggest water park, interconnecting but still self-contained getaways for grownups, and one more amazing innovation. Taking as a model Universal Studios Hollywood, where studio tours added a new profit center to an existing movie/tv production facility, Disney and MGM created Disney/MGM Studios, a combined theme-park/studio. It was a stroke of show business genius! Florida’s motion picture industry was already well known as the home of low-budget productions, drive-in movies and the like. Some producers, like Ivan Tors of Flipper fame, had made national entertainment careers based in Florida instead of Hollywood. The area had an established craft, technical and talent base, and was a right-to-work haven for producers looking to make shows on budgets uninflated by Hollywood and New York craft unions. The result: two big-money businesses for the price of one!Less than the price of one, if you figure in the development perks and tax breaks local governments often offer to those who bring thousands of jobs to any community. 

Parks of all sorts have felt one overwhelming pressure that affects all businesses and all traditions: the public’s easy boredom and demand for change. Some have successfully given the people what they want, others have not tried, or have tried and failed to find an innovation that intrigues the public.

“Things aren’t the way they used to be,” one old-timer has been heard to say; “and, you know what? They never were the way they used to be.”

If Steeplechase and Luna and Dreamland seem to us like wonders that should never have been allowed to fade, recall the plea on the marquee of a run-down pre-renewal Times Square porn theater: “It’s new until you’ve seen it.”

Large theme parks continue to innovate, with bigger (or at least different) shows, newer rides, wilder roller coasters, and ever-higher prices, even though some are operating on a scale not much bigger than the average former local park. Many older, smaller amusement parks, like Pennsylvania’s Kennywood, still find new and different ways to entertain, their charms only enhanced by their modest, comfortable size and careful preservation as reminders of bygone days.

History Section Index

1 – Early Fairs & Carnivals    2 – Expositions    3 – Freak Shows & Museums

4 – Circuses    4a – Circus Acts    4b – Clowns

5a – Wild West Shows    5b – Medicine Shows

6 – Carnivals    7 – Amusement & Theme Parks    8 – Vaudeville

	Design a Roller CoasterTry your hand at designing your own roller coaster. You will be building a conceptual coaster using the physics concepts that are used to design real coasters. You won’t need to compute any formulas.

You will decide the following – the height of the first hill, the shape of the first hill, the exit path, the height of the second hill, and the loop.

When you’re done, your coaster will need to pass an inspection for both safety and fun.

Here we go!

First you need to determine theheight of the first hill. Start building your coaster by clicking on the “Begin” button.

Note: We’ll assume that your coaster is a single-car coaster running on a frictionless track. It has a mass of 800 kg (1760 lbs). The acceleration due to gravity is 32 ft/s/s. Back to Roller Coaster“Amusement Park Physics” is inspired by programs from The Mechanical Universe…and Beyond.

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History of Amusement & Theme Parks

Amusement park is the more generic term for a collection of amusement rides and other entertainment attractions assembled for the purpose of entertaining a fairly large group of people. An amusement park is more elaborate than a simple city park or playground, as an amusement park is meant to cater to adults, teenagers, and small children.

An amusement park may be permanent or temporary, usually periodic, such as a few days or weeks per year. The temporary (often annual) amusement park with mobile rides etc. is called a funfair or carnival.

The original amusement parks were the historical precursors to the modern theme parks as well as the more traditional midway arcades and rides at county and state fairs (in the United States). Today, amusement parks have largely been replaced by theme parks, and the two terms are often used interchangeably.

For a remarkable example of a European park, dating from 1843 and still existing, see Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen. Even older is the Oktoberfest which is not only a beer festival but also provides a lot of amusement park features, dating back to 1810, when the first event was held in Munich, Germany.

History of American amusement parks

The first American amusement park, in the modern sense, was at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago, Illinois. The 1893 World’s fair was the first to have a Ferris wheel and an arcade midway, as well as various concessions. This conglomeration of attractions was the template used for amusement parks for the next half-century, including those known as trolley parks.

In 1897, Steeplechase Park, the first of three significant amusement parks opened at Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. Often, it is Steeplechase Park that comes to mind when one generically thinks of the heyday of Coney Island. Steeplechase Park was a huge success and by the late 1910s, there were hundreds of amusement parks in operation around the world. The introduction of the world-famous Cyclone roller coaster at Steeplechase Park in 1927 marked the beginning of the roller coaster as one of the most popular attractions for amusement parks as well as the later modern theme parks of today.

During the peak of the “golden age” of amusement parks from roughly the turn of the 20th century through the late 1920s, Coney Island at one point had three distinct amusement parks: Steeplechase Park, Luna Park (opened in 1903), and Dreamland (opened in 1904). However, the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II during the 1940s saw the decline of the amusement park industry. Furthermore, fire was a constant threat in those days, as much of the construction within the amusement parks of the era was wooden. In 1911, Dreamland was the first Coney Island amusement park to completely burn down; in 1944, Luna Park also burned to the ground.

By the 1950s, factors such as urban decay, crime, and even desegregation led to changing patterns in how people chose to spend their free time. Many of the older, traditional amusement parks had closed or burned to the ground. Many would be taken out by the wrecking ball to make way for suburban development. In 1964, Steeplechase Park, once the king of all amusement parks, closed down for the last time.

In 1955, Disneyland in Anaheim, California revived the amusement industry with its themed lands and matching attractions instead of using the older formula with traditional rides in one area and a midway, concessions, and sideshow attractions in another. The idea of theme parks caught on and, by the 1980s, became a billion dollar-a-year industry in the United States and around the world.

COOL PEOPLE -Classy People From The Past Who Remind Us What “Cool” Really Means!

#50 Classy People From The Past Who Remind Us What “Cool” Really Means!

 

Jake Heppner3 weeks ago

Our society has come a long way in the past few decades but we’ve completely forgotten what it’s like to be classy. Let’s take a lesson from these masters of “old school cool.”

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6 time Golden Globe winner #Paul Newman boating in #Venice during a film festival (1963)

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Elspeth Beard, shortly after becoming first Englishwoman to circumnavigate the world by motorcycle. The journey took 3 years and covered 48,000 miles.

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#Marlon Brando’s screen test in “Rebel Without A Cause” (1955).

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#Children of Chicago (1941)

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The gorgeous necklines of the 1950s

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#Audrey Hepburn at a premiere on September 14, 1953.

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An old family photo from the early 1900s

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#Sigourney Weaver in a suit

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Women boxing on a roof in LA (1933)

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A young #Harrison Ford

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A young boy stealing the show, back when middle school kids knew how to dance (1950)

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Cosmos host and astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson at a college wrestling match

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#Clint Eastwood with actresses Olive Sturgess and Dani Crayne in San Francisco, 1954

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The original way to ‘text’ in Class (1944)

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A young #Sean Connery relaxing on the couch

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A gang of #greasers in NYC, 1950

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#Caroline Kennedy walks ahead while her father, the most powerful man in the world, carries her doll. (1960)

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Teenagers and their first car (1950s)

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Canadian Prime Minister Pierre #Trudeau and his cabinet – 1968. These men knew how to wear a suit.

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#Diana Rigg (Olenna Tyrell from Game of Thrones) in 1967

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#Sophia Loren, one of the only actresses to win an Oscar, Grammy, and Golden Globe awards.

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A famous quote of hers: “Sex appeal is fifty percent what you’ve got and fifty percent what people think you’ve got.”

#Ellen O’Neal, the greatest woman freestyle skateboarder in the 1970s.

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Three boys pose for a camera on the streets of #Jamaica

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A man ice skating in a suit (1937)

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A businessman doubling as a #graffiti artist

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Photo by Linus Ma

The #Beatles before they were famous

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This is how teenagers dated in the #1950s

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High school fashion feature in #Life Magazine (1969)

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Leather clad #English rocker girl

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#Frank Sinatra stepping out of a helicopter with a drink

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#A young Kevin Spacey (1980s)

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#Dean Martin & #Angie Dickinson on the set of #Rio Bravo, 1959

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Girl with typewriter and a smoke

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A couple on Michigan Avenue in #Chicago #(1975)

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A stylish couple in the rain in #London #(1963)

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#Queen Elizabeth and #Prince Phillip at the horse races #(1968)

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#Muhammad Ali looking dapper

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#David Bowie’s mugshot

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#Paul McCartney and #Mick Jagger sit opposite each other on a train to Bangor. (1967)

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A salesman has his motorized roller skates refueled at a gas station (1961)

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A young #Michael Caine in 1959

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#Brigitte Bardot visits #Pablo Picasso at his studio near #Cannes in 1956

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A couple dancing in a 1950’s “#Be Bop” theater as everyone looks on.

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#Jimi Hendrix backstage at #Monterey Pop Festival, 1967

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Girl on a scooter (1969)

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#Ernest Hemingway’s striking passport photo (1923)

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The definition of old school cool. #Cary Grant in the #1950s

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The people we aspired to be decades ago are much different than the celebrities we look up to today. The values of our past have nearly vanished, but I’m hoping that if everyone sees this, they might be convinced to get back to our roots. Please share and remind everyone what “cool” used to be like!

COOL PEOPLE – ELIZABETH TAYLOR AND RICHARD BURTON

#COOL PEOPLE  #RICHARD BURTON AND ELIZABETH TAYLOI

Burton and Taylor: Trailer

Video:
Hollywood’s most glamorous and tempestuous couple are brought to life by Helena Bonham Carter (‘Les Miserables,’ ‘The King’s Speech’) as Liz Taylor and Dominic West (‘The Wire,’ ‘The Hour’) as Richard Burton. Don’t miss the biopic on BBC America.

http://www.bbcamerica.com/burton-and-taylor/videos/trailer/

“IN FROM THE COLD” RICHARD BURTON -FULL LENGTH

http://youtu.be/RGhya4oaNc8

 

RICHARD BURTON FULL DOCUMENTARY

http://youtu.be/RIVr6sT1GaU

ELIZABETH TAYLOR MEMORABLE MOVIE MOMENTS

http://youtu.be/2l9LrwFm7Nk

“WHAT A DUMP” A SCENE FROM WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

one of my all time favorite movies!

 http://youtu.be/xWoAOohbr5M

ABOUT ELIZABETH TAYLOR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Taylor

RICHARD BURTON BIO

http://www.biography.com/people/richard-burton-9232503

RICHARD BURTON AND ELIZABETH TAYLOR

By Michael Thornton

7:56PM BST 19 Jul 2013

The first time I saw Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton together off-screen was on a bitterly cold January day in 1963 at Heathrow Airport.

I had met Taylor before. I was 14 when she came to the Sussex seaside village of Rottingdean, where I had gone to school, to visit my friend Enid Bagnold, whose novel, National Velvet, had provided the 12-year-old Elizabeth with her first Hollywood starring role as a girl who rides her pony to victory in the Grand National.

But I had never glimpsed Burton in the flesh, and my first sight of him was to prove shockingly memorable. I was at Heathrow to watch some of the location shooting for a film, The VIPs, in which Taylor and Burton were co-starring, supported by a host of famous names including Maggie Smith, Margaret Rutherford, Louis Jourdan and Orson Welles.

Burton, wild-eyed and red in the face, was punching the air like a boxer who had lost co-ordination. My first impression was that he must be filming a drunk scene. But then several of his wild lunges landed on innocent passers-by, and I realised that he was paralytic. I discovered that he had consumed 14 Bloody Mary’s before lunch, then moved on to neat vodka in the afternoon.

Over the years, I was to meet the Burton’s – who married twice and divorced twice – on many occasions. The last time was backstage at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York in May 1983, when the world’s most famous ex-lovers, who’d by then been apart for seven years, following their second divorce, forged a disastrously ill-judged reunion in Noël Coward’s comedy Private Lives, the story of an ex-husband and wife who encounter each other on their second honeymoons, staying in adjoining rooms at a hotel in the South of France.

This grisly swan song in the tempestuous saga of Liz and Dick – it was to be the last time they would perform together – is brilliantly dramatized in Monday night’s BBC Four TV biopic, Burton and Taylor, in which the legendary couple are recreated with eerie authenticity by two award-winning actors, Helena Bonham Carter and Dominic West. Its writer, William Ivory, who fought a long and painful battle to conquer alcohol addiction, understands his two star protagonists very well, but says: “Burton and Taylor were addicted to more than alcohol. They were addicted to each other.”

Addiction was evident in their first encounter, a year before I witnessed Burton’s display at Heathrow, when he staggered onto the Rome set of Cleopatra, then the most costly screen epic produced, in which Taylor became the first star in Hollywood to command a salary of one million dollars. The film, now in its 50th anniversary year, has been digitally enhanced and was re-released this month in cinemas and on Blu-ray.

At his first meeting with Taylor, Burton turned up drunk. He could barely walk. His hands shook as he tried to sip hot coffee from a cup. Seeing his difficulty, Taylor helped by holding the cup to his lips. She later claimed that in that one simple gesture, a bond was forged between them, and that she found in Burton the same qualities she had loved in her third husband, millionaire producer Mike Todd, who was killed in a plane crash: power, strength, intellect, but also vulnerability.

In Cleopatra, in which Taylor had the title role, Burton played her lover, Mark Antony, a situation that was swiftly duplicated off-screen and developed into a scandal, for both were married – Burton to the former actress Sybil Williams, by whom he had two daughters, the younger of whom was autistic, and Taylor to the singer Eddie Fisher, whom she had annexed from one of America’s screen sweethearts, Debbie Reynolds, bringing widespread condemnation down on her head.

The Vatican denounced Taylor’s affair with Burton as “erotic vagrancy”, but after their marriage in 1964, they became the hottest properties in the movie world, reaching the peak of their careers with the film of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966.

As the bitter, erudite couple, George and Martha, who spend the evening trading vicious insults in front of their horrified and fascinated guests, their performances seemed uncomfortably close to their own lives. Both admitted that the film had taken its toll on their relationship, and Taylor confessed that she got “tired of playing Martha” in real life. Her performance won her a second Best Actress Oscar. Burton was nominated but did not win – one of seven nominations that failed to bring him an Oscar.

Burton’s lavish gifts of jewelry to Taylor – the Krupp Diamond, which she wore daily; the pear-shaped Taylor-Burton diamond; and the 50‑carat La Peregrina Pearl – kept the gilded couple in the headlines, but both began to drink more heavily, and to argue increasingly, and no one was very surprised when, after 10 years of marriage, they were divorced in 1974.

If they couldn’t live together, however, it seemed as if they couldn’t live apart. Less than 16 months later, they were remarried, but it lasted only a matter of months before they separated again and there was a second divorce.

In 1983, when Taylor and Burton announced their plan to co-star in a stage revival of Private Lives, both were involved with other people. Burton was with the television production assistant Sally Hay, and Taylor with a Mexican lawyer, Victor Luna – but neither was legally attached, which hugely increased media speculation that they might marry for the third time. The theme of Private Lives – the reunion of divorced partners – added to this impression.

Taylor appeared not even to have read Coward’s play when they began work on it, and came to rehearsals drunk and also clearly the worse for prescription drugs. A staggering $2 million of seats were sold in advance, but both Taylor and Burton, at 51 and 57 respectively, were years too old for the leading roles. The reviews were devastating. One critic compared Taylor’s acting to “the Hitler diaries – you don’t believe it, but you gotta look!”

On the night I saw the play in New York, the audience was dominated by camp contingents of Taylor’s movie fans, who screamed approval of everything she did, causing her frequently to ad-lib and step out of character.

Backstage, Burton seemed depressed and anxious. He told me the decision to work with Taylor again had been “a mistake… it’s been a bloody fiasco”.

Taylor began missing performances. During one of her many absences, Burton and Sally Hay took off for Las Vegas and got married there. Taylor responded by announcing her engagement to Victor Luna, whom she never married. She then collapsed with a respiratory infection and was absent from the production again.

One of Burton’s theatrical mentors, the Shakespearean actor and director Sir Anthony Quayle, was convinced that the strain imposed on Burton by the reunion with Taylor destroyed his failing health. He died from a brain hemorrhage eight months later. When Taylor was informed of his death, she fainted.

Elizabeth Taylor was created a Dame of the British Empire in 2000. After the dissolution of her eighth and final marriage to Larry Fortensky, whom she had met in rehab at the Betty Ford Centre, Taylor did not marry again, although she described her last partner, Jason Winters, as “one of the most wonderful men I’ve ever known”.

The last time I saw her, a year before her death, she was in a wheelchair, but still mentally alert, although she had become reclusive and an element of paranoia had crept into her outlook.

I mentioned her second husband, the English actor Michael Wilding, father of her two sons, who had been a friend of mine. She said sharply: “Please don’t talk about him. He is haunting me.”

“Well, I am sure he would be a friendly ghost,” I replied. “Michael was always a very kind man.”

“I was a fool to marry so often,” she said. “If I had my time over again, I would never do that. The truth is I now don’t give a damn about most of those men. Richard is the only one I truly loved and still care about. I shall miss him until the day I die.”

Snapshot: 24 Photos of Richard Burton and Elizabeth

Taylor’s Romance

By Brigid Brown | Posted on October 9th, 2013

Richard Burton (Dominic West) says to ex-wife Dame Elizabeth Taylor (Helena Bonham Carter) in the film Burton and Taylor, “We’re addicts Elizabeth, you and I.” She coyly responds, “Love is not a drug.”

However you want to interpret this line, the two couldn’t stay away from each other, tackling 12 films together, diving head first into two consecutive marriages, resulting in two divorces and still drawn to each other after all of that, taking on one last project.

The made-for-TV film, premiering on BBC America on Wednesday, October 16 at 9/8c, puts a spotlight on the couples’ last performance together in the NYC stage presentation of Private Lives. Coincidentally, or not so coincidentally, the play portrays a divorced couple who have lingering feelings.

This snapshot of 24 photos walks you through their romantic entanglement:

FASCINATING BUSINESS CARDS OF FAMOUS PEOPLE

 

Famous World Ideologies, as explained by references to Cows

AUGUST 25, 2010SHONARI

1. Feudalism: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.
2. Pure Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else’s cows. You have to take care of all the cows. The government gives you all the milk you need.
3. Bureaucratic Socialism: Your cows are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and eggs the regulations say you should need.
4. Fascism: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk.
5. Pure Communism: You have two cows. Your neighbors help you take care of them, and you all share the milk.
6. Real World Communism: You share two cows with your neighbors. You and your neighbors bicker about who has the most “ability” and who has the most “need”. Meanwhile, no one works, no one gets any milk, and the cows drop dead of starvation.
7. Russian Communism: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk. You steal back as much milk as you can and sell it on the black market.
8. Perestroika: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the Mafia takes all the milk. You steal back as much milk as you can and sell it on the “free” market.
9. Cambodian Communism: You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.
10. Militarianism: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.
11. Totalitarianism: You have two cows. The government takes them and denies they ever existed. Milk is banned.
12. Pure Democracy: You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets the milk.
13. Representative Democracy: You have two cows. Your neighbors pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.
14. British Democracy: You have two cows. You feed them sheeps’ brains and they go mad. The government doesn’t do anything.
15. Bureaucracy: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.
16. Pure Anarchy: You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fair price or your neighbors try to take the cows and kill you.
17. Pure Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.
18. Capitalism: You don’t have any cows. The bank will not lend you money to buy cows, because you don’t have any cows to put up as collateral.
19. Enviromentalism: You have two cows. The government bans you from milking or killing them.
20. Political Correctness: You are associated with (the concept of “ownership” is a symbol of the phallo-centric, war mongering, intolerant past) two differently – aged (but no less valuable to society) bovines of non-specified gender.
21. Surrealism: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

22 of the greatest movie opening lines of all times

Click link below for list

http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/the-22-greatest-movie-opening-lines-of-all-time

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25 Great Psychological Thrillers That Are Worth Your Time

23 April 2014 | Features, Film Lists | by Andrew Lowry

6. The Night of the Hunter

Based on the novel of the same title, Night of the Hunter casts Robert Mitchum in the lead role as Harry Powell, an unethical preacher cum murderer. Alongside Shelley Winters, the film is loosely based on a true story, as he attempts to romance the unsuspecting widow and steal the hidden money. It was to be the last film directed by Charles Laughton.

Set in 1930’s West Virginia, Harry Powell is a self-labelled preacher who has been travelling the country attracting widows, then killing and robbing them, all the while convinced that this is what God wants him to do. Arrested for driving a stolen car and temporarily jailed, he meets prisoner Ben Harper, a convicted killer and bank robber facing execution. Despite not being able to convince Ben to disclose where the loot is hidden, Powell hatches a plan to target his next widow, Willa Harper (Shelley Winters). However, with the two Harper children being the only ones who know where the spoils are, Powell certainly won’t have things his own way.

With Mitchum giving such a skin crawling and menacing performance, Night of the Hunter is now known to be one of the most frightening movies around, for its time. Containing possibly the most notoriously twisted, on-screen villain in cinematic history, this is a film you will either LOVE or HATE.

5. The Innocents

Directed by Jack Clayton and starring Deborah Kerr, The Innocents is a gothic horror released in 1961. Without showing any gory or graphic images, this film relies simply on the setting, direction and the viewer’s own perception. Based on the novel, The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents is open ended, leaving several interpretations of which all are unsettling and thought provoking.

Miss Giddens (Kerr) agrees to become the new governess to two orphaned children, named Flora and Miles who are currently in the care of their wealthy but disinterested uncle. After arriving at their beautiful country estate, Miss Giddens immediately connects with Mrs Grose, the likeable housekeeper, and meets Flora, a bubbly, cheerful young girl with a pet tortoise. With Miss Giddens still settling in to her new headquarters, a letter is received from Miles’ boarding school, advising that he has been sent home early and subsequently expelled. Upon meeting Miles for the first time, the governess finds him extremely charming, almost flirtatious. However, coinciding with the boy’s arrival, sinister and peculiar events begin to arise. With Miss Gidens demanding to know more about the past residency, sickening secrets are revealed, secrets that lead to a horrifying and ghastly culmination of events.

Whatever rationale you may come up with, the result is a breathtakingly disturbing translation of a classic ghost story, written by Henry James.

4. Don’t Look Now

Based on Daphne Du Maurier’s short story, Don’t Look Now, is a frightening film that shows the psychological weight, the death of a loved one can bring. In this case Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play husband and wife, John and Laura, who experience the heart-breaking tragedy of losing their young daughter, after she drowned in their pond. The film presents the different styles of grief we can suffer.

Fast forward to the future and John and Laura are currently in Venice after John decided to restore an old church. After meeting a blind psychic woman in a restaurant, Laura’s mood changes when told that their daughter is happy. However, John, being the absolute non-believer in clairvoyance, is not nearly as excited. But when they both start to witness strange sightings, particularly the same red-coated figure, (similar to how their daughter last appeared) desperation overcome grief, to haunting consequences

Director Nicolas Roeg creates an extremely chilling atmosphere with the tension building up to a ghastly, grotesque climax.

3. Rosemary’s Baby

The most acclaimed in ‘the apartment trilogy’, Rosemary’s Baby stars Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes as husband and wife who have just moved into an old fashioned New York City apartment.

Thrilled with their new surroundings, Rosemary (Farrow) and Guy (Cassavetes) decide that having a baby is the next step in their relationship. With her interfering, yet supportive neighbours (Minnie and Roman), she embarks on her journey through pregnancy and is somewhat shoved in the direction of Dr Sapirstein, who insists that Rosemary drink a concoction that her helpful neighbour will bring her daily.

However, after burrowing deeper into the bizarre behaviour of those all around her, including her husband Guy; she speculates that they all have very sinister intentions for the unborn child. Can Rosemary unravel the plot in time to save her baby AND her sanity? Or has this all been a cruel illusion of mind tricks?

Mia Farrow produces the performance of a lifetime in Polanski’s brilliant psychological horror. Released in 1968, this truly terrifying film effortlessly stands the test of time.

2. Les Diaboliques

Directed by Henri-George Clouzot, this 1955 black and white French-masterpiece, features on many top horror film lists.

The film revolves around a boarding school, owned by the vulnerable Christina, (Vera Clouzot) but controlled by her repressive husband Michel (Paul Meurisse) with his mistress, teacher Nicole (Simone Signoret) in tow.With both women possessing a closeness and confidentiality in each other, due to the abusive Michel, they formulate a plan to take care of this tyrant. However, between an intrusive private investigator, incorruptible schoolboys and a missing corpse, things take a mysterious turn for the worse.

Legend has it that Alfred Hitchcock was first approached to direct Les Diaboliques, however, when the deal came to nothing, Henri-Georges Clouzot was the inheritor.

1. Vertigo

Widely regarded as director Alfred Hitchcock’s best, Vertigo is a complex, psychological thriller starring James Stewart and Kim Novak. Proudly sitting atop of the much celebrated Sight and Sound Poll (in 2012), this masterpiece is a movie filled with suspense that unfolds in an extraordinarily haunting climax.

John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson (Stewart) is a retired San Francisco police detective. After being involved in a rooftop chase, resulting in the death of a policeman, Scottie has been battling vertigo. When approached by an old college friend to secretly pursue the man’s wife Madeline (Novak), he begrudgingly accepts. As Madeline proves exceedingly difficult to follow, he eventually tracks her down and rescues her as she attempts to leap into San Fran Bay. With both Madeline and Scottie spending more and more time together they ultimately confess their love for each other, whilst in the surroundings of an old Mission. Out of nowhere, Madeline runs into the church and climbs the bell tower. With Scottie powerless to run after her, we are left with a breathtakingly daring act of cinematic genius that only the master of suspense could compose.

With a fantastic backdrop of San Francisco, this fable of romance and obsession is a stunning piece of work that should be ranked as highly in another 50 years’ time, as it is today.

Author Bio: Andrew Lowry lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland. He is a government worker by day, and cinephile by night.

Read more at http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/25-great-psychological-thrillers-that-are-worth-your-time/4/#Cps8Has64pHiIi6p.99

The 22 Greatest Movie Opening Lines Of All Time

02 January 2014 | Features, Other Lists | by David Zou

The first line can make or break a movie.

And some of the best films also boast superb opening gambits that suck you in, make you think, have you laughing or just tease you. Some have over 100 words, some have only a few words, but they have the same effect.

We’ve rounded up some of our favorites – let us know yours in the comments…

22. Mallrats (1995)

The Line: “One time my cousin Walter got this cat stuck up his ass. True story. He bought it at our local mall, so the whole fiasco wound up on the news.

“It was embarrassing for my relatives and all, but next week, he did it again. Different cat, same results, complete with another trip to the emergency room.

“So, I run into him a week later in the mall and he’s buying another cat. And I says to him, ‘Jesus, Walt! What are you doing? You know you’re just gonna get this cat stuck up your ass too. Why don’t you knock it off?’

“And he said to me, ‘Brodie, how the hell else am I supposed to get the gerbil out?’ My cousin was a weird guy.

21. Fight Club (1999)

The Line: “People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden…”

20. Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994)

The Line: “Oh, f**k! F**k!”

19. The Big Lebowski (1998)

The Line: ”Way out west there was this fella I wanna tell ya about. Goes by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least that was the handle his loving parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. See, this Lebowski, he called himself ‘The Dude’”

18. The Jerk (1979)

The Line: “I am not a bum. I’m a jerk. I once had wealth, power, and the love of a beautiful woman. Now I only have two things: my friends and… uh… my thermos.

“Huh? My story? Okay. It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin’ on the porch with my family, singin’ and dancin’ down in Mississippi.”

17. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (1998)

The Line: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

16. LA Confidential (1997)

The Line: “’Come to Los Angeles! The sun shines bright, the beaches are wide and inviting, and the orange groves stretch as far as the eye can see. There are jobs aplenty, and land is cheap.

“Every working man can have his own house, and inside every house, a happy, all-American family. You can have all this, and who knows… you could even be discovered, become a movie star… or at least see one.

“Life is good in Los Angeles… it’s paradise on Earth.’ Ha ha ha ha. That’s what they tell you, anyway.”

15. Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Read more at http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/the-22-greatest-movie-opening-lines-of-all-time/#6dGQvwLK0xI6Fusb.99

SOME OF THE BEST BOOKS EVER- The BBC Believes You Only Read 6 of These Books…

 

BBC Believes You Only Read 6 of These Books…

The BBC believes that most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books below. How many have you read?
(Tip: The average Goodreads member has read 23 out of 100 books on this list)
p.s: BBC didn’t make a declaration. The list is probably based on the average. Also, Narnia and Shakespeare are on the list twice but, they can be a freebie if you prefer 🙂

BELOW ARE SOME OF MY FAVORITE BOOKS-AS A CHILD I READ “OF MICE AND MEN” AND I MUST SAY IT’S MY MOST FAV, BOOK EVER.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2mGbJP/:1mzkK5gRo:Q+ho8GD@/www.listchallenges.com/kaunismina-bbc-6-books-challenge/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

rare vintage photos of cool people hanging out

CLICK BELOW FOR MORE PHOTOS DETAILS

http://www.vintag.es/2013/08/rare-vintage-photographs-of-famous.html