Tag: Movies

The Funniest People in Movies — Smashwords: Many formats, Including PDF

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Movies — Work

Work

• Al Boasberg was a wonderful comedy writer, but he didn’t like to be rushed. Once, producer Irving Thalberg rushed him. Mr. Thalberg wanted a scene written for the Marx Brothers — now. Finally, Mr. Boasberg said that he had written the material that Mr. Thalberg wanted. Then he told Mr. Thalberg that he was leaving his office, but would leave the scene behind. The Marx Brothers and Mr. Thalberg rushed to Mr. Boasberg’s office to read the scene — and found it cut into many pieces and nailed to the ceiling. According to Groucho, “It took us about five hours to piece it together.” But the scene was worth all that work — Mr. Boasberg had written what eventually became the famous scene in A Night at the Opera in which many, many people crowd into a small room.

• Being a successful actress can be very difficult work. While filming the movie Scream 2, Sarah Michelle Gellar was also starring in TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For a while, she worked on the TV series Monday through Thursday, then worked on Scream 2 Friday through Sunday. Sometimes, she would work on Buffy until 2 a.m., then show up in three hours at 5 a.m. to start another workday. One morning, Sarah was driving to work with the controvertible top of her car down. She noticed people staring at her, then looked down and saw that she was only partially dressed — she was so tired that she had forgotten to put on a dress.

• Famous cartoonist Chuck Jones’ father failed time after time as a businessman, but this turned out to have an advantage for Chuck and his siblings. When his father started a new company, he would buy lots of business stationery with the company’s name and letterhead on it, and lots of pencils, also with the company’s name on them. When the business failed, Chuck and his siblings had lots of paper and pencils to draw with. Chuck said, “We Joneses were rolling in tons of lovely white bond paper.” As an adult, Mr. Jones worked on cartoons featuring Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and other Looney Tunes characters.

• Charles Lederer became a famous screenwriter in Hollywood, but in early life he seldom worked. Instead, he slept until noon and spent a lot of time in swimming pools. This was something that his girlfriend didn’t like, so she took him out to eat at the Colony Restaurant, where she encouraged him to stop loafing and to find work, etc. Mr. Lederer listened to everything that his girlfriend had to say to him, then he stood up, took off his pants, and handed them to her, saying, “Here, you wear them.” Then he walked out of the restaurant.

• Comedian Joe E. Brown’s father was a house painter who took pride in his work. One day he was taking his son to a baseball game when they passed a house he had painted a few weeks before. However, as he looked at the house he noticed a spot on the porch that he had forgotten to paint, so the baseball game had to wait until he got some paint and finished the job. Mr. Brown writes, “I was a grown man before I realized examples such as this were the foundation of my desire to give my best in every job.”

• Tex Avery, the director of many classic Bugs Bunny cartoons and the man who gave Bugs his distinctive personality, was a perfectionist who worked long hours to make his cartoons funny. In fact, he once worked so hard that he delayed urinating for so long that he ended up in a hospital, where a catheter had to be used to empty his overfull bladder. Despite his hard work, he was insecure about his job, and when he was away from his desk he carried around a timing chart for cartoons so it always looked as if he were working.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Movies — Telegrams, Telephones, Tobacco, Work

Telegrams

• The production costs were mounting for the movie The Captain Hates the Sea, starring the noted actors — and drinkers — John Gilbert and Victor McLaglen, so Columbia Studios head Harry Cohn sent the director, Lewis Milestone, this telegram: “HURRY UP! THE COST IS STAGGERING!” Mr. Milestone sent back this telegram: “SO IS THE CAST.”

Telephones

• W.C. Fields didn’t care for Hollywood studio bigshots. Once, Louis B. Mayer called him. Mr. Fields’ friend, Corey Ford, answered the telephone and told him that Mr. Mayer was wondering why Mr. Fields hadn’t shown up for filming that day. Mr. Fields said, “Give him an evasive answer. Something on the order of ‘Drop dead.’” (When Mr. Fields died, humorist Frank Sullivan sent this telegram to one of Mr. Fields’ friends: “I HOPE HE GIVES ST. PETER AN EVASIVE ANSWER.”)

• While making the 1948 movie Foreign Affair, actress Jean Arthur worried that director Billy Wilder was giving the best close-ups not to herself, but to her co-star, Marlene Dietrich. Forty-five years later, Ms. Arthur gave Mr. Wilder a telephone call. She had just seen the movie on television and wanted to apologize.

• While making a motion picture, comedian Jack Oakie did not show up to work one day. The cast, crew, and director all were waiting for him in the hot sun. Mr. Oakie telephoned them. He said, “Guess where I am?” — then hung up.

• Comedian Bob Hope had clout. He once telephoned a movie theater in Palm Springs to ask when the movie started. The person who answered the telephone replied, “Mr. Hope, what time would you like it to start?”

Tobacco

• Hugh Herbert played comic support in movies of the 1930s and 1940s. He was also funny in real life. One day, insult comedian Jack E. Leonard saw Mr. Herbert smoking a cigar — from which clouds of smoke were billowing — at the Friars Club and asked him, “Don’t you ever inhale?” Mr. Herbert replied, “Not with you in the room.”

• Movie director John Waters once decided to use aversion therapy to get himself to quit smoking, so he ate all the butts in an ashtray. Unfortunately, he decided that they really didn’t taste that bad, and he kept on smoking.

Work

• While working at RKO, Lucille Ball had a notable encounter with movie star Katherine Hepburn. Lucy was having some studio portraits taken, and since she wanted to look her best, she went to Ms. Hepburn’s makeup man and talked him into making her up. All went well until Ms. Hepburn was announced and Lucy was thrown out of the makeup room. Suddenly she realized that she had left her tooth caps in the makeup room — an unfortunate event because you can’t take a glamour portrait with bad teeth. She tried to catch the make-up man’s attention through a small window, but he didn’t see her, so finally an angry Lucy threw a cup of coffee at him, missing him, but hitting Ms. Hepburn. Ms. Hepburn didn’t say anything to Lucy, but she got up and left the studio, saying she couldn’t work that day.

• While making the movie Shampoo, Warren Beatty had to ride a motorcycle around a corner, where he met Jack Warden coming the other way in a Mercedes. The two vehicles nearly collided, and Mr. Beatty put the motorcycle on the ground. A stagehand named Ron Webber came over to help him, and Mr. Beatty accidentally kicked the motorcycle into him, burning Mr. Webber’s arm without meaning to and without knowing he had burned it. The next day, Mr. Beatty saw the burn and asked Mr. Webber how he had gotten it. Mr. Webber replied, “Hey, man, you kicked that d*mn bike into me and burnt my arm.” Mr. Beatty then said, “Ron, from now on, you’re in all my films.” He kept his word — every time he made a film, he hired Mr. Webber.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Movies — Sex, Sound, Special Effects, Telegrams

Sex

• Judy Holliday, star of The Solid Gold Cadillac, was a wonderful comedian, but she occasionally had to deal with sexual advances from studio executives. During one such episode, she reached into her dress, pulled out her falsies, handed them to the studio executive, and said, “Here. I think these are what you’re after.”

Sound

• While making his very first movie, in the days in which sound equipment was unsophisticated, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen ran into a problem trying to get the sound of the voice of Charlie McCarthy, his dummy, onto the movie soundtrack. Eventually, the source of the problem was discovered to be a soundman who moved the microphone over to Charlie McCarthy whenever the dummy had a line.

• The voice of the character Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies is menacing and easily recognizable — filmmaker George Lucas wanted the character, who has been badly burned and must stay in his costume to survive, to sound like a “walking iron lung.” The voice was created by using a microphone inside a breathing regulator used by scuba divers.

Special Effects

• For the movie The Time Machine, Wah Ming Chang and Gene Warren needed to show a volcano erupting and its lava flowing through a town. Therefore, they created a miniature town and cooked 250 gallons of red-colored oatmeal to represent the lava. Unfortunately, they cooked the oatmeal on Friday and did the filming on Monday. Only after pouring the containers on the set during filming did they discover that the oatmeal had spoiled. The special effects room was so small that Mr. Chang and Mr. Warren found themselves pinned to a wall by 250 gallons of stinking, spoiled oatmeal. Nevertheless, they eventually filmed the scene correctly and ended up winning two Oscars for their special effects in The Time Machine.

• In Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws, he used a huge mechanical shark. During one scene in which Richard Dreyfuss’ character goes underwater in a protective cage, Mr. Spielberg used a real great white shark. The real shark was much smaller than the mechanical shark, so to make the shark appear as big as the mechanical shark, Mr. Spielberg used a little person (aka midget or dwarf) to stand in for Mr. Dreyfuss in the scene.

Stars

• When Psycho was first released, director Alfred Hitchcock ordered that no audience member be admitted after the film began. The audience assumed that something shocking would happen right away, although the film begins slowly. Actually, Mr. Hitchcock was doing something radically different — killing off the big star, Janet Leigh, early in the film. Mr. Hitchcock didn’t want members of the audience to arrive late, then keep wondering when Ms. Leigh was going to appear on screen.

• Once a star, always a star. When she was in her 70s, child star Shirley Temple showed up for a People magazine photo shoot featuring breast cancer survivors. She announced, “I want to be in the middle of the shot because that’s the star position. They can’t cut you out if you’re in the middle.” All of the other people in the photo shoot were happy to give her the star position.

Telegrams

• Peter Lorre was an excellent actor who became renowned for his performance as a child murderer in Fritz Lang’s film M. Because he was Jewish, he left Germany at the beginning of the Nazis’ rise to power and moved to Vienna. Nazi propagandist Paul Joseph Goebbels did not know that Mr. Lorre was Jewish and asked him to come back to Germany. Mr. Lorre replied with this telegram: “THERE ISN’T ROOM IN GERMANY FOR TWO MURDERERS LIKE HITLER AND ME.”

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Movies — Problem-Solving, Screenplays, Sex

Problem-Solving

• Early in his career, filmmaker John Waters and the actors in his films lived in cheap lodgings. However, they had no trouble getting repairs made. For example, when the heater conked out, Mr. Waters would simply telephone the landlord and say, “We know where you live, and since we don’t have any heat, we’ll be there tonight to stay with your family.”

• Movie crews sometimes have interesting assignments. When Fred Astaire’s Top Hat was ready to film, Benito Mussolini controlled Italy, and the movie’s producers knew that they could not get permission to film in Venice; therefore, they ordered the movie crew, “Build us Venice.” They got what they wanted.

• Action star Jackie Chan was injured during the filming of his action movie Rumble in the Bronx, so he had to wear a cast over his foot. No problem. Over the cast, Mr. Chan wore a sock that had been painted to resemble a tennis shoe and continued filming.

• While filming the movie The Flame of the Desert in Egypt, opera singer Geraldine Farrar was so annoyed by the stink of a camel that each day she drenched it with perfume. This solved the problem, but at great expense.

Screenplays

• Filmmaker George Lucas finds writing difficult. Early in his career, he wrote the script for his first feature, THX 1138, which was about a future dystopia. At one point, he looked at the draft and decided it was terrible. He showed it to a friend, Francis Ford Coppola, who read it and agreed that it was terrible: “It is. You’re absolutely right.” Nevertheless, he learned to write, and he created the screenplays (with some help from friends) for American Graffiti and Star Wars.

• W.C. Fields used to take great delight in ripping off movie studios. He would write a script, then sell it to his movie studio for $25,000. The movie studio then would give the script back to him. However, because Mr. Fields had story approval, he would reject the script, then write another script and sell it to the studio for an additional $25,000.

• Fred Astaire was very complimentary to the writers of his movies. Betty Comden and Adolph Green once read one of their scripts to him, and he said, “You can’t ever top that. Nothing could ever be as good as that.”

Sex

• Marco Perella, a Texan actor, worked with Renée Zellweger before she made it big. One day, she wanted to play cards with Marco and three other men in a trailer during a break and because it was cold, she wanted to close the door of the trailer. Marco explained to sweet, innocent Renée that closing the door wasn’t a good idea because of the gossip that was sure to be aroused. When Renée understood what Marco was saying, she went to the door of the trailer and shouted, “ATTENTION, EVERYBODY! I JUST WANT EVERYONE TO KNOW THAT I’M CLOSING THIS DOOR SO WE CAN GET WARM, AND THAT DOESN’T MEAN WE’RE HAVING SEX! WE’RE PLAYING CARDS! WE’RE NOT SCREWING! NO HANKY-PANKY HERE! EVERYBODY, RELAX! NO SEX! NO SEX! NO SEX!” She then closed the door and said, “Deal.”

• Marilyn Monroe went to the Beverly Hills Hotel one morning to have breakfast with a friend, Nunnally Johnson. When the doorman rang Mr. Johnson’s room to announce Ms. Monroe’s presence, Mr. Johnson said, “Send her up.” However, the doorman explained that it was hotel policy not to allow young ladies to visit gentlemen in their rooms. Mr. Johnson replied, “She isn’t a young lady — she’s a call girl. Send her up.” The doorman sent her up.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Movies — Problem-Solving

Problem-Solving

• In 1948, a year when a scandal could ruin an actor’s career, Robert Mitchum was arrested for possession of marijuana. When he was asked what his career was, he replied, “Former actor.” Newspaper articles about the arrest included the joke, and instead of having his career ruined, Mr. Mitchum found it enhanced. It also helped when articles included his answer to reporters who asked what life on a prison farm was like after spending 60 days there: “Just like Palm Springs — without the riffraff, of course.” (Mr. Mitchum continued to gain such publicity throughout his career. At Cannes, a young lady he was with took off the top of her bikini in front of photographers. Being a perfect gentleman, Mr. Mitchum preserved her modesty by covering her breasts — with his hands.)

• When move producer Darryl F. Zanuck purchased the film rights of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, some people felt that he was buying the rights to prevent a movie ever being made of the book, which criticized banks and big farm interests. However, Mr. Zanuck did make a movie based on the book — the movie, starring Henry Fonda, is a classic. Because so many powerful people opposed the making of a movie based on The Grapes of Wrath, the making of the movie was kept secret. Whenever anyone asked which movie they were filming, they gave the title of another movie. In addition, Mr. Zanuck hired extra stagehands — that is, bodyguards — for the making of this particular film.

• Anyone who has ever seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail knows that in the movie King Arthur and his knights do not ride horses; instead, they are followed by people using coconuts to make horse-riding noises. During the making of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the budget was quite low and filming had to be completed in only five and a half weeks. In fact, the comedy troupe couldn’t afford to use horses, which would have lengthened the time it took to make the movie. However, they managed to turn a weakness into a strength by substituting the use of coconuts for the horses.

• In the film The Seven Samurai, some samurai are given a test. They are invited into a building where a man is hiding with a stick. The first samurai crosses the threshold, and the man hidden inside hits him with the stick. This samurai fails the test. Later, the second samurai crosses the threshold, dodges the blow, and hits the man who has the stick. This samurai also fails the test. Still later, the third samurai pauses at the threshold, studies the footprints in the dirt, and realizes that a man is hiding inside. This samurai passes the test.

• Jack Palence excellently played a bad guy in the 1953 movie classic Shane. However, he was a bad horseman. After several tries, he made a perfect dismount, so director George Stevens used that shot in the movie every time Mr. Palence dismounted — and, by running the film backward, every time Mr. Palence mounted. In addition, in one scene Mr. Palence was supposed to gallop into town. But Mr. Palence was such a poor horseman, he finally was told to walk the horse into town. (This scene works very well in the movie.)

• Mike Nichols directed the controversial film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Of course, the people behind the film worried that it would be censored by the Catholic Church’s League of Decency, but Mr. Nichols came up with a plan to have the League approve it. He arranged for Jackie Kennedy to watch the movie while sitting beside the monsignor who headed the League and for Jackie to turn to the monsignor after the film ended and say, “How Jack would have loved it!” The plan worked; the League approved the film.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Movies — Prejudice, Preparation, Problem-Solving

Prejudice

• Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing is deliberately ambiguous. In it, a black man is unjustly killed, and in retaliation a mob of black people burns down a pizzeria owned by a white man. At its end, two quotations appear. The quotation by Martin Luther King preaches nonviolent resistance to injustice, while the quotation by Malcolm X says that violence in defense may be needed when blacks are attacked. When a reporter asked Mr. Lee what the right thing is, Mr. Lee replied, “I don’t know. I know what the wrong thing is: racism.”

• Many of the top executives in the early days of Hollywood were Republicans. When Irving Thalberg’s lawyer, Eddie Loeb, discovered that actor William Haines was a Democrat, he went straight to Mr. Thalberg and told him, “You know you have a Democratic snake here?” Fortunately, Mr. Thalberg, a Republican, was more enlightened than other Hollywood executives, so he replied, “The man’s entitled to his own opinion,” and he let Mr. Haines keep his job.

• Peter Sellers, famous as Inspector Clouseau in Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther movies, was Jewish, although not everyone realized that. Mary, the sister of comedian Terry-Thomas, met Peter in a hotel in Brighton, England, and told him that he would like it there, for among other attractions, no Jews were there. Mr. Sellers leaned across the table toward Mary, winked, and said, “Well, Mary, there is now!”

• While filming Hurry Sundown in Louisiana in 1967, Jane Fonda was horrified to see prejudice at first hand. Black actors had leading roles in the movie, and this upset many white Louisiana residents. These prejudiced people objected to black actors using a motel pool, and they wrote threatening letters and slashed tires.

• During the Civil Rights era, black comedian (and occasional movie actor) Dick Gregory put his career on the back burner so that he could participate in gaining rights for his people. When he was asked why he was practically giving up his career to do this, he replied, “They didn’t laugh Hitler out of existence, did they?”

• The famous Norwegian actress Liv Ullman was born in Tokyo. After she was born, the Japanese nurse told her mother, “I’m afraid it’s a girl. Would you prefer to inform your husband yourself?”

Preparation

• In 1977, Jane Fonda starred in the movie Julia, based on a friendship that playwright Lillian Hellman had when she was a young woman. To prepare for her role as the playwright, Ms. Fonda read half of a play that Ms. Hellman had written, then she set the play aside, pretended to be Ms. Hellman, and wrote the second half of the play.

• Oprah Winfrey took seriously her role as Mattie in the television movie The Women of Brewster Place. To prepare for the role, she pretended to be Mattie and wrote a 200-page journal using the character’s voice and point of view.

Problem-Solving

• Early in his career, Harold Lloyd looked for a way to break into movies. He used to sit on a bench outside a film studio in hopes that he would be hired as an extra. As he waited, he noticed that many of the actors and extras walked out of the studio in their makeup to eat lunch, then they returned to the studio after their lunch break. Therefore, Mr. Lloyd put on makeup, and the movie studio guards, thinking that he was an actor, allowed him to enter the studio grounds along with the real actors. Inside the studio, Mr. Lloyd made some friends and started acting in films. He quickly became a famous silent-movie comedian and the star of such classic comedies as Safety Last and The Freshman.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Movies — Practical Jokes, Prejudice

Practical Jokes

• Hispanic movie star Antonio Banderas occasionally played practical jokes when he was a member of a traveling troupe of theatrical actors in his native Spain. For example, an actor on stage was required to eat a piece of bread, so Mr. Banderas put lots of salt and vinegar on the bread before it was taken on stage. However, being a member of this particular traveling troupe was not all fun and games. The actors put on plays that defied dictator Francesco Franco, so the actors, including Mr. Banderas, were sometimes arrested.

• Margaret Lockwood is an English actress who appeared in The Lady Vanishes, which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Mr. Hitchcock enjoyed playing practical jokes; he once asked Ms. Lockwood to sit in a chair that had been wired so that it gave her an electric shock.

Prejudice

• As a very out and very effeminate homosexual in London before the rise of the gay rights movement, Quentin Crisp was frequently beaten up, and he became as much of an expert in avoiding violent confrontations as one could become through experience. Once, some homophobes started following him, so he began to walk faster until a taxi appeared. He hailed the taxi and got into it. Frequently, confrontations would end at that point, but the young homophobes surrounded the taxi and the taxi driver ordered Mr. Crisp to get out — at other times, taxi drivers had driven slowly but persistently through the crowd of homophobes. When Mr. Crisp was pulled out of the taxi, the homophobes started to beat him and he fell to the ground. He was afraid that they would start kicking him, but he managed to say, “I seem to have annoyed you gentlemen in some way.” This dignified sentence was so unexpected that the homophobes let him get up and walk away, although they continued to shout insults after him. Actor John Hurt played Mr. Crisp in a celebrated 1975 made-for-TV movie titled The Naked Civil Servant.

• Hollywood screenwriter Charles Lederer was stationed in India during World War II. While there, he accompanied a friend on a visit to a British woman who vigorously denounced the Jews. This was a mistake, because Mr. Lederer’s father was a Jew, and Mr. Lederer was known for his remarkable ability to get revenge on people who made him angry. The British woman had a cabinet in her home, on top of which a very expensive vase was displayed. Mr. Lederer stood by the cabinet and asked, “What do you have against the Jews?” The British woman insincerely replied, “Why, I have nothing against the Jews.” Mr. Lederer then smashed the very expensive vase and said, “You have now.”

• Sometimes people who believe in racial stereotypes make themselves look like the fools they are. Once, James “Jimmy” Wong Howe, a famous Hollywood cinematographer, was preparing for the opening of a Chinese restaurant he had invested in. He noticed a news photographer trying to take a shot of the new restaurant despite being in danger of being run over because he was standing in the street. Mr. Howe told the photographer, “If you snap on a wide-angle lens, you can move the camera up on the sidewalk.” The photographer looked up at Mr. Wong and said, “Look, Chinaman, let me take the pictures and you go cook your noodles.”

• Groucho Marx and his wife looked for a beach club where their children could enjoy the ocean. However, Groucho was Jewish at a time when many clubs would not allow Jews to be members. When Groucho applied to become a member of a beach club, the manager said, “I don’t know if you are aware of this, but we have a very restricted clientele here.” Groucho knew that “restricted clientele” meant “no Jews allowed,” so he mocked prejudice by telling the manager, “Look, Mister, I am Jewish. My wife is not Jewish. That means my kids are only half Jewish. Can’t they go into the water up to their knees?”

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Movies — Politics, Practical Jokes

Politics

• When Michael Moore, director of Roger and Me, was in high school, the voting age was lowered to 18, so he called up the county clerk and asked, “Uh, I’m gonna be eighteen in a few weeks. If I can vote, does that mean I can also run for office?” It did, so he ran for school board on this platform: “Fire the high school principal and the assistant principal!” Of course, the adults got upset, so five of them ran against him. They split the anti-Michael vote, and young Michael was elected. The day after his political victory, he walked down the school hallway, with his shirt tail hanging out, and the principal said to him, “Good morning, Mr. Moore.” Why did the principal call this high school student “Mr.”? Because the high school student was now his boss.

• Robert Redford starred in The Candidate, a movie about a naive man running for the U.S. Senate without any idea of what he would do if he won the election. Instead of paying extras, the movie crew handed out to passersby political posters with Mr. Redford’s face on them. When a crowd gathered, Mr. Redford appeared and acted. Sometimes people thought he was really running for office and so they would ask him questions. Someone once asked him, “What about Welfare?” Mr. Redford replied, “Beats me.”

• Groucho Marx once went on a goodwill tour to Mexico at a time when that country was politically unstable and its President changed frequently. After being told that his goodwill group would meet with the Mexican President the next day, Groucho asked, “What assurance have I got that he’ll still be President by four o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”

Practical Jokes

• Andre the Giant, who played Fezzik in the movie version of The Princess Bride by William Goldman, once was wrestling in Mexico while Arnold Schwarzenegger was in the audience. After winning the wrestling match, Andre gestured for Mr. Schwarzenegger to join him in the ring, then as the fans cheered and shouted, he told Mr. Schwarzenegger that he spoke Spanish and the fans were shouting for him to take his shirt off and strike some bodybuilding poses. Mr. Schwarzenegger happily obliged, then discovered later that Andre had been putting him on — the fans had NOT been shouting for him to take his shirt off and strike some bodybuilding poses.

• Some practical jokes played on cartoonists found their way into actual cartoons. For example, Tex Avery, the man who created Bugs Bunny’s personality, remembers a boy who worked in the mail room playing a practical joke on cartoon gagmen Friz Freleng and Tedd Pierce. The mail boy created a fake firecracker out of cardboard, painted it red and put a fuse on it, then he lit the fuse and threw the fake firecracker into the gag writers’ room. Of course, they scattered, but nothing happened. The next time the mail boy threw something into the room, they remained seated and ignored it — of course, this time, the mail boy had thrown a real firecracker.

• In 1952, Tex Avery created one of his most memorable gags in the cartoon “Magical Maestro.” In the cartoon, a hair appeared to get caught in the projector and so was projected on screen. However, the cartoon character Poochini eventually notices the hair, stops singing, and removes the hair from the screen. This gag fooled many employees who ran the projectors. Some complained to MGM, which ordered that each film can containing the cartoon be labeled with a warning telling employees to ignore the hair, as it was part of the cartoon.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Movies — Mothers, Music, Names

Mothers

• Hollywood director Jim Cruze bought his mother a fig farm, then hired men to buy her figs at outrageous prices. Once, someone offered to buy the fig farm from her. Mr. Cruze advised, “I wouldn’t sell it — not when you get so much for your figs.”

• The child of actress Margaret Rutherford was a transsexual who went from being a man to being a woman. A wonderful mother, Margaret said about her child, “We loved him as a man, and now we’ll love her as a woman.”

Music

• After Grace Moore became a movie star with One Night of Love, audiences at her music concerts began requesting song after song from the movie, including “Ciribiribin.” While she was preparing a concert with conductor Willem Mengelberg, they looked at requests for songs for the upcoming concert. Over and over again, “Ciribiribin” was requested. This surprised Mr. Mengelberg, and he asked her what “Ciribiribin” was. She explained that it was an Italian folk song that was much too inconsequential to be sung with an orchestra and it was being requested because she had sung it in One Night of Love. Therefore, the two agreed to have her sing the song with only a piano providing accompaniment. However, at the concert the applause she received for this little song was so great that Mr. Mengelberg motioned for her to sing it again, and as she sang it various instruments from the orchestra joined in. After the concert, Mr. Mengelberg told her, “Regardless of who wrote that little song, where it came from, or whatever qualities it may have as a musical composition, if you in singing it can make an audience so happy, sing it until you die.”

• The movie Star Wars is 110 minutes long, and music plays for 90 of those minutes. Filmmaker George Lucas decided to have a musical theme for each of the major characters — the music for Darth Vader is very easily recognizable — and the character’s theme plays when that character is on the screen. Mr. Lucas got the idea from the musical composition Peter and the Wolf, which has themes for each of its major characters.

Names

• Hungarian producer Alexander Korda was the man who produced the film The Third Man, but after producer David O. Selznick bought the film for distribution in America, he put his name on it. One year later, Mr. Korda met Mr. Selznick and told him, “You know, David, I just hope I don’t die before you.” Mr. Selznick asked why, and Mr. Korda replied, “Because I hate to think of you going to my gravestone, scratching off my name, and putting yours on instead.”

• Jane Withers was a child actress who became famous because in the movie Bright Eyes, the character she played was mean to America’s darling, Shirley Temple. Even before Jane was born, her mother wanted her to be a star. She decided to name her daughter “Jane” because she thought that “Withers” was a long name for a movie marquee, so a short first name was needed so the entire name would fit on the marquee.

• When Luciano Pavarotti decided to make a movie, he met with the movie’s producer to discuss the name his character should have. The meeting was held in Giorgio Fini’s restaurant, and the food that day was cooked especially well — so well, in fact, that Mr. Pavarotti decided to name his character — with Mr. Fini’s permission — Giorgio Fini. The movie was titled Yes, Giorgio.

• Opera singer Helen Traubel knew a movie star who was very fond of talking about his famous friends. Once, a less famous actor walked by, and he said, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Ms. Traubel’s husband, Bill, murmured to her, “He’s a name dropper.”

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