The Gnat's Wazoo Movies Trivia Quiz

Answer: Francois Truffaut

He was only in it for about fifteen seconds, tops, but after this cameo, Truffaut's directing career came to a screeching halt. It was the height of selling out, especially considering Truffaut's elevated standing in the cinematic community, to appear in what had to be one of the most shameless attempts to cash in on the gravy train "Star Wars" had opened up for sci-fi films! All this just to do a walk-on in a movie that reeked of opportunism.

Sheesh!

Answer: The Tempest

Disney Studios did a lot of the special effects work on this film. It was also one of the only films to have an entirely electronic musical score. A very fetching Anne Francis and a pre-farce Leslie Nielsen starred in this universally lauded gem, along with Walter Pidgeon, who almost never consented to star in anything substandard. Look out for Earl Holliman and "Oscar" from "The Six Million Dollar Man" and a few other recognizable faces in this intense movie.

Answer: Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle

This was a slice out of the life of Dorothy Parker, during her tenure at "Condé Nast", "The New Yorker" and as a Hollywood screenwriter, as she palled around with her friends and colleagues at the "Algonquin Round Table". Her tragic affairs, her brutal marriage to a drunken soldier, and her acerbic wit are all on display in this movie, where she is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. (I think I would have picked comedian Margaret Smith or Susan Sarandon to play her, though.)

Campbell Scott plays a very unconvincing Robert Benchley (John Lovitz with a moustache...what do you think?), but the actors who play Alexander Wolcott and George S. Kauffman are bang-on! Rudolph's production crew, as it did in "The Moderns", a film also set in the 20s, reproduces the era faultlessly.

Answer: An orchestra

Yep! A regular, garden variety, underpaid, overstudied and overworked symphony orchestra played the eerie, otherworldly music for the "light show" portion of "2001". If you'll listen closely, you'll notice that no percussion was used at all, just strings, woodwinds, horns and maybe a piano.

Answer: Carter J. Burke

Reiser played the sleazy, manipulative, slave-to-the-bottom-line character, Carter J. Burke, in the riveting sequel to "Alien", directed by James Cameron. He was second only to the monster on Ripley's short list of losers!

Answer: False

Nope! Peter Hyams directed the disappointing sequel to what was probably one of the most incredible, poetically-directed movies ever made. "2010", a pretentious mess, starred Roy Scheider (replacing William Sylvester as Heywood Floyd), Helen Mirren, John Lithgow and Bob Balaban.

The star of the original, Keir Dullea, makes a cameo as David Bowman, or his wraith. It's a truly awful movie and a tremendous letdown!

Answer: Linda Harrison

Ms. Harrison appeared briefly in Tim Burton's remake of "PotA", along with Charlton Heston, as "the woman in cart". After this movie, however, poor Ms. Harrison was in "Airport", the immediate sequel to "PotA", "Beneath The Planet of the Apes", "Cocoon" and its sequel, a few grade "B" films, a bit of TV, and then disappeared into near complete obscurity. Heston, also, was never quite the same again. Once a charismatic, flaming liberal, after this movie, he started his inexorable move to the right, to the point where he became a stark-staring Bircher! Ms. Harrison was married to the head of 20th Century Fox, Richard Zanuck, the very year "PotA" was released and their marriage lasted for 10 years! She still occasionally stars in Zanuck productions.

Though the make-up for the original movie was much ballyhooed, the ape-man make-up for "2001" was much more convincing, and "Apes" was released in the same year as "2001"!

Some major talent was used in this movie because, along with Harrison and Heston, there were: Maurice Evans, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter and James Daly. It was remarked by one movie critic at the time that Ms. Hunter, who played chimpanzee doctor Zira, had "fantastic eyes". One great line she uttered in the film, as Heston's Taylor was about to kiss her a platonic farewell, was: "Okay, but you're so darned ugly!"

Answer: sanctuary in my tribe

The above line was spoken by the character, Stilgar, leader of the Fremen, in the 1984 release of David Lynch's treatment of Herbert's novel. This character meets the main characters, Paul and Jessica Atreides, for the second time as they escape pursuit and capture in the "south polar region" of Arrakis.

"Dune", the adaptation of Herbert's epic novel, about a time far in the future, where space travel is dependent on the cultivation and distribution of a substance called "melange", was an utter bomb at the box office.

Though well-acted, a visual feast and fairly faithful to the novel, nobody really wanted to watch what was essentially a paean to the imagined benefits of LSD, fraught with religiosity and pomp. However, though the movie itself didn't do well in theaters, it probably did well on video, since every video store on Earth seems to have stocked it in multiples since the days that VCRs became popular! It also started or revived the careers of many people, including: Patrick Stewart, Kyle MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, Everett McGill, Dean Stockwell, Brad Dourif, Jurgen Prochnow, Freddie Jones and Alicia Witt.

There is a well-known, badly edited release of this film that occasionally runs on televison, and Lynch himself has disowned it. Many mistakes in editing, dialogue and denouement are made in this version, which has an extra 55 minutes tagged onto it. If you look to the credits that used to be attributed to Lynch, you will see the names "Alan Smithee", the all-purpose Hollywood pseudonym, as director and "Judas Booth", incorporating the names "Judas", betrayer of Jesus, and "John Wilkes Booth", assassin of Abraham Lincoln, as screenwriter. Lynch must have truly hated the edit! After seeing it, you may understand why. As if to make up for this version, the Sci-Fi Channel has done a remake and a faithful sequel to it over the past five years.

Answer: They had him wearing glasses.

Yep! Apparently, someone in Burton's crew thought all the DC heroes wore glasses in their secret identities, and figured they'd stick a pair on Brucie, played by both Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer! As any faithful reader of Batman and Detective Comics knows, Brucey-boy has 20-20 vision and the mask he wears as Batman conceals his identity just fine so Bruce doesn't have to wear any disguise as a civilian.

If I'm not mistaken, I think George Clooney had them, too, in the execrable "Batman and Robin", the sequel that brought the franchise down.

Answer: In prophylactics

As a matter of fact, he was awful at recognizing authentic art, had nothing to do with Chinese food, (he seemed to prefer French,) and his incredibly abrasive personality was not something he should have passed on to others in a self-help book. He got it by helping people avoid pregnancy and STDs!

John Lone was an odd choice for the role of Bertrand Stone. First of all, he was Chinese and the last name of the character is "Stone"; second, there were almost no major Chinese industrialists of any stripe in the United States or Europe in the 20s, least of all in a widespread, personal hygiene field like prophylactics.

Just about no one but Linda Fiorentino's character, Rachel, seemed to like Stone at all in "The Moderns", and when Hart, Keith Carradine's character, loses to him in a boxing match over Rachel, his friends are either greatly disappointed in him or flock to him even closer, because everybody generally wanted to see Stone taken down a peg!

This film was directed by Alan Rudolph, a former protégé of Robert Altman, and was one of three excellent movies he did in the mid-80s.

Answer: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

Released in 1966, this is a film that should have walked away with the Oscar for best picture that year and should have furnished Burton with his first Oscar for best actor! A gritty, dark film about the realistic machinations in the world of cold war espionage, it also starred Claire Bloom, Cyril Cusack, Michael Holdern, (Lillian Hellman's twin brother,) and Oskar Werner, (William Buckley's twin brother). With a cast like that, how could you possibly make a bad movie?

The above line was spoken by Burton's character, Alec Leames, as he buys weekly groceries at a neighborhood market. He must act unstable to establish a back story for the mission at hand.

A stark contrast to the comic book-style adventures of James Bond and Derek Flint.

Answer: False

This movie starred Bernie Hamilton and well known TV actress Barbara Barrie as an interracial, married couple dealing with social taboos of the times. Though it dealt with what was then a tinderbox of an issue, it generally passed without much notice.

Though it dealt frankly with the subject, diplomatically, in 1964, it was definitely not the first to deal with interracial romantic entanglements. One other such movie was "Imitation of Life", made twice, roughly 25 years apart, which tackled the subject as well. The original (1934) starred Claudette Colbert, Louise Beavers, Rochelle Hudson and Fredi Washington, and the remake (1958) starred Lana Turner, Juanita Moore, Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner.

The main theme of the film was the relationship between a white woman and a black woman and the daughters of both women. The daughter of the black woman, a mulatto who could pass for caucasian, led a shallow and self-hating life as a plaything of the white men she entertained. She has an epiphany when her long-suffering mother dies.

"Imitation" was a very poignant, haunting film, both times. Another notable film on this subject was "Pinkie".

Answer: Leondegrance in "Excalibur"

"Excalibur", a beautifully rendered, magical retelling of the legend of King Arthur, was Patrick Stewart's first major film role, playing the part of Arthur's future father-in-law, Sir Leondegrance. Stewart's first general exposure had been in the teleplay, "I, Claudius" on the BBC and PBS.

Nigel Terry, "John" in "The Lion In Winter", played Arthur in this film about the legend of the king. Nicol Williamson played Merlin, and Helen Mirren, looking very different than she does today, played the vengeful Morgana. I guarantee you you will not recognize Gabriel Byrne here, playing a very different type of character than he usually plays.

Answer: The Lion In Winter

"The Lion In Winter" was the film that should have assured Peter O'Toole his first Oscar for best actor. It was also the film that launched the movie careers of former James Bond Timothy Dalton, future Knight of the British Empire, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Nigel Terry, who would go on to play King Arthur in "Excalibur", as mentioned before.

Amazingly enough, it also revived the career of Katherine Hepburn, whose career had been dormant since the mid-fifties. Both O'Toole and Hepburn acted their kiesters off in this film, a happy marriage of the contemporary dramatics of Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee and the trappings of "Ivanhoe". This is one of my very favorite films of all time!

Hepburn won a unique, shared Academy Award for best actress, along with Barbra Streisand, in 1968, thanks to this movie.

Answer: Ralph Bakshi

Ralph Bakshi, the man who revived "Mighty Mouse" for Saturday morning TV, and got into a lot of trouble for it, produced and directed this animated, very first version of "The Lord of the Rings", back in 1978. What was unique about this film is that a good portion of the film was "animated" by painting over filmed scenes and actors.

Bakshi was the same man who made the first "Fritz the Cat" movie six years previous, along with the raunchy slice-of-life movie "Heavy Traffic".