50 Fun Facts About The Film Industry

The Hollywood Sign went up in 1923 as a temporary billboard advertising what in the hills above Los Angeles?

A housing development called Hollywoodland was the product on sale. The sign was only meant to be temporary, and its last four letters stayed up until 1949.

Movie previews are called trailers because early cinemas originally screened them at which point in the programme?

After the main film was the original slot, so the adverts literally trailed the feature. Audiences walked out before they played, so they moved to the front and kept the name.

Which candy saw sales soar after E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial used it as alien bait when the maker of M&M's declined?

Reese's Pieces were a fairly new product when Mars turned the film down, reportedly fearing that the alien would frighten children.

Whose star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame hangs on a wall because he did not want his name walked on?

Muhammad Ali shares his name with the Islamic prophet, so his star was mounted upright. The committee had decided that boxing counted as a form of live performance.

What stood in for blood in the black-and-white shower scene of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 thriller Psycho?

Chocolate syrup photographed better in black and white than stage blood, while the stabbing sounds were made by puncturing a melon.

Which word for a hit film began in the 1940s as press slang for bombs that could flatten a street?

Blockbuster jumped from wartime bombs to cinema in 1943, when trade adverts used the word to sell the RKO war picture Bombardier.

Independent filmmakers first moved to Hollywood partly to escape the patent enforcers of which famous inventor's trust?

Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company had its home base far away on the East Coast, which made its patents much harder to enforce in California.

Which producer holds the record for most Oscars won by one person, including one with seven miniature statuettes?

Walt Disney won 22 competitive Academy Awards, a record. His separate honorary prize for Snow White came as one full-sized statuette and seven little ones.

Nollywood, a film industry that grew out of a 1990s boom in straight-to-video movies, belongs to which African country?

Nigeria's video boom is usually dated to the 1992 hit Living in Bondage. The Nollywood label has been traced to a New York Times article of 2002.

Which Hollywood studio's films open with Leo, a roaring lion framed by a loop of film and a Latin motto?

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer inherited the lion from Goldwyn Pictures, whose publicist Howard Dietz chose it in 1916 as a tribute to his old university's mascot.

Bollywood, the Hindi-language film industry, is based in which Indian city whose older name supplies the B?

Mumbai was long known as Bombay, and the nickname Bollywood simply blends that older name with Hollywood.

Which 1927 Al Jolson picture helped end the silent era as the first feature film with lip-synchronised speech?

The Jazz Singer has only a few isolated talking sequences, yet its success signalled that silent pictures were finished.

Which 1995 release, Pixar's debut feature, was the first full-length film to be animated entirely on computers?

Toy Story needed only 27 animators, who were drawn less by the mediocre pay than by the chance to make cinema history.

Which 1997 release was first in cinema history to earn more than one billion dollars at the worldwide box office?

Titanic passed the billion-dollar mark in March 1998 and stayed the highest-grossing film until its own director's Avatar overtook it in 2010.

Which 1975 thriller is seen as a turning point for Hollywood after opening unusually wide with heavy advertising?

Jaws became the first film to earn $100 million in US theatrical rentals, helped by about two dozen prime-time TV adverts each night in the days before it opened.

Which thriller, already a winner at Cannes, became the first non-English-language film to win the Best Picture Oscar?

Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho, was also the first South Korean film to receive any Academy Award recognition at all.

Which award, first won in 1955 by the American drama Marty, is the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival?

The Palme d'Or replaced the festival's Grand Prix, was itself dropped in 1964, and came back for good in 1975.

Which fruit tops the trophy handed out for the year's worst films on the eve of the Oscars?

Raspberry, in the rude sense of blowing one, gives the Golden Raspberry Awards, or Razzies, their name. The golf-ball-sized fruit sits on a film reel above a gold-painted jar lid.

Hollywood rolled out CinemaScope and other widescreen formats in the 1950s to win audiences back from which new rival?

Television had sent cinema attendance into serious decline by 1950, so 20th Century Fox bet that a far wider picture would set its releases apart.

Which streaming company began in 1997 as a California start-up that rented DVDs to customers through the post?

Netflix was founded by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings in Scotts Valley and did not launch its streaming service until 2007.

Which film won Best Picture at the 2017 Oscars moments after La La Land had been announced as the winner by mistake?

Moonlight was declared the winner more than two minutes into the La La Land producers' speeches, when crew members walked on stage to explain the error.

Which colour process, celebrated for the saturated look of The Wizard of Oz, ran three strips of film through a camera?

Technicolor's special three-strip cameras lasted until the mid-1950s, when a single strip of colour negative let a standard camera do the job.

Which actor's institute took over a Utah film festival that was later renamed after his 1969 outlaw role?

Robert Redford played the Sundance Kid opposite Paul Newman and gave the name to land he bought in Utah's Wasatch Mountains. His Sundance Institute later took over the festival.

Which piece of set equipment is snapped shut before every take so editors can synchronise the picture with the sound?

A clapperboard gives editors one sharp noise and one visible movement to line up, which matters because film stock reacts to light and not to sound.

Which company's founder George Eastman struck a 1908 deal making it the sole film supplier to America's movie producers?

Kodak kept making motion-picture stock after directors including Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese lobbied the big studios into a 2015 supply deal.

In which European country is the Tabernas Desert, where many spaghetti westerns of the 1960s were shot?

Spain's Almería province looks so like the American Southwest that a western town was built there for Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More. The set later became a theme park.

Which French term, first applied by critic Nino Frank in 1946, labels shadowy Hollywood crime dramas of the 1940s?

Film noir literally means black film, and most of the American professionals who made these pictures never heard the label at the time.

The Oscar statuette shows an Art Deco figure standing on a reel of film and holding which object?

A sword is gripped by the figure, a knight, whose reel of film has five spokes for the Academy's original branches. The gold-plated bronze statuette weighs 8.5 pounds.

Which oddly named film-crew job is the chief assistant to either the gaffer or the key grip?

Best boy is first recorded in print in 1931, when a newspaper explained that the gaffer's first assistant went by that title.

Foley artists, named after the Universal Studios veteran Jack Foley, recreate what for a film during post-production?

Everyday sound effects such as footsteps, swishing clothes and squeaky doors are performed in time with the picture. Jack Foley kept at it until his death in 1967.

Which term describes an object that drives a plot yet hardly matters itself, like the statuette in The Maltese Falcon?

A MacGuffin can stay a complete mystery: the briefcase in Pulp Fiction motivates several characters, and its contents are never revealed.

Which fake name did the Directors Guild of America credit from 1968 when a director wanted to disown a film?

Alan Smithee was largely retired in 2000, after a 1997 comedy about a director with that very name ended up credited to the pseudonym itself.

Which stock audio clip, a man's cry recorded for the 1951 film Distant Drums, did Ben Burtt slip into Star Wars?

The Wilhelm scream went on to feature in every Star Wars and Indiana Jones film made under George Lucas. It is thought to be the voice of actor Sheb Wooley.

In which city did the Lumière brothers hold their first paid public film screening, at the Grand Café in December 1895?

Paris saw the show in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café, nine months after a private screening of Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.

Which name did America's first storefront cinemas take from the price of a ticket?

Nickelodeon joins the five-cent coin charged at the door to the ancient Greek odeion, a roofed theatre. The little converted shops flourished from about 1905 to 1915.

Which country developed the IMAX giant-screen format, whose first film was shown at Expo '70 in Osaka?

Canada was home to the four co-founders of the IMAX company, and their first giant-screen production was called Tiger Child.

In which US state was the drive-in theater patented by a man who first nailed a screen to trees in his backyard?

New Jersey got Richard Hollingshead's drive-in in June 1933. In his tests he had set a projector on the hood of his car and tried the radio sound with the windows up and down.

Which Hollywood cinema, opened by Sid Grauman in 1927, sets film stars' handprints in the concrete of its forecourt?

The Chinese Theatre followed the success of Grauman's nearby Egyptian Theatre, and several rival stories claim to explain how the first footprints got there.

Which director suggested the PG-13 rating after parents complained about violence in two 1984 films he had worked on?

Steven Spielberg had directed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and produced Gremlins, both rated PG. The war film Red Dawn was the first released with the new label.

Which nickname is given to the censorship rules that governed Hollywood films until age ratings replaced them in 1968?

The Hays Code took its name from Will H. Hays, who led the studios' trade association from 1922 to 1945.

Which French company, founded in 1895 by an engineer turned inventor, is the world's oldest surviving film company?

Gaumont was set up by Léon Gaumont a year before its rival Pathé, and well ahead of Universal and Paramount, which both date from 1912.

A 1948 Supreme Court antitrust ruling against Paramount forced Hollywood's major studios to give up ownership of what?

Their cinema chains were where the studios showed their own pictures, and breaking that link opened American screens to more foreign and independent work.

Which silent film about First World War fighter pilots won the very first Academy Award for Best Picture?

Wings is the only fully silent film to take the top prize, and it was considered lost for many years until a print turned up in a French archive.

Which Rome studio complex, inaugurated by Mussolini in 1937, led to the city being dubbed Hollywood on the Tiber?

Cinecittà hosted so many international productions in the 1950s, Roman Holiday among them, that the nickname stuck to the whole city.

Which cocktail gives its name to the final shot of a film crew's day, the one after the Abby Singer?

Martini refers to the well-earned drink at the end of a hard day. The second-to-last shot honours Abby Singer, a production manager and assistant director.

Which blacklisted screenwriter secretly won Oscars for Roman Holiday and The Brave One through a front and a pseudonym?

Dalton Trumbo wrote The Brave One as Robert Rich, a name borrowed from a nephew of the producers, and the Academy handed him that statuette only in 1975.

The Story of the Kelly Gang, listed by UNESCO as the first full-length narrative feature film, came from which country?

Australia's silent film about the outlaw Ned Kelly premiered in Melbourne on 26 December 1906 and reached British screens just over a year later.

During the Second World War, a metal shortage meant Oscar statuettes were made for three years from which material?

Painted plaster Oscars were only a stopgap. After the war, the winners were invited to trade them in for gold-plated metal ones.

Which 1969 drama starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman is the only X-rated film to win the Best Picture Oscar?

Midnight Cowboy's X was the equivalent of the later NC-17, and the film was re-rated R when it was reissued in 1971.

Which studio did Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks help found in 1919 to control their own work?

United Artists also counted director D. W. Griffith among its founders, and it was built on letting talent control its own money and art rather than depend on the big studios.