Question: Why was Preston a private and not an officer like the rest?
Question: Why isn't Baron's name on the guest list for the Catholic Charities party? They must have invited him since he looks rather surprised his name isn't there.
Answer: Cardinal Law may have disinvited him out of suspicion. Or maybe just a clerical error.
Question: Near the beginning of the film, Capote is talking about a story involving a gay black man being in love with a Jew. Since all the rest of his anecdotes involve real people and/or works, does anyone know which book he's talking about?
Chosen answer: He is talking about 'Giovanni's Room' a novel by James Baldwin.
Question: Did White Castle sell cheeseburgers in this time period?
Answer: Absolutely. White Castle is credited as the first "fast food" chain in the United States. The company began its traditional brick and mortar, fast food burger operation in 1921 but had operated as a food cart company since 1916.
Answer: There is no double level bridge out of New York city.
I'm not sure what this comment is a response to, but it's not an answer to this question.
Question: In the book, Dwight and Toby paint the whole house white, including the piano. But in the movie, I don't remember that scene. They definitely have movie still photos though of Robert De Niro and Leonrdo DiCaprio covered in white paint. Anyone understand this?
Answer: It's typical in movies that more scenes are filmed than what makes it into the final film. This has to do with continuity, the film's overall length, plotting, etc. If a certain scene does not serve the overall story structure, then it is edited out. Sometimes the studio insists that certain scenes be cut, even over a director's objections. After a movie is released on DVD, the deleted scenes may be restored in a "director's cut" or there's a separate section showing all the edited portions.
Thanks! Just wanted to make sure I wasn't making it up.
Question: Why does Gary Oldman speak with a Russian accent when Lee Harvey Oswald was from New Orleans?
Answer: Lee Harvey Oswald was very sympathetic to the communist ideal, and lived in Russia for a while. He probably adopted the accent as an affectation towards that end.
Question: Is it true that Lee was able to steal enough money from her victims to buy a house (or even just put a down payment on it?) I would assume she could only use cash, and it seems unfeasible that she'd be able to acquire that much cash from people's wallets without murdering hundreds of them.
Chosen answer: In the story it shows she does not kill every man. It is possible she had sex with multiple men without killing them and got more money (but maybe not that much) than just what she stole from the men she killed.
Question: Is David Thewlis still banned from entering the China for his role in this movie? I know that Brad Pitt's ban was lifted in 2014, but was Thewlis' ban lifted too?
Answer: Brad Pitt's ban was lifted in 2014, but David Thewlis is still banned from entering China to this day.
Question: Why is the word "Happiness" in the title misspelled?
Answer: In an interview, the real-life Chris Gardiner, (played by Will Smith) explained that the deliberately misspelled word was written that way on the child daycare center's wall (representing how children can sometimes misspell words). Gardiner later interpreted it to personally mean that true happiness is not defined in just one way, there are many ways to be happy, and that was reflected in the alternate spelling.
Question: I was wondering whether the evidence that Adrian Brody gathered was true, or if it's artistic license. It seems that if it were true, there should have been a further inquiry into George Reeve's death.
Answer: Here is a good link that will help separate fact from fiction. http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/celebrity/george_reeves/1_index.html.
Question: The producer in the restaurant scene, played by Judd Apatow, who rudely tells Tommy that he's never going to make it big - was he a real person? If so, did he ever see "The Room" and bump into Tommy since?
Question: Near the end of the film, Stephen asks Jane how long he has to live, and she says two years. But I thought they already established he had two years near the start of the film. Can someone please explain this?
Chosen answer: Throughout his existence, prognoses of the life expectancy for Dr. Stephen Hawking have been repeatedly offered and then surpassed. He continues to amaze with not only his brilliance, but his resilience. In this case it sounds like a callback to the initial estimate, which was demonstrably inaccurate.
Question: Alexander shoots the moose with a rather rapid fire action: it sounds as if the rifle is semi-automatic. What was the true story, and why did Alexander specifically ask for a a cal .22 rifle? Was it because he planned to hunt small game, and knew that a heavier rifle/calibre would be unsuitable? To plan for moose hunting, he would choose something like cal.308.
Answer: Having read Krakauers book: The rifle was a .22 Remington scoped semiautomatic. Accounts at the time mention that this may not have been the best choice, and it is clear that McCandless did not have enough experience to live in the wild, although it is impressing enough that he managed to survive for 16 weeks.
Question: Assuming people knew, how did Marston avoid trouble for living with two wives?
Answer: Though it may be considered immoral and socially unacceptable, particularly during the film's 1940s time frame, it is not illegal to live with multiple people in a sexual relationship. It is only illegal to be married to more than one person at the same time. Marston was not a bigamist. He was legally married to his wife, Elizabeth. They engaged in a consensual polyamorous (not polygamous) relationship with Olive, who was not married to Marston.
Question: What did they mean in their meeting about no medicine on the mission?
Answer: The exact quote was "there's no medicine in a gunfight," meaning the SEALs couldn't just stop shooting at the enemy to help another SEAL who was injured. They're speaking more broadly of the "Self-aid" concept, where each person needs to look out for himself until someone else can come provide medical assistance.
Excellent answer.
Question: When the jug was hit, how did the bullet not hit the horse behind it?
Answer: In reality, the bullet probably would have hit the horse, injuring it. Movies tend to gloss over details like that to serve and simplify the plot. Older movies particularly fudged reality, assuming audiences would not notice or care. It is also possible that the bullet was somehow deflected or broke up upon impact.
Question: Did people actually care about figure skating? I wasn't alive when this happened, but apparently it was one of the biggest sporting controversies of all time. Well I find that quite hard to believe, since before this movie came out, I'd never heard anyone talk about figure skating, I barely even knew what it was. Was figure skating ever actually a big thing, or do people just like controversy?
Answer: It used to be a lot more popular. The Harding/Kerrigan Winter Olympic figure skating competition was the 6th highest rated program in TV history as of 1994, with 48.5 million viewers, no doubt helped by the controversy. It's slowly declined over time - from 1998 to 2018 viewing figures for the US championships declined by 1/3. Opinions about its loss of appeal range from a change in the scoring (used to be judges rating out of 6.0, now it's a more complicated points system), to a lack of "star power", with recognisable names grabbing people's attention. In the UK at least, skater team Torville and Dean were household names for a long time, but I'd imagine a lot of people would struggle to think of skaters with that level of popular recognition nowadays. That said, viewing figures for the 2018 US championships were 60% up on 2017, and membership of the US figure skating organization has risen for the last four years - these things wax and wane like any other.
Question: Who did the actual piano-playing for the movie? I'm sure it couldn't have been Michael Douglas.
Chosen answer: Michael Douglas was not playing the piano himself. Special effects were used to digitally graft Douglas' head onto the body of Philip Fortenberry, a Julliard-trained pianist who also once played at the now-closed Liberace Museum in Las Vegas.
Question: In one of the very first scenes set in one of the plantation slave huts, Solomon is struggling to sleep. He is sleeping on the floor squashed amongst many other slaves. During this scene, what looks like a white youngish woman encourages him to touch her. A little earlier we see her sitting on the porch of the slave hut eating alone whilst the slaves are eating. As far as I could tell, she doesn't appear again in the film. Who is she? Does she play a greater role in the book? Was there more of a story here that ended up on the cutting room floor?
Question: Dave Schultz trained Kurt Angle. Did Kurt (or at least someone playing him) appear in the film?
Answer: No actor is credited for the role of Kurt Angle, and there are no overt references to him in the film.
Thank you.
Answer: Preston was loosely based on the real-life Lincoln Kirstein. Prior to WWII, he was a noted writer and an influential person in the cultural arts in America. When the war broke out, he enlisted in the army with the rank of private. He eventually joined the Army's Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives unit, later known as the Monuments Men. He was selected for his abilities, regardless of his military rank. The movie reflected that.
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