I, ROBOT (2004). In 1995 screenwriter Jeff Zintar wrote a spec script called Hardwired about a robot who murders a man. Studio after studio optioned it and then dropped it. After spending years in development hell, the project almost died completely until 20th Century Fox obtained the rights to Isaac Asimov’s classic I, Robot short stories. The studio commissioned Zintar to rewrite his script adopting Asimov’s themes—but they still wouldn’t approve it because it was going to cost too much to make. When Will Smith became interested in the project, everything changed. Fox agreed to a bigger budget if I, Robot became a “Will Smith movie.” So Smith brought in his favorite screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, to rewrite the script to match the star’s on-screen persona, changing it from a “talky mystery” into an action thriller.
Did it work? Yes. Although I, Robot received only mediocre reviews, the combination of Will Smith + sci-fi blockbuster + summer release = a critic-proof movie. It made $345 million worldwide, more than twice its budget.
GROUNDHOG DAY (1993). Danny Rubin’s original screenplay about Phil Connors (Bill Murray), a bitter weatherman who finds himself living the same day over and over…and over…until he finally figures out what’s really important in life, was altered significantly by director Harold Ramis. Rubin’s version began with Phil already stuck in the time loop. Ramis changed it so that Phil enters the time loop after the film begins—and the audience has to figure it out along with him. And in Rubin’s script, one of Phil’s ex-girlfriends wanted to teach him a lesson so she placed a voodoo curse on him. Ramis left the cause unknown and also shortened the time Phil was stuck in the loop from thousands of years to what he estimates is “about ten years.” Ramis also put more emphasis on the love story.
Did it work? Yes. Rubin was reportedly upset about the changes, but they paid off: Groundhog Day made $70 million domestically (it cost less than $15 million to make) and has been included on many “Top Comedies of All-time” lists.
The lesson: No screenplay is safe in the Hollywood system. Still, a working draft must be completed before the rest of the pieces can be added.
What are the rest of the pieces? Turn to Part II on page 232.
Bear cubs are born toothless, blind, and bald.
BAD NEWS BARED
Is being a professional journalist so competitive and fast-paced that writers sometimes make up stories? Here are some real-life journalism scandals.
Busted: Stephen Glass, the New Republic
Scoop: In May 1998, the New Republic published “Hack Heaven,” Glass’s dramatic story of Ian Restil, a 15-year-old computer hacker. According to the story, Restil landed a job as a consultant with Jukt Micronics, a company whose databases he’d broken into and sabotaged. The article included an interview with Restil and a first-person account of a “hacking convention” in Maryland. Forbes.com technology reporter Adam Penenberg read the article and thought the details didn’t add up. Penenberg did some research and discovered that not only had there been no hacking conference, but Ian Restil and Jukt Micronics didn’t even exist. When called out by his superiors at the New Republic for making up a news article, Glass fabricated elaborate evidence to cover his tracks. He created phony Jukt voice-mail accounts, business cards, and a Web site. Then he gave his editor, Charles Lane, a Palo Alto, California, phone number for “George Sims,” a Jukt executive. Bad idea. Lane knew that Glass had a brother at Stanford (located in Palo Alto), realized it was a ruse and fired Glass. An internal review later determined that of the 41 stories Glass had written for the New Republic, 27 contained falsified material. Aftermath: In 2003 Glass decided to write fiction. His first novel: The Fabulist, the story of an ambitious reporter who gets caught making up stories. Today Glass works as a paralegal.
Senator John Kerry is related to four U.S. presidents and King Henry III.
Busted: Janet Cooke, the Washington Post
Scoop: In September 1980, the Post ran “Jimmy’s World,” Cooke’s harrowing account of violence, poverty, and the heroin trade in an unnamed Washington, D.C., ghetto. At the center of the piece was “Jimmy,” an eight-year-old third-generation heroin addict whose ambition was to be a drug dealer when he grew up. The story sickened and saddened readers and city officials, who wanted Cooke to tell them where the boy lived so he could be helped. Cooke refused, claiming that her sources were drug dealers and if she revealed them, they’d kill her. The city launched a massive search for Jimmy, but couldn’t find him, fueling rumors about whether Jimmy was even real. The Post addressed—and denied—the rumors in print. Cooke won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for “Jimmy’s World,” but the rumors continued, so two days after the Pulitzer win, Post editors demanded that Cooke provide evidence of Jimmy’s existence. She couldn’t—she had made the whole thing up. Jimmy, the eight-year-old heroin addict, didn’t exist.
Aftermath: Cooke returned her Pulitzer and became a store clerk in Michigan. Her explanation: The Post was a high-stress environment and she was under a lot of pressure from her editors to produce a major story. During an interview with drug dealers and homeless people, she’d heard about a child heroin addict. She couldn’t locate him, so she made him up. In 1996 Cooke sold the movie rights to her story for $1.5 million. (The movie was never made.)
Busted: Jack Kelley, USA Today
Scoop: Kelley had been a foreign correspondent for USA Today since 1991, filing reports from war zones around the world. In 2003 executive editor Brian Gallagher received an anonymous tip that Kelley had “embellished” a story filed from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1999. Gallagher assigned staffer Mark Memmott to investigate. Kelley’s main source for the article was “army documents.” He told Memmott that he saw the documents in a room with a single translator present, but then changed the story, saying he’d gotten them in an interview with a human rights activist in which two translators were present. The activist had no recollection of Kelley; the first translator denied the participation of a second translator. And then, suddenly, Kelley found the second translator. Memmott became suspicious when her account matched Kelley’s word for word, and she called from Texas, not from eastern Europe. It turned out that the “translator” was actually an old friend of Kelley’s. In 2003 USA Today editors told Kelley they knew about the hoax. Kelley confessed and, a few months later, resigned.
Aftermath: Another internal investigation revealed that Kelley had made up at least part of more than 20 stories. He’d never really found the diaries of dead Iraqi soldiers, witnessed an attack on Palestinians in Israel, trekked through the mountains with a Kosovar rebellion group, or interviewed Elian Gonzales’s father in Cuba.
Of all the Beatles autographs in circulation, only about 6% are believed to be authentic.
RANDOM ORIGINS
Once again, the BRI asks—and answers—the question: Where does all this stuff come from?
WATERBEDS
The waterbed has actually been developed—unsuccessfully—numerous times. The first was more than 3,000 years ago, when Persians filled goat skins with water, sealed them with tar, and left them out in the sun to warm the water. The next time was in 1832, when Scottish doctor Neil Arnott filled a rubber-coated, mattress-sized piece of canvas with water, hoping to prevent bedsores. It wasn’t a big seller (even in hospitals), nor was it when English doctor James Paget copied the design in 1873. The main reasons: The beds leaked, and they were cold. But in 1926, scientists at B.F. Goodrich came up with a synthetic material that could make waterbeds both leakproof and warm: vinyl. Sold via mail order, they were, once again, a commercial disappointment. Then in 1968, a San Francisco State University student named Charles Hall was trying to create an ultra-soft piece of furniture. After rejecting a gigantic vinyl bag filled with Jell-O, he tried filling it with water (he’d never heard of Arnott, Paget, or Persian goatskin-and-tar beds). Hall called his creation the Pleasure Pit and patented it. Waterbeds finally caught on, at least with Bay Area hippies. They became a national fad in the early 1980s.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
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bsp; In January 1888, thirty-three men (including world-renowned explorers, military officers, academics, bankers, and mapmakers) met at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., to organize a group whose mission was to “increase geographical knowledge.” Bylaws were written up, and two weeks later the National Geographic Society was officially established. As a first step toward fulfilling their mission, the Society decided to publish a monthly journal, beginning with the first issue of National Geographic Magazine in October 1888. It was a dry, academic journal in its early days, but still attracted readers thanks to photographs from exotic places as well as maps and archaeology reports. It didn’t become the magazine it is today until Alexander Graham Bell was named president of the Society in 1897. Among Bell’s innovations: He had the magazine printed on thick paper so it felt more like a book, devised the yellow-trimmed photographic cover, and solicited rollicking firsthand accounts from explorers like Robert Peary and Ernest Shackleton. He also realized that the magazine’s strength was showcasing photos from around the world. By 1908 photos took up half of the magazine, and even more than that after 1910 when National Geographic ran color images for the first time. By 1950 it was one of the top 10 most-read magazines in the world. It’s now published in 32 languages, and reaches more than 50 million readers every month.
Straws were used by ancient Egyptian brewers to taste test beer without disturbing the sediment.
TARTAR SAUCE
Before there was tartar sauce, there was steak tartare, a French dish that consists of chopped and seasoned raw beef topped with onions and capers. Whoever invented it (that person is lost to history) named it after the Tatars, a nomadic Turkic group who lived in Russia in the medieval era and, according to legend, were known for eating raw meat. Sauce de tartare was created in France the 18th century to accompany the entree. It consisted of mayonnaise, pickles, capers, onions, and tarragon. The thick, goopy sauce made its way to England in the late 19th century, where tartare was anglicized to tartar and was served alongside a distinctively English dish: fried fish.
RADIATION BLOCKING SUNGLASSES
In the early 1980s, NASA developed original coatings to protect their cameras and telescopes from the sun’s heat and radiation while in space. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (at California Institute of Technology) thought the concept might have commercial applications, so they leased the technology from NASA. They adapted the basic scientific principles of the coatings to create a product: a welding mask that blocked more of the harmful, blinding UV light given off in welding than conventional masks did. When NASA heard about it, they made their own improvements, making the coatings lighter and more flexible. In turn, JPL took that technology and created sunglasses that block UV rays. Most famous radiation-blocking sunglasses: Blue Blockers, sold via TV infomercials.
If the Milky Way galaxy were the size of Asia, our solar system would be the size of a penny.
COWS ON THE RUN
!Where else can you find a bunch of rampaging-bovine stories—each complete with its own pithy Beatles-related title? Only in Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
BLACK COW RUNNING IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT
Moo-Cow (described by police as “fat”) escaped from her pasture in Grafton, Massachusetts, in the middle of the night in February 2007 and ran five miles down Route 140. “She was mad,” said resident Paula Tripp. A local rancher lassoed Moo-Cow, but then “the man let go of the rope,” said Tripp, “and I grabbed it and got dragged up the street. There was no stopping this thing.” In the end, the numerous cops and residents in the posse just had to wait for the Scottish Highlander to get tired and take a rest. As dawn approached, Moo-Cow finally gave up and was returned home. (The following day, the barbed-wire fence around her pasture was fortified.)
DAY TRIPPERS
The hills were alive with the sound of moo-sic in July 2005 when 10 members of a Bavarian family were attacked by a herd of 40 cows. The family members (who ranged from infant to elderly) were crossing a meadow in the foothills of the Austrian Alps when one of the children tried to pet a calf. Bad idea: The protective mother cow interpreted it as an attack and charged the family. Then her bovine companions charged, too—sending picnic supplies flying and the family scattering. An elderly member of the family suffered a heart attack, a seven-year-old was seriously injured, and many other scrapes and bruises were reported, but, thankfully, no one was killed.
Cow terminology: A heifer is a female cow who has not yet birthed a calf.
I’M SO TIRED
After a cow escaped from a livestock market in Visalia, California, in 2008, she wandered into a nearby tire shop. “It seemed like a nice cow at first,” said employee Mario Sanchez, “but I knew something was wrong when it kept coming at me.” The cow picked up Sanchez and tossed him onto the tire changing machine. Then another employee, Frank Bautista, tried to lure her away. “Come here, Betsy,” he said. But then she charged Bautista, too. He scrambled out of the way, and the cow ran back outside and head-butted a car. By that point, workers from the market had caught up and captured her as she trotted down Main Street. Neither of the tire shop employees were seriously injured, and the cow was later sold at an auction.
HEIFER SKELTER
“I worked on a farm when I was a youngster and always told people that cows never attacked,” said 50-year-old British police inspector Chris Poole. But apparently he forgot to tell the cows. In 2007 Poole was walking his dog on a well-traveled footpath through a cow pasture. “All of a sudden, we were surrounded,” he recalled. “I wasn’t scared and waved and shooed them away.” But the cows wouldn’t be shooed. “I felt this cow butt me hard in the back. I fell to the ground and there were hooves all around me and I was being repeatedly head-butted.” Poole suffered four broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a gash on his head. Adding insult to injury: “One cow stood on my arm and broke my watch.” Poole recovered, but will now warn people to give cows a “wide berth.”
RUN FOR YOUR LIFE IF YOU CAN, BIG GIRL
On the morning of her scheduled execution in January 2006, a 1,200-pound heifer made a break from the slaughterhouse line at Mickey’s Packing Plant in Great Falls, Montana. “I watched her do things that are just not possible for a cow,” said plant manager Del Morris. After jumping a five-foot fence, Molly (Morris’s name for the cow) led police and plant workers on a six-hour chase in which she nearly got hit by an SUV and a tractor trailer, darted across the tracks just in front of an oncoming train, and barreled through a fence when her pursuers cornered her. Even three tranquilizer darts failed to slow Molly down. But it was when she traversed the strong currents to the other side of the icy Missouri River that Morris realized this cow was too special to end up on a dinner plate. After Molly was finally coaxed into a trailer, Morris let Great Falls residents decide her fate. Their choice: a fenced-in field just out of town, where Molly will live out her days.
Do you? 7 out of 10 people believe in life after death.
LEAVE READY ZAGROMYHAT TO US!
Next time you’re really bored, try this: Go to an Internet translation page, type a phrase in English and translate it into another language. Then translate the new phrase into another language and then back to English. The results can be quite amusing.
English: “Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.”
Greek→English: “Divine John, Reader of Baths.”
English: “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”
Russian→Japanese→English: “I described and I have upadenny stand up!”
English: “Who let the dogs out?”
Chinese→English: “Who bleeds off the dog?”
English: “Antidepressants may cause dry mouth due to decreased saliva, possibly contributing to the development of tooth decay.”
Greek→Japanese→English: “You disagree the medicine with cause, for drying saliou reduction of the mouth contributes to the development of possibility, it is carious tooth.”
English: “Rolling on the floor laughing.”
English: “Mama said knock you out.”
Spanish→English: “The breast said eliminates to him.”
English: “Let’s get ready to rumble!”
Russian→German→English: “Leave ready zagromyhat to us!”
English: “Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?”
Spanish→French→Dutch→English: “He is seldom the done question, he is our education of the children.”
Hold the fries! Until the late 18th century, the French believed that potatoes caused leprosy.
English: “I’d like to buy a vowel, Pat.”
Russain→Danish→Japanese→English: “It is to like to do the vowel which purchases, but it is the pad.”
English: “You want fries with that?”
Japanese→Hindi→English: “I desire to fritter?”
English: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Japanese→Korean→Greek→English: “It is time the waistcoat was ugliest when.”
English: “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.”
Japanese→Swedish→English: “I am all for I ate them all, it is possible to believe what is not.”
English: “Don’t mess with Texas.”
Japanese→Bulgarian→Polish→Korean→English: “Texas which goes round and is confused.”
English: “Pardon me, sir, but do you have any Grey Poupon?”
French→German→Chinese→English: “Please forgive me, Mr. Chairman, but have you established your gray poupon?”
English: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.”
Korean→English: “Makes boldmakes bold and also anyone man not going before where in order to go.”
Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader Page 14