Skeptoid 4: Astronauts, Aliens, and Ape-Men

by Brian Dunning

  No, we’re talking about the folklore of classic Hollywood, the enduring fables that gild the stars with mystique. So let us now dim the lights, raise the curtain, strike a dramatic note on the Wurlitzer, and fade in on:

  BEN-HUR MYTHS

  There are at least two lingering legends about Ben-Hur, the 1959 epic starring Charlton Heston. It was Hollywood’s third iteration of the film, with black and white silent versions appearing in 1907 and 1925. The 1925 version rivaled the scope of the 1959 movie, with a chariot race in particular that was larger and more violent. The charioteers are said to have been offered a prize of $5,000 to win, for real, resulting in much onscreen mayhem.

  This probably gave rise to the most common myth, that a stuntman was killed during the 1959 chariot race and that its footage was left in the final cut. Although a few sources have made this claim, the studio’s records, and the statements of most of those involved including Charlton Heston, say that no stuntmen or horses were seriously hurt. The sequence was very carefully shot over several weeks. The worst injury came from a stuntman whose chin was smashed and cut when he unexpectedly flipped out over the front of his chariot. Articulated dummies were put to very effective use throughout this scene, and the guys you see getting trampled or run over are all dummies.

  The source of the myth is probably the 1925 film. Records were poorly kept and incidents often went unreported in those days, so we don’t know for sure, but most film historians agree that at least one stuntman was killed, and at least a few horses were injured badly enough that they had to be put down. A lot of this happened in one particular crash where several chariots came around a blind corner and struck another that had overturned.

  The other myth from Ben-Hur is that a red sports car, sometimes described as a Ferrari, can be seen in the background of the 1959 chariot race. There’s a good reason you won’t find any screen captures of this on the Internet; it seems to be a completely untrue rumor. I watched the entire scene carefully on the DVD, and others on the Internet have gone through it frame-by-frame. No red car has been found yet; though there are numerous tire tracks visible onscreen from the camera trucks, which may be the source of the myth.

  GOLDFINGER’S GOLDEN GIRL

  We all remember the classic scene where Sean Connery comes across the gold-painted corpse of Goldfinger’s assistant whom he had seduced to betray her boss. Later he observes that she had died of skin suffocation, and that painting the entire body would be lethal unless you leave a small bare patch at the base of the spine, “to allow the skin to breathe”. This danger subsequently became something of an urban legend.

  Perhaps the writers forgot that we breathe through our lungs, not through our skin. Today, performers are routinely bodypainted, even with latex. People take mud baths. There are certainly other things that can go wrong when you coat your entire body — overheating and hypothermia are two real possibilities — but “skin suffocation” is not one of them.

  THE POLTERGEIST CURSE

  The story goes that all three children who starred in Poltergeist were dead soon after its release, as were a number of other actors from the series. It’s partially true, but a few hits and many misses does not really make a good legend.

  Dominique Dunne, who played the older daughter, was murdered at age 22 only five months after the movie was released. Heather O’Rourke, the little girl, died from a medical condition at age 12, but only after completing both sequels. In a blow to the curse, Oliver Robins, who played the son, is still alive and well, and is writing and directing.

  Other actors from the original Poltergeist and the sequels have since passed away as well, but of expected age related conditions. It’s a little like saying there’s a Gettysburg Address curse, since everyone who attended is now dead.

  THE WIZARD OF OZ HANGING

  There’s a famous legend that an actor playing one of the munchkins in The Wizard of Oz was distraught over a lost love and decided to hang himself in the background of a live scene shot in the movie. Some versions of the story have it as a stagehand who may have fallen accidentally. Somehow nobody noticed it at the time and the shot was left in the final cut. Right after Dorothy and the Scarecrow pick up the Tin Woodsman, they link arms and go happily singing down the yellow brick road. In the center of the screen, between two trees against the blue backdrop, something can be seen falling to the ground. A few seconds later there is another large movement in the same spot. It’s too far away and indistinct to make a clear judgment, but with a little imagination, I suppose it could be taken as someone being hanged.

  Fortunately, there are no records of any hanged corpses being discovered when the set was struck. What did happen, though, was that various large birds were borrowed from the Los Angeles Zoo to roam freely around and make the sets look more wild. Although the movement is indistinct, it takes very little imagination to see one of those birds jumping down from the tree then spreading its wings. Or doing some other bird thing. No record survives of bird poop being cleaned up in that spot, so this is just one of those mysteries that we’ll never solve. You judge which you think is more likely: A suicide where no body was found and nobody was missing; or some large birds strutting about that are known to have been there.

  BRANDON LEE’S DEATH

  The mysterious death of Bruce Lee’s son was sure to achieve a cult status all its own. The story goes that actor Brandon Lee was shot on the set of his final film, The Crow, in the middle of filming a scene; and that his death was left in the final cut of the movie. Many of the same conspiracy claims surrounding his father’s death surfaced again: He was assassinated for revealing martial arts secrets, killed by organized crime, or some other such thing.

  Brandon Lee was indeed shot while filming. It was a tragic accident involving a gun firing blanks. A fragment of a dummy bullet, from a previous scene, was lodged in the gun and fired into Lee, fatally wounding him. Some mystery remains surrounding the film of the incident, with some saying it was destroyed, and others saying it was confiscated by police. It was not used in the movie. The scene was rewritten and reshot using a double, and the manner of his death is different than what happened in the fatal accident.

  No credible evidence links the tragedy in any way to organized crime or martial arts overlords. Everything that happened was fully explained by the events of the day, no external mysterious forces required.

  STEVEN SPIELBERG’S COVERT BEGINNINGS

  One of director Steven Spielberg’s most enduring pieces of fictional entertainment is the story he used to tell about how he got started in show business. He snuck off of a Universal Studios tram, slunk around the studio, and moved into a vacant office, adding his own name to the building directory. From there he met people, introducing himself as a new director on the lot, and finally weaseled his way into his first directing jobs.

  Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, especially if the truth is really mundane. Spielberg was once shown around the lot by a friend of a friend of his father’s, and returned the next summer for an unpaid internship working on purchase orders. He did make the most of this opportunity, though, finally landing a job directing a TV episode after several summers running errands and stacking paper. The rest is movie history. But among those who worked there with him at the time, none remembers any but legitimate work-related reasons for him to be wherever he was.

  JAMES DEAN’S KILLER CAR

  James Dean, one of Hollywood’s prototypical outcast bad boys, enjoyed his motor racing at least as much as he enjoyed acting. To this end he bought a 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder, in which he was infamously killed in a road accident on his way to a race. The legend says that anyone who owns the wrecked Spyder has bad luck; they die or get injured by it or something like that.

  The car was pretty comprehensively destroyed in the crash, and its few useful (and valuable) mechanical components were parted out by the insurance company. When the wreck was initially purchased, a man’s legs are said to have been broken when it
was delivered on a trailer. It’s not too surprising, since the car was a non-rolling lump and probably had to be awkwardly lifted onto dollies to roll it down the ramp. Two amateur racers installed the car’s engine and transaxle in their own cars. One was later killed and the other was injured in separate racing accidents in cars using the Spyder’s components, however none of the James Dean parts caused the accident. A whole great long string of horrible injuries are said to be associated with the car’s body, which went on tour with the California Highway Patrol as an exhibit in the late 1950’s, but there is no reliable documentation that any of these injuries actually happened.

  James Dean in his Porsche 550 Spyder

  Bits of the car disappeared (some are currently displayed in various museums), and it’s said that the remaining body was mysteriously lost during transport. However no police report was ever filed regarding a theft, so the safe money says that there’s probably no appreciably sized remnants of the car unaccounted for; the families of the two amateur racers still have the parts they bought. Certainly there’s no good evidence that unusual accidents were associated with the car or its parts, and enough details of the legend are demonstrably fabricated to cast doubt on the whole idea.

  THE WIZARD OF OZ AND PINK FLOYD

  The story goes that if you watch The Wizard of Oz while listening to Pink Floyd’s album Dark Side of the Moon, there are moments where they appear to synchronize, where certain lyrics seem relevant to the action onscreen. This combination has been popularly dubbed Dark Side of the Rainbow.

  The band members and engineer Alan Parsons all deny it. It’s one of those cases where for every moment that does seem to match up, there are 100 other moments that don’t; and no clear agreement among believers on what matches and what doesn’t. People have claimed many such matches between various movies and albums. I’m not going to try and talk you out of this one. They’re both works of art, and art is in the eye of the beholder; but if you want someone (who knows) to admit it was done deliberately, you’re going to have to keep waiting.

  THREE MEN AND A GHOST

  There’s one myth that I almost didn’t include because I was trying to stick to classic Hollywood and this was such a stupid movie and an even stupider myth, but it seems to have grown long enough legs to warrant a mention. In Three Men and a Baby, the story goes that the ghost of a boy is visible standing in some curtains in the background. Screen caps are all over the Internet if you want to take a look. But one of the deleted scenes shows a better view of the object, and it’s a near life-size cardboard cutout of Ted Danson wearing a tux and top hat. Viewed out of focus and from across the room, the top hat looks like a young boy’s mussed-up hair. If you try to look this up on the Internet, it’s almost impossible to find a page that does not also give the explanation; so I doubt you can find anyone who’s heard of this myth but doesn’t know about the cardboard cutout. Nevertheless, Ted Danson’s indomitable star power (hint of sarcasm) seems to keep this one near the top of every list of Hollywood legends.

  BURIED AT THE MAGIC KINGDOM

  This one isn’t about a movie, but since Disney is a movie studio, I’ll include a myth about their Magic Kingdom theme parks. The story goes that there are people buried at the parks, possibly including Walt Disney himself, said to be cryogenically preserved under Disney World.

  The stories are completely untrue, in fact I couldn’t find any credible evidence worthy of examination. If there is any, let me know. Walt himself was cremated, and his ashes reside at Forest Lawn in Los Angeles. But this leads us to a creepy fact that almost confirms the rumor: On many occasions, Disney security has caught guests scattering the ashes of deceased Disney fans at theme parks. Most of the evidence of this is anecdotal, as you’re not likely to see Disney sending a press release to the newspapers. But once when police were called when a woman was seen doing this at the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, Disney employees began emailing bloggers and columnists who follow Disney that it happens quite frequently.

  So although you won’t find anyone officially buried at the Magic Kingdom, the remains of its most enduring fans... are everywhere.

  THE SUPERMAN CURSE

  There are various versions of the so-called Superman curse, centering around the idea that anyone who plays Superman meets an untimely end. It’s also said that George Reeves, the original television Superman, went crazy and thought he could actually fly, and tossed himself from a building. That one’s easily disproven: George Reeves died of a gunshot wound ruled a suicide, but like so many suicides, enough of his loved ones said that “he’d never do such a thing” that dark rumors of murder and hit men persisted, as promoted by the 2006 movie Hollywoodland.

  Although bigscreen Superman Christopher Reeve was paralyzed and died nine years later, his career flourished in the seven years since he’d last played Superman; and when he died, he died a much beloved philanthropist and spokesman. Even George Reeves’ career was doing well; the TV show had been renewed for another season when he died and was very successful.

  The other Supermen also serve as evidence that playing Superman is less of a curse than a blessing. The original movie serial Superman, Kirk Alyn, was successful enough that he was typecast and chose to leave the industry, happily retiring to Arizona. Dean Cain of Lois & Clark is alive, well, and happy, as is Tom Welling of Smallville. Bud Collyer played Superman on the radio for 11 years, and in cartoons for two years, and went on to have a full and successful career.

  We should all be so super lucky to be stricken with such a super curse.

  JOHN WAYNE AND THE NEVADA TEST SITE

  Supposedly, John Wayne’s death from cancer was caused by his work in the Utah desert in 1954 on the 1956 Howard Hughes film The Conqueror, a movie widely regarded as Wayne’s worst. The location near St. George, Utah, is notorious for being downwind from the Nevada Test Site, where a large number of atomic weapons had been detonated in prior years, and thus was the recipient of much radioactive fallout. Wayne’s co-stars Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead also died of cancer; in fact, by the time People magazine checked up on all 220 cast and crew for a 1980 article, 91 of them had contracted some form of cancer, and 46 had died of cancer.

  People’s inspiration was apparently a 1979 article in the tabloid The Star by Peter Brennan who merely speculated about the coincidence without doing any real research. It was repeated by such newspapers as the New York Post (August 6, 1979) and the Los Angeles Times (August 6, 1979). People went a step further, talking to a few experts and managing to track down the history of the cast and crew. This article was what really started the story; in fact, virtually anything you might find about this story takes its quotes directly from People. One of the most often borrowed was from an enthusiastic fallout activist, Dr. Robert Pendleton at the University of Utah, who said:

  With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size you’d expect only 30-some cancers to develop. With 91, I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up even in a court of law.

  But it didn’t, at least not for residents of St. George, Utah, often referred to as the “downwinders”, when attorneys went door-to-door in the 1970’s. The Times of London reported that some 700 such lawsuits were unsuccessful. However, ten years after the People magazine article, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was passed and has since paid out over $1.5 billion, including many payments to people who had only to prove that they lived in certain counties during a certain time period, and had one of a list of approved diseases. Although this makes it sound like the link must have been proven, science doesn’t depend on what politicians were able to convince bureaucrats to do.

  And what science has found, contrary to what’s reported in virtually every article published on the subject, is that any link between the film crew’s cancers and the atomic tests is far from confi
rmed. First of all, the numbers reported by People are right in the range of what we might expect to find in a random sample. According to the National Cancer Institute, in 1980 the chances of being diagnosed with a cancer sometime in your lifetime was about 41%, with mortality at 21.7%. And, right on the button, People’s survey of The Conqueror’s crew found a 41.4% incidence with 20.7% mortality. (These numbers make an assumption of an age group of 20-55 at the time of filming.)

  A 1979 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found no consistent pattern of correlation between childhood cancers and fallout exposure in the Utah counties, with the exception of leukemia. For reasons unknown, leukemia rates were about half that of the United States at large, but after the fallout period, this increased to just slightly above the normal rate. The authors were unable to correlate either leukemia or other cancers to fallout. Considering that the film crew spent only a few weeks there, instead of their whole lives like the people who were studied, it seems highly unlikely that they were affected.

  But we can’t make that declaration for certain. The data we have for the film crew is totally inadequate. Most crucial factors are unknown, like age, age of incidence, types of cancer, heredity, dose-response, and other risk factors each may have had — like John Wayne’s smoking of five packs a day. And, of course, “cancer” is not one disease; it is hundreds of different diseases. Plus there’s an obvious alternate explanation: The cast and crew simply got old in those intervening decades.