A loose adaption of the Giovanni Arpino novel Il buio e il miele and the 1974 movie Profumo di Donna, Scent of a Woman (1992) stars Al Pacino as the bitter, angry, depressed, and blind Lt. Col. Frank Slade in a role that would earn him his first Oscar win. Chris O’Donnell plays prep school student Charlie Simms, who is tasked with babysitting Slade in New York City over a Thanksgiving weekend. Here are some facts about the movie—the first to ever air on the Starz Network—to read before you get tangled up and tango on.

1. JACK NICHOLSON SAID NO.

Nicholson was initially approached to play the blind lieutenant colonel, but after he read the script, he passed. He made up for it with a big 1992, appearing in Man Trouble, Hoffa, and A Few Good Men.

2. MATT DAMON, BEN AFFLECK, BRENDAN FRASER, AND O’DONNELL’S CASTMATES IN SCHOOL TIES ALL AUDITIONED FOR CHARLIE.

“The whole cast went down to audition for it,” Matt Damon remembered in a 1997 Vanity Fair profile. “So the way I found out about the part is, I’m checking in with my agent, to see if anything good has come in, and my agent says, ‘Here’s one with a young role, and . . . Oh my God, it’s got Al Pacino in it!’ So I go up to Chris and say, ‘Have you heard about this movie?’ and he says [curtly] ‘Yeah.’ So I say, ‘Do you have the script?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Can I see it?’ ‘No—I kinda need it.’ Chris wouldn’t give it to anybody.” Stephen Dorff also auditioned.

3. O’DONNELL WAS VERY CONFIDENT HE GOT THE ROLE, BUT WAS VERY NERVOUS AT HIS AUDITION.

While Damon, Affleck, Fraser, Randall Batinkoff, and Anthony Rapp all felt their auditions didn’t go well, O’Donnell felt good about his. “Chris used to play things close to the vest,” Damon said. “We asked him how his audition went, and he just said [highpitched, Hibernian singsong], ‘Ohhh, it was all right.’ And we were like ‘Dude! Just tell us how it went!’ And he would say [singsong again], ‘Ohhh, I don’t know.’”

As O’Donnell later admitted, it wasn’t easy. “I really wanted it, I really prepared hard for it,” he recalled. “Al Pacino was a no-brainer. But when I got in there, Al is such an intimidating presence and the character is supposed to be intimidated by him. I was able to play on that natural nervousness that I had around him in the audition process that helped me to win the role.”

4. CHRIS ROCK AUDITIONED FOR CHARLIE, TOO.

“There was a little bit of talk about me playing the Chris O’Donnell part in Scent of a Woman, which actually would’ve been a better movie,” the comedian told Rolling Stone in 2014. “Not ’cause of me—it just would’ve been a better movie with a black kid playing that part.”

5. DIRECTOR MARTIN BREST WANTED PACINO AND O’DONNELL SEPARATED.

Brest wanted to split the two up so he could create tension, but Pacino and O’Donnell actually wound up bonding off-screen, putting a halt to any separation plans.

“It was just the most nerve wracking experience of my life, and being that nervous around Al Pacino for the majority of the film as well,” O’Donnell later said. “I knew at the time I was doing it that this is going to be the greatest single acting experience of my life that I’ll ever have.” Pacino gave the then 21-year-old actor some life advice while on set. “He always told me don’t ever marry an actress. He said you’ll always be second in their life.” O’Donnell didn’t.

6. LT. COL FRANK SLADE WAS THREE DIFFERENT PEOPLE.

Screenwriter Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Rose) discovered that his brother was broke and living in a big expensive New York apartment that he was a year behind on rent for. One week later, Brest called him and showed him Profuma di Donna. “I looked at this movie, and this character struck me as being exactly like my brother, who became the character in Scent of a Woman,” Goldman said. “The character was crossed with my first sergeant in the Army, a member of the famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team, who was the second man I’ve ever really been afraid of, and the first man I was afraid of—my father. The sergeant was a real soldier…So this character became a hybrid of all these people.”

7. ‘HOO-AH’ CAME FROM PACINO’S GUN EXPERT.

“I was working with a lieutenant colonel who was teaching me the ways [of the Army],” Pacino recalled. “We worked every day, and he’d teach me how to load and unload a .45 and all this stuff. Every time I did something right, he’d go, ‘Hoo-ah!’ Finally, I asked, ‘Where did you get that from?’ And he said, ‘When we were on the line, and you turned and snapped the rifle in the right way, [you’d say,] ‘Hoo-ah!’ So I just started doing it. It’s funny where things come from.”

8. PACINO WAS FITTED FOR SPECIAL LENSES THAT HE ENDED UP NOT USING.

After spending months getting fitted for special lenses that would make Pacino’s blindness more convincing, the actor and Brest opted not to use them. There was concern that Pacino’s eyes would get hurt if he used them for too long.

9. PACINO HURT HIS CORNEA FALLING INTO A BUSH.

“You don’t focus your eyes. And what happens is, you just go into a state,” Pacino told Larry King after King asked how he pretended to be blind. “As a matter of fact, I had an eye injury during the shooting of the film, because I fell into a bush. And the worst kind of eye injury is when plant life gets into your cornea. It stuck into my cornea. As I was falling, my eyes weren’t focusing and the thing went into my eye. So it’s also dangerous to do that.”

10. THAT TANGO SCENE WAS PAINFUL FOR GABRIELLE ANWAR.

Gabrielle Anwar (later Fiona Glenanne on Burn Notice) put herself on tape and flew to New York to meet Pacino for an audition. She was then told she didn’t get the role of Donna because she “wasn’t quite right,” before the powers-that-be changed their mind and asked her to fly back to New York. She spent a week with a tango instructor, but didn’t really need to, since she used to dance at a nightclub for teenagers in her England hometown of Laleham.

Anwar claimed in 2013 that Pacino did not attend the tango rehearsals. “It was a bit dodgy. I have a few sort of half-broken toes still,” she said. “It was interesting… (but) it’s Al Pacino, for God’s sake; I couldn’t exactly complain. I was afraid… He was incredibly nice to me.”

11. THEY WENT TO PLACES THE GODFATHER AND BOTH ARTHUR FILMS HAD GONE BEFORE.

The all-male Baird School was filmed at the all-female Emma Willard School in Troy, New York. (Emma Willard was the first women’s higher education institution in the United States.) But the final Baird scene was shot at Hempstead House, one of the four mansions on Sands Point Preserve in Long Island, New York. One of the other mansions was where the movie producer woke up to his horse’s head in that other Pacino film.

They also shot in the Oak Room at The Plaza Hotel, where the original Arthur drank with Gloria. The tango was performed in the ballroom of The Pierre Hotel. The luxury penthouse there was used again by Brest when he made it Anthony Hopkins’s character’s home in Meet Joe Black (1998). The penthouse was also used by the Arthur Bach played by Russell Brand in the 2011 remake.

12. O’DONNELL’S BEST TAKE WAS A CAMERA OPERATOR’S WORST.

“The one scene where Chris O’Donnell cries, the focus puller missed and it was soft,” editor Michael Tronick revealed. “Normally, Marty [Brest] wouldn’t consider looking at something that’s imperfect that’s flatly out of focus. But it was the best take and we knew it. It had to be in the movie.”

13. PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN CREDITED IT AS HIS BIG BREAK.

Hoffman had to audition five times to get the part of George. When he won the role he was living in Brooklyn with just a futon while making ends meet working at a deli. Hoffman admitted to The New York Times in 2008 he sometimes caught Scent of a Woman on TV. “I’ll watch it, and I say, ‘Do less, Phil, less, less!’” he said. “Now, I’m a little mortified by parts of my performance. But back then, it was huge! It was pure joy to get to do the work.” Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson claimed that after he saw Hoffman in the movie, “It was one of those ridiculous moments where you call someone and say, ‘You’re my favorite actor.'” Anderson then wrote the part of Scotty J. in Boogie Nights (1997) for him.

14. BREST THOUGHT THE LENGTH WAS JUST FINE.

Some critics notably said the movie, at two hours and 37 minutes, was too long. The first cut by Brest went 160 minutes long. Brest, Goldman, and Pacino wanted it to be even longer, and Universal wanted it shorter. Brest, Goldman, and Pacino eventually won when test audiences gave a higher score to the longer 157-minute cut. Universal, however, cut the movie down for TV and on airplanes. For those versions, Brest removed his name.

15. CHRIS O’DONNELL HAD MORE WORK TO DO.

O’Donnell was working on his marketing degree at Boston College when he starred in the movie. The day after the movie premiere, he needed to finish a term paper and had three finals to study for.

Residents of a new skyscraper in Dubai will be able to fall asleep in front of one view and wake up facing another. That’s because, when completed, the structure will be the first to include rotating floors capable of moving independently from one another.

According to Travel + Leisure, David Fischer of the Dynamic Group is the architect with the ambitious vision to build the world’s first rotating skyscraper. Each unit is to be built separately, which would also make the building the first prefabricated skyscraper on Earth. Once constructed, the apartments will be attached to a central, stationary hub with wind turbines between each floor that generate electricity. Using voice commands, residents will be able to tell the unit to start, stop, adjust its rotation speed, and move to follow the sun or shade. The price of each living space is estimated to come out to $30 million.

The project has been met with numerous setbacks since it was proposed in 2008, but Fischer recently shared that it’s back on with completion set for 2020. The rotating skyscraper would join Dubai’s lineup of remarkable architecture, which includes the first 3D-printed office building and the world’s tallest skyscraper.

[h/t Travel + Leisure]

Sometimes the standard candy bars you find in your local convenience store just aren’t enough. Here are some giant portions of candy for when you want to throw health concerns to the wind and really binge.

1. GUMMY BEAR; $150

Ever wish your gummy bears were big enough to cuddle? You could definitely wrap your arms around this ginormous gelatinous bear, which clocks in at 26 pounds and comes in four flavors: blue raspberry, green apple, orange, and red cherry. The stomach is hollow, so it can double as a bowl for even more candy. If you’re looking for ideas on what to do with this mammoth snack (besides eat it), Andy Milonakis can help.

Find it: Vat19

2. GUMMY SNAKE; $150

At 8 feet long and 26 pounds, this gummy is enough to feed an entire party: It’s technically over 450 servings!

Find it: Amazon, eBay

3. CHUPA CHUPS LOLLIPOP; $20

Did you know that Salvador Dalí designed the Chupa Chups logo? Like the artist’s famous surrealist style, these giant Chupa Chups seem other-worldly. The 2-pound lollipops are 65 times larger than the usual Chupa Chups and come with an extra thick stick that makes you feel like candy royalty wielding a sugary scepter. The sucker has a whopping 2800 calories, so don’t eat it all in one sitting (even kings have to worry about cavities).

Find it: Vat19

4. PEANUT BUTTER CUP; $40

There’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s, but when it comes to this colossal 2-pound peanut butter cup, slow and steady wins the race. The website implies that you should slice it like a cake and share it with friends, but we won’t judge if you decide to eat the whole thing.

Find it: Candy Warehouse

5. NERDS; $39

At first glance, this giant Nerds box seems impractical, but it’s actually housing 36 smaller boxes inside. We recommend this strawberry/grape box for parties or psyching out Trick-or-Treaters.

Find it: Staples, It’Sugar

6. TOBLERONE BAR; $51 – $107

We know how painful it can be when someone asks for a piece of your precious Toblerone bar. Now you can finally have a bar big enough for you and maybe one freeloading friend. This enormous bar is 2.6 feet long and weighs almost 10 pounds. Each triangle is about 10-by-10 inches, so that’s a full meal right there. Just like the smaller version, each bar has milk chocolate made from Swiss milk from the Alps, along with honey and almond nougat.

Find it: Amazon, eBay

7. HELLO KITTY PEZ; $18

Pez dispensers are cool, but they’d be way cooler if they were bigger than your head. This massive, 15-inch-tall Hello Kitty Pez dispenser is exactly the thing you need for intense sugar cravings. The 1.43 pound plastic structure pops out entire rolls of Pez instead of individual pieces like the pedestrian dispensers you’re used to. It comes with six rolls of Pez to start, which you can pop right in.

Find it: Amazon

8. RICE KRISPIES TREATS; $16

Sure, you can make your own Rice Krispies Treats, but why bother when you can just buy an entire 32-ounce sheet for half the effort? Best of all, it comes in the classic blue wrapper like its smaller counterparts. If you decide to share (weird) you can cut it into about 30 to 40 reasonably sized squares.

Find it: Amazon

9. POP ROCKS; $15

This giant Pop Rocks box has a similar deal to the Nerds box. Instead of a container of loose Pop Rocks, you can find eight small bags in assorted flavors. Now you just need a big bottle of soda to wash down the exploding candy.

Find it: It’Sugar

10. SWEET TARTS; $23

This hefty tube of Sweet Tarts is great for more than just satisfying a sugar craving; use it to play a game of Wiffle ball, intimidate potential muggers, knight people in the name of your candy kingdom, and more. The 24-inch tube is filled with 1.5 pounds of individually wrapped Sweet Tarts, so you’ll always have access to a snack when you’re done with whatever you’ve decided to use your giant tube for.

Find it: It’Sugar

11. HERSHEY’S CHOCOLATE BAR; $36

Bring this 5-pound bar of chocolate to a campfire and start making some substantial s’mores.

Find it: Amazon

Last year, fans of kitschy kitchen gadgets fell in love with the Nessie soup ladle—a handy spoon that created the illusion that the mythical Scottish creature was actually hiding in your stew this whole time. This year, the hot new animal-themed ladle is a graceful swan that floats on top of your pot. Swanky, made by the same creators that brought us Nessie, is a self-balancing ladle that can float in whatever liquid you’ve got heating up in your saucepan. The curved swan head works nicely as a handle that can be hooked on the wall for storage. It’s made with food-safe plastic that’s safe in the dishwasher.

You can pick one up in black, white, or pink on Amazon or Animi Causa. And if you’re in the United Kingdom, keep your purchase under wraps, or the Queen might try to claim it.

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The theater owners and exhibitors attending the ShoWest convention in February 1989 had a lot to look forward to. In an attempt to stir their interest in upcoming studio releases, major distributors were showing off stars and footage: Paramount led with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Columbia had Ghostbusters II. But it was Warner Bros. that caused the most stir.

In addition to Lethal Weapon 2, the studio had Tim Burton’s Batman, a straight-faced adaptation of the comic, and Michael Keaton—who slipped into a screening of some early footage—was no longer being derided as a poor casting choice. Then, in the midst of all this star power, the studio brought out a 35-year-old actor-writer-director with a shock of orange hair and an Australian accent.

The man had never appeared in a feature film before, much less starred in one, but Warner was gambling that his forthcoming comedy about a Tasmanian Albert Einstein who invents rock music and runs into Thomas Edison would be a hit. It had already become the sixth highest-grossing film in Australia’s history, besting both E.T. and Rambo: First Blood Part II.

The man’s real name was Greg Pead. Warner Bros. introduced him as Yahoo Serious, Hollywood’s next big comedy attraction.

To understand Warner’s appetite for an unproven commodity like Yahoo Serious, it helps to recall the peculiar preoccupation American popular culture had with Australians in the 1980s. Energizer had created a hit ad campaign with Mark “Jacko” Jackson, a pro football player who aggressively promoted their batteries in a series of ads; Paul Hogan parlayed his fish-out-of-water comedy, Crocodile Dundee, into the second highest-grossing film of 1986. (Serious would later bristle at comparisons to Hogan, whom he referred to as a “marketing guy” who sold cigarettes on Australian television.)

Born in Cardiff, Australia on July 27, 1953, Serious grew up in rural bush country and mounted car tires at a garage in order to pay his way through the National Art School. When he was expelled for illustrating the school’s facade with satirical jokes that the faculty didn’t find particularly funny, Serious moved on to direct Coaltown, a documentary about the coal mining industry, and pursued painting.

Serious would later recall that the desire for a larger audience led him away from art and into feature filmmaking. ”It hit me like a ton of bricks one day,” Serious told The New York Times in 1989. “I remember having a cup of coffee and I went, ‘Well, look, there is a giant canvas in every little town everywhere around the world. And on this giant canvas there are 24 frames of image on that screen every second and it’s the most wonderful living art form.’” It was around this same time, in 1980, that Serious changed his name.

To get a feel for the language of film, Serious sat through repeated viewings of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove; he aspired to have the kind of total autonomy over his movies that directors like Woody Allen and Charlie Chaplin enjoyed.

In 1983, Serious was traveling along the Amazon River when he spotted someone wearing a T-shirt depicting Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out. The image is now pervasive, appearing on posters and other merchandise (not to mention an early cover of mental_floss), but it seemed unique to the performer, who was struck by the idea that Einstein was once young and never took himself too seriously. And the concept for Young Einstein was born.

Serious’s idea, which transplanted Einstein to Tasmania and imagined encounters with Sigmund Freud, Thomas Edison, and the atomic bomb, took years to assemble. He borrowed camera equipment and sold his car to help finance the film; he shot an eight-minute trailer that convinced investors he was capable of making a feature. His mother cooked meals for the crew on set.

In order to maintain creative control, Serious gave up profit participation in Young Einstein, which he starred in, co-produced, co-wrote, and directed. When the film was released in Australia in 1988, it made an impressive $1.6 million at the box office and drew the attention of Warner Bros., which likely had visions of a Crocodile Dundee-esque hit. American press had a field day with Serious, who appeared on the cover of TIME and was given airtime on MTV.

Critics and audiences weren’t quite as enamored. The Orlando Sentinel suggested that “Tedious Oddball” would be a more appropriate name for the film’s creator. In his one-star review, Roger Ebert wrote that, “Young Einstein is a one-joke movie, and I didn’t laugh much the first time.” In the U.S., Young Einstein grossed just over $11 million, a fairly weak showing for a summer comedy. It was bested in its opening weekend by both Ron Howard’s Parenthood and the Sylvester Stallone action-grunter Lock Up.

Although American distributors quickly cooled on Serious, Australia’s enthusiasm for the filmmaker didn’t dampen. When Serious released 1993’s Reckless Kelly, a fictionalized account of outlaw Ned Kelly, it made $5.4 million in Australia—three times as much as Young Einstein. Serious took a seven-year sabbatical, then returned with 2000’s Mr. Accident, a slapstick comedy about an injury-prone man who tries to thwart a scheme to inject nicotine into eggs. Meeting a tepid critical and financial reception, it would be his third and (likely) final film.

At roughly the same time Mr. Accident was released, Serious took issue with upstart search engine Yahoo!, alleging the site was piggybacking on his popularity. He filed a lawsuit, which was quickly dropped when he failed to prove the URL had damaged him in any way.

The amused headlines stemming from that incident were the last examples of Serious capturing attention in America. Having completed just three films, no other projects have come to fruition; Serious launched a website detailing some of his background and to air some of his Yahoo!-related grievances.

Now 63, Serious currently serves as director of the Kokoda Track Foundation, an Australian aid organization dedicated to improving the living conditions of Papua New Guineans. The board’s website lists him as Yahoo Serious, which is the name he claims that all of his family and friends have called him since he changed it in 1980.

“You can choose every aspect of your life,” Serious once said. “Why not your name?”

Facebook wants to help you find your next job. The company just launched a jobs page within the site to allow companies to advertise their career openings, as Fast Company reports. If you see a job you want to apply for, you don’t even have to leave the site to throw your hat into the ring.

The Facebook jobs page allows you to filter opportunities by location, industry, and time commitment (full-time, part-time, internship, etc.). The jobs bookmark gathers all listings in the same place, but if you’re looking for work with a specific company, corporate Facebook pages now have a jobs tab in the same toolbar where you’d look for their photos or their “about” section.

If you see a posting you like, you can apply within the site. Facebook will pre-populate the application with basic info from your profile, and then you can insert your cover letter and add relevant experience or education that isn’t on your Facebook profile as needed. You can also delete or edit information that Facebook auto-filled from your profile if necessary.

It’s a great deal for Facebook, since the social media network can now become even more intertwined with the rest of your life. Even if you tire of the social aspects of the site, you’ll need to maintain a profile in order to use its job-searching capabilities. And making it easier to apply for jobs is a good incentive to get people to share information about their education and past job experience on their profile, even if they previously didn’t think Facebook needed to know what high school they went to.

For users, the amazing convenience might be colored a bit by privacy implications. For one thing, you’re adding to the treasure trove of (sometimes creepy) personal information Facebook already has about you. And then there’s the fact that you’re throwing the doors to your social-media presence wide open for potential employers. Employers may have already looked up potential hires on Facebook to suss out any red flags that might make them think twice about a candidate, but when the job application itself is on Facebook, the process is that much easier. The jobs function lets applicants choose what information on their profile to share with the potential employers, but if you do forget to hide something damning, it won’t take any real effort on the part of your would-be boss to find it.

[h/t Fast Company]

The Shamrock Shake has been a seasonal McDonald’s specialty for decades, but even the classics can benefit from a high-tech update. This year, the fast food chain is launching a new version of the treat that layers the traditional mint flavor on top of chocolate. And in promotion of the new product, McDonald’s is also releasing a reinvented straw.

As Co.Design reports, the STRAW (Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal) was designed by real engineers at the aerospace and robotics engineering firms JACE and NK Labs. What sets the device apart from conventional straws is the sharp bend in its shape and the three, eye-shaped holes in addition to the opening at the bottom end. The extra holes are positioned in a way that allows drinkers to take a sip that’s equal parts top mint layer and bottom chocolate layer. As the video below illustrates, it’s “a spectacularly unnecessary product.”

A total of 2000 STRAWs, complete with fancy, black carrying cases, will be given out for free at McDonald’s in 80 cities. You have the next few weeks to snatch up yours if you don’t want to be stuck sipping milkshakes the old-fashioned way.

[h/t Co.Design]