Humans and airplanes both need oxygen, but high speed airliners operate much more efficiently at high altitudes where the air is thinner. The lack of oxygen doesn’t bother them because jet engines compress their intake air anyway, but above about 8000 feet, the lack of oxygen would start making passengers woozy, and at higher altitudes still, would be fatal.
That’s why airliners carry emergency oxygen. The cabin is normally pressurized to about 8000 feet, but if pressurization ever fails above about 14,000 feet, some passengers would be unable to absorb sufficient oxygen from the rarefied air and would grow faint, even ill—especially those who are old or infirm, and those accustomed to near-sea level pressure, which is a third of the global population.
We can tolerate much higher altitudes, though, if we have pure oxygen to breath instead of the 21 percent oxygen in ordinary air. Breathing supplemental oxygen, we can go up to about 35,000 feet (40,000 with a full face mask ensuring 100 percent undiluted oxygen). Much higher than that and we risk passing out or asphyxiation even with 100 percent oxygen. That’s why few airliners fly higher—passengers would need pressure suits or at least full face masks as backup life support. Were it not for that, planes would happily fly at 50,000, 60,000, or even 70,000 feet.
So … to answer the question.
If you’ve ever gone scuba diving (or seen it on TV) you know that divers only get air when they draw a breath—their rig doesn’t just continually belch out air (unless the regulator is busted) because that would waste air.
That’s what the bag is for. The oxygen generator over your seat in an airliner does just continually belch out oxygen. There is no tank or regulator—just a canister containing chemical reactants which, once started, produce a continuous stream of oxygen until the reactants are used up (a few minutes, long enough to descend to thicker air).
The flimsy little bag is there to catch the stream of oxygen in between your breaths so it isn’t wasted. That’s it. It only inflates while you are exhaling, provided you are breathing slowly enough. That’s why it might not inflate (you might not give it a chance you panicky rascal).
Although most Americans spend Halloween at festive costume parties or trick-or-treating with family, other countries have their own rituals and customs. Here are 12 Halloween (and Halloween-like) traditions from around the world.
1. DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS // MEXICO
From November 1 to November 2, people celebrate Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) to honor the dead throughout Mexico and parts of Latin America. It is believed that the Gates of Heaven open up at midnight on October 31 and the souls of children return to Earth to be reunited with their families for 24 hours. On November 2, the souls of adults come down from Heaven to join in the festivities.
The holiday is celebrated with in-home altars full of fruit, peanuts, turkey, soda, hot chocolate, water, and stacks of tortillas and special holiday bread called pan de muerto (bread of the dead), which are left as offerings for weary ghosts. For the souls of children, families leave out toys and candies, while adult souls receive cigarettes and shots of mezcal.
2. KAWASAKI HALLOWEEN PARADE // JAPAN
At the end of every October for the past 20 years, almost 4,000 costumed Halloween enthusiasts from all around the world gather just outside Tokyo in Kawasaki for the Kawasaki Halloween Parade, which is the biggest such parade in Japan. However, not everyone can simply join in the festivities. The Kawasaki Halloween Parade has strict guidelines and standards, so you have to apply for entry two months before the parade begins. There’s also a Kawasaki Halloween Children’s Parade for kids under 6 years old that takes place a day before.
In addition, the Japanese also celebrate O-bon, a yearly Buddhist holiday that honors the spirits of a family’s ancestors. In some traditions, lanterns are hung in front of homes and temples to guide the spirits inside, as traditional dances are performed. Families also visit graves and offer food and treats to the dead.
3. PANGANGALULUWA // THE PHILIPPINES
Pangangaluluwa is a tradition in the Philippines where children go door to door, often in costumes. However, instead of saying “trick or treat,” the children ask for alms and prayers for those stuck in purgatory. This tradition has increasingly been supplanted by trick-or-treating, but some towns are reviving it as a local fundraiser.
4. DAY OF DRACULA // ROMANIA
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People from all around the world flock to celebrate Halloween at Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes’s purported home at Bran Castle in Transylvania, Romania (although it was never actually his castle, and there’s debate if he ever even visited the site). There are a number of guides and inclusive travel packages in Romania that offer tours and parties at Count Dracula’s castle for Halloween.
5. SAMHAIN // IRELAND
Ireland is considered the birthplace of modern Halloween with its origins stemming from ancient Celtic and Pagan rituals and a festival called Samhain (end of the light half of the year) that took place thousands of years ago. Modern Irish celebrate Halloween with bonfires, games, and traditional Irish foods like barmbrack, an Irish fruitcake that contains coins, buttons, and rings for fortunetelling. For example, rings mean marriage, while coins mean wealth in the upcoming year.
6. ALL SAINTS’ DAY & ALL SOULS’ DAY // GERMANY
On November 1, Germans (and many other Catholics from around the world) celebrate All Saints’ Day (followed by All Souls’ Day on November 2). It’s an annual time to honor the lives of the saints who died for their Catholic beliefs, as well as the souls of dead family members. In observance of the holiday, people go to mass and visit the graves of their loved ones.
In addition, many Germans hide their kitchen knives, so returning spirits wouldn’t be accidentally harmed or use them to harm the living.
7. ZHONG YUAN JIE // SINGAPORE
During Zhong Yuan Jie, it is believed the Gates of Hell are opened and all Hell-beings are set free to roam the Earth. To honor the spirits, people take to the streets to burn joss sticks and paper money as offerings to their ancestors. Chinese opera is also offered up and performed to “empty” audiences to show respect to ghosts. During this time, many people avoid weddings, moving into new homes, and starting businesses as other ways to honor the spirits.
8. FESTIVAL OF HUNGRY GHOSTS // HONG KONG
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On the 15th day of the seventh lunar month, which is around mid-August to mid-September, the people of Hong Kong celebrate the Festival of Hungry Ghosts. It is believed around this time, restless spirits roam around the world, so several parts of East Asia appease and “feed” their ancestors’ ghosts with food and money for the afterlife. It’s part of a larger month-long celebration that also features burning paper, food offerings, and giving out free rice for the neighborhood.
9. PITRU PAKSHA // INDIA
For 16 days during the second Paksha of the Hindu lunar month of Bhadrapada, many people celebrate Pitru Paksha throughout India. Hindus believe when a person dies, the Hindu god of death, Yama, takes their souls to Purgatory, which also contains the last three generations of a family. During Pitru Paksha, the souls are released to be with their families on Earth before returning to Purgatory.
Families must perform the ritual of Shraddha to ensure their family’s place in the afterlife. If Shraddha isn’t performed, the soul wanders around the Earth for eternity. During Pitru Paksha, families offer the dead food, such as kheer (sweet rice and milk), lapsi (a sweet porridge), rice, lentils, spring beans, and pumpkins, which are cooked in silver or copper pots and served on banana leaves.
10. DZIEŃ ZADUSZNY // POLAND
On November 1-2, most people across Poland travel to graveyards to visit their dead family members. Dzień Zaduszny (or Zaduszki) is All Souls’ Day for Catholics in the country. The holiday is celebrated with candles, flowers, and an offering of prayers for departed relatives. On the second day, people attend a requiem mass for the souls of the dead.
11. AWURU ODO FESTIVAL // NIGERIA
The Awuru Odo Festival marks the return of dead friends and family back to the living. Lasting up to six months, the holiday is celebrated with a feast, music, and masks before the dead return to the spirit world. Although the Awuru Odo Festival is an important ritual, it happens once every two years when it is believed the spirits will return to Earth.
12. P’CHUM BEN // CAMBODIA
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From the end of September to the middle of October, Buddhist families gather together to celebrate P’chum Ben, a religious holiday to honor and remember the dead. People give foods like sweet sticky rice and beans wrapped in banana leaves, and visit temples to offer up baskets of flowers as a way to pay respect to their deceased ancestors. It’s also a time for people to celebrate the elderly.
Before J.K. Rowling started dabbling in the American history of witches, we had our own traditions: Native American myths, the Salem Witch Trials, Bewitched, the 1970s resurgence, and the current phenomenon tell a long narrative of witches in America.
First, as in most cultures, the conceptions of witches and witchcraft have been around for a while in the North American region. The witch-like concept of skin-walkers, or yee nahgloshii, comes from the Diné culture, or Navajo people. However, it can be difficult to find information about Native peoples’ concepts and histories of witchcraft, mostly because they’re not very interested in going into detail about it with people outside of the culture. As Dr. Adrienne Keene wrote, “These are not things that need or should be discussed by outsiders. At all. I’m sorry if that seems ‘unfair,’ but that’s how our cultures survive.”
We do know a lot about American colonial conceptions of witchcraft, if only because it led to a lot of drama and death. But in 1658, predating the Salem Witch Trials, there was Elizabeth “Goody” Garlick, Long Island’s Witch of Easthampton (modern day East Hampton), who had been accused by an ill 16-year-old mother right before the teenager died. The local magistrates—even then overwhelmed by the gossiping and pettiness of their constituents—deferred to Hartford, Connecticut’s court (at the time, Long Island had administrative ties to Connecticut). Luckily for Goody, the Governor of the colony was John Winthrop, Jr., who saw these accusations of witchcraft as mere community pathology—a viewpoint he carried throughout all the witch trials he oversaw over the next decade.
Salem, Massachusetts, as we all know, was not so lucky between 1692 and 1693. There have been several reasons cited for what led to the witchcraft hysteria—among them: colonists displaced by King William’s War pouring in from the north; ergot poisoning in the rye grain; and Salem Village’s first ordained minister, Reverend Samuel Parris, who the people of Salem generally thought of as greedy and rigid (or, in modern day parlance, a “hardass”).
So it was particularly fascinating when Parris’s 9-year-old daughter Elizabeth and 11-year-old niece began experiencing contortions and tantrums, or “fits,” alongside another 11-year-old girl. All three were pressed for why, and in turn blamed Parris’s slave, a woman named Tituba; Sarah Good, a homeless beggar; and Sarah Osborne, a woman who had a reputation for breaking social norms.
While the latter two women denied being witches, Tituba made up strange, fascinating stories that captivated and went along with the leading questions asked by John Hathorne, the Salem town justice who handled most of the town depositions.
All three were jailed, though Tituba was the only one who lived; she was let out of prison 13 months later. (Osborne died in prison while Good was hanged after giving birth in prison; her baby died before her hanging.) Meanwhile, special courts were put in place for these Salem witch trials, and nearly four months after the initial accusations, Bridget Bishop—who was known for her gossipy nature and promiscuity—was the first person hanged as a witch. In all, 19 people were hanged as witches—including John Proctor, who eventually became the protagonist of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible—and one was pressed to death before the special courts were disbanded and “spectral evidence” (i.e. dreams and visions) was no longer usable during trial.
The next time witches were part of popular culture—beyond the condemning of the Salem Witch Trials—was in a much smaller context. In the early 1900s, when women’s magazines were giving advice on throwing Halloween parties, they were describing an opportunity for mixed-sex courtship rituals. This meant making elements of the holiday more palatable to the decade’s New Woman, depicting witches as beautiful and alluring instead of terrifying and devilish.
The cute witch trend continued into the 1960s with Bewitched, a popular TV series about a then-modern-day witch who decides to live as a suburban housewife. Before the show, the citizens of Salem were ashamed of the trials—to the point that no one would speak to Arthur Miller when he went there to do research. But with The Crucible’s success, and Bewitched filming episodes on location in Salem—including one where main character Samantha Stephens calls out the ridiculousness of the trials—the city experienced a resurgence, enough to boost the local economy through kitschy acknowledgement of the trials. This included, incidentally, a statue of Elizabeth Montgomery, the actress who played Samantha on Bewitched.
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Around the same time in the 1960s, the independent feminist group Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, or W.I.T.C.H., was founded. (They also went by “Women Inspired to Tell Their Collective History,” “Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays,” among other names.) They were interested in a feminism based on several methods of social change, not just toppling the patriarchy, and viewed witches as “the first guerrilla fighters against women’s oppression.” They spread their message by carrying out witch-like publicity stunts, such as protesting and “hexing” Wall Street, giving out garlic cloves and cards that said “We Are Witch We Are Women We Are Liberation We Are We” at a restaurant.
In the 1970s, witch collectives began to gather and organize more openly. Dianic Wicca, or Dianic Witchcraft, founded by Zsuzsanna Budapest and started on the Winter Solstice of 1971, is unlike other Wiccan traditions in that it has women-only covens, and worships only a monotheistic goddess (though it perceives goddesses of any culture merely as other incarnations of the main goddess). When asked about this during a 2007 interview, Budapest said, “It’s the natural law, as women fare so fares the world, their children, and that’s everybody. If you lift up the women you have lifted up humanity. Men have to learn to develop their own mysteries. Where is the order of Attis? Pan? Zagreus? Not only research it, but then popularize it as well as I have done. Where are the Dionysian rites? I think men are lazy in this aspect by not working this up for themselves. It’s their own task, not ours.”
In 1973, the American Council of Witches was founded and convened in April 1974 to draft a set of common principles of Wicca and Witchcraft in America. Unfortunately, they disbanded that same year because they could not agree for long, though they did come up with 13 Principles of Wiccan Belief (the first of which is, “We practice rites to attune ourselves with the natural rhythm of life forces marked by the phases of the Moon and the seasonal Quarters and Cross Quarters”), which is still used today. In fact, in 1978, these principles were put into the U.S. Army’sReligious Requirements and Practices of Certain Selected Groups: A Handbook for Chaplains.
If we’re going to look at a more modern witch, we’d want to turn to Alex Mar, author of Witches of America, last October’s cultural history of modern witchcraft and Wicca in America. According to an article she wrote for Cosmopolitan, “Since the ’80s, Pagans have been gathering in outdoor festivals and indoor hotel conferences all around the country, sometimes in groups of a few thousand. And with the rise of the Internet in the ’90s, vast networks have also spread online, making it that much easier for someone Craft-curious, in an area without a visible Pagan presence, to connect with a mentor in a chat room.”
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The internet has also definitely changed witchcraft. It’s become a cornerstone of modern feminism. It’s led to fights and discussion about the capitalist uses of witchcraft, which involves selling spells on Etsy. The website Broadly, in particular, has regular witch news about local covens, pagan festivals, and guides to celebrating the fall equinox.
What about the future of American witches? Well, next year will see the release ofBasicWitches: A Guide To Summoning Success, Banishing Drama and Raising Hell With Your Coven, by Jaya Saxena and Jess Zimmerman.
Suffice to say that witches have come a long way in America.
Back in May, the Manchester branch of Asda, one of Britian’s largest supermarket chains, introduced an early morning “quiet hour” of shopping for customers with autism. At 8 a.m., the store turned off its music, electronics displays, and escalators in order to create a more peaceful shopping environment for customers who are prone to over-stimulation or anxiety. The program was an immediate success, with other branches quickly following suit. Now, Toys “R” Us is endeavoring to make the most wonderful time of the year a comfortable experience for all shoppers. According to The Telegraph, several UK outposts of the behemoth toy store chain will hold a “quiet hour” of holiday shopping on the morning of Sunday, November 6.
In addition to making the experience music- and announcement-free, the stores will also dim their lights and reduce the amount of fluorescent lighting being aimed at patrons. According to the Autism Society, approximately 1 percent of the world’s population lives with an autism spectrum disorder; since 2000, the number of children affected by it has increased by nearly 120 percent. In the U.S. alone, more than 3.5 million people are afflicted, which makes gaining a deeper understanding of what it’s like to live with the disorder so important.
“We’re delighted that Toys ‘R’ Us is again showing the way by hosting an autism-friendly shopping event in every Toys ‘R’ Us store in the lead up to Christmas,” said Daniel Cadey, autism access manager for the UK’s National Autistic Society. “Simple changes like this can make a huge difference to the 700,000 autistic people in the UK and to their families, and we hope that many more major retailers will follow the great example set by Toys ‘R’ Us.”
If you were to ask one thousand Cleveland Indians fans to name their all-time favorite player, a decent percentage might say Willie Mays Hayes or Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn. Such is the enduring appeal of Major League. Although there have been hundreds of baseball movies over the years, few have resonated so strongly with fans and players alike, or had such an impact on the game itself. As the real-life Tribe suits up for the 2016 World Series, let’s take a moment to revisit the greatest fictional team in Indians history.
Although Major League is something of a love letter to Ohio’s second largest city, very few scenes were filmed there. Early on, the producers realized that it wouldn’t be easy to shoot a movie at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium while working around the Indians’s and the Browns’s schedules. “We were shooting late in the summer and the Browns were already playing pre-season games and there were football lines on the field all the time and that didn’t look real good,” Ward told ESPN. “There were also some union issues in Cleveland … So we went to Milwaukee.”
Most of Major League’s principal photography was filmed in Milwaukee, although Ward did manage to shoot the opening credits sequence in Cleveland, along with some establishing shots of Municipal Stadium. In Arizona, Tucson’s Hi Corbett Field—which was used by the Cleveland Indians from 1946 to 1992—provided the backdrop for some of the spring training scenes.
2. BOB UECKER DID A LOT OF IMPROVISING.
“Juuust a bit outside!” Colorful MLB player-turned-announcer (then actor) Bob Uecker was always Ward’s first choice for the role of Harry Doyle. “There was never anybody else up for this job,” Ward said. “I said, ‘Get me Uecker, I don’t care what it takes. We’ve got to have him.’ He contributed ad libs that were sensational.”
Ward actively encouraged Uecker to make up his lines on the spot. “David let me go,” Uecker once said. “He said, ‘I want you to be Harry Doyle. Say whatever comes into your head.’” Before the cameras started rolling, Uecker would be given “general directions” about whatever topic Doyle was supposed to be prattling on about. Then he’d improvise the actual dialogue. “Most of it was stuff I heard guys say in dugouts and clubhouses,” Uecker explained. “Like the line about the Pete Vuckovich character leading the American League in home runs and nose hair. Ball players rag on each other like that all the time.”
3. THE ACTORS ATTENDED A BASEBALL BOOT CAMP.
A few of Major League’s stars had at least some baseball experience under their belts. Tom Berenger (Jake Taylor) had played the game in high school, as had Corbin Bernsen (Roger Dorn). Meanwhile, Chelcie Ross (Eddie Harris) suited up for Southwest Texas State’s team during his college years. Then there was Charlie Sheen (Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn), who pitched so well as a teenager that he once received an athletic scholarship offer from the University of Kansas. “He could’ve played pro ball,” Uecker said of Sheen (who had starred in John Sayles’s Eight Men Out, about the Black Sox scandal, a year before Major League’s release).
Still, athletically gifted as some of his performers were, Ward decided that everyone could benefit from some professional assistance. So he brought on longtime Dodgers catcher Steve Yeager to organize a training camp for the actors. Under his guidance, Sheen and company fine-tuned their pitching, fielding, and hitting over the span of a few weeks.
4. WESLEY SNIPES TURNED DOWN A ROLE IN DO THE RIGHT THING TO PLAY WILLIE MAYS HAYES.
Wesley Snipes was still a relative unknown in 1989; at that point, one of his career highlights had been starring in the iconic, Martin Scorsese-directed music video for Michael Jackson’s “Bad.” Impressed by Snipes’s performance, Spike Lee offered the actor a minor part in Do the Right Thing. The actor declined so that he could take on a much bigger role: Willie Mays Hayes in Major League. However, Lee would later cast Snipes in Mo’ Better Blues (1990) and Jungle Fever (1991). In 2010, Snipes said that he considers himself “indebted to Spike for considering me and opening me up to that world.”
5. THE GRUMPY GROUNDSKEEPERS WERE PLAYED BY A FATHER AND SON DUO.
Being a 1980s comedy, Major League comes with plenty of montages. These allow the film to showcase some running gags; for example, the sequences repeatedly cut to two groundskeepers who disparage the Indians at Municipal Stadium. The two were portrayed by actor Kurt Uchima and his son, Keith.
Speaking of bit players: Jeremy Piven was cast as an irritable Cleveland bench jockey—but don’t bother looking for him in the film. To shorten the run time, his scenes were deleted. “I have the claim to fame of cutting a future star,” Ward jokes on the DVD commentary.
6. ACTOR DENNIS HAYSBERT REALLY DID HIT A HOMER IN THAT FINAL SCENE.
Best known today as 24’s President David Palmer and Allstate’s resident celebrity spokesman, Dennis Haysbert exudes an air of mystery in Major League as the Cuban-born slugger Pedro Cerrano. The character was loosely based on some real-life MLB stars—brothers Matty, Jesus, and Felipe Alou—who briefly became teammates as members of the San Francisco Giants. It was rumored (though never confirmed) that the three were deeply superstitious and would talk to their bats, just as Cerrano does onscreen.
During the shoot, Haysbert proved to be a talented ballplayer, as well as a great actor. Whenever the script called for his character to hit a homer, he actually did. “Every home run I was supposed to hit out, I hit out,” Haysbert said in the DVD documentary My Kinda Team: Making Major League. He kept this streak going through the climactic sequence, which sees Cerrano knock one out of the park at the bottom of the seventh. During the take, Haysbert sent the ball flying over the left field fence at Milwaukee County Stadium. His co-stars were awestruck. “Everyone stopped and applauded,” Ward toldSports Illustrated.
7. AN ALTERNATE ENDING CAST THE VILLAIN IN A MORE SYMPATHETIC LIGHT.
Question: If Rachel Phelps, the Indians’s ex-showgirl owner (played by Margaret Whitton) wanted the team to stink, why didn’t she just fire her manager? Or send her best players down to the minors? Or cut the club’s rising stars? The theatrical version of Major League never explains this glaring plot hole, but there’s a deleted scene that does. In the original script, the Indians manager confronts Phelps right before the huge playoff game against the Yankees. Calmly, she reveals that she secretly cares about the club and hoped they’d win all along. Moreover, Phelps claims to have personally scouted all of the players (except Hayes, whom she calls “a surprise”). “They all had flaws which concealed their real talent, or I wouldn’t have been able to get them,” Phelps tells the manager. “But I knew if anyone could straighten them out, you could. And if you tell them any of this, I will fire you.”
The scene was shot and incorporated into the first cut of the film. Once test audiences saw it, they didn’t react well to Major League’s third act twist. By the movie’s end, viewers had come to love hating Phelps. So in accordance with their wishes, Ward and producer Chris Chesser deleted the owner’s redemption scene. This forced them to re-shoot parts of the final Yankees sequence. Footage of Phelps cheering on the Indians was hastily replaced with new clips that showed her sneering, cussing, and—most memorably—criticizing Vaughn’s entry music.
8. SHEEN CLAIMS THAT HE USED STEROIDS TO GET INTO CHARACTER.
“Let’s just say I was enhancing my performance a little bit,” Sheen revealed in a 2011 interview. The actor claims that he took PEDs for roughly “six or eight weeks” while Major League was being made. “It was the only time I ever did steroids … My fastball went from 79 to like 85.”
9. MAJOR LEAGUE IS CREDITED WITH KICKING OFF A MUSICAL TREND IN PRO BASEBALL.
Since its release in the spring of 1989, Major League has given rise to the modern trend of MLB closers choosing their own entrance songs as they strut out onto the field.
Relief pitcher Mitch Williams drew Sheen’s ire when he adopted the nickname “Wild Thing” and changed his jersey number from 28 to 99—which happened to be Ricky Vaughn’s number. On top of all that, he chose the hit Troggs song “Wild Thing” as his personal theme, just like a certain Major League character did. Instead of seeing Williams’s antics as a tribute, Sheen felt that they stole his thunder. “I was pissed for years at Mitch Williams and said he never gave me credit,” the actor once fumed.
10. IN 2016, THE (REAL) CLEVELAND INDIANS SET UP A JOBU SHRINE.
Maybe the Indians should thank Pedro Cerrano for their recent winning ways. This past summer, second baseman Jason Kipnis and first baseman Mike Napoli converted an empty locker in the team clubhouse into a shrine to Jobu, the fictional deity Cerrano worships. Their ensemble includes a tiny figurine of the religious figure, along with a sweater that quotes Pedro’s famous line, “It’s very bad to steal Jobu’s rum.” Evidently, this shrine is having the desired effect. “We’ve had Jobu there for a little bit,” Kipnis said after a win in late June, “He’s been working. He didn’t like the airport vodka we left him. So we tried Bacardi and that seems to be working.”
Google Earth is a virtual globe that lets its users “fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean.” To achieve that goal, the service must regularly stitch together individual photos from its library of satellite images in order to create a wider view. In two dimensions, that’s not so hard. But trying to convert that to three dimensions—especially in places where the visuals can get tricky, like where roads overlap—is where the algorithm can break down, and the resulting topologies can resemble what looks like an M.C. Escher painting viewed through beer goggles.
A fuel is a substance that can burn in the presence of oxygen. An oxidizer is a source of oxygen. A propellant is the combination of fuel and oxidizer. It is the chemical mixture that is burned to provide propulsion.
The three most common rocket propellants are liquid (hypergolic), liquid (non-hypergolic), and solid rocket.
For hypergolic fuels, these two substances are so reactive that just coming into contact with each other causes them to ignite. For non-hypergolic fuels, an ignition source is provided.
Pumps inject fuel and oxidizer into a combustion chamber where they burn, producing hot, rapidly expanding gases that are looking for a way out.
Solid rockets have a single substance that is pre-mixed to contain fuel and oxidizer. That substance is cut or molded into shapes and thicknesses appropriate for the types of burns the rocket needs to perform. That material is put inside the rocket fuselage. Sometimes it is bonded to the sides, sometimes it isn’t. And then ignition is provided in the center of the fuselage so that the fuel burns from the inside out.
With the liquid propellants, thrust can be easily manipulated using the turbo pumps that feed the fuel and oxidizer into the combustion chamber. The engine can be stopped and restarted. Solid rockets can usually only be controlled by their shape. Once they are burning, it really isn’t practical to stop them from burning. Some rockets work around this by using multiple sections of solid fuel and then burning them separately.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a love letter to the golden age of offbeat cinema, written in bright red lipstick. As any regular Frankie fan can tell you, it’s based on an offbeat stage show that sprang from the mind of Richard O’Brien. (He plays Riff Raff in the film version.) A B-movie devotee, O’Brien wove numerous cult film references into his theatrical lovechild and, by extension, its cinematic reincarnation. But The Rocky Horror Picture Show doesn’t limit itself to honoring a single genre. Seasoned movie buffs may also recognize quick nods to a French crime drama, a thriller about a murderous priest, and the weirdest project that Roger Ebert ever worked on. So before Fox’s live Rocky Horror reboot gets us all doing the time warp again, let’s go over some of the little homages that spiced up the original.
1. FRANKENSTEIN (1931)
Lightning struck twice when Universal Studios unveiled a new take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1931. Earlier that same year, the company had released its hugely successful cinematic version of Dracula. With Boris Karloff delivering an outstanding performance as the monster, Frankenstein turned into an even bigger hit and became the fourth highest-grossing film of its decade. The Rocky Horror Picture Show salutes the instant classic when Riff Raff scares off Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s monster with a candelabra. This echoes a similar henchman/creature scuffle from Universal’s Frankenstein. In the 1931 film, the doctor’s assistant is a hunchback named Fritz. (The more famous Igor character hadn’t yet been conceived.) Upon being left alone with the monster, he taunts it by shoving a flaming torch into the poor brute’s face. Spooked by the flames, it instinctively recoils, just like our friend Rocky does.
2. DOCTOR X (1932)
Let there be lips! The Rocky Horror Picture Show begins on an appropriately odd note: As the opening credits roll, a pair of disembodied crimson lips sail into view and set the mood by regaling us with a song called “Science Fiction/Double Feature.” The lyrics are gut-loaded with references to iconic B-movies, including 1932’s Doctor X. A suspenseful tale about a mad scientist and his homemade creature, it’s gone down in history as the first horror film to be shot in color, although a black-and-white version was shown at most theaters.
3. THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933)
Here’s another classic that gets a title drop in Rocky Horror’s surreal intro. Based on an H.G. Wells novel of the same name, The Invisible Man was directed by James Whale, the visionary behind Universal’s Frankenstein and its 1935 follow-up, The Bride of Frankenstein. An effective cautionary tale, the movie follows Dr. Jack Griffin, a chemist who gets drunk with power after discovering the secret of invisibility. Whale’s special effects team used every trick in the book here. For example, to execute scenes where Griffin disrobes, leading man Claude Rains wore black velvet tights under his costume and went through his blocking on an entirely black set. The resulting footage, which showed nothing but Griffin’s floating clothes, was then superimposed over a different length of film that captured the other actors and the primary sets. Other sequences called for good, old-fashioned wires, which helped various objects travel through the air, seemingly all by themselves.
4. KING KONG (1933)
In 1932, producer Merian C. Cooper promised Fay Wray “the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.” Naturally, she figured he was talking about Cary Grant. Wray instead ended up working with the eighth wonder of the world himself. Released by RKO Pictures during one of the worst years of the Great Depression, King Kong might be the single most influential film ever made. It was the first movie to have a completely original score, the first to ever be re-released, and among the first to pit live actors against stop-motion monsters. The Rocky Horror Picture Show really has something of a fixation with this flick; not only do those disembodied red lips sing about it, but Dr. Frank-N-Furter also pines for Fay Wray’s iconic Kong dress near the finale. Furthermore, we get to see Rocky himself climbing up a model radio tower, RKO’s logo, before falling to his death. To quote the final line of King Kong, “It was beauty killed the beast.”
5. THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)
Magenta rocks a zany new hairstyle for Rocky Horror’s thrilling climax. Her arresting coiffure was more or less directly lifted from The Bride of Frankenstein. In this spectacular sequel, the title character dons a streaky, upright hairdo that was modeled after a famous bust of Nefertiti, an ancient Egyptian queen. Although the monster’s mate appears to be wearing a wig in Bride, the mop we see on-screen is nothing of the sort. “[It was] my own hair,” actress Elsa Lanchester said. “I had it lifted up from my face, all the way around; then they placed a wire cage on my head and combed my own hair over that cage. Then they put the gray-streak hairpieces in afterwards.”
6. THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951)
“Science Fiction/Double Feature” acknowledges one of the most topical films of 1951. Once the Cold War arrived, sci-fi movies began to grow more overtly political. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, a benevolent alien named Klaatu (played by Michael Rennie) warns the human race that its increasing usage of nuclear weapons has made other planets nervous enough to consider wiping out all life on Earth in a preemptive strike. Given the controversial subject matter, Hollywood’s reigning censorship board, the Production Code Administration (PCA), went through the script with a fine-tooth comb and left its fingerprints on the finished product. At the end of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Klaatu delivers an anti-war sermon before ascending back into the heavens from whence he came. To avoid offending certain moviegoers, the PCA insisted the speech be rewritten so as to temper or omit “words that seem to be directed towards the United States.”
7. WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1951)
“But when worlds collide, said George Pal to his bride, I’m gonna give you some terrible thrills,” sang the Rocky Horror lips. Pal was an animator and producer who specialized in sci-fi thrillers. It was he who brought The War of the Worlds (another H.G. Wells novel) to the silver screen for the very first time in 1953. Like that better-known movie, When Worlds Collide is a doomsday story—although this time mankind’s survival is threatened not by extraterrestrial warships, but by a rogue planet that’s about to smack right into the earth. When another, potentially habitable planet is discovered, the world’s leaders scramble to save humanity by dispatching a “space ark” filled with a select group of people to colonize this new terrain. Will the desperate plan work? Or is our species destined for extinction? See the movie and find out for yourself.
8. IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953)
Early on in “Science Fiction/Double Feature,” the lips give this game-changer a little love. In 1950, Universal Studios hired Ray Bradbury to pen an original story outline about an alien spaceship. But instead of writing the brief plot synopsis that he’d been paid for, Bradbury overzealously handed in a full-length script. The premise he came up with put a fresh spin on the alien invasion genre, as it posits that extraterrestrial visitors might not necessarily be evil. Bradbury’s plot focuses on an interstellar vessel that crash-lands in Arizona. To get home, the otherworldly crew must fix their ride without getting themselves killed by suspicious human beings. Universal liked the idea, but decided to let someone else put the finishing touches on the script. Bradbury didn’t take this well.
“With the treatment in hand,” Bradbury recalled, “they fired me and hired Harry Essex to do the final screenplay (which, he told me later, was simply putting icing on the cake).” Titled It Came From Outer Space, their finished movie had a major impact on a whole generation of budding directors.
In 1977, Bradbury attended the world premiere of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Afterwards, the author told Spielberg that he’d thoroughly enjoyed the picture. In response, the director said “Close Encounters wouldn’t have been made if I hadn’t seen It Came From Outer Space six times as a kid. Thanks.”
9. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)
The sole directorial effort of actor Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter comes with an unforgettable villain. Reverend Harry Powell, masterfully portrayed by Robert Mitchum, is a serial-killing preacher who weds and murders a series of rich widows. Tattooed onto his knuckles are the words “love” and “hate,” which—as he reveals in the above clip—represent that eternal struggle between good and evil. Eddie from Rocky Horror sports an identical set of tats though, unlike Powell, he never explains their significance. (It probably has something to do with rock ‘n roll and/or hot patooties.)
10. TARANTULA (1955)
Big bug flicks were all the rage in the 1950s. The fad began with Them!, a 1954 Warner Bros. classic about giant, radioactive ants that terrorize New Mexico before going national. When this creepy, crawly picture became one of the year’s highest-grossing films, Hollywood took notice. Over the next few years, a swarm of monster arthropod movies attempted to ride the coattails of Them!, including The Deadly Mantis and The Black Scorpion (both released in 1957). But perhaps the most well-reviewed copycat is Tarantula, a film that sees Clint Eastwood take to the skies in a fighter jet to do battle with a 50-foot arachnid. Whereas Them! relied on puppetry, Tarantula mainly used footage of actual spiders for its effects sequences. As those Rocky Horror lips point out, the film’s resident scientist is played by Leo G. Carroll, whose credits include North by Northwest and five other Alfred Hitchcock pictures.
11. FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
By Gene Roddenberry’s own admission, Star Trek owes a lot to Forbidden Planet. An epic space opera that carries the whiff of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Forbidden Planet had an abnormally high budget for a 1950s science fiction film, costing around $2 million to create. The result is a gorgeous film loaded with state-of-the-art miniatures and matte paintings.
Particular care was given to realizing the film’s primary non-human character, a lovable robot named Robby. He was brought to “life” by an actor in a suit made out of “thermo-formed” plastics. Far from being an inert costume, the outfit was given a vast array of buttons and gears that energetically spin around throughout his screen time. As if this weren’t enough, neon light tubes come on whenever he speaks. Altogether, the Robby suit cost at least $100,000 to build and contained 2600 feet of wiring. Such technical wizardry landed Forbidden Planet an Academy Award nomination for Best Special Effects. And, of course, it receives a well-deserved shout-out in the chorus of “Science Fiction/Double Feature.”
12. CURSE OF THE DEMON (1957)
Some references are subtler than others. That magnificent mouth never name-checks this film, but alludes to it by quipping “Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes and passing them used lots of skill.” Curse of the Demon, starring Andrews, was based on “Casting the Runes,” a 1911 short story by M.R. James. A subtle breed of monster film, it features a hellish beast that hunts down accursed human beings. In order to build suspense and uncertainty, director Jacques Tourneur planned on keeping the monster almost completely out of sight. By doing this, he hoped to make the audience question the creature’s existence. But when his producer rejected the idea, Tourneur was forced to shoot long sequences that explicitly show the monster reaching out and killing its prey. Nearly 60 years later, fans still argue about whether this was the right call or a misstep.
13. THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1962)
“And I really got hot when I say Janette Scott fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills,” go the opening song’s lyrics. What are Triffids, you ask? Fictional, man-sized plants capable of walking around on their roots. They also have toxic stingers and an appetite for human flesh. The botanical brutes first appeared in novelist John Wydnam’s 1951 thriller, The Day of the Triffids. By far his most famous book, it tells the story of a meteor shower that blinds everyone who gazes at it. With a huge proportion of humanity rendered sightless, the killer plants (of indeterminate origin) make their move. Two separate BBC miniseries have been based upon The Day of the Triffids; the story was also converted into a 1962 film starring Janette Scott and inspired Alex Garland to write the screenplay for 28 Days Later.
14. BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964)
“Say, do any of you guys know how to Madison?” Brad Majors asks Frank-N-Furter’s eccentric guests. This wasn’t just a throwaway line; it was an homage. The preceding Rocky Horror dance number is “The Time Warp,” a bit that was inspired by a memorable dance sequence in the 1964 French crime drama Band of Outsiders. An offering from French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, it’s about three wannabe thieves who plot to execute a heist. At one point, the trio dances the Madison in a Parisian cafe.
15. BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970)
Roger Ebert—yes, that Roger Ebert—co-wrote the script for this one-of-a-kind cult classic. NicknamedBVD by its fans, it was originally supposed to be a sequel to the critically-panned drama Valley of the Dolls (1967). Director Russ Meyer had other ideas. As Ebert put it, the auteur “wanted everything in the screenplay except the kitchen sink. The movie, he theorized, should simultaneously be a satire, a serious melodrama, a rock musical, a comedy, a violent exploitation picture, a skin flick and a moralistic expose … of what the opening crawl called ‘the oft-times nightmarish world of Show Business.’”
Ultimately, BVD evolved into a bit of a parody about an all-female rock group that tries to make it in Hollywood. Soon, the musicians do just that, but find themselves woefully unprepared for stardom’s numerous drawbacks. A downward spiral ensues, complete with drug abuse, one-night stands, and a brutal decapitation.
Ebert’s chaotic movie struck a chord with Richard O’Brien. While The Rocky Horror Picture Show stage musical was still being rehearsed in London, O’Brien brought the cast to a midnight screening of BVD because it had the campy tone that he felt their production should emulate. This style was then carried over into Rocky Horror’s subsequent film adaptation. For services rendered, the movie subtly tips its hat to a certain “moralistic expose”: When Dr. Scott is dragged through the castle, you can see a Beyond the Valley of the Dollsposter in the background.
If there is a tie in the Electoral College, the race for president gets sent to the House of Representatives, where the top three candidates are decided by each state’s delegation as a statewide block. As a state, the representatives decide on a candidate to vote for and, after much politicking, one candidate eventually gets a majority of states and becomes president. For vice presidents it’s a little simpler: it’s only the top two candidates, each senator gets a vote, and whoever gets the majority of Senate votes wins.
Now that that’s been dealt with, how did we get to this odd scenario? And are there any ways that it can be made odder?
A LITTLE BACKGROUND
First, as a matter of clarification, the result in November is just a guideline; the real action is in December, when the Electoral College votes. While it would be a political crisis if the Electoral College completely disregarded the will of the people, it’s not impossible. Only around half of the states plus Washington, D.C. have laws that explicitly say an elector has to vote for their state’s winning candidate. And among those states the laws vary wildly.
In North Carolina, for example, failure to vote for the correct candidate results in a $500 fine and the elector is automatically removed, doesn’t have a vote recorded, and a new elector is put in place. In New Mexico, it’s a fourth-degree felony for an elector to vote for a different candidate, but there’s no provision for canceling the vote. And Ohio just has it as a vague “it’s illegal.” The Supreme Court has never ruled on the constitutionality of these restrictions, as it has never really mattered and electors tend to be party faithful anyway. But for the following scenarios, it’s important to keep in mind:
Our current system is the result of the 12th Amendment, which grew out of the disastrous election of 1800. Article II of the Constitution says that each elector needs to cast two votes and the candidate with the most electoral votes wins, while second place gets the vice presidency. In 1800, the Federalist Adams/Pinckney ticket was up against the Democratic-Republicans’ Jefferson/Burr. The Federalists recognized the inherent problem with the then-current rules and gave one electoral vote to John Jay (who wasn’t even a candidate), so that Adams would have one more vote than Pinckney. However, the victorious Democratic-Republicans messed that part up and gave Jefferson and Burr the same number of votes, sending it to the House to decide which one of them would be president.
Thirty-six ballots and a truly ridiculous amount of politicking later, Jefferson was finally elected president and Burr vice president. But the flaws in the Constitution were beginning to show, and the 12th Amendment was ratified just in time for the next presidential election. The 12th Amendment changed it so that electors voted for a president and a vice president, as opposed to two presidential ballots. It also created the modern rules for tie-breaking.
WHAT HISTORY CAN TELL US
In the entire history of the country, the Electoral College has only failed to come to an agreement twice, once for president and once for vice president. Weirdly however, they were in two different elections.
The 1836 election pitted Martin Van Buren against a supergroup of Whig opponents specially picked to appeal to specific regions. The plan was to prevent Van Buren from getting a majority in any region so that the House would make the decision. It didn’t work and Van Buren won; but when it came time to count the electoral votes, Van Buren’s running mate, Richard Johnson, was one vote short of a majority. The entire Virginia delegation had cast their presidential votes for Van Buren and their vice presidential ballots for a different candidate. The election went to the Senate, which picked Johnson in a party line vote.
In 1824, Andrew Jackson won a plurality in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, but not a majority. When it got to the House, they chose second place John Quincy Adams to be president. Accusations immediately started flying that Adams had secured the support of Speaker of the House Henry Clay, who had come in fourth in the race and was thus ineligible to be chosen, in exchange for an appointment as Secretary of State. As for the vice presidency? John Calhoun has been described by one historian as “everybody’s second choice” and won Electoral College votes from all sides of the political spectrum, dominating his vice presidential opponents.
WHAT IF THERE’S NO TIE ON ELECTION DAY?
Waking up on Wednesday morning, the newspapers blare “We have a winner!” But that’s not the end of the story.
After the contentious 2000 election, with Bush sitting on 271 electoral votes and Gore with 267, there were reports and conspiracy theories of Gore and Democrat consultants trying to flip three electors (for their part, the Gore campaign disavowed the endeavor). This didn’t happen (and actually one Gore elector abstained, giving Gore 266 votes), but the fact that it was even tossed around as an idea shows that the Electoral College could in theory make up their own minds regardless of the actual results.
In 1988, it was George H.W. Bush vs. Michael Dukakis and his running mate Lloyd Bentsen. Bush won in a landslide, but one elector flipped their ballot and voted Bentsen president and Dukakis vice president, giving Bentsen one electoral vote for president (the elector, Margarette Leach of West Virginia, did it to protest the Electoral College).
It was inconsequential because the vote was a landslide. But what if it wasn’t and the election was tied?
The Constitution says “if no person [has an electoral majority], then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as president” shall the House pick the president. In a no-Electoral College-majority election, the Dukakis-Bentsen flip would have resulted in the House choosing between the top three presidential electoral vote getters—Bush, Dukakis, and Bentsen. In that case, it wouldn’t be impossible for the House to decide Bentsen as winner. And although constitutional scholars doubt whether the system would allow such a scenario to take place, Bentsen could in theory also be a vice presidential candidate (the 12th Amendment has the Senate pick between the top two vice presidential vote-getters, so Dukakis would be out).
The Electoral College doesn’t need to go down the route of people anyone has actually “voted for”’ either. In 1972, one elector cast a vote for the Libertarians, despite them only getting 3674 popular votes in the entire country. But at least they were running for president. In 1976, the two main candidates were Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, with Bob Dole and Walter Mondale as the respective VPs. Carter/Mondale walked away from election night the winners with 297 electoral votes to Ford/Dole’s 241. But after the Electoral College met, Ford only got 240. This wasn’t a repeat of Gore’s missing electoral vote or the Dukakis flip—Dole still got 241.
One Washington state (which Ford won) elector voted Ronald Reagan for president, Dole for vice president (Reagan would later tell the elector, Mike Padden, “Boy, we sure gave ’em a go in ’76. It came so close”), which illustrates that the Electoral College can pick anyone. And the Bentsen elector actually said, “If 270 women got together on the Electoral College we could have had a woman president.”
More than 60 years ago, a rising star filmmaker put together a small cast, built a giant set, and turned a screenplay almost no one wanted into a landmark feature film. To this day, Rashomon is considered one of the greatest entries in the stellar filmography of Akira Kurosawa. It brought Japan to the world cinema stage, made Kurosawa an icon, and continues to endure both as a work of art and as an example of just how fragile our relationship to the truth can be. To celebrate this iconic film, here are 11 facts about how it got made.
1. STUDIOS WERE RELUCTANT TO MAKE IT.
Akira Kurosawa had the idea and the budget for what would become Rashomon as early as 1948, but for at least two years he couldn’t get a studio to commit to the film. The Toyoko Company, who originally planned to fund the film, backed out in 1948 after determining the film to be too much of a risk. Toho, the studio where Kurosawa made many of his films, said no. Then the Daiei studio signed a one-year contract with Kurosawa and agreed to fund the film after Kurosawa expanded the script to add a more definitive beginning and ending. Even as Daiei backed the film, though, the head of the studio—Masaichi Nagata—wasn’t impressed, walking out of his first screening. Of course, when the film became a darling of international cinema, he was more than happy to take credit.
2. IT’S BASED ON TWO SHORT STORIES.
The script that would become Rashomon began as a slightly short screenplay by Kurosawa’s friend, Shinobu Hashimoto, adapted from the short story “In A Grove” by the Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. The story, like the film, features varying accounts of an incident told by different people.
Kurosawa liked the idea, but felt the script needed expansion, so he used Akutagawa’s story Rashomon, in which characters huddle in the rain under the Rashomon gate, as inspiration. The two merged, and the film was born.
3. ITS VISUAL STYLE WAS INSPIRED BY SILENT FILMS.
While thinking about how Rashomon should look, Kurosawa remembered the days before films had sound, when visuals were the star, and hunted down French avant-garde films of the silent era for research. He saw the film as a “play of light and shadow,” and as a result many of its most famous sequences are built upon the camera, not the dialogue.
“I like silent pictures and I always have,” Kurosawa said. “They are often so much more beautiful than sound pictures are. Perhaps they had to be.”
4. THE MAIN SET WAS SO BIG THEY COULDN’T BUILD THE WHOLE THING.
In researching Rashomon, Kurosawa paid particular attention to how the titular “Rashomon Gate” should look, and did research on other similar gates of the period. In the end, he determined that the gate should be much larger than originally intended. It was so big, in fact, that if they’d built it intact, it would have collapsed on itself.
“It was so immense that a complete roof would have buckled the support pillars,” Kurosawa said. “Using the artistic device of dilapidation as an excuse, we constructed only half a roof and were able to get away with our measurements.”
5. AN ASSISTANT LEFT THE FILM BECAUSE HE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND THE STORY.
Rashomon’s now-famous nonlinear storytelling style might seem commonplace to modern viewers, but it wasn’t in 1950. As a result, three of Kurosawa’s assistant directors came to him during production to ask him to explain the script. He explained that the film was about “the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology,” and two of the assistants left to read the script again. A third kept asking for further clarification, to the point that Kurosawa eventually asked for his resignation.
6. THE CAST INVENTED THEIR OWN DISH DURING THE SHOOT.
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Rashomon’s small cast became a tight, energetic group during production, enduring grueling shooting days and then going out drinking together at night. According to Kurosawa, they eventually created a meal together, which they called “Mountain Bandit Broil.”
“It consisted of beef strips sautéed in oil and then dipped in a sauce made of curry powder in melted butter,” according to Kurosawa. “But while they held their chopsticks in one hand, in the other they’d hold a raw onion. From time to time they’d put a strip of meat on the onion and take a bite out of it. Thoroughly barbaric.”
7. LEECHES WERE A PROBLEM.
For the iconic forest scenes, Kurosawa chose the pristine Nara forest, and the cast and crew happily headed out into the trees to shoot there. There was just one problem: leeches. They would drop out of the trees, crawl up cast members’ legs, and generally plague the entire production. So, the cast and crew came up with a simple solution: salt.
“Before we left for the location in the morning we would cover our necks, arms and socks with salt,” Kurosawa said. “Leeches are like slugs—they avoid salt.”
8. THE ICONIC RAIN SCENES WERE CREATED WITH INK.
Anyone who’s ever seen Rashomon remembers the iconic shots of characters crouched under the Rashomon Gate, sheltering themselves from torrential rain. While shooting, though, the production had trouble getting the rain (created by fire hoses) to show up on camera when silhouetted against the sky. So, to make it more visible, black ink was added to the water to create contrast.
9. IT BROKE THE RULES OF CONTEMPORARY CINEMATOGRAPHY.
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To further emphasize his “light and shadow” metaphors, Kurosawa wanted his camera to sometimes point directly at the sun, creating a lens flare effect. At the time, this technique was so frowned upon that some believed it would literally burn the film, rendering it useless. Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa was willing to take the risk, though, and the result is iconic.
10. IT IS CREDITED WITH INTRODUCING JAPANESE CINEMA TO THE WORLD.
After making Rashomon, Kurosawa went on to direct an adaptation of one of his most beloved novels, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. The film was greeted with very poor reviews, and he was crestfallen. Then, at the peak of his despair, he got a call informing him that Rashomon had won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, a festival he didn’t even know the film was screening at. It would then go on to win an honorary Academy Award for Outstanding Foreign Language Film. To this day, Rashomonis credited with bringing Japanese cinema onto the global stage.
11. ITS NAME IS SYNONYMOUS WITH UNRELIABLE NARRATION.
Since its rise as a global pop culture phenomenon, Rashomon’s narrative has inspired a particular phrase used everywhere from TV shows to courtrooms: “The Rashomon Effect.” This describes a situation in which different people have different accounts of the same incident, perhaps in part because they lie to make themselves look favorable.
Additional Sources: The Films of Akira Kurosawa, by Donald Richie
