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Film Industry Quiz

Quiz:

1.       What are the two most important days of the week that count the most towards ensuring a film’s survival in the theaters? What are the three most important days of the week?

2.       What two families that have won Oscars over three generations?

3.       Why do they use popcorn in the theaters?

4.       Orson Wells was considered by some to be the greatest filmmaker ever. What was the one mistake he made with his debut film Citizen Kane that derailed his career?

5.       Name 3 Sundance films over the last few years that have gone mainstream?

6.       6. MGM stands for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Who exactly were these people?

7.        7. Carrie Fisher, Jamie Lee-Curtis and Angelina Jolie all have parents in the film industry. Who were they?

        8.       What kind of movie always makes money?

        9.       Who originally owned the studio United Artists and who owns it now?

10.   The five highest grossing films of all-time are Titanic, The Dark Knight, Star Wars, _____, and E.T. Fill in the blank

 

OK, pencils down:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Answers:

1.       The second of these two questions is slightly easier to answer. The three most important days of the week are Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Based on the weekend totals, theaters decide how many showings a day they will have for that film the following week. If for some bizarre reason, audiences flooded your local multiplex to see a particular film on a Tuesday, it would be pretty much irrelevant towards ensuring that the film gets ample time the following week.

 

I would give a slight edge to Friday and Saturday, however, because the number that is printed in the newspaper’s Monday edition is based on the grosses from Friday and Saturday with a mathematical formula used to calculate the Sunday totals. There should be a mention that those are the initial weekend numbers and are only estimates. It usually takes an extra day or two to get the exact figures, which aren’t too far off from the projections, but it happens quite frequently that the film that was projected to be the #1 film in the Monday newspaper actually turns out to be the #2 film, and it might not get mentioned in the next day’s paper. 

 

2.       The Hustons and the Coppollas. John Huston directed mostly adventure films and directed his father, Walter, to an Oscar in 1948 for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (see picture on the left. Huston also won Oscars for directing and writing the film and later directed his daughter to an Oscar in 1985 with Prizzi’s Honor. In 2003, Sofia Coppolla got an Oscar for writing Lost in Translation, while her father Francis got an Oscar for directing the Godfather II. In addition, Francis’s father Carmine, a flutist in the NBC Symphony Orchestra, won an Oscar for composing the score for the film. It’s not an easy question to get and I only knew of it because it was the final answer to Jeopardy once.   

3.       Three reasons for this are that a) The cost to make popcorn is incredibly small and the profit margin is high b) Popcorn makes you thirsty prompting you to want to buy soda c) Popcorn doesn’t make noise in the theater

 

4.       Orson Welles’ film was a biography of a newspaper publisher named William Randolph Hearst. Hearst was still alive at the time, quite a powerful man and highly displeased with the not-so-subtle portrayal of him. In response, he threatened RKO (the film studio) that he wouldn’t distribute or advertise for their films, and while the studio ended up showing the film anyway, they refused to give Welles the creative freedom he needed to become successful for the rest of his career.

 

5.       The Sundance film festival was founded by Robert Redford over 20 years ago and gives filmmakers who weren’t able to get studio financing for their projects (because they’re not established enough as writers, producers, actors or directors, likely) a chance to have their films made and shown to an audience. Sometimes films at Sundance attract the attention of a producer or studio who buys the rights to the film and shows it on a larger scale where they might have won critical acclaim. A fairly long list of films that have made it big after breaking through at Sundance: Napoleon Dynamite, Hustle and Flow, Little Miss Sunshine, Junebug, Garden State, 28 Days Later, Bend it Like Beckham, American Splendor, Station Agent, The Aristocrats, The Squid and the Whale, Art School Confidential, The Savages, The Last Mimzy, King of California, Hamlet 2, Frozen River, Black Snake Moan, The Blair Witch Project, Lucky Number Sliven, Thank You for Smoking, The Good Girl and Friends with Money. Just think: If not for the right combination of luck and the Sundance Film Festival, these films would have never made it to your movie theater, because in many cases, they were rejected by studios.

 

6.       Only one-and-a-half of those three names belongs to real people and technically none of them created MGM. The company was created by Marcus Lowe (think Lowe Theaters) who brought up two movie properties, Metro and Goldwyn, merging them together. Louis B. Mayer was the name of the film executive he put in charge of production and Irving Thalberg as his assistant who managed the actual shooting of the pictures. Why the film company wasn’t called Lowe-Thalberg-Mayer, I’m not quite sure. As for the M and G of M-G-M, Metro wasn’t an actual person, and Goldwyn Pictures came from an earlier merger between Samuel Goldfish and the Selwyn family. Samuel Goldfish later legally changed his name to Goldwyn because he liked the sound of it so technically, there was a Samuel Goldwyn at one time and he would later form his own studio even though he had nothing to do with MGM. It is also worth noting that Samuel Goldwyn was his third legal name: He was born in Poland with the name before it changed to Schmuel Gelbfisz.

Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh

7.       Carrie Fisher’s mom was Debbie Reynolds who was best-known for “Singing in the Rain,” “How the West was Won” and “The Singing Nun.” Angelina Jolie’s father is Jon Voight who has been one of the most visible actors of the last 30 years. You’ve seen him in “Enemy of the State,” “National Treasure,” “Ali” and several other films I’m sure. His two most famous and influential roles were in the Oscar-winning film “Midnight Cowboy” and his Oscar-winning role in the Vietnam war film “Coming Home.” Jamie Lee Curtis’ mom is Janet Leigh who is most famous as the woman who was murdered in the shower in Psycho. I confuse her quite often with Vivian Leigh who was the star of “Gone with the Wind” and “Streetcar Named Desire,” but the two aren’t related and neither of them were born with that last name. Her dad is comic actor Tony Curtis who is still alive today.

 

8.       This is not necessarily a question with one right answer but I was thinking of sequels when I wrote the question. Sequels almost always make money which is why there are so many of them. As long as a decent amount of people saw the original movie, it’s a safe bet that enough people are going to follow that storyline to its sequel. This is why film critics tend to complain about sequels: They often are lazily written attempts to cash in on the original.

 

9.       United Artists was a unique studio in that it was founded not by executives but by movie stars. The studio was founded by director DW Griffith and silent film stars Charlie Chaplain, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford because no one could afford to pay their salaries. The studio is run today by none other than struggling megastar Tom Cruise who got the gig after he was dismissed by Summer Redstone at Paramount. Tom Cruise turned to producing in 1996 with the film Mission Impossible. He recruited a business partner in Paula Wagner and the two have produced films that he has acted in, his friend Cameron Crowe’s film “Elizabethtown” his then-wife Nicole Kidman’s film “The Others,” and a film about corruption in the magazine industry called “Shattered Glass” (I suspect that his interest in this project might have paralleled his hobby of suing magazines for libel).

 

10.   The answer is Shrek 2. It’s hard to say exactly why Shrek 2 did so well, but a film released in the right time of the year can rake in votes. Like I also said, sequels also do well.