Neatorama

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• Gone With The Sequels
• Little Boy Battles through Hiccups While Singing National Anthem
• All of the Films of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ranked
• The Eagles Of Death Metal Discuss The Paris Terror Attacks
• This Sideboard Was Inspired by a Boxing Ring
• Old Plane Fuselage Makes for New Plane-Trippy Lightshow
• How to Make Giant Lightsabers
• HQT - Gryffindor - Wizards Aren't Known For Their Athletic Abilities
• Directors’ Cuts
• Bulldog and His Human Sing a Duet
• I Want to Believe In This <i>X Files</i> Merchandise
• Restaurant Menus of the 1850s and 60s
• Sea Wars Trailer
• The Perfect Christmas Gift: A Custom Potato
• Why Do People in Old Movies Talk Funny?
• Psychologists Develop a Formal Definition of Stupidity
• 15 Years of Terror

Gone With The Sequels Posted: 23 Nov 2015 05:00 AM PST The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader. What happens when the fans of a hugely popular novel and every book publisher in the world demand a sequel that the author doesn’t want to write? The author’s family waits 50 years, then hires someone to follow up Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. NEVER GO HUNGRY AGAIN Gone With the Wind, published in 1936, is one of the most successful and enduring books of all time. It won author Margaret Mitchell a Pulitzer Prize, has sold more than 30 million copies (and it’s still in print), and was adapted into a film in 1939 that became the most commercially successful movie ever. While the novel ends ambiguously (Rhett Butler up and leaves poor Scarlett O’Hara, and she doesn’t quite know what to do next), Mitchell felt her 1,037-page novel told a complete story, and despite major interest from her publisher and the public, she had no interest in writing a follow-up. Mitchell died in 1949 at age 49, having never published another novel. MADE IN CAROLINA In 1987, shortly after the novel’s 50th anniversary, Mitchell’s estate announced that it was commissioning a sequel to Gone With the Wind. Why? The book’s copyright was about to expire. Once the novel fell into the public domain, anyone could write a sequel, and the Mitchell estate would lose control of the characters. Not only that, they feared a slew of bad, unauthorized sequels flooding the market that could devalue the original work. The family and its attorneys interviewed 12 writers before selecting Alexandra Ripley, a Southern author best known for romantic historical novels set in the South (like Gone With the Wind), such as Charleston, On Leaving Charleston, and New Orleans Legacy. Mitchell’s family gave Ripley free rein to write whatever kind of follow-up she wanted… provided she follow an extensive set of guidelines (primarily “no raw sex”) and have the first two chapters completed by April 1988. “My hand just won’t write ‘fiddle-dee-dee,’” Ripley said about the style guidelines. “But I figure I’ll have to give them at least three and throw in ‘God’s nightgown!’ ‘Great balls of fire!’ and ‘As God is my witness!’” That April, the estate sent the first 39 pages of the still-untitled novel to every major New York publisher and gave them all 10 days to make an offer. The highest bidder: Warner Books, which agreed to pay $4.94 million, edging out a $ 4.8 million offer from Dell Books. Ripley was given 18 months to finish the book. (It took Mitchell 10 years to write Gone With the Wind.) Expectations were high, and Ripley had no delusions about the task at hand. “This one will never be mine,” she told the Associated Press. “I am trying to prepare myself for a universal hatred of what I’m going to do. Margaret Mitchell may write better than I do. But she’s dead.” In September 1991 —almost two years after Ripley’s original deadline— the 823-page Scarlett hit bookstores. The plot: Scarlett goes to Charleston to look for Rhett and confront his family, and then settles down in her family’s ancestral homeland in Ireland. SCARLETT FEVER Scarlett was a pop-culture phenomenon. It was the best-selling book of 1991, selling more than six million copies— more than triple the number of the runner-up, Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears. It spent 28 weeks on the Publishers Weekly best-seller list. CBS quickly announced plans to adapt it into a TV miniseries. The only problem: Just as Ripley had predicted, book critics and literary purists hated it. Critic Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it “stunningly uneventful.” Jack Miles of the Los Angeles Times lamented that Scarlett was an indicator of the triumph of lazy commerce over literary art. “Frankly, my dear,” quipped John Goodspeed of the Baltimore Sun, “it stinks.” RIPLEY’S GAME The public didn’t care what the critics thought. They welcomed the idea of continuing the story of Mitchell’s beloved characters. The Scarlett miniseries, starring Joanne Whalley as Scarlett O’Hara and Timothy Dalton as Rhett Butler, aired over four nights in November 1994 to big ratings and later won two Emmy Awards. To this day, the book is still a steady seller, with a few thousand copies still bought each year (though not as many as Gone With the Wind). Ripley was able to weather the storm and returned to writing her own novels. “There are two reasons why I’m doing this book,” Ripley told Contemporary Authors in 1987. “I can’t resist it, and as soon as this is done I will be able to write anything I want to,” meaning she would never have to worry about paying the bills again. She was right; she never had to sell out again. She wrote two novels after Scarlett— both published by Warner Books— From Fields of Gold (1994) and A Love Divine (1997). Both became best-sellers. THE ENGLISH, PATIENT The Mitchell estate (essentially three lawyers who acted on behalf of Mitchell’s two surviving nephews) liked the success that Scarlett brought, but they reportedly didn’t care for the novel itself. So in 1995 they commissioned English novelist Emma Tennant to write another sequel to Gone With the Wind. Tennant was best known for writing what was actually a well-received sequel to an immensely popular book by a well-loved author— Pemberley (1993), a follow-up to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. They gave Tennant the same guidelines they’d given to Ripley, requiring her to imitate Mitchell’s voice and stick to the original novel’s characters. She also wasn’t allowed to write in any “acts of incest, miscegenation, or sex between two people of the same sex.” St. Martin’s Press bought the rights to publish Tennant’s book, paying the Mitchell estate $ 4.5 million. TARA, GONE The estate had the full right of refusal of any finished manuscript… and that’s exactly what they did. Tennant submitted a 575-page novel called Tara, and while she had followed the Mitchell estate’s guidelines, they didn’t like the book. The estate had wanted a reboot, to wash away the bad feelings left by Scarlett, but Tennant’s book picked up right where Scarlett left off. The estate told Tennant they would not be publishing Tara (official reason: because it read “too British”) and then filed an injunction to prevent it from ever seeing the light of day. And it never has. But Mitchell’s people were still on the hook with St. Martin’s Press for the $4.5 million advance. In 1996 they approached another high-profile author: Southern novelist Pat Conroy, who had penned The Prince of Tides and who had just finished writing an introduction for a 60th-anniversary reprint of Gone With the Wind. Conroy was interested, of course, but he wasn’t willing to sacrifice his artistic freedom the way Ripley and Tennant had. Nor did he want to spend months slaving over a manuscript only to have it rejected for not being “true” enough to the source material. Conroy made the estate nervous when he mocked the “guidelines” to a reporter. He joked that he’d open the book with a scene of Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes in bed together with Rhett saying, “Ashley, have I ever told you that my grandmother was black?” Publicly, a lawyer for the estate praised Conroy as “an artist” and promised not to restrain him in any way. Privately, however, Conroy claims that the attorneys refused to let him follow through with some of his plot points… which included killing off Scarlett O’Hara. Ultimately, contract negotiations fell apart and Conroy moved on. AN ELF ON THE SHELF By 2000 St. Martin’s was getting fairly anxious over the fact that it had spent more than $4 million and five years on a book that never materialized. The executives working on the project, publisher Sally Richardson and editor Hope Dellon, began researching potential sequel authors on their own, without the knowledge of the Mitchell estate. One day, while browsing in a New York bookstore, Dellon found a solid candidate: She picked up Jacob’s Ladder, a historical novel set during the Civil War (sound familiar?) by a writer named Donald McCaig. Dellon tracked down McCaig and asked if he’d be interested in writing a sequel to Gone With the Wind. She expected him to immediately jump at the offer, but he didn’t— because he had never read Gone With the Wind. (But then he did, and he signed on.) WAR CHANGES EVERYTHING McCaig’s concept for his sequel: to not make it a sequel at all. Instead, he decided to set the novel in the Civil War and depict the events of Gone With the Wind from Rhett Butler’s point of view. Why? He felt that the book would lack emotional resonance without that backdrop. A simple sequel, said McCaig, would be dull and lack tension (which might have been the problem with Scarlett). “You take the Civil War out of it and have the epic love story, and everything else is kind of ‘Oh dear,’” McCaig told the New York Times. PEOPLE WHO READ PEOPLE McCaig spent six years working on the novel, doing research in libraries and document archives throughout the South. He even took a boat out into Charleston Harbor to help him understand how Rhett Butler could have navigated through fierce naval blockades. McCaig turned in chapters to St. Martin’s as he finished them, which were then individually reviewed by the Mitchell estate’s lawyers— a mutually agreed-upon arrangement to prevent them from rejecting (or hating) the full manuscript after the fact, as had happened with Scarlett and Tara. In 2007 Rhett Butler’s People was finally published, although to less fanfare than had greeted Scarlett, but to slightly better reviews. It nearly sold out its first print run of a million copies, again less than Scarlett numbers, but enough that the Mitchell estate and St. Martin’s Press asked McCaig to write another entry in the Gone With the Wind saga. It’s a prequel that will follow the life of Gone With the Wind’s Mammy, or “Ruth,” as she’ll be called in McCaig’s Ruth’s Journey. WENT WITH THE WIND But try as the Mitchell estate did to keep tight control over who wrote about the further adventures of the fictional characters that Margaret Mitchell first concocted more than 80 years earlier, they couldn’t fully suppress unauthorized sequels. In 2001 a North Carolina teacher named Kate Pinotti self-published her first novel, The Winds of Tara, her own idea of what happened to the characters of Gone With the Wind after that book wrapped up. The book directly follows Gone With the Wind (ignoring the other sequels and offshoots), with Scarlett leaving Atlanta and returning home to Tara, her family’s Georgia plantation. DOWN UNDER Self-published books are rarely cash cows or attention-getters, but the ever-vigilant Mitchell estate got wind of Winds and sent a cease-and-desist letter, demanding that Pinotti stop printing and distributing the book (even though it had a print run of just a few hundred copies). A legal battle ensued, with Pinotti claiming that her book was a parody, which is considered “fair use” under U.S. copyright laws. Mitchell’s estate argued infringement and won an injunction banning the publication of The Winds of Tara in the United States. But that’s just the United States. Australian publisher Fontaine Press followed the case, did some research, and discovered that the Australian copyright to Gone With the Wind had expired in 1999. That meant that Fontaine could legally publish a sequel in that country… which they did, releasing The Winds of Tara in 2008. Reviews were mixed, but if you ever manage to find a copy of the original banned self-published 2001 edition, hold on to it— it routinely sells for more than $ 300 online. _______________________________ The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader. The latest annual edition of Uncle John’s wildly successful series features fascinating history, silly science, and obscure origins, plus fads, blunders, wordplay, quotes, and a few surprises Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

Little Boy Battles through Hiccups While Singing National Anthem Posted: 23 Nov 2015 04:00 AM PST (Video Link) Ethan Hall is just seven years old. He had been given an important task: singing the song of his people before a crowd watching him at the beginning of a baseball game. It was the worst possible time to get hiccups. But Ethan did. This took place at Cooper's Stadium in Adelaide, Australia. Ethan started hiccuping at the beginning of his performance of "Advance Australia Fair." But he kept right on going, maintaining his composure and the dignity of his homeland's national anthem. As the color commentator for the game says at the end of the video, Ethan's performance was "absolutely priceless." -via Huffington Post

All of the Films of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ranked Posted: 23 Nov 2015 03:00 AM PST Philip Seymour Hoffman in a publicity still from The Talented Mr. Ripley Image: Paramount Pictures Fans of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman were floored and saddened when the actor died of a heroin overdose in February of 2014. It inspired some to go back and review the titles from his impressive film career, which spanned from 1991 until the year he died. Beginning as a scene-stealing character actor and ending up as a commanding presence who often carried the movies and theater productions in which he starred, no one could say that, as an actor, Hoffman was a "one trick pony." As such, Hoffman played widely varied character types: from a gay crew member of porn films in Boogie Nights to a privileged, preppy snob in The Talented Mr. Ripley. From a secretive Catholic priest in Doubt to a lonely obscene phone caller in Happiness. Refresh yourself with every film title from the late actor's body of work and see how a writer from Vulture ranked each with his opinions of worst to best here.

The Eagles Of Death Metal Discuss The Paris Terror Attacks Posted: 23 Nov 2015 02:00 AM PST The Eagles Of Death Metal never wanted to be associated with an event as tragic as the terrorist attacks on Paris, but since fate dealt them that dark card they're now forced to come to grips with what they witnessed. VICE sat down with the two guys at the core of the band- Jesse Hughes, who was present in Paris, and Josh Homme, who wasn't at the concert but is now raising money for the families of Paris Attack victims. (YouTube Link) People all over the world have been waiting to hear what The Eagles Of Death Metal have to say about that terrible day, and it appears our wait will be over when their VICE interview airs at the end of November. -Via LAist

This Sideboard Was Inspired by a Boxing Ring Posted: 23 Nov 2015 01:00 AM PST Go ahead and step through the ropes into the ring. It's completely safe, even though this sideboard is designed to look like a boxing ring. Emmanuel Gonzalez Guzman, a Chilean designer, calls his eye-catching design Cuerda (translation). The ropes hold inside and partially conceal whatever is stored there. -via Contemporist

Old Plane Fuselage Makes for New Plane-Trippy Lightshow Posted: 23 Nov 2015 12:00 AM PST Vimeo Link PlayMID and Eduardo Cajal's production Porta Estel·lar (catalan for "Star Gate") was created using the fuselage of an old airplane as container and stage for a light show made more immersive by the close quarters. The show makes great use of the contours of the fuselage such as the windows and rounded body. The creators intend Porta Estel·lar to be suggestive of "the idea of interstellar travel, audience flies to outer space in an intense trip, from departure and takeoff to the sighting of comets, planets, galaxies and alien worlds, until finally returning safe to earth." Via Gizmodo

How to Make Giant Lightsabers Posted: 22 Nov 2015 10:00 PM PST For his home Christmas light display this year, Bob Clagett made a pair of giant lightsabers. The hilts are made of cardboard cylinders painted silver and accented with duct tape. The blades are made of clear plastic roofing material and fixed inside the hilts with drywall screws driven through 2x4s. The actual light comes from Christmas decorative lights mounted just inside the hilts. Clagett found the lightsabers surprisingly sturdy. You can even duel with them! -via Core77

HQT - Gryffindor - Wizards Aren't Known For Their Athletic Abilities Posted: 22 Nov 2015 08:00 PM PST HQT- Gryffindor by Deadround It's hard to tell who you should root for in the fast paced world of quidditch, well, except for the fact that only jerks root for Slytherin. It may seem like a no-brainer to root for Harry's squad, but one player doesn't make a team, even if that player is young Mr. Potter. So when you choose a side as teams battle their way to the Hogwarts Quidditch Cup finales remember- don't let a sorting hat do your team picking for you, just watch them play and go with the team you find most enchanting! Celebrate your favorite fictional sport with this HQT- Gryffindor t-shirt by Deadround, it's a bold way to declare your allegiance to the most chivalrous and courageous house at Hogwarts! Visit Deadround's Facebook fan page, official website and Tumblr, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more magical designs: Columbia's Vigors Sir Daniel Fortesque The Cult Of Rapture HQT- Slytherin View more designs by Deadround | More Fantasy T-shirts | New T-Shirts Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

Directors’ Cuts Posted: 22 Nov 2015 08:00 PM PST A few facts about movie directors, from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids.  13 of the 100 top-grossing films of all time were made by Steven Spielberg or George Lucas. In 1968 Steven Spielberg and George Lucas took a directing class taught by Jerry Lewis. During the famous “chest bursting” scene in Alien (1979), director Ridley Scott got the reaction he wanted by unexpectedly showering the actors with real blood. Youngest movie director: Kishan Shrikanth of India directed a full-length film at age nine. Only one person has won Emmys for acting, writing, and directing: Alan Alda (for M* A* S* H). Supposedly, Wes Craven named his horrifying character, Freddy Krueger, after a kid who used to bully him in school. Leonard “Mr. Spock” Nimoy costarred in the 1985 Bangles video “Going Down to Liverpool.” Of the more than 250 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Alfred Hitchcock directed only 18. The sketch that Jack drew of Rose in Titanic was actually drawn by director James Cameron. (Cameron has many talents: he was also once a school bus driver.) David Lynch turned down the chance to direct Return of the Jedi. Woody Allen disliked his film Manhattan so much that he offered to direct another movie for United Artists for free if they shelved it. (They refused.) Italian director Frederico Fellini was nominated for 12 Oscars for writing or directing. Number of wins: 0. Francis Ford Coppola is an honorary ambassador to Belize. First movie Steven Spielberg ever saw: The Greatest Show on Earth, at age four. _______________________________ The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids. Weighing in at over 400 pages, it's a fact-a-palooza of obscure information. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

Bulldog and His Human Sing a Duet Posted: 22 Nov 2015 06:00 PM PST (Video Link) Junior is a French Bulldog. Walter Ledermüeller is his human. They like to sing together and have a YouTube channel filled with their car-based performances. They're often joined by Walter's partner Emanuel. In the past, they've made covers of hits such as "Let It Go" and "Love Is an Open Door" from the movie Frozen. In their latest music video, the duo sings a version of the song "Diamonds in the Sky." -via Tastefully Offensive

I Want to Believe In This <i>X Files</i> Merchandise Posted: 22 Nov 2015 04:00 PM PST Every major pop culture phenomenon ends up having some strange official merchandise, but the stuff that truly resonnates with fans ends up having some even more bizarre unofficial merchandise, much of which is available for sale on Etsy.  That's particularly true when it comes to The X-Files. In fact, Flavorwire did a quick roundup of some of the strangest X-Files merchandise available on the crafting site and it really does come in all varieties of strange and wonderful creations -from the Saint Mulder candle above to the punk rock jacket below. Of course, if you prefer your fun merchandise in fun t-shirt form, we have plenty of great X-Files tees available in the NeatoShop.

Restaurant Menus of the 1850s and 60s Posted: 22 Nov 2015 02:00 PM PST The University of Houston includes the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management. As a result, the archives of the University of Houston Libaries include a variety of old menus that show what hotel and restaurant patrons long ago could eat. You can browse high resolution images of several menus here. One thing that I found surprising was the concept of "breakfast wine." Barnum's City Hotel in Baltimore had a wide variety of options. Drinking spirited beverages before noon? How scandalous! -via Boing Boing

Sea Wars Trailer Posted: 22 Nov 2015 12:00 PM PST The crew of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower put together their own version of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer. The Navy’s creative use of what they had available will make you laugh and then make you go “Whooooa!” (YouTube link) At the end, you’ll see the title, and maybe think it says The IKEA Wakens. No, it’s The Ike Awakens. That’s the short name of the aircraft carrier. It's an easy mistake to make. -via Uproxx

The Perfect Christmas Gift: A Custom Potato Posted: 22 Nov 2015 10:00 AM PST Looking for something truly special to impress your loved ones this holiday? How about sending a custom message on a potato to his or her address thanks to the wizards of Annonymous Potato. Best of all, the gift, which is already great value of $13, is available on Groupon for 50% off! So now you can send a heartfelt potato for only $6.50 (plus shipping and handling). Who could afford to pass up such a great offer? And, since it stays anonymous, it makes a perfect present for Secret Santa.

Why Do People in Old Movies Talk Funny? Posted: 22 Nov 2015 08:00 AM PST YouTube Link A past episode of BrainStuff – HowStuffWorks explains that odd, sorta-Brit/sorta not accent that some American actors, politicians and other notable names used to affect. What we're hearing is known as the Transatlantic (Mid-Atlantic) Accent, which was taught to actors, media types and students alike, mostly prior to the second world war. What's funnier than the accent itself is the way some actors spoke that way consistently throughout their early films and then dropped it in their later years, thus rendering their voices practically unrecognizable. Mia Farrow in, say, Rosemary's Baby vs. her later films comes to mind. Via Laughing Squid

Psychologists Develop a Formal Definition of Stupidity Posted: 22 Nov 2015 07:00 AM PST (The Stupid t-shirt on sale at the NeatoShop) What does it mean to be stupid? That's not a dumb question. In fact, it's important to know what, precisely, is stupidity. Psychologists Balazs Aczel and Bence Palfi of Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary and Zoltan Kekecs of Baylor University in Waco, Texas decided to find out. They compiled a list of 180 stories of people acting stupidly, then asked 154 undergraduate students to read 15 of these stories. The participants then rated the stupidity of the actor in the story from 1 to 10 and explain why the action was stupid. From the study results, the scholars formed a comprehensive definition of stupidity and published their findings in the journal Intelligence. Real Clear Science quotes their article: The first situation in which people call an action stupid is when the actor takes high risks while lacking the necessary skills to perform the risky action. A typical story for this is when burglars wanted to steal cell phones, but instead stole GPS navigation devices. They didn't switch them off so the police were able to track them easily. We named this category ‘Confident ignorance’. The second cluster consisted cases of ‘Absentmindedness – Lack of practicality’... A typical story here is when someone inflates more air in the car tires than allowed. Here the person either forgot to pay attention to the action or he or she doesn't know something essential about tire inflation. The third category is ‘Lack of control’. Cases here are thought to be the result of obsessive, compulsive or addictive behavior. For example, one of the stories in this category described a person who canceled a meeting with a good friend to instead continue playing video games at home. -via Jonah Goldberg

15 Years of Terror Posted: 22 Nov 2015 06:00 AM PST German designer Milan Vuckovic (previously at Neatorama) compiled terrorist attacks over the past 15 years, between December of 2000 and November of 2015. This visualization follows a timeline at the bottom showing where attacks took place and roughly the number of people killed. Every death is a tragedy, but for accuracy and simplicity, the attacks plotted were limited to those in which twenty or more people died. (YouTube link) While the 9/11 attacks produced the highest number of casualties, you can’t help but notice that some areas of the world endure these incidents constantly. And they have since long before the beginning of this century. It’s a sad sequence, beautifully presented. -Thanks, Milan!

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