News

Fans of the popular procedural series "Bones" know that, throughout the series, the number 447 just kept popping up over and over and over again. Whether it appears as a time on clocks, room numbers, or just in the background of a scene — a trend that started in earnest in the show's fourth season — 447 is as important to "Bones" as "the numbers" were to "Lost." But what do they mean? Well, in the show's 12th and final season, the Jeffersonian Institute — where Temperance "Bones" Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and her team work as forensic scientists and anthropologists to solve cold cases alongside FBI agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) — blows up, and in the "Bones" series finale "The End in the End," the show reveals that the explosion took place at 4:47.

"We came up with [our take] pretty near the beginning of the season," showrunner Michael Peterson told TVInsider after the finale aired in...

The 1986 version of Little Shop of Horrors has an alternate ending where Audrey II takes over the world, which was originally intended but changed due to audience preference. Little Shop of Horrors has had multiple iterations including a 1960 film, a 1982 musical, and a 1986 movie musical, each with their own unique endings. The tragic ending of Little Shop of Horrors, where the main characters die and the villain wins, would have been a more consistent and emotionally effective choice for the 1986 version and any potential future remakes.

The 1986 version of Little Shop of Horrors concludes with Audrey II's defeat, but the film's alternate ending saw the alien plant take over the world. It's often said that Hollywood doesn't have any original ideas anymore, which is, of course, an exaggeration. Plenty of original films still get released, however they often don't get the same theatrical and marketing push that the latest superhero blockbusters or franchise sequels receive.

CopAt the ripe age of twenty-six—the two were born within days of each other in 1928—James B. Harris and Stanley Kubrick formed Harris-Kubrick Productions. With Kubrick leading the charge behind the camera and Harris acting as the right-hand-man producer, the duo completed three major critical successes: The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), and Lolita (1962). But where Kubrick’s subsequent work has achieved a supreme, hall-of-fame stature, Harris’s own directorial career—consisting of five excellent movies made across a four-decade span—remains, despite the valiant effort of a few notable English-language critics (Michael Atkinson, Jonathan Rosenbaum), on the relative sidelines. The latest attempt to boost Harris’s reputation: BAMcinématek’s week-long retrospective of Harris’s producing and directing output, selected by “Overdue” co-programmers Nick Pinkerton and Nicolas Rapold.Harris and Kubrick stopped working together amidst a pre-production disagreement during the making of what would become Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb...

If you're as fond as I am of Stephen Sondheim's much celebrated stage musical Sweeney Todd (and I consider it to be his greatest achievement), then you owe it to yourself to check out Sondheim's first succesful foray into the macabre, Evening Primrose. Based on the short story of the same name by the underrated (at least these days) John Collier (it can be found in the author's seminal 1951 collection Fancies and Goodnights), Evening Primrose is the tale of a young poet named Charles Snell (played by Norman Bates himself, actor Anthony Perkins). Tired of dealing with real life, he retreats into a secret world of gray-haired similarly eccentric drop-outs in a New York City department store, in order to devote all of his...

In 1966, composer Stephen Sondheim collaborated with playwright James Goldman on a musical adaptation of a John Collier short story about a community of outsiders who pose as department-store mannequins by day and follow their own eccentric rules by night. The show, Evening Primrose, aired on the experimental anthology series ABC’s Stage 67, with Anthony Perkins playing a young poet who learns he isn’t the first to have the bright idea of retreating from the real world, while Charmian Carr (a.k.a. Liesl von Trapp in The Sound Of Music) plays a woman who’s been lost ...

The 1966 television musical Evening Primrose is not a lost masterpiece, but it certainly hasn't deserved its four and a half decades of obscurity, either. Presented as part of the short-lived ABC anthology series ABC Stage 67, this adaptation of a John Collier short story hasn't been available for viewing outside of bootlegs or museums since its initial broadcast. ABC never presented it again. It was never syndicated nor released on VHS, much less Blu-Ray or DVD. That hasn't stopped legions of curious fans from being eager to see what it was like. Much of the fascination is due to the fact that Evening Primrose features four vintage tunes from Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim (Sweeny Todd, Assassins) and was adapted by playwright and screenwriter James Goldman (They Might Be Giants, The Lion in Winter). The two later collaborated on Follies. It...

Charlton Heston plays a Norman knight in this impressive costume drama set in 11th-century France

Director Franklin J Schaffner (1920-1989) went into TV immediately after service during the second world war with the Us Navy and built a considerable reputation during New York's golden age of live TV drama before turning to the cinema with a succession of intelligent, visually striking pictures. Patton is most famous, but before that he had two happy collaborations with Charlton Heston on Planet of the Apes and the less well-known The War Lord. In the latter, a highly impressive costume drama set in 11th-century France, Heston (right) plays a Norman knight going dangerously astray when assigned to a remote garrison on the fringe of Europe, where Christianity confronts paganism. The literate script is by British novelist John Collier and Millard Kaufman (author of Bad Day at Black Rock), the music is by Jerome Moross...