Yes, AlfredHitchcock directed two costume dramas, Jamaica Inn (1939), and Under Capricorn (1949), both set in the nineteenth century.
Hitchcock once said he didn’t like to direct historical movies because he couldn’t “imagine anyone in a costume picture ever going to the bathroom.”
D. W. Griffith paid $2,500 for the rights to Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s The Klansman, the book on which The Birth of a Nation (1915) was based. Dixon also received a twenty-five percent interest on the picture, which brought him several million dollars. The Birth of a Nation also drew on Dixon’s novel The Leopard’s Spots.
Marlene Dietrich said about the departed Orson Welles at the end of Touch of Evil (1958), “He was some kind of man. What does it matter what you say about someone?”
During the Depression, dish houses were movie houses that offered dishes as inducement for attending the shows.
George Hamilton played Robert Cole, a character based on Raskolnikov, in this strange version of Feodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment set in Santa Monica, California. It was Hamilton’s screen debut.
There were four brothers who started the studio named Warner Brothers: Harry (1881-1958), Albert (1884-1967), Sam (1888-1927), and Jack (1892-1978). They were the children of Jewish immigrants from Poland. They founded the studio in 1923.
Hitchcock used the word MacGuffin to mean a pretext for a suspense plot, an object or secret, such as military plans, of vital importance to the characters but of no real importance to the filmmaker. He thought his best MacGuffin was the set of vague “government secrets” in North by Northwest (1959), because this MacGuffin…