In the meantime, the race is on to find ways to minimize the impact that burping, farting livestock have on the environment. Adding fish oil to animal feed has been shown to reduce emissions by up to 21 percent; adding beneficial bacteria to the feed cuts them by up to 70 percent. Another promising idea: kangaroo farts. Kangaroos don’t emit any methane when they burp or fart, thanks to bacteria found in their digestive tracts. Scientists are trying to isolate the bacteria and develop ways to transfer it to cattle, sheep, and other livestock, but that could take several years. Why wait? Some environmentalists argue that people should eat kangaroo in place of other meats. “It’s low in fat, it’s got high protein levels, and it’s very clean in the sense that it’s the ultimate free-range animal,” says Peter Ampt of Australia’s Institute of Environmental Studies.
A FINE EXAMPLE
In 2008 43-year-old Theresa Bailey sued her former employer, the direct–marketing firm Selectabase, demanding compensation for the abuse she suffered at the hands of her boss, David Nye. Bailey, who worked at Selectabase for three months in 2007, claimed that Nye regularly farted in her direction just for laughs. “The number of times he would lift up his bottom off the chair and fart and think it’s funny is unreal,” she says. In addition to the gas attacks, Bailey says she was ordered to wear a badge that read “I’m simple,” after she asked for instructions on how to log phone calls into her computer, and had a beach ball thrown at her head when she took offense at sexist jokes. Bailey won; Selectabase had to pay her £5,146 (about $10,000) but still denied that any of its employees acted in “an inappropriate, unfair, or discriminatory way.”
LAW AND ODOR
In March 2009, the Air-O-Matic company of Florida, makers of “Pull My Finger”—a fart-noise generator that was the second-most popular iPhone application sold in the Apple iPhone App Store—threatened legal action against a Colorado company called InfoMedia. They’re the makers of the #1-selling application—the iFart, which is also a fart-noise generator. Air-O-Matic claims that “Pull My Finger” is a protected trademark, and wants InfoMedia to stop using the expression in its marketing materials. InfoMedia argues that the expression is in the public domain—no one owns it, so anyone is free to use it. InfoMedia is seeking a declaratory judgement to that effect against Air-O-Matic, which, if granted, would guarantee its right to say “pull my finger” anytime it wants. Air-O-Matic co-founder Sam Magdalein says he hopes that the dispute can be resolved amicably. “Believe it or not, I’m really uncomfortable with bathroom humor. It would be pretty ridiculous to have this end up in court,” he said.
AMAZING COINCIDENCES
Do you like reading in the bathroom? So do we! Wow.
• On Christmas Eve 1994, two cars collided near Flitcham, England. The drivers were twin sisters who were delivering presents to each other. Their names: Lorraine and Levinia Christmas.
• On June 6, 2009, two men in China picked the same winning seven-digit lottery number. Though they were hundreds of miles away from each other, they bought their tickets at the exact same time, down to the second.
• A hot-air balloon crashed into a power line in Ruthwell, Scotland, interrupting the movie being shown on local television: Around the World in 80 Days…about a voyage in a hot-air balloon.
• American journalist Irv Kupcinet was in a London hotel room in 1953 when he found a few items that belonged to a friend of his, basketball star Harry Hannin. Two days later, Kupcinet received a letter from Hannin—he’d found a tie with Kupcinet’s name on it in a Paris hotel room.
• A blurry photo of a man stealing a wallet in a store ran on the bottom of the front page of the December 14, 2007, edition of Idaho’s Lewiston Tribune. Above it was an unrelated photo of a man painting a business. Readers noticed both men were wearing the same clothes…and could be the same man. He was, leading to his arrest.
• In 1972 a taxi driver from Bermuda accidentally struck and killed a man who was riding a moped. One year later, the taxi driver accidentally struck and killed the man’s brother—who was riding the exact same moped on the exact same stretch of road.
• In 1911 three men—named Green, Berry, and Hill—were convicted of a murder. They were hanged at London’s Greenberry Hill.
• On June 24, 2005, veteran actor Paul Winchell died at age 82. He voiced the character of Tigger in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh films. The next day, John Fiedler died at age 80. He was the voice of Piglet.
CELEBRITY GOSSIP
Here’s the latest edition of our cheesy tabloid section.
LEC BALDWIN
A In 2009 Baldwin joked on the Late Show with David Letterman that he was “thinking about getting a Filipino mail-order bride.” The comment created an uproar in the Philippines, where the practice of mail-order brides is illegal. The government not only banned Baldwin from the country but issued a vague threat. Said Senator (and former action movie star) Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr.: “Let him try to come here, and he’ll see mayhem.”
BOB DYLAN
According to American Idol judge Paula Abdul, Dylan snuck in to a taping of the hit show…twice. “He had a beard and tried to be in disguise,” said Abdul, “but I knew it was him.”
JENNIFER ANISTON
Although she says she likes the “natural look” when it comes to her appearance, in 2008 Aniston brought her personal hairdresser to the U.K. premier of her film Marley & Me. According to Daily Mail, the actress paid for the hairdresser’s first-class flights, his plush hotel room, and daily expenses for a week, plus the daily fee for his cosmetological duties. Total cost: $59,000. And what did Aniston get for all that? A hair straightening.
SARAH JESSICA PARKER
One night in 2009, the Sex and the City star was pulled over by a police officer for driving without her headlights on. Parker explained that she had recently purchased the Mercedes luxury minivan and hadn’t yet figured out how to work the headlights. The cop showed her how and let her off with a warning. “The officer was very patient,” said Parker’s representative.
MICK JAGGER
While attending a party in the late 1990s, the aging rock star was introduced to one of his idols, British jazz singer George Melly. “I didn’t expect you to have so many wrinkles,” said Melly. “They’re not wrinkles. They’re laugh lines,” Jagger replied. To which Melly said, “Surely nothing could be that funny.”
KEVIN BACON
Whenever he attends a wedding reception, Bacon bribes the DJ $20 to not play Kenny Loggins’s title song from the 1984 movie Footloose, in which Bacon starred. Reason: If the song comes on, guests form a circle around the actor and expect him to dance.
KATHARINE HEPBURN
Hepburn had a phobia of dirty hair and reportedly sniffed the heads of her cast and crew and told them if they needed to wash it. (Another piece of Hepburn gossip: She went through a phase when she was 10 years old—she cut her hair short, wore boys’ clothes, and called herself “Jimmy.”)
LINDSAY LOHAN
In September 2008, Lohan announced that she wanted to hold a fund-raiser for presidential candidate Barack Obama. But Obama’s campaign asked her not to, fearing that Lohan’s former reputation as a “wild party girl” might send the wrong message to undecided voters.
BRAD PITT
Before becoming an actor in the late 1980s, Pitt had a job driving strippers to and from parties. “It was not a wholesome atmosphere, and it got very depressing,” he says. So Pitt decided to quit, but his boss convinced him to do one last gig. There, he talked to a girl who urged him to take the acting class she was in. “It really set me on the path to where I am now,” he says. “Strippers changed my life.”
ALEX TREBEK
When the Jeopardy! host was saying his vows at his wedding ceremony in 1990, the officiant asked if he would “take this woman as his lawfully wedded wife.” Trebek replied, “The answer is…Yes!”
GREED: THE LOST MASTERPIECE
For film director Erich von Stroheim, bringing his favorite novel
to the big screen was a work of passion, but it would nearly undo his career. The story is as epic as any classic movie, even if the final product itself is lost to history.
TRINA AND McTEAGUE
Loosely based on a real-life San Francisco murder, Frank
Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague was all about the destructive power of greed. The main plot: Marcus is engaged to Trina, a German immigrant. One day, Trina falls off a swing and chips a tooth, so Marcus takes her to see his friend McTeague, an unlicensed dentist. Despite Marcus’s objections to gambling (because he can’t afford to play), Trina wins a massive fortune in an underground lottery. They fight, and Trina leaves Marcus for McTeague. But she hoards her money, lives like a pauper, and turns into a hag. Out of jealousy, Marcus gets McTeague’s dental practice shut down. McTeague has no way of making a living, but Trina still won’t share with him, either. So McTeague kills her.
The nearly 500-page novel takes place over two decades, features dozens of other characters and subplots, recurring motifs, and lengthy physical descriptions of the characters and the seedy San Francisco neighborhoods in which they live. The many subtle touches and countless details would make it a hard book to turn into a movie, but silent film director Erich von Stroheim knew he could do it.
THE GERMAN INVASION
Von Stroheim emigrated from Vienna to the United States in 1909 at age 24, and after a few years of odd jobs found work as a crewman on the 1914 silent film epic The Birth of a Nation. He parlayed that job into a stint as an actor in World War I-era films, playing loathsome German military captains. Von Stroheim’s portrayals of evil Germans were so popular that his films were marketed as “Starring Erich von Stroheim, the man you love to hate.” In The Heart of Humanity, for example, von Stroheim’s character tears off a nurse’s uniform with his teeth and throws a crying baby out of a window.
But by 1916 the jingoism he’d helped spread backfired on him—Germans were so hated in the United States during and immediately after World War I that von Stroheim couldn’t get work anymore (even though he wasn’t really German—he was Austrian). With no acting work being offered to him, the former movie star was reduced to renting a room in a boarding house in New York City. In his room, he found an old, beat-up copy of McTeague left by the previous tenant. The book struck a nerve, especially in how McTeague had suddenly lost his means of employment when others turned on him. Von Stroheim vowed to himself that he’d make a movie out the book someday.
A few months later, he got a break: D. W. Griffith, director of The Birth of a Nation, asked him to co-star in his latest movie, Intolerance. So von Stroheim headed for the world’s emerging film capital—Hollywood, California.
ARTISTIC VISION
Intolerance was von Stroheim’s ticket back into the movie business. The anti-German sentiment died down enough to where he acted in a dozen more silent movies. They were commercial hits, so in 1919 Universal Pictures allowed him to direct a script he’d written, called Blind Husbands. It, too, performed well at the box office, so Universal let him direct more movies. But von Stroheim was a self-styled artist who refused to compromise his artistic vision. Shoots ran long, dozens of takes were required—von Stroheim would do whatever it took to get exactly what he wanted. Result: his movies went way over budget.
To rein him in, Universal hired a new studio head—21-year-old Irving Thalberg. For their first film together, Foolish Wives, Thalberg gave von Stroheim a $250,000 budget. Despite Thalberg’s attempts to penny-pinch, von Stroheim managed to spend $1.25 million. Halfway through production of von Stroheim’s next film, 1923’s Merry-Go-Round, Thalberg decided that he was still spending too much money, so he fired him. Von Stroheim signed with rival studio Metro-Goldwyn.
Thalberg’s method at Universal was to make cheap, profitable movies, period. At Metro-Goldwyn, executives believed they could make commercial movies and turn a profit while allowing directors to make the movies they wanted to make (as long as they stayed under budget). So, seven years after he’d first discovered the book, von Stroheim pitched his idea of adapting McTeague to the studio bosses. They gave him the go-ahead with only one condition: He had to retitle it Greed.
Hoping to make the most of his artistic freedom, but also hoping to avoid pushing his bosses at Metro-Goldwyn too far, von Stroheim had to make sure he had enough money to make the Greed he wanted, so he supplemented the movie’s budget with his own personal funds. To get the money, he took out a second mortgage on his house and sold his car. To further lower costs, he took a pay cut. Although contracted to write, direct, and edit the picture, he accepted only a small fee for editing—two weeks’ scale salary.
KEEPING IT REAL
Have you ever watched the movie version of a novel you read, and found yourself disappointed because too much had been left out? That’s pretty much a necessity—a book contains far more material than can be included in a two-hour film. Von Stroheim didn’t want that to be the case with Greed. He wanted to include everything—every subplot, every line of dialogue, every piece of furniture and physical trait present in the novel. That would be an extremely ambitious concept today, but this was 1923—color film, special effects, and even sound were not yet available.
So in striving for realism and staying absolutely faithful to the book, von Stroheim had to innovate: He filmed on location, which was seldom done in 1923. (Greed was the first feature film ever made without any sets or soundstages.) The bulk of the action takes place in and around McTeague’s apartment in San Francisco, so von Stroheim rented a dilapidated house there and furnished it with run-down furniture exactly as Norris’s book described. To get a better sense of their characters, von Stroheim even made his actors live in the house. He also insisted that the scenes that took place in Death Valley, the hottest place in North America, be shot there. During filming, the temperature reached a blazing 142°F. Jean Hersholt, who portrayed Marcus, was hospitalized for internal bleeding triggered by dehydration.
A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT
It took von Stroheim nine months and $500,000 to make Greed— 18 times longer and five times more expensive than most movies of the time. But it was worth it to von Stroheim: Every miniscule detail of all 496 pages of McTeague was present in Greed. As a final touch, to emphasize the recurring themes of wealth and greed, von Stroheim hand-painted the actual film, using gold paint to color every gold object in the movie.
The director had made his masterpiece, but there was one big problem: It was more than nine hours long. No movie studio in Hollywood would release a movie that long, not even one that let directors do what they wanted. Von Stroheim realized he’d have to abandon his original vision of McTeague…and chop it down to a more manageable length.
But first he held a private screening of the complete, “true” Greed for his friends, family, and a few reporters. Exactly 12 people saw the nine-hour film in its first showing. It was also the only screening ever made of the full film. Those 12 people are the only ones who ever saw von Stroheim’s masterpiece the way he intended it to be seen. And they loved it.
BIG BUSINESS
But in April 1924, there were big changes at Metro-Goldwyn Studios. Lowe’s Theatres bought the company. They also bought Mayer-Schulberg Studios, and merged them into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Former Mayer-Schulberg chief Louis B. Mayer was appointed head of production, and he did not share Metro-Goldwyn’s “the director rules” approach. He shared Thalberg’s philosophy: Make a movie fast and cheap with a producer overseeing expenses. In fact, Mayer hired Thalberg—von Stroheim’s nemesis at Universal—to enforce these new rules.
Von Stroheim, meanwhile, still had a movie to finish. He carefully edited Greed, somehow getting the running time down to four hours with most of the plot, subplots, and themes intact. He sent the four-hour cut to his friend, editor Rex Ingram, asking if he could recommend anything else to delete. Ingram removed an hour, then sent the film back to von Stroheim with a note reading, “If you cut one more foot I shall never speak to you again.
”
CUT IT OUT
Von Stroheim presented the three-hour version to Mayer…who didn’t even watch it. Instead, he passed it off to a staff editor with instructions to cut it to an even 120 minutes. The two-hour Greed was a completely different movie from the nine-hour, the four-hour, or even the three-hour Greed. According to Film Monthly magazine, it “turned a tragedy rich with telling detail into a bare outline.”
The two-hour Greed concentrates exclusively on McTeague (Gibson Gowland), Trina (ZaSu Pitts), and Marcus. Most of the many subplots and characters were eliminated. Here’s a taste of some elements that were in Norris’ novel and filmed by von Stroheim, but completely removed from the final film:
Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader Page 49
