Weird stuff that I know or have found out and wanted to put someplace so that I can find it more easily when I need to look it up.
The movie Scent of a Woman (1992) is based on the novel Il Buio e il Miele by Giovanni Arpino. Scent of a Woman is also considered a remake of an Italian film, Profuma di donna (1974), which was also based on the book. (22 September 2005)
Gottfried August Buerger wrote, or rather embellished upon past work to create the book The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Which has had at least four movies made of it. Turns out the Baron was a real person, well-known for his somewhat exaggerated story-telling style. A series of authors created more and more fantastic versions of his stories, many based on ancient myth, some on standard tall tales/urban legends, and influenced by Jonathan Swift. Some good URLs on the subject:
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is one of the most famous book of tall tales. It is based on stories told by Karl Friedrich von Munchhausen, a retired army captain, who was noted for his exaggerated and fantastic accounts of his war adventures and hunting experiences. The German scientist and librarian Rudolf Erich Raspe produced the first, small book based on these and some other stories. His work was followed by enlarged collections, composed by other authors, of whom Gottfried Burger (1747-1794) is the most notable.
The USA original series The Dead Zone (based on the Stephen King novel of the same name) uses Jeff Buckley's "New Year's Prayer" as its theme song.
The play THE FRONT PAGE by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur was set in 1928 Chicago. It was first made into a movie in 1930, and was called The Front Page. It was directed by Lewis Milestone and starred Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien. It was made again as His Girl Friday in 1940, directed by Howard Hawks, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. In 1945 the play was brought to television as The Front Page directed by Ed Sobol and starring Vinton Haworth and Matt Crowley. It was brought to television again in 1948 as The Front Page and starred Michael Balfour and Henry Gilbert. It was remade in 1974 as The Front Page directed by Billy Wilder and starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau (but still set in the 1930's). It was made again in 1988 as Switching Channels directed by Ted Kotcheff and starred Kathleen Turner, Christopher Reeve, & Burt Reynolds. This version was updated to be contemporary.
The 1941 movie Ball of Fire (directed by Howard Hawks, starring Gary Cooper & Barbara Stanwyck) was remade in 1948 by Howard Hawks AGAIN as A Song is Born starring Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo. The first is a light-hearted comedy, the second is a light-hearted comedy and a jazz-history tour-de-force (including performances by Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnett, and Mel Powell).
James Thurber wrote The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
A number of people have corrected me, stating that The Monty Python theme song is actually the Liberty Bell March, by John Phillip Sousa. To me, it sounds like Leichte Kavallerie (Light Cavalry), an operetta Overture composed by Franz von Suppe. (This is the only trivia entry I have no support for - because when I wrote it, there was no data online about it - so I suppose I deserve to be wrong.)
Il barbihre di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) was an opera composed by Gioachino Rossini
The overature from Carmen (opira-comique in 4 acts) is very popular with Keith Lockhart's Boston Pops and was composed by Georges Bizet
The standard wedding march is actually from A Midsummer Night's Dream, composed by Felix Mendelssohn
Larry Deluca's comic opera was called LAURENCIO
The text read by Fox Mulder in "The Field Where I Died" (an episode of The X-Files) was taken from "Paracellus" by Robert Browning
Irony is defined as the use of words to express something as the
opposite of its literal meaning. Similarly, dramatic irony is (from
the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary):
There are a lot of apples in the world (this is not all of them, but this lists a LOT of them)
There are also a lot of James Bond movies
There are some unofficial rules to John Woo movies