19 Truly, Truly, Truly Interesting Deep-Dive Pop Culture Facts That’ll Make You Feel Smarter After You Read Them

1.The last surviving witness to President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 was alive during your grandparents’ and/or parents’ lifetime.

His name was Samuel J. Seymour. He was just 5 years old at the time and was at Ford Theatre the night Lincoln was assassinated. In February 1956, at age 95, Samuel appeared on the TV game show I’ve Got a Secret and told his story (he would die a few months later).

And fun fact: Samuel also had two very famous people try to guess his secret. Audrey Meadows, who starred in the classic sitcom The Honeymooners and the ICONIC Lucille Ball.

2.Contrary to popular belief, Cleopatra was NOT a box office bomb; in fact, it was the highest-grossing film of 1963. The issue was that the film was so expensive to make, it really didn’t turn a profit.

At the time, the movie cost $42 million to make (which, when adjusted for inflation, is around $433,264,313 million in today’s money). There were several reasons the cost got out of control, including the elaborate costumes and sets, production delays, and Elizabeth Taylor’s health, which forced the already-built sets to be moved from cold rainy London to sunny Rome.

Cleopatra was so costly that it almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox — which was forced to sell 300 acres of its backlot to stay afloat. That area is now modern-day Century City.

3.The Wizard of Oz was not a box office hit when it was released in 1939. Like Cleopatra, it was a very expensive movie to make and had a hard time recouping its money at the box office. It cost close to $3 million dollars to make (including promotional costs), and as the LA Times pointed out, it needed to make that back when the average movie theater ticket cost 25 cents for adults and 15 cents for kids.

The film would eventually make a profit when it was re-released 10 years later, in 1949.

However, the reason the film has become such an iconic piece of pop culture is that starting in 1956, it began having yearly TV showings that helped introduce it to new generations of kids over the decades (especially since this was in the pre-home video time).

4.The whole Roswell crash incident was mostly forgotten for over 30 years after the United States Air Force issued an almost immediate retraction that they had not recovered a crashed UFO in Roswell, New Mexico, and that it had been debris from a downed weather balloon.

It wasn’t until the late ’70s and early ’80s that interest in Roswell was renewed after the National Enquirer ran the uncorrected original news story about the alleged crash. There were also several books, like The Roswell Incident, that were published about it that further delved into it being a huge government cover-up.

Most everything we think about when we think of the “Roswell crash,” like the alien bodies, a nurse seeing them (who later died in suspicious circumstances), the military base being on high alert and filled with strange debris, came from an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. Those things mentioned in the episode came from Glenn Dennis, who was a mortician in Roswell in 1947 and claimed to have been contacted by the Air Force for child-sized hermetically sealed caskets and asked how to preserve bodies exposed to the elements, and that he was also friends with the nurse who saw the alien bodies first-hand.

5.The Phoenix Lights is thought to be the most witnessed UFO sighting ever. Thousands of people in Arizona and Nevada reported seeing the two separate incidents that make up the Phoenix Lights.

It happened on March 13, 1997, at around 8 p.m.; people began reporting seeing a very large V-shaped object (with three lights on the bottom of each side and one in the front) flying very slowly and silently over the towns of Prescott and Dewey, Arizona. A couple of hours later, at around 10 p.m., a series of red and orange lights appeared to hover above Phoenix.

As I said above, this was witnessed by thousands of people, including Kurt Russell — who was actually an unnamed pilot who reported what he was seeing to the airport. Russell happened to be flying his plane with his son, Oliver, when they came across the lights. He went on to say that he and Oliver never spoke about it, and he never really thought about it until a few years later when his wife, Goldie Hawn, was watching a TV show that was doing a piece on the Phoenix Lights and that’s when it all came back to him.

Eventually, the US Air Force came forward to say that they were responsible for the incident, admitting that lights were leftover high-intensity flares dropped during a training exercise. Although, lots of people who witnessed the Phoenix Lights are skeptical of that explanation to this day.

6.In 1960, Psycho changed how people watched movies in theaters — and it’s how we watch them today. Before 1960, it was common for people to buy a ticket and drop into a theater at any point during a movie. Movies played on loops repeatedly, so if you only caught the last half-hour of a movie, you would just stay in your seat and wait for it to play again so you could watch what you missed. Directors and studios hated that, but it’s how people were used to going to the movies. However, that posed a problem for Psycho.

One of the big twists in Psycho is that Janet Leigh’s character, Marion Crane, is murdered in the shower halfway through the film. Janet was the movie’s most famous star, so having her killed would shock and confuse the audience and make them not know what to expect next. Alfred Hitchcock had gone to great lengths to keep the plot a complete secret, so he wanted people not to have the film spoiled by coming in after that shower scene.

Jerry Pickman, who was the then-vice president of advertising and publicity at Paramount, came up with an ingenious way to both market the film and ensure people watched the movie from the beginning. He created an ad campaign (like the poster seen below) that featured Hitchcock telling people that they not only had to watch Psycho from the beginning but also that theaters would refuse to let anyone in after the movie had started.

7.Marlon Brando’s performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather is considered legendary and has gone down in cinematic history as such. But he almost didn’t get the part of Vito because at the time, he was considered a temperamental, washed-up actor, whom the studio refused to hire. And for his part, Brando initially wasn’t interested and didn’t really want to work.

In fact, it was truly a series of events that got Brando cast in the role. The film’s director, Francis Ford Coppola, was dead set on casting either Brando or Laurence Olivier as Vito. When he was told no to casting Brando by Paramount’s then-president, Stanley Jaffe, Coppola faked a stress-induced epilepsy in Jaffe’s office. After that stunt, Jaffe reconsidered and told him he would consider Brando for the role on three conditions — with one of them being that he would need to screen-test for it.

Meanwhile, Mario Puzo, who wrote The Godfather novel, read a story that comedian–sitcom star–producer Danny Thomas was interested in buying a majority share in Paramount with the sole purpose of casting himself as Vito. That caused an alarmed Puzo to write a letter to Brando — whom he had envisioned in the role — and plead with him to consider the role of Vito. Brando’s personal secretary, Alice Marchak, knew that he needed to work because he was deeply in debt, so she bought a subscription to the Hollywood Reporter to keep tabs on potential roles for him. However, he caught her reading it one day and got mad that she would bring “movie magazines into [his] house.” So she left his house and let him cool off for a few days, during which time she read that Paramount was looking to cast the role of Vito in The Godfather. When she came back to Brando’s house, she found Puzo’s letter in the mail.

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Puzo and Brando would eventually talk over the phone, and by then, Marchak had read the book and knew the role was right for him. She also slowly played to Brando’s ego by commenting to him about all his fellow actors who were being considered for the role — causing him to want the part even more.

Eventually, he agreed to it, but Coppola knew he would need to screen-test him in order to cast him (something that would be an insult to an actor of Brando’s stature). So he devised a plan in which he didn’t tell Brando it was a screen test, but instead told him that he wanted to come over to his house to try some things for the camera, experiment a bit, and try some improvisation. And that worked. When Coppola finally did the not-a-screen-test-at-all at Brando’s house, he saw the 47-year-old actor transform into Vito in front of his eyes as he smeared black shoe polish on his blonde hair to give it a darker and greased-back look, gave himself a shoe polish mustache, and put wads of tissue in his cheeks to give himself an appearance of a bulldog. The rest, of course, is movie history.

8.The iconic boulder-rolling scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark is an homage to a very similar thing that happened in the 1954 Scrooge McDuck comic “The Seven Cities of Cibola.” In the comic, Scrooge, Huey, Dewey, and Louie travel to a lost city, where they find an emerald idol. However, noticing it is booby-trapped, they decide not to take it. What they don’t realize is that they have been followed by the Beagle Boys, who decide to steal the idol, which sets off a giant boulder that chases after them.

George Lucas — who came up with Indiana Jones — was a big fan of the Scrooge McDuck comics (which were created by Carl Barks) growing up and told Edward Summer, a writer who put together a book of Barks’ Scrooge comics, that the boulder scene in Raiders was a “conscious homage” to “The Seven Cities of Cibola.”

In a sort of full-circle moment, the Raiders logo would go on to inspire the DuckTales one (which of course is a classic cartoon series about Scrooge McDuck’s adventures):

9.The classic scene in The Seven Year Itch, where Marilyn Monroe’s dress is lifted up by the air from a subway grate, had to be reshot in California at 20th Century Fox’s studios.

The scene was originally filmed on location in New York City, but there were over 2,000 spectators on the street watching the scene being filmed, and they would yell every time her skirt went up. The noise coming from the crowd made it impossible for director Billy Wilder to use any takes from it.

While the iconic image of Marilyn’s dress billowing up is one of the first things we think about when we think of her, it’s actually not shown like that in the movie. In the film, you really don’t see anything more than her knees as the dress flows up. However, the full body shot images were used in posters and promotional material for the movie.

10.Dolly Parton secretly produced one of the most iconic and influential shows of all time: Buffy the Vampire Slayer!!!

The show was produced by Sandollar Entertainment, a production company that Dolly cofounded with her friend and business partner Sandy Gallin (on the right), in 1986.

In fact, Sandollar had produced the original movie it was based on, so they owned the rights to it. Gail Berman, who was the then-president and CEO of Sandollar Television, always thought it would be a great TV series. Since Joss Whedon wrote the script to the film, Sandollar was contractually obligated to offer him the opportunity to helm the series. According to Berman, she and Whedon were on the same page about Buffy, with eventually Dolly and Sandy (as heads of the production company) getting involved to help make the series happen.

Berman went on to be an executive producer on Buffy, as well as its spinoff Angel, and left Sandollar shortly thereafter to focus on the shows. After leaving, Berman had lunch with Dolly, where she complained that men at the company had not given her her fair share of the Buffy royalties. Dolly then handed her a check to cover what she was owed.

11.“Believe” is not only one of the most iconic songs of the ’90s, but also one that would change music forever. However, Cher wasn’t interested in doing a dance song. Still, Rob Dickins, who was the then-president of her label, Warner Music U.K., felt that since her last album (which was rock ballads) had been a disappointment, she should focus on her gay audience and told her to do a dance album. Dickins then reached out to songwriter Brian Higgins to submit songs for a Cher dance album, and “Believe” was among one of the songs he sent in.

After several rewrites, Cher recorded the song. However, she was unaware that the producers, Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling, had created a version with the signature Auto-Tune effect in it. Afraid that Cher would HATE the Auto-Tune sound, they only shared it with her after having a few beers. Cher loved it and told them to keep it in. Dickins, however, disliked the Auto-Tune sound and told them to take it out. When Cher found out that they were going to take the Auto-Tune effect out, she said, “You can change that part of it, over my dead body! Don’t let anyone touch this track, or I’m going to rip your throat out.”

12.Tim Burton was supposed to direct a third Batman movie that was reportedly called Batman Continues. The movie would have featured Michael Keaton as Batman, Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, and Billy Dee Williams as Two Face.

Even though Batman Returns was well received by critics and a hit at the box office, Burton was asked to step down by Warner Bros. from making a third Batman movie after parents complained about Batman Returns being too dark and him refusing to make the next film lighter.

Warner Bros. also passed on making a Catwoman spinoff film that would’ve had Pfeiffer reprising the role. The film also would have been directed by Burton and written by the same writer who wrote Batman Returns.

Joel Schumacher was brought on by Warner Bros. to helm the Batman franchise. And while it was reported that Michael Keaton didn’t want to return to the role because Tim Burton was no longer involved, that wasn’t exactly the case. In an interview with In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast in 2022, Keaton said that he did talk to Schumacher about a third film, but that the two clashed over the direction of the character. Schumacher wanted a more comics-style story, while Keaton wanted to continue to tell the Batman story he created with Burton.

Warner Bros / ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection, Warner Bros / ©Warner Bros/courtesy Everett Collection / Everett Collection

With Keaton gone, Schumacher recast Val Kilmer in the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman, as well as Chris O’Donnell in the role of Dick Grayson/Robin. Originally, Marlon Wayans had signed on to play Robin in what would’ve been Burton’s third Batman film.

Ron Galella, Ltd. / Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images, Warner Bros / ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

However, Wayans gets residuals for Batman Forever, even though he does NOT appear in the movie. Per a clause in his contract, he was guaranteed to be paid his salary plus residuals, even if he was recast.

13.From 1977 until her death in 1994, Jackie Kennedy Onassis was a very successful and well-respected book editor at Doubleday. In 1983, executives at Doubleday came up with the idea of having Michael Jackson write his autobiography, and they asked Jackie to help get him to agree to sign and spearhead it. A mega-famous pop star’s memoir would not be the type of book Jackie would ever want to be involved with, but she understood that Doubleday having a huge commercial book would help get her passion projects published. By all accounts, she would go on to regret ever agreeing to get involved.

Sonia Moskowitz / Getty Images, Getty Images

After an initial meeting with Michael at the Jackson family home in Encino, California, Jackie was able to secure the book deal. Michael got a $300K advance, total control over the book, and a foreward written by Jackie (which was something she initially refused to do but went on to agree to). According to Shaye Areheart, who was Jackie’s editorial assistant at the time, dealing with Michael was “a huge nightmare,” and he seemed uninterested in actually working on the book, which caused it to be delayed.

Michael also began calling Jackie at her home in Martha’s Vineyard to have long phone conversations with her to complain about the difficulties of being famous. Jackie, who was notoriously private, refused to engage with him on that topic. She went on to tell her friend Edward Kasinec that “Michael Jackson is driving me mad with his phone calls.” Eventually, Michael submitted his first manuscript, which he worked on with his first ghostwriter. The manuscript was much shorter than they anticipated and featured nothing revealing about himself other than “fluff.” Jackie rejected the manuscript and called Michael and told him he needed to open up and be sincere because if it was just a book about how great and successful he was, then “we’d all be made fools of.” Michael agreed and got a new ghostwriter.

Unhappy with his second manuscript, he began editing parts of it with Jackie’s assistant, Shaye, who flew around the world to finish it. Eventually, they were able to finish the second manuscript and get it ready to be published. But Michael then decided he didn’t want to publish the book. However, they were able to convince him to do so, and in 1988, his autobiography Moonwalk was published and went on to be No. 1 on the New York Times Best Sellers list and sell out all 500,000 copies printed. Even though it was hugely successful, Michael, who had full control, refused to allow Doubleday to print more copies or a paperback version.

14.It was shooting Harriet the Spy that led Rosie O’Donnell to create The Rosie O’Donnell Show — but it was actually more out of necessity. The film was shot in Toronto and had long hours. At the end of the shooting days, Rosie noticed that her infant son, Parker, was more attached to their housekeeper. This made her realize she needed a New York–based job with shorter hours in order to spend more time with him.

So, Rosie came up with the idea of doing a daytime talk show as the solution. As Vulture puts it, it was a “then-radical daytime-television experiment” to do a talk show that was centered on interviewing celebrities and engaging with the live studio audience. But it worked, and the show would go on to change television

15.Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis paid for two Forrest Gump scenes (one was the scene where Forrest runs across the US) to be filmed out of their own pockets. According to Hanks, Paramount refused to increase the film’s $55 million budget, and just the running scene alone would be very expensive to shoot.

Hanks and Zemeckis agreed to pay for the scenes in return for a larger percentage of the film’s box office gross. He said that they both put in a lot of money, but it paid off! Reportedly, Hanks earned $65 million dollars from his percentage of the box office gross.

16.Steve Jobs wanted to call the iMac MacMan. In fact, according to Ken Segall, who was the creative director at Apple’s ad agency, TBWAChiatDay, and came up with the name iMac, Jobs really liked the name MacMan and was “fixated” on it. Jobs did approach the agency just to see if they had any better suggestions, saying, “I have a name that I really like, we’re going to go with it, but if you guys can do better we need you to do better within the next two weeks.”

Segall said that a week later, they met with Jobs and presented him with five names, saving iMac for last because he thought “it was the killer name.” However, Jobs hated the name iMac, too.

A week later, Segall presented Jobs with three more names and also brought up that he still liked iMac as a name. Jobs hated the three new names, but said about iMac, “I don’t hate it this week, but I don’t like it either, so now you’ve got two days.” Segall said that the next day, a friend at Apple called him to tell him Jobs had used iMac on one of the models and that it was getting good reactions. The rest was history.

17.Somewhere between 2013 and 2015, you probably came across this popular “You had one job!” meme about Phil Tippett, the “dinosaur supervisor” credited in the end credits of Jurassic Park.

Well, he actually was the “dinosaur supervisor.” Tippett was an Oscar-winning special effects producer who was brought on to work on Jurassic Park because he specialized in stop-motion animation. Originally, Steven Spielberg had thought all the up-close shots of the dinosaurs would be done by puppets and animatronics (which they did use), and all the full shots and running sequences would be done using models and stop-motion animation.

However, the team over at Industrial Light & Magic told Spielberg that CGI technology had gotten a lot better and they could create dinosaurs that could fool the eye. Once Spielberg saw the CGI dinosaurs, he knew that was the way to go.

When Spielberg told Tippett that he had decided to go with CGI, Tippett replied, “I’ve just become extinct!” (a line that Steven would actually end up using in the movie). However, it was the exact opposite. Spielberg knew Tippett had a special skill set: He knew how animals behaved and moved. So instead of letting him go, Spielberg made Tippett the “dinosaur supervisor,” a role that had him overseeing the animation at ILM, to make sure the dinosaurs looked as real, and moved as realistically, as possible.

18.Prior to its release in 1997, many critics and Hollywood insiders predicted that Titanic would be a box office bomb. And there were several reasons why it was predicted to be a failure. First off, at the time it was the most expensive movie ever made and was getting compared to the costly Waterworld — which had been released a couple of years before and had not managed to be a huge success because it, like Titanic, was the then–most expensive movie ever made.

Second, aside from the cost of filming, Titanic also took a long time to film. Going way over schedule also delayed the release of the movie — as it was originally meant to be released during the summer (the blockbuster movie season). Moving its release date to December set off red flags.

And last, many on-set stories about everything from the difficulty of working with Cameron to the PCP poisoning of the crew members had been reported throughout the film’s production, which only added to the “doomed film” narrative.

19.And lastly: It wasn’t just Netflix; there were various reasons why Blockbuster ended up going out of business. One reason was the popularity of DVDs. Until the introduction of DVDs, studios relied on the movie rental market as their primary way of making money from the home entertainment market — with Blockbuster accounting for nearly 50% of that revenue for them. To make it lucrative for both sides, the studios would give an exclusive window to video rental chains for new movie releases before they would put them on sale to the general public.

So, if you wanted to watch a new movie at home, you more than likely would only be able to rent it. However, this changed when DVDs were released. In 1998, Warren Lieberfarb, then-head of Warner Bros.’s home video division and an early proponent of DVD technology, approached then-Blockbuster CEO John Antioco about creating the same exclusive rental window for DVDs. Well, Antioco turned down that offer. Lieberfarb, left with no choice, decided that DVDs should be released directly to customers. DVDs were also inexpensive to produce, so they could be sold cheaply.

By 2002, DVD players had become, at the time, the fastest-adopted consumer electronics device ever, with around 80 million players sold. Also, retailers like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Costco, seeing the popularity of DVDs, expanded the footprints of the home entertainment department in their stores, becoming Blockbuster’s biggest competitors. In fact, Walmart actually replaced Blockbuster as the studios’ largest revenue source for the home entertainment market.

With the price of DVDs so low and stores carrying wide selections of both new and older movies, people began to buy movies a lot more — going from an average of about 5 VHS a year to buying around 15 DVDs a year— and renting less. If you were around at the time, you probably remember people building big movie collections. The studios benefited hugely from this, as they were making bigger profits from sales. As early as 2002, Blockbuster was seeing the effects of the shift in consumers, and it began to experience declining profits.