Heywood “Woody” Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg; December 1, 1935) is an American filmmaker, writer, actor, comedian, and musician whose career spans more than six decades.
He worked as a comedy writer in the 1950s, writing jokes and scripts for television and publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen began performing as a stand-up comedian, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comedian, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he maintains is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian.
You have got to love the outrageous clothing and hair styles from the 1970’s. Jump suits and bell bottoms.
Dansband (“dance band”) is a Swedish term for a band that plays dansbandsmusik (“dance band music”). Dansbandsmusik is often danced to in pairs. Jitterbug and foxtrot music are often included in this category. The music is primarily inspired by swing, schlager, country, jazz, and rock. The main influence for rock-oriented bands is the rock music of the 1950s and 1960s.
The terms dansband and dansbandsmusik were coined around 1970, when Swedish popular music developed a signature style. The genre developed primarily in Sweden, but has spread to neighboring countries Denmark, Norway and the Swedish speaking regions of Finland. When the music came to Norway it was first called “Svensktoppar” (from the Swedish radio music chart Svensktoppen, which was a major arena for dansband music before its rules changed in January 2003).
I watched a movie the other day and when ‘The End’ text appeared a really catchy song started. So I listened to the song and began watching the credits. It seemed to never end, credit after credit with name after name. A question arose in my head; how many people are in a crew for a Hollywood film?
By Stephen Follows
Last week I ran a course in Malaysia for the Met Film School and the Malaysian Government. Malaysia is set to be a popular destination for Hollywood projects, thanks mostly to the 30% tax break and the brand new Pinewood Studio complex. The studio is not officially open yet but already ‘Marco Polo’ has set up shop and is hiring. The Malaysian government is funding courses to prepare locals for work on huge Hollywood productions and my course last week was for would-be Production Assistants.
In order to give the students a sense of the scale of these productions I asked them to guess how many people worked on the movie ‘Avatar’. Guesses ranged from a few hundred up to a thousand. The actual figure (according to IMDb) is 2,984.
This got me thinking about what the number of crew members could tell us about a production. There are few caveats to this approach which I’ve laid out at the bottom of this article, but nonetheless it’s quite a revealing process. I took the 50 highest grossing films of each of the past 20 years (giving me 1,000 films to study) and looked at the number of people credited on IMDb. In summary…
Iron Man 3 credits 3,310 crew members
The average number of crew credits in the top 1,000 films between 1994 and 2013 was 588.
Over half of the top films had under 500 people in their crew
On average the top films of the past two decades have each had 3.5 writers, 7 producers, 55 people in the art department, 32 in sound, 55 in camera / electrical and 156 in visual effects.
The Butler had 39 producers – 5 producers, 17 executive producers, 6 co-executive producers, 4 co-producers and 7 associate producers
A third of the workers on Love Actually were in the art department
Crew credits suggest that Peter Jackson favours special effects over visual effects more than the industry average.
Now You See Me has six times the average number of people in the camera department
23% of the people who worked on ‘Pokemon: The First Movie’ were in the music department
The largest crew on a Hollywood film
The biggest crews are rather staggering, with 3,310 people receiving a credit on Iron Man 3.
FILMS WITH LARGEST CREWS (1994-2013)
Iron Man 3
3,310
Avatar
2,984
Marvel’s The Avengers
2,718
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
2,709
Chronicles of Narnia: Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
2,622
Man of Steel
2,543
Captain America: The First Avenger
2,536
Thor
2,384
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
2,376
His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass
2,235
Overall, the average number of crew credits was 588, with the top 25% of films accounting for half of all credits. Out of my list of 1,000 films…
Only 1 film had over 3,000 credits
13 films credited between 2,000 – 2,999 people
133 films credited between 1,000 – 1,999 people
287 films credited between 500 – 999 people
566 films credited under 500 people
Visual Effects
Avatar just pips Iron Man 3 to the Oscar for ‘Most People Credited in the Visual Effects Department’. Interestingly, The Golden Compass is the only Hollywood film in the top 20 of this visual effect chart which was not released in 3D.
FILMS WITH LARGEST VISUAL EFFECTS DEPARTMENT (1994-2013)
Avatar
1,844
Iron Man 3
1,834
Marvel’s The Avengers
1,514
Man of Steel
1,445
The Golden Compass
1,252
For 57 of my 1,000 films, the Visual Effects Department made up over 50% of all crew members. If you meet someone in a pub who says they worked on Harry Potter there is a 62% chance they worked in visual effects. Similar numbers are true for Gravity, Pacific Rim, Avatar and Total Recall. In fact, the VFX department of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II made up a larger percentage of the total crew than Avatar (62.0% versus 61.8%). This is surprising as Harry Potter appears to be an almost exclusively live action film whereas Avatar is largely CGI animation.
Special Effects
Special effects include on-set physical, mechanical and in-camera effects and should not be confused with digital / visual effects. Hollywood films by Peter Jackson take up four out of the top five places, revealing his love of real-world, on set trickery.
FILMS WITH LARGEST SPECIAL EFFECTS DEPARTMENTS (1994-2013)
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
225
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
217
Avatar
212
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
211
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
195
Stunts
The number of stunt performers involved with the most recent Batman film is rather impressive, due in part to the huge street battles.
After doing some bad methamphetamine, Kim Jong Un and his brown nosing generals decide to hit the U.S. with their new long-range missile the KN-08. The intended target was either Los Angeles or San Francisco according to RAND Corporation analysts.
The missile guidance system fails, as predicted by Stephen Colbert, and lands a thousand miles to the north. The missile and its nuclear warhead land in southern Alberta, Canada. Barley missing blowing up a herd of 10,000 black Angus cattle.
It is time Canada gets on board with the U.S. anti-ballistic missile defense system.
So first off, yeah, I know that David Lee Roth’s isolated vocals from Van Halen’s 1978 juggernaut, “Runnin’ With the Devil” have been making the rounds out on the Internet for a while. But perhaps what you didn’t know is that there is a site that allows you to download them in neat little MP3 files so you could, as I’d strongly suggest, use them as ring tones for your smart phone. So let’s all help make our smart phones great again by ditching those irritating pre-loaded ringtones and replacing them with Diamond Dave’s straight-up mythical war cry from the stoner teen anthem, “Aaahhh Haaa YEAHHH!”
Shark Week on Discovery Channel sadly has ended. But it’s not over yet. Sharknado 5 is only days away.
Getting back to reality, real shark attacks in the world.
A shark attack is an attack on a human by a shark. Every year over 70 attacks are reported worldwide. Despite their relative rarity, many people fear shark attacks after occasional serial attacks, such as the Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916, and horror fiction and films such as the Jaws series. Out of more than 489 shark species, only three are responsible for a double-digit number of fatal, unprovoked attacks on humans: the great white, tiger, and bull. The oceanic whitetip has probably killed many more castaways, but these are not recorded in the statistics.
Joseph “Joey” Christian Chestnut (born November 25, 1983) is an American competitive eater. He is currently ranked first in the world by Major League Eating. He is a Vallejo, California, native and resides in San Jose, California. Chestnut’s height is 6-feet-one-inch (1.9 m); his weight is 230 pounds (104 kg).
On July 4, 2007, Chestnut won the 92nd Annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, beating six-time defending champion Takeru “Tsunami” Kobayashi by consuming 66 hot dogs and buns (HDB) in 12 minutes, which set a new world record. The following year, he successfully defended his title by winning a 5 hot dog eat-off after tying Kobayashi in consuming 59 HDB in 10 minutes. On July 4, 2009, Chestnut beat Kobayashi again, by consuming a new world record of 68 HDB and winning his third consecutive title. On July 4, 2010, Chestnut took home his 4th consecutive Mustard Belt eating 54 HDB. The 2010 contest was a runaway victory, as Kobayashi did not compete due to a contract dispute with Major League Eating. On July 4, 2011, he won his fifth-consecutive championship with 62 HDB. 2012 marked his sixth consecutive win, when Chestnut tied his own world record from 2009 by devouring 68 HDB. In 2013, Chestnut captured his seventh straight title, eating a total of 69 HDB, breaking his previous world record. In 2014, Chestnut captured his eighth straight title eating a total of 61 HDB.
Chestnut proposed to his longtime girlfriend Neslie Ricasa just before defending his title in the 2014 Nathan’s competition. The couple split up in early 2015, prior to their scheduled wedding date.
Chestnut lost the 2015 Hot Dog eating contest to Matt Stonie. On July 4, 2016, Chestnut regained the championship belt from Stonie by eating 70 hot dogs; 3.5 hot dogs short of his record-setting qualifying round. A year later on July 4, 2017, he raised the bar again by raising his record to 72 hot dogs.
Chestnut, a San Jose State University student, entered the competitive eating scene in 2005 with a break-out performance in the deep-fried asparagus eating championship, in which he beat high-ranked eater Rich LeFevre by eating 6.3 pounds of asparagus in 11.5 minutes. That same year, during Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest, he downed 32 dogs, placing third behind Takeru Kobayashi and Sonya Thomas.
World Records Held
Deep Fried Asparagus Eating Championship in Stockton, California, May 2014: 12.8 lbs. deep fried asparagus in 10 minutes.
Pork ribs: 13.76 pounds pork rib meat in 12 minutes at John Ascuaga’s Nugget Casino Resort during the Best in the West Nugget Rib Cook-off in Sparks, Nevada on August 28, 2013.
Steak: 4.5 pounds of steak, plus sides, in 8 minutes, 52 seconds at Big Texan Steak Ranch on March 24, 2008. Chestnut’s record was broken on Monday May 26, 2014 by competitive eater Molly Schuyler, who finished in 4 minutes, 58 seconds; by the next year she bested her own record, currently at 4 minutes, 18 seconds.
(Hot Dogs) Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs and buns (HDB): 72 HDB in 10 minutes during the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest Qualifier in Coney Island, New York on July 4, 2013. This record is backed by MLE and shared with Takeru Kobayashi. This beat by 1 the record he set in the Nathan’s event in 2009, and tied in 2012.
Matzoh Balls: 78 matzoh balls in 8 minutes at Kenny & Ziggy’s New York Delicatessen Restaurant in Houston, Texas on March 2, 2008
Bratwurst: 70 bratwursts in 10 minutes at Oktoberfest Zinzinnati in Cincinnati, OH on September 22, 2013.
Hard Boiled Eggs: 141 hard-boiled eggs in 8 minutes at the Radcliff Fall Festival in Radcliff, KY on October 5, 2013.
Pork Roll: 32 quarter-pound pork roll sandwiches in 10 minutes at the Trenton Thunder World Famous Case’s Pork Roll Eating Championship in Trenton, NJ on September 26, 2015.
Mutton Sandwich: 55 of 4oz mutton sandwiches in 10 minutes at 2017 International Bar-B-Q Festival in Owensboro, Kentucky
Every one knows about the hot dogs, with Chestnut a perennial champ of the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest on July 4 in Coney Island.
But tacos are no problem, either, as he showed again this Saturday on day 2 of the Taco Truck Throwdown at Chukchansi Park in Fresno, California.
Chestnut gave those on hand a show when he stuffed down 92 carne asada tacos in 8 minutes to win the World Taco Eating Championship at Throwdown 7.
“The heat was really hard so I was sweating a little bit more than I should,” said Chestnut, who pocketed $4,000 for the win and said he’ll return next summer to defend his title. “I had little deep coughs where it came out a little bit. I wasn’t burping or anything; the food wasn’t settling fast enough, but it worked out.”
And if you think that means Chestnut didn’t get to enjoy what was put in front of him?
The MarkoZen Blog 