Movies

In case you haven’t been keeping tabs on the news of the weird lately, the body of the Loch Ness monster has been found. Well, sort of. Researchers surveying the depths of the Scottish loch with sonar imaging technology have rediscovered a 30-foot prop Nessie used in the 1970 film “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.” Sunk during filming in 1969, the model monster has been hanging out 180 meters deep on the loch bed ever since. The researchers with the Loch Ness Project didn’t expect to encounter any mysterious creatures—real or artificial—so finding the film artifact was a quirky coincidence to their scientific search for Nessie’s lair. “We have found a monster, but not the one many people might have expected,” commented Loch Ness expert Adrian Shine. In a bit of mythical monster synchronicity, a drone has captured what may be footage of a Bigfoot scampering through the Idaho landscape.

Sea Serpent Garden Sculpture | $180

The blockbuster’s iconic poster image owes as much to a museum as it does to pulp fiction illustration. The monstrous Great White shark surging from the bottom of the frame toward a hapless swimmer was designed by Roger Kastel for the paperback edition of Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel. From that, you might expect that Kastel spent weeks in a wetsuit and a shark cage, studying the ocean’s uber-predators firsthand. Nope. He just took the C train uptown to the American Museum of Natural History to study their shark exhibits, dry and threatened only by mobs of tourists. Kastel’s museum inspirations might have included the fearsome, disembodied reconstruction of a Carcharodon megalodon’s jaws, a shark ancestor that terrorized the seas some 10 million years ago. The bathing beauty at the top of Kastel’s image was actually a model that he had been sketching for a Good Housekeeping ad. He asked her to stay a little longer and had her pose for the image by lying on a stool and pretending to swim.

Handmade Shark Slippers | $42

Although the movie industry has gone global in the 21^st century, Hollywood remains synonymous with movie making. But that wasn’t always the case. For almost a decade between 1912 and 1920, idyllic Ithaca, NY was the cinematic capital of the US. Movie moguls of the silent era Theodore and Leopold Wharton came to the Finger Lakes community (initially to shoot scenes for a Western), fell in love with the area’s many charms, and set up a studio near the Cayuga Lake shore. This brought superstars of the day like Oliver Hardy, Lionel Barrymore (great uncle of Drew), and Harry Houdini to town, and also attracted other filmmakers to Tompkins County. With the advent of “talkies,” the industry soon shifted to the West Coast, and Ithaca today is known for the intellectual enclave of Cornell University and for its bounty of farm-to-table culture. But for a few years around the First World War, the town hosted the early heyday of movie magic.

DIY Cinema Lightbox | $15-60

This post is about how Bacon brings everyone together. As a vegetarian company, we generally don’t talk about bacon…but in this case, it’s Kevin Bacon, center of the Hollywood universe—at least according to the popular theory / party game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” And now, rather than spending countless hours researching obscure movie cast lists, Google will give you the Bacon separation number in a millisecond. Simply type “Bacon number [name of other actor]” into the Google search field and boom! There it is.

But this got me curious: how well does this work with other people with the surname Bacon? How about British Painter Francis Bacon? Yep—just three degrees. Francis Bacon and William S. Burroughs appeared in Burroughs: The Movie. William S. Burroughs and Don Creech appeared in The Book of Life. Don Creech and Kevin Bacon appeared in X-Men: First Class. How about English philosopher and statesman Sir Francis Bacon? That one’s more of a challenge, but it does work if you combine Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. In the overlap of those two networks (plus some creative license), there are only four incredible degrees of separation between the two Bacons. Behold: Sir Francis Bacon knew William Shakespeare (in fact, some would say he was William Shakespeare), Joseph Fiennes played the Bard in Shakespeare in Love, Fiennes and Elisabeth Shue appeared together in Leo, and Shue and Kevin Bacon both appeared in Hollow Man.

And in case you’re wondering, there are only three degrees between this author and Kevin Bacon: I met and pitched a TV script to Gary Coleman, who appeared in The Great Buck Howard with Tom Hanks, and Hanks was part of the Apollo 13 crew with…Kevin Bacon.

Film Reel Table | $850