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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about movies and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the movie urban legends featured so far.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Stephen Spielberg directed his first work for a studio when he was 21 years old.

Sid Scheinberg, the Universal Vice President for Production who signed Steven Spielberg to a contract with Universal in 1968, recalled his first meeting with the young director.

I just have one request and I’d like you to give me not so much a commitment, Mr. Scheiberg, but a promise. I want to direct something before I am twenty-one. That is very important to me.

That, of course, would be impossible, since Spielberg was ALREADY 21 at the time, having been born on December 18, 1946.

However, let’s say that Spielberg really meant direct WHILE he was 21. That’s more reasonable, and when he his signing with Universal was announced, Spielberg WAS 21 years old. For six more days, that is, as he was signed in December of 1968.

So did it happen?
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about movies and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the movie urban legends featured so far.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: The song “Laura” is from the soundtrack of the film “Laura.”

Like I mentioned in a recent Movie Urban Legends Revealed, when a film from a movie would become popular during the 1940s, it would be because the film itself was a hit.

So it seemed natural enough when the popular 1944 noir film Laura was released…

and it was soon followed in 1945 by the popular song “Laura,” that “Laura” came from the movie.

And in a way, it did, just not in the way you traditionally think of a song coming from a film’s soundtrack.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about movies and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the movie urban legends featured so far.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Did famed Alien designer H.R. Giger really design a Batmobile for Batman Forever?

1979’s Alien was a brilliant fusion of science fiction and horror as screenwriter Dan O’Bannon and director Ridley Scott had the crew of a spacecraft slowly but surely killed by an alien creature that had essentially stowed away in the body of one of the crew members during an away mission to a nearby planet. The film’s setting of a cramped commercial space vessel was perfectly suited for such a tense thriller.

The alien creature also stood out for its unique and striking design. The creature was designed by Swiss artist Hans Rudolf “H.R.” Giger, who screenwriter O’Bannon had worked with when they were both attached to a Dune film adaptation that never happened. O’Bannon later recalled, “I had never seen anything that was quite as horrible and at the same time as beautiful as his work.” So when O’Bannon’s screenplay for Alien was optioned, he immeditately thought of Giger for the designer of the alien. Director Ridley Scott ultimately chose a design based on a drawing Giger had done called “Necronom IV.”

Studio exectuvies were worried that Giger’s design might be too disturbing for viewers, but Scott was adamant about using Giger’s design and the resulting film obviously proved Scott correct. Giger (and the rest of the Visual Effects team for the film, namely arlo Rambaldi, Brian Johnson, Nick Allder and Dennis Ayling) won the Academy Award for Visual Effects. Giger recently was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. However, reader Steve wrote in to ask if we almost saw Giger’s work appear in Batman Forever, of all places. He asked, “Is it true that artist H.R. Giger did production design art for the film “Batman Forever”, with a radically different design for the Batmobile than the seen in the film (or elsewhere). This rumor seems to get passed around a lot as fact. I would love to see the design sketch’s if they exist. Thank you. Keep up the great work.”

Well, is it true? Did we almost get a surrealist version of the Batmobile? Read on to find out!
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about movies and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the movie urban legends featured so far.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Dimitri Tiomkin asked for and received the publication rights for “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’” for free!

It’s hard to imagine nowadays, when the film soundtrack business is practically its own separate entity, but there was a time when songs from movies would only become popular songs if the movie was popular (or, of course, if the song was released later on by itself independent of the movie entirely).

For instance, when 1944’s Going My Way was a hit…

THEN Bing Crosby was able to have a hit with “Swinging on a Star” from the film.

Contrast that, for instance, with 1984’s “Footloose,” which was already a hit song by Kenny Loggins…

BEFORE the film of the same name came out and was a big hit.

So when in the 40 years between did Hollywood change their approach?

It very well might have been with Dimitri Tiomkin and “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'”
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about music and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the music urban legends featured so far.

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: Clem Snide’s “Moment in the Sun” is a parody of Jewel.

After using the Foo Fighter’s song “Next Year” for the first season of the TV show Ed, the producers went looking to a slightly less famous band, Clem Snide, for the theme song for the second season.

The New York band, which existed mostly as an outlet for singer/songwriter Eef Barzelay’s music, offered up three new songs, but the producers ultimately asked them for a song the group had already done called “Moment in the Sun.”

The upbeat tune served as the theme song for Ed for the second season of the show, but the Foo Fighters returned the next season (and the show’s fourth, and last, season).

What’s particularly interesting about the producers’ choice of “Moment in the Sun” is that the song was written as a parody of a typical Jewel song (circa Jewel’s first album, Pieces of You)!
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about music and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the music urban legends featured so far.

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: Bob Dylan lifted a number of lines from a Japanese novel for songs on his album “Love and Theft.”

Bob Dylan’s album “Love and Theft” continued the strong “comeback,” of sorts, that Dylan had began with 1997’s Time Out of Mind (which ended up winning Album of the Year at the Grammys).

The album was specifically called “Love and Theft,” not Love and Theft, which is clearly a reference to Eric Lott’s book Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.

In Lott’s book, he discusses how, at the heart of blackface was the appropriation of another culture’s, well, culture.

And in Dylan’s album, Dylan sings songs in a variety of different genres extending throughout the last hundred plus years of American music.

In one song, “High Water (for Charlie Patton),” Dylan basically takes most of Charlie Patton’s song “High Water” and writes a new song around it.

So it perhaps is not much of a surprise that it later was revealed that Dylan had appropriated a large number of lines from a book into the lyrics of the songs on the album.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about music and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the music urban legends featured so far.

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: Pat Boone’s recording of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” resulted in the lyrics being sanitized.

In a recent Music Urban Legends Revealed, we took a look at the misconception that Pat Boone changed Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” to “Isn’t That a Shame.”

Today, we look at a different misconception regarding Pat Boone’s role regarding the sanitization of a rock ‘n’ roll song.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about TV and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the TV urban legends featured so far.

TV URBAN LEGEND: An episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation was never filmed because it featured two gay crew members on the Enterprise.

One of the few good aspects of the recent news that J.H. Williams III and W. Hayden Blackman were leaving Batwoman over editorial differences with DC Comics was the fact that there did not seem to be any problems with DC editorial over the fact that Batwoman is gay. To wit, DC squelched plans for Batwoman to get married, but everyone in involved agrees that that was just part of DC’s general negative stance on comic book characters getting married rather than a problem with the idea of two gay characters getting married. It is good to know that in 2013, things like two gay characters getting married are not the issue that they were thirty years ago (or heck, even ten years ago). Naturally, then, you would imagine that as time went by, views on homosexuality would become more and more accepting. That was certainly the vision of Gene Roddenberry, the man who created Star Trek during the 1960s and Star Trek: The Next Generation in the 1980s. One of the main concepts of Star Trek was that in the future, all the silly prejudices of the modern era were gone. In the first series in the 1960s, right smack in the middle of the Cold War Roddenberry had a Russian serving on the Enterprise’s bridge. During the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, Roddenberry had the first interracial kiss on prime time television (albeit a forced kiss, but still, baby steps). By the time that the 1980s rolled around, Roddenberry used the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation as commentary on all sorts of 1980s issues.

In fact, in the show “bible” (a document written by Roddenberry that would serve as an overall manual for how the show should be written), Roddenberry notes:

We now have more freedom and story latitude, because our series by-passes the networks and is made directly for television stations. As before, without neglecting entertainment values, we invite writers to consider premises involving the challenges facing humanity today (the 1980’s and 90’s), particularly those which interest the writer personally. The new Star Trek episodes will continue the tradition of vivid imagination, intelligence and a sense of fun, while still assessing where we humans presently are, where we’re going, and what our existence is really about.

As it turned out, however, the one area where the challenges facing humanity today could not be adapted into a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode is when the topic was homosexuality, even if the writer was a Star Trek legend.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about TV and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the TV urban legends featured so far.

TV URBAN LEGEND: John Charles Daly resigned from ABC News because of ABC’s rather…odd coverage of Election Night in 1960.

John Charles Daly was one of the most respected newsmen in television history (he was also a proud supporter of his high school, the famous Tilton School, where he served as President later in his life – the portrait below is in recognition of his service of Tilton).

Daly first broke on to the scene as a radio newsman.

He was the first reporter to announce two major news stories – the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945.

His greatest legacy, though, even more than his career as a newsman, was his 17 year tenure as the host and moderator of the game show What’s My Line?

In any event, while working on What’s My Line?, he continued to work for CBS News.

However, in 1953, he took a job at ABC, becoming the Vice President of ABC News and the anchor of their evening news broadcast (where his sign off was “Good night, and a good tomorrow”)

ABC in those days was very much considered the black sheep of the three major networks. It did not have as much programming as CBS and NBC, and what programming it DID have was solely on the entertainment side of the equation – its news division was pretty much a shambles compared to the larger output of NBC and CBS.

That, naturally, was their plan in hiring Daly, one of the most well-respected newmen out there.

However, even with Daly (and the equally well-respected Chet Huntley) on their team, ABC’s News was a bit of a joke. Early on in his tenure, ABC impressively aired the entire Army-McCarthy hearings, but soon the network changed to targeted counter-programming, airing entertainment programs when its rivals aired news programs.

In 1958, NBC and CBS delivered nearly TWICE the amount of news coverage than ABC! Roughly 96 hours compared to 49!!!

It came to a head in 1960, though, when even Daly had had enough of the empty promises of ABC to clean up their news coverage.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about TV and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the TV urban legends featured so far.

TV URBAN LEGEND: Ken Osmond grew up to be the rock singer Alice Cooper.

In an earlier edition of TV Urban Legends Revealed, reader boxcuttah suggested that I feature this one, so, well, here ya go!

The TV sitcom Leave it to Beaver ran for six seasons in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

It starred two boys, Wally and Theodore (know as “Beaver”) and their parents, Ward and June.

A stand-out character on the show was teen actor Ken Osmond’s portrayal of Eddie Haskell, a good friend of Wally’s.

Eddie was the prototypical wisecracking kid who always acted like a saint when parents were looking.

A persistent rumor over the years was that Osmond, who was not seen much after the shoe ended, grew up to become rock star Alice Cooper.

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