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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 car chase in The French Connection was done without any permits.

It is often said that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, and that seems to be the motto of the William Friedkin’s The French Connection.

The 1971 film The French Connection starred Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider as cops taking down a large delivery of heroin (the titular “French Connection”). Hackman plays “Popeye” Doyle and Scheider plays Buddy Russo.

William Friedkin directed the film, which was based on the real life story of cops Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso.

The film was a big hit, both commercially and critically. At the Academy Awards the next year, the film won the Academy Award for Best Film, Friedkin won Best Director and Hackman won for Best Actor (Scheider was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but lost to Ben Johnson for The Last Picture Show).

For all the critical acclaim, though, the film is best remembered today for its dramatic car chase scene.

At one point in the film, one of the bad guys commandeers an elevated subway train to make his getaway from Popeye Doyle.

Doyle then commandeers a civilian’s car (a 1971 Pontiac LeMans) and proceeds to chase the runaway train from below.

It’s a brilliant and breathtaking chase scene, highlighted by a number of specific stunts, including a collusion during an intersection…

and Doyle almost hitting a woman and her baby…

which, in turn, causes the car to hit a pile of garbage…

The whole thing was quite elaborate, quite dangerous and done…without the permission of the City of New York!!!
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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: Bela Lugosi learned his lines for the film Dracula phonetically – he did not speak English at the time!

As the story goes, when Béla Lugosi starred in Tod Browning’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1931, he was not the first choice for the role.

That much is true.

However, one of the reasons given is that Lugosi did not even speak English at the time, but rather, had learned his lines for the popular Broadway theatrical version of Dracula that he was starring in (which got him the role in the film) phonetically, which is also how he learned his lines for the movie.

Is that true?
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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: The Cure put a disclaimer sticker on their singles compilation album, Standing on a Beach, to make sure people did not misinterpret the meaning of one of their songs.

“Killing an Arab” is an early single by the popular pop band, The Cure.

It appears on their classic early album, Boys Don’t Cry…

The song is pretty much exactly based on Albert Camus’ classic short novel, The Stranger, which is about a man who actually, you know, kills an Arab (naturally, that is not the extent of the novel).

Well, as you might imagine, a song with a title like “Killing an Arab” gained a slightly different group of fans than what the Cure’s Robert Smith (who wrote and sang the song) expected, and Smith quickly regretted the song title. So he soon decided to address the issue head on.
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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: The original recording of Jimi Hendrix on Happening With Lulu was saved by being hidden on an old tape by a BBC engineer.

Lulu (born Marie Lawrie) was a young Scottish singer (and I mean young, she’s only 60 now!) who had a hit with the title track of the film, To Sir With Love, where she played a student of Sidney Poitier’s “Sir” character.

In the late 60s, Lulu hosted her own live variety show on the BBC called (among a few different names over the seven plus years it was on the air) “Happening for Lulu,” which was a pretty standard variety show (besides being live, which was certainly a bit of a novelty).

However, Lulu was a pretty darn cool lady, so she tried to get acts that you wouldn’t normally expect to see on a variety show hosted by the lady who sang “To Sir With Love.”

The epitome of that attitude was when she had Jimi Hendrix on the show in early 1969.

Hendrix opened with “Voodoo Child”…

He was then scheduled to play “Hey Joe” and then perform a short duet with Lulu as the credits rolled.

However, Hendrix clearly did not want to do that, so first he performed an extended intro to “Hey Joe” and a few verses…

before abruptly halting the show to proclaim “We’d like to stop playing this rubbish and dedicate a song to the Cream regardless of what kind of group they might be. I’d like to dedicate this to Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce.”

and they then went into a feedback-fueled version of the Cream song “Sunshine of Your Love”…

By now, Hendrix had not only gone past the time for him and Lulu to do a duet, he was now actually past the allotted time for the program, and the live program was now cutting into the BBC’s 6 O’Clock News!!!

They were cut off and the show ended.

The next day, the basic report was about how “arrogant” Hendrix was and “insulting” to Lulu. She obviously didn’t care, as she had Hendrix over to her flat that night with her and her soon-to-be-husband, Maurice Gibb.

In any event, the legend is that although the rules were at the time that all video tapes were wiped for re-use, an engineer couldn’t help but save Hendrix’s performance and hid it on a tape containing a documentary about trains, which is where it stayed, forgotten until found years later.
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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 Trayvon Martin case led to a Sci-Fi comedy film changing its title.

One of the most stressful times in the making of a movie is the time after filming is complete but before the film has been released. During this time, filmmakers can drive themselves crazy with thoughts about how their film will succeed or fail (I did a legend awhile back about how George Lucas freaked out so much about Star Wars after filming was completed that he made a bizarre bet with Steven Spielberg essentially betting that Star Wars would fail (or at least not do as well as Spielberg’s next picture). However, it is not just the filmmaker’s psyche that is at risk during this period. Things like studio marketing evaluations and audience testing can dramatically alter the way a film is promoted and/or released. The 2012 film Red Dawn had the invading army in the film literally changed from China to North Korea after marketing evaluations decided that the film would lose out of too much revenue from China if they had the villains be Chinese. More recently, the Brad Pitt action film World War Z had extensive re-shoots that saw the last third of the movie essentially entirely re-written. At least those situations, though, are within the control of the studio. The craziest problems are when real life events suddenly give your film meaning that it never meant to have. Most famously, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 led to a number of films being delayed and edited because of content related to the attacks (the comedy Big Trouble, about a rogue nuclear bomb secretly smuggled on to an airplane, was delayed seven months and the Gwyneth Paltrow flight attendant comedy View From the Top was delayed well over a year! And that was just because it was a film about airplanes!). Rarely has this type of problem been as unpredictable, tough, then with the story of how the February 2012 fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida led to a science fiction comedy having to change its name last summer.
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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: Delbert McClinton taught John Lennon how to play the harmonica.

Reader Travis wrote in to ask:

One I hear a lot around here (in Texas) is that musician Delbert McClinton taught John Lennon how to play the harmonica. True or not.

While it’s not true, Travis, it’s amazing how much truth there IS to the story.

Delbert McClinton has had a remarkable career in the music industry, playing on hits in the 1960s and later having hit singles in the 1990s!

McClinton got his first big break in the business, though, when he played harmonica on a song by a fellow Texan, Bruce Channel.

The song was called “Hey Baby,” and it was a smash hit in the Spring of 1962.

McClinton’s harmonica performance on the song was remarkable, and really gave the song its unique flavor (it’s a really great song that you really ought to get if you’ve never heard it before).

In any event, the song was so popular that Channel and McClinton went on tour in England in the Summer of 1962, and on that tour, their supporting band was a young quartet known as the Beatles!
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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: Doris Roberts hid a back injury so that she could be cast on Remington Steele.

Doris Roberts played Mildred Krebs, the assistant to the investigators Laura Holt and Remington Steele on the TV series Remington Steele.

What’s amazing, though, is what she put herself through to GET the job!
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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: Omar was going to be killed off during Season 1 of The Wire.

Omar Little, played by Michael K. Williams, was one of the most interesting characters on The Wire, which is saying a lot, as The Wire is FILLED with interesting characters.

Omar is also caught up in a bit of a legend that started due to…Michael Williams!

Williams has given interviews that said that Omar was originally intended to be killed off at the end of Season 1, but the show’s head, David Simon, decided he liked Williams’ portrayal of Omar so much that he changed his mind and kept him for the rest of the series (practically).

Is it true, though?
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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: Julie Newmar, Catwoman on the Batman TV series, received a federal patent on a special type of pantyhouse that accentuates a woman’s ass.

One of the unique qualities of a TV show becoming a sensation is that the actors associated with the show become cultural icons in their own right. This was certainly the case for Julie Newmar, the dancer, model and actress who portrayed Catwoman on the 1966 Batman TV series. Her form-fitting costume accentuated her hourglass figure in all the right places for straight young men watching the program at the time (and those who have watched it in re-runs ever since). Newmar even specifically had her Catwoman costume slightly altered to accentuate her curves. She recently noted that she had the belt on her costume lowered from her waist to her hips to draw attention to her curvy hips.

Newmar has always had a fiery, one might almost call it “cheeky” disposition (her attitude has led to a famous legend about a cutting remark she made about The Wild, Wild West’s Michael Dunn, which I featured as a TV legend awhile back), but surprisingly, her cheeky disposition went beyond mere attitude and entered into the world of inventions in literal fashion when she patented a special type of pantyhouse designed to accentuate a woman’s ass! Read on for more details…
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about the world of photography and whether they are true or false.

PHOTOGRAPHY URBAN LEGEND: Robert Doisneau’s “The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville” was a candid shot.

While obviously Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “V–J day in Times Square” photograph of a soldier spontaneously celebrating the surrender of Japan in 1945 with a nearby woman is the most famous candid kiss captured as a photograph…

Robert Doisneau’s “The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville” was always a close second, with his seemingly candid shot of two young lovers kissing in the streets of Paris, which (like Eisentaedt’s picture in 1945) appeared in Life Magazine in 1950.

Interestingly enough, while Eisentaedt’s photograph was an instant classic, it was not until the early 1980s that Doisneau’s photograph became a sensation, after a publisher came to Doisneau looking to turn the decades old photograph into a poster.

Over the years, the photo was treated as a candid shot and various people had come forward claiming to be the kissing couple. Doisneau always let them have their chance at making their claim – it was fine by him, as he knew who the actual couple was, so if others wanted to say it was them, it was no skin off his back.

That changed, however, in 1993.
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