FILM 1646: HIDDEN FIGURES

TRIVIA: While John Glenn did specifically request that Katherine Johnson review all of the numbers for the Friendship 7 mission before he would agree to go through with it, he did so weeks before the mission actually took place, not when the countdown to launch was nearing at Cape Canaveral.

When Taraji P. Henson signed on for the lead role, she met with the real-life Katherine Johnson, who was 98 years old, to discuss the character she was about to portray. Henson learned that Johnson had graduated from high school at age 14 and from college at age 18, and was still as lucid as anyone years younger. After the film was screened for Johnson, she expressed her genuine approval of Henson's portrayal, but wondered why anybody would want to make a film about her life.

The issue with the bathrooms was not something Katherine Johnson personally experienced. It was actually encountered by Mary Jackson instead. In fact, it was this incident, as a result of Jackson ranting to a colleague, which got her moved to the wind tunnel team. Johnson was initially unaware that the East Side bathrooms were even segregated, and used the unlabeled "whites-only" bathrooms for years before anyone complained. When she simply ignored the complaint, the issue was dropped completely.

One of the ways that Katherine experiences workplace discrimination is when her coworkers require her to use a separate coffee pot. Whenever the office's coffee area is shown, the brand of coffee that they use, Chock Full o'Nuts, is also visible. The use of this brand in the context of segregation is historically relevant. In 1957, Chock Full o'Nuts was one of the first major New York corporations to hire a black executive as a corporate vice-president. The man they hired, retired baseball legend Jackie Robinson, had made history by being the first person to break the color barrier in professional baseball.

On the day that the scene was filmed in which Paul Stafford is speaking to the NASA engineers in the Space Task Group office about needing to develop the math for re-entry, there was an extra face in the crowd. Mark Armstrong, son of Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, had been invited by actor Ken Strunk to make a cameo appearance in the scene, and joined the other actors who were playing the NASA engineers.

Several of the control console props in the Mercury Mission Control set were originally built for the Mission Control Room set for Apollo 13 (1995). They were modified for use in the later films, including The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015).

This marks the second time Taraji P. Henson and Mahershala Ali have played love interests. The first was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).

Producer Pharrell Williams also oversaw all musical elements, and the soundtrack.

FILM 1420: GOOD WILL HUNTING

TRIVIA: After the 2014 death of Robin Williams, the Boston Public Garden park bench where he and Matt Damon had their conversation scene, became an impromptu memorial site for the actor with people leaving flowers, quotes and various items at the bench. A petition has been passed around to erect a statue in Williams' memory near the bench.

The scene where Sean and Will are in his office, and Sean starts talking about his dead wife and her farting antics. These lines were ad-libbed by Robin Williams, which is probably why Matt Damon is laughing so hard. If you watch the scene carefully you can notice the camera shaking, probably due to the cameraman laughing as well.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck found a clever way to choose the right studio for their script: the story goes that on page 60 of the script, they wrote a completely out-of-nowhere sex scene between Will and Chuckie. They took it to every major studio, and nobody even mentioned the scene. When they met with Harvey Weinstein at Miramax, he said, "I only have one really big note on the script. About page 60, the two leads, both straight men, have a sex scene. What the hell is that?" - Damon and Affleck explained that they put that scene specifically in there to show them who actually read the script and who didn't. As Weinstein was the only person who brought it up, Miramax was the studio chosen to produce the film.

Casey Affleck ad libbed most of his lines. This frustrated Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Gus Van Sant during filming - but they later admitted that Casey's improvised lines were much funnier and better than what had been originally written for him.

Matt Damon's personal favorite movie of his own.

Minnie Driver's character Skylar is named after Damon's girlfriend, Skylar Satenstein, who left Damon for Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich before filming began. Damon and Driver became romantically involved during production.

Gus Van Sant painted the picture that hangs in Sean Maguire's (Robin Williams) office.

The job interview Will sends Chuckie on is for a company called Holden & McNeil. Ben Affleck's character in Chasing Amy (1997) was Holden McNeil.

When Will (Matt Damon) and Sean (Robin Williams) meet for the first time in Sean's office, Will recommends that Sean read Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States". As a boy, Matt Damon was Zinn's neighbor and provided the voice for the CD recording of that book.

To date this is the film with the highest US box office gross with Kevin Smith's name attached to it. All his own films that he has written and directed have not grossed more than $35 million at the US box office.

FILM 1294: THE IMITATION GAME

TRIVIA: Winston Churchill stated that Turing made the single greatest contribution in Britain's war effort.

Benedict Cumberbatch confessed that in one of the final scenes of the film he couldn't stop crying and had a breakdown. It was, as he said, "being an actor or a person that had grown incredibly fond of the character and thinking what he had suffered and how that had affected him."

On 27 November 2014, ahead of the film's US release, The New York Times reprinted the original 1942 crossword puzzle from The Daily Telegraph used in recruiting code breakers at Bletchley Park during World War II. Entrants who solve the puzzle can mail in their results for a chance to win a trip for two to London and a tour of the famous Bletchley Park facilities.

In an interview with USA Today, Benedict Cumberbatch said of Turing's Royal Pardon, "The only person who should be pardoning anybody is him (Turing). Hopefully, the film will bring to the fore what an extraordinary human being he was and how appalling (his treatment by the government was). It's a really shameful, disgraceful part of our history."

Framed tortoise shells are seen hanging on the walls of Turing's home. This is an allusion to his later work showing that the patterns on tortoise shells, despite their apparent complexity (and beauty), can come about from a rather simple set of rules or instructions, i.e. the underlying genetic code. This convinced Turing that exceedingly complex biological entities can stem from simple programs, i.e. from simple changes in the DNA. This insight has profound implications for evolution, especially to those arguments asserting that the complexity of life could not have arisen by chance alone.