FILM 1197: SHERLOCK JR.

TRIVIA: Buster Keaton practiced for four months, working with a pool expert, to learn all the trick shots that Sherlock Jr. performs during the pool game. Nevertheless, it took him five days to film all the trick shots, and get them right. When he was finished, all the best trick shots he had filmed were cut together to make it look like Sherlock Jr. was playing one continuous game of pool.

In one scene at a train station, Buster Keaton was hanging off of a tube connected to a water basin. The water poured out and washed him on to the track, fracturing his neck nearly to the point of breaking it. This footage appears in the released film. Keaton suffered from blinding migraines for years after making this movie and was unaware of the reason, until a doctor diagnosed him in the 1930s.

Following his "entrance" into the "movie within a movie," the scenery changes around Buster Keaton very quickly, as if the movie is changing scenes with quick edits. (He suddenly finds himself on a crowded city street, in the jungle confronted by lions, on a rock in the middle of the ocean, etc.) Keaton later recalled that his cameraman, Byron Houck, had used surveying instruments to position him and the camera at the exact correct distances and positions to give the illusion of continuity as the scenes changed.

Sherlock Jr.'s assistant, Gillette, is named after William Gillette, the first actor to play Sherlock Holmes on stage.

According to the book Buster is reading, the seven rules for being a detective are: 1. Search Everybody. 2. Look for Clue. 3. Examine all windows. 4. Search for finger prints. 5. Shadow your man closely. 6. Send for the police. 7. Keep cool. Buster actually only employs rules #1 and #5 in the movie.

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Film 818: Moonrise Kingdom

Trivia: Though it was filmed in part on Prudence Island, Rhode Island, the map of the island of New Penzance is based on Fisher's Island, New York.

Wes Anderson's sixth collaboration with Bill Murray.

Before filming, neither Kara Hayward nor Jared Gilman had ever seen a typewriter in person. Hayward later said, "Fran (Frances McDormand) had a lot of fun with that. She couldn't believe it. She showed me that the keys are in the same place as now (on computers)."

After filming was completed, Kara Hayward got to keep the kitten owned in the film by her character Suzy, and Jared Gilman got to keep the backpack used by his character Sam.

The film opened in only four theaters, two in New York and two in Los Angeles, but earned $167,250 per screen, the all-time record for highest per-theater box office average of a non-animated film.

According to Wes Anderson, Suzy's discovery of the "Coping with a Troubled Child" pamphlet was based on a similar experience from his own childhood: "It wasn't anything terrible. It's just something that at the time, when I found it, I was like, 'What is this!' I immediately knew who that troubled child was even though hypothetically it could have been someone else."

In the film, Laura Bishop shouts at various family members through a bullhorn. The idea came from co-writer Roman Coppola's childhood, as his mother Eleanor Coppola used a bullhorn in a similar fashion.

During filming, Wes Anderson rented an old mansion in Newport, Rhode Island for himself, editor Andrew Weisblum, and director of cinematography Robert D. Yeoman, in which they had a room set up for editing the film. It had been arranged for the cast to stay in a nearby hotel, but eventually some of the actors also decided to stay at the mansion, including Edward Norton, Bill Murray, and Jason Schwartzman. Murray later joked that the theory was to have everyone close by so that they could all work "ungodly art-movie hours."