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Snuffing Out Anachronisms, and Other News

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On the Shelf

anachronism

Not so fast, Abe. Image via Anachro.net.

  • The Cotton Club was also shooting in New York. The night we were shooting the Marshmallow Man, some guy said to me, ‘This is insane, what’s this movie?’ I said, ‘The Cotton Club, man. That guy Francis, you can’t stop him.’” In honor of Harold Ramis, an oral history of Ghostbusters.
  • What do you do when your students’ literary touchstone is Law and Order: SVU?
  • Online, Steven Soderbergh has released Psychos, “a feature-length mashup of Hitchcock’s original 1960 movie and Gus Van Sant’s controversial shot-for-shot 1998 remake.”
  • At last, screenwriters can stop anachronisms in their tracks with the Anachronism Machine. “It maps the script’s words and phrases against a Google database consisting of the full texts of six million books and spits out a graphical rendering of the likely anachronisms the script is guilty of.”
  • The first entry in an A to Z of forgotten books: “When it appeared in 1923, André Maurois’s Ariel was one of a new breed of what reviewers of the time took to calling ‘romance biographies.’”