Clockwise from top left: Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Larry David, Michael Richards, Jason Alexander, Seinfeld
Question: Please help settle a bet between my brother and myself. The loser has to buy tickets to a Braves game. I say Larry David showed up on Seinfeld a few times, but my brother says he didn't. What do you say? Who's right?
Answer: Assuming your brother has to buy a ticket for you, Phil, I say enjoy the game. Your brother may not have recognized him, but David did pop up on the show during its eight-year run, which started in May 1990.
Most fans know that Seinfeld cocreator David (Fridays, Curb Your Enthusiasm) provided the voice of George Steinbrenner on the show. That alone, I'm thinking, wouldn't settle your bet since your bro might try to
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Question: I just watched Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and the scene with Daryl Hannah as a hit woman disguised as a nurse reminded me of a TV-movie I saw as a kid. It was about a bunch of nurses in a house, and they’re afraid of a serial killer so they’re not going outside. But the twist is that one of the nurses is the killer, and he’s really a man dressed like a woman. I’m stumped and no one knows what I’m talking about, except for one person who said Alfred Hitchcock directed it. Can you help?Answer: Sure. What you saw wasn’t a movie but a 1965 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-1965) — though Alfred Hitchcock himself didn’t direct it — called An Unlocked Window. It was directed by Joseph Newman, based on Ethel Lina White’s 1933 novel Some Must Watch
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Question: I remember in the '80s there was a remake of an old French movie about this man who keeps tormenting his wife and another woman. It was set in a castle or something, and the scene I remember most vividly is the one in which the wife runs into the bathroom and locks the door. She turns around and all of a sudden, he pops out of the tub full of water and his eyes are rolled back into his head. She screams. Please, oh please, tell me the title of this movie and something about it!
Answer: Although it was made earlier than you suggest, I think you're remembering Reflections of Murder (1974), a startlingly good made-for-TV remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Diabolique (1955), in which the sadistic headmaster of a cavernous boys' boarding schoo
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NBC's Fear Factor will return for a sixth season on Dec. 6, replacing The Biggest Loser with, um, Joe Rogan. This go-round, the grossfest will feature a "Home Invasion" segment, in which Rogan springs surprises on unsuspecting homeowners; a heist-themed episode where players try to unlock a sunken armored car; family and reality-star-studded contests; and an episode staged entirely at Psycho's Bates Motel on the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot.
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Question: I would really like to know if what happened in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre movies is true or not. A lot of people I've asked are convinced that the movies document real events, but I've read that while real-life killer Ed Gein inspired the movies, there was no massacre at all. Can you clear this up for me please?
Answer: No to Texas, the chainsaw and the massacre. Yes to dug-up corpses, an isolated farmhouse of horrors, bone furniture and accessories. Utterly deranged Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein killed two women, but became notorious for his bizarre doodling with body parts, including human-skull soup bowls and a "woman suit" stitched together from corpse skin, the direct inspiration for Jamie Gumb's shenanigans in The Silence of the Lambs, and a centerpiece of the underrated 2000 movie Ed Gein. Gein inspired
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Question: Is The Usual Suspects credited with ushering in an era of shocking last-second movie twists, or is that considered to have been a long-standing plot device? It seems like ever since that movie, suspense thrillers just aren't complete without a big shocker ending.Answer: My gut is that Psycho (1960), which predates The Usual Suspects (1995) by 35 years, was among the first mainstream movies in which a last-minute twist changes the entire tenor of what precedes it. The revelation that Mrs. Bates is dead and her son, Norman (Anthony Perkins), has committed a series of murders dressed in her clothes was such a world-class shocker that keeping it secret became part of the movie's publicity campaign, which director
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Anything but Love
Question: I know you've written about on-set fighting in the past, so I'll ask you about another rumor. Was it true that Jamie Lee Curtis and Richard Lewis fought a lot while they were on Anything But Love?
Answer: Depends on whom you choose to believe, Anne — the tabloid reporters who reported on the supposed turmoil, or the stars themselves. According to the two of them, nothing beyond the usual professional give-and-take took place on the ABC comedy, which ran from March 1989 to June 1992.
"I've never been involved in a show without a few problems," Lewis told TV Guide in 1989. "That's why this so-called controversy with Jamie and me is so laughable. She has a point of view, yes. There is some tension involved, even on the best of shows. We like to joke with each other, and some people misunderstand that. Hey, this isn't Othello. We have
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