Asked to choose a single “master image” to sum up his work, Steven Spielberg chose this shot from Close Encounters, in which little Barry Guiler opens his living-room door to see the “beautiful but awful light” emanating from an alien spacecraft. “And he’s very small,” Spielberg said, “and it’s a very large door, and there’s a lot of promise or danger outside that door.”

The scene in which Barry encounters midnight visitors in his kitchen won praise for Spielberg’s direction of untrained 3-year-old actor Cary Guffey:

The story is recounted in Joseph McBride’s 2010 biography of Spielberg: “I had to the left of the camera a cardboard partition, and to the right of the camera a second cardboard partition. To the left of the camera, I put Bob Westmoreland, our makeup man, in a gorilla suit — the full mask and hands and hairy body. To the right of the camera, I dressed myself up as an Easter Bunny, with the ears and the nose and the whiskers painted on my face. Cary Guffey didn’t know what to expect. He didn’t know what he was gonna react to. His job was to come into the kitchen, stop at the door, and just have a good time. … And just as he came into the kitchen, I had the cardboard partition dropped and Bob Westmoreland was there as the gorilla. Cary froze, like a deer caught in car headlights … I dropped my partition, and he looked over at me, and there was the Easter Bunny smiling at him. He was torn. He began to smile at me — he was still afraid of that thing. Then I had Bob — I said, ‘Take off your head.’ Bob took off his mask, and when Cary saw it was the man that put his makeup on in the morning, Cary began to laugh. Even though it was a trick, the reaction was pure and honest.”

Eugene Graves and William Brown patented this grim game in 1902. A row of effigies stand on blocks under a gibbet. Each effigy is fitted with a noose, and the players take turns shooting balls at the blocks, “representing summary punishment meted out to the victim.”

In the patent abstract, the effigies are described only as “notorious criminals and persons opposed to law and order”; Graves and Brown note that these can be varied to suit the “location, place or country for which the game is especially designed.”

“A flag may be provided for each figure to designate the character or nationality of the effigy.” We’re lucky this didn’t catch on.

When John Barrymore was on his deathbed in 1942, he received a wire from W.C. Fields.

It said YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME.

The football teams of Barbados and Grenada found themselves in a bizarre situation in a qualification round for the 1994 Carribean Cup. In order to advance to the finals, Barbados had to win this game by a margin of two goals; in any other outcome Grenada would qualify. Also, the tournament organizers had stated that if the teams reached a draw, extra time would be added to the match in which every goal would count double, the so-called “golden goal.”

Barbados was leading 2-0 when Grenada scored a goal in the final four minutes. With so little time remaining, the Barbados players conferred and, to everyone’s surprise, turned on their own goal, evening the score at 2-2. Their strategy was clear: If they could maintain this tie for the remaining few minutes, they’d be rewarded with an extra 30 minutes of playing time in which a single goal would give them the two-point margin they needed.

The Grenadians, realizing this, spent the last two minutes trying to get control of the ball and send it into their own goal — this would end the game at 3-2 and deny Barbados its two-goal margin.

The Barbadians, realizing this, began defending the Grenadian goal, effectively reversing the whole game. To add to the confusion, some Grenadians tried to make regular goals as well, which left Grenada attacking both goals, Barbados defending both, and most players and supporters utterly bewildered. The Barbadians eventually succeeded in holding the score at 2-2 — and made a winning goal in the extra time.

“I feel cheated,” complained Grenadian manager James Clarkson. “The person who came up with these rules must be a candidate for a madhouse. The game should never be played with so many players running around the field confused. Our players did not even know which direction to attack: our goal or their goal. I have never seen this happen before. In football, you are supposed to score against the opponents to win, not for them.” The Caribbean Cup retired the golden goal rule shortly thereafter.

(Thanks, Karl.)

In 1961, when Groucho Marx turned 71, he received a telegram from Irving Berlin:

THE WORLD WOULD NOT BE IN SUCH A SNARL
HAD MARX BEEN GROUCHO INSTEAD OF KARL.

The word zombie is never used in Night of the Living Dead.

The word Mafia is never used in The Godfather.

One afternoon the doorbell rang at Peter Sellers’ London flat. Sellers was working in his study upstairs, so his wife Anne answered the door. It was a telegram for her:

BRING ME A CUP OF COFFEE. PETER.

In 1960 Jerry Lewis and Henny Youngman were having lunch at a Miami restaurant when Lewis was mobbed by autograph seekers. Youngman slipped out to the lobby unnoticed and returned as if nothing had happened. Shortly afterward Lewis received a telegram from the hotel bellboy:

DEAR JERRY, PLEASE PASS THE SALT. HENNY.

What key is “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” written in? It’s not easy to say; the harmony is strangely ambiguous. Musicologist Naphtali Wagner found that the song is notated differently in two reasonably authoritative sources, Wise Publications’ The Beatles Complete (1983) and Hal Leonard’s The Beatles: Complete Scores (1993):

And he found that scholars disagree as well:

• Steven Porter believes that it’s in A major, “surrounded by tonicized structural neighbour tones (B♭ major and G major), as a sort of substitute for the absence of a structural dominant.”
• Walter Everett believes it’s in G major, citing a voice-leading graph that opens with the hypothetical notes G and B in the outer voices.
• Allan Moore is ambivalent: The scale steps in the upper voice suggest G major, but the bass line contradicts this, and the key signatures suggest D major.

Wagner shows that a case can be made for three rival interpretations: A major, D major, and G major. “Each is consistent with the Beatles’ harmonic style and has precedents in many other songs.” But he adds that one solution might be to abandon the idea of monotonality and see the song as oscillating between two keys: A in the chorus and pre-chorus and G in the chorus. “This version could be defended with the argument that oscillation between tonal centres separated by a major second is found in other Beatles songs, such as ‘Doctor Robert,’ ‘Good Day Sunshine’ and ‘Penny Lane.'”

(Naphtali Wagner, “The Beatles’ Psycheclassical Synthesis: Psychedelic Classicism and Classical Psychedelia in Sgt. Pepper,” in Oliver Julien, ed., Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles, 2008.)