Read Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
India outlawed
bhoonda
in 1962 because of its obvious dangers. But 10 years later it was made legal again after protests by people in the region. As for Singh, he had the gods on his side in 2005, and calmly stepped off the saddle after his hair-raising ride. “It was amazing. He was so calm when he slid down the rope,” one spectator said. “He is truly a hero.”
So
that’s
why they’re not allowed in church: Glow sticks contain an ingredient called
luciferin
.
Some roles are so closely associated with a specific actor that it’s hard to imagine that he or she wasn’t the first choice for the part. Can you imagine, for example…
T
OM HANKS AS JERRY MAGUIRE
(
Jerry Maguire
—1996) Cameron Crowe wrote the movie and created the role of a shallow sports agent specifically for Tom Hanks. But Hanks turned him down—he was too busy filming his directorial debut,
That Thing You Do
. Tom Cruise was reluctant to do the movie (he didn’t want to be anybody’s second choice), but did it and was nominated for an Oscar. Hanks’s movie bombed.
JOHN TRAVOLTA AS JIM MORRISON
(
The Doors
—1991) John Travolta was the front-runner for the Morrison role. He met with the surviving members of the Doors in 1986 and impressed them so much that they gave director Oliver Stone their approval to go ahead with Travolta. They even considered going on tour with him as lead singer. Ultimately, though, they decided Travolta was “too nice” to replace Morrison, both onscreen and off.
JADA PINKETT-SMITH AS TRINITY
(
The Matrix—
1999) Readers of
Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader
may recall that Will Smith turned down the role of Neo in
The Matrix
. But it could have been a family affair: Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith, went on multiple auditions for the female lead and thought she had nailed the part. Then little-known actress Carrie-Anne Moss auditioned once…and got it. But the film’s directors, Larry and Andy Wachowski, did like Pinkett-Smith—so much that they cast her in both sequels,
The Matrix Reloaded
and
The Matrix Revolution
s.
SYLVESTER STALLONE AS AXEL FOLEY
(
Beverly Hills Cop
—1984) The script was written in 1977 as an action movie for Stallone. But by the time production started in 1983, cop movies were stale. Producers wanted to make the film more of a comedy, but Stallone actually wanted
more
action and violence. Two weeks before filming, Stallone quit. Producers decided to play up the comedy, ordered a rewrite, and hired Eddie Murphy.
Don’t touch! The “warts” on a toad are actually toxin-filled glands.
CHARLIZE THERON AS NOMI MALONE
(
Showgirls
—1995) Theron auditioned for the role of the criminal-turned-stripper, then took herself out of the running. The part went to Elizabeth Berkeley. The movie, one of the most notorious bombs of all time, flopped, and pretty much ended Berkeley’s career. Theron later called her decision “a blessing.”
JAMES CAAN AS SUPERMAN
(
Superman
—1978) After starting off the 1970s with a starring role in
The Godfather
, by 1977 Caan was in a career slump. Director Richard Donner was working on the first
Superman
movie and offered Caan the lead. At the time, action-movie roles were mostly the territory of TV stars, and Caan, a serious actor, didn’t want to be lumped in with those guys. He told Donner, “There’s no way I’m getting into that silly suit.” The part went to TV actor Christopher Reeve.
JODIE FOSTER AS PRINCESS LEIA
(Star Wars—
1977) Carrie Fisher got the part—she was director George Lucas’s first choice. But Fisher was more interested in pursuing a career as a writer than as an actress, and Lucas feared she might drop out before filming began. So he had another actress ready to go: Jodie Foster, who was only 15 at the time. (Lucas had seen her act in the role of a child prostitute in
Taxi Driver
and was convinced she could do it.)
HENRY WINKLER AS DANNY ZUKO
(
Grease
—1978) It’s not too hard to imagine Winkler in this part. The role of a tough, leather-jacket-wearing 1950s greaser is pretty similar to Fonzie, the character Winkler played on
Happy Days
. And that’s exactly why Winkler didn’t do it: He didn’t want to be typecast.
GARY COOPER AS RHETT BUTLER
(
Gone With the Wind
—1939) Cooper was the producers’ first choice, but he’d hated the book and thought a movie was a bad idea. “
Gone With the Wind
is going to be the biggest flop in Hollywood history,” he said after Clark Gable had been cast, “and I’m just glad it’ll be Clark Gable who’s falling on his face and not Gary Cooper.”
Yellow fever: The average American eats 28 pounds of bananas a year.
News of the scantily clad and the folks they make mad.
N
UDE:
In February 2005, an Auckland, New Zealand, man charged with indecent exposure arrived at the courthouse to answer the charges…naked. Simon Oosterman, 24, had been arrested a week earlier for taking part in the Auckland Naked Bike Ride, which was organized to protest dependence on automobiles. Now he was protesting the arrest. “There has to be a distinction,” Oosterman said, “between people flashing young girls and simple public nudity.”
PRUDE:
In June 2004 Oleg Shlyk, the deputy governor of Kaliningrad, Russia, ordered female government employees to stop wearing short skirts and sexy makeup to work. His reason: The women were arousing the “animal instincts” of male government workers. But by trying to encourage public modesty, Shlyk ended the object of public ridicule. “If short skirts and makeup distract him and he cannot control himself to direct his energy correctly,” said Yuri Matochkin, a deputy of the regional parliament, “he ought to change his job.”
NUDE:
Ontario, Canada, police arrested a 39-year-old man after he stripped off his clothes and jumped naked into a gas-station car wash when his taxi driver stopped at the station to fill up. The man, whose name was not released to the media, was still “bathing” when police came and took him away. He was later charged with being naked
and
intoxicated in a public place.
PRUDE:
The city of San Antonio, Texas, has come up with a novel way to prevent strippers from stripping completely: They are now required to apply for business licenses, and must carry them on their person while performing. The licenses are about half the size of a credit card…so where are the dancers supposed to put them? “It can be on the wrist or ankle, or something like that,” says Lt. Mike Gorhum, head of the city’s vice squad.
The Great Salt Lake is getting saltier—rivers dump 1.1 million tons of new salt into it every year.
Our continuing quest to keep commodes in the public eye.
P
ASTORAL PIT STOP
Rev. John Hawdon was filling in for the regular vicar at Longforgan Parish Church in Perthshire, Scotland, when, during a break in the service, he had to make a pit
stop…forgetting that his wireless lapel mic was still attached to his robe. The stunned congregation listened to the sounds of the reverend
“peeing, sighing with relief, flushing, and washing his hands.” Said one parishioner, “It was mortifying. Every sound boomed and echoed around the church. We all sat there looking at each other, totally embarrassed. One or two folk managed a wee giggle.”
TAKE A SEAT
Rosemary Salce is a guidance counselor at Public School #18 in Manhattan. Because of overcrowding and budget cuts in New York City’s public schools, Salce’s counseling office had to be turned into a classroom, which left the school’s only guidance counselor with no place to counsel. Her solution: She converted one of the school’s restrooms into an office. It has room for only two chairs and a desk, but the small size isn’t the biggest problem. “Every time a toilet flushes somewhere in the school, it stinks in here,” Salce laments. But at least, she admits, the students have access to her services.
DID A DEADHEAD STEAL THE DEAD’S HEAD?
One of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s most treasured possessions was his salmon-colored personal toilet, where he reportedly spent a lot of time thinking and writing songs. After his death in 1995, the toilet became the property of Henry Koltys, who had purchased Garcia’s Sonoma, California, home. Koltys didn’t want the toilet, though, and sold it to a casino for $2,550. The casino planned to add the potty to a traveling exhibit (they also purchased William Shatner’s kidney stones for the show), but before they could claim the commode, someone stole it. Garcia’s gardener, Jon Lipsin, thinks it was “liberated” by Deadheads. “It’s a little gross,” he said, “but I could see that toilet in a rock ’n’ roll museum.”
Prince Charles owns a collection of toilet seats.
America’s Most Wanted
was the Fox network’s first big hit. It was pretty controversial when it was launched in the late 1980s, but love it or hate it, it’s hard to argue against a show that has led to the capture of nearly 1,000 wanted criminals.
M
ADE IN GERMANY
When Fox TV first went on the air on October 6, 1986, it had only one show—
The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers
—but it had ambitious plans to add others. One program that Fox wanted to copy was
Aktenzeichen XY…Ungelöst
(
File XY…Unsolved
), a German TV show that had been on the air since 1967. Each episode featured as many as five real-life unsolved crimes that were reenacted and presented to the viewing audience. The hope was that someone would call in with a tip that would help solve the crime.
File XY
was the outgrowth of an earlier show called
Vorsicht, Falle!
(
Beware, Trap!
), which warned viewers about scam artists operating in Germany. Without being asked, so many viewers had sent in information about the con men depicted on the show that the producers decided to create
File XY
around the premise of asking viewers to send in tips. In 1984 the BBC began airing a similar show called
Crimewatch UK;
it too was successful. But would the concept work in the United States?
PUTTING IT TOGETHER
Michael Linder, a former
Entertainment Tonight
producer, and Stephen Chao, a former
National Enquirer
reporter, were the Fox executives who fleshed out the show’s details. They decided to focus the most attention on cases involving violent criminals who had committed crimes in the recent past and were likely to continue if they weren’t caught right away. Escaped cons or repeat offenders were preferred; with these cases it was thought there would be less risk of violating the rights of someone who might later turn out to be innocent. Cases involving people who were only “wanted for questioning” were off-limits for the same reason.
One of the biggest challenges was getting law-enforcement agencies to cooperate with the show. Linder wanted to feature someone on the FBI’s Most Wanted list in the pilot episode, but the FBI wasn’t sure it should get involved. Fox was a new network and
America’s Most Wanted
was an unproven concept. The show would film reenactments of brutal real-life crimes—would they be done respectfully and in good taste? In the end the FBI did decide to cooperate…with the pilot. Future cooperation would depend on how the first show turned out.
Is this some kind of joke? In Quitman, Georgia, it is illegal for a chicken to cross the road.
FBI officials gave Linder information on each criminal on the Most Wanted list. After reading about them all, he decided to focus on the case of David James Roberts, an Indiana prison inmate who had escaped from custody in 1968 while serving six life terms for rape, arson, and murder, including the murder of two children. He’d been on the run for nearly 20 years.
The producers recruited actors to play Roberts and his victims, returned to the scenes of some of his crimes, and filmed reenactments. Stories on other wanted criminals were also filmed.
Now all the show needed was a host.
FIRST CHOICE
Early on, Linder and Chao thought John Walsh, an outspoken advocate for missing and exploited children, would make a good host for the show. In 1981 Walsh’s six-year-old son, Adam, had been kidnapped from a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida. Weeks later, his partial remains were recovered in a drainage ditch 120 miles away; the rest of his body was never found. Since then, Walsh and his wife, Revé, had channeled their grief into lobbying to remove the legal and bureaucratic obstacles that made it difficult to recover missing children. The passage of the federal Missing Children Act of 1982 and the Missing Children’s Assistance Act of 1984 were due in large part to their efforts.
Walsh understood from personal experience the impact that the media could play in solving crimes. His family’s story was made into two TV movies:
Adam
(1983) and
Adam: His Song Continues
(1986). Each movie had ended with photos of and information on 55 missing kids, for a total of 110 for both shows. Dozens of the kids were then found or accounted for (by 1990, 71 of the cases would be solved).