As is the tradition, this year’s annual Stuart Byron Movie Trivia Quiz seeks to winnow out dilettantes from the dead-serious cinephiles, and with so many cheating opportunities blithely available, the challenge has to be hard-won. None of these questions can be easily answered via a handy book or trip to the video store; CNet data sources can be useful, but even there a ration of cine-knowledge and ingenuity is required. TV movies and broadcast plays are generally admissible; TV shows and shorts are not. The prize: a $250 gift certificate at the bookshop or video store of your choice. You can mail your entry to the Voice offices, e-mail it to [email protected], or submit online (www.villagevoice.com). Voice employees are ineligible.
MY BRILLIANT CAREER
1. What living actor/actress has had the longest career in movies?
2. One actor/actress has appeared in films by seven out of nine frontline nouvelle vague directors (Godard, Rivette, Truffaut, Rohmer, Resnais, Varda, Demy, Malle, and Chabrol). Name him/her.
3. What director and actor/actress made the most films together?
4. What actor/actress has been directed the most times by his/her father?
5. For a point apiece, name as many directors as you can who were once professional athletes.
FORGOTTEN SILVER
6. Identify the pictured film at right.
EYES WITHOUT A FACE
7. Name the quoted film critic.
A. On Harpo Marx: “He’s the St. Francis of the Rabelaisian hagiography, a moon-calf on roller-skates, the most aggressive of dreamers. Since he’s a pickpocket and a sex maniac, one can’t altogether describe him as a dreamer. . . . ”
B. On Hedy Lamarr: “Miss Lamarr’s accent on the contrary never seems in the way but makes her speech a sublime kind of baby talk, as though she had just caused a marshmallow successfully to melt in her mouth.”
C. On Chuck Jones: “One of Jones’s key inventions is the animal who is a totally invulnerable, can’t-possibly-be-stopped adversary, a mysterious force like rain that is always surrounded by a hush that is a mixture of the awe, revelation, instinctive reverence of a soon-to-be-victim just before he is maneuvered off the cliff or into a distant puff of smoke miles away in the desert.”
D. On Marilyn Monroe: “She would bat her Bambi eyelashes, lick her messy suggestive open mouth, wiggle that pert and tempting bottom, and use her hushed voice to caress us with dizzying innuendoes. Her extravagantly ripe body bulging and spilling out of her clothes, she threw herself at us with the off-color innocence of a baby whore.”
CHARACTER
8. What actor has played:
A. Judas, Herod, and Louis XIII?
B. D’Artagnan, Modigliani, and Faust?
C. Ben Bradlee, Andrew Jackson, and Lyndon Johnson?
D. Dreyfus, Horatio Nelson, and Henry Cabot Lodge?
E. Pontius Pilate, Shylock, and Robespierre?
F. Louis XV, François Villon, and Richard III?
G. Buffalo Bill, Robert E. Lee, and Pope Leo I?
H. Churchill, Richelieu, and Disraeli?
9. What actor played his own father twice?
10. Name the film in which:
A. Warren Beatty drinks raw eggs in whiskey.
B. Robert DeNiro smokes opium.
C. Joan Bennett spits grape pits into a sinkful of dishes.
D. Warren Oates paints billboards.
E. Isabelle Huppert lies down in a field to have her crotch sniffed.
F. Robert Redford wipes cigarette ash off a sofa.
WRITTEN ON THE WIND
11. In what movie were these immortal lines uttered, and by whom?
A. “Are Phoenix girls that bad?”
B. “I fuck your sons and daughters because they’re pigs!”
C. “It’s rough with a new country. Do you realize the entire population is still packed in crates?”
D. “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man: I get older, they stay the same age.”
E. “On those second-floor lintels between the Lally columns, you want we should rabbet them or not?”
F. “Y’know, sooner or later . . . You really wear that suit.”
12. Name the movies in which the following fictional films were being shot.
A. Crash Course
B. Chubby Rain
C. Confessions of a Peeping John
D. Portrait of a Girl
E. The Walls Are Closing In
MURDER BY TELEVISION
13. In what movies were the following films watched on a television?
A. Heroic Trio
B. Wall Street
C. I Stand Alone
D. To Please a Lady
E. Tora, Tora, Tora
F. The Losers
G. Nosferatu
13. What was the first movie adapted/derived from a TV show?
14. What was the first film depicting television?
The answers.