Ask Parky: Elementary, my dear Sacha

This week, our film buff answers your questions on long titles, Sherlock Holmes and the Fox logo

* David Parkinson
* guardian.co.uk,
* Wednesday August 06 2008 00:06 BST
* Article history

I recently saw Joshua Dugdale's documentary, The Unwinking Gaze: The Inside Story of the Dalai Lama's Struggle for Tibet. Seemed a pretty long title to me - how does it fare compared with others?
John Horwich, Battersea
Dr Strangelove Dr Strangelove. Photo: Kobal

At 13 words, it ties for seventh place with Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

The longest title is Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Hellbound, Flesh-Eating Subhumanoid Zombified Living Dead, Part 3 (37 words, 192 letters).
Blood Feud Sophia Loren in Blood Feud. Photo: Kobal

This comic redubbing of Joseph Green's 1962 sci-fi chiller, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, was directed by James Riffel, who, in 1991, had used the pseudonym Lowell Mason to rework George A Romero's Night of the Living Dead as Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D (41 words, 168 letters).

The record for an original work, however, belongs to Lina Wertmüller's 1978 drama, Un Fatto di sangue nel commune di Sculiana fra due unomini per causa di una vedova si sospetanomoventi politici. Amore-Morte-Shimmy. Lugano belle. Tarantelle. Taratelle e vino (26 words, 171 letters). This was abbreviated in Italy to Fatto di sangue fra due uomini per causa di una vedova - si sospettano moventi politici, while the English-language title was Blood Feud. A recut version was simply dubbed, Revenge.

If Sacha Baron Cohen and Robert Downey Jr are racing to become the big screen's next Sherlock Holmes, who was the first?
Meg Little, Luton
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes Robert Stephens in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Photo: Kobal

The identity of the eponymous actor in Sherlock Holmes Baffled remains unknown. Running some 30 seconds, the film was produced for the Mutoscope peepshow in 1900 (although the copyright on one existing version states 1903) and features a cigar-smoking Holmes disturbing a burglar, who keeps disappearing thanks to some stop-frame magic. Click here to watch the clip and try and solve the mystery.

When did 20th Century Fox introduce its famous logo and theme tune? Marsha Rodgers, Ipswich

The edifice and searchlights logo was designed in 1933 by matte artist Emil Kosa Jr to preface releases by 20th Century Pictures, with the accompanying fanfare being composed by Alfred Newman. The original third layer words "Pictures Inc" were replaced by "Fox" when the studio merged with the Fox Film Corporation in 1935 and this combination remained in situ for 18 years, with a Technicolor version being available from Henry King's Ramona (1936).
How to Marry a Millionaire poster The poster for How to Marry a Millionaire. Photo: Kobal

With the introduction of CinemaScope in 1953, the front office decided that the logo needed to be more imposing and new graphics were commissioned for Howard Hawks' How to Marry a Millionaire, to which Newman appended the "CinemaScope extension", which became the standard following another Marilyn Monroe vehicle, Henry Hathaway's River of No Return (1954). This revision, which was conducted by Alfred's brother Lionel, predominantly held sway over the next four decades, although Fox inexplicably dropped its trademark in 1970, only to reinstate it a year later after a public outcry.

New recordings of the fanfare were made by John Williams for Irvin Kershner's The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and respectively in 1994 and 1997 by Bruce Broughton and David Newman (who is Alfred's son) to accompany the existing CGI aerial swoop version of the so-called "majestic tower".

Several novelty credits have been produced down the years, with cars driving through the "O" in The Cannonball Run (1981), the searchlights going out in Die Hard 4.0 and Ralph Wiggum singing along with the fanfare in The Simpsons Movie (both 2007).
The Simpsons Movie Ralph Wiggum (far left) in The Simpsons Movie. Photo: Kobal

Want to ask Parky a question? Email ask.parky@guardian.co.uk. Thanks to those who've already done so, and apologies to those who tried last week and failed - all technical problems are now resolved so do try again.

Are there still countries in the world that haven't produced a feature film?

Magda Pobrec, Nantwich

Around 180 countries have now produced features, but many have still to make a film of any kind. Oceania is particularly barren, with Samoa yet to venture into production and Fiji, Tonga and Papua New Guinea reliant on overseas support. Collaboration has also been the watchword in Africa, with several states producing features in conjunction with former colonial powers. Sudan and Somalia have produced independent pictures, but it's difficult to confirm their running times. So Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gambia, Lesotho, Malawi, Seychelles, Sierra Leone and Swaziland currently stand as the African nations outside the cinematic community.

French Guiana, the Falklands and several Caribbean islands have also to register their first feature and the same is also true of the Vatican, Kosovo and Montenegro (although the latter pair have only just claimed independence). Elsewhere in Europe, the likes of Andorra have had to settle for co-producing features, although the equally diminutive Liechtenstein made its mark on the 70s Euro horror scene, while Monaco's credits include Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace (1964) and Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More (1965).

Greenland recently ended its screen dependence on Denmark to produce its first full-length drama, Otto Rosing's Nuummioq (you can watch the trailer here). But, perhaps more notably, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has just announced that the previously cinephobic state of Saudi Arabia intends to capitalise on the pioneering efforts of Abdullah al-Eyaf and Haifaa al-Mansour and produce its own first feature in the near future.

Why was the Academy Award for Dance Direction dropped after just three years?

Amanda Tarleton, Hammersmith
Top Hat Tripping the light fantastic ... Top Hat. Photo: Kobal

Presented between 1935-37, the Oscar for the year's best screen choreography was largely discontinued as it was felt there were too few candidates for the category to be much of a competition. Doubts were also cast about a voting system that led to Dave Gould taking the inaugural statuette with I've Got a Feeling You're Fooling from Broadway Melody of 1936 and Straw Hat from Folies Bergère, while Hermes Pan was consigned to second place with Piccolino and the title number from the Fred and Ginger gem, Top Hat, and Busby Berkeley could only manage third for The Words Are in My Heart and the magisterial Lullaby of Broadway from Gold Diggers of 1935. Changes to the nomination process still couldn't prevent the triumph of Seymour Felix's grandiose A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody from The Great Ziegfeld (1936). So the award was retired after Hermes Pan was commended for his work with Fred Astaire on the Fun House routine in A Damsel in Distress.

Sad to see that king of the voice-overs Don LaFontaine died last week. When were trailers introduced?

Matt Warren, Tiverton

It's one of the great movie myths that trailers were introduced in the 1910s to bore audiences out of picture palaces in the days of continuous programmes. Equally specious is the claim that projectionists homemade trailers by splicing together scenes from the film due to play at their venue later in the week.
Rin Tin Tin Who knew Rin Tin Tin was quite so big? Photo: Kobal

As is so often the case in screen history, the actual pioneer was Georges Méliès, who ran a promotional reel outside the Theatre Robert-Houdin in Paris some time in 1898. The first instance in the United States seems to have taken place at a concession stand at Rye Beach, New York in 1913, when the first reel of the serial The Adventures of Kathlyn was shown with a cliffhanging caption asking whether Kathlyn Williams would escape from a lion's den. Nils Granlund claimed to have used a slide show to promote a forthcoming Charlie Chaplin short at Marcus Loew's Seventh Avenue Theatre in Harlem in 1914, but Famous Players became the first company to launch a concerted advertising campaign when it trailed clips from Ashley Miller's The Quest of Life in September 1916.

Paramount Pictures established Hollywood's first dedicated trailer division in 1919, while Rin Tin Tin and John Barrymore featured in the first sound trailers produced on Vitaphone by Warners in 1926. However, from 1920 until the early 1960s, the majority of US trailers were produced by the New York-based National Screen Service.

Has any film had stand-ins for a dead actor as famous as Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law for Heath Ledger in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus?
Mark Robertson, Lewisham

In a word, no. Leo McCarey borrowed footage from Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train to complete Robert Walker's performance in My Son John (1952) and Douglas Trumbull utilised unused scenes and a stand-in to finish Brainstorm (1983) after Natalie Wood drowned. More recently, CGI was employed to disguise the demise of John Candy in Wagons East (1994) and Oliver Reed in Gladiator (2000). But film-makers usually seek to mask a star's absence by using anonymous body doubles, who are shot from oblique angles to hide their more obvious dissimilarities.

Since Mary Dees and Paula Winslowe teamed to duplicate Jean Harlow's physical and vocal presence in Jack Conway's Saratoga (1937), several high-profile pictures have resorted to such tactics, including The Misfits (1961, Clark Gable), Game of Death (Bruce Lee, 1978), Poltergeist III (Heather O'Rourke, 1988) and The Crow (Brandon Lee, 1994). Similarly, Nick Adams dubbed some of James Dean's dialogue in Giant (1956), while Jane Withers completed Mary Wickes's voicing of Laverne the gargoyle in Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996).
Plan 9 from Outer Space Isn't that your chiropractor? ... Plan 9 from Outer Space

The deception hasn't always been convincing, however, with neither bit player George Sorel nor chiropractor Tom Mason looking anything like Lionel Atwill or Bela Lugosi respectively in Lewis D Collins and Ray Taylor's serial Lost City of the Jungle (1946) and Edward D Wood, Jr's legendarily awful B flick, Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959).

An intriguing variation occurs in King Vidor's Solomon and Sheba (1959), however, as the late Tyrone Power can be seen in occasional long shots instead of his replacement, Yul Brynner

Last week, you said Dragnet was the first feature spun off from a TV series. What was the first in the UK?
Magnus Barrington, Coleraine
The Quatermass Xperiment Scene from The Quatermass Xperiment

The first British programme to translate to the big screen was the sci-fi drama, The Quatermass Experiment, which had been broadcast live from Alexandra Palace by the BBC in 1953. An attempt to record the action using the Kinoscope process was abandoned after two episodes, but the show so unnerved armchair viewers that Hammer snapped up the rights and retitled the property The Quatermass Xperiment to emphasise its X-rated content. Nigel Kneale, who had scripted the six-part original, was unhappy with the performance of fading American star Brian Donlevy in the role created by Reginald Tate, Professor Bernard Quatermass: "He took very little interest in the making of the film or in playing the part. It was a case of take the money and run. Or in the case of Mr Donlevy, waddle."

I was ankle deep in popcorn on my last visit to the local multiplex. Who on earth introduced the disgusting stuff into cinemas?
Andrea Lilley, King's Lynn
popcorn sofa cinema

You may have read last month that some independent chains are considering a ban on popcorn, but you'll never escape it in the multiplexes. It recently emerged that UK cinema tickets would cost an extra £31.30 without the popcorn subsidy. So maybe you should be grateful to David B Wallerstein, who, in 1928, talked the management of the Chicago Theater into offering popcorn to its patrons. During the silent era, audiences paid such close attention to the action and captions that they didn't need the distraction of confectionery. But Wallerstein reasoned that viewers could listen to the new-fangled spoken dialogue while also tucking into buttered popcorn. Hence director King Vidor opining, "Popcorn and necking only came into pictures with the talkies."

Joining the Balaban & Katz Corporation from the Harvard Business School in 1926, Wallerstein established himself as a pioneering exhibitor. He introduced live entertainment between films and Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Mary Martin all sang at his venues. He retired as president of B&K in 1965, but not before he had persuaded ABC to help his friend Walt Disney finance Disneyland. But, as Morgan Spurlock would confirm, Wallerstein's lasting legacy is the fast food concept of supersizing. Realising that people felt greedy returning for second helpings of popcorn, toffee apples and iced drinks, but needing to increase his concession takings, Wallerstein abandoned two-for-one offers in favour of the kingsize portion. Furthermore, he persuaded founder Ray Kroc to adopt the idea on joining the board of McDonald's in 1968.

Now Fred Crane is dead, how many members of the Gone With The Wind cast are still alive?
Marsha Rodgers, Ipswich

With a year to go until the 70th anniversary of David O Selznick's epic adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's novel, seven principal and three uncredited cast members have survived Fred Crane. The nephew of silent siren Leatrice Joy, he was spotted by then-director George Cukor while accompanying his cousin, Leatrice Joy Gilbert, to an audition for the role of Suellen O'Hara that eventually went to Evelyn Keyes (who died on July 4). Struck by his strapping frame and lazy Southern drawl, Cukor cast Crane alongside future Superman George Reeves as the twins Brent and Stuart Tarleton - although they were wrongly credited on screen and the error proved too costly to correct. Ultimately, Crane's career rather petered out, but he did have the distinction of uttering the film's opening line to Vivien Leigh: "What do we care if we were expelled from college, Scarlett? The war is going to start any day now, so we'd have left college anyhow."
Olivia De Hallivand Olivia de Havilland in 1950. Photograph: Kobal

The most prominent extant star is Olivia De Havilland, who won the Best Supporting Oscar for her performance as Melanie Hamilton. The Tokyo-born actress, who turned 92 on July 1, is not the oldest survivor, however. That distinction falls to 93-year-old Alicia Rhett, who auditioned for the role of Melanie, but had to settle for playing her sister-in-law, India. The baby of this exclusive club is Cammie King, who was 74 on August 5. Ironically, her character perished in the picture itself, as she played Bonnie Blue, Scarlett's daughter with Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), whose riding accident doomed her parents' already tempestuous marriage.

For the record, the other credited GWTW survivors are Ann Rutherford (Carreen O'Hara), Mickey Kuhn (Beau Wilkes) and Mary Anderson (Maybelle Merriwether), while Frank Coghlan Jr, Tommy Kelly and Ann Bupp are the last remaining bit players. What are the chances of the latter emulating her brother, Sonny? He played Orson Welles's son in Citizen Kane (1941) and was the last cast member to die, on November 1 last year.

Who is the Michael Phelps of the Oscars?
Malcolm Burke, Sevenoaks

The runaway winner is Walt Disney. He converted 22 of his 59 Oscar nominations as a producer of animated and live-action films, while also receiving three special citations and the Irving G Thalberg Award, giving him a grand total of 26 Academy Awards.

However, as head of his own studio, Disney could pretty much append his name to any project he chose. Yet art director Cedric Gibbons (who actually designed the Oscar) stood an even better chance of landing gongs, as his 1924 contract entitled him to a credit on every MGM picture released in the United States. No wonder he won 11 Oscars from 39 nominations.

Costume designer Edith Head's eight wins from 35 nominations were all her own work, however. She remains the most decorated female in Oscar history, and a woman also leads the way in the acting stakes, with Katharine Hepburn winning Best Actress on four occasions: Morning Glory (1933); Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967); The Lion in Winter (1968); and On Golden Pond (1981). She also has the distinction of receiving all 12 of her nominations in this one category.

Eight men have won Best Actor on two occasions - Fredric March, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks and Daniel Day-Lewis. However, Nicholson also has a Best Supporting statuette to his credit, which puts him ahead on points of Walter Brennan who was chosen as Best Supporting Actor three times in five years between 1936 and 1940.

Typically, a couple of plucky Brits figure among the unlucky losers in the acting categories, with Richard Burton joining Irishman Peter O'Toole on seven failed nominations and Deborah Kerr heading the actress list with six.

Any idea about a film made some 15 years ago that involved pigs and DNA?
Franny Armstrong, London
Still from Leon the Pig Farmer A still from Leon the Pig Farmer. Photograph: Channel 4

Billed as "the first Jewish comedy feature film to come out of Britain", Vadim Jean and Gary Sinyor's Leon the Pig Farmer (1993) tells the story of a London estate agent (Mark Frankel), who discovers that he was the product of artificial insemination, because his presumed father had a low sperm count. Curious about his biological parent, Leon heads to North Dinthorpe in Yorkshire to meet pig farmer Brian Chadwick (Brian Glover) and his wife Yvonne (Connie Booth), who are determined to conform to Leon's Jewish traditions. However, things change when he accidentally uses sheep semen to impregnate a sow and produces the world's first kosher pig.

Partly inspired by Sinyor's encounter with a pig farmer who haggled over the price of tractor-towing a caravan out of some mud, Leon was produced at the suggestion of Monty Python's Eric Idle, after he had seen the Sinyor-scripted, BAFTA-nominated short, The Unkindest Cut (1988).

Originally budgeted at £33m, the picture was completed for £3,150,000, after the cast and crew agreed to defer their salaries. They were eventually paid after the film scooped around £31m at the UK box office.

Which film has been banned for the longest time by the British censor?
Ric Marron, Stafford
A still from Cannibal Holocaust Try showing this in 1913 ... A still from Cannibal Holocaust. Photograph: Graham Turner / The Guardian

According to the British Board of Film Classification database, 875 films have been rejected on first submission since the turn of the last century. The first year for which listed titles are available is 1913, when 22 pictures were refused a certificate and none seems to have been reappraised. The earliest dated is Edison's The Great Physician, which was rejected on 21 January. Sources differ as to whether this drama was directed by Richard Ridgely or Bannister Merwin, but it's agreed that Charles Ogle starred as Death alongside Mabel Trunnelle, Robert Brower and Helen Coughlin.

Among the other 1913 titles are Spanish Bull Fight and A Snake's Meal, which were presumably spurned on the grounds of animal cruelty, and Religion and Superstition in Beloochistan and The Crimson Cross (aka The Mysteries of the Rosary, which starred Barbara Tennant as the Virgin Mary), which would probably have fallen foul of the strict guidelines on the depiction of religious topics.

One suspects British prudery accounted for Emil Albes's Frou Frou, Allan Dwan's Love Is Blind and Henri Pouctal's The Love Adventures of Faublas. But the rejection of the slapstick shorts Funnicus the Minister and La Culotte de Rigadin are more puzzling, as the prolific comic-director partnerships of Funnicus (Paul Bertho) and Romeo Bosetti and Rigadin (Charles Prince) and Georges Monca were firm family favourites across the globe.

So many films these days seem to be collaborations between companies from different countries. When did cross-border co-production actually begin?
Jason Freeman, Sheffield
The Lumiere brothers The Lumière brothers, whose Cinématographe was used by itinerant cameramen all across the globe. Photo: Sipa Press/Rex Features

Co-production has technically existed since 1896, as many of the earliest international images were filmed using the Lumière Cinématographe by such itinerant cameramen as François-Constant Girel, André Carré, Gabriel Veyre, Marius Sestier and Jean Promio. The most widely travelled Lumiere operator, however, was Félix Mesguich, who filmed in the US, Canada, Russia, Britain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Greece, Palestine, Egypt, Ceylon, India, Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, Singapore, Japan and China, as well as France and his native Algeria.

Unfortunately, little is known about the first contracted co-production, as no print of Das Geheimnis der Lüfte has survived. Directed by Ernst Klein and starring Julius Brandt, Eva Roth, Max-Ralf Ostermann and Karl Illner, the five-reel drama premiered at the Grabenkino in Vienna in August 1913.

The co-producers were Erich Pommer from Wiener Autorenfilm and Marcel Vandal of (it is presumed) Pathé Frères. Pommer clearly enjoyed the experience, for, as head of Ufa, he became a leading advocate of the Film Europe initiative in the mid-1920s to make "continental" films for pan-European audiences. However, the deleterious impact of the Parufamet agreement he signed with Paramount and MGM in 1925 hastened the end of his tenure and any hopes of sustained co-production perished beneath the triple threat of the talkies, the Depression and authoritarianism.

What happened to the proposed Mr Benn movie?
Alison McGoldrick, Plymouth
Mr Benn Fancy dresser ... Mr Benn. Photo: King Roll Films Ltd/Nickelodeon UK/PA

Plans for a live-action feature based on David McKee's 1971 animated children's favourite were announced in early 1999. John Hannah was slated to star as the besuited, bowler-hatted occupant of 52 Festive Road, while Ben Kingsley was due to play the owner of the fancy dress shop whose changing room was a portal to adventure. The storyline was to chronicle Mr Benn's search for lost love Monica McBride (Jane Horrocks), in what director Jevon O'Neill called "one man's journey to fulfil his potential".

But Mr Benn seemed doomed when the sponsoring UK Films Group collapsed. As if by magic, Erinfilm stepped into the breach in March 2000, promising a budget of £4 million. However, the green light was extinguished again in April 2001 and the project has since remained dormant.

When were the earliest moving images projected?
Martin Hipkiss, Rhyl

According to some theories, images have been projected since prehistoric times, with the caves at Lascaux possibly acting as a primitive pinhole camera. Ancient thinkers like Mo Tzu, Plato and Aristotle all discussed optical principles central to the making and showing of moving pictures, while Han-era China saw the development of the magic "makyoh" mirror and the Shao Ong shadow play, which inspired the famous wayang kulit puppets of Indonesia.
Prehistoric paintings in caves at Lascaux The earliest screening room? ... prehistoric paintings in caves at Lascaux. Photo: Sissie Brimberg/National Geographic/Getty

In 1290, physician-cum-showman Arnaud de Villeneuve used a camera obscura to project images of outdoor performers enacting combat and hunting scenes on to the wall of a darkened room. Mathematician Girolamo Cardano presented similar "moving shows" in the 1550s, complete with sound effects. But the process of confining the object and the means of projection within a single piece of apparatus had already begun.

Around 1420, Giovanni de Fontana had included in his Liber Instrumentorum an illustration of a demonic figure being projected by a lantern. Yet the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher is usually credited with evincing the first feasible magic lantern. The science in his book, Ars Magna Lucis Et Umbra (1646), is somewhat shaky. But, in the 1571 second edition, he acknowledged the refinements of fellow pioneers Thomas Rasmussen Walgensten and Christian Huygens in describing his Lanterna Magica and also described a revolving wheel of eight paintings known as a "Smicroscopin", which sequentially depicted Christ's death and resurrection.

Another 60 years were to elapse, however, before Dutchman Pieter van Musschenbroek devised a dual slide method that enabled movement within projected images. One 1736 scene, for example, showed a man doffing his hat and bowing to a lady in front of a windmill with revolving sails.

I was struck by the absence of dialogue for much of the opening of WALL-E. When did silent films finally stop being made?
Andrew Lancer, Brighouse
City Lights Don't say a word ... Charlie Chaplin in City Lights. Photo: Kobal

Just as screen historians will tell you that films have never been wholly silent, they will also insist that movies without spoken dialogue have never entirely died out. There was certainly a time during the Talkie boom when mass silent production ceased, with Britain's last feature being John Argyle's crime drama, Paradise Alley (1931).

Things were more complicated in the US, however. Pictures like Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931) and the Marquis Henry de la Falaise's Legong: Dance of the Virgins (1935) eschewed dialogue, but George Melford's The Poor Millionaire (1930) was the last Hollywood feature released without a pre-recorded soundtrack, while Oscar Micheaux's Phantom of Kenwood (1933) seems to have been the last produced outside the studio system.

Elsewhere, silent production persisted into the late 30s, although silent 16mm melodramas remained the staple of the Thai film industry for another four decades. Subsequently, silent techniques have been used for comic effect by the likes of Jacques Tati and Mel Brooks, while avant-gardists like Stan Brakhage often dispensed with soundtracks to concentrate focus on their visuals.

However, there has been a mini revival of silent cinema since Aki Kaurismäki billed Juha (1999) as the last silent of the 20th century. The master of the silent pastiche is Canadian Guy Maddin, whose wordless homages include Careful (1992), The Heart of the World (2000), Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and Brand Upon the Brain! (2006). However, Rolf de Heer and Esteban Sapir respectively revived classic tropes in 2007 with Dr Plonk and La Antena (which is currently showing at the ICA in London), and Michael Pleckaitis is due to follow suit later this year with the Gothic comedy, Silent.

In your previous column, you mentioned the first person to swear in a 12A film? Go on then, tell us who it was.
Martin Atkins, Honiton
Bourne Identity Oh bugger ... Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity. Photo: Kobal

The first film to receive a 12A certificate in this country was Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity (2002) and its first swear word was delivered by Matt Damon in the line, "Fuck it. I can't remember anything that happened before two weeks ago."

Given the advances in digital technology, why has nobody updated the Wilhelm Scream?
Antony Chase, Wembley
The Asphyx What a screamer ... Robert Powell and Robert Stephens in The Asphyx. Photo: Kobal

Over 170 Hollywood movies have now used the Wilhelm Scream. This year alone, you will have heard it in Cloverfield, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Hancock, Horton Hears a Who! and Kung Fu Panda.

It was first used for a sequence in which a soldier is attacked by an alligator in Raoul Walsh's Distant Drums (1951). Sheb Wooley, who played Private Jessup in the film, recorded six excruciating screams in all. But the effect was named after Richard Brooke's character, Private Wilhelm, in Gordon Douglas's The Charge at Feather River (1953) by Ben Burtt, who included it in The Scarlet Blade (1974), a swashbuckling spoof he made at USC with Rick Mitchell and Richard Anderson.

While researching effects for Star Wars (1977), Burtt found Wooley's original recordings in the Warner sound archive and it became something of an in-joke among designers and editors during the Movie Brat era. However, it has since become a standard effect in films, TV, theme park rides and video games. As for why it's never been replaced, no one seems to have done it better than Sheb Wooley, whose other claim to fame was a 1958 No.1 hit with 'Purple People Eater'.

Has there ever been an animal equivalent of an Oscar? Phila, the wondrously photogenic dog in Time to Die (which I saw at the Edinburgh film festival), would be a shoo-in.
Beryl Madison, Leith

Rhubarb cat Orangey, tabby extraordinaire from Rhubarb. Photo: Kobal

Tokaj, the border collie who played Phila, and 91-year-old Danuta Szaflarska certainly had a scene-stealing contest in Pole Dorota Kedzierzawska's charming drama. But Tokaj has already missed out on this year's Palm Dog and must now hope to get his paws on a Fido at October's London film festival.

However, neither of these awards yet carries the prestige of the Patsy, which was inaugurated by the American Humane Association to commemorate the blindfolded horse that broke its back during a 70ft plunge for a stunt in Henry King's Jesse James (1939). The Picture Animal Top Star of the Year was first presented to the four-legged lead of Francis (1950), the talking mule voiced by Chill Wills. Among his successors was Roy Rogers's horse, Trigger, who followed his Patsy for Son of Paleface with the 1958 Craven award for outstanding equine achievement.

Onetime Lassie wrangler Frank Inn earned over 40 Patsies, with his most enduring winner being Orangey, the hefty tabby from Rhubarb (1951) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961).

I've just seen Jhoom Barabar Jhoom on DVD, in which Bobby Deol saves Preity Zinta from being crushed by a giant waxwork of Superman at Madame Tussaud's. Have any other movies been filmed there?
Asha Patil, Tewkesbury

Corridor of Mirrors Looking peaky ... Corridor of Mirrors. Photo: Kobal

Shaad Ali's 2007 Masala is the most recent picture to be filmed at Tussaud's. But the first to feature the London wax museum seems to have been the slapstick silent Pimple in The Whip (1917), in which Fred Evans escapes from its confines with the help of the genie from Aladdin's lamp.

Regretably, Alfred Hitchcock dispensed with Mrs Belloc Lowndes's Tussaud ending for his 1926 adaptation of The Lodger. But 1936 saw Katharine Hepburn's Victorian free spirit visit the galleries in Mark Sandrich's A Woman Rebels and Polar explorer James Carew wager to spend a night in the Chamber of Horrors in George Pearson's Midnight at Madame Tussaud's.

The same room figured in Laurence Huntingdon's Wanted for Murder (1946), a thriller co-scripted by Emeric Pressburger and starring Eric Portman as a man haunted by the fact that his executioner father is displayed among the grotesques as "The Happy Hangman". Ironically, Portman found himself immortalised in wax in Terence Young's Corridor of Mirrors (1948), after he is sentenced to death for murder while deranged by the conviction that Edana Romney is the reincarnated subject of the 400-year-old painting that hangs among the period-costumed dummies in his sinister abode.

Has a film ever been disqualified from the Oscars?
Larry Morgan, Hulme

lust, caution rain It never rains but it pours ... Lust, Caution was barred from the Oscars

Several pictures have been deemed ineligible for the Academy Awards, but only one has been disqualified after the announcement of the nominations.

The 2007 Oscars were particularly mired in controversy, with the percentage indigenity of the principal cast and crew preventing Taiwan from submitting Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, while a surfeit of English dialogue precluded Israeli director Eran Kolinn's The Band's Visit. Similarly, Jonny Greenwood and Eddie Vedder's scores for There Will Be Blood and Into the Wild were disbarred respectively for containing insufficient original music and too many songs.

The sole nomination to have been withdrawn by AMPAS, therefore, remains Nino Rota's Original Score nod for The Godfather (1972), after it was discovered that the composer had plagiarised his own work for Eduardo De Filippo's comedy, Fortunella (1958). Ironically, Rota and Carmine Coppola shared the Oscar for The Godfather, Part Two (1974), even though it reprised themes that had been deemed impermissible two years earlier.