The Only Known Movie of Mark Twain
Being a writer and history enthusiast, I thought that this was a nice little piece of history when I ran across it. Thomas Edison visited his friend Mark Twain in 1909 and filmed him at Twain’s Redding, CT, home. It’s a silent film clip, but it’s neat to actually see the real Mark Twain moving around. Twain would die the following year and so this remains the only known film of the iconic author. Unfortunately, there are no voice recordings of Twain. While Edison also made phonographs of Twain reading his stories out loud, they were destroyed in a 1914 fire. Here’s a frame of the clip. You can watch the entire movie here at Mental Floss.
From "Team of Rivals" to "Lincoln"
So Daniel Day-Lewis is going to star in Lincoln as Abraham Lincoln. He’ll probably do a good job with role. He’s a great actor. What I’m more curious about is how the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Team of Rivals will be adapted to a movie. I read that it will focus on the last four months of Lincoln’s life. Now I may be remembering wrong, but wasn’t the gist of the book about how all these men with competing and sometimes conflicting views came together to form a “Dream Team”? If so, then wouldn’t a lot of the focus need to be on the time around when Lincoln was elected as the 16th President of the United States? And if the movie doesn’t capture this storyline, then is it truly adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s books? Steven Spielberg will be directing so I Read more…
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