1

X-Men (2000)

Remember the scene when Magneto and Professor X play a tense, symbolic game of chess? Well, the actors certainly do. Here’s why: Neither Patrick Stewart nor Ian McKellen knew how to play chess before filming.

So, director Bryan Singer brought in a Canadian chess Grandmaster to help design the game the two men would share by choreographing each piece's movement based on the high-strung dialogue they were having —Professor X needed to win.

2

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Did you know that E.T., the beloved extraterrestrial who wanted to phone home, was intentionally designed to have no specified gender ?

Director Steven Spielberg expressed that his intention was to define E.T. as a "plant-like" creature, neither male nor female, and that this was explicitly explained in earlier versions of the script.

However, in the film, young Elliott insists that he knows the gender of his newfound friend: "He’s a boy," he explains to his sister when she asks. The audience went along with Elliott’s interpretation, and hence E.T. is considered to be male.

3

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)

Jim Carrey loathed the process of becoming The Grinch. Though the Dr. Seuss character was fun to play, sitting for hours and hours for makeup and costume until the green look was perfected, he said, was exhausting.

So, he was shocked one day when he arrived on set, only to find yet another Grinch ready there before him. It was none other than director Ron Howard, who had been up since 3:30 am, getting into full costume in solidarity with him.

4

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Watching Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, one might take for granted that the stop-motion marvel took years of painstaking effort. Around 227 puppets were built for the production because each character had multiple duplicates to allow shooting on many sets simultaneously.

The protagonist Jack Skellington alone needed nearly 400 different heads to capture enough facial expressions.

5

Toy Story (1995)

Even though we all recognize Woody the Cowboy, there was a time when the leading character of Toy Story was going to be… quite different.

Sheriff Woody was at first conceived as a ventriloquist dummy . But the Pixar creators thought that a softer cowboy toy would be a little bit friendlier. What do you think?

6

Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)

We all know the loyal little robot of the Star Wars world. But R2-D2’s name came about unintentionally. While filming a previous film, George Lucas had liked an abbreviation he heard his sound editor shout one day: "R2, D2".

It referred to "Reel 2, Dialogue Track 2" . But the expression sparked Lucas’s imagination.

7

Home Alone (1990)

Yes, Kevin is nine years old in the movie. But most of his "dangerous" moments were handled by a 30-year-old stuntman in kid-sized clothes!

Still, some injuries were inevitable. And they didn’t come from hanging from a zipline or sliding downstairs: No, young Macauley Culkin got a scar from Joe Pesci accidentally biting his fingers too hard in one scene.

8

Interstellar (2014)

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is well known for its ambitious science fiction vision. But Nolan went above and beyond with details. For example, the robot TARS wasn’t a CGI creation: it was physically built (a kind of "puppet-robot").

Plus, the space suits the actors wore were designed with functioning oxygen units and cooling tubes! Needless to say, though, all scenes were filmed on Earth.

9

The Matrix (1999)

Did you know that Johnny Depp was the first choice to play Neo for The Matrix ? As an up-and-coming actor in the 90s, the writers had considered him perfect for the role. However, fate decided Keanu Reeves would take the part, and the rest was history.

Reeves didn’t have it easy, though: the Wachowskis had him read philosophical books like Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, Out of Control by Kevin Kelly, and Introducing Evolutionary Psychology by Dylan Evans.

10

Scarface (1983)

After Martin Scorsese saw Brian De Palma’s Scarface, he reportedly told actor Steven Bauer: "It’s great… but they’re going to hate it ."

He wasn’t wrong. Critics did hate it, at first. They called it vulgar, excessive, hysterical, and violent. Scorsese himself had been criticized for the violence in his own work, so he recognized the pattern instantly. However, as we know, audiences eventually made it a cult classic.

1

A city became an unwilling laboratory

In September 1950, San Franciscans went about their lives without knowing that the U.S. military was conducting a biological-warfare vulnerability test around them . During Operation Sea-Spray, bacteria were released into the city’s environment to study how an airborne biological agent might spread through a major coastal city .

The organisms included Serratia marcescens , selected because researchers at the time considered it suitable as a relatively harmless stand-in for something much more dangerous that could be actually used for biological warfare. Residents weren't informed or asked for consent, an aspect of the operation that would raise obvious ethical objections today.

2

Particles were scattered across America

Sea-Spray wasn't the end of large-scale military dispersion experiments. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Army's Operation LAC (Large Area Coverage)used microscopic fluorescent zinc cadmium sulfide particles to investigate how biological-warfare agents might travel through the atmosphere .

The scale was astonishing. The National Research Council later described LAC as the largest test undertaken by the Army Chemical Corps, with experiments spanning an area from the Rocky Mountains toward the Atlantic and from Canada toward the Gulf of Mexico. Related tests took place in places including Minneapolis, St. Louis, Corpus Christi, and Fort Wayne.

3

What really happened at Hawthorne?

Between 1924 and 1933, researchers conducted a famous series of workplace studies at Western Electric's enormous Hawthorne Works, near Chicago. One early question sounded straightforward: Would changing factory lighting make employees more productive?

The answer proved surprisingly complicated. Researchers expanded their work to examine breaks, schedules, supervision, and social relationships. More than 21,000 employee interviews were eventually conducted. The studies helped inspire the idea known as the "Hawthorne effect": that people may behave differently when they know they're being observed.

4

Would you believe everyone else or your own eyes?

Psychologist Solomon Asch devised a wonderfully simple test of conformity in the 1950s. A participant looked at lines of obviously different lengths and had to identify which one matched a reference line. Under normal circumstances, the task was extremely easy.

There was just one catch: nearly everyone else in the room was secretly working for Asch . On selected trials, these confederates confidently gave the same obviously wrong answer before the real participant responded. Many participants went along with the group at least once, despite what they could plainly see. Even more revealingly, later variations showed that simply having someone else break the group's unanimity could dramatically weaken its influence.

5

Scientists created two rival tribes

In 1954, psychologist Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues brought 22 boys, around 11 years old, to a summer camp at Oklahoma's Robbers Cave State Park. The children didn't know that they were subjects in an elaborate experiment .

Researchers separated them into two groups, which became the Rattlers and Eagles, and allowed each to develop its own identity . Then came competitions deliberately designed to encourage rivalry. Hostility escalated quickly. Researchers eventually introduced problems neither group could easily solve alone, such as difficulties involving the camp's water supply. Working toward these shared, or "superordinate", goals helped reduce the conflict.

6

How far would you go if an authority told you to?

At Yale University in the early 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram told volunteers they were participating in an experiment about learning. They were instructed to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks whenever another participant answered a question incorrectly .

The shocks weren't real, and the supposed victim was working with the researchers . But the person pressing the switches didn't initially know that. The machine climbed from 15 volts all the way to a menacing 450 volts, and in Milgram's famous baseline experiment, 65% of participants continued to the maximum level when prompted by the experimenter. Some showed considerable distress. Milgram conducted numerous variations with very different results, demonstrating that circumstances mattered enormously.

7

The marshmallow test wasn’t as simple as we thought

Imagine being a preschooler alone in a room with a delicious treat and an agonizing choice: enjoy a small reward now or wait and receive a bigger reward later . Psychologist Walter Mischel and his colleagues used variations of this setup at Stanford beginning in the late 1960s to study delayed gratification and self-control.

Later studies associated children's ability to wait with outcomes years afterward, and the experiment became a pop-psychology phenomenon . But there's an important twist. More recent research using larger and more diverse samples found that the relationship weakened substantially when researchers accounted for family background and childhood circumstances.

8

Facebook experimented with 689,000 news feeds

In January 2012, hundreds of thousands of people unknowingly became participants in an enormous experiment conducted through Facebook. Researchers altered the News Feeds of 689,003 English-speaking users, reducing either positive or negative emotional content and examining what those users subsequently posted .

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, found small changes consistent with "emotional contagion": altering the emotional balance of posts people encountered was associated with corresponding changes in the language they later used.

9

The military tried to build a pigeon-guided missile

Before sophisticated computerized guidance systems, psychologist B. F. Skinner proposed an alternative with feathers. During World War II, his Project Pigeon attempted to train pigeons to help guide weapons toward targets.

The concept wasn't quite as crazy as it sounds. Pigeons could be remarkably good at recognizing visual targets . Skinner trained them to peck at an image displayed on a screen; if the weapon drifted off course, movement of the target image could produce corrective guidance signals through the bird's pecking. The National Defense Research Committee eventually provided $25,000 for the work before dropping the project in 1944. The Navy later revisited the idea as Project ORCON, short for "organic control." Electronic guidance ultimately made the avian alternative unnecessary.

10

The Government really investigated psychic spies

Beginning during the Cold War, U.S. intelligence and defense agencies really did spend years investigating "remote viewing", the supposed ability to describe distant or hidden objects and locations without using ordinary senses .

Various programs eventually became popularly associated with the name Stargate. In 1995, an outside evaluation reviewed roughly two decades of work and concluded that the program hadn't demonstrated sufficiently useful operational intelligence capabilities to justify continuing it. Stargate was terminated.

11

The CIA tried to make a spy cat

During the Cold War, the CIA faced a familiar espionage problem: How could an operative get close enough to secretly overhear a conversation without attracting attention? Someone came up with a decidedly unconventional answer: a cat.

The appropriately nicknamed Acoustic Kitty project investigated whether surgically implanted listening and transmitting equipment could transform an apparently ordinary feline into a mobile surveillance device . Declassified CIA records confirm the project, but officials eventually concluded that environmental and security problems made the technique impractical.

12

Would you stop to help a stranger?

In 1973, Princeton psychologists John Darley and C. Daniel Batson devised an experiment with an almost storybook setup. Seminary students were sent across campus to give a talk. On the way, each encountered a man slumped in an alley who appeared to need help .

Some students were told they had plenty of time; others were told they were already late. And in a brilliant touch, some were heading to give a talk about the biblical Good Samaritan itself. Yet the topic of their speech didn't significantly determine whether they stopped. Time pressure did. About 63% of those who weren’t in a hurry helped, compared with just 10% of those in the high-hurry condition . Some hurried participants passed the distressed stranger while literally on their way to discuss the Good Samaritan.

1

Frank Sinatra

Image: Dushawn Jovic

Frank Sinatra was one of America’s—and the world’s—most recognized artists, and even today, his name remains an unmistakable icon. We’ll never forget hits like "New York, New York," "My Way," "Fly Me to the Moon," and many others. And his last words were no less poetic than his life: "I'm losing," he allegedly said.

2

Groucho Marx

Image: Alan Hardman

They say humor follows comedians in all aspects of their lives—even to the very end. This was true for the great Groucho Marx, who passed away in 1977 at the age of 86 after bringing laughter to millions during his lifetime. As for his last words, there are two versions of the story, and both are funny! One version claims he said, " Die, my dear? That’s the last thing I’ll do! " while the other has him exclaiming, "This is no way to live!"

3

Buddy Rich

Image: Katherine Hanlon

Bernard "Buddy" Rich was a legendary American drummer renowned for his unique improvisational ability. He passed away at age 69 after brain surgery. Reportedly, his last words were a witty response to a nurse who asked if he was allergic to anything: "Yeah, country music," he said.

4

Donald O'Connor

Image: Nikko Balanial

Some artists never separate themselves from their work. Perhaps that’s what was going through the mind of dancer, singer, and actor Donald O’Connor—famous for his role in Singin’ in the Rain —when heart failure caused his death. His last words were, "I'd like to thank the Academy for my lifetime achievement award that I will eventually get." He still hasn’t received one.

5

George Washington

Image: Priscilla Gyamfi

George Washington will always be remembered as the Father of his Country, who led the Continental Army to victory in the Revolutionary War and served as the first president of the United States. In 1799, George Washington fell ill with respiratory infections that grew more severe over time. He passed away that year at the age of 67 at his Mount Vernon estate. According to historical accounts, his last words were an expression of acceptance: "Tis well."

6

T.S. Eliot

Image: anotherxlife

T.S. Eliot, the famous Missouri-born writer known for works such as The Waste Land and Four Quartets, passed away on January 4, 1965, at the age of 76. It's said that, in his last moments, the poet was reflective and serene, and his last word was the name of his love: "Valerie."

7

Joan Crawford

Image: Noom Peerapong

The great American actress Joan Crawford was much more than a pretty face. Her talent and complex personality were evident throughout her fruitful career, which was crowned with films such as Mildred Pierce . She died in 1977 of a heart attack. According to a biography, while a nurse was praying at her bedside, the actress exclaimed her last words: "Don't you dare ask God to help me!"

8

Humphrey Bogart

Image: JOSHUA COLEMAN

Say Casablanca, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The Maltese Falcon, and one face automatically comes to mind: the iconic Humphrey Bogart. He was 57 years old when he died of cancer in 1957. According to sources, his wife, Laura, was leaving the hospital to pick up their children from school when he uttered his last words: "Goodbye, kid. Hurry back."

9

Eugene O'Neill

Image: Gwen King

Eugene O'Neill, the celebrated American playwright, faced numerous health issues throughout his life, which worsened in his later years. He passed away in 1953 at the age of 65. As one might expect from a talented playwright, his dramatic last words were full of intensity: "I knew it, I knew it! Born in a goddamn hotel room and dying in a hotel room."

10

Emily Dickinson

Image: Gülfer ERGİN

The famous poet Emily Dickinson is one of our country’s literary prides, known for beautiful works such as "Because I could not stop for Death" and "Hope is the thing with feathers." She was born in 1830 and died in 1886 in Massachusetts. Her last words were as poetic as her life: "I must go in, the fog is rising."