Film Terms
An object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself.
What is a MacGuffin?
A cynical expatriate American cafe owner struggles to decide whether or not to help his former lover and her fugitive husband escape the Nazis in French Morocco.
What is “Casablanca”?
This director is known for his trademark amount of debris floating in the air.
Who is Ridley Scott?
This 1991 spellbinding behind-the-scenes documentary dishes all the dirt about the making of Francis Ford Coppola's “Apocalypse Now,” including bad weather, heart attacks, temperamental stars and a ballooning budget.
What is “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse”?
In the future this one restaurant rules them all.
What is Taco Bell?
A person or thing that appears or is introduced into a situation suddenly and unexpectedly and provides an artificial or contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty.
What is deus ex machina?
The story of 21-year-old recent college graduate with no well-defined aim in life, who is seduced by an older married woman, but then falls for her daughter.
What is “The Graduate”?
When Ronald Reagan became president of the United States he asked the chief of staff to show him the war room featured in one of his films, believing it to really be in the Pentagon.
Who was Stanley Kubrick?
A 1989 enraging look at the closing of a GM plant in Flint, Michigan and the attempts to confront the auto-industry executive about their role in the city’s economic downturn.
What is “Roger & Me”?
As a director when not starring in his films Stallone likes to make a cameo. In this film squeal he goes "strutting" down the streets NYC in a large white fur coat.
What is "Staying Alive"?
It helps to increase the stakes and tension for the main character to meet their goal by a specific time.
What is a ticking clock?
A silent film star falls for a chorus girl just as he and his delusionally jealous screen partner are trying to make the difficult transition to talking pictures in 1920s Hollywood.
What is “Singin’ in the Rain”?
Knowing the censors will always find something to cut, this director would intentionally include additional content to bait the censors, thus getting his original vision through to the theaters.
Who was Alfred Hitchcock?
A 1988 true-crime tale of a murdered Dallas police officer, structured like a whodunit thriller, that led to the exoneration of an innocent man.
What is “The Thin Blue Line”?
To make ends meet while looking for work as an actor he did this job at the zoo.
What is clean out the lion cages?
A plot device that causes the audience to start in the middle of the plot or action.
What is in medias res?
Two musicians who disguise themselves by dressing as women to escape from mafia gangsters whom they witnessed committing a crime.
What is “Some Like It Hot”?
This director has more than once used color, technically the lack of, to get violence past the censors, including de-saturating the final shoot out on one film and going to black and white in another.
Who is Martin Scorsese?
A 1976 honest and open look at a Kentucky coal-mine strike, keeping the focus on the drama of the situation, including the death of one of the men on strike, while still including the rich local culture of bluegrass.
What is “Harlan County U.S.A.”?
His first film with a starring role.
What is "The Party at Kitty and Stud's"?
A character or object that is introduced early on in the film in which its set-up will pay-off later in the story.
What is a plot voucher?
A mental asylum in which repeated attempts to diagnose the patients as insane are conceived as part of a larger scheme to produce pliant, docile subjects across the United States.
What is “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”?
This director is so detail focused he is said to have laid on the floor to reposition the dust bunnies under a radiator when setting the scene.
Who is David Lynch?
A 1955 deeply affecting half-hour short, with the omnipresent narration of a Holocaust survivor over the imagery of an empty and decrepit Auschwitz, and photos of the medical experiments that went on there.
What is “Night and Fog”?
Running up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum in "Rocky" they used the original system of this now mainstream invention.
What is the Steadicam?