ANNE THOMPSON PRESENTS DAVID THOMSON'S 50-QUESTION MOVIE QUIZ

I never did get around to posting my answers from the SLIFR summer quiz, and I vowed I would not let the next one pass before I managed to put my own answers down for posterity. I have been meticulously preparing the path for undertaking this task, and now, just as my level of enthusiasm is approaching the perfect height to finally grapple with my own quiz, along comes another distraction, this one of the highest order. Anne Thompson alerted me this morning that the esteemed writer and critic David Thomson has just updated The New Biographical Dictionary of Film for a fifth edition, but there’s something special to accompany it that Anne cheerfully passed along to readers of her Thompson on Hollywood blog at IndieWIRE.

It seems that Mr. Thomson, no doubt inspired by years of SLIFR quizzes (…) and perhaps just a little encyclopedic knowledge of his own, has devised a 50-question quiz to commemorate the fifth edition of his essential tome, which he sent along to Anne. Anne published the quiz this morning and is offering copies of the fifth edition of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, signed by Mr. Thomson, to the first three of her readers to submit 50 correct answers to Thomson’s puzzler before 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, November 14, 2010. If no one guesses all 50, then the three entries with the most correct answers will be declared the winners. (Participants in the recent SLIFR Great Halloween Horror Screengrab Contest will be familiar with this wrinkle.) The questions are all derived from information straight out of Thomson’s volume, but this is going to be a hard one to cheat on open-book style—you’re gonna have to know your stuff to get one of these prizes. Here’s a sample question or four:

6. Name a director who has filmed material from Ed McBain, Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare.

13. What’s the bond between The Third Man and Johnny Guitar?

15. In the Cut and Panic Room – who’s the missing link?

39. What links Sunrise and A Place in the Sun?

Whew. Just looking over the list of questions there might be-- might-- be 10 that I can answer off the top of my head without hesitation or fear of looking stupid. The rest are going to take some serious caffeine and much grinding and gnashing off teeth. But what else do you and I have to do? Contact Anne at akstanwyck@yahoo.com with your answers—don’t deposit them in her comments thread, because all you’ll be doing then is giving away answers to everybody that not everybody may have. And for God’s sake, don’t put ‘em in my comments thread—they won’t do you a lick of good there. Although, wait— Um, y-yeah, yeah. Go ahead and put your answers in my comments thread, or better yet, send ‘em to my e-mail address. I’ll make sure that Anne gets ‘em, and in a timely fashion too. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. Yeah…

It’s David Thomson’s 50-question quiz now playing through November 14 exclusively at Thompson on Hollywood. Have fun!

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