The Movie Timeline - be obsessive, be very obsessive
..............T H E M O V I E T I M E L I N E..............
Welcome. Yes, the coding is gleefully retro here - who knew that websites could look "so 1998". But here we focus our geekery elsewhere: on movies, and more specifically, on the chronology of all movies, pasted together in a big list. Keep your submissions coming in! You make this. The list runs on one simple premise: that everything you see in the movies is true - the real mixes with the fictitious, so long as it's reported in a movie somewhere. So do join in - the above left links should help you Submit the event from the film you'd like, although do a Search first - we may well have it already!
NEWS! We have a Twitter account. Follow @MovieTimeline. You'll then be treated to one 'event' a day from the world of movie history - some'll be real world stuff, some'll be the world of fiction.
I recently blogged about my personally handpicked journey through history in 100 movies. Do click and read. It's in 3 parts, so click on the links at the bottom after part 1.
Today in movie history...
1834: 24th March: John Wesley Powell is born. (Palmyra, New York - Ten Who Dared)
1921: Thursday 24th March: Maruska Kuder (Poland - ...And Give My Love to the Swallows)
1927: Thursday 24th March: Silent film icon Don Lockwood and his friends Kathy Selden and Cosmo Brown concoct a plan to save his new sound picture "The Dueling Cavelier" after a disasterous preview. They celebrate by singing "Good Morning". When Don walks home, he's caught on a rain storm, which calls for more dancing and singing...in the rain. (Hollywood, California - Singin' in the Rain)
1940: Sunday 24th March: The newspaper The Continental Drift runs the headline "Zero Corners Market." (Zubrowka - The Grand Budapest Hotel)
1941: Monday 24th March: Donald Fauntleroy Duck is drafted into the army. (Donald Gets Drafted)
1974: Sunday 24th March: Dave Lockwood is born. (Atlanta, Georgia - The Change-Up)
1980: Monday 24th March: Chief Accountant Frederick Keinszig is seen leaving the offices of International Immobialiare. (Vatican City - The Godfather: Part III)
1981: Tuesday 24th March: An alignment of the stars in the Casseopeia region heralds the Second Coming of Christ. (England - Omen III: The Final Conflict)
1984: Saturday 24th March: John Bender, Claire Standish, Allison Reynolds, Brian Johnson and Andrew Clark become friends after a day in detention. (The Breakfast Club)
1999: Wednesday 24th March: Ethan Hunt kidnaps John C. McCloy to gather information about the virus Chimera and its cure. (Sydney, Australia - Mission: Impossible 2)
2004: Wednesday 24th March: Dr.Lawrence Gordon writes a report about John Kramer's inoperable frontal-lobe tumor. (Saw III)
2008: Monday 24th March: Easter Monday (Still Waiting...)
2014: Monday 24th March: April is fired from Channel 6 after she tries explaining to Bernadette Thompson about what she saw. She tells Eric Sacks about the turtles. The turtles hack into her computer and ask her to meet with them. (New York City, New York - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)
Here are a few recent films we've put in their chronological place...
Bridesmaids
Tintin
Captain America
Hugo
Moneyball
The Woman In Black
Sherlock Holmes
The King's Speech
Friends With Benefits
...as well as many others.
You can explore the dates on the left-hand bar to see discover...
When Harry Met Sally - that'll be 1977.
The Day The Bubble Burst - it was a Tuesday.
The Day The Earth Stood Still - that was a Wednesday.
Employee of the Month - that month was November 2006.
Hogwarts was founded just 61 years after King Arthur sought the Holy Grail by storming a castle with a large wooden rabbit.
Plus the coincidences, for instance...
- Gangs of New York's Amsterdam Vallon was killing Butcher Bill, down the road Abraham Lincoln was being kidnapped by Bill & Ted...
- Lucky Al Capone - he was sent to Alcatraz by Eliot Ness just in time to miss King Kong rampaging around New York...
- Andy Dufresne was wrongly sentenced to Shawshank a few short months before someone else was framed - Roger Rabbit...
Submit your own historical event from a movie (not TV - yet) by clicking here. It can be a real event (eg. the sinking of the Titanic) or a far-from-real event (eg. Marty McFly attending his parents' school dance) - so long as it's found in a film. It must be a verifiable date - whether a year subtitled at the start ("1941, France..."), a visible clue in the film (character picks up a newspaper), or some historical backdrop (From Hell's Jack The Ripper). If you know what year a movie is set in, let me know.
Thanks for linking to us and please continue to plug us on your journeys round the net. For now please ignore the crappy straightforward appearance - explore the information and trivia, have some fun with it - it really is a very simple idea. But it needs your help!
In the beginning... God created the heavens and the earth (The Bible)
Shortly after the beginning... God subcontracts the fjords to Slartibartfast, a planetary construction engineer from Magrathea (The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy)
26,000,000,000BC Los Angeles (and everywhere else) - The Earth's crust begins to harden (Adaptation)
A long time ago... Luke Skywalker and Han Solo lead a rebellion against the evil empire(Star Wars)
1 zillion BC October 9: Cavemen discover fire, and the joys of eating dinosaur egg (Caveman, 1981)
From this point on the dates get more sensible - begin the timeline...
Some other sites you may like...
The Movie Timeline twitter feed. Do follow.
Movie Banter - our podcast 'n' blog
My site as a stand-up, with gig guides, cv, etc
Ruined Endings (plots and endings of all the best films. And some bad ones.)
And unaffiliated, but friendly sites...