The Movie Timeline - of all the movie timelines on all the net, you walked into this one
..............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...
1357: 2nd April: Prof. E.A. Johnston left a note to be found in the future by his students, so they would come back in time to help him. (Castlegard, France - Timeline)
1805: 2nd April: Hans Christian Andersen is born. (Odensk, Denmark - Hans Christian Andersen)
1865: 2nd April: The Confederates are loading Confederate $20 gold coins aboard the ironclad CSS Texas, which has a gun battle down river until disappearing into a fog bank, to be found 140 years later by Dirk Pitt of NUMA in the Sahara desert. (The James River, Vingina - Sahara)
1917: Monday 2nd April: President Woodrow Wilson asks Congress to send U.S. troops into battle against Germany in World War I. (Wilson)
1941: Wednesday 2nd April: German Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel resumes his advance into Cyrenaica signaling the beginning of what nine days later will become the recapture of Libya by the Axis forces. (Libya - The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel)
1952: Wednesday 2nd April: Alberto and Ernesto emark on the Inca Trail. (Cuzco, Peru - The Motorcycle Diaries)
1952: Wednesday 2nd April: Alberto pretends it's his 30th birthday. (The Motorcycle Diaries)
1961: Sunday 2nd April: Diarmuid Russell convinces Pamela "P.L." Travers to meet with Walt Disney about a film adaptation of her literary character, Mary Poppins. (London, England - Saving Mr. Banks)
1974: Tuesday 2nd April: Ed Dalton is born. (Daybreakers)
2006: Sunday 2nd April: Nina von Stauffenberg, wife of the would-be Hitler assassin Claus von Stauffenberg, dies. (Valkyrie)
2008: Wednesday 2nd April: $210 deposited in the Stone Security Bank account of Katherine and Benjamin Mee. (Los Angeles, California - We Bought a Zoo)
2009: Thursday 2nd April: A date in Richard Phillips' email inbox. (Captain Phillips)
2010: Friday 2nd April: Catelaya's boyfriend Danny Delanay takes a picture of her while she is asleep before she leaves to meet with her uncle, who tells her that his friend was murdered in Miami. (Chicago, Illinois - Colombiana)
2011: Saturday 2nd April: Joe Morelli is arrested. (Trenton, New Jersey - One for the Money)
2158: 2nd April: 48 children are found in an abandoned bus; kidnapping suspect is at large. (Elysium)
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...