In November 1999, Don Eigler proved that man had truly mastered the atom: not by way of a devastating explosion or constrained reaction, but with art. The physicist, working for IBM, spelled out the company’s name using 35 individual atoms of the element xenon using a scanning tunneling microscope.

Now, scientists use scanning tunneling microscopes “for more than just imaging surfaces. Physicists and chemists are able to use the probe to move molecules, and even individual atoms, around in a controlled way,” says physicist Jim Al-Khalili in a 2004 book. Fourteen years ago, Don Eigler was the first person to do so, an achievement that helped to open the door on the then-nascent field of nanotechnology.

Don Eigler spelled out IBM’s logo using xenon atoms in 1999 Photo: IBM

Now IBM is back, and with fourteen more years playing with these techniques, scientists have moved from precisely positioning individual atoms to making them dance. In a new short stop-motion film, A Boy and His Atom, scientists manipulated thousands of individual atoms to make the “world’s smallest movie.” The movie exists on a plane 100,000,000 times smaller than the world as we know and experience it. The boy and his ball are made from molecules of carbon monoxide, and yet gives an image reminiscent of the video games of the early 1980s.

“Though the technology that the team discusses isn’t new,” says the Verge, “they were able to use it in a new way: the black-and-white images and playful music form a strong artistic style that’s reminiscent of early film, but at an entirely different scale.”

For more information about how the movie was made, IBM has released a behind-the-scenes video to accompany their animation.

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Image: Wladislaw Starewicz

Today, Slate told the story of Wladislaw Starewicz and his weird, animated, insect-puppet stop motion movies. Here’s his masterpiece, The Cameraman’s Revenge, made in 1912:

Starewicz wasn’t the first stop motion animator. The first place stop motion shows up is in 1898, in a movie called The Humpty Dumpty Circus, which has been lost to the world. The first example we can see is from 1902, called Fun in a Bakery Shop – a movie made by Edwin S. Porter and produced by the one and only Thomas A. Edison.

In 1905, the film El Hotel Electrico showcased more early stop motion animation, as bags zoom around the electric hotel seemingly by magic.

Then, in 1906 the world got the first direct manipulation animation – in which a segment of the image is moved or changed or erased in each frame. This film was also put out by Edison, and is called Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.

And Edison can also take credit for bringing the first claymation to the world, in this film Dream of a Rarebit Fiend.

Starewicz, who made the whimsical and wonderful bug animation, also made all sorts of other weird animations. Here is his short from 1922 called Frogland:

And since then, stop motion has grown and grown into things like Coraline and Fantastic Mister Fox, and many animators cite these early stop motion artists as inspiration. They also serve as a reminder that you don’t need Pixar’s budget to make something wonderful, just a few dead bugs and a camera.

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Image: Ellen Fitzsimons

You’ve probably seen this disclaimer before: “No animals were harmed in the making of this film.” But while filming the HBO show “Luck” three different horses were injured and euthanized last year. That was one of the most publicized examples of animals dying for someone’s art, but the New York Times found other examples, too: Two dozen animals died while filming The Hobbit series. A shark died while filming a Kmart commercial. All these animal deaths are causing many to wonder whether or not the American Humane Association’s rules are strict enough, or enforced well enough, to keep animals safe.

The AHA’s guidelines are 131 pages long and include checklists for producers. They ask for a copy of the script, the names of any animal handlers and veterinarians, the location of the shooting and all crew lists, script changes and other information that might help the association keep an eye on the animals. They instruct producers not to film during extreme weather or during the hottest or coldest parts of the day. Animals must be transported safely, not over-rehearsed or over-worked and never left unattended. There should be no alcohol used around animals ever, they say, and props should all be made of rubber or balsa wood. The list goes on.

After the Kmart shark incident, PETA jumped in to criticize the AHA, claiming that people were jumping in and out of the pool with the shark and that there wasn’t an AHA representative on the scene. They told ABC News:

“Repeatedly, we see [the AHA] falling short when it comes to protecting animals,” Gallucci said. “They never should have approved this. They should have immediately stopped shooting when the shark was showing signs of stress.”

Of course, PETA is opposed to any use of live animals in filming of all kinds, so the criticism of the AHA isn’t surprising. The AHA responded that PETA’s claims were inaccurate, that there was someone on the scene and that no one was jumping into the pool with the shark.

But this case highlights a difficult area for animal vets. After the shark began to look ill and was rushed to the vet, it was simply too late. Vets really don’t know much about many of these exotic animals before we use them in commercials or television, so even if they look for warning signs, they aren’t totally sure what to look for.

There are other challenges to keeping up with production as well. The AHA is a non-profit, and they simply can’t monitor everything the way they would like to. In the Kmart shark case, they didn’t watch how the shark was transported because they didn’t have enough time or resources. Here’s the New York Times:

The humane association argues that it is struggling to meet the challenges of protecting animals in an era of modern filmmaking. “We’re not covering enough animal action, because of the way the business model in the industry has changed,” Robin R. Ganzert, the association’s chief executive, said in a phone interview last month.

But others aren’t so keen on giving the AHA more power over producers. Some say that they industry is already far too heavily regulated. Benay Karp, whose company supplies everything from skunks to rhinos to film companies, told the New York Times, “It feels to us that they’re becoming an animal rights organization no longer interested in what’s right and wrong in the industry, but only in collecting money.”

The AHA is funded by grants from the industry, and this year they were allotted about $2.1 million. That translated into monitoring 3,498 days of shooting, and 570 “no animals were harmed” certifications.

That includes making sure that the producers of CSI don’t put black widows and pill bugs together—which breaks the AHA rule prohibiting putting animals that might eat each other in the same container. You can see which movies got the thumbs up from the AHA, and which didn’t, on their site. Some even put a fake credit at the end, like District 9, which included a notice, not authorized by the AHA, that ”no animals were harmed in the making of this movie.” The King’s Speech was also knocked for falsely claiming to have been approved by the AHA. They claimed they had no idea that the phrase was trademarked.

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Image: Sara

The New Yorker describes the sound as “that low and loud synthesized hum—ominous and brain-addling.” It wasn’t always there, but nearly every action movie now seems to use it. You can get the sound on demand with this handy button, or listen to it here:

You’ve heard it over and over again in trailers, but here’s a taste:

This sound really first showed up in 2010, with Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Here’s the New Yorker again:

By now, this accursed bass drone feels as if it has always been a part of our cinematic lives. Yet its reign of sonic terror has been relatively brief, dating, with a few antecedents, to a string of trailers made for Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” from 2010. The teaser for the film was released in 2009, and featured music by Mike Zarin. The movie’s third trailer, this time scored by Zach Hemsey, added a playful and clever string element over Zarin’s big booms. Both of these components were then absorbed into the film’s soundtrack, by Hans Zimmer, a composer who, based largely on his work on Nolan’s films in the past decade, probably deserves most of the blame for loosing this particular rock slide into the world.

Vulture has a slideshow of all the movies that use the sound, and a conversation between a French horn, a Basoon, a Trombone, a Tuba and a Timani about the sound:

French horn: Hans Zimmer rolls up with his four Grammys and his Oscar and is all “Just trust me, horns.” We didn’t want to.

Tuba: But then we all started playing.

Trombone: And it was like, blam! Magic!

Bassoon: I knew immediately that we were on to something.

Trombone: It was incredible.

French horn: It was like the first time I saw the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which I saw shortly after its completion, because the Reniassance.

And here’s a mashup of a ton of Inception horns in movie trailers:

If you believe that movie trailers are a reflection of what people want, then what does this drone say about us? Perhaps the ominous drone is a nod to the inner turmoil of even our flashy action heroes. There’s lots to worry about today, and “those thunderous musical cues seem handed down to remind us that even frivolous popcorn movies aren’t supposed to merely be fun anymore.”

There will be a new movie trailer trope soon enough, and the Inception BRAAAM will fade away like the vuvuzuela (which, actually, makes a pretty similar sound if you think about it). Perhaps our next sound will be perkier, like cats meowing or a tambourine or something. Now might be a good time to send your suggestions to Hans Zimmer.

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Photo: Cliff1066

Ocean-loving director James Cameron is supporting future deep sea exploration by donating the $10 million submersible that he used to venture into the sea’s deepest spot last year. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will inherit the vehicle, and according to the New York Times, the undersea craft will help in designing more advanced vehicles and technologies.

Cameron timed the announcement to coincide with the anniversary of his seven-mile solo dive last year into the lowest point of the Mariana Trench, the Challenger Deep. Unfortunately, Cameron didn’t find much. As PCMag reported last year, Cameron said the landscape was an almost “completely featureless … almost gelatinous flat plain.” But Cameron’s submersible—the only one currently capable of carrying a person seven miles deep—was a notable proof of concept.

According to the Times, Woods Hole should receive the vehicle sometime in June.

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Photo: Andrea Kirkby

Spider-Man’s silk could have stopped a moving train—if his silk resembled the stuff produced by the Darwin’s bark spider, which lives in Madagascar and builds enormous 80-foot wide webs.

A team from the University of Leicester set out to test the reality of this hypothetical hero move from the second Spider-Man movie, Wired reports:

First, the team calculated how much four R160 New York City subway cars — packed with a total of 984 people — would weigh (about 200,000 kilograms, or roughly 10 Atlas V rockets). Then, they calculated how fast the train was going (24 meters per second, or about 53 miles per hour) and how much resistance the track would have offered as it charged forward (negligible). From there, they could work out how much force the webbing would have needed to exert upon the train to stop it: about 300,000 Newtons, or about 12 times the amount of force exerted by a large American alligator as its jaws snap shut.

Figures in hand, the team considered the way trains, webs and anchor buildings would interact geometrically and how much tensile strength a line of web would need in order to hold up a train without snapping.

After crunching the numbers, they found that Spider-Man could indeed have saved that train from plummeting off the track. Spiders such as the Darwin’s black spider produce silk with strength values of 1.5 to 12 gigapascals. Scale those values to a human-sized spindle of silk and web, and the calculations add up to amazing, train-stopping abilities.

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Photo: National Archives of the United States

Nearly 150 years after the Thirteenth Amendment’s adoption, Mississippi finally caught on and officially ratified a ban on slavery. According to Time, the movie Lincoln helped spark this sudden call to action.

The story began in November last year, when Ranjan Batra, an associate professor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, went to see director Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated historical drama Lincoln, reports the Jackson, Miss. Clarion-Ledger. Spielberg’s civics lesson tells the story of the final months of President Abraham Lincoln’s life and his efforts to get the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed by the House of Representatives.

Interest piqued, Batra wondered what happened to the amendment once it was passed. As it turns out, it went on to be adopted in under a year when 27 of the 36 then-existing states ratified it, in 1865. Mississippi, the final hold-out, only ratified the amendment in 1995. However, Batra noticed a provoking detail on the website usconstitution.net—Mississippi never formally notified the U.S. archivist of its belated decision. In other words, the 1995 ratification was unofficial.

Batra mentioned the oversight to a friend, Ken Sullivan, who recalled the 1995 debate over the law and tracked down a copy of the resolution. It had been passedby the Mississippi Senate and House — unanimously, recalled the bill’s introcuder, Sen. Hillman Frazier to the Clarion-Ledger — but inexplicably had never beensent to the Office of the Federal Register.

With Batra’s prompting, the state hustled to correct the oversight by filing the necessary paperwork. On February 7, Mississippi received word from the Federal Register that confirmed it had officially ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Senator Frazier remarked, “We finally got it right.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Mississippi – History and Heritage 
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Image: Tim Sackton

You might have heard that The Hobbit looks kind of weird. The movie was shot with a special camera developed by the founder of Oakley sunglasses (weirdly enough), at 48 frames per second (fps). That frame rate seem to make people generally unhappy.Here’s The Village Voice:

Available for viewing only in select cinemas in major cities (the rest will feature a standard 24-frame presentation), this “high-frame rate” Hobbit features exceptionally sharp, plasticine images the likes of which we might never have seen on a movie screen before….Whereas video-shot “films” have labored for years to approximate the look of celluloid, Jackson goes whole hog in the opposite direction, the idea being that this acute video quality comes closer to the way the human eye perceives reality. Fair enough, but the reality Jackson conjures isn’t quite the one he intends: Instead of feeling like we’ve been transported to Middle-earth, it’s as if we’ve dropped in on Jackson’s New Zealand set, trapped in an endless “making of” documentary, waiting for the real movie to start.

Others loved it. Wired says:

In the 48-frames-per-second version of Hobbit, Middle-earth in 3D looks so crisp it’s like stepping into the foreground of an insanely gorgeous diorama. The film will also be released at the standard 24 fps, but Jackson sees the high-speed format as the “premium version” of his vision because it essentially doubles the amount of visual data projected onto the screen. At 48 fps, images appear more precise and 3D action becomes smoother, without the blur that can occur when the camera pans too quickly or objects move rapidly across the frame.

Peter Jackson isn’t that worried about it. He says:

I’m fascinated by reactions. I’m tending to see that anyone under the age of 20 or so doesn’t really care and thinks it looks cool, not that they understand it but they often just say that 3D looks really cool. I think 3D at 24 frames is interesting, but it’s the 48 that actually allows 3D to almost achieve the potential that it can achieve because it’s less eye strain and you have a sharper picture which creates more of the 3-dimensional world.

The camera that Jackson used to shoot the entire movie was developed by Jim Jannard, the founder of Oakley. Forbes spoke with Jackson about it:

It seemed like the major camera-makers–the big companies–were not really providing the sort of image quality; They were heavy, and they were very, very expensive. And so suddenly RED shows up, with Jim Jannard, and he’s got some very interesting revolutionary ideas about how to improve the picture quality, make the cameras light and small, and bring their price down. And so that sort of appealed to me–it’s a maverick approach. It’s the sort of approach in which things advance–by somebody like Jim Jannard coming along to do that, and forcing the big companies to basically pick up their game.

As tends to be the case when two extremely wealthy people meet and want to do something, the rest was easy. And so the 48 fps adventure began and ended on your screen.

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The Hobbit You Grew Up With Isn’t Quite the Same As the Original, Published 75 Years Ago Today
The Residents of Tolkien’s Middle Earth Are 81 Percent Male

Image: Shelly Wilfong

You think you know all about Cinderella, right? She works for her mean step-mother and horrible step-sisters, all the while dreaming of going to the ball. Because she is so good and fair, she is helped out by a fairy godmother, a team of woodland creatures and some pumpkins. Eventually, she meets her prince but must flee at the stroke of midnight, leaving behind the glass slipper, which her prince uses to find her. They, of course, live happily ever after.

Sure, that’s the Disney version. And it’s a good example of “Tales of the Persecuted Heroine,” which usually goes exactly how you would image—a heroine is persecuted for no reason and overcomes her captors. Classic princess stuff. But Cinderella isn’t a Disney story, and earlier versions are, well, different. At Tabled Fables, a podcast about fairytales, they describe some alternate Cinderella stories.

Other versions of the story, for example, leave out the fairy Godmother. Instead, they’ve got magical plants or talking animals that help out. Another detail that tends to change is just what Cinderella has on her feet. In the Disney version, she’s wearing glass slippers. But out of 345 different versions of the story, only 6 of them mentioned a glass slipper. There were golden shoes, there were jeweled shoes and, in the Danish version, she’s wearing galoshes. Even in the Disney version it probably wasn’t even supposed to be a glass slipper—the original description was actually for slippers made of squirrel fur. A mistranslation turned it into glass.

So next time you dress up for Cinderella for Halloween, you could opt for a pair of squirrel fur slippers or some rain boots and still be true to the story—and probably far more comfortable.

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Daniel Craig plays James Bond in Skyfall.

Starting with Ian Fleming’s 1953 Casino Royale, and continuing today with Skyfall, out in North America, Mr. James Bond has been fighting and seducing his way across the planet, thwarting bad guy after bad guy in a bid to save the world from evil machinations with varying degrees of both evilness and complexity.

Over the years, some of Bond’s villains’ plans have been kind of outlandish. Others, though, haven’t been all that bad. Former CIA intelligence analyst Mark Stout and cold war historian Edward Geist point out to the CBC three examples of plans that might actually have worked, had Mr. Bond not interfered:

• On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: Bond stops the use of a crop-destroying bio-weapon. Stout says, “This is actually something that during the Cold War the United States worried about quite a bit — that the Soviets might do this to American crops.”
• Casino Royale: “[A] shady operator named Le Chiffre attempts to make a financial killing by short-selling his stock in a major airline before launching a terrorist attack on one of its planes. …Stout says that right after the 9/11 attacks, analysts noticed seemingly unusual trading activity with the stock of some of the airlines involved in that disaster.”
• Octopussy: “[A] rogue general in the Soviet military, schemes to detonate a nuclear bomb in West Germany, blame it on the Americans and use it as a pretext for the Soviets to invade Western Europe. …While Geist concedes “the Soviets were never really inclined to do something like that,” he says that carrying out General Orlov’s plot “would have seriously complicated NATO policy in that era.”

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Image: ladypsychosis

The monster creeps around the corner, unseen to everyone except the audience. It sneaks up behind his victim, and as it consumes the fleshy human, there is a horrified, horrific scream. What does that scream sound like? Often it’s one of two stock screams: the Wilhelm or the Howie. Which is better?

Motherboard has a good roundup of vidoes of each scream. The Wilhelm scream comes first from 1951, in the movie “Distant Drums.” But no one has any idea who the voice actor was for that scream.

Here’s Hollywood Lost and Found on the Wilhelm:

And On the Media did a great piece on the history of the scream.

They explain that the voice actor who first screamed the Wilhelm is still unknown, but his work is everywhere. In fact, it’s kind of a contest amongst sound designers to get the scream into their work. David Serchuk, from On the Media explains Stephen Altobello’s semi-obsession with sneaking in the scream: “Sound editors like Anderson and Altobello say that often when directors notice The Wilhelm they demand it be pulled.”

Altobello told Serchuk that he most admired whoever put the Wilhelm into the Judy Garland movie A Star is Born:

I’ve even tried to mix it in, like mix it into a track so that it can’t be removed. Like if you want this car sound on that TV set, you gotta have the scream. I can’t even turn – you know – and I act stupid, like, “Well I don’t know! That’s just part of it! You know?” I tried to get it into an HBO after school special about not using drugs but the filmmaker pulled it out. I tried to get it into a film called Chicago Cab, and they were like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Whoever put it in the movie in the background for one scene, that’s fine; that was probably expected. But whoever found a way to weasel it into the arrangement of a Judy Garland song, that’s somebody who really pulled off the ultimate, I think, because the movie stops and it’s the only thing that’s happening. I’ll never be able to pull that off.

There’s something kind of creepy about just how persistent the Wilhelm scream has been, Antebello says. ” I always wondered about people who were relatives of, like, the woman whose voice is on “At the Tone the Time Will Be.” I always thought, well what if that’s some guy’s, like, ex-girlfriend or something and he just calls and listens to the time?”

But the Wilhelm isn’t the only scream out there. There’s also the lesser known Howie. Motherboard identifies where they (and I) first heard the Howie.

Derek Mead, managing editor of Motherboard, writes:

One incredibly intrepid internet researcher traced it to the Hollywood Edge “Premiere” sound library, where it’s unceremoniously known as “Screams 3; Man, Gut-wrenching Scream And Fall Into Distance.” You might recognize it fromFace/Off, Last Action Hero, Beethoven’s Second (?) or the intro to “Aaahh!!! Real Monsters,” but it’s also been featured in a ton of video games.

So which one is better? The classic Wilhelm or the under appreciated Howie? Motherboard weighs in:

For Halloween, I think the Howie is just that much more ridiculous and horrifying, especially when it’s got a more hollow sound like at the end of “Real Monsters.” But, hey, the Wilhelm certainly has the better pedigree, there’s no denying that. Still, the Howie is my favorite Hollywood scream. What’s yours?

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Image: School House Rock

Earlier this month, the Meyer Levin School for the Performing Arts put out a Gangnam Style parody video about Long Division. I dare you not to enjoy this:

For all the goofiness, songs have a long history of helping us learn things. Take the ABC’s for example:

Or everyone’s favorite history lesson—the Bill on Capitol Hill.

Want to learn all the states and capitals? Try this Animaniacs song:

Actually, the Animaniacs are doing more than their fair share of education in this country. Here’s another song about the nations of the world:

The difference between Istanbul and Constantinople? Bam, there’s a song for that too:

And for the chemists, Tom Lehrer has a song of the elements (that existed at the time):

Go forth and learn while singing, my friends.

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Image: Juli

It’s a classic movie scene: the bad guy has kidnapped the hero (or the hero’s wife and kids) and has tied them up with their mouths taped shut. They’re trapped and can’t even scream for help. Well, not really.

Kevin Nugent tried this trick, and he showed that, actually, you can get the tape off your mouth without using your hands. Here’s how:

So all those mute, helpless victims should really just buck up and eat the tape. Of course, the point isn’t really if the scenes are super legit. One YouTube commenter points out:

There is also no such thing as a 1,200 round magazine for a gun but we still watch the movies don’t we? Also, I don’t think Predators are real.

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Are these Titanic wax figures not super creepy? Image: Cliff

The scene is iconic: Jack bids Rose a goodbye, letting her stay safe on the raft as it floats away from the sinking Titanic, leaving his fate sealed in the icy waters. But some people have pointed out that, perhaps, Jack was just dumb for not climbing onto the raft. This series of photos started making the Internet rounds earlier this year on sites like The Meta Picture and shows that they could have totally both fit:

Credit: Imgur, Themetapicture.com

But James Cameron, ever a stickler, has consistently explained that the problem wasn’t the space on the raft but its buoyancy: Had Jack tried to climb up he would have certainly pitched Rose into the icy North Atlantic. Well, that’s not true either. Enter: the Myth Busters.

Turns out, if Rose had been less busy crying and more busy thinking she could have tied her life jacket to the bottom of the plank and kept them both afloat. Of course, Rose would never do that. And, of course, James Cameron stands by his decision to kill Jack. Film School Rejects puts it this way:

Of course, Cameron still doesn’t really care, saying “The script says Jack dies. He has to die.” True love is dead, James Cameron. Dead and cold and wet and frozen. Thanks.

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Clerics take part in a protest against innocence of Muslims, an anti-Islamic film Image: Mohamed CJ

Today, as protests continue across the Muslim world in reaction to a translated movie trailer posted on YouTube, French magazine Charlie Hebdo announced that it was publishing cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.

As a precautionary measure, the French government deployed riot police to the magazine’s headquarters in Paris and plans to close French embassies in 20 countries this Friday to try and contain any riots that might ensue from the publication of the cartoons.

The BBC reports that 30 people have died in the protests connected to the film  “Innocence of Muslims.” The Atlantic Wire reports that groups in Germany, the United States and Canada have expressed interest in hosting screenings of the film.

Here in the United States, controversy is brewing as well. New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority recently lost a court battle to prevent the placement of an inflammatory ad in the subway system. The ad, sponsored by the group the American Freedom Defense Initiative, reads: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad”

The New York Times interviewed Muneer Awad, executive director of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who had one of the most level-headed reactions to the subway controversy:

Mr. Awad added that the group had not called for the ads’ removal, though it has asked the transportation authority to redirect funds it receives for the ads to the city’s Human Rights Commission.

“It’s perfectly legal to be a bigot and to be a racist,” he said. “We want to make sure there’s a counter-voice.”

Shocking (and perfectly legal) statements in the form of art, ads and political cartoons are nothing new. Here are just a few of the more recent/memorable ones and the counter-voices they inspired.

• 2012: “The Master,” a film loosely based on the early days of Scientology premieres, inciting calls and e-mails of protest from Scientologists.
• 2012: Punk Band Pussy Riot is convicted for preforming a “Punk Prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. They were arrested, and sentenced to do time. Counter-protests in support of the band have occurred all over the world.
• 2006: Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten publishes cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The ensuing protests involved embassies in flames and tens of thousands of protesters.
• 2004: Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ premieres, greeted by worldwide protests accusing the film of anti-Semitism.
• 2004: Filmmaker Theo Van Gogh is murdered for making a fictional film about a Muslim woman’s arranged marriage.
• 1988: Author Salman Rushdie publishes The Satanic Verses, and goes into hiding after Iranian clerics issue a fatwa demanding his death.
• 1988: Last Temptation of Christ, a Martin Scoresese picture appears in theatres. Hundreds of protesters appear.
• 1915: The Birth of a Nation, a white supremacist film, opens to protests by the African-American community in Boston.

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