title: Roswell incident

text: As soon as Marcel brought the material to General Ramey's office, both Ramey and his chief of staff Colonel Thomas Dubose identified the material as pieces of a weather balloon kite. The FWAAF weather officer on duty explained to reporters that such "ray wind" devices were used at about 80 weather stations across the country. The balloons were attached to a six-pointed reflective device that looked like a silver star. After launch, the balloon expanded with increasing altitude before bursting around 60,000 feet with pieces then dispersing in their fall to the ground.


title: Roswell incident

text: The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been 12 feet [3.5 m] long, [Brazel] felt, measuring the distance by the size of the room in which he sat. The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards [180 m] in diameter. When the debris was gathered up, the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet [1 m] long and 7 or 8 inches [18 or 20 cm] thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches [45 or 50 cm] long and about 8 inches [20 cm] thick. In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds [2 kg]. There was no sign of any metal in the area which might have been used for an engine, and no sign of any propellers of any kind, although at least one paper fin had been glued onto some of the tinfoil. There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument, although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable Scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in the construction. No strings or wires were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may have been used.


title: Roswell incident

text: On July 9, Brazel told the "Roswell Daily Record" that the debris consisted of "large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks." He paid little attention to it but returned later with his wife and daughter to gather up some of the debris.


title: Roswell incident

text: On July 9, Marcel explained: "[We] spent a couple of hours Monday afternoon [July 7] looking for any more parts of the weather device", said Marcel. "We found a few more patches of tinfoil and rubber." That day it was reported that Brazel had reported the debris after hearing reports about "flying discs" and wondering if that was what he had picked up, then going to see Sheriff Wilcox where he "whispered kinda confidential like" that he may have found a flying disc.


title: Roswell incident

text: After the initial newspaper reports of 1947, the Roswell incident faded from public attention for more than 30 years, when interest re-emerged in the late 1970s. The Roswell incident was featured in films, TV shows, and books. Amid increasingly complex conspiracy theories, multiple hoaxes and legends about "alien bodies" were incorporated into the Roswell mythos. The trend culminated in 1995's purported footage of an "Alien Autopsy", which filmmakers later revealed to be a hoax (though they preferred the term "reconstruction").


title: Roswell incident

text: In February 1978, UFO researcher Stanton Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel, the only person known to have accompanied the Roswell debris from where it was recovered to Fort Worth where reporters saw material that was claimed to be part of the recovered object. Marcel's statements contradicted those he made to the press in 1947.


title: Roswell incident

text: In November 1979, Marcel's first filmed interview was featured in a documentary titled "UFO's Are Real", co-written by Friedman. The film had a limited release but was later syndicated for broadcasting.


title: Roswell incident

text: On February 28, 1980, sensationalist tabloid the "National Enquirer" brought large-scale attention to the Marcel story. On September 20, 1980, the TV series "In Search of..." aired an interview where Marcel described his participation in the 1947 press conference:


title: Roswell incident

text: Marcel gave a final interview to HBO's America Undercover which aired in August 1985. In all his statements, Marcel consistently denied the presence of bodies. Between 1978 and the early 1990s, UFO researchers such as Stanton T. Friedman, William Moore, Karl T. Pflock, and the team of Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt interviewed several dozen people who claimed to have had a connection with the events at Roswell in 1947.


title: Roswell incident

text: In October 1980, Marcel's story was featured in the book "The Roswell Incident" by Charles Berlitz and William Moore. The authors had previously written popular books on such fringe topics as the Philadelphia Experiment and on the Bermuda Triangle. Though he was uncredited, Friedman carried out some research for the book.


title: Roswell incident

text: The book's narrative holds that an alien craft was flying over the New Mexico desert observing US nuclear weapons activity, but crashed after being hit by lightning, killing the aliens on board; a government cover-up duly followed. Historian Kathy Olmsted writes that book's narrative has come to be known as "version 1" of the Roswell myth. Berlitz and Moore's narrative was dominant until the late 1980s when other authors, attracted by the commercial potential of writing about Roswell, started producing rival accounts.


title: Roswell incident

text: "The Roswell Incident" featured accounts of debris described by Marcel as "nothing made on this earth." Additional accounts by Bill Brazel, son of rancher Mac Brazel, neighbor Floyd Proctor and Walt Whitman Jr., son of newsman W. E. Whitman who had interviewed Mac Brazel, suggested the material Marcel recovered had super-strength not associated with a weather balloon.


title: Roswell incident

text: The book introduced the contention that debris which was recovered by Marcel at the Foster ranch, visible in photographs showing Marcel posing with the debris, was substituted for debris from a weather device as part of a cover-up. The book also claimed that the debris recovered from the ranch was not permitted a close inspection by the press. The efforts by the military were described as being intended to discredit and "counteract the growing hysteria towards flying saucers". Two accounts of witness intimidation were included in the book, including the incarceration of Mac Brazel.


title: Roswell incident

text: The authors claimed to have interviewed over 90 witnesses, though the testimony of only 25 appears in the book. Only seven of these people claimed to have seen the debris. Of these, five claimed to have handled it.


title: Roswell incident

text: "The Roswell Incident" (1980) was the first book to introduce the controversial second-hand stories of civil engineer Grady "Barney" Barnett and a group of archaeology students from an unidentified university encountering wreckage and "alien bodies" while on the Plains of San Agustin before being escorted away by the Army. The second-hand Barnett stories were described by ufologists as the "one aspect of the account that seemed to conflict with the basic story about the retrieval of highly unusual debris from a sheep ranch outside Corona, New Mexico, in July 1947".


title: Roswell incident

text: Many alleged first-hand accounts of the Roswell incident actually contain information from the Aztec, New Mexico, UFO incident, a hoaxed flying saucer crash which gained national notoriety after being promoted by journalist Frank Scully in his articles and a 1950 book "Behind the Flying Saucers". The hoax included stories of humanoid bodies and metals with unusual properties.


title: Roswell incident

text: In 1991, Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt published "UFO Crash at Roswell". They added testimony from 100 new witnesses, including those who reported an elaborate military cordon and debris recovery operation at the Foster ranch. The book included the new claims of a "gouge ... that extended four or five hundred feet [120 or 150 m]" at the ranch.


title: Roswell incident

text: Randle and Schmitt reported Gen. Arthur Exon had been directly aware of debris and bodies, but Exon disputed his depiction, saying his comments had been based exclusively on second-hand rumors. The 1991 book sold 160,000 copies and served as the basis for the 1994 television film "Roswell". Also in 1991, retired USAF Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, who had posed with debris for press photographs in 1947, publicly acknowledged the weather balloon cover story, corroborating Marcel's previous admissions.


title: Roswell incident

text: The Barnett "alien body" accounts were mentioned in the 1991 book, though the dates and locations were changed from the accounts found in 1980's "The Roswell Incident". In this new account, Brazel was described as leading the Army to a second crash site on the ranch, at which point the Army personnel were supposedly "horrified to find civilians [including Barnett] there already."


title: Roswell incident

text: "UFO Crash at Roswell" (1991) prominently featured the stories of mortician Glenn Dennis. On September 20, 1989, an episode of "Unsolved Mysteries" had included second-hand stories of "Barney" Barnett seeing alien bodies captured by the Army. Mortician Dennis had called the show's hotline claiming to have knowledge of the events.


title: Roswell incident

text: Dennis claimed to have received "four or five calls" from Air Base with questions about body preservation and inquiries about small or hermetically sealed caskets; he further claimed that a local nurse told him she had witnessed an "alien autopsy". Dennis's stories of Roswell alien autopsies were the first account to allege alien corpses at the Roswell Army Air Base. Pflock observed that Dennis's story "sounds like a B-grade thriller conceived by Oliver Stone."


title: Roswell incident

text: In September 1991, Dennis co-founded a UFO museum in Roswell along with former RAAF public affairs officer Walter Haut and Max Littell, a real estate salesman. Dennis appeared in multiple documentaries repeating his story.


title: Roswell incident

text: Randle deemed Glenn Dennis one of the "least credible" Roswell witnesses. Randle said Dennis was not credible "for changing the name of the nurse once we had proved she didn't exist."


title: Roswell incident

text: Scientific skeptic author Brian Dunning concurs that Dennis cannot be regarded as a reliable witness, considering that he had seemingly waited over 40 years before he started recounting a series of unconnected events. Such events, Dunnings argues, were then arbitrarily joined to form what has become the most popular narrative of the alleged alien crash. Some prominent UFOlogists including Karl T. Pflock, Kent Jeffrey, and William L. Moore have become convinced that there were no aliens or alien spacecraft involved in the Roswell crash.


title: Roswell incident

text: In 1992, Stanton Friedman released "Crash at Corona", co-authored with Don Berliner. The book introduced new "witnesses" and added to the narrative by doubling the number of flying saucers to two, and the number of aliens to eight – two of which were said to have survived and been taken into custody by the government. In 1994, Randle and Schmitt authored another book, "The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell" which included a claim that alien bodies were taken by cargo plane to be viewed by Dwight D. Eisenhower.


title: Roswell incident

text: The existence of so many differing accounts led to a schism among ufologists about the events at Roswell. The Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), two leading UFO societies, disagreed in their views of the various scenarios presented by Randle–Schmitt and Friedman–Berliner; several conferences were held to try to resolve the differences. One issue under discussion was where Barnett was when he saw the alien craft he was said to have encountered. A 1992 UFO conference attempted to achieve a consensus among the various scenarios portrayed in "Crash at Corona" and "UFO Crash at Roswell"; however, the publication of "The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell" "resolved" the Barnett problem by simply ignoring Barnett and citing a new location for the alien craft recovery, including a new group of archaeologists not connected to the ones the Barnett story cited.


title: Roswell incident

text: After United States congressional inquiries, the General Accounting Office launched an inquiry and directed the Office of the United States Secretary of the Air Force to conduct an internal investigation. The result was summarized in two reports. The first, released in 1994, concluded that the material recovered in 1947 was likely debris from Project Mogul, a military surveillance program employing high-altitude balloons (and classified portion of an unclassified New York University project by atmospheric researchers). The second report, released in 1997, concluded that reports of recovered alien bodies were likely a combination of innocently transformed memories of accidents involving military casualties with memories of the recovery of anthropomorphic dummies in military programs such as the 1950s Operation High Dive, mixed with hoaxes perpetrated by various witnesses and UFO proponents. The psychological effects of time compression and confusion about when events occurred explained the discrepancy with the years in question.


title: Roswell incident

text: By the 1990s, a scholarly consensus emerged concluding that the military decided to conceal the true purpose of the crashed device—nuclear test monitoring—and instead inform the public that the crash was of a weather balloon. The balloon had been launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field a month earlier. It carried a radar reflector and classified Project Mogul sensors for experimental monitoring of Soviet nuclear testing.


title: Roswell incident

text: The Air Force reports were dismissed by UFO proponents as being either disinformation or simply implausible, though skeptical researchers such as Philip J. Klass and Robert Todd, who had been expressing doubts regarding accounts of aliens for several years, used the reports as the basis for skeptical responses to claims by UFO proponents. After the release of the Air Force reports, several books, such as Kal Korff's "The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You To Know" (1997), built on the evidence presented in the reports to conclude "no credible evidence from any witness has turned out to present a compelling case that the object was extraterrestrial in origin."


title: Roswell incident

text: In 1995, film footage purporting to show an alien autopsy and claimed to have been taken by a US military official shortly after the Roswell incident was released by Ray Santilli, a London-based video entrepreneur. The footage caused an international sensation when it aired on television networks around the world. Santilli admitted in 2006 that the film was mostly a reconstruction, but continued to claim it was based on genuine footage now lost, and some original frames that had supposedly survived. A fictionalized version of the creation of the footage and its release was retold in the comedy film "Alien Autopsy" (2006).


title: Roswell incident

text: In 1997, former Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso reported in his autobiographical book "The Day After Roswell" that the Roswell Crash did happen and that when he was assigned to Fort Riley (Kansas) in July 1947, a Sergeant showed him purportedly-nonhuman bodies that were from an "air crash". Corso further claimed that years later, he helped oversee a project to reverse engineer recovered crash debris. Philip Klass analyzed his claims line by line and exposed many inconsistencies and factual errors. Corso's story was noted for its similarities to the film "" which had been released six years prior; In that film, civilians secretly attempt to reverse-engineer extraordinary technology of unknown origin.


title: Roswell incident

text: In 2007 Donald Schmitt and Tom Carey published the book "Witness to Roswell", which prominently featured a document said to be a sworn affidavit by Walter Haut, who had written the first Army press release about the Roswell crash in 1947. The document, alleged to have been left by Haut and opened only after his death in 2005, includes a description of the 1947 crash debris having been discussed by high-ranking staff and how Haut had seen alien bodies. The claims, however, drew an unimpressed response even from ufologists: Dennis Balthaser said that the document was not written by Haut, and that by 2000 Haut's mental state was such he could not recall basic details about his past, making the detail contained in the affidavit seem dubious. Physicist and skeptic Dave Thomas commented: "Is Roswell still the 'best' UFO incident? If it is, UFO proponents should be very, very worried."


title: Roswell incident

text: On October 26, 2007, Bill Richardson (who at the time was a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for U.S. president) was asked about releasing government files on Roswell. Richardson responded that when he was a Congressman, he attempted to get information on behalf of his New Mexico constituents, but was told by both the Department of Defense and Los Alamos Labs that the information was classified. "That ticked me off", he said, "the government doesn't tell the truth as much as it should on a lot of issues." He promised to work on opening the files if he were elected president.


title: Roswell incident

text: In 2011, American journalist Annie Jacobsen's "" featured a claim that Josef Mengele, a German SS officer and a doctor in Auschwitz, was recruited by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to produce "grotesque, child-size aviators" to be remotely piloted and landed in America in order to cause hysteria similar to Orson Welles' "The War of the Worlds" (1938).


title: Roswell incident

text: The book was criticized for extensive errors by scientists from the Federation of American Scientists. Historian Richard Rhodes, writing in "The Washington Post", also criticized the book's sensationalistic reporting of "old news" and its "error-ridden" reporting. He wrote: "All of [her main source's] claims appear in one or another of the various publicly available Roswell/UFO/Area 51 books and documents churned out by believers, charlatans and scholars over the past 60 years. In attributing the stories she reports to an unnamed engineer and Manhattan Project veteran while seemingly failing to conduct even minimal research into the man’s sources, Jacobsen shows herself at a minimum extraordinarily gullible or journalistically incompetent."


title: Roswell incident

text: In September 2017, UK newspaper "The Guardian" reported on Kodachrome slides which some had claimed showed a dead space alien. First presented at a BeWitness event in Mexico, organised by Jaime Maussan and attended by almost 7,000 people, days afterwards it was revealed that the slides were in fact of a mummified Native American child discovered in 1896 and which had been on display at the Chapin Mesa Archeological Museum in Mesa Verde, Colorado, for many decades.


title: Roswell incident

text: In February 2020, an Air Force historian revealed a recently declassified report of a circa-1951 incident in which two Roswell personnel donned poorly fitting radioactive suits, complete with oxygen masks, while retrieving a weather balloon after an atomic test. On one occasion, they encountered a lone woman in the desert, who fainted when she saw them. The personnel could have appeared, to someone unaccustomed to then-modern gear, to be alien.


title: Roswell incident

text: Despite a lack of credible evidence for any alien spaceship, believers firmly hold to the belief that one did crash near Roswell but the truth has been concealed by a government conspiracy. B. D. Gildenberg has called the Roswell incident "the world's most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim".


title: Roswell incident

text: Pflock said, "[T]he case for Roswell is a classic example of the triumph of quantity over quality. The advocates of the crashed-saucer tale ... simply shovel everything that seems to support their view into the box marked 'Evidence' and say, 'See? Look at all this stuff. We must be right.' Never mind the contradictions. Never mind the lack of independent supporting fact. Never mind the blatant absurdities." Korff suggests there are clear incentives for some people to promote the idea of aliens at Roswell, and that many researchers were not doing competent work: "[The] UFO field is people who are willing to take advantage of the gullibility of others, especially the paying public. Let's not pull any punches here: The Roswell UFO myth has been very good business for UFO groups, publishers, for Hollywood, the town of Roswell, the media, and UFOlogy ... [The] number of researchers who employ science and its disciplined methodology is appallingly small."


title: Roswell incident

text: B. D. Gildenberg wrote there were as many as 11 reported alien recovery sites and these recoveries bore only a marginal resemblance to the event as initially reported in 1947, or as recounted later by the initial witnesses. Some of these new accounts could have been confused accounts of the several known recoveries of injured and dead servicemen from four military plane crashes that occurred in the area from 1948 to 1950. Other accounts could have been based on memories of recoveries of test dummies, as suggested by the Air Force in their reports. Charles Ziegler argued that the Roswell story has all the hallmarks of a traditional folk narrative. He identified six distinct narratives, and a process of transmission via storytellers with a core story that was created from various witness accounts and was then shaped and molded by those who carry on the UFO community's tradition. Other "witnesses" were then sought out to expand the core narrative, with those giving accounts not in line with the core beliefs being repudiated or simply omitted by the "gatekeepers". Others then retold the narrative in its new form. This whole process would repeat over time.


title: Roswell incident

text: Though hundreds of people were interviewed by various researchers, only a few of these people claimed to have seen debris or aliens. Most witnesses were just repeating the claims of others. Pflock notes that of these 300-plus individuals reportedly interviewed for "UFO Crash at Roswell" (1991), only 41 can be "considered genuine first- or second-hand witnesses" and only 23 can be "reasonably thought to have seen physical evidence, debris". Of these, only seven have asserted anything suggestive of otherworldly origins for the debris.


title: Roswell incident

text: In "The Roswell Incident", Marcel stated, "Actually, this material may have "looked" like tinfoil and balsa wood, but the resemblance ended there ... They took one picture of me on the floor holding up some of the less-interesting metallic debris ... The stuff in that one photo was pieces of the actual stuff we found. It was not a staged photo." Timothy Printy points out that the material Marcel positively identified as being part of what he recovered is material that skeptics and UFO advocates agree is debris from a balloon device. After that fact was pointed out to him, Marcel changed his story to say that that material was not what he recovered. Skeptics like Robert Todd argued that Marcel had a history of embellishment and exaggeration, such as claiming to have been a pilot and having received five Air Medals for shooting down enemy planes, claims that were all found to be false, and skeptics feel that his evolving Roswell story was simply another instance of this tendency to fabricate.


title: Roswell incident

text: As for the accounts from those who claimed to have seen aliens, critics identified problems ranging from the reliability of second-hand accounts to credibility problems with witnesses making demonstrably false claims, or multiple, contradictory accounts, to dubious death-bed confessions or accounts from elderly and easily confused witnesses. Pflock noted that only four people with supposed firsthand knowledge of alien bodies were interviewed by Roswell authors. All reports of bodies came about a minimum of 31 years after the fact.


title: Roswell incident

text: In popular lore, "grays are said to be the creatures whose flying saucer crashed near Roswell in 1947. Various claims have the grays' bodies found among the wreckage while others assert that some survived". However, no mention of alien bodies related to the Roswell incident occurs until 1980.


title: Roswell incident

text: In the interval between 1947 and 1980, the idea of Grey aliens had entered the public consciousness beginning with the Betty and Barney Hill incident. In December 1963, Betty Hill and her husband Barney sought out a psychiatrist after Betty experienced recurring nightmares. On February 10, 1964, the ABC Network broadcast an episode of the science fiction television show "The Outer Limits" that featured an extraterrestrial with large, wrap-around eyes. Twelve days later, during a hypnosis session, Barney Hill told his psychiatrist a story about a being with wrap-around eyes. Modern psychiatric consensus is that Hill experienced false memory syndrome, in which therapy methods such as hypnosis lead to confabulations.


title: Roswell incident

text: On October 20, 1975, the NBC network aired a made-for-TV movie inspired by the Hills starring James Earl Jones. Depictions of Grey aliens would go on to appear in a number of books, films, and television shows, such as the 1977 film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". Greys would later be incorporated into the Roswell legend.


title: Roswell incident

text: In a 2012 visit to Roswell, President Barack Obama joked "I come in peace." In December 2020, Obama joked with Stephen Colbert: "It used to be that UFOs and Roswell was the biggest conspiracy. And now that seems so tame, the idea that the government might have an alien spaceship."


title: Roswell incident

text: In a 2014 interview, former President Bill Clinton reported that his administration had investigated the incident, saying "When the Roswell thing came up, I knew we’d get gazillions of letters. So I had all the Roswell papers reviewed, everything".


title: Roswell incident

text: When asked during a 2015 interview with "GQ" magazine about whether he had looked at top-secret classified information, Obama replied, "I gotta tell you, it's a little disappointing. People always ask me about Roswell and the aliens and UFOs, and it turns out the stuff going on that's top secret isn't nearly as exciting as you expect. In this day and age, it's not as top secret as you'd think."


title: Roswell incident

text: In June 2020, then-President Donald Trump, when asked if he would consider releasing more information about the Roswell incident, said "I won’t talk to you about what I know about it, but it’s very interesting."


title: Roswell incident

text: A June 1997 CNN/"Time" poll revealed that the majority of people interviewed believed that aliens had indeed visited Earth, and that aliens had landed at Roswell, but that all the relevant information was being kept secret by the US government. According to anthropologists Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart, the Roswell Story was a prime example of how a discourse moved from the fringes to the mainstream according to the prevailing "zeitgeist": public preoccupation in the 1980s with "conspiracy, cover-up and repression" aligned well with the Roswell narratives as told in the "sensational books" which were being published. Additionally, skeptics and some social anthropologists saw the increasingly elaborate accounts of alien crash landings and government cover-ups as evidence of a myth being constructed.


title: Roswell incident

text: Prominent skeptics Joe Nickell and co-author James McGaha identified a myth-making process, which they called the "Roswellian syndrome". In this syndrome, a myth is proposed to have five distinct stages of development: "incident", "debunking", "submergence", "mythologizing", and "reemergence and media bandwagon effect". The authors predicted that the Roswellian syndrome would "play out again and again", in other UFO and conspiracy-theory stories.


title: Jamie Clayton

text: Jamie Clayton (born on January 15, 1978) is an American actress and model. Clayton is best known for starring as Nomi Marks in the Netflix original series "Sense8", Sasha Booker in the third season of "Designated Survivor" and Tess Van De Berg in Showtime's "". She portrays Pinhead in the 2022 "Hellraiser" film.


title: Jamie Clayton

text: Clayton was raised in San Diego, California. Her father, Howard Clayton, was a criminal defense attorney, and her mother, Shelley, is an event planner. When she was 19, Clayton moved to New York City to pursue a career as a makeup artist.


title: Jamie Clayton

text: In 2010, Clayton was the makeup artist and co-host on VH1's first makeover show "TRANSform Me". The following year she played the recurring role of Kyla in the third season of the HBO series "Hung". In 2012, Clayton played the lead role of Michelle Darnell on the Emmy Award winning interactive web series "Dirty Work" and the role of Carla Favers on the TV series "Are We There Yet?" She also narrated the audiobook for the children's novel "Melissa" about a young transgender girl.


title: Jamie Clayton

text: Clayton starred as one of the eight main characters in the Netflix original television series "Sense8" that premiered on June 5, 2015. In "Sense8" she played Nomi Marks, a trans woman, political blogger, and hacker living in San Francisco. Clayton said that she was primarily interested in "Sense8" because of the opportunity to play a transgender character written by filmmakers Lilly and Lana Wachowski and to be on set with them. Being a fan of science fiction and J. Michael Straczynski in particular also attracted her to this project.


title: Jamie Clayton

text: In 2019, Clayton starred in "", the sequel to the Showtime original "The L Word". Season 2 of "The L Word: Generation Q" was announced by Showtime in January 2020. She also guest starred in The CW’s "Roswell: New Mexico".


title: Jamie Clayton

text: Clayton is a trans woman. In 2011, she was honored by "Out" magazine as part of their annual "Out 100" awards.


title: Robert Trujillo

text: Roberto Agustín Miguel Santiago Samuel Trujillo Veracruz (; born October 23, 1964) is an American musician, best known as the bassist for heavy metal band Metallica since 2003. He first rose to prominence as the bassist of crossover thrash band Suicidal Tendencies from 1989 to 1995, while also collaborating with Suicidal Tendencies frontman Mike Muir for funk metal supergroup Infectious Grooves. After leaving Suicidal Tendencies, he performed with Ozzy Osbourne, Jerry Cantrell, and heavy metal band Black Label Society. Trujillo joined Metallica in 2003 and is the band's longest-serving bassist. He was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Metallica in 2009.


title: Robert Trujillo

text: Robert Trujillo was born in Santa Monica, California, on October 23, 1964. He is of Mexican and Native American descent. He grew up in Culver City, California, where his father was a teacher at Culver City High School. Trujillo gained an interest in music during his childhood; his mother was a huge fan of soul music, particularly musicians like Marvin Gaye, James Brown, and Sly and the Family Stone. Trujillo stated that "Jaco [Pastorius] was my hero growing up", and that the iconic jazz bassist changed his view of what the instrument could play: "Hearing him was like hearing Eddie Van Halen doing "Eruption" for the first time: You thought, 'What instrument is that?' I loved jazz fusion and branched out from there. But Jaco had an edge that far exceeded his jazz persona. He was funk, he was rock, he was soul. And his whole attitude was punk." He began playing in "a lot of backyard party bands", playing music by Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, Rush, and Led Zeppelin. He went to jazz school when he was 19 with the intention of becoming a studio musician, but he maintained his passion for rock and metal.


title: Robert Trujillo

text: Trujillo gained prominence when he replaced Bob Heathcote as the bassist for California crossover thrash band Suicidal Tendencies. Initially billed as "Stymee" on the 1989 album "Controlled by Hatred/Feel Like Shit...Déjà Vu", Trujillo remained in the band until the mid-1990s. Concurrent to his work with Suicidal Tendencies, Trujillo is a member of the band's side project, Infectious Grooves, along with vocalist Mike Muir.


title: Robert Trujillo

text: Trujillo was a member of Ozzy Osbourne's band for a number of years starting in the late 1990s. In contrast to his earlier jazz and funk inspired playing, Osbourne's band was more straightforward to hard rock and metal. Trujillo co-wrote several songs on the "Down to Earth" album. He was the subject of controversy for re-recording Bob Daisley's bass tracks for reissued versions of Osbourne's first two solo albums "Blizzard of Ozz" (1980) and "Diary of a Madman" (1981) after Daisley claimed that he was not paid proper royalties. During this time, Trujillo formed an experimental supergroup, Mass Mental, with then Dub War singer Benji Webbe, whose "ragga-punk-metal" outfit had just disbanded. The band released one studio album in Japan and one live album of their performance in Tokyo before disbanding. Zakk Wylde, a personal friend and bandmate from the Ozzy days, recruited him to play with Black Label Society for a few shows.


title: Robert Trujillo

text: Trujillo joined Metallica on February 24, 2003, two years after Jason Newsted resigned. He had previously met and befriended his future bandmates when Suicidal Tendencies supported Metallica during the Nowhere Else to Roam tour in 1993, and again during the Shit Hits the Sheds Tour one year later. Trujillo received one million dollars from the band as an advance for joining Metallica. His audition and hiring as well as his million dollar payment offer appeared in the documentary film "". As the current bassist for Metallica, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside all current members of the band, as well as previous bassists Jason Newsted and Cliff Burton.


title: Robert Trujillo

text: Trujillo is married and has a son and a daughter. Trujillo's wife, Chloé, has created a pyrography design of the Aztec calendar on one of his basses.


title: Robert Trujillo

text: In 2012, Trujillo produced a documentary about jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius titled "Jaco", directed by Stephen Kijak and Paul Marchand. The film was named Official Film of Record Store Day 2014 and was released in November 2014.


title: Robert Trujillo

text: Trujillo is primarily a finger-style player, but sometimes plays with a pick. Trujillo's predecessor in Metallica, Jason Newsted, was predominantly a pick-style player, while Cliff Burton, Newsted's predecessor and bassist on Metallica's first three albums, played finger-style exclusively. Trujillo is known for playing "massive chords" and "chord-based harmonics" on the bass.


title: Robert Trujillo

text: Trujillo uses the slap bass technique, seen mostly in his work with Suicidal Tendencies and Infectious Grooves. At many of the shows during Metallica's 2004 Madly in Anger with the World Tour, Trujillo would often play an extended bass solo (dubbed "Jungle Essence" on recordings), which made extensive use of slap bass and other techniques and effects.


title: Robert Trujillo

text: For recording purposes, Trujillo uses his own code for writing down bass arrangements. Inspired by an article by Pino Palladino, he developed this during the recording sessions for Jerry Cantrell's "Degradation Trip", which, according to Trujillo, had him working from "little hoodrat demos" with nearly inaudible bass.


title: Robert Trujillo

text: With Metallica, Trujillo has primarily been playing Warwick Streamer bass guitars, both 5- and 4-strings. His signature model Streamer bass was released in March 2010. He often plays Fernandes Gravity 5-string basses, particularly a model with a silver finish, blue flame decals, and EMG pickups. In addition to his signature Warwick basses, Zon Guitars produce a signature bass model, the Sonus RT. Prior to Metallica, he was most often seen playing Tobias, ESP and MusicMan basses (all 5-strings), as well as a Fender Precision Bass with Black Label Society and Ozzy Osbourne. Trujillo has been seen in concert playing a Yamaha TRB5-P2 5-string bass, a customized green Rickenbacker 4001/4003 4-string bass modified with EMG pickups, various Nash P-Bass Copy guitars, and both a classic Fender Precision Bass and Fender Jazz Bass. Trujillo is the custodian of Jaco Pastorius' legendary "Bass Of Doom" (the sunburst fretless 1962 Jazz Bass used by Pastorius on most of his recordings and live appearances). He has performed onstage with Metallica with the instrument.


title: Robert Trujillo

text: For amplification, he uses Ampeg amplifiers and cabinets. In 2010, Trujillo collaborated with Jim Dunlop to create his new Icon signature bass strings – these strings are taper-core stainless steel, with a non-tapered B string in gauges 45–130 (5-string).


title: Robert Trujillo

text: Trujillo's pedal board consists of an Electro Harmonix Q-Tron, a Tech 21 SansAmp Bass Driver DI, a Tech 21 XXL, an MXR m-135 SmartGate, a Morley Mark Tremonti wah pedal, and a Boss OC-2 Octave Pedal; all powered by a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power.


title: Robert Trujillo

text: He is a playable character in "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD" when the "Pro Skater 3 HD Revert Pack" downloadable content is installed.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Susan Magdalane Boyle (born 1 April 1961) is a Scottish singer. She rose to fame in 2009 after appearing as a contestant on the third series of "Britain's Got Talent", singing "I Dreamed a Dream" from "".


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle's debut studio album, "I Dreamed a Dream", was released in November 2009; it became the UK's best-selling debut album of all time, beating the previous record held by "Spirit" by Leona Lewis, and set a record for first-week sales by a debut album, according to the Official Charts Company. In her first year of fame, Boyle made £5 million (£ million today) with the release of "I Dreamed a Dream" and its lead-off singles, "I Dreamed a Dream" and "Wild Horses". The success continued with her second studio album, "The Gift" (2010), where she became only the third act ever to top both the UK and US album charts twice in the same year, and was followed by Boyle's third studio album, "Someone to Watch Over Me" (2011). She subsequently released the studio albums "" (2012), "Home for Christmas" (2013), "Hope" (2014), "A Wonderful World" (2016), and "Ten" (2019).


title: Susan Boyle

text: On 12 May 2012, Boyle returned to "Britain's Got Talent" to perform as a guest in the final, singing "You'll See". The following day, she performed at Windsor Castle for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Pageant singing "Mull of Kintyre". Having performed "I Know Him So Well" in a duet with one of her idols Elaine Paige in London in December 2009, Boyle performed with her other musical idol Donny Osmond in Las Vegas in November 2012, singing "This is the Moment", a duet from her fourth album. She is known for supporting various charitable causes, and has appeared on the UK charity telethons BBC Children in Need and Comic Relief. As of 2013, Boyle had sold over 19 million albums worldwide and received two Grammy Awards nominations. On 23 July 2014, she performed "Mull of Kintyre" at the Opening Ceremony of the 2014 Commonwealth Games in front of the Queen. To date, Boyle has released eight albums, including two Christmas releases, "The Gift" and "A Wonderful World". In 2019, Boyle celebrated ten years in showbiz, with a compilation album titled "Ten" and a tour.


title: Susan Boyle

text: As of 2021, Boyle has sold 25 million records. Her debut album, "I Dreamed A Dream" (2009), is one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century, having sold over 10 million copies worldwide, and it was the best-selling album internationally in 2009.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle was raised in Blackburn, West Lothian. Her father, Patrick Boyle, was a miner and veteran of the Second World War who also worked as a singer at the Bishop's Blaize; her mother Bridget was a shorthand typist. Both her parents were born in Motherwell, Lanarkshire, but also have family links to County Donegal in Ireland. Born when her mother was 45 years old, Boyle was the youngest of four brothers and five sisters. She was raised thinking that she had been briefly deprived of oxygen during a difficult birth resulting in a learning disability. However, she was told in 2012–13 that she had been misdiagnosed and is on the Autism spectrum with an IQ "above average". Boyle says she was bullied as a child.


title: Susan Boyle

text: After leaving school with few qualifications, Boyle took part in government training programmes, and performed at local venues.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle took singing lessons from vocal coach Fred O'Neil. She attended Edinburgh Acting School and took part in the Edinburgh Fringe. She also long participated in her parish church's pilgrimages to the Knock Shrine, County Mayo, Ireland, and sang there at the Marian basilica.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In 1998, Boyle recorded three tracks—"Cry Me a River", "Killing Me Softly", and "Don't Cry for Me Argentina"—at Heartbeat Studio, Midlothian. She used all her savings to pay for a professionally cut demo, copies of which she later sent to record companies, radio talent competitions, local and national TV. The demo consisted of her versions of "Cry Me a River" and "Killing Me Softly with His Song"; the songs were uploaded to the Internet after her "BGT" audition.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In 1999, Boyle submitted a track for a charity CD to commemorate the Millennium produced at a West Lothian school. Only 1,000 copies of the CD, "Music for a Millennium Celebration, Sounds of West Lothian", were pressed. An early review by Amber McNaught in the "West Lothian Herald & Post" said Boyle's rendition of "Cry Me a River" was "heartbreaking" and "had been on repeat in my CD player ever since I got this CD..." The recording found its way onto the internet following her first televised appearance, and the "New York Post" said it showed that Boyle was "not a one-trick pony." "Hello!" said the recording "cement[ed] her status" as a singing star.


title: Susan Boyle

text: After Boyle won several local singing competitions, her mother urged her to enter "Britain's Got Talent" and take the risk of singing in front of an audience larger than her parish church. Former coach O'Neil said Boyle abandoned an audition for "The X Factor" because she believed people were being chosen for their looks. She almost abandoned her plan to enter "Britain's Got Talent", believing she was too old, but O'Neil persuaded her to audition nevertheless. Boyle said that she was motivated to seek a musical career to pay tribute to her mother. Her performance on the show was the first time she had sung in public since her mother died.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In August 2008, Boyle applied for an audition for the third series of "Britain's Got Talent" (as contestant number 43212) and was accepted after a preliminary audition in Glasgow. When Boyle first appeared on "Britain's Got Talent" at the city's Clyde Auditorium, she said that she aspired to become a professional singer "as successful as Elaine Paige". Boyle sang "I Dreamed a Dream" from "Les Misérables" in the first round, which was watched by over 10 million viewers when it aired on 11 April 2009. Programme judge Amanda Holden remarked upon the audience's initially cynical attitude, and the subsequent "biggest wake-up call ever" upon hearing her performance.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle was "absolutely gobsmacked" by the strength of the reaction to her appearance. Afterwards, Paige expressed interest in singing a duet with Boyle, and called her "a role model for everyone who has a dream". Boyle's rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream" was credited with causing a surge in ticket sales in the Vancouver production of "Les Misérables". Cameron Mackintosh, the producer of the musical, also praised the performance, as thrilling and uplifting".


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle was one of 40 acts that were put through to the semi-finals. She appeared last on the first semi-final on 24 May 2009, performing "Memory" from the musical "Cats". In the public vote, she was the act to receive the highest number of votes to go through to the final. She was the clear favourite to win the final, but ended up in second place to dance troupe Diversity; the UK TV audience was a record of 17.3 million viewers.


title: Susan Boyle

text: The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) became concerned by press reports about Boyle's erratic behaviour and speculation about her mental condition and wrote to remind editors about clause 3 (privacy) of their code of press conduct. The day after the final, Boyle was admitted to The Priory, a private psychiatric clinic in London, Talkback Thames explained, "Following Saturday night's show, Susan is exhausted and emotionally drained." Her stay in hospital attracted widespread attention, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown wishing her well. Simon Cowell offered to waive Boyle's contractual obligation to take part in the BGT tour. Her family said "she's been battered non-stop for the last seven weeks and it has taken its toll [...but...] her dream is very much alive", as she had been invited to the Independence Day celebrations at the White House.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle left the clinic three days after her admission and said she would participate in the BGT tour. Despite health concerns, she appeared in 20 of the 24 dates of the tour, and was well received in cities including Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin, Sheffield, Coventry, and Birmingham. "The Belfast Telegraph" stated that "Despite reports of crumbling under the pressure..., she exuded a confidence resembling that of a veteran who has been performing for years".


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle's first album, "I Dreamed a Dream", was released on 23 November 2009. The album includes covers of "Wild Horses" and "You'll See" as well as "I Dreamed a Dream", and "Cry Me a River". In Britain, Boyle's debut album was recognised as the fastest selling UK debut album of all time selling 411,820 copies, beating the previous fastest selling debut of all time, "Spirit" by Leona Lewis. "I Dreamed a Dream" also outsold the rest of the top 5 albums combined in its first week.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In the US, the album sold 701,000 copies in its first week, the best opening week for a debut artist in over a decade. It topped the "Billboard" chart for six straight weeks and although it narrowly failed to become the best-selling album of 2009, with sales of 3,104,000 compared to 3,217,000 for Taylor Swift's "Fearless", it was one of only two albums to sell over 3 million copies in the US, and was also the top selling "physical" album of 2009, with only 86,000 of its sales coming from digital downloads. This has in turn garnered more media attention, as mentioned by "People" magazine.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In Italy, it was the first album of the month in the Italian No. 1 Account by a non-Italian artist ever. In only a week, it sold more than 2 million copies worldwide, becoming the fastest selling global female debut album.


title: Susan Boyle

text: On 13 December 2009 she appeared in her own television special "I Dreamed a Dream: the Susan Boyle Story", featuring a duet with Elaine Paige. It got ratings of 10 million viewers in the United Kingdom and in America was the TV Guide Network's highest rated television special in its history.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In November 2009 it was reported that Boyle's rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream" would be the theme song of the anime movie "Eagle Talon The Movie 3" which was later released in Japan on 16 January 2010. Boyle performed for Pope Benedict XVI on his tour of Britain in 2010. In May 2010, Boyle was voted by "Time" magazine as the seventh most influential person in the world. Boyle's original song "Who I Was Born To Be" was the theme song of anime film Welcome to the Space Show, which opened in Japan on 26 June 2010.


title: Susan Boyle

text: On 9 July 2010, Boyle announced that her second album would be a Christmas album entitled "The Gift". As part of the lead-up to the album, she held a competition called "Susan's Search", the winner of which sang a duet with her on her new CD. The album was released on 8 November 2010.


title: Susan Boyle

text: The album was produced by Steve Mac, who said that "Now Susan's used to the studio and the recording process, this time round we might go even further down a traditional route of recording by getting a band together and rehearsing songs before we go into the studio to see what works, how she reacts with certain parts, and so we can change the arrangements that way. I think that's going to work much better...With Susan it's very important she connects with the public and the public connect with her. She doesn't want to sing anything that hasn't happened to her or she can't relate to."


title: Susan Boyle

text: In November 2010, Boyle became one of only three acts ever to top both the UK and US album charts twice in the same year.


title: Susan Boyle

text: On 30 November 2010, in the United States, Boyle performed on ABC's "The View" singing "O Holy Night" and then on NBC's "Christmas at Rockefeller Center" program performing "Perfect Day" and "Away in a Manger".


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle performed on the second semi-final results show of the sixth season of "America's Got Talent", which aired on 31 August 2011.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle released her fourth album "" in November 2012. She reportedly took piano lessons as she planned on playing it for the album. A reporter told "The Sun" "Susan loves the piano and always dreamed of being able to reach a standard which would allow her to play on stage and on her albums." In October 2012 renowned opera star Placido Domingo released his album "Songs" which included a duet with Boyle of Shania Twain's "From This Moment On".


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle made her first acting appearance as Eleanor Hopewell in "The Christmas Candle". The film is based on a book written by author Max Lucado about a 19th-century village of simple people in the English Cotswolds in need of a miracle. The film was released on 22 November 2013 in the US and 29 November 2013 in the UK. Talking about her first acting role, Boyle said, "I can't believe I'm making a film. I'm very excited to be a part of "The Christmas Candle". Everyone on set is a delight to work with and it's a fantastic experience to be part of the team." In the movie Boyle sings an original song, "Miracle Hymn", the anthem for the film and a track from her album "Home for Christmas", which also featured a duet with Elvis Presley singing "O Come All Ye Faithful". The album was released on 29 October 2013 in the US. Previously in television, Boyle starred as herself in "" and in a 2011 documentary titled "". Boyle also starred in a second documentary titled "There's Something About Susan" in the UK, which first aired on ITV on 12 December 2013. It aired in the US on Ovation Channel under the title "Susan Boyle Her Secret Struggle" with the premiere on 9 April 2014. In October 2013 American vocalist Johnny Mathis released an album titled "Sending You a Little Christmas". The album includes "Do You Hear What I Hear?" a duet performed with Boyle.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle released her sixth album, "Hope", in October 2014 in the US and in November 2014 in the UK. The album, whose theme is hope and inspiration, includes a recorded live performance by Boyle of "You Raise Me Up" with the Lakewood Church choir. "Hope" mostly contains renditions of classic ballad song, as well as uptempo songs themed around inspiration and hope as Boyle sees those as the "two elements we all need in our life to drive us forward and inspire us to go out and capture our dreams; they worked for me after all." Boyle stated that "I have really enjoyed making this album. I had a huge input in music suggestions and finally have been able to record one of my all time favourites, "Angel", originally by Sarah Mclachlan. I also am pleased to be able to sing some uptempo songs that show variation in my repertoire."


title: Susan Boyle

text: The album debuted at number 16 on the "Billboard" 200 in the United States, becoming Susan Boyle's sixth consecutive top 20 album there. The album spent 35 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Top Inspirational Albums chart. It has sold 115,000 copies in the United States .


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle performing at the 2014 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony in Glasgow, Scotland, performing "Mull of Kintyre" upon the arrival of the Head of the Commonwealth, HRH Queen Elizabeth II.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Following the release of previous album, "Hope" in 2014, Boyle took a break during 2015 to "take a little me time and spend time at home with family and friends", and thus the recording of her seventh studio album was postponed to 2016. In October 2016, Boyle announced the release of "A Wonderful World".


title: Susan Boyle

text: In September 2018, Boyle was confirmed to be a contestant in "". When asked why she joined the competition, she stated that she wanted to win this time. She performed on 7 January 2019, singing "Wild Horses" from her 2009 debut album "I Dreamed a Dream" and received a golden buzzer from judge Mel B. She progressed straight to the finals where she sang the song "I Dreamed a Dream" from her original audition back in 2009, but failed to finish in the top five.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle's eighth studio album, "Ten", was released on 31 May 2019 and features a duet with Michael Ball on the track "A Million Dreams".


title: Susan Boyle

text: Websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have been crucial in facilitating Boyle's rapid rise to fame. The most popular YouTube video submission of her audition garnered nearly 2.5 million views in the first 72 hours. On the day following the performance, the YouTube video was the most popular article on Digg and made the front page of Reddit. Within a week, the audition performance had been viewed more than 66 million times, setting an online record, while on Wikipedia her biography attracted nearly half a million page views. A total of 103 million video views on 20 different websites was reached within nine days. The "Los Angeles Times" wrote that her popularity on YouTube may in part be due to the broad range of emotion packed into a short clip which was "perfect for the Internet". In December 2009, her audition was named the most-watched YouTube video of the year, with over 120 million viewings, more than three times higher than the second-most-popular video.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Additionally, Boyle's first on-camera interview with Scots journalist Richard Mooney for her local newspaper the "West Lothian Courier" was named as YouTube's Most Memorable Video of 2009. The video went viral after being uploaded to YouTube on 14 April 2009, amassing more than 5.4 million views as of November 2022.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Many newspapers around the world (including China, Brazil and the Middle East) carried articles on Boyle's performance. Later, the British press took to referring to her by a short-form of her name, 'SuBo'. In the US, several commentators drew parallels between Boyle's performance and that of Paul Potts. "ABC News" hailed "Britain's newest pop sensation", and its Entertainment section headlined Boyle as "The Woman Who Shut Up Simon Cowell".


title: Susan Boyle

text: Within the week following her performance on "Britain's Got Talent", Boyle was a guest on STV's "The Five Thirty Show". She was interviewed via satellite on CBS's "The Early Show", NBC's Today, FOX's "America's Newsroom", The Oprah Winfrey Show, and via satellite on "Larry King Live"; she was also portrayed in drag by Jay Leno, who joked that they were related through his mother's Scottish heritage.


title: Susan Boyle

text: At the invitation of NHK, a major Japanese broadcaster, Boyle appeared as a guest singer for the 2009 edition of Kōhaku Uta Gassen, an annual songfest on New Year's Eve in Tokyo, Japan. She was introduced as the by the MCs and appeared on the stage escorted by Takuya Kimura; she sang "I Dreamed a Dream".


title: Susan Boyle

text: Although Boyle was not eligible for the 2010 Grammy Awards, its host Stephen Colbert paid tribute to Boyle at the ceremony, telling its audience "you may be the coolest people in the world, but this year your industry was saved by a 48-year-old Scottish cat lady in sensible shoes." There was also earlier controversy when Boyle was not nominated in any of the categories for the 2010 Brit Awards.


title: Susan Boyle

text: A stage musical of Boyle's life was originally planned with Boyle appearing as herself. She said she hated "having to sit watching people up there" who are actors. However it was later decided that actress Elaine C. Smith would portray her and that Boyle would join the cast of "I Dreamed a Dream" for a cameo appearance.


title: Susan Boyle

text: "I Dreamed a Dream" opened on 27 March 2012 with fans from all over the world occupying the Theatre Royal, Newcastle, for the opening week. The musical received generally warm reviews. The musical toured the UK and Ireland in 2012.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle said she was initially upset by the show, because she was "not used to it". She called it "surreal", but later changed her mind and found it "clever and amusing".


title: Susan Boyle

text: Fox Searchlight has bought life rights to Boyle along with rights to the musical "I Dreamed a Dream". Fox plans to develop a film version of the musical.


title: Susan Boyle

text: "The Huffington Post" noted that the producers of the show would have anticipated the potential of this story arc by deliberately presenting Boyle in a manner that would enhance this initial reaction. "The Herald" described Boyle's story as a modern parable and a rebuke to people's tendency to judge others based on their physical appearance. Similarly, "Entertainment Weekly" said that Boyle's performance was a victory for talent and artistry in a culture obsessed with physical attractiveness and presentation. In an interview with "The Washington Post", Boyle said:


title: Susan Boyle

text: "The Washington Post" believed that her initial demeanour and homely appearance caused the judges and audience to be "waiting for her to squawk like a duck". New York's "Daily News" said that an underdog being ridiculed or humiliated but then enjoying an unexpected triumph is a common trope in literature, and the stark contrast between the audience's low expectations and the quality of her singing made Boyle's performance such an engaging piece of television.


title: Susan Boyle

text: R.M. Campbell, music critic for "The Gathering Note," compared Boyle to iconic American jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, who had a long and distinguished career despite being overweight: "[it is] really, really hard to make a career if a woman isn't attractive". In another "Huffington Post" article, Letty Cottin Pogrebin wrote that although people may "weep for the years of wasted talent", Boyle's performance was a triumph for "women of a certain age" over a youth culture that often dismisses middle-aged women. Tanya Gold wrote in "The Guardian" that the difference between Boyle's hostile reception and the more neutral response to Paul Potts in his first audition reflected society's expectation that women be both good-looking and talented, with no such expectation existing for men. Los Angeles vocal coach Eric Vetro stated, "She's an Everywoman as opposed to an untouchable fantasy goddess, so maybe that's why people react to her."


title: Susan Boyle

text: Several media sources have commented that Boyle's success seemed to have particular resonance in the United States. An American entertainment correspondent was quoted in "The Scotsman" comparing Boyle's story to the American Dream, as representing talent overcoming adversity and poverty. The Associated Press described this as Boyle's "hardscrabble story", dwelling on her modest lifestyle and what they characterised as urban deprivation in her home town. Similarly, "The Independent"s New York correspondent David Usborne wrote that the United States will always respond to "the fairy tale where the apparently unprepossessing suddenly becomes pretty, from "Shrek" to "My Fair Lady"".


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle still lives in the family home, a four-bedroom ex-council house in Blackburn, which she purchased from her earnings in 2010. Her father died in the 1990s, and her eight siblings had left home. Boyle has never married, and she dedicated herself to caring for her ageing mother until her death in 2007 at the age of 91. A neighbour reported that when Bridget Boyle died, her daughter "wouldn't come out for three or four days or answer the door or phone". Boyle is a practising Roman Catholic and sang in her church choir at her church in Blackburn. Boyle remains active as a volunteer at her church, visiting elderly members of the congregation in their homes. On a 2010 episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show", Boyle summarised that her daily life was "mundane" and "routine" prior to stardom.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In 2012, Boyle was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. She made her diagnosis public in a BBC interview in December 2013.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In November 2012, when asked if she had tried to find love through Internet dating, Boyle said she was too scared, saying: "Knowing my luck I'd go out on a date and you'd find my limbs scattered around various Blackburn dustbins!"


title: Susan Boyle

text: In July 2013, Boyle endorsed the Better Together campaign to keep Scotland as part of the United Kingdom in the 2014 independence referendum. In so doing, she stated, "I am a proud, patriotic Scot, passionate about my heritage and my country. But I am not a nationalist", going on to say, "We have still been able to retain our proud identity whilst being a part of Britain."


title: Susan Boyle

text: In November 2014, it was reported that Boyle was dating her first boyfriend, who was "around the same age" as she was.


title: Susan Boyle

text: On 26 January 2010, Boyle sang together with other major artists on the charity recording "Everybody Hurts" put together by Simon Cowell for Haiti Relief for the victims of the Haiti earthquake. On 30 January 2010, Boyle performed at the Indsamling Charity Gala, a telethon for Haiti and Africa held at the Tivoli Concert Hall in Copenhagen, Denmark.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Boyle has appeared on the three major UK charity telethons. On 19 March 2010 she sang for the Sports Relief charity on BBC1. On 18 March 2011 she sang a duet of "I Know Him So Well" with Peter Kay on the BBC's Comic Relief; in addition to the television performance, the duet was sold on CD, DVD, and MP3 download to raise more money for charity. The CD was #21 on the all-time Comic Relief CDs sold. She has performed for BBC Children in Need telethon five times thus far: on 19 November 2010; on 18 November 2011, and on 16 November 2012. on 16 November 2013. on 14 November 2014.


title: Susan Boyle

text: On 10 November 2010, Boyle performed at the Pride of Britain Awards in London. On 19 March 2011 in Glasgow at the Scottish Variety Awards Boyle performed; the money raised was donated to Cash for Kids Charity.


title: Susan Boyle

text: On 28 August 2013 Boyle travelled down with the Lothian Special Olympics Team to the Special Olympics Great Britain National Summer games in Bath. In the evening she performed at the Opening Ceremony of the Special Olympics GB at the Royal Crescent in Bath, England and also stayed to watch the events and hand out medals to the first day's winners.


title: Susan Boyle

text: On 14 August 2013 it was announced that Boyle would sing at the Prince & Princess of Wales Hospice 30th Anniversary Variety Performance at the Clyde Auditorium in Glasgow on 27 October 2013.


title: Susan Boyle

text: On 16 September 2010 Boyle sang at the Papal Mass performed for Pope Benedict XVI in Glasgow at Bellahouston Park in front of a crowd of 65,000.


title: Susan Boyle

text: For three years Boyle has launched the Wee Box campaign for the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (SCIAF) in Glasgow, on 9 March 2011, on 21 February 2012, and on 12 February 2013.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In May 2012 it was reported that Boyle would become patron of the struggling Regal Theatre, Bathgate where she first performed "I Dreamed a Dream".


title: Susan Boyle

text: On 24 October 2012 Boyle, together with the West of Scotland and Edinburgh Garrison Military Wives choirs, launched the Poppy Scotland appeal on the steps of the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In January 2012, Boyle donated a performance dress, which she had worn on "America's Got Talent" on 31 August 2011, to The Laura McPhee Memorial Fund (Asthma) UK Charity. The dress was sold at auction for £521 and helped raise awareness of the charity.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In July 2012 Boyle donated a performance dress designed by Suzanne Neville, which she had worn at performances in Madrid on the "Ana Rosa Show" on 12 February 2010 and in Paris on "Vivement Dimanche" on 17 February 2010. £6,523 was raised and presented to the Prince's Trust.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Also in June 2013 Boyle donated for auction a performance dress which she had worn on "The Oprah Show" on 19 October 2010, with proceeds of the auction going to Metro Radio Newcastle England's Cash For Kids Campaign, with all funds raised going to disadvantaged kids across the region. The winning bid was £400.


title: Susan Boyle

text: Prior to performing at the International Music Festival "White Nights of St. Petersburg", at the Ice Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, on 13 June 2013, Boyle visited Children's Hospital Number 17 and presented to the hospital a gift of an anesthetic machine.


title: Susan Boyle

text: It was announced 28 October 2013 that Boyle is a new ambassador for Save the Children UK. Boyle released a music video 8 December 2013 featuring children from the FAST program singing "O Come All Ye Faithful" with Elvis Presley. All royalties will go towards Save the Children UK and money raised in the US will be donated to the Elvis Presley Charitable Foundation.


title: Susan Boyle

text: The "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" show aired a comedy sketch showing the "feel good" effect that Boyle's performance has had on people.


title: Susan Boyle

text: "The Simpsons" aired a new commercial for its 20th-anniversary show "Springfield's Got Talent", in which Homer Simpson talks about his dreams "to be a great singer like Boyle".


title: Susan Boyle

text: In June 2009, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a short story called "I Dreamed a Dream" that was based on a combination of Boyle's appearances on "Britain's Got Talent" and the political difficulties of the then UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.


title: Susan Boyle

text: The 5 November 2009 episode of the show "30 Rock" showed recurring character Kathy Geiss (Marceline Hugot) – who has a dowdy appearance and awkward demeanor – singing in the style of Boyle as Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy teared up.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In the "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" episode “Return of the King”, main character Charles Boyle mentions a cousin named Susan, who didn’t know she could sing until her late 40s, hinting that said cousin is Boyle herself.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In 2012 Boyle was awarded an honorary doctorate for her contribution to the creative industries from Edinburgh's Queen Margaret University, where she obtained a Certificate of Higher Education in caring.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In 2015 Boyle was awarded an honorary doctorate in the field of music from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow.


title: Susan Boyle

text: In September 2010 Boyle was presented with three Guinness World Records which were featured in the Guinness World Records 2011 edition published 16 September 2010. The three records were for Fastest-selling Album by a Female (UK), Most Successful First Week UK Debut Album Sales, as well as Oldest Artist to Reach No. 1 with a Debut Album (US & UK).


title: Susan Boyle

text: On 20 November 2010 Boyle achieved another World Record for Oldest Female at No. 1 on UK Albums Chart with her second album "The Gift".


title: Susan Boyle

text: On 20 November 2010 Boyle received two other Guinness World Records due to the success of "The Gift", one record being "Only British female artist to top both the US and UK album charts with two releases" and the other being "Most successful Christmas album in the UK" – "On 20 November 2010, Susan Boyle's (UK) album The Gift became the first Christmas album to ever top the UK chart."


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Daniel Coulter Reynolds (born July 14, 1987) is an American singer and songwriter. He is the lead vocalist of the pop rock band Imagine Dragons. Reynolds also released an EP in 2011, titled "Egyptian – EP," as a duo with his former wife Aja Volkman under the moniker Egyptian. He is a recipient of the Songwriters Hall of Fame Hal David Starlight Award.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Reynolds was born in Las Vegas, the seventh of nine children (eight boys and one girl) of Christene M. (née Callister) and Ronald Reynolds, a lawyer and author. Both are natives of Nevada, and Reynolds is a 4th generation Nevadan. As a Boy Scout he earned the rank of Eagle Scout in 2005. Reynolds was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). When he was 19 years old he volunteered full-time as a missionary in Nebraska for two years.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Reynolds wrote the song "I Bet My Life" celebrating and reflecting on his enduring relationship with his parents. Following his graduation from Bonanza High School, he attended University of Nevada, Las Vegas (after losing his ecclesiastical endorsement for Brigham Young University) and then transferred to BYU after serving an LDS mission, where he studied communications, marketing, and music and excelled academically. While at BYU, he formed Imagine Dragons and won the school's battle of the bands competition before leaving to pursue music full-time.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Reynolds was initially reluctant to become a professional musician, partially because future bandmate Wayne Sermon had once told him: "Don't do music because you want to do music - do music if you have to do music". After he began attending Brigham Young University, Reynolds found that he could not "do anything else" and committed fully to a professional music career. In Utah, Reynolds met and recruited drummer Andrew Tolman to form Imagine Dragons. With Reynolds as lead vocalist, Imagine Dragons won BYU's "Battle of the Bands" and other local competitions. Bassist Ben McKee joined the band in Las Vegas and after Tolman's departure 2011 invited Daniel Platzman, also a friend of Wayne's from Berklee College of Music, to play drums, thus completing the group's current lineup. The band relocated to Las Vegas, where they began performing almost nightly as a lounge act. It was there in 2009 that they caught their first big break when Train's frontman, Pat Monahan, fell sick just prior to the Bite of Las Vegas Festival. Imagine Dragons were called to fill in for them and performed in front of a crowd of more than 26,000 people. In November 2011, they signed with Interscope Records and began working with Grammy award-winning producer Alex da Kid.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Imagine Dragons released their debut studio album "Night Visions" on September 4, 2012. The album was preceded by their first single "It's Time", released on August 18, 2012. "Night Visions" charted in the top ten albums in the U.S. in 2012, 2013, and 2014. It won a Billboard Music Award for Top Rock Album and was nominated for a Juno Award for International Album of the Year. The album's second single, "Radioactive", reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. "Radioactive" set the all-time record for the longest reign at the top of the Billboard Rock Songs chart, with 23 consecutive weeks. It also broke the all-time record for longest run on the Billboard Hot 100, with 87 weeks, a record that would remain unbroken until The Weeknd's smash single “Blinding Lights” charted for an 88th week on the Billboard Hot 100 in August 2021. "Rolling Stone" called it "the biggest rock hit of the year". It is the best-selling rock song in digital history, with sales of more than 7.5 million copies in the United States, and was certified diamond by the RIAA. The third single, "Demons", reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is the eighth best-selling rock song in digital history with sales in excess of 5 million copies in the United States. Imagine Dragons were nominated for two Grammy Awards, Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance; they won the latter. They also won two AMAs for Favorite Alternative Artist, a Teen Choice Award for Choice Rock Group, a World Music Award for World's Best Rock Act, and a Billboard Music Award for Top Rock Artist. The band made their major festival headlining debut at the Made In America Music Festival in 2014 and also drew large crowds and positive reviews at festivals such as Lollapalooza Brazil in 2014.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Imagine Dragons released their second album, "Smoke + Mirrors," in February 2015. "Smoke + Mirrors" debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, UK Albums Chart, and Canadian Albums Chart. Two of the album's four singles, "I Bet My Life" and "Shots", charted on the Billboard Hot 100.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Imagine Dragons released their third album "Evolve" on June 23, 2017. "Evolve" debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Canadian Albums Chart. Singles "Believer", "Thunder", and "Whatever It Takes", each of which have charted at number 4, number 4, and number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, respectively. Believer topped the "Billboard" Hot Rock Songs (29 weeks), Alternative Songs (13 weeks), and Adult Top 40 charts. Thunder also topped the "Billboard" Hot Rock Songs (22 weeks so far) and Alternative Songs chart (3 weeks so far), as well as the Mainstream Top 40 chart. Whatever It Takes topped the "Billboard" Rock Songs chart (17 weeks so far) and Alternative Songs chart (3 weeks). In 2018, the band was nominated for two more Grammy Awards and received the iHeartRadio Music Award for Alternative Rock Artists of the Year.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Imagine Dragons released their fourth studio album "Origins" on November 9, 2018. The album debuted at number two on the Billboard 200. The singles "Natural" and "Bad Liar" peaked at number #13 and #56 on the Billboard Hot 100 respectively.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Imagine Dragons released their fifth studio album "Mercury - Act 1" on September 3, 2021. The album debuted at number nine on the Billboard 200. The single "Follow You" peaked at number #68 on the Billboard Hot 100.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Reynolds was invited to perform an opening set for Nico Vega in 2010; this was when he met Aja Volkman, the group's lead singer. He asked her to help him finish some demos he was developing. The two began collaborating, and formed Egyptian. They recorded, produced, and independently released a four track eponymous EP digitally. They have only performed this material once live.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: In 2013, Reynolds discovered the unsigned alternative band X Ambassadors. After connecting with the band, he brokered a record deal for them with KidinaKorner/Interscope Records. Dan co-wrote a few songs on their debut album "VHS", which has gone on to achieve Platinum certification by the RIAA.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: In 2016, Reynolds formed Night Street Records, an imprint label under Interscope Records. His first signing was alternative hip-hop artist K.Flay.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: He organized the charity festival LOVELOUD, held August 26, 2017 in Orem, to "fight against teen suicide and to bring communities [...] and encourage acceptance" of LGBTQ youth. The concert donated the profits to LGBT organizations The Trevor Project, GLAAD, and others. Performing acts included Imagine Dragons, Neon Trees, Krewella, Joshua James, and Nicholas Petricca (of Walk the Moon). The film "Believer", centering on LGBTQ youth suicides in Utah, and the LOVELOUD concert, premiered at Sundance on January 20, 2018, and on HBO on June 25, 2018.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: A second LOVELOUD festival was held on July 28, 2018, at Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City. Acts included Imagine Dragons, Zedd, Mike Shinoda (of Linkin Park), Grace VanderWaal, Tyler Glenn (of Neon Trees), Vagabon, A.W., and Cameron Esposito. An estimated 35,000 people attended the 2018 event and raised approximately a million dollars for the various charities. The event was live streamed for free on YouTube, sponsored by AT&T. During his appearance at the 2018 festival, Utah's Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox announced Governor Gary Herbert's declaration of July 28, 2018, as "LoveLoud Day in Utah."


title: Dan Reynolds

text: The third LOVELOUD festival occurred on June 29, 2019, at USANA Amphitheater in West Valley City. In addition to Reynolds, featured performers included Kesha, Daya, Tegan & Sara, PVRIS, K. Flay, and many others. Martin Garrix was also originally booked to perform; however, due to an injury, was unable to attend the festival. In his absence, Indie Pop band AJR made an appearance and entertained fans with hits such as 100 Bad Days, Weak, Burn the House Down, and Don't Throw Out My Legos. Former BYU mascot and dancer, Charlie Bird, also performed a choreographed number along with some dancers from the BYU Cougarettes. Other notable speakers included Reynold's wife, Aja Volkman, Shannon Beveridge and X González.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Reynolds cites Arcade Fire, Nirvana, Muse, The Beatles, Paul Simon, Coldplay, Linkin Park, Harry Nilsson, and U2 as some of his and the band's artistic influences. He credits bands like Foster the People and Mumford & Sons for bringing alternative pop music to a new level of commercial success in recent years.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: On March 5, 2011, Reynolds married Aja Volkman. The two have three daughters and a son. Their first daughter was born on August 18, 2012. Their fraternal twin daughters were born on March 28, 2017. Their son was born on October 1, 2019.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: On April 26, 2018, Reynolds announced that after just over seven years of being married, he and Volkman would divorce. However, on November 7, 2018, Reynolds announced, along with the release of the Imagine Dragons song "Bad Liar", that he and Volkman never went through with the divorce, that she helped co-write the song with him earlier in the year, and they were together once again. However, on September 16, 2022, Reynolds announced that he and Volkman were again separating.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Reynolds suffers from ankylosing spondylitis, which he announced at Leeds First Direct Arena in 2015 during the band's Smoke + Mirrors tour. In 2016 he partnered with Novartis's ThisASLife to raise awareness about the severe inflammatory disease. During the same year, Reynolds said in an interview that he had been heavily depressed for the past two years and often sees a therapist. He has also suffered from ulcerative colitis since the age of 21. Many songs on "Night Visions" were inspired by his depression. He aims to destigmatize and change how society sees depression and the act of seeking professional help. In April 2018, he began to talk about his physical and mental health struggles on his social media accounts and continues to offer encouraging messages of support to his fans and others struggling as well.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Reynolds and his mother Christene appear in the Paramount+ series "From Cradle to Stage", hosted by Dave Grohl and his mother Virginia Hanlon Grohl. The Reynolds episode aired on May 6, 2021.


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Reynolds grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, identified as a member as of 2019, and stated he had doctrinal disagreements with the church's stance on homosexuality. During a 2021 interview with "Attitude" he described himself as "non-Mormon"; the following month, he stated "I'm not raising my kids in any religiousness if that means anything. I'm more spiritual based and religion hasn't really been my cup of tea."


title: Dan Reynolds

text: Since 2013, Imagine Dragons along with the family of Tyler Robinson formed and support The Tyler Robinson Foundation, helping young people battling cancer. During the foundation's 2018 annual gala, it raised $2.1 million to support young people battling cancer. Imagine Dragons have also partnered with Do The Write Thing: National Campaign to Stop Violence (presided over by Reynolds' uncle), Amnesty International's "Bringing Human Rights Home", OneOrlando Fund's "All Is One Orlando Unity Concert", and Crackle's "Playing It Forward" (S1 E2).


title: Dan Reynolds

text: In 2015, Imagine Dragons released the track "I Was Me" with all proceeds going to the One4 project to help fleeing refugees, particularly in the Middle East. He also helped organize the LoveLoud Fest to benefit LGBTQ organizations.


title: Film noir

text: Film noir (; ) is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and motivations. The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American "film noir". Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key, black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography. Many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Great Depression.


title: Film noir

text: The term "film noir", French for 'black film' (literal) or 'dark film' (closer meaning), was first applied to Hollywood films by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, but was unrecognized by most American film industry professionals of that era. Frank is believed to have been inspired by the French literary publishing imprint Série noire, founded in 1945.


title: Film noir

text: Cinema historians and critics defined the category retrospectively. Before the notion was widely adopted in the 1970s, many of the classic films noir were referred to as "melodramas". Whether film noir qualifies as a distinct genre or whether it is more of a filmmaking style is a matter of ongoing debate among scholars.


title: Film noir

text: Film noir encompasses a range of plots: the central figure may be a private investigator ("The Big Sleep"), a plainclothes police officer ("The Big Heat"), an aging boxer ("The Set-Up"), a hapless grifter ("Night and the City"), a law-abiding citizen lured into a life of crime ("Gun Crazy"), or simply a victim of circumstance ("D.O.A."). Although film noir was originally associated with American productions, the term has been used to describe films from around the world. Many films released from the 1960s onward share attributes with films noir of the classical period, and often treat its conventions self-referentially. Some refer to such latter-day works as neo-noir. The clichés of film noir have inspired parody since the mid-1940s.


title: Film noir

text: The questions of what defines film noir, and what sort of category it is, provoke continuing debate. "We'd be oversimplifying things in calling film noir oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel ..."—this set of attributes constitutes the first of many attempts to define film noir made by French critics and Étienne Chaumeton in their 1955 book "Panorama du film noir américain 1941–1953" ("A Panorama of American Film Noir"), the original and seminal extended treatment of the subject. They emphasize that not every film noir embodies all five attributes in equal measure—one might be more dreamlike; another, particularly brutal. The authors' caveats and repeated efforts at alternative definition have been echoed in subsequent scholarship: in the more than five decades since, there have been innumerable further attempts at definition, yet in the words of cinema historian Mark Bould, film noir remains an "elusive phenomenon ... always just out of reach".


title: Film noir

text: Though film noir is often identified with a visual style, unconventional within a Hollywood context, that emphasizes low-key lighting and unbalanced compositions, films commonly identified as noir evidence a variety of visual approaches, including ones that fit comfortably within the Hollywood mainstream. Film noir similarly embraces a variety of genres, from the gangster film to the police procedural to the gothic romance to the social problem picture—any example of which from the 1940s and 1950s, now seen as noir's classical era, was likely to be described as a melodrama at the time.


title: Film noir

text: While many critics refer to film noir as a genre itself, others argue that it can be no such thing. Foster Hirsch defines a genre as determined by "conventions of narrative structure, characterization, theme, and visual design". Hirsch, as one who has taken the position that film noir is a genre, argues that these elements are present "in abundance". Hirsch notes that there are unifying features of tone, visual style and narrative sufficient to classify noir as a distinct genre.


title: Film noir

text: Others argue that film noir is not a genre. Film noir is often associated with an urban setting, but many classic noirs take place in small towns, suburbia, rural areas, or on the open road; setting, therefore, cannot be its genre determinant, as with the Western. Similarly, while the private eye and the femme fatale are stock character types conventionally identified with noir, the majority of films noir feature neither; so there is no character basis for genre designation as with the gangster film. Nor does film noir rely on anything as evident as the monstrous or supernatural elements of the horror film, the speculative leaps of the science fiction film, or the song-and-dance routines of the musical.


title: Film noir

text: An analogous case is that of the screwball comedy, widely accepted by film historians as constituting a "genre": the screwball is defined not by a fundamental attribute, but by a general disposition and a group of elements, some—but rarely and perhaps never all—of which are found in each of the genre's films. Because of the diversity of noir (much greater than that of the screwball comedy), certain scholars in the field, such as film historian Thomas Schatz, treat it as not a genre but a "style". Alain Silver, the most widely published American critic specializing in film noir studies, refers to film noir as a "cycle" and a "phenomenon", even as he argues that it has—like certain genres—a consistent set of visual and thematic codes. Screenwriter Eric R. Williams labels both film noir and screwball comedy a "pathway" in his screenwriters taxonomy; explaining that a pathway has two parts: 1) the way the audience connects with the protagonist and 2) the trajectory the audience expects the story to follow. Other critics treat film noir as a "mood", characterize it as a "series", or simply address a chosen set of films they regard as belonging to the noir "canon". There is no consensus on the matter.


title: Film noir

text: The aesthetics of film noir were influenced by German Expressionism, an artistic movement of the 1910s and 1920s that involved theater, music, photography, painting, sculpture and architecture, as well as cinema. The opportunities offered by the booming Hollywood film industry and then the threat of Nazism led to the emigration of many film artists working in Germany who had been involved in the Expressionist movement or studied with its practitioners. "M" (1931), shot only a few years before director Fritz Lang's departure from Germany, is among the first crime films of the sound era to join a characteristically noirish visual style with a noir-type plot, in which the protagonist is a criminal (as are his most successful pursuers). Directors such as Lang, Jacques Tourneur, Robert Siodmak and Michael Curtiz brought a dramatically shadowed lighting style and a psychologically expressive approach to visual composition ("mise-en-scène") with them to Hollywood, where they made some of the most famous classic noirs.


title: Film noir

text: By 1931, Curtiz had already been in Hollywood for half a decade, making as many as six films a year. Movies of his such as "20,000 Years in Sing Sing" (1932) and "Private Detective 62" (1933) are among the early Hollywood sound films arguably classifiable as noir—scholar Marc Vernet offers the latter as evidence that dating the initiation of film noir to 1940 or any other year is "arbitrary". Expressionism-orientated filmmakers had free stylistic rein in Universal horror pictures such as "Dracula" (1931), "The Mummy" (1932)—the former photographed and the latter directed by the Berlin-trained Karl Freund—and "The Black Cat" (1934), directed by Austrian émigré Edgar G. Ulmer. The Universal horror film that comes closest to noir, in story and sensibility, is "The Invisible Man" (1933), directed by Englishman James Whale and photographed by American Arthur Edeson. Edeson later photographed "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), widely regarded as the first major film noir of the classic era.


title: Film noir

text: Josef von Sternberg was directing in Hollywood during the same period. Films of his such as "Shanghai Express" (1932) and "The Devil Is a Woman" (1935), with their hothouse eroticism and baroque visual style anticipated central elements of classic noir. The commercial and critical success of Sternberg's silent "Underworld" (1927) was largely responsible for spurring a trend of Hollywood gangster films. Successful films in that genre such as "Little Caesar" (1931), "The Public Enemy" (1931) and "Scarface" (1932) demonstrated that there was an audience for crime dramas with morally reprehensible protagonists. An important, possibly influential, cinematic antecedent to classic noir was 1930s French poetic realism, with its romantic, fatalistic attitude and celebration of doomed heroes. The movement's sensibility is mirrored in the Warner Bros. drama "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" (1932), a forerunner of noir. Among films not considered noir, perhaps none had a greater effect on the development of the genre than "Citizen Kane" (1941), directed by Orson Welles. Its visual intricacy and complex, voiceover narrative structure are echoed in dozens of classic films noir.


title: Film noir

text: Italian neorealism of the 1940s, with its emphasis on quasi-documentary authenticity, was an acknowledged influence on trends that emerged in American noir. "The Lost Weekend" (1945), directed by Billy Wilder, another Vienna-born, Berlin-trained American auteur, tells the story of an alcoholic in a manner evocative of neorealism. It also exemplifies the problem of classification: one of the first American films to be described as a film noir, it has largely disappeared from considerations of the field. Director Jules Dassin of "The Naked City" (1948) pointed to the neorealists as inspiring his use of location photography with non-professional extras. This semidocumentary approach characterized a substantial number of noirs in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Along with neorealism, the style had an American precedent cited by Dassin, in director Henry Hathaway's "The House on 92nd Street" (1945), which demonstrated the parallel influence of the cinematic newsreel.


title: Film noir

text: The primary literary influence on film noir was the hardboiled school of American detective and crime fiction, led in its early years by such writers as Dashiell Hammett (whose first novel, "Red Harvest", was published in 1929) and James M. Cain (whose "The Postman Always Rings Twice" appeared five years later), and popularized in pulp magazines such as "Black Mask". The classic film noirs "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) and "The Glass Key" (1942) were based on novels by Hammett; Cain's novels provided the basis for "Double Indemnity" (1944), "Mildred Pierce" (1945), "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1946), and "Slightly Scarlet" (1956; adapted from "Love's Lovely Counterfeit"). A decade before the classic era, a story by Hammett was the source for the gangster melodrama "City Streets" (1931), directed by Rouben Mamoulian and photographed by Lee Garmes, who worked regularly with Sternberg. Released the month before Lang's "M", "City Streets" has a claim to being the first major film noir; both its style and story had many noir characteristics.


title: Film noir

text: Raymond Chandler, who debuted as a novelist with "The Big Sleep" in 1939, soon became the most famous author of the hardboiled school. Not only were Chandler's novels turned into major noirs—"Murder, My Sweet" (1944; adapted from "Farewell, My Lovely"), "The Big Sleep" (1946), and "Lady in the Lake" (1947)—he was an important screenwriter in the genre as well, producing the scripts for "Double Indemnity", "The Blue Dahlia" (1946), and "Strangers on a Train" (1951). Where Chandler, like Hammett, centered most of his novels and stories on the character of the private eye, Cain featured less heroic protagonists and focused more on psychological exposition than on crime solving; the Cain approach has come to be identified with a subset of the hardboiled genre dubbed "noir fiction". For much of the 1940s, one of the most prolific and successful authors of this often downbeat brand of suspense tale was Cornell Woolrich (sometimes under the pseudonym George Hopley or William Irish). No writer's published work provided the basis for more films noir of the classic period than Woolrich's: thirteen in all, including "Black Angel" (1946), "Deadline at Dawn" (1946), and "Fear in the Night" (1947).


title: Film noir

text: Another crucial literary source for film noir was W. R. Burnett, whose first novel to be published was "Little Caesar", in 1929. It was turned into a hit for Warner Bros. in 1931; the following year, Burnett was hired to write dialogue for "Scarface", while "The Beast of the City" (1932) was adapted from one of his stories. At least one important reference work identifies the latter as a film noir despite its early date. Burnett's characteristic narrative approach fell somewhere between that of the quintessential hardboiled writers and their noir fiction compatriots—his protagonists were often heroic in their own way, which happened to be that of the gangster. During the classic era, his work, either as author or screenwriter, was the basis for seven films now widely regarded as films noir, including three of the most famous: "High Sierra" (1941), "This Gun for Hire" (1942), and "The Asphalt Jungle" (1950).


title: Film noir

text: The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the classic period of American film noir. While "City Streets" and other pre-WWII crime melodramas such as "Fury" (1936) and "You Only Live Once" (1937), both directed by Fritz Lang, are categorized as full-fledged noir in Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's film noir' encyclopedia, other critics tend to describe them as "proto-noir" or in similar terms.


title: Film noir

text: The film now most commonly cited as the first "true" film noir is "Stranger on the Third Floor" (1940), directed by Latvian-born, Soviet-trained Boris Ingster. Hungarian émigré Peter Lorre—who had starred in Lang's "M"—was top-billed, although he did not play the primary lead. (He later played secondary roles in several other formative American noirs.) Although modestly budgeted, at the high end of the B movie scale, "Stranger on the Third Floor" still lost its studio, RKO, US$56,000 (), almost a third of its total cost. "Variety" magazine found Ingster's work: "...too studied and when original, lacks the flare to hold attention. It's a film too arty for average audiences, and too humdrum for others." "Stranger on the Third Floor" was not recognized as the beginning of a trend, let alone a new genre, for many decades.


title: Film noir

text: Most film noirs of the classic period were similarly low- and modestly-budgeted features without major stars—B movies either literally or in spirit. In this production context, writers, directors, cinematographers, and other craftsmen were relatively free from typical big-picture constraints. There was more visual experimentation than in Hollywood filmmaking as a whole: the Expressionism now closely associated with noir and the semi-documentary style that later emerged represent two very different tendencies. Narrative structures sometimes involved convoluted flashbacks uncommon in non-noir commercial productions. In terms of content, enforcement of the Production Code ensured that no film character could literally get away with murder or be seen sharing a bed with anyone but a spouse; within those bounds, however, many films now identified as noir feature plot elements and dialogue that were very risqué for the time.


title: Film noir

text: Thematically, films noir were most exceptional for the relative frequency with which they centered on portrayals of women of questionable virtue—a focus that had become rare in Hollywood films after the mid-1930s and the end of the pre-Code era. The signal film in this vein was "Double Indemnity", directed by Billy Wilder; setting the mold was Barbara Stanwyck's unforgettable femme fatale, Phyllis Dietrichson—an apparent nod to Marlene Dietrich, who had built her extraordinary career playing such characters for Sternberg. An A-level feature, the film's commercial success and seven Oscar nominations made it probably the most influential of the early noirs. A slew of now-renowned noir "bad girls" followed, such as those played by Rita Hayworth in "Gilda" (1946), Lana Turner in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1946), Ava Gardner in "The Killers" (1946), and Jane Greer in "Out of the Past" (1947). The iconic noir counterpart to the femme fatale, the private eye, came to the fore in films such as "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), with Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, and "Murder, My Sweet" (1944), with Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe.