title: The Great Khali

text: Dalip Singh Rana (born 27 August 1972) is an Indian professional wrestler and wrestling promoter better known by his ring name The Great Khali. He is best known for his tenure in WWE where he became the first Indian-born WWE World Heavyweight Champion in history.


title: The Great Khali

text: Dalip Singh's famous achievements in WWE made him a national hero in India. In a country where cricket is the most popular sport, he created sensation by winning WWE championship in 2007, became one of the most famous athletes and a legend in India. WWE honoured Khali by inducting him in WWE Hall of Fame in 2021.


title: The Great Khali

text: He made his professional wrestling debut in 2000. Before embarking on his professional wrestling career, he was an of Punjab Police. He has appeared in four Hollywood films, two Bollywood films and several television shows. He is the founder and head coach of India's largest professional wrestling promotion, Continental Wrestling Entertainment, founded in 2015. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame as a member of the 2021 class.


title: The Great Khali

text: Rana was born in a Rajput Family to Jwala Ram and his wife Tandi Devi was also born in a Rajput family family in the Dhiraina village of Himachal Pradesh's Sirmaur district.


title: The Great Khali

text: One of seven siblings in a poor family, Rana had to do odd jobs to help his family make ends meet. He suffers from acromegaly, which among other symptoms causes gigantism and chin protrusion. When Rana was serving as a security guard in Shimla, he caught the eye of a police officer from the neighbouring State of Punjab who previously helped several employees of the Punjab Police to become international sportspersons"," got him employed into the Punjab Police in 1993. Although Rana was reluctant to leave Himachal Pradesh, his brother was also offered a job in the Punjab Police"," after his arrival in Punjab's Jalandhar, he trained in local gyms to become a wrestler and soon was selected for specialised wrestling training in the United States.


title: The Great Khali

text: Under the ring name Giant Singh he first became a professional wrestler for All Pro Wrestling (APW) in the United States, making his first appearance in October 2000 when teaming with Tony Jones against the West Side Playaz.


title: The Great Khali

text: When Rana came to San Francisco, he signed a contract with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and spent eight months there, until WCW was bought by their rival promotion, World Wrestling Federation (WWF).


title: The Great Khali

text: As Giant Singh, he received an offer from New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) by Team 2000 leader, Masahiro Chono, along with another big man, Giant Silva. They were the tallest tag team in professional wrestling history at an average height of 7 foot 1 inches and a combined weight of 805 pounds, teaming up for the first time at the Tokyo Dome in October when labelled as Club 7 by Chono defeated Hiroshi Tanahashi, Kenzo Suzuki, Wataru Inoue and Yutaka Yoshie in a handicap Match when Silva pinned Tanahashi and Inoue at the same time. Singh suffered his first loss in a tag team match at Wrestling World 2002 in January 2002 after Hiroyoshi Tenzan pinned him with a cradle. Singh suffered another big tag defeat during March, being pinned by Manabu Nakanishi after a German suplex pin, though his most critical loss came in August at Tokyo Nippon Budokan, when after a falling out he was pinned by Silva in a singles match.


title: The Great Khali

text: Starting in 2002, he also wrestled in the Mexican promotion Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL) and the Japanese promotion All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW) until 2006, when he signed with WWE.


title: The Great Khali

text: On 2 January 2006, Rana became the first Indian professional wrestler to be signed to a contract by World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). He was assigned to their developmental federation, Deep South Wrestling, where he wrestled under his real name.


title: The Great Khali

text: With Daivari as his manager, the unnamed Singh debuted on WWE television as a villain on 7 April episode of "SmackDown!", attacking The Undertaker and leaving him defenseless during his match with Mark Henry, thus causing a no contest ruling. The following week on "SmackDown!" he was introduced as The Great Khali and Daivari explained that he finally had a client who would destroy The Undertaker (after Muhammad Hassan and Mark Henry had previously failed). Khali made his in-ring debut on 21 April episode of "SmackDown!", defeating Funaki.


title: The Great Khali

text: On 12 May episode of "SmackDown!", Khali was John Bradshaw Layfield's hand-picked opponent against World Heavyweight Champion Rey Mysterio (Khali had a height advantage of 21 inches and weight advantage of 250 pounds) and defeated Mysterio in a squash match. In his match against The Undertaker at Judgment Day on 21 May, Khali defeated The Undertaker with a kick to the head after receiving some illegal help from Daivari. Khali continued on a rampage for several weeks, winning handicap matches, beating wrestlers up in a display of power and mocking The Undertaker's signature pin and victory pose.


title: The Great Khali

text: Khali then challenged The Undertaker to a Punjabi Prison match at The Great American Bash. However, Khali was not medically cleared to compete in the match and was replaced by Big Show, who lost despite Khali's interference. After he was medically cleared, Khali was challenged by The Undertaker to a Last Man Standing match at SummerSlam on 20 August. The match was moved to the "SmackDown!" just prior to SummerSlam and was won by The Undertaker, giving Khali his first definite loss in WWE.


title: The Great Khali

text: The Great Khali and Daivari were moved to the ECW brand officially when they made their ECW debuts on 31 October episode of "ECW on Sci Fi", when Daivari defeated "The Reject" Shannon Moore in a very quick match. Afterwards, Moore was manhandled by Khali. Daivari continued his ECW winning streak over the next several weeks with The Great Khali usually following up the contest with a chokebomb on Daivari's opponent. At December to Dismember on 3 December, Daivari got a victory over Tommy Dreamer following a roll-up. Dreamer then chased Daivari backstage, but Khali appeared and caught Dreamer, planting him on the steel ramp with a chokebomb.


title: The Great Khali

text: On 8 January 2007 episode of "Raw", Jonathan Coachman announced that Khali had signed with Raw (without Daivari, who stayed on ECW) and would wrestle John Cena in the main event, which Khali won by disqualification after Cena took a steel chair held by Armando Estrada and hit Khali with it, though after the match he performed a chokeslam on Cena and left the ringside area, leaving Cena prone to an attack by Umaga. On 19 February episode of "Raw", Khali demanded better competition after easily defeating The Highlanders. Four days later on "SmackDown!", Khali interfered in a Falls Count Anywhere Money in the Bank qualifying match between Kane and King Booker by costing Kane the match, leading to a feud culminating in a match at WrestleMania 23, which Khali won in his first appearance at WrestleMania after slamming Kane with the "Khali Bomb" and choking him with a hook and chain at the end of the match. On 30 April episode of "Raw", Khali attacked Edge, Randy Orton and Shawn Michaels (all three top contenders to the WWE Championship at the time) backstage. Khali then attacked WWE Champion John Cena as well, sending a message that he wanted Cena's title. The next week on "Raw", Khali defeated Michaels in a number-one contender's match for the WWE Championship at Judgment Day. At Judgment Day on 20 May, Khali lost via submission for the first time when tapping out to Cena's "STFU", though Khali's foot was under the rope and unnoticed by the referee. The next night on "Raw", Khali expressed outrage over the outcome via his new translator and manager, Ranjin Singh. At One Night Stand on 3 June, Khali lost to Cena in a Falls Count Anywhere match after he was hit with an "FU" off a crane bed, thus marking the first time Khali had been pinned in a singles match.


title: The Great Khali

text: On 11 June episode of "Raw", as part of the 2007 WWE draft, Khali was drafted to the SmackDown! brand as the brand's first draft pick. In July, Khali began a feud with Batista and the two were scheduled for a match at The Great American Bash. However, because Edge vacated the World Heavyweight Championship due to a legitimate injury, a 20-man battle royal was held for the title on 20 July edition of "SmackDown!", which Khali won after eliminating both Kane and Batista in one move, winning his first World Heavyweight Championship. Khali dominated and defeated both Batista and Kane in a triple-threat match at The Great American Bash on 22 July. Khali debuted a new finisher called the "Khali Vise Grip" (a two-handed clawhold) which he used to wear down Batista, Kane, and Ric Flair.


title: The Great Khali

text: At SummerSlam on 26 August, Khali lost by disqualification when he used a steel chair, but retained the title. Khali then began a feud with Rey Mysterio after Mysterio won a Championship Competition to become the number-one contender, leading Khali to apply his "Visa Grip" on Mysterio on 7 September episode of "SmackDown!" until Batista came to the rescue, with SmackDown General Manager Theodore Long informing Khali that he would have to defend the World Heavyweight Championship also against Batista in a triple threat match at Unforgiven on 16 September, where Khali's 61-day reign ended after receiving a spinebuster. Khali challenged Batista to a rematch in a Punjabi Prison match at No Mercy on 7 October, which Khali lost by failing to escape the Punjabi Prison before Batista.


title: The Great Khali

text: In late 2007 and early 2008, Khali was put in a program with Finlay usually trying to assault Hornswoggle, but with Finlay stopping him. Khali participated in the SmackDown Elimination Chamber match at No Way Out on 17 February, which was won by The Undertaker. At WrestleMania XXIV on 30 March, Khali participated in a 24-man battle royal to determine a challenger for ECW Champion Chavo Guerrero that evening, but the match was won by Kane. Khali then had a short feud with Big Show, culminating in a match at Backlash on 27 April, which Big Show won.


title: The Great Khali

text: In July, Khali feuded with Triple H over the WWE Championship and on 25 July episode of "SmackDown" he won a battle royal also involving Big Show, Jeff Hardy, Montel Vontavious Porter, Mr. Kennedy, and Umaga for the right to face Triple H at SummerSlam. At SummerSlam on 17 August, Khali lost to Triple H after receiving a "Pedigree". Khali was given another opportunity to win the WWE Championship when he faced Jeff Hardy to gain entry into the championship scramble at Unforgiven on 7 September, but Triple H interfered in the qualification match and aided Hardy with a chair shot to Khali, helping Hardy win and eliminating Khali from title contention.


title: The Great Khali

text: On 3 October, daredevil Johnny Knoxville aired an interview with Khali and his translator on his website, jackassworld.com, but when Knoxville asked about Khali's "taliwacker" he became upset and threatened to tip the interview table onto Knoxville. Khali later invited Knoxville to attend 13 October episode of "Raw", where Knoxville was attacked by Khali, WWE Diva Beth Phoenix and Hornswoggle. Khali then took on a more fun persona and became a fan favourite when he and Ranjin Singh hosted the weekly Khali Kiss Cam, where Singh would summon ostensibly random women from the audience to kiss Khali. In May 2009, The Great Khali feuded with Dolph Ziggler, winning by disqualification after Ziggler attacked him with a steel chair. As a result, Khali began coming out to the ring during and after Ziggler's matches, in attempt to gain revenge and to stop Ziggler from cheating. Over the next few weeks, Khali lost to Ziggler by countout and disqualification after Ziggler made it look like Khali hit him with a steel chair. At The Bash on 28 June, Khali lost to Ziggler by pinfall after Kane returned and attacked Khali. It was later revealed that Ranjin Singh was Khali's brother, while the feud with Kane resulted in matches at SummerSlam on 23 August and Breaking Point on 13 September, both of which Khali lost.


title: The Great Khali

text: Khali required knee surgery and Kane assaulted him with the ring steps during a match so Khali could have time off. Whilst injured, Khali made a surprise appearance alongside Ranjin Singh, Ozzy Osbourne and his wife Sharon on 2 November episode of "Raw" as a judge for the Raw's Got Talent segment, in which he hit Chavo Guerrero with a chop. Khali made his official return on 14 December episode of "Raw", teaming with Christian and Kane to defeat Ezekiel Jackson, Vladimir Kozlov and William Regal.


title: The Great Khali

text: On 2 April episode of "SmackDown" it was announced that Khali would take time off to spend time with his family and regroup his thoughts back in India, but he made an appearance as Khaluber (Khali dressed as MacGruber) on 19 April "Raw" by teaming up with special guest host Will Forte (as MacGruber) in a handicap match against Vladimir Kozlov which they won by intentional countout. As part of the 2010 WWE supplemental draft, Khali and Ranjin Singh were both drafted back to the Raw brand. After returning from his hiatus the previous month, Khali was announced by John Cena to be a part of his team along with Bret Hart, Chris Jericho, Edge, John Morrison and R-Truth to face The Nexus at SummerSlam on 15 August, but on 9 August episode of "Raw" he was assaulted and injured by The Nexus, thus removing him from the match. Following the attack, Khali took another hiatus to compete in "Big Boss", in which he was the runner up on.


title: The Great Khali

text: Khali made his return at the 2011 Royal Rumble, but was eliminated shortly by Mason Ryan. On 14 March episode of "Raw", after Khali defeated The Miz by disqualification, Miz assaulted Khali with a steel chair, injuring him. Khali won an interbrand dark match battle royal at WrestleMania XXVII on 3 April. On 26 April, Khali was drafted back to SmackDown as part of the 2011 supplemental draft. Khali returned on 29 April episode of "SmackDown", talking backstage with Jinder Mahal, who made his WWE debut that night. On 2 May episode of "Raw", Khali dressed up as the Tooth Fairy at The Rock's birthday party. On 6 May episode of "SmackDown", Mahal"—"unimpressed by how Khali and Ranjin Singh have been partaking in childish activities instead of winning matches"—"confronted Singh about his mismanagement of Khali. Mahal then interrupted a Khali Kiss Cam segment the following week on "SmackDown", slapping Khali twice. On 20 May episode of "SmackDown", Mahal interrupted Khali's match against Jey Uso, which led to Khali leaving the ring to confront Mahal, who then slapped Khali again, which made Khali re-enter the ring, defeat Jey Uso and then assault Jimmy Uso after the match.


title: The Great Khali

text: On 27 May episode of "SmackDown", after being defeated by Kane, Mahal came out and shoved Ranjin Singh and then Khali used his "Vise Grip" on Singh, thus forming an alliance with Mahal and acting as Mahal's bodyguard, assaulting Mahal's opponents after his matches. On 1 July edition of "SmackDown", Ranjin Singh revealed that Mahal was their brother-in-law and that if Khali did not obey Mahal, then he would divorce Khali's sister and put his family back into poverty. On 9 September episode of "SmackDown", Khali and Mahal went against WWE Tag Team Champions Air Boom (Evan Bourne and Kofi Kingston) in a losing effort after Khali pushed Mahal, allowing Kingston to hit his finishing move onto Mahal and after the match he walked away from Mahal, thus ending their alliance. On 23 September episode of "SmackDown", Khali defeated Mahal. On 30 September episode of "SmackDown", Khali was defeated by World Heavyweight Champion Mark Henry, who after the match "fractured" Khali's fibula with a steel chair.


title: The Great Khali

text: On 29 January 2012, Khali returned to WWE at the Royal Rumble as the number 15 entrant in the Royal Rumble match, eliminating Ezekiel Jackson and Jinder Mahal before being eliminated by Cody Rhodes and Dolph Ziggler. Khali returned on 3 February episode of "SmackDown", saving Justin Gabriel from Rhodes, Hunico and Hunico's bodyguard Camacho, then being announced as the replacement to Mark Henry in the Elimination Chamber match for the World Heavyweight Championship at the Elimination Chamber pay-per-view event. At Elimination Chamber on 19 February, Khali failed to capture the World Heavyweight Championship after being eliminated first by Big Show. On 23 March episode of "SmackDown", Khali was added to Theodore Long's WrestleMania XXVIII team, but they were defeated by John Laurinaitis' team on 1 April. In July it was announced that Khali was undergoing surgery for a benign tumor found in his pituitary gland due to acromegaly. Khali returned at the "SmackDown" tapings on 16 October in a match taped for "Saturday Morning Slam".


title: The Great Khali

text: On 26 December episode of "Main Event", Khali won a 20-man battle royal to become the number one contender to the United States Championship. Khali received his title shot on 2 January 2013 episode of "Main Event", but was defeated by defending champion Antonio Cesaro. On 27 January, Khali competed in the 2013 Royal Rumble match, but was eliminated by Daniel Bryan and Kane. In late 2013, Khali began teaming with Santino Marella and resumed being managed by Hornswoggle after they defeated Heath Slater and Jinder Mahal on 27 September episode of "SmackDown", but at Battleground on 6 October they were defeated by Cesaro and Jack Swagger. On 26 January 2014, Khali participated in the 2014 Royal Rumble match, but was eliminated by The Shield.


title: The Great Khali

text: At WrestleMania XXX on 6 April, Khali competed in the André the Giant Memorial Battle Royal, but failed to win. Khali participated in the Intercontinental Championship battle royal at Battleground on 20 July, but the match was won by The Miz. On 31 October edition of "SmackDown", Khali was defeated by Rusev in what would be his final match in WWE until 2017. On 13 November, his contract expired and he left WWE.


title: The Great Khali

text: On 23 July 2017, Khali returned to WWE at Battleground as a Heel to assist WWE Champion Jinder Mahal in a Punjabi Prison match for the WWE Championship. He helped Mahal by preventing Randy Orton from escaping from the cage, thus Mahal escaped first and retained the title.


title: The Great Khali

text: Khali returned on 27 April 2018 at The Greatest Royal Rumble match, entering at number 45, and lasted for less than a minute, before being eliminated by Braun Strowman and Bobby Lashley. This was his final match for WWE so far.


title: The Great Khali

text: In February 2015, Khali opened his own wrestling promotion and school in Jalandhar, Punjab, the Continental Wrestling Entertainment (CWE), which held its first event on 12 December 2015. In February 2016, he won the CWE World Heavyweight Championship. His students such as Dilsher Shanky and Kavita Devi got signed with WWE. As of 25 October 2022, Shanky is part of the main roster, while Kavita's contract is ended. Both of them wrestled in Khali's promotion and won CWE championship.


title: The Great Khali

text: CWE is the largest professional wrestling promotion in India, with over 4.38 million YouTube subscribers and 1.31 billion video views.


title: The Great Khali

text: On 28 May 2001, Brian Ong died after receiving a flapjack wrestling move from Singh. Ong had suffered a previous concussion during the session, but the trainers gave him a lower evaluation for not avoiding injuries and told him to continue training. In addition, it was proven that Ong did not receive protective gear or supervision by All Pro Wrestling (APW) staff and this second concussion ultimately proved fatal for him. As Singh inadvertently caused his death, Ong's family brought a lawsuit against APW. APW was found liable for recklessness after less than a day of deliberations, awarding the Ong family for damages of over $1.3 million.


title: The Great Khali

text: From October 2010 until the final in January 2011, Khali appeared on the television reality show "Bigg Boss", on which he finished as first runner-up. The show made special arrangements only for Khali, including a custom-made bed to fit him. In March 2011, Khali had a brief cameo in episode 18 of NBC's "Outsourced", and appeared on the Disney Channel TV program "Pair of Kings" as Atog, a rock-smashing giant, in the episode "Fight School".


title: The Great Khali

text: Rana has been described as "extremely religious". He meditates every day and "abhors" alcohol and tobacco. He was a disciple of Indian spiritual guru Ashutosh Maharaj.


title: The Great Khali

text: It is said that Rana suggested the ring name The Great Khali after the Hindu goddess Kali, who is associated with eternal energy. However he himself rejected the fact and said that the name was given to him randomly by WWE in an interview given to India TV for their show Aap Ki Adalat.


title: The Great Khali

text: Rana's training schedule consists of two hours of weight training, morning and evening, every day, but his diet is unclear, as in some interviews it was claimed he maintains his size on a vegetarian diet and in other interviews it was claimed he consumes vast quantities of chicken. He has since clarified that he loves vegetarian food, but also consumes meat.


title: The Great Khali

text: On 26 July 2012 it was reported that Rana underwent a brain surgery due to a tumor on his pituitary gland.


title: Taylor Tomlinson

text: Taylor Elyse Tomlinson is an American comedian. She has released two Netflix stand-up specials called "Quarter-Life Crisis" (2020) and "Look At You" (2022).


title: Taylor Tomlinson

text: Taylor Elyse Tomlinson was born in Orange County, California. She was raised in Temecula, California, where she graduated from Temecula Valley High School. She briefly attended California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo before transferring to a community college in the San Diego metropolitan area to be closer to comedy clubs for her career. She then attended California State University San Marcos before dropping out to pursue her budding comedy career full time. She and her three younger siblings were raised in a devout Christian family, which features prominently in her comedy routines. When she was eight years old, her mother died of cancer. Her father remarried a year later.


title: Taylor Tomlinson

text: Tomlinson began performing comedy when she was 16, after her father signed her up for a stand-up class. She performed in church basements, school venues, and coffee shops. She became a top 10 finalist on the ninth season of NBC's "Last Comic Standing" in 2015, and was named one of the "Top 10 Comics to Watch" by "Variety" at the 2019 Just for Laughs Festival. She has appeared on "The Tonight Show", "Conan", and various Comedy Central productions. She developed a sitcom for ABC in 2017, but it was not picked up for a pilot. She performed a 15-minute set on an episode of the Netflix stand-up series "The Comedy Lineup" in 2018.


title: Taylor Tomlinson

text: Tomlinson's first Netflix stand-up special, "Quarter-Life Crisis", premiered in March 2020. Later that year, she toured with fellow comedian Whitney Cummings on the Codependent Tour. She was also part of the podcast "Self-Helpless" with fellow comedians Kelsey Cook and Delanie Fischer that year. In 2021, she started her own podcast called "Sad in the City". She was placed on the "Forbes" 30 Under 30 list in December 2021. Her second Netflix stand-up special, "Look At You", premiered in March 2022.


title: Taylor Tomlinson

text: Tomlinson said in her stand-up special, "Look At You", that she was once engaged, but called it off, before taping her first special. Her stand-up material references her experiences of mental health issues including depression, and in "Look At You" she discusses being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.


title: Training Day

text: Training Day is a 2001 American crime thriller film directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by David Ayer. It stars Denzel Washington as Alonzo Harris and Ethan Hawke as Jake Hoyt, two LAPD narcotics officers over a 24-hour period in the gang-ridden neighborhoods of Westlake, Echo Park, and South Central Los Angeles. It also features Scott Glenn, Cliff Curtis, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Macy Gray in supporting roles.


title: Training Day

text: "Training Day" was released on October 5, 2001, by Warner Bros. Pictures. It received positive reviews from critics, who praised Washington and Hawke's performances but were divided on the screenplay. It was a commercial success, grossing $104 million worldwide against a production budget of $45 million.


title: Training Day

text: The film received numerous accolades and nominations, with Washington's performance earning him the Academy Award for Best Actor and Hawke being nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 74th Academy Awards.


title: Training Day

text: A television series based on the film, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, was announced in August 2015 and premiered February 2, 2017 on CBS, but was cancelled after one season. A prequel about a young Alonzo Harris was announced in October 2019 as currently being in development by Warner Bros. Pictures. On February 28, 2022, the prequel, named "Training Day: Day of the Riot" has started production in California.


title: Training Day

text: Ambitious Los Angeles Police Department Officer Jake Hoyt is up for promotion and is assigned to Detective Alonzo Harris, a highly decorated narcotics officer, for a one-day evaluation. Driving around in Alonzo's Monte Carlo, they begin the day by catching some college kids buying marijuana. Confiscating their drugs, Alonzo puts it into a pipe and tells Jake to smoke it. When Jake refuses, Alonzo threatens him at gunpoint, stating that refusing like this while on the streets would get him killed. Jake smokes the pipe, and Alonzo tells him that it was laced with PCP.


title: Training Day

text: After paying a visit to Roger, an ex-cop turned drug dealer, Jake notices a pair of addicts attempting to rape a teenage girl in an alley. Jake intervenes while Alonzo watches. After the girl leaves and Alonzo scares the addicts off, Jake finds the girl's wallet on the ground and retrieves it.


title: Training Day

text: Later, Alonzo and Jake apprehend a dealer named Blue, finding crack rocks and a loaded handgun on him. Rather than go to jail, Blue informs on his employer Kevin "Sandman" Miller, who is in prison. Using a fake search warrant, Alonzo steals $40,000 from Sandman's home. At lunch, the two visit Alonzo's mistress Sara and their young son. Alonzo then meets with a trio of corrupt high-ranking police officials he dubs the "Three Wise Men." Aware that the Russian Mafia is hunting Alonzo over a large unpaid debt, they suggest that he skip town. Alonzo insists he has control of the situation and trades the $40,000 for an arrest warrant.


title: Training Day

text: Using the warrant, Alonzo, Jake, and four other narcotics officers return to Roger's house and seize $4 million from the premises, a quarter of which Alonzo keeps. Alonzo shoots and kills Roger when Jake refuses to do so, and stages the scene with his men to make the shooting look justified. Infuriated, Jake gets into a Mexican standoff with the corrupt officers; Alonzo (having planned the day's events) threatens Jake by reminding him of the LAPD's routine blood test, which will identify the PCP-laced cannabis Jake smoked earlier and end his career. Alonzo promises to protect Jake for his cooperation, and Jake is forced to comply.


title: Training Day

text: Later that evening, Alonzo drives Jake to the home of a Sureño gangster named "Smiley" for an errand. Jake reluctantly plays poker with Smiley and his fellow gang members as he waits for Alonzo. As they talk, Smiley reveals Alonzo's situation: by midnight, Alonzo must pay $1 million to the Russians for killing one of their men in Las Vegas, or be killed himself. Realizing that Alonzo abandoned him and has paid Smiley to kill him, Jake attempts to flee but is beaten and dragged to the bathroom to be executed. Before they can kill Jake, a gang member searches him for money and finds the wallet of the teenage girl, who happens to be Smiley's cousin. After calling his cousin and confirming how Jake had saved her, Smiley releases Jake out of gratitude.


title: Training Day

text: Jake returns to Sara's apartment to arrest Alonzo, just as he is leaving to pay the Russians with Roger's money. A gunfight and chase ensue, and Alonzo is eventually subdued on the street while the entire neighborhood gathers to watch. Alonzo offers money to whoever kills Jake to no avail. Jake then takes the stolen cash, intending to submit it as criminal evidence against Alonzo. The neighborhood gang allows Jake to leave safely. Enraged, Alonzo threatens to retaliate against the gang members, but the unimpressed gangs ignore him and walk away.


title: Training Day

text: Alonzo flees for his life to LAX, but he is ambushed and gunned down by the Russians. Jake returns home as the press reports on Alonzo's death.


title: Training Day

text: Davis Guggenheim was originally attached to direct the film, with Matt Damon as Jake Hoyt and Samuel L. Jackson as Alonzo Harris. Once Washington became attached to the project, however, he requested to have Guggenheim replaced. Eminem was offered the role of Jake Hoyt, but turned it down to star in "8 Mile". Tobey Maguire, Paul Walker, Freddie Prinze Jr., Ryan Phillippe, and Scott Speedman tested for the role of Jake Hoyt.


title: Training Day

text: Although corruption in L.A.'s C.R.A.S.H. unit was yet to be exposed when "Training Day" was written, Antoine Fuqua has stated that the emergence of the Rampart Scandal in the late 1990s catalyzed the completion of the film. Denzel Washington also grew a beard in order to emulate the appearance of Rafael Pérez, an LAPD narcotics officer involved in multiple scandals. Fuqua wanted Washington's character to be seductive and part of a machine, and not just a random rogue cop. In Washington's own words: "I think in some ways he's done his job too well. He's learned how to manipulate, how to push the line further and further, and, in the process, he's become more hard-core than some of the guys he's chasing."


title: Training Day

text: Fuqua also saw Ethan Hawke's character as generally honorable but so driven by ambition that he was willing to compromise his principles, particularly when following the charming and persuasive example of Washington's character. He has said that he fought with studio executives who wanted to cut the Three Wise Men scene, thinking it slowed the film. He insisted that the Wise Men scene was pivotal in establishing that at least some of Alonzo's illegal actions were sanctioned by his superiors who regarded unethical behavior as a necessary evil.


title: Training Day

text: Fuqua wanted "Training Day" to look as authentic as possible, and he shot on location in some of the most infamous neighborhoods of Los Angeles. He even obtained permission to shoot in the Imperial Courts housing project, the first time L.A. street gangs had allowed film crew to be brought into that neighborhood. The crew also filmed in Hoover Block and Baldwin Village. Parts of the film were shot on a dead end street called Palmwood Drive, where the Black P. Stones Blood gang members were seen on the rooftops. Cle Shaheed Sloan, the gang technical advisor of "Training Day", managed to get on screen real-life gang members from Rollin' 60 Crips, PJ Watts Crips, and B. P. Stones (a Bloods set). According to Fuqua, the actors and crew ended up receiving a warm welcome from local residents. When he was unable to shoot a scene directly on location, he recreated the locations on sets.


title: Training Day

text: There were also two police officers on hand as technical advisors, Michael Patterson and Paul Lozada (the latter from the San Francisco Police Department). Washington, Hawke and other cast members also met with undercover police officers, local drug dealers, and gang members to help them understand their roles better.


title: Training Day

text: A soundtrack containing hip hop music was released on September 11, 2001, by Priority Records. It peaked at 35 on the "Billboard" 200 and 19 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and spawned two hit singles, Nelly's "#1" and Dr. Dre and DJ Quik's "Put It on Me".


title: Training Day

text: "Training Day" was originally scheduled for release on September 21, 2001, and had a strong advertising push. However, following the September 11 attacks, the film was pushed back until October 5, 2001, and opened at number one, grossing $24.2 million. Upon opening, it achieved the second-highest October opening weekend, behind "Meet the Parents". In its second week of release, the film's grossed $13.4 million, staying at the number one position. The film stayed in the top-ten box office until the seventh week of release, landing at number 12. With an estimated budget of $45 million, "Training Day" ultimately grossed $76.6 million in the US and $104.9 million worldwide.


title: Training Day

text: On review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, "Training Day" holds an approval rating 73% based on 161 reviews, with an average rating of 6.50/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "The ending may be less than satisfying, but Denzel Washington reminds us why he's such a great actor in this taut and brutal police drama." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 69 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Training Day

text: "Chicago Sun-Times" film critic Roger Ebert said: "Washington seems to enjoy a performance that's over the top and down the other side". Ebert gave the film three out of four stars, praising both the lead and supporting actors and the film's gritty, kinetic energy. He noted several plot holes and wrote that "[a] lot of people are going to be leaving the theater as I did, wondering about the logic and plausibility of the last 15 minutes."


title: Training Day

text: Writing in "The Hollywood Reporter", Michael Rechtshaffen gave the film a positive review on September 12, 2016, when he stated: "Denzel Washington ventures into the dark side as a seriously corrupt narcotics cop in "Training Day", and the results are electrifying. So is the picture, thanks to taut, sinewy direction by Antoine Fuqua and a compelling script by David Ayer ("The Fast and the Furious")."


title: Training Day

text: Denzel Washington's performance as Detective Alonzo Harris was highly praised by critics. In "The Village Voice", Amy Taubin expressed: "Training Day, Antoine Fuqua's propulsive, elegantly written police thriller, offers the unsettling spectacle of Denzel Washington, whose old-fashioned combination of decency and sexiness suggests the African American counterpart to Gregory Peck (in his "To Kill a Mockingbird" period), as an LAPD cop so evil he makes Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant look like even smaller potatoes than he was meant to be".


title: Training Day

text: In June 2003, the American Film Institute named Alonzo Harris the 50th greatest screen villain of all time in its list "AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains".


title: Training Day

text: On August 7, 2015, it was announced that Antoine Fuqua had decided to develop a television series based on the movie, and had teamed with Jerry Bruckheimer to develop the concept. Warner Bros. Television was shopping the show to the American broadcast networks. Will Beall would write the series, while Fuqua would serve as executive producer, and would direct the potential pilot. CBS ordered a pilot on August 14, 2015. In addition to Fuqua, Bruckheimer, Beall, and Jonathan Littman will serve as executive producers for the series, which is set 15 years after the original film. In May 2016, CBS picked up the series.


title: Training Day

text: In the CBS television series Alonzo is mentioned by Deputy Chief Joy Lockhart when briefing Officer Kyle Craig on sending him undercover at LAPD's Special Investigation Section to investigate Detective Frank Roarke. Frank briefly mentions Alonzo at the end of the first season. The series, starring Bill Paxton and Justin Cornwell premiered on February 2, 2017.


title: Training Day

text: On May 17, 2017, Antonie Fuqua announced the series had been canceled after one season and four months after Paxton's death.


title: Training Day

text: In October 2019, it was reported that Warner Bros. was developing a prequel to "Training Day". The prequel follows a young Alonzo Harris in late April 1992, two days before the verdict of the Rodney King trial and the L.A. riots. On February 28, 2022, the prequel, named "Training Day: Day of the Riot" has started production in California.


title: Germanic languages

text: The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia.


title: Germanic languages

text: The West Germanic languages include the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English with around 360–400 million native speakers; German, with over 100 million native speakers; and Dutch, with 24 million native speakers. Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, with over 7.1 million native speakers; Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 4.35–7.15 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it (at least 2.2 million in Germany (2016) and 2.15 million in the Netherlands (2003)); Yiddish, once used by approximately 13 million Jews in pre-World War II Europe, now with approximately 1.5 million native speakers; Scots, with 1.5 million native speakers; Limburgish varieties with roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border; and the Frisian languages with over 500,000 native speakers in the Netherlands and Germany.


title: Germanic languages

text: The largest North Germanic languages are Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, which are in part mutually intelligible and have a combined total of about 20 million native speakers in the Nordic countries and an additional five million second language speakers; since the Middle Ages, however, these languages have been strongly influenced by Middle Low German, a West Germanic language, and Low German words account for about 30–60% of their vocabularies according to various estimates. Other extant North Germanic languages are Faroese, Icelandic, and Elfdalian, which are more conservative languages with no significant Low German influence, more complex grammar and limited mutual intelligibility with other North Germanic languages today.


title: Germanic languages

text: The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, all of which are now extinct. The last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken until the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea.


title: Germanic languages

text: The SIL "Ethnologue" lists 48 different living Germanic languages, 41 of which belong to the Western branch and six to the Northern branch; it places Riograndenser Hunsrückisch German in neither of the categories, but it is often considered a German dialect by linguists. The total number of Germanic languages throughout history is unknown as some of them, especially the East Germanic languages, disappeared during or after the Migration Period. Some of the West Germanic languages also did not survive past the Migration Period, including Lombardic. As a result of World War II and subsequent mass expulsion of Germans, the German language suffered a significant loss of "Sprachraum", as well as moribundity and extinction of several of its dialects. In the 21st century, German dialects are dying out as Standard German gains primacy.


title: Germanic languages

text: The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic, also known as Common Germanic, which was spoken in about the middle of the 1st millennium BC in Iron Age Scandinavia. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, notably has a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change known as "Grimm's law." Early varieties of Germanic entered history when the Germanic tribes moved south from Scandinavia in the 2nd century BC to settle in the area of today's northern Germany and southern Denmark.


title: Germanic languages

text: English is an official language of Belize, Canada, Nigeria, Falkland Islands, Saint Helena, Malta, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, Philippines, Jamaica, Dominica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, American Samoa, Palau, St. Lucia, Grenada, Barbados, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Pakistan, India, Papua New Guinea, Namibia, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and former British colonies in Asia, Africa and Oceania. Furthermore, it is the "de facto" language of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, as well as a recognized language in Nicaragua and Malaysia.


title: Germanic languages

text: German is a language of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland and has regional status in Italy, Poland, Namibia and Denmark. German also continues to be spoken as a minority language by immigrant communities in North America, South America, Central America, Mexico and Australia. A German dialect, Pennsylvania Dutch, is still used among various populations in the American state of Pennsylvania in daily life.


title: Germanic languages

text: Dutch is an official language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao, the Netherlands, Sint Maarten, and Suriname. The Netherlands also colonized Indonesia, but Dutch was scrapped as an official language after Indonesian independence. Today, it is only used by older or traditionally educated people. Dutch was until 1983 an official language in South Africa but evolved into and was replaced by Afrikaans, a partially mutually intelligible daughter language of Dutch.


title: Germanic languages

text: Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa and is a "lingua franca" of Namibia. It is used in other Southern African nations, as well.


title: Germanic languages

text: Low German is a collection of very diverse dialects spoken in the northeast of the Netherlands and northern Germany.


title: Germanic languages

text: Scots is spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster (where the local dialect is known as Ulster Scots).


title: Germanic languages

text: Frisian is spoken among half a million people who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.


title: Germanic languages

text: Luxembourgish is a Moselle Franconian dialect that is spoken mainly in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where it is considered to be an official language. Similar varieties of Moselle Franconian are spoken in small parts of Belgium, France, and Germany.


title: Germanic languages

text: Yiddish, once a native language of some 11 to 13 million people, remains in use by some 1.5 million speakers in Jewish communities around the world, mainly in North America, Europe, Israel, and other regions with Jewish populations.


title: Germanic languages

text: Limburgish varieties are spoken in the Limburg and Rhineland regions, along the Dutch–Belgian–German border.


title: Germanic languages

text: In addition to being the official language in Sweden, Swedish is also spoken natively by the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, which is a large part of the population along the coast of western and southern Finland. Swedish is also one of the two official languages in Finland, along with Finnish, and the only official language in Åland. Swedish is also spoken by some people in Estonia.


title: Germanic languages

text: Danish is an official language of Denmark and in its overseas territory of the Faroe Islands, and it is a "lingua franca" and language of education in its other overseas territory of Greenland, where it was one of the official languages until 2009. Danish, a locally recognized minority language, is also natively spoken by the Danish minority in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein.


title: Germanic languages

text: Norwegian is the official language of Norway. Norwegian is also the official language in the overseas territories of Norway such as Svalbard, Jan Mayen, Bouvet island, Queen Maud Land and Peter I island.


title: Germanic languages

text: All Germanic languages are thought to be descended from a hypothetical Proto-Germanic, united by subjection to the sound shifts of Grimm's law and Verner's law. These probably took place during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe from c. 500 BC. Proto-Germanic itself was likely spoken after c. 500 BC, and Proto-Norse from the 2nd century AD and later is still quite close to reconstructed Proto-Germanic, but other common innovations separating Germanic from Proto-Indo-European suggest a common history of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers throughout the Nordic Bronze Age.


title: Germanic languages

text: From the time of their earliest attestation, the Germanic varieties are divided into three groups: West, East, and North Germanic. Their exact relation is difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions.


title: Germanic languages

text: The western group would have formed in the late Jastorf culture, and the eastern group may be derived from the 1st-century variety of Gotland, leaving southern Sweden as the original location of the northern group. The earliest period of Elder Futhark (2nd to 4th centuries) predates the division in regional script variants, and linguistically essentially still reflects the Common Germanic stage. The Vimose inscriptions include some of the oldest datable Germanic inscriptions, starting in c. 160 AD.


title: Germanic languages

text: The earliest coherent Germanic text preserved is the 4th-century Gothic translation of the New Testament by Ulfilas. Early testimonies of West Germanic are in Old Frankish/Old Dutch (the 5th-century Bergakker inscription), Old High German (scattered words and sentences 6th century and coherent texts 9th century), and Old English (oldest texts 650, coherent texts 10th century). North Germanic is only attested in scattered runic inscriptions, as Proto-Norse, until it evolves into Old Norse by about 800.


title: Germanic languages

text: Longer runic inscriptions survive from the 8th and 9th centuries (Eggjum stone, Rök stone), longer texts in the Latin alphabet survive from the 12th century (Íslendingabók), and some skaldic poetry dates back to as early as the 9th century.


title: Germanic languages

text: By about the 10th century, the varieties had diverged enough to make mutual intelligibility difficult. The linguistic contact of the Viking settlers of the Danelaw with the Anglo-Saxons left traces in the English language and is suspected to have facilitated the collapse of Old English grammar that, combined with the influx of Romance Old French vocabulary after the Norman Conquest, resulted in Middle English from the 12th century.


title: Germanic languages

text: The East Germanic languages were marginalized from the end of the Migration Period. The Burgundians, Goths, and Vandals became linguistically assimilated by their respective neighbors by about the 7th century, with only Crimean Gothic lingering on until the 18th century.


title: Germanic languages

text: During the early Middle Ages, the West Germanic languages were separated by the insular development of Middle English on one hand and by the High German consonant shift on the continent on the other, resulting in Upper German and Low Saxon, with graded intermediate Central German varieties. By early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South to Northern Low Saxon in the North, and, although both extremes are considered German, they are hardly mutually intelligible. The southernmost varieties had completed the second sound shift, while the northern varieties remained unaffected by the consonant shift.


title: Germanic languages

text: The North Germanic languages, on the other hand, remained unified until well past 1000 AD, and in fact the mainland Scandinavian languages still largely retain mutual intelligibility into modern times. The main split in these languages is between the mainland languages and the island languages to the west, especially Icelandic, which has maintained the grammar of Old Norse virtually unchanged, while the mainland languages have diverged greatly.


title: Germanic languages

text: Germanic languages possess a number of defining features compared with other Indo-European languages.


title: Germanic languages

text: Note that some of the above characteristics were not present in Proto-Germanic but developed later as areal features that spread from language to language:


title: Germanic languages

text: Roughly speaking, Germanic languages differ in how conservative or how progressive each language is with respect to an overall trend toward analyticity. Some, such as Icelandic and, to a lesser extent, German, have preserved much of the complex inflectional morphology inherited from Proto-Germanic (and in turn from Proto-Indo-European). Others, such as English, Swedish, and Afrikaans, have moved toward a largely analytic type.


title: Germanic languages

text: The subgroupings of the Germanic languages are defined by shared innovations. It is important to distinguish innovations from cases of linguistic conservatism. That is, if two languages in a family share a characteristic that is not observed in a third language, that is evidence of common ancestry of the two languages "only if" the characteristic is an innovation compared to the family's proto-language.


title: Germanic languages

text: The following innovations are also common to the Northwest Germanic languages but represent areal changes:


title: Germanic languages

text: The following innovations are common to the Ingvaeonic subgroup of the West Germanic languages, which includes English, Frisian, and in a few cases Dutch and Low German, but not High German:


title: Germanic languages

text: The oldest Germanic languages all share a number of features, which are assumed to be inherited from Proto-Germanic. Phonologically, it includes the important sound changes known as Grimm's Law and Verner's Law, which introduced a large number of fricatives; late Proto-Indo-European had only one, /s/.


title: Germanic languages

text: The main vowel developments are the merging (in most circumstances) of long and short /a/ and /o/, producing short /a/ and long /ō/. That likewise affected the diphthongs, with PIE /ai/ and /oi/ merging into /ai/ and PIE /au/ and /ou/ merging into /au/. PIE /ei/ developed into long /ī/. PIE long /ē/ developed into a vowel denoted as /ē/ (often assumed to be phonetically ), while a new, fairly uncommon long vowel /ē/ developed in varied and not completely understood circumstances. Proto-Germanic had no front rounded vowels, but all Germanic languages except for Gothic subsequently developed them through the process of i-umlaut.


title: Germanic languages

text: Proto-Germanic developed a strong stress accent on the first syllable of the root, but remnants of the original free PIE accent are visible due to Verner's Law, which was sensitive to this accent. That caused a steady erosion of vowels in unstressed syllables. In Proto-Germanic, that had progressed only to the point that absolutely-final short vowels (other than /i/ and /u/) were lost and absolutely-final long vowels were shortened, but all of the early literary languages show a more advanced state of vowel loss. This ultimately resulted in some languages (like Modern English) losing practically all vowels following the main stress and the consequent rise of a very large number of monosyllabic words.


title: Germanic languages

text: The following table shows the main outcomes of Proto-Germanic vowels and consonants in the various older languages. For vowels, only the outcomes in stressed syllables are shown. Outcomes in unstressed syllables are quite different, vary from language to language and depend on a number of other factors (such as whether the syllable was medial or final, whether the syllable was open or closed and (in some cases) whether the preceding syllable was light or heavy).


title: Germanic languages

text: The oldest Germanic languages have the typical complex inflected morphology of old Indo-European languages, with four or five noun cases; verbs marked for person, number, tense and mood; multiple noun and verb classes; few or no articles; and rather free word order. The old Germanic languages are famous for having only two tenses (present and past), with three PIE past-tense aspects (imperfect, aorist, and perfect/stative) merged into one and no new tenses (future, pluperfect, etc.) developing. There were three moods: indicative, subjunctive (developed from the PIE optative mood) and imperative. Gothic verbs had a number of archaic features inherited from PIE that were lost in the other Germanic languages with few traces, including dual endings, an inflected passive voice (derived from the PIE mediopassive voice), and a class of verbs with reduplication in the past tense (derived from the PIE perfect). The complex tense system of modern English (e.g. "In three months, the house will still be being built" or "If you had not acted so stupidly, we would never have been caught") is almost entirely due to subsequent developments (although paralleled in many of the other Germanic languages).


title: Germanic languages

text: Among the primary innovations in Proto-Germanic are the preterite present verbs, a special set of verbs whose present tense looks like the past tense of other verbs and which is the origin of most modal verbs in English; a past-tense ending; (in the so-called "weak verbs", marked with "-ed" in English) that appears variously as /d/ or /t/, often assumed to be derived from the verb "to do"; and two separate sets of adjective endings, originally corresponding to a distinction between indefinite semantics ("a man", with a combination of PIE adjective and pronoun endings) and definite semantics ("the man", with endings derived from PIE "n"-stem nouns).


title: Germanic languages

text: Note that most modern Germanic languages have lost most of the inherited inflectional morphology as a result of the steady attrition of unstressed endings triggered by the strong initial stress. (Contrast, for example, the Balto-Slavic languages, which have largely kept the Indo-European pitch accent and consequently preserved much of the inherited morphology.) Icelandic and to a lesser extent modern German best preserve the Proto–Germanic inflectional system, with four noun cases, three genders, and well-marked verbs. English and Afrikaans are at the other extreme, with almost no remaining inflectional morphology.


title: Germanic languages

text: The following shows a typical masculine "a"-stem noun, Proto-Germanic "*fiskaz" ("fish"), and its development in the various old literary languages:


title: Germanic languages

text: Originally, adjectives in Proto-Indo-European followed the same declensional classes as nouns. The most common class (the "o/ā" class) used a combination of "o"-stem endings for masculine and neuter genders and "ā"-stems ending for feminine genders, but other common classes (e.g. the "i" class and "u" class) used endings from a single vowel-stem declension for all genders, and various other classes existed that were based on other declensions. A quite different set of "pronominal" endings was used for pronouns, determiners, and words with related semantics (e.g., "all", "only").


title: Germanic languages

text: An important innovation in Proto-Germanic was the development of two separate sets of adjective endings, originally corresponding to a distinction between indefinite semantics ("a man") and definite semantics ("the man"). The endings of indefinite adjectives were derived from a combination of pronominal endings with one of the common vowel-stem adjective declensions – usually the "o/ā" class (often termed the "a/ō" class in the specific context of the Germanic languages) but sometimes the "i" or "u" classes. Definite adjectives, however, had endings based on "n"-stem nouns. Originally both types of adjectives could be used by themselves, but already by Proto-Germanic times a pattern evolved whereby definite adjectives had to be accompanied by a determiner with definite semantics (e.g., a definite article, demonstrative pronoun, possessive pronoun, or the like), while indefinite adjectives were used in other circumstances (either accompanied by a word with indefinite semantics such as "a", "one", or "some" or unaccompanied).


title: Germanic languages

text: In the 19th century, the two types of adjectives – indefinite and definite – were respectively termed "strong" and "weak", names which are still commonly used. These names were based on the appearance of the two sets of endings in modern German. In German, the distinctive case endings formerly present on nouns have largely disappeared, with the result that the load of distinguishing one case from another is almost entirely carried by determiners and adjectives. Furthermore, due to regular sound change, the various definite ("n"-stem) adjective endings coalesced to the point where only two endings ("-e" and "-en") remain in modern German to express the sixteen possible inflectional categories of the language (masculine/feminine/neuter/plural crossed with nominative/accusative/dative/genitive – modern German merges all genders in the plural). The indefinite ("a/ō"-stem) adjective endings were less affected by sound change, with six endings remaining ("-, -e, -es, -er, -em, -en"), cleverly distributed in a way that is capable of expressing the various inflectional categories without too much ambiguity. As a result, the definite endings were thought of as too "weak" to carry inflectional meaning and in need of "strengthening" by the presence of an accompanying determiner, while the indefinite endings were viewed as "strong" enough to indicate the inflectional categories even when standing alone. (This view is enhanced by the fact that modern German largely uses weak-ending adjectives when accompanying an indefinite article, and hence the indefinite/definite distinction no longer clearly applies.) By analogy, the terms "strong" and "weak" were extended to the corresponding noun classes, with "a"-stem and "ō"-stem nouns termed "strong" and "n"-stem nouns termed "weak".


title: Germanic languages

text: However, in Proto-Germanic – and still in Gothic, the most conservative Germanic language – the terms "strong" and "weak" are not clearly appropriate. For one thing, there were a large number of noun declensions. The "a"-stem, "ō"-stem, and "n"-stem declensions were the most common and represented targets into which the other declensions were eventually absorbed, but this process occurred only gradually. Originally the "n"-stem declension was not a single declension but a set of separate declensions (e.g., "-an", "-ōn", "-īn") with related endings, and these endings were in no way any "weaker" than the endings of any other declensions. (For example, among the eight possible inflectional categories of a noun — singular/plural crossed with nominative/accusative/dative/genitive — masculine "an"-stem nouns in Gothic include seven endings, and feminine "ōn"-stem nouns include six endings, meaning there is very little ambiguity of "weakness" in these endings and in fact much less than in the German "strong" endings.) Although it is possible to group the various noun declensions into three basic categories — vowel-stem, "n"-stem, and other-consonant-stem (a.k.a. "minor declensions") — the vowel-stem nouns do not display any sort of unity in their endings that supports grouping them together with each other but separate from the "n"-stem endings.


title: Germanic languages

text: It is only in later languages that the binary distinction between "strong" and "weak" nouns become more relevant. In Old English, the "n"-stem nouns form a single, clear class, but the masculine "a"-stem and feminine "ō"-stem nouns have little in common with each other, and neither has much similarity to the small class of "u"-stem nouns. Similarly, in Old Norse, the masculine "a"-stem and feminine "ō"-stem nouns have little in common with each other, and the continuations of the masculine "an"-stem and feminine "ōn/īn"-stem nouns are also quite distinct. It is only in Middle Dutch and modern German that the various vowel-stem nouns have merged to the point that a binary strong/weak distinction clearly applies.


title: Germanic languages

text: As a result, newer grammatical descriptions of the Germanic languages often avoid the terms "strong" and "weak" except in conjunction with German itself, preferring instead to use the terms "indefinite" and "definite" for adjectives and to distinguish nouns by their actual stem class.


title: Germanic languages

text: Note that divisions between and among subfamilies of Germanic are rarely precisely defined; most form continuous clines, with adjacent varieties being mutually intelligible and more separated ones not. Within the Germanic language family are East Germanic, West Germanic, and North Germanic. However, East Germanic languages became extinct several centuries ago.


title: Germanic languages

text: The West Germanic group is the larger by far, further subdivided into Anglo-Frisian on one hand and Continental West Germanic on the other. Anglo-Frisian notably includes English and all its variants, while Continental West Germanic includes German (standard register and dialects), as well as Dutch (standard register and dialects). East Germanic includes most notably the extinct Gothic and Crimean Gothic languages.


title: Germanic languages

text: The earliest evidence of Germanic languages comes from names recorded in the 1st century by Tacitus (especially from his work "Germania"), but the earliest Germanic writing occurs in a single instance in the 2nd century BC on the Negau helmet.


title: Germanic languages

text: From roughly the 2nd century AD, certain speakers of early Germanic varieties developed the Elder Futhark, an early form of the runic alphabet. Early runic inscriptions also are largely limited to personal names and difficult to interpret. The Gothic language was written in the Gothic alphabet developed by Bishop Ulfilas for his translation of the Bible in the 4th century. Later, Christian priests and monks who spoke and read Latin in addition to their native Germanic varieties began writing the Germanic languages with slightly modified Latin letters. However, throughout the Viking Age, runic alphabets remained in common use in Scandinavia.


title: Germanic languages

text: Modern Germanic languages mostly use an alphabet derived from the Latin Alphabet. In print, German used to be predominately set in blackletter typefaces (e.g., fraktur or schwabacher) until the 1940s, while "Kurrent" and, since the early 20th century, "Sütterlin" were formerly used for German handwriting. Yiddish is written using an adapted Hebrew alphabet.


title: Germanic languages

text: The table compares cognates in several different Germanic languages. In some cases, the meanings may not be identical in each language.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Magnolia is a 1999 American drama film written, directed and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. It stars an ensemble cast, including Jeremy Blackman, Tom Cruise, Melinda Dillon, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ricky Jay, William H. Macy, Alfred Molina, Julianne Moore, Michael Murphy, John C. Reilly, Jason Robards (in his final film role) and Melora Walters. The film has a mosaic of interrelated characters in search of happiness, forgiveness, and meaning in the San Fernando Valley. The script was inspired by the music of Aimee Mann, who contributed several songs to its soundtrack.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: "Magnolia" received positive reviews, with critics praising its acting (particularly Cruise), direction, screenplay, and storytelling, as well as its soundtrack; however, some deemed it overlong and melodramatic. Of the ensemble cast, Cruise was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 72nd Academy Awards, and won the award in that category at the Golden Globes of 2000. The film also won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Officer Jim Kurring investigates a disturbance at a woman's apartment, finding a body in a closet. Dixon, a neighborhood boy, tries to tell him who committed the murder. Jim goes to the apartment of Claudia Wilson. Her neighbors called the police after she argued with her estranged father, Jimmy Gator, and blasted music while snorting cocaine. Unaware of her addiction, Jim asks her on a date.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Jimmy hosts a quiz show called "What Do Kids Know?" and is dying of cancer. The newest child prodigy on the show, Stanley Spector, is hounded by his father for the prize money and demeaned by the adults, who prevent him from using the bathroom during a commercial break. When the show resumes, he wets himself. As the show continues, a drunken Jimmy sickens, ordering the show to go on after he collapses. After Stanley's father berates him, Stanley runs away.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Donnie Smith, former "What Do Kids Know?" champion, watches the show from a bar. Donnie's parents took all his prize money. He has been fired from his job due to performance issues and is in love with a male bartender with braces. Donnie is obsessed with getting braces himself, thinking the bartender will love him back. He hatches a plan to steal money from his boss for the surgery.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: The show's former producer, Earl Partridge, is also dying of cancer. Earl's trophy wife, Linda, collects his prescriptions while he is cared for by a nurse, Phil Parma. Earl asks Phil to find his estranged son, Frank Mackey, a motivational speaker and pickup artist. Frank is interviewed by a journalist who knows Frank took care of his dying mother after Earl left. Frank storms out of the interview, after which Phil tries to contact him.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Linda goes to see Earl's lawyer, hoping to change Earl's will. She married Earl for his money, but now loves him and does not want it. The lawyer suggests she renounce the will and decline the money, which would go to Frank. Linda rejects his advice and berates Phil for seeking out Frank, but later apologizes. She drives to a vacant parking lot and takes handfuls of medicine with alcohol. Dixon finds Linda near death in her car, robs her, and calls an ambulance.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Jim loses his gun while trying to catch a suspect. When he meets Claudia, they promise to be honest with each other, so he confesses his ineptitude as a cop and admits he has not been on a date since he divorced three years earlier. Claudia says he will hate her because of her problems, but Jim assures her that her past does not matter. They kiss, but she runs off.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Jimmy goes home to his wife, Rose, and confesses that he cheated on her. She asks why Claudia does not talk to him, and Jimmy admits that Claudia believes he molested her. Rose demands to know if it is true, but Jimmy cannot remember. Rose leaves him.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Donnie takes money from his employer's safe. As he drives away, he decides to return the money but cannot get back in. While climbing a utility pole to the roof, Jim sees him. Suddenly, frogs begin falling from the sky. Donnie is knocked from the pole, smashing his teeth. As Jimmy is about to shoot himself, frogs fall through his skylight, causing him to shoot the television and cause a house fire. Rose crashes her car outside of Claudia's apartment, but makes it inside and reconciles with her daughter. Earl is awakened and sees Frank beside him before dying. Linda's ambulance crashes in front of the hospital. Donnie is rescued by Jim, and Jim's gun falls from the sky.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Jim helps Donnie return the money. Frank goes to the hospital to be with Linda, who will recover. Stanley wakes his father to tell him that he needs to be nice to him, but his father tells him to go to sleep. Jim goes to see Claudia, telling her he wants to make things work between them. As Jim is explaining, Claudia smiles.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Anderson started to get ideas for "Magnolia" during the long editing period of "Boogie Nights" (1997). As he got closer to finishing the film, he started writing down material for his new project. After the critical and financial success of "Boogie Nights", New Line Cinema, who backed that film, told Anderson that he could do whatever he wanted and the filmmaker realized that, "I was in a position I will never ever be in again." Michael De Luca, then Head of Production at New Line, made the deal for "Magnolia", granting Anderson final cut without hearing an idea for the film. Originally, Anderson had wanted to make a film that was "intimate and small-scale," something that he could shoot in 30 days. He had the title of "Magnolia" in his head before he wrote the script.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: As he started writing, the script "kept blossoming" and he realized that there were many actors he wanted to write for and then decided to put "an epic spin on topics that don't necessarily get the epic treatment". He wanted to "make the epic, the all-time great San Fernando Valley movie". Anderson started with lists of images, words and ideas that "start resolving themselves into sequences and shots and dialogue," actors, and music. The first image he had for the film was the smiling face of actress Melora Walters. The next image that came to him was of Philip Baker Hall as her father. Anderson imagined Hall walking up the steps of Walters' apartment and having an intense confrontation with her. Anderson also did research on the magnolia tree and discovered a concept that eating the tree's bark helped cure cancer.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Before Anderson became a filmmaker, one of the jobs he had was as an assistant for a television game show, "Quiz Kid Challenge", an experience he incorporated into the script for "Magnolia". He also claimed in interviews that the film is structured somewhat like "A Day in the Life" by The Beatles, and "it kind of builds up, note by note, then drops or recedes, then builds again".


title: Magnolia (film)

text: By the time he started writing the script, Anderson was listening to the music of his friend Aimee Mann. He used her first two solo albums and demo tracks for her upcoming third album, "Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo", as a basis and inspiration; he said he "sat down to write an adaptation of Aimee Mann songs". In particular, Mann's song "Deathly" inspired the character of Claudia. Claudia uses part of the lyric as dialogue in the film ("Now that I've met you / Would you object to / Never seeing each other again"). The film also features a sequence in which the characters sing along to Mann's song "Wise Up".


title: Magnolia (film)

text: The character of Jim Kurring originated in 1998 when actor John C. Reilly grew a mustache out of interest and started putting together an unintelligent cop character. He and Anderson did a few parodies of "COPS" with the director chasing Reilly around the streets with a video camera. Actress Jennifer Jason Leigh made an appearance in one of these videos. Some of Kurring's dialogue came from these sessions. This time around, Reilly wanted to do something different and told Anderson that he was "always cast as these heavies or these semi-retarded child men. Can't you give me something I can relate to, like falling in love with a girl?" Anderson also wanted to make Reilly a romantic lead because it was something different that the actor had not done before.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: For Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anderson wanted him to play a "really simple, uncomplicated, caring character". The actor described his character as someone who "really takes pride in the fact that every day he's dealing with life and death circumstances". With Julianne Moore in mind, Anderson wrote a role for her to play a crazed character using many pharmaceuticals. According to the actress, "Linda doesn't know who she is or what she's feeling and can only try to explain it in the most vulgar terms possible". Anderson said that Linda's story was inspired by his own father's wife. For William H. Macy, Anderson felt that the actor was scared of big, emotional parts and wrote "a big tearful, emotional part" for him.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: While convincing Philip Baker Hall to do the film by explaining the significance of the rain of frogs, the actor told him a story about when he was in the mountains of Italy and got caught in bad weather—a mix of rain, snow and tiny frogs. Hall had to pull off the road until the storm passed. According to an interview, Hall said that he based the character of Jimmy Gator on real-life TV personalities such as Bob Barker and Arthur Godfrey. The rain of frogs was inspired by the works of Charles Fort, and Anderson claims that he was unaware that it was also a reference in The Bible when he first wrote the sequence. At the time the filmmaker came across the notion of a rain of frogs, he was "going through a weird, personal time", and he started to understand "why people turn to religion in times of trouble, and maybe my form of finding religion was reading about rains of frogs and realizing that makes sense to me somehow".


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Tom Cruise was a fan of Anderson's previous film, "Boogie Nights", and contacted the filmmaker while he was working on Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999). Anderson met with Cruise on the set of Kubrick's film and the actor told him to keep him in mind for his next film. After Anderson finished the script, he sent Cruise a copy and the next day, the actor called him. Cruise was interested but nervous about the role. Anderson met with Cruise along with De Luca who helped convince the actor to do the film. Frank T.J. Mackey, the character that Cruise would play in the film, was based in part on an audio-recording done in an engineering class taught by a friend that was given to Anderson. It consisted of two men, "talking all this trash" about women and quoting a man named Ross Jeffries, who was teaching a new version of the Eric Weber course, "How to Pick Up Women," but utilizing hypnotism and subliminal language techniques. Anderson transcribed the tape and did a reading with Reilly and Chris Penn. The director then incorporated this dialogue and his research on Jeffries and other self-help gurus into Mackey and his sex seminar. Anderson felt that Cruise was drawn to the role because he had just finished making "Eyes Wide Shut", playing a repressed character, and was able to then play a character that was "outlandish and bigger-than-life". Anderson filmed a full-length infomercial with Cruise and even bought time on late night TV to play it on.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Anderson wrote the role of Earl Partridge for Jason Robards, but Robards could not do it due to staph infection. After George C. Scott declined the role, Robards managed to take it. He said of his character, "It was sort of prophetic that I be asked to play a guy going out in life. It was just so right for me to do this and bring what I know to it". According to Hall, much of the material with Partridge was based on Anderson watching his father die of cancer. Anderson wanted Burt Reynolds to star in the film after working on "Boogie Nights", but Reynolds declined it.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Filming began on January 12, 1999, and was initially scheduled to be 79 days, but ending up lasting until June 24, 1999, making a total of 90 filming days plus 10 days of second unit filming.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Anderson is known for his use of long takes in his films, moving along considerable distances with complex pivoting movements and transitions in actors and background. Of the long takes in "Magnolia", the most notable may be the 2 minutes 15 seconds where character Stanley Spector arrives at the studio for a taping of "What Do Kids Know?", the camera seamlessly moving through multiple rooms and hallways, transitioning to follow different characters throughout the take.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: The production designers looked at films with close, tight color palettes, films that were warm and analyzed why they did that and then applied it to "Magnolia". They also wanted to evoke the colors of the magnolia flower: greens, browns and off-whites. For the section of the prologue that is set in 1911, Anderson used a hand-cranked Pathé camera that would have been used at the time. Some of the actors were nervous about singing the lyrics to Mann's "Wise Up" in the film's climactic scene and so Anderson had Moore do it first and she set the pace and everyone else followed.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Anderson and New Line reportedly had intense arguments about how to market "Magnolia". He felt that the studio did not do a decent enough job on "Boogie Nights" and did not like the studio's poster or trailer for "Magnolia". Anderson ended up designing his own poster, cut together a trailer himself, wrote the liner notes for the soundtrack album, and pushed to avoid hyping Cruise's presence in the film in favor of the ensemble cast. Even though Anderson ultimately got his way, he realized that he had to "learn to fight without being a jerk. I was a bit of a baby. At the first moment of conflict, I behaved in a slightly adolescent knee-jerk way. I just screamed."


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Anderson met Aimee Mann in 1996 when he asked her husband, Michael Penn, to write the score and songs for his film, "Hard Eight". Mann had songs on soundtracks before but never "utilized in such an integral way", she said in an interview. She gave Anderson rough mixes of songs and found that they both wrote about the same kinds of characters. He encouraged her to write songs for the film by sending her a copy of the script. Anderson said that "Simon and Garfunkel is to "The Graduate" as Aimee Mann is to "Magnolia"".


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Two songs were written expressly for the film: "You Do", which was based on a character later cut from the film, and "Save Me", which closes the film; the latter was nominated in the 2000 Academy Awards and Golden Globes and in the 2001 Grammys. Most of the remaining seven Mann songs were demos and works in progress; "Wise Up", which is at the center of a sequence in which all of the characters sing the song, was originally written for the 1996 film "Jerry Maguire". At the time, Mann's record label had refused to release her songs on an album. The song that plays at the opening of the film is Mann's cover of "One" by Harry Nilsson. Mann's track "Momentum" is used as the loud playing music in Claudia's apartment scene when Officer Jim arrives and was also featured in the trailer for the film.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: The soundtrack album, released in December 1999 on Reprise Records, features the Mann songs, as well as a section of Jon Brion's score and tracks by Supertramp and Gabrielle that were used in the film. Reprise released a full score album in March 2000.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: "Magnolia" initially opened in a limited release on December 17, 1999, in seven theaters grossing $193,604. The film was given a wide release on January 7, 2000, in 1,034 theaters grossing $5.7 million on its opening weekend. It eventually grossed $22.5 million in North America and $26 million in other territories, for a worldwide tally of $48.5 million, against its budget of $37 million.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 83% based on 147 reviews, with an average rating of 7.50/10. The site's critical consensus reads, ""Magnolia" is an ambitious, lengthy work that ultimately succeeds due to interesting stories and excellent ensemble performances." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 77 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C−" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: "USA Today" gave the film three and a half stars out of four and called it "the most imperfect of the year's best movies". Roger Ebert from the "Chicago Sun-Times" awarded the film four stars out of four, praising it in both of his reviews from 2000 and 2008, and as his second favorite film of 1999, behind Being John Malkovich. He said in the first review, ""Magnolia" is the kind of film I instinctively respond to. Leave logic at the door. Do not expect subdued taste and restraint, but instead a kind of operatic ecstasy". After rewatching it in 2008, he added the film to his 'Great Movies' list. "Entertainment Weekly" gave the film a "B+" rating, praising Cruise's performance: "It's with Cruise as Frank T.J. Mackey, a slick televangelist of penis power, that the filmmaker scores his biggest success, as the actor exorcises the uptight fastidiousness of "Eyes Wide Shut" ... Like John Travolta in "Pulp Fiction", this cautiously packaged movie star is liberated by risky business". "The Independent" said that the film was "limitless. And yet some things do feel incomplete, brushed-upon, tangential. "Magnolia" does not have the last word on anything. But is superb". Kenneth Turan, in his review for the "Los Angeles Times", praised Tom Cruise's performance: "Mackey gives Cruise the chance to cut loose by doing amusing riffs on his charismatic superstar image. It's great fun, expertly written and performed, and all the more enjoyable because the self-parody element is unexpected". In his review for "The New York Observer", Andrew Sarris wrote, "In the case of "Magnolia", I think Mr. Anderson has taken us to the water's edge without plunging in. I admire his ambition and his very eloquent camera movements, but if I may garble something Lenin once said one last time, 'You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs'."


title: Magnolia (film)

text: In her review for "The New York Times", Janet Maslin wrote, "But when that group sing-along arrives, "Magnolia" begins to self-destruct spectacularly. It's astonishing to see a film begin this brilliantly only to torpedo itself in its final hour," but went on to say that the film "was saved from its worst, most reductive ideas by the intimacy of the performances and the deeply felt distress signals given off by the cast". Philip French, in his review for "The Observer", wrote, "But is the joyless universe he (Anderson) presents any more convincing than the Pollyanna optimism of traditional sitcoms? These lives are somehow too stunted and pathetic to achieve the level of tragedy". The "Time" critic Richard Schickel wrote: "The result is a hard-striving, convoluted movie, which never quite becomes the smoothly reciprocating engine Anderson (who did "Boogie Nights") would like it to be."


title: Magnolia (film)

text: In an interview, Ingmar Bergman mentioned "Magnolia" as an example of the "strength of American cinema". Roger Ebert included the work in his "Great Movies" list in November 2008, saying, "As an act of filmmaking, it draws us in and doesn't let go." "Total Film" magazine placed it at number 4 in their list of 50 Best Movies in Total Film's lifetime. In 2008, it was named the 89th greatest movie of all time by "Empire" magazine in its issue of "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time". It received eight votes – five from critics and three from directors – in the British Film Institute's 2012 "Sight & Sound" polls.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Following the film's release, Anderson said: "I really feel ... That "Magnolia" is, for better or worse, the best movie I'll ever make." Later, however, he came to consider it overlong; when asked in a Reddit AMA what he would tell himself to do if he could go back to when he shot the movie, his response was "Chill The Fuck Out and Cut Twenty Minutes."


title: Magnolia (film)

text: In 2004, the American Film Institute nominated the song "Save Me" from this film for AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Songs.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: Essays have been written on the themes in "Magnolia", such as regret; loneliness; the cost of failed relationships as a result of parents, particularly fathers, who have failed their children; and cruelty to children and its lasting effect (as demonstrated by the sexual assault perpetrated on Claudia by Jimmy).


title: Magnolia (film)

text: At the end of the film, frogs rain from the sky. Throughout the film, there are references to the Book of Exodus 8:2 "And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs."


title: Magnolia (film)

text: The film has an underlying theme of unexplained events, taken from the 1920s and 1930s works of Charles Fort. Fortean author Loren Coleman's 2001 book "Mysterious America: The Revised Edition" includes a chapter entitled "The Teleporting Animals and "Magnolia"", addressing the film. The chapter discusses how one of Fort's books is visible on the table in the library and the film's end credit thanking Charles Fort.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: The only character who seems to be unsurprised by the falling frogs is Stanley. He calmly observes the event, saying, "This happens. This is something that happens." This has led to the speculation that Stanley is a prophet, allegorically akin to Moses, and that the "slavery" to which the film alludes is the exploitation of children by adults. These "father issues" persist throughout the film, as seen in the abuse and neglect of Claudia, Frank, Donnie, Stanley, and Dixon.


title: Magnolia (film)

text: The DVD release includes a lengthy behind-the-scenes documentary, "That Moment". It uses a fly-on-the-wall approach to cover nearly every aspect of production, from production management and scheduling to music direction to special effects. The behind-the-scenes documentary is an in-depth look into Anderson's motivation and directing style. Pre-production included a screening of the film "Network" (1976), as well as "Ordinary People" (1980). Several scenes showed Anderson at odds with the child actors and labor laws that restrict their work time. The character of Dixon has further scenes filmed but, from Anderson's reactions, appear not to be working. These scenes were cut completely and have never been shown on DVD.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: American Gangster is a 2007 American biographical crime film directed and produced by Ridley Scott and written by Steven Zaillian. The film is fictionally based on the criminal career of Frank Lucas, a gangster from La Grange, North Carolina who smuggled heroin into the United States on American service planes returning from the Vietnam War, before being detained by a task force led by detective Richie Roberts. The film stars Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe with co-stars Ted Levine, John Ortiz, Josh Brolin, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Ruby Dee, Lymari Nadal and Cuba Gooding Jr.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: Development for the film initially began in 2000, when Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment purchased the rights to a "New York" magazine story about the rise and fall of Lucas. Two years later, screenwriter Steven Zaillian introduced a 170-page scriptment to Scott. Original production plans were to commence in Toronto for budget purposes; however, production eventually relocated permanently to New York City. Because of the film's rising budget Universal canceled production in 2004. After negotiations with Terry George, it was later revived with Scott at the helm in March 2005. Principal photography commenced over a period of five months from July to December 2006; filming took place throughout New York City and concluded in Thailand.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: "American Gangster" premiered in New York on October 20, 2007, and was released in the United States and Canada on November 2. The film was well received by most film critics, and grossed over US$266.5 million worldwide, with domestic grosses standing at $130.1 million. Many of the people portrayed, including Roberts and Lucas, have stated that the film took much creative license with the story, and three former DEA agents sued Universal claiming the agency's portrayal was demoralizing. "American Gangster" was nominated for twenty-one awards, including two Oscar nominations for Best Art Direction and Best Supporting Actress (Ruby Dee), and won three including a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role for Dee.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: In 1968, Frank Lucas is the right-hand man of Harlem mob boss Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson. When Johnson dies of a heart attack, Frank enters the heroin trade, buying directly from producers in Thailand and smuggling it into the U.S. through returning Vietnam War servicemen. Frank sells his heroin under the brand "Blue Magic", whose affordability and purity make it incredibly popular, eliminating much of his competition.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: Newark detective and aspiring lawyer Richie Roberts is ostracized in his precinct after handing in almost $1 million that he found in a mobster's car. After his outcasted and addicted partner overdoses on Blue Magic, Captain Lou Toback puts Roberts in charge of a special task force that targets major local drug suppliers. Roberts is also depicted having a bitter divorce battle with his ex-wife over his infidelity.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: Frank's heroin racket prospers; he eventually sells Blue Magic wholesale to many dealers in the New York Tri-State Area and expands his distribution through other criminal organisations. With this monopoly, Frank becomes Harlem's top crime lord, opening legitimate business fronts and maintaining a low profile, while befriending politicians and famous celebrities (such as Joe Louis). He buys a mansion for his mother and recruits his five brothers as his lieutenants. Frank eventually falls in love with and marries Eva, a Puerto Rican beauty queen. He attends the Fight of the Century with her, where Roberts spots Frank, notices he has better seats than the Italian mobsters, and begins investigating him. Frank also comes to odds with competing local gangster Nicky Barnes; corrupt NYPD detective Nick Trupo, who is among many people Frank is forced to bribe; and the Corsican mafia, who unsuccessfully attempt to assassinate Frank and his wife for putting them out of business.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: One night, Roberts' detectives witness one of Frank's cousins, Jimmy Zee, shoot his girlfriend; he becomes their informant in lieu of being convicted. They make Jimmy wear a wire, through which they learn that Frank has negotiated one final shipment of heroin after the fall of Saigon. They identify and search one of the last planes carrying Lucas' stock, discovering that it is being smuggled through the coffins of dead servicemen. They follow the drugs into Newark's projects and obtain a warrant to raid Frank's heroin processing facility, which results in the death of Frank's nephew Stevie Lucas and the arrest of Frank's brother Huey. They then arrest the other four brothers, and finally Frank himself.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: During a trial against Frank, Roberts offers him a chance at leniency if he will help him expose corrupt police officers, to which Frank agrees. Following Frank's cooperation, three-quarters of the New York DEA and many NYPD officers are arrested and convicted, while Trupo commits suicide. Roberts becomes a defense attorney and has Frank as his first client. Frank is sentenced to 70 years in prison, of which he serves 15 years and is released in 1991.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: In 2000, Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment purchased the rights to "The Return of Superfly", by , an article published in "New York" magazine story about the rise and fall of the 1970s heroin kingpin Frank Lucas. In 2002, screenwriter Steven Zaillian brought a 170-page script to director Ridley Scott, who expressed interest in making two films from it. However, Scott did not immediately pursue the project, choosing to make "Kingdom of Heaven" instead. In November 2003, Universal and Imagine entered negotiations with Brian De Palma to direct "Tru Blu", with a script by Zaillian based on the life of Frank Lucas. Zaillian interpreted the account as one of "American business and race", focusing the script thematically on corporate business. Production was initially slated for a spring 2004 start.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: In March 2004, the studio entered new negotiations with Antoine Fuqua to direct, as well as Denzel Washington to star in the film as Frank Lucas. The following May, Benicio del Toro entered negotiations to star as Detective Richie Roberts, who brought down Lucas. Production of "Tru Blu" was reset to begin in early fall 2004, with the film slated for a release date of June 3, 2005. In September 2004, Dania Ramirez entered negotiations to join the cast of the film, now titled "American Gangster".


title: American Gangster (film)

text: Universal Pictures reported that it greenlit "American Gangster" with a budget of $80 million, which escalated to $93 million, with $10 million for development costs and $3 million for the delay of the production start date. Sources close to the director insist that the budget was $93 million from the beginning. The studio also sought for "American Gangster" to be produced in Toronto rather than New York City to save money, but Fuqua resisted the re-location. The studio's parent company General Electric received tax credits in New York City, so production was moved to the city. This change increased the budget to $98 million. Fuqua's camp insisted that it was seeking ways to reduce the budget, but the studio argued about several aspects of the project under him. The director had wanted to film a Vietnam sequence in Thailand and to cast notable names such as Ray Liotta and John C. Reilly in minor roles. To add to the studio's budgetary concerns, Fuqua was rewriting the script during the pre-production process. The director did not have a shot-list, final locations, and supporting actors signed to initiate production.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: Fuqua was fired on October 1, 2004, four weeks before principal photography would begin. The studio cited creative differences for its action. After Fuqua's departure, the studio met with Peter Berg to take over directing the film, and Denzel Washington had approved of the choice. Due to the search potentially escalating a budget already in the US$80 million range and the difficulty in recouping the amount based on the film's subject matter, Universal canceled production of "American Gangster", citing time constraints and creative elements. The cancellation cost the studio $30 million, of which $20 million went to Washington and $5 million went to del Toro due to their pay or play contracts.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: In March 2005, "American Gangster" was revived as Universal and Imagine entered negotiations with Terry George to revise Zaillian's script and direct the film, which was to be financed with a target budget of US$50 million. Will Smith was approached to replace Washington as Frank Lucas, though an offer would be postponed until George completed his revision of the script. George cut many key scenes, characters and Asian locations to reduce costs, but the project failed to progress given financial problems and producer Grazer feeling they "couldn't make it right" without the removed material.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: After Scott and Zaillian met on another project, Zaillian brought up the "Gangster" project again with Scott, who decided he was ready to do it. Producer Brian Grazer and Imagine executive Jim Whitaker decided against pursuing George's attempt and to return to Zaillian's vision. In February 2006, Ridley Scott entered talks with the studio to take over "American Gangster" from George, returning to Zaillian's draft as the film's basis. Washington returned to his role as Lucas, and Russell Crowe was attached to star as Roberts. Crowe was drawn to the project based on his previous work with the director on "Gladiator" and "A Good Year", Washington wanted to work with Crowe again, after 1995's "Virtuosity". Production was slated for summer 2006.


title: American Gangster (film)

text: Scott had discussed the script with Crowe as they worked on "A Good Year" in France, and they sought to take on the project. The director reviewed Zaillian's script, Terry George's rewrite, and a revision by Richard Price during the project's incarnation with director Antoine Fuqua. Scott preferred Zaillian's approach and chose to follow it. The director encountered a challenge in the script since the characters Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts do not encounter each other until twenty minutes before the end of the film. The director sought to flesh out the private universes of these characters, which would evolve, and to have scenes cut between the two characters to provide a balance. Elements such as Frank Lucas's interaction with his family and Richie Roberts's dysfunctional marriage were written to add to the characters' backgrounds. The rappers T.I., RZA, and Common were added to the cast to appeal to younger audiences.