title: Voynich manuscript

text: The manuscript currently consists of around 240 pages, but there is evidence that additional pages are missing. Some pages are foldable sheets of varying size. Most of the pages have fantastical illustrations or diagrams, some crudely coloured, with sections of the manuscript showing people, fictitious plants, astrological symbols, etc. The text is written from left to right. The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish-Lithuanian book dealer who purchased it in 1912. Since 1969, it has been held in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. The manuscript has never been demonstrably deciphered, and none of the many hypotheses proposed over the last hundred years have been independently verified. The mystery of its meaning and origin has excited the popular imagination, making it the subject of study and speculation.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Yale University published the manuscript online in its entirety—225 pages—in their digital collections library.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The codicology, or physical characteristics of the manuscript, has been studied by researchers. The manuscript measures , with hundreds of vellum pages collected into 18 quires. The total number of pages is around 240, but the exact number depends on how the manuscript's unusual foldouts are counted. The quires have been numbered from 1 to 20 in various locations, using numerals consistent with the 1400s, and the top righthand corner of each "recto" (righthand) page has been numbered from 1 to 116, using numerals of a later date. From the various numbering gaps in the quires and pages, it seems likely that, in the past, the manuscript had at least 272 pages in 20 quires, some of which were already missing when Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1912. There is strong evidence that many of the book's bifolios were reordered at various points in its history, and that the original page order may well have been quite different from what it is today.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Samples from various parts of the manuscript were radiocarbon dated at the University of Arizona in 2009. The results were consistent for all samples tested and indicated a date for the parchment between 1404 and 1438. Protein testing in 2014 revealed that the parchment was made from calf skin, and multispectral analysis showed that it had not been written on before the manuscript was created (i.e., it is not a palimpsest). The quality of the parchment is average and has deficiencies, such as holes and tears, common in parchment codices, but was also prepared with so much care that the skin side is largely indistinguishable from the flesh side. The parchment is prepared from "at least fourteen or fifteen entire calfskins".


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The goat skin binding and covers are not original to the book, but date to its possession by the Collegio Romano. Insect holes are present on the first and last folios of the manuscript in the current order and suggest that a wooden cover was present before the later covers. Discolouring on the edges points to a tanned-leather inside cover.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Many pages contain substantial drawings or charts which are colored with paint. Based on modern analysis using polarized light microscopy (PLM), it has been determined that a quill pen and iron gall ink were used for the text and figure outlines. The ink of the drawings, text, and page and quire numbers have similar microscopic characteristics. In 2009, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) revealed that the inks contained major amounts of carbon, iron, sulfur, potassium and calcium with trace amounts of copper and occasionally zinc. EDS did not show the presence of lead, while X-ray diffraction (XRD) identified potassium lead oxide, potassium hydrogen sulphate, and syngenite in one of the samples tested. The similarity between the drawing inks and text inks suggested a contemporaneous origin.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the ink outlined figures, possibly at a later date. The blue, white, red-brown, and green paints of the manuscript have been analyzed using PLM, XRD, EDS, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM).


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Computer scientist Jorge Stolfi of the University of Campinas highlighted that parts of the text and drawings have been modified, using darker ink over a fainter, earlier script. Evidence for this is visible in various folios, for example "f1r", "f3v", "f26v", "f57v", "f67r2", "f71r", "f72v1", "f72v3" and "f73r".


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Every page in the manuscript contains text, mostly in an unidentified language, but some have extraneous writing in Latin script. The bulk of the text in the 240-page manuscript is written in an unknown script, running left to right. Most of the characters are composed of one or two simple pen strokes. There exists some dispute as to whether certain characters are distinct, but a script of 20–25 characters would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each. There is no obvious punctuation.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Much of the text is written in a single column in the body of a page, with a slightly ragged right margin and paragraph divisions and sometimes with stars in the left margin. Other text occurs in charts or as labels associated with illustrations. There are no indications of any errors or corrections made at any place in the document. The ductus flows smoothly, giving the impression that the symbols were not enciphered; there is no delay between characters, as would normally be expected in written encoded text.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Only a few of the words in the manuscript are thought to have not been written in the unknown script:


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Various transcription alphabets have been created to equate Voynich characters with Latin characters to help with cryptanalysis, such as the Extensible (originally: European) Voynich Alphabet (EVA). The first major one was created by the "First Study Group", led by cryptographer William F. Friedman in the 1940s, where each line of the manuscript was transcribed to an IBM punch card to make it machine readable.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The text consists of over 170,000 characters, with spaces dividing the text into about 35,000 groups of varying length, usually referred to as "words" or "word tokens" (37,919); 8,114 of those words are considered unique "word types". The structure of these words seems to follow phonological or orthographic laws of some sort; for example, certain characters must appear in each word (like English vowels), some characters never follow others, or some may be doubled or tripled, but others may not. The distribution of letters within words is also rather peculiar: Some characters occur only at the beginning of a word, some only at the end (like Greek ς), and some always in the middle section.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Many researchers have commented upon the highly regular structure of the words. Professor Gonzalo Rubio, an expert in ancient languages at Pennsylvania State University, stated:


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Stephan Vonfelt studied statistical properties of the distribution of letters and their correlations (properties which can be vaguely characterized as rhythmic resonance, alliteration, or assonance) and found that under that respect Voynichese is more similar to the Mandarin Chinese pinyin text of the "Records of the Grand Historian" than to the text of works from European languages, although the numerical differences between Voynichese and Mandarin Chinese pinyin look larger than those between Mandarin Chinese pinyin and European languages.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Practically no words have fewer than two letters or more than ten. Some words occur in only certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. Few repetitions occur among the thousand or so labels attached to the illustrations. There are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row (see "Zipf's law"). Words that differ by only one letter also repeat with unusual frequency, causing single-substitution alphabet decipherings to yield babble-like text. In 1962, cryptanalyst Elizebeth Friedman described such statistical analyses as "doomed to utter frustration".


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In 2014, a team led by Diego Amancio of the University of São Paulo published a study using statistical methods to analyse the relationships of the words in the text. Instead of trying to find the meaning, Amancio's team looked for connections and clusters of words. By measuring the frequency and intermittence of words, Amancio claimed to identify the text's keywords and produced three-dimensional models of the text's structure and word frequencies. The team concluded that, in 90% of cases, the Voynich systems are similar to those of other known books, indicating that the text is in an actual language, not random gibberish.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Linguists Claire Bowern and have applied statistical methods to the Voynich manuscript, comparing it to other languages and encodings of languages, and have found both similarities and differences in statistical properties. Character sequences in languages are measured using a metric called h2, or second-order conditional entropy. Natural languages tend to have an h2 between 3 and 4, but Voynichese has much more predictable character sequences, and an h2 around 2. However, at higher levels of organization, the Voynich manuscript displays properties similar to those of natural languages. Based on this, Bowern dismisses theories that the manuscript is gibberish. It is likely to be an encoded natural language or a constructed language. Bowern also concludes that the statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript are not consistent with the use of a substitution cipher or polyalphabetic cipher.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: As noted in Bowern's review, multiple scribes or "hands" may have written the manuscript, possibly using two methods of encoding at least one natural language. The "language" Voynich A appears in the herbal and pharmaceutical parts of the manuscript. The "language" known as Voynich B appears in the balneological section, some parts of the medicinal and herbal sections, and the astrological section. The most common vocabulary items of Voynich A and Voynich B are substantially different. Topic modeling of the manuscript suggests that pages identified as written by a particular scribe may relate to a different topic.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In terms of morphology, if visual spaces in the manuscript are assumed to indicate word breaks, there are consistent patterns that suggest a three-part word structure of prefix, root or midfix, and suffix. Certain characters and character combinations are more likely to appear in particular fields. There are minor variations between Voynich A and Voynich B. The predictability of certain letters in a relatively small number of combinations in certain parts of words appears to explain the low entropy (h2) of Voynichese. In the absence of obvious punctuation, some variants of the same word appear to be specific to typographical positions, such as the beginning of a paragraph, line, or sentence.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The Voynich word frequencies of both variants appear to conform to a Zipfian distribution, supporting the idea that the text has linguistic meaning. This has implications for the encoding methods most likely to have been used, since some forms of encoding interfere with the Zipfian distribution. Measures of the proportional frequency of the ten most common words is similar to those of the Semitic, Iranian, and Germanic languages. Another measure of morphological complexity, the Moving-Average Type–Token Ratio (MATTR) index, is similar to Iranian, Germanic, and Romance languages.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The illustrations are conventionally used to divide most of the manuscript into six different sections, since the text cannot be read. Each section is typified by illustrations with different styles and supposed subject matter except for the last section, in which the only drawings are small stars in the margin. The following are the sections and their conventional names:


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript is that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of the illustrations have fueled many theories about the book's origin, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The first section of the book is almost certainly herbal, but attempts have failed to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporaneous herbals. Only a few of the plant drawings can be identified with reasonable certainty, such as a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern. The herbal pictures that match pharmacological sketches appear to be clean copies of them, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plant drawings in the herbal section seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, bloodletting, and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript. However, interpretation remains speculative, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Much of the early history of the book is unknown, though the text and illustrations are all characteristically European. In 2009, University of Arizona researchers radiocarbon dated the manuscript's vellum to between 1404 and 1438. In addition, McCrone Associates in Westmont, Illinois found that the paints in the manuscript were of materials to be expected from that period of European history. There have been erroneous reports that McCrone Associates indicated that much of the ink was added not long after the creation of the parchment, but their official report contains no statement of this.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The first confirmed owner was Georg Baresch, a 17th-century alchemist from Prague. Baresch was apparently puzzled about this "Sphynx" that had been "taking up space uselessly in his library" for many years. He learned that Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher from the Collegio Romano had published a Coptic (Egyptian) dictionary and claimed to have deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs; Baresch twice sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher in Rome, asking for clues. The 1639 letter from Baresch to Kircher is the earliest known mention of the manuscript to have been confirmed.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Whether Kircher answered the request or not is not known, but he was apparently interested enough to try to acquire the book, which Baresch refused to yield. Upon Baresch's death, the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci (also known as Johannes Marcus Marci), then rector of Charles University in Prague. A few years later, Marci sent the book to Kircher, his longtime friend and correspondent.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Marci also sent Kircher a cover letter (in Latin, dated 19 August 1665 or 1666) that was still attached to the book when Voynich acquired it:


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The "Dr. Raphael" is believed to be Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky, and the sum would be about 2 kg of gold.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: While Wilfrid Voynich took Raphael's claim at face value, the Bacon authorship theory has been largely discredited. However, a piece of evidence supporting Rudolph's ownership is the now almost invisible name or signature, on the first page of the book, of Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz, the head of Rudolph's botanical gardens in Prague. Rudolph died still owing money to de Tepenecz, and it is possible that de Tepenecz may have been given the book (or simply taken it) in partial payment of that debt.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: No records of the book for the next 200 years have been found, but in all likelihood, it was stored with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University). It probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States. The new Italian government decided to confiscate many properties of the Church, including the library of the Collegio. Many books of the university's library were hastily transferred to the personal libraries of its faculty just before this happened, according to investigations by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, and those books were exempt from confiscation. Kircher's correspondence was among those books, and so, apparently, was the Voynich manuscript, as it still bears the "ex libris" of Petrus Beckx, head of the Jesuit order and the university's rector at the time.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Beckx's private library was moved to the Villa Mondragone, Frascati, a large country palace near Rome that had been bought by the Society of Jesus in 1866 and housed the headquarters of the Jesuits' Ghislieri College.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In 1903, the Society of Jesus (Collegio Romano) was short of money and decided to sell some of its holdings discreetly to the Vatican Library. The sale took place in 1912, but not all of the manuscripts listed for sale ended up going to the Vatican. Wilfrid Voynich acquired 30 of these manuscripts, among them the one which now bears his name. He spent the next seven years attempting to interest scholars in deciphering the script, while he worked to determine the origins of the manuscript.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In 1930, the manuscript was inherited after Wilfrid's death by his widow Ethel Voynich, author of the novel "The Gadfly" and daughter of mathematician George Boole. She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend Anne Nill. In 1961, Nill sold the book to antique book dealer Hans P. Kraus. Kraus was unable to find a buyer and donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969, where it was catalogued as "MS 408", sometimes also referred to as "Beinecke MS 408".


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The timeline of ownership of the Voynich manuscript is given below. The time when it was possibly created is shown in green (early 1400s), based on carbon dating of the vellum. Periods of unknown ownership are indicated in white. The commonly accepted owners of the 17th century are shown in orange; the long period of storage in the Collegio Romano is yellow. The location where Wilfrid Voynich allegedly acquired the manuscript (Frascati) is shown in green (late 1800s); Voynich's ownership is shown in red, and modern owners are highlighted blue.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Many people have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich manuscript, among them Roger Bacon, John Dee or Edward Kelley, Giovanni Fontana, and Voynich.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Marci's 1665/1666 cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his friend the late Raphael Mnishovsky, the book had once been bought by Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia for 600 ducats (66.42 troy ounce actual gold weight, or 2.07 kg). (Mnishovsky had died in 1644, more than 20 years earlier, and the deal must have occurred before Rudolf's abdication in 1611, at least 55 years before Marci's letter. However, Karl Widemann sold books to Rudolf II in March 1599.)


title: Voynich manuscript

text: According to the letter, Mnishovsky (but not necessarily Rudolf) speculated that the author was 13th-century Franciscan friar and polymath Roger Bacon.<ref name="Bacon/Mnishovsky">


title: Voynich manuscript

text: </ref> Marci said that he was suspending judgment about this claim, but it was taken quite seriously by Wilfrid Voynich, who did his best to confirm it. Voynich contemplated the possibility that the author was Albertus Magnus if not Roger Bacon.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The assumption that Bacon was the author led Voynich to conclude that John Dee sold the manuscript to Rudolf. Dee was a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I of England who was known to have owned a large collection of Bacon's manuscripts.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Dee and his "scrier" (spirit medium) Edward Kelley lived in Bohemia for several years, where they had hoped to sell their services to the emperor. However, this sale seems quite unlikely, according to John Schuster, because Dee's meticulously kept diaries do not mention it.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: If Bacon did not create the Voynich manuscript, a supposed connection to Dee is much weakened. It was thought possible, prior to the carbon dating of the manuscript, that Dee or Kelley might have written it and spread the rumor that it was originally a work of Bacon's in the hopes of later selling it.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Some suspect Voynich of having fabricated the manuscript himself. As an antique book dealer, he probably had the necessary knowledge and means, and a lost book by Roger Bacon would have been worth a fortune. Furthermore, Baresch's letter and Marci's letter only establish the existence of a manuscript, not that the Voynich manuscript is the same one mentioned. These letters could possibly have been the motivation for Voynich to fabricate the manuscript, assuming that he was aware of them. However, many consider the expert internal dating of the manuscript and the June 1999 discovery of Baresch's letter to Kircher as having eliminated this possibility.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Eamon Duffy says that the radiocarbon dating of the parchment (or, more accurately, vellum) "effectively rules out any possibility that the manuscript is a post-medieval forgery", as the consistency of the pages indicates origin from a single source, and "it is inconceivable" that a quantity of unused parchment comprising "at least fourteen or fifteen entire calfskins" could have survived from the early 15th century.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: It has been suggested that some illustrations in the books of an Italian engineer, Giovanni Fontana, slightly resemble Voynich illustrations. Fontana was familiar with cryptography and used it in his books, although he did not use the Voynich script but a simple substitution cipher. In the book "Secretum de thesauro experimentorum ymaginationis hominum" (Secret of the treasure-room of experiments in man's imagination), written c. 1430, Fontana described mnemonic machines, written in his cypher. That book and his "Bellicorum instrumentorum liber" both used a cryptographic system, described as a simple, rational cipher, based on signs without letters or numbers.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Sometime before 1921, Voynich was able to read a name faintly written at the foot of the manuscript's first page: "Jacobj à Tepenece". This is taken to be a reference to Jakub Hořčický of Tepenec, also known by his Latin name Jacobus Sinapius. Rudolph II had ennobled him in 1607, had appointed him his Imperial Distiller, and had made him curator of his botanical gardens as well as one of his personal physicians. Voynich (and many other people after him) concluded that Jacobus owned the Voynich manuscript prior to Baresch, and he drew a link from that to Rudolf's court, in confirmation of Mnishovsky's story.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Jacobus's name has faded further since Voynich saw it, but is still legible under ultraviolet light. It does not match the copy of his signature in a document located by Jan Hurych in 2003. As a result, it has been suggested that the signature was added later, possibly even fraudulently by Voynich himself.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Baresch's letter bears some resemblance to a hoax that orientalist once played on Athanasius Kircher. Müller sent some unintelligible text to Kircher with a note explaining that it had come from Egypt, and asking him for a translation. Kircher reportedly solved it. It has been speculated that these were both cryptographic tricks played on Kircher to make him look foolish.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Raphael Mnishovsky, the friend of Marci who was the reputed source of the Bacon story, was himself a cryptographer and apparently invented a cipher which he claimed was uncrackable (c. 1618). This has led to the speculation that Mnishovsky might have produced the Voynich manuscript as a practical demonstration of his cipher and made Baresch his unwitting test subject. Indeed, the disclaimer in the Voynich manuscript cover letter could mean that Marci suspected some kind of deception.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In his 2006 book, Nick Pelling proposed that the Voynich manuscript was written by 15th-century North Italian architect Antonio Averlino (also known as "Filarete"), a theory broadly consistent with the radiocarbon dating.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: According to the "letter-based cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European language that was intentionally rendered obscure by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript "alphabet" through a cipher of some sort—an algorithm that operated on individual letters. This was the working hypothesis for most 20th-century deciphering attempts, including an informal team of NSA cryptographers led by William F. Friedman in the early 1950s.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The counterargument is that almost all cipher systems consistent with that era fail to match what is seen in the Voynich manuscript. For example, simple substitution ciphers would be excluded because the distribution of letter frequencies does not resemble that of any known language, while the small number of different letter shapes used implies that nomenclator and homophonic ciphers should be ruled out, because these typically employ larger cipher alphabets. Polyalphabetic ciphers were invented by Alberti in the 1460s and included the later Vigenère cipher, but they usually yield ciphertexts where all cipher shapes occur with roughly equal probability, quite unlike the language-like letter distribution which the Voynich manuscript appears to have.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: However, the presence of many tightly grouped shapes in the Voynich manuscript (such as "or", "ar", "ol", "al", "an", "ain", "aiin", "air", "aiir", "am", "ee", "eee", among others) does suggest that its cipher system may make use of a "verbose cipher", where single letters in a plaintext get enciphered into groups of fake letters. For example, the first two lines of page "f15v" (seen above) contain "" and "", which strongly resemble how Roman numerals such as "CCC" or "XXXX" would look if verbosely enciphered.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In 1943, Joseph Martin Feely claimed that the manuscript was a scientific diary written in shorthand. According to D'Imperio, this was "Latin, but in a system of abbreviated forms not considered acceptable by other scholars, who unanimously rejected his readings of the text".


title: Voynich manuscript

text: This theory holds that the text of the Voynich manuscript is mostly meaningless, but contains meaningful information hidden in inconspicuous details—e.g., the second letter of every word, or the number of letters in each line. This technique, called steganography, is very old and was described by Johannes Trithemius in 1499. Though the plain text was speculated to have been extracted by a Cardan grille (an overlay with cut-outs for the meaningful text) of some sort, this seems somewhat unlikely because the words and letters are not arranged on anything like a regular grid. Still, steganographic claims are hard to prove or disprove, because stegotexts can be arbitrarily hard to find.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: It has been suggested that the meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of certain pen strokes.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to those of natural languages. For instance, the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts. Amancio "et al." (2013) argued that the Voynich manuscript "is mostly compatible with natural languages and incompatible with random texts".


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The linguist Jacques Guy once suggested that the Voynich manuscript text could be some little-known natural language, written plaintext with an invented alphabet. He suggested Chinese in jest, but later comparison of word length statistics with Vietnamese and Chinese made him view that hypothesis seriously. In many language families of East and Central Asia, mainly Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese, Khmer, etc.) and possibly Tai (Thai, Lao, etc.), morphemes generally have only one syllable.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Child (1976), a linguist of Indo-European languages for the U.S. National Security Agency, proposed that the manuscript was written in a "hitherto unknown North Germanic dialect". He identified in the manuscript a "skeletal syntax several elements of which are reminiscent of certain Germanic languages", while the content is expressed using "a great deal of obscurity".


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In February 2014, Professor Stephen Bax of the University of Bedfordshire made public his research into using "bottom up" methodology to understand the manuscript. His method involved looking for and translating proper nouns, in association with relevant illustrations, in the context of other languages of the same time period. A paper he posted online offers tentative translation of 14 characters and 10 words.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Tucker & Talbert (2014) published a paper claiming a positive identification of 37 plants, 6 animals, and one mineral referenced in the manuscript to plant drawings in the "Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis" or Badianus manuscript, a fifteenth-century Aztec herbal. Together with the presence of atacamite in the paint, they argue that the plants were from colonial New Spain and the text represented Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. They date the manuscript to between 1521 (the date of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire) and "circa" 1576. These dates contradict the earlier radiocarbon date of the vellum and other elements of the manuscript. However, they argued that the vellum could have been stored and used at a later date. The analysis has been criticized by other Voynich manuscript researchers, who argued that a skilled forger could construct plants that coincidentally have a passing resemblance to theretofore undiscovered existing plants. Nahuatl specialist Magnus Pharao Hansen has rejected their proposed readings as pure nonsense.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript words led William F. Friedman to conjecture that the text could be a constructed language. In 1950, Friedman asked the British army officer John Tiltman to analyze a few pages of the text, but Tiltman did not share this conclusion. In a paper in 1967, Brigadier Tiltman said:


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The concept of a constructed language is quite old, as attested by John Wilkins's "Philosophical Language" (1668), but still postdates the generally accepted origin of the Voynich manuscript by two centuries. In most known examples, categories are subdivided by adding suffixes (fusional languages); as a consequence, a text in a particular subject would have many words with similar prefixes—for example, all plant names would begin with similar letters, and likewise for all diseases, etc. This feature could then explain the repetitious nature of the Voynich text. However, no one has been able yet to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich manuscript.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The fact that the manuscript has defied decipherment thus far has led various scholars to propose that the text does not contain meaningful content in the first place, implying that it may be a hoax.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In 2003, computer scientist Gordon Rugg showed that text with characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have been produced using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by means of a perforated paper overlay. The latter device, known as a Cardan grille, was invented around 1550 as an encryption tool, more than 100 years after the estimated creation date of the Voynich manuscript. Some maintain that the similarity between the pseudo-texts generated in Gordon Rugg's experiments and the Voynich manuscript is superficial, and the grille method could be used to emulate any language to a certain degree.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In April 2007, a study by Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner published in "Cryptologia" supported the hoax hypothesis. Schinner showed that the statistical properties of the manuscript's text were more consistent with meaningless gibberish produced using a quasi-stochastic method, such as the one described by Rugg, than with Latin and medieval German texts.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Some scholars have claimed that the manuscript's text appears too sophisticated to be a hoax. In 2013, Marcelo Montemurro, a theoretical physicist from the University of Manchester, published findings claiming that semantic networks exist in the text of the manuscript, such as content-bearing words occurring in a clustered pattern, or new words being used when there was a shift in topic. With this evidence, he believes it unlikely that these features were intentionally "incorporated" into the text to make a hoax more realistic, as most of the required academic knowledge of these structures did not exist at the time the Voynich manuscript would have been written.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In September 2016, Gordon Rugg and Gavin Taylor addressed these objections in another article in "Cryptologia", and illustrated a simple hoax method that they claim could have caused the mathematical properties of the text.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In 2019, Torsten Timm and Andreas Schinner published an algorithm that matches the statistical characteristics of the Voynich manuscript, and could have been used by a Medieval author to generate meaningless text.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In their 2004 book, Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill suggest the possibility that the Voynich manuscript may be a case of glossolalia (speaking-in-tongues), channelling, or outsider art. If so, the author felt compelled to write large amounts of text in a manner which resembles stream of consciousness, either because of voices heard or because of an urge. This often takes place in an invented language in glossolalia, usually made up of fragments of the author's own language, although invented scripts for this purpose are rare.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Kennedy and Churchill use Hildegard von Bingen's works to point out similarities between the Voynich manuscript and the illustrations that she drew when she was suffering from severe bouts of migraine, which can induce a trance-like state prone to glossolalia. Prominent features found in both are abundant "streams of stars", and the repetitive nature of the "nymphs" in the balneological section.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The theory is controversial, and it's virtually impossible to prove or disprove it, short of deciphering the text. Kennedy and Churchill are themselves not convinced of the hypothesis, but consider it plausible. In the culminating chapter of their work, Kennedy states his belief that it is a hoax or forgery. Churchill acknowledges the possibility that the manuscript is either a synthetic forgotten language (as advanced by Friedman), or else a forgery, as the preeminent theory. However, he concludes that, if the manuscript is a genuine creation, mental illness or delusion seems to have affected the author.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: One of the earliest efforts to unlock the book's secrets (and the first of many premature claims of decipherment) was made in 1921 by William Romaine Newbold of the University of Pennsylvania. His singular hypothesis held that the visible text is meaningless, but that each apparent "letter" is in fact constructed of a series of tiny markings discernible only under magnification. These markings were supposed to be based on ancient Greek shorthand, forming a second level of script that held the real content of the writing. Newbold claimed to have used this knowledge to work out entire paragraphs proving the authorship of Bacon and recording his use of a compound microscope four hundred years before van Leeuwenhoek. A circular drawing in the astronomical section depicts an irregularly shaped object with four curved arms, which Newbold interpreted as a picture of a galaxy, which could be obtained only with a telescope. However, Newbold's analysis has since been dismissed as overly speculative after John Matthews Manly of the University of Chicago pointed out serious flaws in his theory. Each shorthand character was assumed to have multiple interpretations, with no reliable way to determine which was intended for any given case. Newbold's method also required rearranging letters at will until intelligible Latin was produced. These factors alone ensure the system enough flexibility that nearly anything at all could be discerned from the microscopic markings. Although evidence of micrography using the Hebrew language can be traced as far back as the ninth century, it is nowhere near as compact or complex as the shapes Newbold made out. Close study of the manuscript revealed the markings to be artefacts caused by the way ink cracks as it dries on rough vellum. Perceiving significance in these artefacts can be attributed to pareidolia. Thanks to Manly's thorough refutation, the micrography theory is now generally disregarded.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In 1943, Joseph Martin Feely published "Roger Bacon's Cipher: The Right Key Found", in which he claimed that the book was a scientific diary written by Roger Bacon. Feely's method posited that the text was a highly abbreviated medieval Latin written in a simple substitution cipher.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Leonell C. Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, believed that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a "peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet". Strong published a translation of two pages in 1947, and claimed that the plaintext revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th-century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include "A Little Herbal", published in 1550. Notes released after his death reveal that the last stages of his analysis, in which he selected words to combine into phrases, were questionably subjective.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In 1978, Robert Brumbaugh, a professor of classical and medieval philosophy at Yale University, claimed that the manuscript was a forgery intended to fool Emperor Rudolf II into purchasing it, and that the text is Latin enciphered with a complex, two-step method.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In 1978, John Stojko published "Letters to God's Eye", in which he claimed that the Voynich Manuscript was a series of letters written in vowelless Ukrainian. The theory caused some sensation among the Ukrainian diaspora at the time, and then in independent Ukraine after 1991. However, the date Stojko gives for the letters, the lack of relation between the text and the images, and the general looseness in the method of decryption have all been criticised.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In 2014, applied linguistics Professor Stephen Bax self-published a paper proposing a "provisional, partial decoding" of the Voynich Manuscript, proposing a translation for ten proper nouns and fourteen letters from the manuscript using techniques similar to those used to successfully translate Egyptian hieroglyphs. He claimed the manuscript to be a treatise on nature, in a Near Eastern or Asian language, but no full translation was made before Bax's death in 2017.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In September 2017, television writer Nicholas Gibbs claimed to have decoded the manuscript as idiosyncratically abbreviated Latin. He declared the manuscript to be a mostly plagiarized guide to women's health.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Scholars judged Gibbs' hypothesis to be trite. His work was criticized as patching together already-existing scholarship with a highly speculative and incorrect translation; Lisa Fagin Davis, director of the Medieval Academy of America, stated that Gibbs' decipherment "doesn't result in Latin that makes sense."


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Greg Kondrak, a professor of natural language processing at the University of Alberta, and his graduate student Bradley Hauer used computational linguistics in an attempt to decode the manuscript. Their findings were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2017, in the form of an article suggesting that the language of the manuscript is most likely Hebrew, but encoded using alphagrams, i.e. alphabetically ordered anagrams. However, the team admitted that experts in medieval manuscripts who reviewed the work were not convinced.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In 2018, Ahmet Ardıç, an electrical engineer with an interest in Turkic languages, claimed in a YouTube video that the Voynich script is a kind of Old Turkic written in a "poetic" style. The text would then be written using "phonemic orthography", meaning the author spelled out words as they heard them. Ardıç claimed to have deciphered and translated over 30% of the manuscript. His submission to the journal "Digital Philology" was rejected in 2019.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In 2019, Gerard Cheshire, a biology research assistant at the University of Bristol, made headlines for his theory that the manuscript was written in a "calligraphic proto-Romance" language. He claimed to have deciphered the manuscript in two weeks using a combination of "lateral thinking and ingenuity." Cheshire has suggested that the manuscript is "a compendium of information on herbal remedies, therapeutic bathing, and astrological readings"; that it contains numerous descriptions of medicinal plants and passages that focus on female physical and mental health, reproduction, and parenting; and that the manuscript is the only known text written in proto-Romance. He further claimed: "The manuscript was compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon."


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Cheshire claims that the fold-out illustration on page 158 depicts a volcano, and theorizes that it places the manuscript's creators near the island of Vulcano which was an active volcano during the 15th century.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: However, experts in medieval documents disputed this interpretation vigorously, with the executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, Lisa Fagin Davis, denouncing the paper as "just more aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense". Approached for comment by "Ars Technica", Davis gave this explanation:


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The University of Bristol subsequently removed a reference to Cheshire's claims from its website, referring, in a statement, to concerns about the validity of the research and stating: "This research was entirely the author's own work and is not affiliated with the University of Bristol, the School of Arts nor the Centre for Medieval Studies".


title: Voynich manuscript

text: Many books and articles have been written about the manuscript. Copies of the manuscript pages were made by alchemist Georgius Barschius (the Latinized form of the name of Georg Baresch; cf. the second paragraph under "History" above) in 1637 and sent to Athanasius Kircher, and later by Wilfrid Voynich.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: In 2004, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library made high-resolution digital scans publicly available online, and several printed facsimiles appeared. In 2016, the Beinecke Library and Yale University Press co-published a facsimile, "The Voynich Manuscript", with scholarly essays.


title: Voynich manuscript

text: The Beinecke Library also authorized the production of a print run of 898 replicas by the Spanish publisher Siloé in 2017.


title: Dysthymia

text: Dysthymia ( ), also known as persistent depressive disorder (PDD), is a mental and behavioral disorder, specifically a disorder primarily of mood, consisting of similar cognitive and physical problems as major depressive disorder, but with longer-lasting symptoms. The concept was used by Robert Spitzer as a replacement for the term "depressive personality" in the late 1970s.


title: Dysthymia

text: In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), dysthymia is a serious state of chronic depression, which persists for at least two years (one year for children and adolescents). Dysthymia is not a minor form of major depressive disorder, and for some may be more disabling.


title: Dysthymia

text: As dysthymia is a chronic disorder, those with the condition may experience symptoms for many years before it is diagnosed, if diagnosis occurs at all. As a result, they may believe that depression is a part of their character, so they may not even discuss their symptoms with doctors, family members or friends. In the DSM-5, dysthymia is replaced by persistent depressive disorder. This new condition includes both chronic major depressive disorder and the previous dysthymic disorder. The reason for this change is that there was no evidence for meaningful differences between these two conditions.


title: Dysthymia

text: Dysthymia characteristics include an extended period of depressed mood combined with at least two other symptoms which may include insomnia or hypersomnia, fatigue or low energy, eating changes (more or less), low self-esteem, or feelings of hopelessness. Poor concentration or difficulty making decisions are treated as another possible symptom. Irritability is one of the more common symptoms in children and adolescents.


title: Dysthymia

text: Mild degrees of dysthymia may result in people withdrawing from stress and avoiding opportunities for failure. In more severe cases of dysthymia, people may withdraw from daily activities. They will usually find little pleasure in usual activities and pastimes.


title: Dysthymia

text: Diagnosis of dysthymia can be difficult because of the subtle nature of the symptoms and patients can often hide them in social situations, making it challenging for others to detect symptoms. Additionally, dysthymia often occurs at the same time as other psychological disorders, which adds a level of complexity in determining the presence of dysthymia, particularly because there is often an overlap in the symptoms of disorders.


title: Dysthymia

text: There is a high incidence of comorbid illness in those with dysthymia. Suicidal behavior is also a particular problem with those with dysthymia. It is vital to look for signs of major depression, panic disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, alcohol and substance use disorders, and personality disorder.


title: Dysthymia

text: There are no known biological causes that apply consistently to all cases of dysthymia, which suggests diverse origin of the disorder. However, there are some indications that there is a genetic predisposition to dysthymia: "The rate of depression in the families of people with dysthymia is as high as fifty percent for the early-onset form of the disorder". Other factors linked with dysthymia include stress, social isolation, and lack of social support.


title: Dysthymia

text: In a study using identical and fraternal twins, results indicated that there is a stronger likelihood of identical twins both having depression than fraternal twins. This provides support for the idea that dysthymia is in part caused by heredity means.


title: Dysthymia

text: Dysthymia often co-occurs with other mental disorders. A "double depression" is the occurrence of episodes of major depression in addition to dysthymia. Switching between periods of dysthymic moods and periods of hypomanic moods is indicative of cyclothymia, which is a mild variant of bipolar disorder.


title: Dysthymia

text: "At least three-quarters of patients with dysthymia also have a chronic physical illness or another psychiatric disorder such as one of the anxiety disorders, cyclothymia, drug addiction, or alcoholism". Common co-occurring conditions include major depression (up to 75%), anxiety disorders (up to 50%), personality disorders (up to 40%), somatoform disorders (up to 45%) and substance use disorders (up to 50%). People with dysthymia have a higher-than-average chance of developing major depression. A 10-year follow-up study found that 95% of dysthymia patients had an episode of major depression. When an intense episode of depression occurs on top of dysthymia, the state is called "double depression."


title: Dysthymia

text: Double depression occurs when a person experiences a major depressive episode on top of the already-existing condition of dysthymia. It is difficult to treat, as patients accept these major depressive symptoms as a natural part of their personality or as a part of their life that is outside of their control. The fact that people with dysthymia may accept these worsening symptoms as inevitable can delay treatment. When and if such people seek out treatment, the treatment may not be very effective if only the symptoms of the major depression are addressed, but not the dysthymic symptoms. Patients with double depression tend to report significantly higher levels of hopelessness than is normal. This can be a useful symptom for mental health services providers to focus on when working with patients to treat the condition. Additionally, cognitive therapies can be effective for working with people with double depression in order to help change negative thinking patterns and give individuals a new way of seeing themselves and their environment.


title: Dysthymia

text: It has been suggested that the best way to prevent double depression is by treating the dysthymia. A combination of antidepressants and cognitive therapies can be helpful in preventing major depressive symptoms from occurring. Additionally, exercise and good sleep hygiene (e.g., improving sleep patterns) are thought to have an additive effect on treating dysthymic symptoms and preventing them from worsening.


title: Dysthymia

text: There is evidence that there may be neurological indicators of early onset dysthymia. There are several brain structures (corpus callosum and frontal lobe) that are different in women with dysthymia than in those without dysthymia. This may indicate that there is a developmental difference between these two groups.


title: Dysthymia

text: Another study, which used fMRI techniques to assess the differences between individuals with dysthymia and other people, found additional support for neurological indicators of the disorder. This study found several areas of the brain that function differently. The amygdala (associated with processing emotions such as fear) was more activated in dysthymia patients. The study also observed increased activity in the insula (which is associated with sad emotions). Finally, there was increased activity in the cingulate gyrus (which serves as the bridge between attention and emotion).


title: Dysthymia

text: A study comparing healthy individuals to people with dysthymia indicates there are other biological indicators of the disorder. An anticipated result appeared as healthy individuals expected fewer negative adjectives to apply to them, whereas people with dysthymia expected fewer positive adjectives to apply to them in the future. Biologically these groups are also differentiated in that healthy individuals showed greater neurological anticipation for all types of events (positive, neutral, or negative) than those with dysthymia. This provides neurological evidence of the dulling of emotion that individuals with dysthymia have learned to use to protect themselves from overly strong negative feelings, compared to healthy people.


title: Dysthymia

text: There is some evidence of a genetic basis for all types of depression, including dysthymia. A study using identical and fraternal twins indicated that there is a stronger likelihood of identical twins both having depression than fraternal twins. This provides support for the idea that dysthymia is caused in part by heredity.


title: Dysthymia

text: A new model has recently surfaced in the literature regarding the HPA axis (structures in the brain that get activated in response to stress) and its involvement with dysthymia (e.g. phenotypic variations of corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH) and arginine vasopressin (AVP), and down-regulation of adrenal functioning) as well as forebrain serotonergic mechanisms. Since this model is highly provisional, further research is still needed.


title: Dysthymia

text: The "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV" (DSM-IV), published by the American Psychiatric Association, characterizes dysthymic disorder. The essential symptom involves the individual feeling depressed for the majority of days, and parts of the day, for at least two years. Low energy, disturbances in sleep or in appetite, and low self-esteem typically contribute to the clinical picture as well. Those with the condition have often experienced dysthymia for many years before it is diagnosed. People around them often describe them in words similar to "just a moody person". The following are the diagnostic criteria:


title: Dysthymia

text: In children and adolescents, mood can be irritable, and duration must be at least one year, in contrast to two years needed for diagnosis in adults.


title: Dysthymia

text: Early onset (diagnosis before age 21) is associated with more frequent relapses, psychiatric hospitalizations, and more co-occurring conditions. For younger adults with dysthymia, there is a higher co-occurrence in personality abnormalities and the symptoms are likely chronic. However, in older adults with dysthymia, the psychological symptoms are associated with medical conditions and/or stressful life events and losses.


title: Dysthymia

text: Dysthymia can be contrasted with major depressive disorder by assessing the acute nature of the symptoms. Dysthymia is far more chronic (long lasting) than major depressive disorder, in which symptoms may be present for as little as two weeks. Also dysthymia often presents itself at an earlier age than major depressive disorder.


title: Dysthymia

text: Though there is no clear-cut way to prevent dysthymia from occurring, some suggestions have been made. Since dysthymia will often first occur in childhood, it is important to identify children who may be at risk. It may be beneficial to work with children in helping to control their stress, increase resilience, boost self-esteem, and provide strong networks of social support. These tactics may be helpful in warding off or delaying dysthymic symptoms.


title: Dysthymia

text: Persistent depressive disorder can be treated with psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy. The overall rate and degree of treatment success is somewhat lower than for non-chronic depression, and a combination of psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy shows best results.


title: Dysthymia

text: In a meta-analytic study from 2010, psychotherapy had a small but significant effect when compared to control groups. However, psychotherapy is significantly less effective than pharmacotherapy in direct comparisons.


title: Dysthymia

text: In a 2010 meta-analysis, the benefit of pharmacotherapy was limited to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) rather than tricyclic antidepressants (TCA).


title: Dysthymia

text: According to a 2014 meta-analysis, antidepressants are at least as effective for persistent depressive disorder as for major depressive disorder.


title: Dysthymia

text: The first line of pharmacotherapy is usually SSRIs due to their purported more tolerable nature and reduced side effects compared to the irreversible monoamine oxidase inhibitors or tricyclic antidepressants. Studies have found that the mean response to antidepressant medications for people with dysthymia is 55%, compared with a 31% response rate to a placebo. The most commonly prescribed antidepressants/SSRIs for dysthymia are escitalopram, citalopram, sertraline, fluoxetine, paroxetine, and fluvoxamine. It often takes an average of 6–8 weeks before the patient begins to feel these medications' therapeutic effects. Additionally, STAR*D, a multi-clinic governmental study, found that people with overall depression will generally need to try different brands of medication before finding one that works specifically for them. Research shows that 1 in 4 of those who switch medications get better results regardless of whether the second medication is an SSRI or some other type of antidepressant.


title: Dysthymia

text: In a meta-analytic study from 2005, it was found that SSRIs and TCAs are equally effective in treating dysthymia. They also found that MAOIs have a slight advantage over the use of other medication in treating this disorder. However, the author of this study cautions that MAOIs should not necessarily be the first line of defense in the treatment of dysthymia, as they are often less tolerable than their counterparts, such as SSRIs.


title: Dysthymia

text: Tentative evidence supports the use of amisulpride to treat dysthymia but with increased side effects.


title: Dysthymia

text: When pharmacotherapy alone is compared with combined treatment with pharmacotherapy plus psychotherapy, there is a strong trend in favour of combined treatment. Working with a psychotherapist to address the causes and effects of the disorder, in addition to taking antidepressants to help eliminate the symptoms, can be extremely beneficial. This combination is often the preferred method of treatment for those who have dysthymia. Looking at various studies involving treatment for dysthymia, 75% of people responded positively to a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and pharmacotherapy, whereas only 48% of people responded positively to just CBT or medication alone.


title: Dysthymia

text: A 2019 Cochrane review of 10 studies involving 840 participants could not conclude with certainty that continued pharmacotherapy with antidepressants (those used in the studies) was effective in preventing relapse or recurrence of persistent depressive disorder. The body of evidence was too small for any greater certainty although the study acknowledges that continued psychotherapy may be beneficial when compared to no treatment.


title: Dysthymia

text: Because of dysthymia's chronic nature, treatment resistance is somewhat common. In such a case, augmentation is often recommended. Such treatment augmentations can include lithium pharmacology, thyroid hormone augmentation, amisulpride, buspirone, bupropion, stimulants, and mirtazapine. Additionally, if the person also has seasonal affective disorder, light therapy can be useful in helping augment therapeutic effects.


title: Dysthymia

text: Globally dysthymia occurs in about 105 million people a year (1.5% of the population). It is 38% more common in women (1.8% of women) than in men (1.3% of men). The lifetime prevalence rate of dysthymia in community settings appears to range from 3 to 6% in the United States. However, in primary care settings the rate is higher ranging from 5 to 15 percent. United States prevalence rates tend to be somewhat higher than rates in other countries.


title: The Graduate

text: The Graduate is a 1967 American romantic comedy-drama film directed by Mike Nichols and written by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Charles Webb, who wrote it shortly after graduating from Williams College. The film tells the story of 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), a recent college graduate with no well-defined aim in life, who is seduced by an older married woman, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), but then falls for her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross).


title: The Graduate

text: "The Graduate" was released on December 21, 1967, to critical and commercial success, grossing $104.9million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film of 1967. Adjusted for inflation (as of 2021), the film's gross is $857 million, making it the 23rd highest-grossing film in North America with inflation taken into account. It received seven nominations at the 40th Academy Awards including for Best Picture and won Best Director. In 1996, "The Graduate" was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It is currently (as of the 2007 rankings) ranked by the American Film Institute as the 17th greatest American film of all time, having originally been ranked 7th in 1997.


title: The Graduate

text: After earning his bachelor's degree from an East Coast college, Benjamin Braddock returns to his parents' Pasadena, California home. During his graduation party, he is urged to join a business dealing in plastics - the material of the future. Benjamin cringes as his parents deliver accolades during the party and retreats to his bedroom until Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's law partner, insists that he drive her home. Once there, she tries to seduce him. He initially resists her advances, but after his parents continue to make him feel isolated and desperate for any kind of connection, he invites Mrs. Robinson to the Taft Hotel, where he registers under the pseudonym "Mr. Gladstone".


title: The Graduate

text: Benjamin spends the summer relaxing in his parents' pool by day and meeting Mrs. Robinson at the hotel by night. During one of their trysts, Mrs. Robinson reveals that her loveless marriage resulted when she accidentally became pregnant with her daughter, Elaine. When Benjamin jokingly suggests that he date Elaine, Mrs. Robinson angrily forbids it. However, Benjamin's parents, unaware of the affair, are eager for their son to date Elaine and relentlessly pester him to ask her out, as does Mr. Robinson. Benjamin gives in and reluctantly takes Elaine on a date.


title: The Graduate

text: When he sees how upset Mrs. Robinson is, Benjamin attempts to sabotage his date by ignoring Elaine, driving recklessly, and taking her to a strip club. She flees the club in tears, but Benjamin, feeling remorseful, runs out after her, apologizes, and kisses her. They eat at a drive-in restaurant, where they bond over their shared uncertainty about their future plans. After they visit the Taft Hotel for a late-night drink and the staff greet Benjamin as "Mr. Gladstone", Elaine deduces that Benjamin is having an affair with a married woman. Benjamin swears that the affair is over and makes plans for another date with Elaine for the following day.


title: The Graduate

text: To prevent Benjamin from dating Elaine, Mrs. Robinson threatens to tell Elaine about their affair. To thwart this, Benjamin reveals to Elaine that the married woman is her mother. Elaine is so upset that she refuses to see Benjamin again and returns to school at Berkeley.


title: The Graduate

text: Benjamin follows her to Berkeley hoping to regain her affections. Elaine is aghast because her mother told her that Benjamin raped her when she was drunk. After Benjamin explains what really happened and apologizes, Elaine forgives him and they rekindle their relationship. He asks her to marry him, but she is uncertain despite her feelings for him. Later, an angry Mr. Robinson arrives at Berkeley and confronts Benjamin in his boarding room, where he informs him that he and his wife will be divorcing soon, and threatens to have Benjamin jailed if he continues to see Elaine. He then forces Elaine to leave college to marry Carl Smith, a classmate whom she briefly dated.


title: The Graduate

text: Benjamin drives back to Pasadena and breaks into the Robinson home in search of Elaine. Instead, he finds Mrs. Robinson who calls the police and claims that her house is being burglarized. She then tells Benjamin that he cannot prevent Elaine's marriage to Carl. Before the police can arrest him, Benjamin flees the Robinson home and drives back to Berkeley. There, he visits Carl's fraternity and discovers from one of Carl's fraternity brothers that the wedding will take place in Santa Barbara that day. He rushes towards the area near the church, when his Alfa Romeo runs out of gas, causing him to jog towards the church and arrives just as the ceremony ends. Overlooking the sanctuary, he bangs on the glass separating him from the wedding and shouts Elaine's name. After surveying the angry faces of Carl and her parents, Elaine shouts "Ben!" and flees the sanctuary. Benjamin fights off Mr. Robinson and repels the wedding guests by swinging a large cross, which he uses to barricade the church doors, trapping them inside. Elaine and Benjamin escape aboard a bus and sit among startled passengers. As the bus drives on, their ecstatic smiles slowly fade away and they begin to look toward an uncertain future.


title: The Graduate

text: Additionally, Richard Dreyfuss makes an uncredited appearance in one of his early roles as one of the tenants in Mr. McCleery’s building.


title: The Graduate

text: Getting the film made was difficult for Nichols, who, while noted for being a successful Broadway director, was still an unknown in Hollywood. Producer Lawrence Turman, who wanted only Nichols to direct it, was continually turned down for financing. Turman also said that every studio turned down the project saying they read the book and hated it. He then contacted producer Joseph E. Levine, who said he would finance the film because he had associated with Nichols on the play "The Knack", and because he heard that Elizabeth Taylor specifically wanted Nichols to direct her and Richard Burton in "Virginia Woolf".


title: The Graduate

text: With financing assured, Nichols suggested Buck Henry for screenwriter, although Henry's experience had also been mostly in improvised comedy, and had no writing background. Nichols said to Henry, "I think you could do it; I think you "should" do it." Nichols was paid $150,000 but was to receive one-sixth of the profits.


title: The Graduate

text: Nichols' first choice for Mrs. Robinson was French actress Jeanne Moreau. The motivation for this was the cliché that in French culture, "older" women tended to "train" the younger men in sexual matters. Numerous actors were considered for or sought roles in the film. Doris Day turned down an offer because the nudity required by the role offended her.


title: The Graduate

text: Dustin Hoffman was cast as Liebkind in the Mel Brooks film "The Producers" (1967), but before filming began Hoffman begged Brooks to let him go to audition for "The Graduate". When Dustin Hoffman auditioned for the role of Benjamin, he was just short of his 30th birthday at the time of filming. He was asked to perform a love scene with Ross, having previously never done one during his acting classes and believed that, as he said later, "a girl like [Ross] would never go for a guy like me in a million years." Ross agreed, believing that Hoffman "look[ed] about 3 feet tall ... so unkempt. This is going to be a disaster." Producer Joseph E. Levine later admitted that he at first believed that Hoffman "was one of the messenger boys." Despite—or perhaps because of—Hoffman's awkwardness, Nichols chose him for the film. "As far as I'm concerned, Mike Nichols did a very courageous thing casting me in a part that I was not right for, meaning I was Jewish," said Hoffman. "In fact, many of the reviews were very negative. It was kind of veiled anti-Semitism... I was called 'big-nosed' in the reviews, 'a nasal voice'." Hoffman was paid $20,000 for his role in the film, but netted just $4,000 after taxes and living expenses. After spending that money, Hoffman filed for New York State unemployment benefits, receiving $55 per week while living in a two-room apartment in the West Village of Manhattan.


title: The Graduate

text: Before Hoffman was cast, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty and Charles Grodin were among the top choices. Beatty turned the film down, as he was occupied with "Bonnie and Clyde". Redford tested for the part of Benjamin (with Candice Bergen as Elaine), but Nichols thought Redford did not possess the underdog quality Benjamin needed. Grodin turned down the part at first because of the low $500/week salary offered by producer Lawrence Turman. Grodin was offered more money but declined again because he didn't believe he could prepare for a screen test for the film overnight. "If they had given me three days to prepare, I think I would have gotten the role," he said.


title: The Graduate

text: Burt Ward was informally offered Hoffman's role, but was already committed to the role of Robin in the Batman television series.


title: The Graduate

text: Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen, Anthony Perkins, George Hamilton, Keir Dullea, Brandon deWilde and Michael Parks were also considered for the role of Benjamin Braddock.


title: The Graduate

text: Despite playing mother and daughter, Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross were only eight years apart in age.


title: The Graduate

text: The quality of the cinematography was influenced by Nichols, who chose Oscar winner Robert Surtees to do the photography. Surtees, who had photographed major films since the 1920s, including "Ben-Hur", said later, "It took everything I had learned over 30 years to be able to do the job. I knew that Mike Nichols was a young director who went in for a lot of camera. We did more things in this picture than I ever did in one film."


title: The Graduate

text: Many of the exterior university campus shots of Berkeley were actually filmed on the brick campus of USC in Los Angeles.


title: The Graduate

text: The church used for the wedding scene is actually the United Methodist Church in La Verne. In a commentary audio released with the 40th anniversary DVD, Hoffman revealed that he was uneasy about the scene in which he pounds on the church window, as the minister of the church had been watching the filming disapprovingly. The wedding scene was highly influenced by the ending of the 1924 comedy film "Girl Shy" starring Harold Lloyd, who also served as an advisor for the scene in "The Graduate".


title: The Graduate

text: The film boosted the profile of folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel. Originally, Nichols and O'Steen used their existing songs like "The Sound of Silence" merely as a pacing device for the editing until Nichols decided that substituting original music would not be effective and decided to include them on the soundtrack, an unusual move at that time.


title: The Graduate

text: According to a "Variety" article by Peter Bart in the May 15, 2005, issue, Lawrence Turman, his producer, then made a deal for Simon to write three new songs for the movie. By the time they had nearly finished editing the film, Simon had written only one new song. Nichols begged him for more, but Simon, who was touring constantly, told him he did not have the time. He did play him a few notes of a new song he had been working on; "It's not for the movie... it's a song about times past—about Mrs. Roosevelt and Joe DiMaggio and stuff." Nichols advised Simon, "It's now about Mrs. Robinson, not Mrs. Roosevelt."


title: The Graduate

text: "The Graduate" had a dual world premiere in New York City on December 20, 1967 at the Coronet Theatre and at the Lincoln Art Theatre on 57th Street. It was released to the public on December 21, 1967.


title: The Graduate

text: The film was released on Blu-ray by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. "The Graduate" was released on DVD by MGM Home Entertainment. In 2016, the film was released by The Criterion Collection with a new 4K digital restoration.


title: The Graduate

text: "The Graduate" was met with generally positive reviews from critics upon its release. A.D. Murphy of "Variety" and Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" praised the film, with Murphy describing it as a "delightful satirical comedy drama" and Ebert claiming it was the "funniest American comedy of the year". However, "Life" critic Richard Schickel felt the film "starts out to satirize the alienated spirit of modern youth, does so with uncommon brilliance for its first half, but ends up selling out to the very spirit its creators intended to make fun of... It's a shame – they were halfway to something wonderful when they skidded on a patch of greasy kid stuff.” Pauline Kael wondered, "How could you convince them [younger viewers] that a movie that sells innocence is a very commercial piece of work when they're so clearly in the market to buy innocence?"


title: The Graduate

text: Critics continue to praise the film, if not always with the same ardor. For the film's thirtieth anniversary reissue, Ebert retracted some of his previous praise for it, noting that he felt its time had passed and that he now had more sympathy for Mrs. Robinson than for Benjamin (whom he considered "an insufferable creep"), viewing one's sympathy for Mrs. Robinson and disdainful attitude toward Ben as a function of aging and wisdom. He, along with Gene Siskel, gave the film a positive if unenthusiastic review on the television program "Siskel & Ebert". Furthermore, the film's rating in the AFI list of the greatest American films fell from seventh in 1997 to seventeenth in the 2007 update. Lang Thompson, however, argued that "it really hasn't dated much".


title: The Graduate

text: Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 87% based on 83 reviews, with an average rating of 8.90/10. The site's consensus reads: "The music, the performances, the precision in capturing the post-college malaise"The Graduate"s coming-of-age story is indeed one for the ages." On the similar website Metacritic, the film holds a score of 83 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".


title: The Graduate

text: In 1996, "The Graduate" was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", and placed #23 on the list of highest-grossing films in the United States and Canada, adjusted for inflation.


title: The Graduate

text: Years later in interviews, Bancroft stated that Mrs. Robinson was the role with which she was most identified, and added, "Men still come up to me and tell me 'You were my first sexual fantasy.'"


title: The Graduate

text: Terry Johnson's adaptation of the original novel and the film ran both on London's West End and on Broadway, and has toured the United States. There is a Brazilian version adapted by Miguel Falabella. Several actresses have starred as Mrs. Robinson, including Kathleen Turner, Lorraine Bracco, Jerry Hall, Amanda Donohoe, Morgan Fairchild, Anne Archer, Vera Fischer, Patricia Richardson and Linda Gray.


title: The Graduate

text: The stage production adds several scenes that are not in the novel or the film, as well as using material from both film and novel. It also uses songs by Simon & Garfunkel not used in the film, such as "Bridge Over Troubled Water" as well as music from other popular musicians from the era such as The Byrds and The Beach Boys. The West End production opened at the Gielgud Theatre on April 5, 2000, after previews from March 24, with Kathleen Turner starring as Mrs. Robinson. The production closed in January 2002. Jerry Hall replaced Turner on July 31, 2000, followed by Amanda Donohoe from February 2001, Anne Archer from June 2001, and Linda Gray from October 2001. The 2003 UK touring production starred Glynis Barber as Mrs. Robinson.


title: The Graduate

text: The Broadway production opened at the Plymouth Theatre on April 4, 2002, and closed on March 2, 2003, after 380 performances. Directed by Terry Johnson, the play featured the cast of Jason Biggs as Benjamin Braddock, Alicia Silverstone as Elaine Robinson, and Kathleen Turner as Mrs. Robinson. The play received no award nominations. Linda Gray briefly filled in for Turner in September 2002. Lorraine Bracco replaced Turner from November 19, 2002.


title: The Graduate

text: "The Graduate" ran at the Cape Playhouse (Dennis, Massachusetts) in July 2011, and starred Patricia Richardson.


title: The Graduate

text: Charles Webb has written a sequel to his original novel titled "Home School", but initially refused to publish it in its entirety because of a contract he signed in the 1960s. When he sold film rights to "The Graduate", he surrendered the rights to any sequels. If he were to publish "Home School", Canal+, the French media company that owns the rights to "The Graduate", would be able to adapt it for the screen without his permission. Extracts of "Home School" were printed in "The Times" on May 2, 2006. Webb also told the newspaper that there was a possibility he would find a publisher for the full text, provided he could retrieve the film rights using French copyright law. On May 30, 2006, "The Times" reported that Webb had signed a publishing deal for "Home School" with Random House which he hoped would enable him to instruct French lawyers to attempt to retrieve his rights. The novel was published in Britain in 2007.


title: The Graduate

text: In "The Player", Robert Altman's satire of Hollywood, Buck Henry pitches a sequel to "The Graduate" to producer Griffin Mill (played by Tim Robbins) during the film's opening sequence. A parody of Hollywood high concept films, Henry describes the plot as Ben and Elaine living in a haunted house in Northern California, with an invalid Mrs. Robinson living in the attic.


title: The Graduate

text: The final act of the film "Wayne's World 2" begins with an extended parody of the climactic sequence of "The Graduate", where Wayne pulls into a gas station to get directions, eventually asking for a better actor, and eventually stops Cassandra's wedding and barricades the door with an electric guitar. This scene is also parodied in the "Family Guy" episode "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein" and "The Simpsons" episode "Lady Bouvier's Lover".


title: The Graduate

text: The wedding crash scene was parodied for the finale of the Papa and Nicole advertising campaign in the 1990s for the MK1 Renault Clio. The advert, aired in 1998, featured Reeves and Mortimer and tied in with the release of the MK2 Renault Clio.


title: The Graduate

text: The wedding crash scene was parodied in the film "Other Sister" (1999), where Giovanni Ribisi and Juliette Lewis manage to tie the knot despite their developmental disabilities.


title: The Graduate

text: A sixth-season episode of the television series "Roseanne" includes a fantasy scene where Jackie assumes the Bancroft role and attempts to seduce David, with the famous shot of Benjamin seen between the leg of Mrs. Robinson replicated. This scene is also parodied in "The Simpsons" episode "Lisa's Substitute" when Mrs. Krabappel tries to seduce Mr. Bergstrom, who was voiced by Hoffman.


title: The Graduate

text: The film "Kingpin" parodied "The Graduate", showing Woody Harrelson framed by his repulsive landlady's leg, and features an excerpt of "The Sound of Silence" after Harrelson's character has sex with his landlady to make up for back rent, and is so sickened by the act that he repeatedly vomits afterwards.


title: The Graduate

text: The car that Benjamin drives in the movie is an Alfa Romeo Spider. Based on its iconic role, Alfa Romeo sold a version of the Spider in the United States from 1985 to 1990 under the name "Spider Graduate".<ref name="conceptcarz.com/vehicle"></ref>


title: The Graduate

text: Hoffman later recreated the wedding scene at the same church for an Audi commercial, in which he stops his daughter (played by Lake Bell) from getting married and tells her “you're just like your mother” as they drive off, implying that he is an older Benjamin who has a daughter with Elaine.


title: The Graduate

text: The ending of "Archer" season 3, episode 11 features an homage to the ending of "The Graduate" in which Katya Kazanova, a cyborg engaged to be married to the main character Sterling Archer, leaves the wedding in the company of another cyborg, Barry Dylan, after he crashes it. Following their departure on a bus, music reminiscent of "The Sound of Silence" plays as the characters' faces change from excitement to uncertainty.


title: The Graduate

text: The 1992 song, "Too Funky," by George Michael features a clip of the following Anne Bancroft lines "I am not trying to seduce you... Would you like me to seduce you? Is that what you're trying to tell me?" as an intro of the song and is repeated during the final crescendo.


title: The Graduate

text: "(500) Days of Summer" features a scene where the protagonist, Tom, watches "The Graduate" with his then girlfriend Summer. He is said to misinterpret the ending, a fact which serves to characterise his naivety concerning relationships. This moment can be considered a turning point in the film, as it reveals to her the issues with their relationship.


title: The Graduate

text: The plot of the 2005 romantic comedy film "Rumor Has It" directed by Rob Reiner, and starring Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Costner, Shirley MacLaine and Mark Ruffalo revolves around a story where a woman learns that her mother and grandmother may be the inspiration for "The Graduate" and the 1963 novel of the same name it was based on.


title: Platoon (film)

text: Platoon is a 1986 American war film written and directed by Oliver Stone, starring Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen, Keith David, Kevin Dillon, John C. McGinley, Forest Whitaker, and Johnny Depp. It is the first film of a trilogy of Vietnam War films directed by Stone, followed by "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989) and "Heaven & Earth" (1993). The film, based on Stone's experience from the war, follows a U.S. Army volunteer (Sheen) serving in Vietnam while his Platoon Sergeant and his Squad Leader (Berenger and Dafoe) argue over the morality in the platoon and of the war itself.


title: Platoon (film)

text: Stone wrote the screenplay based upon his experiences as a U.S. infantryman in Vietnam, to counter the vision of the war portrayed in John Wayne's "The Green Berets". Although having written films such as "Midnight Express" and "Scarface", Stone struggled to get the film developed until Hemdale Film Corporation acquired the project along with "Salvador". Filming took place in the Philippines in February 1986 and lasted 54 days. "Platoon" was the first Hollywood film to be written and directed by a veteran of the Vietnam War.


title: Platoon (film)

text: Upon its release, "Platoon" received critical acclaim for Stone's directing and screenplay, the cinematography, battle sequences' realism, and the performances of Sheen, Dafoe, and Berenger. The film was a box office success upon its release, grossing $138.5 million domestically against its $6 million budget. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards at the 59th Academy Awards, and won four including Best Picture, Best Director for Stone, Best Sound, and Best Film Editing.


title: Platoon (film)

text: In 1998, the American Film Institute placed "Platoon" at #83 in their "AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movies" poll. In 2019, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


title: Platoon (film)

text: In 1967, U.S. Army volunteer Chris Taylor arrives in South Vietnam and is assigned to an infantry platoon of the 25th Infantry Division near the Cambodian border. Though the platoon is officially under the command of the young and inexperienced Lieutenant Wolfe, the soldiers instead defer to two of his older and more experienced subordinates: the cynical Staff Sergeant Barnes, and the more idealistic Sergeant Elias.


title: Platoon (film)

text: Taylor is immediately deployed with Barnes, Elias and other experienced soldiers for a night ambush on a North Vietnamese Army force. The NVA soldiers manage to get close to the sleeping Americans before a brief firefight ensues, which leads to Taylor becoming wounded and sent to the aid station. Upon his return, Taylor bonds with Elias and his circle of marijuana smokers while remaining distant from Barnes and his more hard-edged followers.


title: Platoon (film)

text: During a subsequent patrol, three men are killed by booby traps and unseen assailants. Already on edge, the platoon is further angered when they discover an enemy supply cache in a nearby village. Barnes aggressively interrogates the village chief about whether the villagers have been aiding the NVA, and coldly shoots his wife dead when she snaps back at him. Elias then gets into a physical altercation with Barnes over the killing before Wolfe pacifies them and orders the supplies destroyed and the village razed. Taylor later prevents two girls from being gang-raped by some of Barnes' men.


title: Platoon (film)

text: When the platoon returns to base, company commander Captain Harris declares that if he finds out that an illegal killing took place, a court-martial will ensue, leaving Barnes worried that Elias will testify against him. On their next patrol, the platoon is ambushed and pinned down in a firefight, and the situation is worsened when Wolfe accidentally directs an artillery strike onto his own unit before Barnes calls it off. Elias takes Taylor and two others to intercept flanking enemy troops, while Barnes orders the rest of the platoon to retreat and goes back into the jungle to find Elias' group. Barnes finds Elias alone and shoots him, then tells the others that Elias was killed by the enemy. While the platoon is extracting via helicopter, they see a mortally wounded Elias emerge from the treeline being chased by NVA soldiers, who eventually kill him. Noting Barnes' anxious manner, Taylor realizes that he was responsible.


title: Platoon (film)

text: Back at base, Taylor attempts to talk his group into fragging Barnes in retaliation when Barnes, having overheard them, enters the room and mocks them. Taylor then assaults Barnes but is quickly overpowered, and Barnes cuts Taylor near his eye with a push dagger before departing.


title: Platoon (film)

text: The platoon is sent back to the front line to maintain defensive positions, where Taylor shares a foxhole with another soldier named Francis. That night, a major NVA assault occurs, and the defensive lines are broken. Much of the platoon, including Wolfe and most of Barnes' followers, are killed in the ensuing battle, while an NVA sapper destroys the battalion headquarters in a suicide attack. Now in command, Captain Harris orders air support to expend all remaining ordnance inside the perimeter. In the chaos, Taylor encounters Barnes, who has been seriously wounded. Just as Barnes is about to kill Taylor, both men are knocked unconscious by an air strike.


title: Platoon (film)

text: Taylor regains consciousness the following morning, picks up an enemy rifle, and finds Barnes, who orders Taylor to call a medic. Seeing that Taylor will not help, Barnes contemptuously tells Taylor to kill him, with which he complies. Francis, who survived the battle unharmed, deliberately stabs himself in the leg and reminds Taylor that because they have been twice wounded, they can return home, and a helicopter carries the two men away. Overwhelmed, Taylor breaks down sobbing as he glares down at multiple craters full of corpses.


title: Platoon (film)

text: Oliver Stone's journey of creating a cinematic piece about his tour of duty in the Vietnam War began almost after it ended in 1968 when he wrote a screenplay called "Break," a semi-autobiographical account detailing his experiences with his parents and his time in the Vietnam War. Stone's active duty service resulted in a "big change" in how he viewed life and the war. Although the screenplay "Break" was never produced, he later used it as the basis for "Platoon". His screenplay featured several characters who were the seeds of those he developed in "Platoon". The script was set to music from The Doors; Stone sent the script to Jim Morrison in the hope he would play the lead. (Morrison never responded, but his manager returned the script to Stone shortly after Morrison's death; Morrison had the script with him when he died in Paris.) Although "Break" was never produced, Stone decided to attend film school.


title: Platoon (film)

text: After writing several other screenplays in the early 1970s, Stone worked with Robert Bolt on the screenplay, "The Cover-up" (it was not produced). Bolt's rigorous approach rubbed off on Stone. The younger man used his characters from the "Break" screenplay and developed a new screenplay, which he titled "Platoon". Producer Martin Bregman attempted to elicit studio interest in the project, but was not successful. Stone claims that during that time, Sidney Lumet was to have helmed the film with Al Pacino slated to star had there been studio interest. But, based on the strength of his writing in "Platoon," Stone was hired to write the screenplay for "Midnight Express" (1978).


title: Platoon (film)

text: The film was a critical and commercial success, as were some other Stone films at the time, but most studios were still reluctant to finance "Platoon," because it was about the unpopular Vietnam War. After the release of "The Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now", the studios then cited the perception that these films were considered the pinnacle of the Vietnam War film genre as reasons not to make "Platoon".


title: Platoon (film)

text: Stone responded by attempting to break into mainstream direction via the easier-to-finance horror genre, but "The Hand" failed at the box office, and he began to think "Platoon" would never be made. Instead, he cowrote "Year of the Dragon" for a lower-than-usual fee of $200,000, on the condition from producer Dino De Laurentiis would next produce "Platoon." "Year of the Dragon" was directed by Stone's friend Michael Cimino, who had also helmed "The Deer Hunter." According to Stone, Cimino attempted to produce "Platoon" in 1984.


title: Platoon (film)

text: De Laurentiis secured financing for "Platoon," but he struggled to find a distributor. Because De Laurentiis had already spent money sending Stone to the Philippines to scout for locations, he decided to keep control of the film's script until he was repaid. Then Stone's script for what would become "Salvador" was passed to John Daly of British production company Hemdale. Once again, this was a project that Stone had struggled to secure financing for, but Daly loved the script and was prepared to finance both "Salvador" and "Platoon." Stone shot "Salvador" first, before turning his attention to "Platoon".


title: Platoon (film)

text: James Woods, who had starred in Stone's film "Salvador", was offered a part in "Platoon." Despite his friendship with the director, he turned it down, later teasingly saying he "couldn't face going into another jungle with [Oliver Stone]". Denzel Washington expressed interest in playing the role of Elias, a character Stone said was based on a soldier he knew in Vietnam. Stone confirmed in a 2011 interview with "Entertainment Weekly" that Mickey Rourke, Emilio Estevez and Kevin Costner were all considered for the part of Barnes. He believes Costner turned down the role "because his brother had been in Vietnam." Stone also verified in the interview that Keanu Reeves turned down the role of Taylor because of the violence. Jon Cryer auditioned for the role of Bunny.


title: Platoon (film)

text: Many Vietnamese refugees living in the Philippines at the time were recruited to act in different Vietnamese roles in the film.


title: Platoon (film)

text: Stone makes a cameo appearance as the commander of the 3d Battalion, 22d Infantry in the final battle, which was based on the historic New Year's Day Battle of 1968 in which he had taken part while on duty in South Vietnam. Dale Dye, who played Captain Harris, the commander of Company B, is a U.S. Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran who also served as the film's technical advisor.


title: Platoon (film)

text: Exterior shooting began on the island of Luzon in the Philippines in February 1986, although the production was almost canceled because of the political upheaval in the country, due to then-president Ferdinand Marcos. With the help of well-known Asian producer Mark Hill, the shoot commenced, as scheduled, two days after Marcos fled the country. Shooting lasted 54 days and cost $6.5 million. The production made a deal with the Philippine military for the use of military equipment. Filming was done chronologically.


title: Platoon (film)

text: Upon arrival in the Philippines, the cast was sent on an intensive training course, during which they had to dig foxholes and were subjected to forced marches and nighttime "ambushes," which used special-effects explosions. Led by Vietnam War veteran Dale Dye, training put the principal actors—including Sheen, Dafoe, Depp and Whitaker—through an immersive 30-day military-style training regimen. They limited how much food and water they could drink and eat and when the actors slept, fired blanks to keep the tired actors awake. Dye also had a small role as Captain Harris. Stone said that he was trying to break them down, "to mess with their heads so we could get that dog-tired, don't give a damn attitude, the anger, the irritation ... the casual approach to death". Willem Dafoe said "the training was very important to the making of the film", adding to its authenticity and strengthening the camaraderie developed among the cast: "By the time you got through the training and through the film, you had a relationship to the weapon. It wasn't going to kill people, but you felt comfortable with it."


title: Platoon (film)

text: Scenes were shot in Mount Makiling, Laguna (province) (for the forest scenes), Cavite (for the river and village scenes), and Villamor Air Base near Manila.


title: Platoon (film)

text: In 1986, a novelization of the film script, written by Dale Dye, was published. In 2018 actor Paul Sanchez, who played Doc in the movie, made a documentary about the making of film, entitled "Platoon: Brothers in Arms".


title: Platoon (film)

text: The film score was by George Delerue. Music used in the film includes "Adagio for Strings" by Samuel Barber, "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane, and "Okie from Muskogee" by Merle Haggard (which is an anachronism, as the film is set in 1967 but Haggard's song was not released until 1969). During a scene in the "Underworld", the soldiers sing along to "The Tracks of My Tears" by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, which was also featured in the film's trailer. The soundtrack includes "Groovin'" by The Rascals and "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding.


title: Platoon (film)

text: "Platoon" was released in the United States on December 19, 1986 and in the Philippines and the United Kingdom in March 1987, with its release in the latter receiving an above 15 rating for strong language, scenes of violence, and soft drug use.


title: Platoon (film)

text: In its seventh weekend of release, the film expanded from 214 theatres to 590 and became number one at the United States box office with a gross of $8,352,394. It remained number one for four weekends. In its ninth weekend, it grossed $12.9 million from 1,194 theatres over the four-day President's Day weekend, being the first film to gross more than $10 million in a weekend in February and setting a weekend record for Orion.


title: Platoon (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 89% based on 120 reviews, with an average rating of 8.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Informed by director Oliver Stone's personal experiences in Vietnam, "Platoon" forgoes easy sermonizing in favor of a harrowing, ground-level view of war, bolstered by no-holds-barred performances from Charlie Sheen and Willem Dafoe." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 92 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Platoon (film)

text: Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars, calling it the best film of the year, and the ninth best of the 1980s. Gene Siskel also awarded the film four out of four stars, and observed that Vietnam War veterans greatly identified with the film. In his "New York Times" review, Vincent Canby described "Platoon" as "possibly the best work of any kind about the Vietnam War since Michael Herr's vigorous and hallucinatory book "Dispatches".


title: Platoon (film)

text: "The film has been widely acclaimed," Pauline Kael admitted, "but some may feel that Stone takes too many melodramatic shortcuts, and that there's too much filtered light, too much poetic license, and too damn much romanticized insanity ... The movie crowds you; it doesn't leave you room for an honest emotion."


title: Platoon (film)

text: However, black journalist Wallace Terry, who spent a two-year tour in Vietnam, and wrote the 1967 "Time" cover story entitled "The Negro in Vietnam", criticized the film for its depiction of African-American soldiers in Vietnam. In an interview with Maria Wilhelm of "People", he called the film's depiction of black troops "a slap in the face". In the interview, Terry noted that there were no black actors playing officers, and the three notable black soldiers in the film were all portrayed as cowards. He further went on to criticise the film for perpetuating black stereotypes, stating the film "barely rises above the age-old Hollywood stereotypes of blacks as celluloid savages and coons who do silly things".


title: Platoon (film)

text: In 2011, British television channel Channel 4 voted "Platoon" as the 6th greatest war film ever made, behind "Full Metal Jacket" and ahead of "A Bridge Too Far".