title: Cox Enterprises

text: Gamut is a subsidiary of CMG known for its work in local, over-the-top (OTT) video advertising solutions, whereas CMG focuses on linear television and radio. Based in New York, NY, in the same building as CMG, Gamut has eight offices in the US. Gamut’s proprietary technology, Gamut TOTAL, places OTT advertising campaigns directly in publishers' ad servers, including Discovery Inc.’s networks.


title: Cox Enterprises

text: Cox Conserves is the company’s national sustainability program that focuses on alternative energy, community investment, employee engagement, energy conservation, waste diversion, recycling, and water conservation.


title: Cox Enterprises

text: Since its launch in 2007, Cox Enterprises has invested more than $120 million in over 400 sustainability and conservation projects through Cox Conserves to drive positive environmental change within the organization, among stakeholders, and within the communities being served. According to its public statements, its primary focus areas include:


title: Cox Enterprises

text: In September 2019, Cox Automotive's Mobility Division entered into an agreement with Rivian, the company developing the first luxury all-electric truck. In the deal, Cox will invest $350 million into Rivian, with the two companies exploring partnership opportunities in service operations, logistics, and digital retailing.


title: Cox Enterprises

text: In August 2022, Cox Enterprises agreed to acquire Axios Media, with the deal being valued at $525 million.


title: Home automation

text: Home automation or domotics is building automation for a home, called a smart home or smart house. A home automation system will monitor and/or control home attributes such as lighting, climate, entertainment systems, and appliances. It may also include home security such as access control and alarm systems. When connected with the Internet, home devices are an important constituent of the Internet of Things ("IoT").


title: Home automation

text: A home automation system typically connects controlled devices to a central smart home hub (sometimes called a "gateway"). The user interface for control of the system uses either wall-mounted terminals, tablet or desktop computers, a mobile phone application, or a Web interface that may also be accessible off-site through the Internet.


title: Home automation

text: While there are many competing vendors, there are increasing efforts towards open source systems. However, there are issues with the current state of home automation including a lack of standardized security measures and deprecation of older devices without backwards compatibility.


title: Home automation

text: Home automation has high potential for sharing data between family members or trusted individuals for personal security and could lead to energy saving measures with a positive environmental impact in the future.


title: Home automation

text: The home automation market was worth US$64 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow to over $163 billion in 2028.


title: Home automation

text: Early home automation began with labor-saving machines. Self-contained electric or gas powered home appliances became viable in the 1900s with the introduction of electric power distribution and led to the introduction of washing machines (1904), water heaters (1889), refrigerators (1913), sewing machines, dishwashers, and clothes dryers.


title: Home automation

text: In 1975, the first general purpose home automation network technology, X10, was developed. It is a communication protocol for electronic devices. It primarily uses electric power transmission wiring for signalling and control, where the signals involve brief radio frequency bursts of digital data, and remains the most widely available.


title: Home automation

text: By 2012, in the United States, according to ABI Research, 1.5 million home automation systems were installed.


title: Home automation

text: Per research firm Statista more than 45 million smart home devices will be installed in U.S. homes by the end of the year 2018.


title: Home automation

text: The word ""domotics"" is a contraction of the Latin word for a home ("domus") and the word "robotics". The word "smart" in "smart home" refers to the system being aware of the state of its devices, which is done through the information and communication technologies (ICT) protocol and the Internet of Things (IoT).


title: Home automation

text: In 2011, Microsoft Research found that home automation could involve high cost of ownership, inflexibility of interconnected devices, and poor manageability. When designing and creating a home automation system, engineers take into account several factors including scalability, how well the devices can be monitored and controlled, ease of installation and use for the consumer, affordability, speed, security, and ability to diagnose issues. Findings from iControl showed that consumers prioritize ease-of-use over technical innovation, and although consumers recognize that new connected devices have an unparalleled cool factor, they are not quite ready to use them in their own homes yet.


title: Home automation

text: Historically, systems have been sold as complete systems where the consumer relies on one vendor for the entire system including the hardware, the communications protocol, the central hub, and the user interface. However, there are now open hardware and open source software systems which can be used instead of or with proprietary hardware. Many of these systems interface with consumer electronics such as the Arduino or Raspberry Pi, which are easily accessible online and in most electronics stores. In addition, home automation devices are increasingly interfaced with mobile phones through Bluetooth, allowing for increased affordability and customizability for the user.


title: Home automation

text: Home automation suffers from platform fragmentation and lack of technical standards a situation where the variety of home automation devices, in terms of both hardware variations and differences in the software running on them, makes the task of developing applications that work consistently between different inconsistent technology ecosystems hard. Customers may hesitate to bet their IoT future on proprietary software or hardware devices that use proprietary protocols that may fade or become difficult to customize and interconnect.


title: Home automation

text: The nature of home automation devices can also be a problem for security, data security and data privacy, since patches to bugs found in the core operating system often do not reach users of older and lower-price devices. One set of researchers say that the failure of vendors to support older devices with patches and updates leaves more than 87% of active devices vulnerable.


title: Home automation

text: Concerns have been raised by tenants renting from landlords who decide to upgrade units with smart home technology. These concerns include weak wireless connections that render the door or appliance unusable or impractical; the security of door passcodes kept by the landlord; and the potential invasion of privacy that comes with connecting smart home technologies to home networks.


title: Home automation

text: Researchers have also conducted user studies to determine what the barriers are for consumers when integrating home automation devices or systems into their daily lifestyle. One of the main takeaways was regarding ease of use, as consumers tend to steer towards "plug and play" solutions over more complicated setups. One study found that there were large gaps in the mental-models generated by users regarding how the devices actually work. Specifically, the findings showed that there was a lot of misunderstanding related to where the data collected by smart devices was stored and how it was used. For example, in a smart light setup, one participant thought that her iPad communicated directly with the light, telling it to either turn off or on. In reality, the iPad sends a signal to the cloud system that the company uses (in this case, the Hue Bridge) which then signals directly to the device.


title: Home automation

text: Overall, this field is still evolving and the nature of each device is constantly changing. While technologists work to create more secure, streamlined, and standardized security protocols, consumers also need to learn more about how these devices work and what the implications of putting them in their homes can be. The growth of this field is currently limited not only by the technology but also by a user's ability to trust a device and integrate it successfully into his/her daily life.


title: Home automation

text: Utilizing home automation could lead to more efficient and intelligent energy saving techniques. By integrating information and communication technologies (ICT) with renewable energy systems such as solar power or wind power, homes can autonomously make decisions about whether to store energy or expend it for a given appliance, leading to overall positive environmental impacts and lower electricity bills for the consumers using the system. In order to do this, researchers propose using data from sensors regarding consumer activity within the home to anticipate the consumer needs and balance that with energy consumption.


title: Home automation

text: Furthermore, home automation has large potential regarding family safety and security. According to a 2015 survey done by iControl, the primary drivers of the demand for smart and connected devices are first "personal and family security", and second "excitement about energy savings". Home automation includes a variety of smart security systems and surveillance setups. This allows consumers to monitor their homes while away, and to give trusted family members access to that information in case anything bad happens.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: The Spartacist uprising (German: ), also known as the January uprising (), was a general strike and the accompanying armed struggles that took place in Berlin from 5 to 12 January 1919. It occurred in connection with the November Revolution that broke out following Germany's defeat in World War I. The uprising was primarily a power struggle between the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) led by Friedrich Ebert, which favored a social democracy, and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, which wanted to set up a council republic similar to the one established by the Bolsheviks in Russia. In 1914 Liebknecht and Luxemburg had founded the Marxist Spartacus League (), which gave the uprising its popular name.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: The revolt was improvised and small scale and quickly crushed by the superior strength of government and paramilitary troops. The death toll was roughly 150–200, mostly among the insurgents. The most prominent deaths were those of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were murdered extrajudicially, almost certainly with the approval of the leaders of the provisional SPD-led government. The party's involvement hampered its position throughout the life of the Weimar Republic, although quashing of the uprising did allow elections for the National Assembly to take place as scheduled on 19 January. The Assembly went on to write the Weimar Constitution that created the first functioning German democracy.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: On 9 November 1918, the Council of the People's Deputies under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert of the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (MSPD) was formed as a provisional Reich government following the collapse of the German Empire at the end of World War I. It had three representatives each from the MSPD and the more left-leaning Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). The Supreme Army Command recognized the Council on 10 November in the secret Ebert-Groener Pact in which Wilhelm Groener, Quartermaster General of the German Army, assured Reich Chancellor Ebert of the loyalty of the armed forces. The MSPD leadership sought a rapid return to "orderly conditions" by means of elections to the National Assembly. The USPD, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), parts of the working class and the Revolutionary Stewards – shop stewards independent of the official unions and freely chosen by workers – wanted to continue with and to safeguard their revolutionary goals of nationalizing property, stripping power from the military and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: At the end of December 1918, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht founded the Communist Party of Germany. Because of the unhappiness of many workers with the course of the November Revolution, other left-socialist groups joined in the party's foundation. The Revolutionary Stewards, however, after deliberations with the Spartacists, decided to remain in the USPD. Rosa Luxemburg presented her founding program on 31 December 1918. In it she noted that the Communists could never take power without the clear support of the majority of the people. On 1 January she again urged that the KPD participate in the planned elections for the National Assembly, but she was outvoted. The majority hoped to gain power by continued agitation in the factories and by "pressure from the streets".


title: Spartacist uprising

text: On 23 December the People's Marine Division (), which had been assigned to protect the provisional government, took Otto Wels of the MSPD hostage to lend weight to its demand for payment of back wages. The following day, against the orders of the three MSPD Council representatives (Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Otto Landsberg), Berlin's police chief Emil Eichhorn of the USPD refused to use the security forces under his command against the People's Marine Division to free Wels from the Berlin Palace where he was being held. Ebert then had the army called in and ordered it to open fire in what came to be known as the skirmish of the Berlin Palace. Wels was freed, but eleven men from the People's Marine Division and 23 from the army were killed.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: On 29 December 29 the three USPD representatives Hugo Haase, Wilhelm Dittmann, and Emil Barth left the Council of People's Deputies in protest. The MSPD representatives then appointed MSPD members Gustav Noske and Rudolf Wissell to replace the USPD representatives on the Council. After that the USPD no longer saw the Council as a legitimate interim government. MSPD majorities in the two main workers' councils agreed to Ebert's wish to dismiss Police Chief Eichhorn, whom he now considered unreliable, but the USPD and KPD interpreted Eichhorn's dismissal as an attack on the revolution. This became the immediate trigger of the uprising.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: On 4 January, the day Eichhorn was dismissed, the executive committee of the Berlin USPD and the Revolutionary Stewards decided to hold a demonstration on the following day. The 5 January demonstration took on a scale that exceeded all their expectations. During its course, armed demonstrators, incited and assisted by informers and provocateurs, occupied the printing plants of the Social Democratic newspaper "Vorwärts" and the "Berliner Tageblatt", as well as several publishing houses' buildings, a printing plant and a telegraph office. The presumed redirection of the mass protests away from the government district to the newspaper district by police informers was described by historian Jörn Schütrumpf as a "strategic masterstroke".


title: Spartacist uprising

text: The leading members of the Revolutionary Stewards, the USPD and the KPD met on the evening of 5 January to decide how to proceed. Most of those present supported the occupation of the Berlin newspaper district and were in favor of taking up the fight against the Social Democratic government. Karl Liebknecht had been "whipped into a state of revolutionary euphoria" by the size of the demonstration and the false report that all regiments in and around Berlin were on their side, whereas Rosa Luxemburg continued to oppose revolutionary actions. Only two spokesmen for the Revolutionary Stewards, Richard Müller and Ernst Däumig, spoke out against the course of action. While both in principle supported a second revolution against the Council of People's Deputies, they considered the timing premature and tactically unwise; they voted only for a general strike. A provisional revolutionary committee to overthrow the government and take power was decided on by about 70 of those present against 6 no votes from the ranks of the Revolutionary Stewards. The committee was formed from 53 people with Georg Ledebour, Liebknecht and Paul Scholze the three co-equal chairmen.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: The following day, the Revolutionary Committee called on the workers of Berlin to stage a general strike on 7 January and overthrow Ebert's government. The call was answered by some 500,000 people who poured into the city center. They did not take part in any fighting in the days that followed, nor were they joined by the strike leaders, although they were ready to disarm the soldiers, as they had been on 9 November. Some of their placards and banners bore the same slogans as at the beginning of the November Revolution: "Peace and Unity".


title: Spartacist uprising

text: Over the next two days, the committee could not agree on how to proceed. Some representatives called for armed insurrection, others pleaded for negotiations with Ebert. The committee was in particular unable to signal to the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who were waiting for direction in the streets and squares what they should do. Because of that they went home again on the evenings of both 6 and 7 January. On those two days, in the estimation of journalist Sebastian Haffner, they would have had the chance to overthrow the government of the People's Deputies by taking over the Reich Chancellery.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: KPD leader Karl Liebknecht, initially against the advice of Rosa Luxemburg, supported the plan to unleash a civil war. The Council of People's Deputies was to be overthrown by force of arms and the elections to the National Assembly scheduled for 19 January prevented. Liebknecht feared that the KPD might otherwise isolate itself too much from the workers who sought the overthrow of the government. At the same time, KPD members tried to win over to their side some of the regiments stationed in Berlin, especially the People's Marine Division. They did not succeed because most of the soldiers were already at home, either because they had declared themselves neutral or because their loyalty was to the previous Council of People's Deputies. In addition, a part of Berlin's citizens, especially the middle class, rallied behind Ebert's government, heeding its call to strike and to act as living shields to secure government buildings.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: On 6 January the Revolutionary Committee began negotiating with Ebert through the mediation of USPD leadership. The negotiations failed on 7 January due to the unwillingness of either side to compromise. The Council of People's Deputies demanded the evacuation of the occupied newspaper buildings, while the insurgents insisted on Eichhorn's reinstatement. The chance for a nonviolent settlement of the conflict was thus lost. On the same day, Ebert gave Gustav Noske command of the troops in and around Berlin, and calls went out for the formation of more Freikorps units. Since early December 1918, such Freikorps units had been forming from former frontline soldiers and volunteers. Now Ebert and Noske allowed them to muster around Berlin with organizations loyal to the Republic and with imperial regiments, some loyal but most hostile to the Republic. Immediately after Noske's appointment, he ordered that all members of the Revolutionary Committee be monitored so that they could be arrested later. To this end, 50 officers were posted in all Berlin post offices.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: On 8 January the Council of People's Deputies called on the population to resist the insurgents and their intended takeover of the government and published a leaflet entitled "The Hour of Reckoning Approaches!" In it the insurgents were threatened with physical annihilation. On 9 January the central executive committee of the Berlin USPD and the KPD issued a joint appeal demanding a fight against "the Judases in the government. ... They belong in the penitentiary, on the scaffold. ... Use weapons against your mortal enemies."


title: Spartacist uprising

text: The mass of the working class followed the call for a general strike to prevent the counterrevolution, but it did not want to have anything to do with military struggles. On the contrary, they continued to demand the unity of the socialist forces and, at a large meeting in the Humboldthain Park on 9 January, demanded the resignation of all the leaders responsible for the "fratricide". Both the Ebert government and Ledebour and Liebknecht were seen as responsible for the situation. Numerous resolutions from the factories called for an end to the street fighting and the creation of a government in which all socialist parties would be represented.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: On 10 January the Freikorps Reinhard Brigade, led by Colonel Wilhelm Reinhard, attacked the Spartacist headquarters in Spandau. On 11 January Noske gave the order for action against those occupying the newspaper building. The attackers, armed with military weapons, far outgunned their opponents. The Potsdam Freikorps captured the building with flame throwers, machine guns, mortars and artillery. Other occupied buildings and streets in the newspaper district were also taken over by 12 January. There were no organized battles because the insurgents were not prepared for them; in many cases they surrendered voluntarily. The military nevertheless shot over a hundred insurgents and an unknown number of uninvolved civilians in the area. On 11 January, for example, seven men who wanted to negotiate with the government troops for a surrender of the building were taken to the Berlin Dragoon Barracks and shot. An investigative committee of the parliament of Prussia later put the overall death toll at 156. Among the military there were thirteen killed and twenty wounded.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: On 13 January Freikorps units from the area around Berlin moved into the city, as did the Guards Cavalry Division, a unit of the soon to be dissolved Prussian Army under Captain Waldemar Pabst. Berlin newspapers hailed the troops' entry at the end of the fighting as the restoration of "peace and order". The military occupation was followed by many instances of violence committed by right-wing troops, far exceeding previous acts of violence by some from the Left.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: Right-wing groups had been agitating against German Communists and their leaders even before the January uprising. The Anti-Bolshevist League printed posters and appeals to the population of Berlin calling for the Bolshevik ringleaders to be found and handed over to the military. A high reward was offered. One leaflet that circulated in large numbers proclaimed: The Fatherland is close to ruin. Save it! It is not threatened from outside, but from within: from the Spartacus League. Strike their leaders dead! Kill Liebknecht! Then you will have peace, work and bread. –The frontline soldiers.After the uprising was crushed, the Spartacist leaders feared for their lives and went into hiding. The government sought them out as alleged putschists in order to prosecute them for the attempted coup before the 19 January elections. Fritz Henck, Philipp Scheidemann's son-in-law, publicly assured the residents of Berlin on 14 January that the leaders of the uprising "would not get off scot-free". In just a few days, he said, it would become clear "that things will get serious for them, too".


title: Spartacist uprising

text: On the evening of 15 January, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were found in the apartment of a friend, Dr. Markussohn, in Berlin-Wilmersdorf by the Wilmersdorf Citizens' Militia, arrested and taken to the Eden Hotel. Their whereabouts had probably become known through the telephone surveillance that Noske had ordered. Waldemar Pabst had the prisoners interrogated and mistreated over a period of hours. KPD leader Wilhelm Pieck, who was also arrested when he visited the apartment that evening, witnessed the abuse as well as a number of telephone calls, one of which Pabst probably made to the Reich Chancellery.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: The murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht were intended to look like an assassination. Private Otto Runge hit Rosa Luxemburg with his rifle butt as she was being led out of the hotel. She was pushed unconscious into a waiting car then shot in the temple by Freikorps Lieutenant Hermann Souchon. Her body was thrown into the Berlin Landwehr Canal by First Lieutenant Kurt Vogel and was not found until 31 May.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: Liebknecht was taken from the hotel shortly after Rosa Luxemburg and after getting into a waiting car was knocked almost unconscious, again by Otto Runge. The car stopped in the Berlin Tiergarten, Liebknecht was forced out then shot in the back as a "fugitive". His body was handed over to a Berlin police station as the "corpse of an unknown man".


title: Spartacist uprising

text: KPD leader Wilhelm Pieck was able to obtain an order to have himself transferred to a prison and escaped en route.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: The killings of 15 January triggered serious unrest and uprisings throughout the German Reich. Gustav Noske deployed Freikorps and Reichswehr units against them and against the soviet republics set up in several major German cities. All were violently put down, the last being the Bavarian Soviet Republic which fell on 3 May. The fighting was often similar to that in Berlin and resulted in a total of about 5,000 deaths, including several political murders of leading representatives of the left.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: On 16 January the Berlin press reported that Liebknecht had been shot while fleeing authorities and Luxemburg lynched by an angry crowd. The basis for this account was a document that Captain Pabst had written on the evening of the murders and had published as an official report from his division. After knowledge of the murders became public, the government called a special meeting at which Ebert is said to have expressed his shock at the murders of the former SPD party comrades he had known for decades. MSPD representatives feared an expansion of the uprisings as a result of the murders. Some briefly considered resigning. Noske, on the other hand, in a 1923 retrospect described the people who had been murdered as the main culprits in the revolution's degeneration into civil war. Thousands had asked beforehand "if no one would render the troublemakers harmless".


title: Spartacist uprising

text: Leo Jogiches, Rosa Luxemburg's former partner, took over the leadership of the KPD after her death and tried to shed light on the murders. In an article in the party's "Die Rote Fahne" ("The Red Flag") newspaper on 12 February 1919, he revealed the names of some of those his own research led him to suspect of being involved. He was arrested in March 1919 during additional Freikorps operations against left-wing workers' leaders and murdered in prison.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: Criminal proceedings against alleged perpetrators were not instigated right away. On 16 February 1919 KPD members began demanding an independent investigation by a non-military special court because they feared suppression of evidence. It was not until May 1919 that some of the perpetrators – including Otto Runge and Kurt Vogel – were brought before a military field court of their own division. The main trial took place from 8 to 14 May 1919. There was repeated testimony that a "ministry aiding the MSPD" had offered a bounty of 100,000 marks for the capture of the Spartacus leaders. Wilhelm Pieck was one of the most important witnesses of the incidents at the hotel that led up to the murders. He and a number of employees of the hotel had been aware of the mistreatment that took place before the murders and overheard telephone calls between officers and their superiors. Pieck testified that he saw "an officer, addressed by the others as 'captain' walking around offering cigarettes to the soldiers and saying, 'The gang must not leave the Eden Hotel alive!' ... A short time after that, a maid came up, fell into the arms of a colleague, and exclaimed, 'I'll never be free of the image of that poor woman being knocked down and dragged around.'"


title: Spartacist uprising

text: Runge received two years in prison, Vogel 28 months. The officers involved, the brothers Heinz and Horst von Pflugk-Harttung, were acquitted. Their commander Waldemar Pabst was not charged, and others who had possibly given orders were not sought out. As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Gustav Noske personally confirmed the verdicts with his signature.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: Vogel was taken out of Moabit Prison on 17 May, three days after the sentencing, by a Lieutenant Lindemann for transfer to Tegel Prison. Lindemann was in fact Captain Lieutenant (and later Admiral) Wilhelm Canaris, who took Vogel to the Netherlands by car. Canaris was never prosecuted for the action.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: Representatives of the KPD and USPD, along with some from the MSPD and the liberals regarded the military trial and verdicts as a judicial scandal. Attempts to challenge the verdict and reopen the trial in a higher court were put off. All the remaining members of the Revolutionary Committee were imprisoned but later released for lack of evidence to show that they were planning an armed coup. It was not until 1929 that Paul Jorns, who had been the military judge in the trial, was dismissed for bias.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: In 1934 the Nazi regime granted Otto Runge compensation for his imprisonment and Kurt Vogel convalescence using taxpayers' money. In January 1935 the National Socialists leveled Luxemburg's and Liebknecht's graves, presumably also disposing of their bones.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: The journalist and right-wing politician Eduard Stadtler stated in his 1935 memoirs that the murders were contract killings. He wrote that on a visit to Pabst on 12 January he had "requested the murders from him" and that Pabst told him later who had carried them out. Pabst also indicated that he had been in contact with Noske.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: In 1959 Pabst had a conversation with Günther Nollau, later vice president of the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, who recorded what Pabst said: "During that time he [Pabst] had heard Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg speak in Berlin. Wearing civilian clothes, he mingled with the crowd. His observations led him to the conclusion that the two were extraordinarily dangerous and that there was no one on their side to counter them. He therefore decided to get rid of them." In 1962 Pabst stated in an interview with "Der Spiegel" that Noske had permitted the murders and afterwards covered up the lack of prosecutions. In 1970 a letter was found in Pabst's estate in which he wrote: "It is clear that I could not have carried out the action without Noske's approval – with Ebert in the background – and that I also had to protect my officers. But very few people have understood why I was never questioned or brought up on charges. As a man of honor, I responded to the behavior of the MSPD by keeping my mouth shut for 50 years about our cooperation."


title: Spartacist uprising

text: Noske always denied the conversation overheard by Pabst in which he was said to have made an agreement to cooperate in the arrest and murder of the Spartacists. Otto Kranzbühler, who later became the lawyer for Hermann Souchon, the man who shot Rosa Luxemburg, stated that Pabst had confirmed to him the telephone conversation with Noske. Biographers also believe that Pabst probably consulted with Noske or Hans von Seeckt of the army command.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: The uprising did not have a mass base and was, according to historian Heinrich August Winkler, only an "attempted coup by a radical minority". Its rapid suppression therefore was no surprise. It was probably also inevitable, since without it, the result would probably have been a civil war throughout Germany and military intervention by the victorious powers. After the uprising was quashed, Ebert could continue on the path towards establishing a parliament. On 19 January 1919 elections for the National Assembly were held. The Assembly finalized the Weimar Constitution on 11 August and created the first functioning German democracy, the Weimar Republic.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: The bloody suppression of the uprising left the SPD under a heavy burden. In the elections to the National Assembly, it received 37.9 percent of the vote, while the USPD received 7.6 percent, with the result that the two already hostile left-wing parties did not obtain an absolute majority. In the subsequent elections during the life of the Weimar Republic, the SPD never again achieved more than 30 percent of the vote and thus remained dependent on coalitions with the middle-class parties of the center in order to participate in the government, even after its reunification with most of the USPD in 1920.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: Every year on the second weekend of January, the Liebknecht-Luxemburg demonstration takes place in Berlin to commemorate Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. It ends at the Socialists' Memorial in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: At Rathausstraße 10 in Berlin-Lichtenberg, there is a memorial with the names of the militants killed there during the later Berlin March Battles.


title: Spartacist uprising

text: In the historiography of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the uprising was judged very positively. Its view was that only the KPD had succeeded in forming a Marxist-Leninist fighting party and created a crucial prerequisite for the victory of the proletarian revolution; in this respect, the KPD's foundation was one of the decisive turning points in the history of the German workers' movement. This interpretation exaggerated the strength of the Spartacus League and its influence and glossed over its failed tactics. Since the 1990 German reunification, historical scholarship has evaluated the uprising predominantly negatively. Hans Mommsen labeled the insurgents' actions a "terrorist coup tactic". Hagen Schulze wrote that their goal was a "socialist, red revolution and a dictatorship of the working class". Heinrich August Winkler sees the January uprising as an "insurrection against democracy"; much like the Bolsheviks, who used force of arms to disperse the democratically elected Russian Constituent Assembly in January 1918, Liebknecht and his followers wanted to prevent formation of a parliamentary government even before the elections to the National Assembly. Historian Henning Köhler characterizes the uprising as "blind action", a "struggle for power … corresponding to the Bolshevik model". Hans-Ulrich Wehler was of the opinion that the KPD, against Luxemburg's advice, "gave in to a putschist current that sought to unleash a German civil war by means of the Berlin January uprising". Sönke Neitzel calls the uprising a "spontaneous, leaderless action". Irish historian Mark Jones makes a similar judgment, characterizing the uprising as an "improvised coup attempt with very little real chance of success".


title: Leslie Grantham

text: Leslie Michael Grantham (30 April 1947 – 15 June 2018) was an English actor, best known for his role as "Dirty" Den Watts in the BBC soap opera "EastEnders". He was a convicted murderer, having served 10 years for the killing of a West German taxi driver, and had significant press coverage resulting from an online sex scandal in 2004.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: Grantham was born in Camberwell, London, the son of Adelaide ("née" Flinders) and Walter William Grantham (1915–1998). He enlisted in the Royal Fusiliers regiment of the British Army in 1965, at the age of 18.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: Grantham married Australian Jane Laurie in 1981. The couple had three sons and divorced in 2013. His son Daniel Laurie is also an actor, and plays Reggie Jackson in "Call the Midwife."


title: Leslie Grantham

text: Having joined the Army (The Royal Fusiliers), Grantham was soon posted to West Germany, where he quickly found himself in debt to army colleagues. He resorted to criminal activities in his attempt to clear the debt.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: On 3 December 1966, Grantham attempted to rob a taxi driver, Felix Reese, in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, by threatening him at gunpoint and demanding money. In a struggle between the two men, Reese died after being shot in the head. Grantham was arrested soon after, and charged with murder.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: In his statement to the police following his arrest, Grantham said that he did not know the gun was loaded and it had gone off during the struggle, which would have resulted in a conviction for manslaughter had a jury believed this version of events. However, at his trial in April 1967, he was subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Although he had committed the murder in West Germany, he served the entirety of his sentence in British prisons. This was because soldiers and officers convicted of any criminal offence that warrants a sentence of over two years are automatically transferred to Her Majesty's Prison Service, since they are also automatically dishonourably discharged.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: Grantham was released in 1977, having served 10 years. While he was in Leyhill Prison in Gloucestershire, he performed in several plays for inmates and members of the public, and edited the prison newspaper. He was encouraged to get more involved in acting professionally by the convicted disgraced Labour Party politician T. Dan Smith, who was also an inmate at Leyhill in the mid-1970s. He also met actress Louise Jameson during her visit to Leyhill near the end of his imprisonment; she had also encouraged him to take up acting and he became good friends with her.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: On release from prison, Grantham decided to pursue an acting career and trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. His theatre work included a role in a play at the Battersea Free Theatre written by television director Matthew Robinson. In 1982, Grantham made his television debut as Boollie in a "BBC2 Playhouse" edition called "Jake's End". The following year he appeared as Frank on an episode of the short lived sitcom "Goodnight and God Bless". Grantham was then cast by Matthew Robinson as Kiston, the henchman of Davros, in the "Doctor Who" serial "Resurrection of the Daleks" (1984). He also played a signals sergeant in episode 12 of the television mini-series "The Jewel in the Crown" (1984) and wrote a play entitled "A Reason" "To Live", which won the Gloucester Drama Festival award for best original play. He made a brief appearance in the Mike Hodges film "Morons from Outer Space" (1985), but by the time the film was released Grantham had gained his best known role.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: In 1984, Grantham auditioned with the BBC for a part in its new soap opera "EastEnders", which aired in February 1985. He was recommended by Matthew Robinson, who was to become a key member of the "EastEnders" production team. Grantham had auditioned for the role of market trader Pete Beale, but he was offered the part of Den Watts. The character, landlord of The Queen Victoria public house, quickly became a national favourite and gained the nickname "Dirty Den" mostly because of the awful way he treated his wife Angie, played by Anita Dobson, with one of his many affairs occurring at the age of 39, when he fathered a child with 16-year-old Michelle Fowler, played by Susan Tully.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: On 25 December 1986, Grantham's character served his on-screen wife with divorce papers, with the famous line "Happy Christmas, Ange." The episode was watched by a record 30 million viewers – over half the British population. In 1988, the character sold his pub to Frank Butcher, played by Mike Reid, and gradually drifted out of key storylines until finally departing in February 1989, although his final scenes had been filmed the previous autumn. Grantham had announced his intention to leave the soap early in 1988, around the same time that it was announced that Dobson would be leaving. However, the series’ bosses had not wanted to suffer the double blow of losing its two biggest characters so close together, and set about an intensive block of filming that would allow Den to remain on screen into 1989, while enabling Grantham to remain on "EastEnders" only until the previous autumn.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: Den had become involved with a criminal organisation called "The Firm" over the summer of 1988, and his only option was to flee The Square. After a spell on remand in custody and a dramatic escape from the police and from members of The Firm who ambushed him on his way to court, viewers watched a mysterious gunman shoot at Den with a gun hidden in a bunch of daffodils, before hearing a splash. A shot depicting Den's death was cut from the final scene, in the hope that Grantham might one day be persuaded to return to the role. The following year, a body believed to be Den's was found in the canal.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: Grantham played Danny Kane in the crime television series "The Paradise Club" (1989–90) alongside Don Henderson.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: He went on to appear in the fourth season of "Cluedo" as Colonel Mustard, He previously appeared as a contestant on the 1990 Christmas special. In the second episode of the fourth season, Col. Mike Mustard murdered former comrade and property developer Sir Nigel Hussey (Ian McNeice) with a G-string in the kitchen. A short time after the episode aired, the producers received a letter that was written by the family of one Felix Reese, who himself was a taxi driver who was shot in the head by Leslie Grantham while he was a soldier stationed in Germany. The Reeses found it distasteful that someone who performed an illegal killing as a soldier would be cast as someone who performed an illegal killing as a soldier.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: He also appeared on "The Detectives" (1993) and "99-1" (1994–95). In 1994, he narrated volume one of Frank Harris's erotic classic "My Life and Loves". In 1997, he produced and starred in the sci-fi mini-series "The Uninvited".


title: Leslie Grantham

text: Alongside Melinda Messenger, Grantham was the co-host of the game show "Fort Boyard" from 1998 to 2001. Also in 2001, he appeared in "Lily Savage's Blankety Blank". He also reunited with his "EastEnders" co-star Anita Dobson in the two-part mini-series "The Stretch" which aired on Sky One in 2000, and in the British gangster film "Charlie" (2004).


title: Leslie Grantham

text: During the 1990s, Grantham was approached more than once by BBC bosses about a possible return to "EastEnders", but rejected each of these offers, often feeling that the storyline at the time would not be the right one to suit any potential comeback.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: However, on 3 May 2003, it was confirmed that Grantham would be returning to "EastEnders" later that year to reprise his role as Den after 14 years. On 29 September 2003, his return to "EastEnders" was aired, with him arriving at the nightclub E20 now owned by his adopted daughter Sharon, portrayed by Letitia Dean.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: It was revealed that Den had survived the shooting and fled to Spain with the help of former mistress Jan Hammond (Jane How), while the body found a year later in the canal had been wrongly identified. Over 17 million people watched one of the most anticipated television events of the year on 29 September, as Den spoke the famous words, "Hello, princess."


title: Leslie Grantham

text: There had been much speculation in the media after Den's departure as to whether the character really was dead – particularly after the original search of the canal site where he was shot failed to uncover any trace of him. BBC bosses said that Den's return had been on the agenda almost every year since the character's departure in 1989, and the first offer for him to return had been made as long ago as 1991. Grantham had turned down every offer to return until that which was made to him in early 2003, feeling that his character did not have adequate links to the show for a comeback to be anything more than an attempt to boost ratings – particularly when Den's daughter Sharon was away from 1995 to 2001, leaving Den without any family in the cast. By 2003, however, his daughter Vicki, played by Scarlett Alice Johnson, had rejoined the cast and a previously unknown son called Dennis Rickman, played by Nigel Harman, was also in the series – the product of an affair between Den and a young woman called Paula Rickman, 30 years earlier.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: In December 2004, Den arranged a scam to get back The Queen Vic from Sam Mitchell (Kim Medcalf), 16 years after he had sold it to Frank.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: In May 2004, a Sunday newspaper printed photographs of Grantham exposing himself and masturbating whilst sucking his finger in a sexually-suggestive manner via a webcam from his dressing room to an undercover reporter named "Amanda". Grantham also allegedly dressed as Captain Hook whilst pleasuring himself, and insulted several cast members of "EastEnders, "including Shane Richie (Alfie Moon), Wendy Richard (Pauline Fowler), Kim Medcalf (Sam Mitchell) and Jessie Wallace (Kat Moon). Grantham released a statement which read, "I am wholeheartedly ashamed of my behaviour and feel that I have let down my colleagues, as well as my friends and family." He also added, "In some small recompense I intend to make a donation to charity as a mark of my apology." He maintained in later interviews that he 'was set up'. He attempted suicide three times as a result of the scandal. In addition, in 2018 it was reported that he had been investigated by police for sexually abusing a school girl, although the victim ultimately decided not to pursue the matter.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: In November 2004, it was confirmed that Grantham would be leaving "EastEnders" in the New Year. Bosses stated that the character would be killed off, but this time "the coffin lid would be nailed shut".


title: Leslie Grantham

text: On 18 February 2005, 16.2 million viewers tuned in to view his character's second demise, this time at the hands of second wife Chrissie, portrayed by Tracy-Ann Oberman, who hit him over the head with a dog-shaped iron doorstop during a confrontation in the Vic.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: Grantham later appeared in two UK tours of "Beyond Reasonable Doubt", a stage adaptation of a Jeffrey Archer play, alongside Simon Ward and Alexandra Bastedo, and performed as a Christmas pantomime villain. He directed and starred in a pantomime of Peter Pan at the Alban Arena in St Albans during Christmas 2005, which was a sell-out and received excellent reviews. After Grantham left "EastEnders" in 2005, he spoke out publicly against the show, criticising its over-the-top, far-fetched storylines, saying 'there was a murder every week... that's not real life'.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: In October 2006, it was announced that, in his first television role since leaving "EastEnders", he would appear in the long-running ITV1 police drama series "The Bill", playing the role of Jimmy Collins, who was on the run from prison. The episode aired on 8 February 2007. This was Grantham's second appearance in "The Bill" as he previously appeared in a few episodes in 1998 and a single episode in 1999 also coincidentally playing another character named Jimmy.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: In February 2010, Grantham appeared in "EastEnders: The Aftermath" on BBC Three to mark the live episode of the show and its 25th birthday. He was interviewed by Kirsten O'Brien from the bar of The Queen Victoria pub which his character had once owned. Grantham was cast for the lead role in the UK thriller movie "DeadTime".


title: Leslie Grantham

text: From 28 November to 11 December 2010, Grantham appeared as Ebenezer Scrooge in the Lincoln Theatre Royal's production of "A Christmas Carol". He portrayed the main character John in the Bulgarian TV series "The English Neighbour", based on the novel of the same name. In 2015 he appeared in the film "Mob Handed" (2016 Release) directed by Liam Galvin playing a detective.


title: Leslie Grantham

text: In June 2018, it was reported Grantham had returned to the United Kingdom from his home in Bulgaria to receive treatment for lung cancer. He died on 15 June 2018, aged 71. That evening's episode of "EastEnders" featured a tribute to Grantham, whilst his co-star and on-screen wife Anita Dobson described him as "a wonderful and special actor, witty and very talented. I shall remember him very fondly and with affection."


title: Wallace Beery

text: Wallace Fitzgerald Beery (April 1, 1885 – April 15, 1949) was an American film and stage actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Bill in "Min and Bill" (1930) opposite Marie Dressler, as General Director Preysing in "Grand Hotel" (1932), as Long John Silver in "Treasure Island" (1934), as Pancho Villa in "Viva Villa!" (1934), and his titular role in "The Champ" (1931), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Beery appeared in some 250 films during a 36-year career. His contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer stipulated in 1932 that he would be paid $1 more than any other contract player at the studio. This made Beery the highest-paid film actor in the world during the early 1930s. He was the brother of actor Noah Beery and uncle of actor Noah Beery Jr.


title: Wallace Beery

text: For his contributions to the film industry, Beery was posthumously inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame with a motion-picture star in 1960. His star is located at 7001 Hollywood Boulevard.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery was born the youngest of three boys in 1885 in Clay County, Missouri, near Smithville. The Beery family left the farm in the 1890s and moved to nearby Kansas City, Missouri, where the father was a police officer.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery attended the Chase School in Kansas City and took piano lessons, as well, but showed little love for academic matters. He ran away from home twice, the first time returning after a short time, quitting school and working in the Kansas City train yards as an engine wiper. Beery ran away from home a second time at age 16, and joined the Ringling Brothers Circus as an assistant elephant trainer. He left two years later, after being clawed by a leopard.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Wallace Beery joined his older brother Noah in New York City in 1904, finding work in comic opera as a baritone, and began to appear on Broadway and in summer stock theatre. He appeared in "The Belle of the West" in 1905. His most notable early role came in 1907 when he starred in "The Yankee Tourist" to good reviews.


title: Wallace Beery

text: In 1913, he moved to Chicago to work for Essanay Studios. His first movie was likely a comedy short, "His Athletic Wife" (1913).


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery was then cast as Sweedie, a Swedish maid character he played in drag in a series of short comedy films from 1914 to 1916. "Sweedie Learns to Swim" (1914) co-starred Ben Turpin. "Sweedie Goes to College" (1915) starred Gloria Swanson, whom Beery married the following year.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Other Beery films (mostly shorts) from this period included "In and Out" (1914), "The Ups and Downs" (1914), "Cheering a Husband" (1914), "Madame Double X" (1914), "Ain't It the Truth" (1915), "Two Hearts That Beat as Ten" (1915), and "The Fable of the Roistering Blades" (1915).


title: Wallace Beery

text: "The Slim Princess" (1915), with Francis X. Bushman, was one of his earliest feature-length films. Beery also did "The Broken Pledge" (1915) and "A Dash of Courage" (1916), both with Swanson.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery was a German soldier in "The Little American" (1917) with Mary Pickford, directed by Cecil B. De Mille. He did some comedies for Mack Sennett, "Maggie's First False Step" (1917) and "Teddy at the Throttle" (1917), but he gradually left that genre and specialized in portrayals of villains prior to becoming a major leading man during the sound era.


title: Wallace Beery

text: In 1917, Beery portrayed Pancho Villa in "Patria" at a time when Villa was still active in Mexico. (Beery reprised the role 17 years later in "Viva Villa!".)


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery was a villainous German in "The Unpardonable Sin" (1919) with Blanche Sweet. For Paramount, he did "The Love Burglar" (1919) with Wallace Reid; "Victory" (1919), with Jack Holt; "Behind the Door" (1919), as another villainous German; and "The Life Line" (1919) with Holt.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery was the villain in five major releases in 1920: "813"; "The Virgin of Stamboul" for director Tod Browning; "The Mollycoddle" with Douglas Fairbanks, in which Fairbanks and Beery fistfought as they tumbled down a steep mountain (see the photograph in the gallery below); and in the noncomedic Western "The Round-Up" starring Roscoe Arbuckle as an obese cowboy in a well-received serious film with the tagline "Nobody loves a fat man." Beery continued his villainy cycle that year with "The Last of the Mohicans", playing Magua.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery had a supporting part in "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (1920) with Rudolph Valentino. He was a villainous Tong leader in "A Tale of Two Worlds" (1921), and was the bad guy again in "Sleeping Acres" (1922), "Wild Honey" (1922), and "I Am the Law" (1922), which also featured his brother Noah Beery Sr.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery had a large then-rare heroic part as King Richard I (Richard the Lion-Hearted) in "Robin Hood" (1922), starring Douglas Fairbanks as Robin Hood. The lavish movie was a huge success and spawned a sequel the following year starring Beery in the title role of "Richard the Lion-Hearted".


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery had an important unbilled cameo as "the Ape-Man" in "A Blind Bargain" (1922) starring Lon Chaney (Beery is seen crouching, in full ape-man make-up, in the background of some of the movie's posters), and a supporting role in "The Flame of Life" (1923). He played another historical king, King Philip IV of Spain in "The Spanish Dancer" (1923) with Pola Negri.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery starred in an action melodrama, "Stormswept" (1923) for FBO Films alongside his elder brother, Noah Beery Sr. The tagline on the movie's posters was "Wallace and Noah Beery – The Two Greatest Character Actors on the American Screen".


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery played his third royal, the Duc de Tours, in "Ashes of Vengeance" (1923) with Norma Talmadge, then did "Drifting" (1923) with Priscilla Dean for director Browning.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery had the titular role in "Bavu" (1923), about Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution. He co-starred with Buster Keaton in the comedy "Three Ages" (1923), the first feature Keaton wrote, produced, directed, and starred in.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery was a villain in "The Eternal Struggle" (1923), a Mountie drama, produced by Louis B. Mayer, who eventually became crucial to Beery's career. He was reunited with Dean and Browning in "White Tiger" (1923), then played the title role in the aforementioned "Richard the Lion-Hearted" (1923), a sequel to "Robin Hood" based on Sir Walter Scott's "The Talisman"; a print of "Richard the Lion-Hearted" is held at the Archives du Film du CNC in Bois d'Arcy.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery was in "The Drums of Jeopardy" (1923) and had a supporting role in "The Sea Hawk" (1924) for director Frank Lloyd. He also appeared in a supporting role for Clarence Brown's "The Signal Tower" (1925) starring Virginia Valli and Rockliffe Fellowes.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. He had a support role in "Adventure" (1925) directed by Victor Fleming.


title: Wallace Beery

text: At First National, he was given the star role of Professor Challenger in Arthur Conan Doyle's dinosaur epic "The Lost World" (1925), arguably his silent performance most frequently screened in the modern era. Beery was top billed in Paramount's "The Devil's Cargo" (1925) for Victor Fleming, and supported in "The Night Club" (1925), "The Pony Express" (1925) for James Cruze, and "The Wanderer" (1925) for Raoul Walsh.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery starred in a comedy with Raymond Hatton, "Behind the Front" (1926), and he was a villain in "Volcano!" (1926). He was a bos'n in "Old Ironsides" (1926) for director James Cruze, with Charles Farrell in the romantic lead.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery had the title role in the baseball movie "Casey at the Bat" (1927). He was reunited with Hatton in "Fireman, Save My Child" (1927) and "Now We're in the Air" (1927). The latter also featured Louise Brooks, who was Beery's costar in "Beggars of Life" (1928), directed by William Wellman, which was Paramount's first part-talkie movie.


title: Wallace Beery

text: He made a fourth comedy with Hatton, "Wife Savers" (1929), then Beery starred in "Chinatown Nights" (1929) for Wellman, produced by a young David O. Selznick. This film was shot silent with the voices dubbed in by the actors afterward, which worked spectacularly well with Beery's resonant voice, although the technique was not used again during the silent era for another full-length feature. Beery then played in "Stairs of Sand" (1929), a Western also starring Jean Arthur (who played the leading lady in the Western film "Shane" 24 years later) before being fired by Paramount.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Irving Thalberg signed Beery to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) as a character actor. The association began well when Beery played the savage convict Butch, a role originally intended for Lon Chaney (who died that same year), in the highly successful 1930 prison film "The Big House", directed by George W. Hill; Beery was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery's second film for MGM was also a huge success: "Billy the Kid" (1930), an early widescreen picture in which he played Pat Garrett. He supported John Gilbert in "Way for a Sailor" (1930) and Grace Moore in "A Lady's Morals" (1930), portraying P. T. Barnum in the latter.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery was well established as a leading man and top-rank character actor. The picture that really made him one of the cinema's foremost stars was "Min and Bill" (1930) opposite Marie Dressler and directed by George W. Hill, a sensational success.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery made a third film with Hill, "The Secret Six" (1931), a gangster movie with Jean Harlow and Clark Gable in key supporting roles. The picture was popular, but was surpassed at the box office by "The Champ", which Beery made with Jackie Cooper for director King Vidor. The film, especially written for Beery, was another box-office sensation. Beery shared the Best Actor Oscar with Fredric March. Though March received one vote more than Beery, Academy rules at the time—since rescinded—defined results within one vote of each other as "ties". (An alternate account has MGM head Louis B. Mayer storming backstage at the Oscars and demanding that March and Beery share that year's Academy Award for Best Actor since the vote was so close.)


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery's career went from strength to strength. "Hell Divers" (1932), a naval airplane epic also starring a young Clark Gable billed under Beery, was a big hit. So, too, was the all-star "Grand Hotel" (1932), in which Beery was billed fourth, under Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, and Joan Crawford, one of the very few times he would not be top billed for the rest of his career. In 1932, his contract with MGM stipulated that he be paid a dollar more than any other contract player at the studio, making him the world's highest-paid actor.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery was a German wrestler in "Flesh" (1932), a hit directed by John Ford, but Ford removed his directorial credit before the film opened, so the picture screened with no director listed despite being labeled "A John Ford Production" in the opening title card. Next Beery was in another all-star ensemble blockbuster, "Dinner at Eight" (1933), with Jean Harlow holding her own as Beery's comically bickering wife. This time, Beery was billed third, under Marie Dressler and John Barrymore.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery was lent to the new 20th Century Pictures for the boisterously fast-paced comedy/drama "The Bowery" (1933), also starring George Raft, Jackie Cooper, and Fay Wray, and featuring Pert Kelton, under the direction of Raoul Walsh. The picture was a smash hit.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Back at MGM, he played the title role of Pancho Villa in "Viva Villa!" (1933) and was reunited with Dressler in "Tugboat Annie" (1933), a massive hit. He was Long John Silver in "Treasure Island" (1934), described as a box-office "disappointment" despite being MGM's third-largest hit of the season, and remains currently viewed as featuring one of Beery's iconic performances.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery returned to 20th Century Productions for "The Mighty Barnum" (1934), in which he played P. T. Barnum again. Back at MGM, he was a kindly sergeant in "West Point of the Air" (1935) and was in an all-star spectacular, "China Seas" (1935), this time billed beneath Clark Gable.


title: Wallace Beery

text: "O'Shaughnessy's Boy" (1935) reunited Beery and Jackie Cooper. He had the lead as the drunken uncle in MGM's adaptation of "Ah, Wilderness!" (1936) and went back to 20th Century – now 20th Century Fox – for "A Message to Garcia" (1936) with Barbara Stanwyck.


title: Wallace Beery

text: At MGM, he was in "Old Hutch" (1936) and "The Good Old Soak" (1937), then he was back at Fox for "Slave Ship" (1937), taking second billing under Warner Baxter, a rarity for Beery after "Min and Bill" catapulted his career into the stratosphere in 1931, during which he received top billing in all but six films ("Min and Bill", "Grand Hotel", "Tugboat Annie", "Dinner at Eight", "China Seas" with Gable and Harlow, and "Slave Ship").


title: Wallace Beery

text: The status of Beery's films went into a decline. After an abrupt European vacation, Beery was in "The Bad Man of Brimstone" (1938) with Dennis O'Keefe (and Noah Beery Sr. in a cameo role as a bartender), "Port of Seven Seas" (1938) with Maureen O'Sullivan, "Stablemates" (1938) with Mickey Rooney, "Stand Up and Fight" (1939) with Robert Taylor, "Sergeant Madden" (1939) with Tom Brown, "Thunder Afloat" (1939) with Chester Morris, "The Man from Dakota" (1940) with Dolores del Río, and "20 Mule Team" (1940) with Marjorie Rambeau, Anne Baxter, and Noah Beery Jr., enjoying top billing in all of them.


title: Wallace Beery

text: "Wyoming" (1940) teamed Beery with Marjorie Main. After "The Bad Man" (1941), which also stars Lionel Barrymore and future President of the United States Ronald Reagan, and was the remake of a Walter Huston picture, MGM reunited Beery and Main in "Barnacle Bill" (1941), "The Bugle Sounds" (1941), and "Jackass Mail" (1942).


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery did a war film, a Technicolor comedy titled "Salute to the Marines" (1943), then was back with Main in "Rationing" (1944). "Barbary Coast Gent" (1944), a broad Western comedy in which Beery played a bombastic con man, teamed him with Binnie Barnes. He did another war film, "This Man's Navy" (1945), then made another Western with Main, "Bad Bascomb" (1946), a huge hit, helped by Margaret O'Brien's casting.


title: Wallace Beery

text: "The Mighty McGurk" (1947) put Beery with another child star of the studio, Dean Stockwell. "Alias a Gentleman" (1947) was the first of Beery's films to lose money during the sound era. Beery received top billing for the smash hit "A Date with Judy" (1949), a hugely popular musical featuring Elizabeth Taylor. Beery's last film, again featuring Main, "Big Jack" (1949), also lost money according to Mannix's reckoning. Beery died of a heart attack three days after the picture's release.


title: Wallace Beery

text: On March 27, 1916, at the age of 30, Beery married 17-year-old actress Gloria Swanson in Los Angeles. The two had co-starred in "Sweedie Goes to College." Although Beery had enjoyed popularity with his "Sweedie" shorts, his career had taken a dip, and during the marriage to Swanson, he relied on her as a breadwinner. According to Swanson's autobiography, Beery raped her on their wedding night, and later tricked her into swallowing an abortifacient when she was pregnant, which caused her to lose their child. Swanson filed for divorce in 1917 and it was finalized in 1918.


title: Wallace Beery

text: On August 4, 1924, Beery married actress Rita Gilman "(née" Mary Areta Gilman; 1898–1986) in Los Angeles. The couple adopted Carol Ann Priester (1930–2013), daughter of Rita Beery's mother's half-sister, Juanita Priester "(née" Caplinger; 1899–1931) and her husband, Erwin William Priester (1897–1969). After years of marriage, Rita filed for divorce on May 1, 1939, in Carson City, Ormsby County, Nevada. Within 20 minutes of filing, she won the decree. Rita remarried 15 days later, on May 16, 1939, to Jessen Albert D. Foyt (1907–1945), filing her marriage license with the same county clerk in Carson City.


title: Wallace Beery

text: In December 1937, comedic actor and Three Stooges founder Ted Healy was involved in a drunken altercation at Cafe Trocadero on the Sunset Strip. E. J. Fleming, in his 2005 book, "The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine", asserts that Healy was attacked by three men:


title: Wallace Beery

text: Around December 1939, Beery, recently divorced, adopted a seven-month-old girl, Phyllis Ann Beery. Phyllis appeared in MGM publicity photos when adopted, but was never mentioned again. Beery told the press he had taken the girl in from a single mother, recently divorced, but he had filed no official adoption papers.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery was considered misanthropic and difficult to work with by many of his colleagues. Robert Young described Beery as a "shitty person". On set, he often never bothered to learn his lines and instead choose to take from other actors' characters and then resent it when his theft was pointed out. When prompting for another actor's close-up, Beery would read the wrong lines, making it harder for his co-stars to meet their marks. Beery was "loathed by everybody, and happily oblivious".


title: Wallace Beery

text: Mickey Rooney was one of Beery's few co-stars to consistently speak highly of him in subsequent decades. In his memoir, Rooney described Beery as "... a lovable, shambling kind of guy who never seemed to know that his shirttail belonged inside his pants, but always knew when a little kid actor needed a smile and a wink or a word of encouragement". He did concede that "not everyone loved [Beery] as much as I did." Rooney noted that Howard Strickling, MGM's head of publicity, once went to Louis B. Mayer to complain that Beery was stealing props from the studio's sets. "And that wasn't all", Rooney continued. "He went on for some minutes about the trouble that Beery was always causing him ... Mayer sighed and said, 'Yes, Howard, Beery's a son of a bitch. But he's "our" son of a bitch.' Strickling got the point. A family has to be tolerant of its black sheep, particularly if they brought a lot of money into the family fold, which Beery certainly did."


title: Wallace Beery

text: Child actors, in particular, recalled unpleasant encounters with Beery. Jackie Cooper, who made several films with him early in his career, called him "a big disappointment". Cooper accused Beery of upstaging and other attempts to undermine his performances out of what Cooper presumed was jealousy. He recalled impulsively throwing his arms around Beery after one especially heartfelt scene, only to be gruffly pushed away. Child actress Margaret O'Brien claimed that she had to be protected by crew members from Beery's insistence on constantly pinching her.


title: Wallace Beery

text: On another occasion, after having invited 12-year-old actor Darryl Hickman to lunch, Beery responded to Darryl's thanks with, "okay, kid, you owe me 75 cents." Beery also refused to leave tips at the MGM commissary because he explained tips are for special service, and since he was a movie star, he already got special service and therefore leaving a tip would be a waste of money.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery only met his match with co-star Marie Dressler. Having come up the hard and long way to her stardom, Dressler refused to take "nonsense from this baboon". She responded to one of Beery's insults by saying she would serve his head on a platter to MGM chief Louis B. Mayer. Although everyone expected Beery to explode, instead, he cowered and acted like "a little boy being very careful that Mommy didn't catch him with his hand in the cookie jar".


title: Wallace Beery

text: Future author Ray Bradbury recalled meeting Beery as a young boy on a Hollywood street, and that his autograph request resulted in Beery cursing and spitting on him.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery owned and flew his own planes, one a Howard DGA-11. On April 15, 1933, he was commissioned a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy Reserve at NRAB Long Beach. One of his proudest achievements was catching the largest giant black sea bass in the world — — off Santa Catalina Island in 1916, a record that stood for 35 years.


title: Wallace Beery

text: A noteworthy episode in Beery's life is chronicled in the fifth episode of Ken Burns' documentary "": In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating Jackson Hole National Monument to protect the land adjoining the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. Local ranchers, outraged at the loss of grazing lands, compared FDR's action to Hitler's taking of Austria. Led by an aging Beery, they protested by herding 500 cattle across the monument lands without a permit.


title: Wallace Beery

text: On February 13, 1948, Gloria Schumm (or Gloria Smith Beery, "née" Florence W. Smith; 1916–1989) filed a paternity suit against Beery. Beery, through his lawyer, Norman Ronald Tyre (1910–2002), initially offered $6,000 as a settlement, but denied being the father. Gloria had given birth on February 7, 1948, to Johan Richard Wallace Schumm. Gloria, in 1944, divorced Stuttgart-born Hollywood actor Hans Schumm ("né" Johann Josef Eugen Schumm; 1896–1990), but remarried him August 21, 1947, after realizing that she was pregnant. Prior to remarrying Schumm, Gloria, on August 4, 1947, met with Beery at his home, where he gave her the name and address of a physician to submit an examination. At or around that time, she also asked Beery to marry her to "legitimatize the expected child" (her words), which Beery refused.


title: Wallace Beery

text: According to newspapers, Gloria claimed to have been intimate with Wallace Beery on or about May 1, 1947, at his home in Beverly Hills (in the court proceedings, however, she claimed to have been intimate with Beery on May 17, 1947). Beery conceded that he had known Gloria for about 15 years, and that under the pseudonym "Gloria Whitney", she had played bit roles in six films in which he starred. She again separated from Hans Schumm on April 15, 1948.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery died of a heart attack on April 15, 1949 (14 months, 1 week, and 1 day after Johan Schumm's birth) — while the suit was pending. Beery had been reading a newspaper at his Beverly Hills home when he collapsed. His body was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. The inscription on his grave reads, "No man is indispensable, but some are irreplaceable."


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery died intestate. In the paternity suit, Gloria Schumm's attorneys demanded $104,135 against Beery's $2,220,000 estate. In February 1952, Judge Newcomb Condee approved a $26,750 settlement from the estate. Gloria Schumm accepted the settlement, and Beery's paternity of Johan Schumm was not acknowledged.


title: Wallace Beery

text: When Mickey Rooney's father died less than a year later, Rooney arranged to have him buried next to his old friend. "I thought it was fitting that these two comedians should rest in peace, side by side", he wrote.


title: Wallace Beery

text: The paternity suit, and subsequent suits – including appeals – extended through about 1952 and were internationally publicized, particularly in gossip columns and tabloids. The litigation has endured as case law with, among other things, treatises addressing the rights of illegitimate offspring against legitimate heirs in races for inheritance.


title: Wallace Beery

text: The upshot was that Schumm's paternity suit against Beery's estate put would-be half-siblings and other would-be family legatees, including a would-be uncle, Noah Beery Sr., in the position as "de facto" defendants. Phyllis Ann Riley was not named in Beery's will. Part of plaintiff's claim, initially, hinged on whether an oral agreement was binding. Gloria had claimed that Beery, while alive, agreed to provide for the child. However, on November 17, 1949, Judge William B. McKesson (1895–1967) threw out Gloria's claim. The judge reasoned that any oral agreement between the two, specifically any that was intended to provide for maintenance and care of a minor, was not binding because the amount allegedly agreed upon was in excess of $500, which must be made in writing.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Another matter in the case hinged on a "peppercorn" rule. That is, for any agreement, oral or written, between Wallace and Gloria to be binding, consideration must exist. The court, initially, found that Beery agreed to an oral contract where Gloria would (i) include the name "Wallace" in the child's name if a male, or "Wally" if a female, and (ii) refrain from filing a paternity suit that both agreed would damage Beery's "social and professional standing as a prominent motion picture star".


title: Wallace Beery

text: Generally, under California state law at the time, a father who neither marries the mother nor acknowledges paternity does not have a right to name the child. That right belongs to the mother. In exchange for Gloria's promise to name the child "Wallace" or "Wally" (the promise representing a form of consideration), Wallace Beery agreed to arrange for the payment of $100 per week to the child (as a third-party beneficiary under the contract), plus a lump sum of $25,000 to the child when he or she attained age 21, in addition to the customary obligation to pay for the "maintenance, support, and education according to the station in life and standard of living of Wallace Beery".


title: Wallace Beery

text: For his contributions to the film industry, Wallace Beery posthumously received a motion-picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. His star is located at 7001 Hollywood Boulevard.


title: Wallace Beery

text: Beery is mentioned in the film "Barton Fink", in which the lead character has been hired to write a wrestling screenplay to star Beery.


title: Wallace Beery

text: In the 1971 comedy "The Projectionist", actor and comedian Chuck McCann impersonates Beery quoting a line from "Min and Bill".


title: Matty Cardarople

text: Matthew Richard Cardarople (born February 9, 1983) is an American actor and comedian. He has appeared in the ABC television series "Selfie", the 2015 film "Jurassic World", the 2016 TV series "Stranger Things", and as the "Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender" in the TV series "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events". In 2021, he played Keith in the film "Free Guy". His supporting roles include appearances in Michael Showalter's 2017 romantic comedy "The Big Sick", and Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi's TV series "Reservation Dogs", set in an Indigenous community in Oklahoma.


title: Matty Cardarople

text: young. He is a graduate of New York Film Academy, after which he worked as a personal assistant for Luke Wilson.


title: Matty Cardarople

text: Cardarople studied acting at The Beverly Hills Playhouse. He studied with Lesly Kahn. His career began with features in the films Blonde Ambition and "Drillbit Taylor". He was discovered by Luke and Owen Wilson.


title: Matty Cardarople

text: He starred as a recurring guest on ABC’s "Selfie". He appeared regularly in Netflix's adaptation of "A Series of Unfortunate Events", which premiered in 2017.


title: Matty Cardarople

text: He has also appeared in the movies "Jurassic World" and "Dumb and Dumber To". His credits include roles in the indie comedy "The 4th", "The Big Sick", the Steven Soderbergh-directed film "Logan Lucky" and other films such as "Itsy Bitsy" and "I am Woman".


title: Matty Cardarople

text: On Television, Cardarople has appeared on shows such as "NCIS: LA", "New Girl", "NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service", "Angie Tribeca", "Scrubs", "Ray Donovan", "You're The Worst", "Comedy Bang! Bang!", "Selfie" and "Chasing Life".


title: Matty Cardarople

text: Cardarople played Count Olaf's "Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender” in "A Series of Unfortunate Events" on Netflix.


title: Taormina

text: Taormina ( , , , ; ) is a "comune" (municipality) in the Metropolitan City of Messina, on the east coast of the island of Sicily, Italy. Taormina has been a tourist destination since the 19th century. Its beaches on the Ionian sea, including that of Isola Bella, are accessible via an aerial tramway built in 1992, and via highways from Messina in the north and Catania in the south. On 26–27 May 2017 Taormina hosted the 43rd G7 summit.


title: Taormina

text: The history of Taormina dates back to before Ancient Greece established its first colony on Sicily in 734 BCE. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Taormina continued to rank as one of the more important towns of the island. Taormina followed the history of Sicily in being ruled by successive foreign monarchs. After the Italian unification, Taormina began to attract well-off tourists from northern Europe, and it became known as a welcoming haven for gay men and artists.


title: Taormina

text: The present town of Taormina occupies the ancient site, on a hill that forms the last projecting point of the mountain ridge that extends along the coast from Cape Pelorus to this point. The site of the old town is about above the sea, while a very steep and almost isolated rock, crowned by a Norman castle, rises about higher. This is the likely site of the ancient "Arx" or citadel, an inaccessible position mentioned by ancient writers. Portions of the ancient walls may be traced at intervals all round the brow of the hill, the whole of the summit of which was occupied by the ancient city. Numerous fragments of ancient buildings are scattered over its whole surface, including extensive reservoirs of water, sepulchres, tessellated pavements, etc., and the remains of a spacious edifice, commonly called a "Naumachia", but the real purpose of which it is difficult to determine.


title: Taormina

text: The ancient theatre of Taormina is built for the most part of brick, and is therefore probably of Roman date, though the plan and arrangement are in accordance with those of Greek, rather than Roman, theatres; whence it is supposed that the present structure was rebuilt upon the foundations of an older theatre of the Greek period. With a diameter of (after an expansion in the 2nd century), this theatre is the second largest of its kind in Sicily (after that of Syracuse); it is frequently used for operatic and theatrical performances and for concerts. The greater part of the original seats have disappeared, but the wall which surrounded the whole cavea is preserved, and the proscenium with the back wall of the scena and its appendages, of which only traces remain in most ancient theatres, are here preserved in an uncommon state of integrity. From the fragments of architectural decorations still extant it has been determined that these were of the Corinthian order, and richly ornamented. Some portions of a temple are also visible, converted into the church of San Pancrazio, but the edifice is of small size.


title: Taormina

text: Other sights include the 12th-14th century "Palazzo Corvaja", the Cathedral ("Duomo di Taormina") dating from the thirteenth century, a 1635 Baroque fountain, the "Palazzo Duchi di Santo Stefano" in Gothic style of the fourteenth century, the Church of "San Domenico", the Anglican Church of Saint George, and the municipal gardens ("Giardini della Villa Comunale").


title: Taormina

text: Just south of Taormina is the Isola Bella, a nature reserve; and further south, situated beside a bay, is the popular seaside resort of Giardini Naxos. Tours of the Capo Sant'Andrea grottos are also available.


title: Taormina

text: The town of Taormina is perched on a cliff overlooking the Ionian Sea. Besides the ancient Greek theatre, it has many old churches, lively bars, fine restaurants and antique shops. The Santuario Madonna della Rocca is one such church. Located on the slope above the town, it commands an impressive view of the coast and Mount Etna to the south, and is accessible on foot via the staired path, Salita Castello. Taormina is approximately a forty-five-minute drive away from Europe's largest active volcano, Mount Etna.


title: Taormina

text: The Cole Porter song "Where is the Life That Late I Led" from the musical "Kiss Me, Kate" references Taormina.


title: Taormina

text: A part of the movie "The Big Blue" (1988) was set and filmed in Taormina, where the main characters take part in the no limits freediving World Championships.


title: Taormina

text: The British songwriter Mark Knopfler evokes the town in his song "Lights of Taormina" in his 2015 album "Tracker".


title: Taormina

text: D.H. Lawrence signed his poem "Snake" with the word "Taormina"—perhaps the location of his "petty" encounter.


title: Taormina

text: The American lawyer Gerald D. McLellan set his legal thriller "The Bully" (2014) between the North End of Boston and Taormina, with very specific place details of the bar called Naxos.


title: Taormina

text: Many exhibitions and events are organized during the summer in Taormina. The exceptional stage for pop and classical concerts, opera and important performances often recorded by television (for example, the ceremony of the Silver Ribbon Award, the Festivalbar, the Kore) is the Ancient Theatre.


title: Taormina

text: Since 1983, the most important performances are realized by Taormina Arte, the cultural institution which organizes music, theatre and dance festivals.


title: Taormina

text: Within the program of Taormina Arte there is the Taormina Film Fest, the heir of the Cinema Festival of Messina and Taormina, dating from 1960, which for about twenty years has hosted the David of Donatello Awards. During the Taormina Film Fest the Silver Ribbons are awarded, a prize created by Italian Film Journalists.


title: Taormina

text: Since 2005, in October, Taormina Arte has organized the Giuseppe Sinopoli Festival, a festival dedicated to its late artistic director.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: The Toxic Avenger is a 1984 American superhero black comedy splatter film directed by Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman (credited as Samuel Weil) and written by Kaufman and Joe Ritter. It is the first installment of "The Toxic Avenger" franchise. The film was released by Troma Entertainment, known for producing low budget B-movies with campy concepts and gruesome violence. Virtually ignored upon its first release, "The Toxic Avenger" caught on with filmgoers after a long and successful midnight movie engagement at the Bleecker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village in late 1985. It is now regarded as a cult classic.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: The film has generated a media franchise including three film sequels, a stage musical production, a video game and a children's TV cartoon. In 2019, it was announced that Legendary Entertainment would be producing a reboot of the film, with original creators Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz of Troma Entertainment serving as producers and Macon Blair serving as writer and director.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: Melvin Ferd Junko III is a weakling who works as a janitor at a health club in the fictional town of Tromaville, New Jersey, where the customers—particularly Bozo, Slug, Wanda and Julie—harass him constantly. His tormentors murder a young boy on a bike with their car and take photos of the carnage afterward. They trick Melvin into wearing a pink tutu and amorously hugging a sheep. He is chased around the health club and out a second story window. He falls into a drum of toxic waste, which sets him on fire. After running down the street, Melvin douses the flames in his bathtub. The chemicals transform him into a hideously deformed mutant with superhuman size and strength.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: A group of drug dealers, led by Cigar Face, are trying to buy off a police officer named O'Clancy. When he refuses to accept the money, Cigar Face and his gang prepare to castrate him. Melvin appears and kills the criminals, then leaves a mop on their faces as a calling card. Cigar Face escapes, promising to take revenge. Melvin returns home, but his mother is terrified of him and will not let him in the house, so Melvin, publicly dubbed "The Monster Hero" (also known as "The Toxic Avenger" or "Toxie") and hailed as a hero, builds a makeshift home in the junkyard.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: A gang of three men hold up a Mexican restaurant and attack a blind woman named Sara. They kill her guide dog and attempt to rape her, but are stopped by Melvin, who wreaks bloody vengeance on them. Toxie takes Sara back to her home, where they get to know one another and subsequently become romantically involved. Melvin continues to fight crime, including drug dealers and pimps for underage prostitutes, and also takes revenge on the four tormentors who caused his transformation. He attacks Wanda in the health club's sauna and burns her backside on the heater. He later returns to the club, pursues Julie into the basement, and cuts off her hair. He confronts Bozo and Slug after they steal a car, ending in Slug getting thrown out of the moving car and Bozo driving off the side of a cliff, killing him.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: As Melvin gives aid to the people in the city, Mayor Belgoody, the leader of Tromaville's extensive crime ring, is terrified of what is happening to his goons. He is worried that it will lead back to him and wants Melvin taken care of. A group of men, led by Cigar Face, surround Melvin with guns. Just before they fire on him, he leaps up to a fire escape, so that they shoot each other.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: When Melvin kills a seemingly innocent old woman in a dry cleaning store (she is in fact a leader of an underground human trafficking ring), Belgoody calls in the United States National Guard. Back in his junkyard home, Melvin is horrified at what he has become. He and Sara decide to move away from the city and take a tent into nearby woods. They are eventually discovered, and the Mayor and the National Guard come to kill him, but the people of Tromaville refuse, and Melvin's mother arrives and identifies the mutant as her son. The Mayor's evil ways are revealed, and Melvin proceeds to rip out Belgoody's organs to see if he has "any guts". The Toxic Avenger continues to combat crime in Tromaville.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: "The Toxic Avenger" was the film that "built the house of Troma", and was Troma's first horror film. Previously the production company focused on sex comedies such as "Cry Uncle!" and "Squeeze Play!". Subsequently, Troma focused almost exclusively on horror films.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: In 1975, Lloyd Kaufman had the idea to shoot a horror film involving a health club while serving as the pre-production supervisor on the set of "Rocky". At the Cannes Film Festival, Kaufman had read an article that said horror films were no longer popular, so Kaufman claims that he decided to produce his own version of the horror film. The film's final outcome was less a bona fide horror film and more of a campy superhero-spoof with extreme violence embedded throughout. The setting of the movie in a health club and the movie was given a working title of "Health Club Horror".


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: Principal photography for "The Toxic Avenger" took place at various locations in New Jersey, including Jersey City, Boonton, Paramus, Harrison, and Rutherford during the summer of 1983. Filming also took place in Depew Park and several surrounding streets in Peekskill, New York. Filming was later reported to be completed in 1983.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: "The Toxic Avenger" was released by Troma on VHS and Betamax in 1986, and for the first time on DVD on March 25, 1998. It was later re-released by Troma on November 20, 2000 and again on September 3, 2002; with the latter release of the film being a part of a 4-Disk Toxic Avenger movie pack. The film was later picked up for distribution by Prism, who later released the film on February 2, 2004. Troma later released a 21st Anniversary Edition version of the film on March 29, 2005. On March 7, 2006; the film was released by Koch Entertainment. The film would not receive another home media release until Troma released a "Japanese Cut" of the film on December 11, 2012. Troma would release the film for the first time on Blu-ray on August 12, 2014. On November 18, later that year, it was again released on Blu-ray by Import Vendor.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, "The Toxic Avenger" holds an approval rating of 70%, based on 20 reviews, and an average rating of 5.5/10. Its consensus reads, "A silly and ribald superhero spoof, "Toxic Avenger's" uninhibited humor hits more than it misses." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 42 out of 100, based on 8 critics, indicating "Mixed or average reviews".


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: Author and film critic Leonard Maltin awarded the film 2.5 out of 4 stars, calling the film, "A funny spoof... Not without violence and gore but still entertaining." Stephen Holden of "The New York Times" rated the film a score of 3/5, complimenting the film for its "maniacally farcical sense of humor", while also noting that the film itself was trash.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: TV Guide gave the film a negative 1/5 stars, writing "Though it is silly, sleazy, and graphically violent, "The Toxic Avenger" does hold a bit of warped charm for fans of this sort of thing." Keith Phipps from "The A.V. Club" was highly critical of the film, writing, "As for the movie itself, it's still a piece of trash, if a marginally entertaining one: It's too self-consciously parodic to be good kitsch, and too gross to be all that fun." In his book "Comedy-Horror Films: A Chronological History, 1914-2008", Bruce G. Hallenbeck described the film as "disgusting, sick, vile, poorly acted and sloppily produced." He challenged the interpretation of the film as a parody, arguing that the mean-spirited tone of its extreme gore and offensiveness makes clear that the filmmakers were simply trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: According to Kaufman, due to the remake of "Mother's Day", major motion picture companies were interested in doing remakes of other Troma films. Among the titles that were in negotiations was "The Toxic Avenger". On April 6, 2010, a remake of "The Toxic Avenger" was announced.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: The remake, once claimed to be aiming for a family-friendly PG-13 release similar to the "Toxic Crusaders" television series, was to be co-written and directed by Steve Pink. In May 2013, Arnold Schwarzenegger entered talks for a role in the film. In late 2013, Schwarzenegger dropped out to work on "Terminator Genisys", but, as of February 2015, plans for the remake continued to circulate. On September 12, 2016, "Variety" reported that Conrad Vernon would direct the film with executive producers Guillermo del Toro, Bob Cooper, Alex Schwartz, Akiva Goldsman, and Greg Lessans. Mike Arnold and Chris Poole were to rewrite the screenplay.


title: The Toxic Avenger (1984 film)

text: On December 10, 2018, it was announced that Legendary Pictures had the rights to reboot the film, with Kaufman and Herz set to serve as the film's producers. In March 2019, Macon Blair was announced to write and direct the upcoming reboot. In December 2020, Peter Dinklage is set to star. In April 2021, Jacob Tremblay also joined the cast with Taylour Paige, who joined in May 2021. On June 12, 2021 it was announced that Kevin Bacon had joined the film as the villain followed by Julia Davis and Elijah Wood on June 16, 2021 with Jonny Coyne and Sarah Niles on June 17. In 2022, the completed work was officially rated R for "strong violence and gore, language throughout, sexual references and brief graphic nudity," thus contradicting earlier claims of a PG-13 rating.


title: Farrukhsiyar

text: Farrukhsiyar or Farrukh Siyar () (20 August 16839 April 1719) was the tenth emperor of the Mughal Empire from 1713 to 1719. He rose to the throne after assassinating his uncle, Emperor Jahandar Shah. Reportedly a handsome man who was easily swayed by his advisers, he lacked the ability, knowledge and character to rule independently. He was an emperor only in name, with all effective power in the hands of the Sayyids of Barah. Farrukhsiyar was the son of Azim-ush-Shan (the second son of emperor Bahadur Shah I) and Sahiba Niswan.


title: Farrukhsiyar

text: Muhammad Farrukhsiyar was born on 20 August 1683 (9th Ramzan 1094 AH) in the city of Aurangabad on the Deccan plateau. He was the second son of Azim-ush-Shan, who was a grandson of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and son of the later emperor Bahadur Shah I. In 1696, Farrukhsiyar accompanied his father on his campaign to Bengal. Aurangzeb recalled Azim-ush-Shan from Bengal in 1707 and instructed Farrukhsiyar to take charge of the province. Farrukhsiyar spent his early years governing the capital city of Dhaka (in present-day Bangladesh); during the reign of his grandfather Bahadur Shah I, he moved to Murshidabad (present-day West Bengal, India).


title: Farrukhsiyar

text: In 1712 Azim-ush-Shan anticipated Bahadur Shah I's death and a struggle for power, and recalled Farrukhsiyar. He was marching past Azimabad (present-day Patna, Bihar, India) when he learned of the Mughal emperor's death. On 21 March, Farrukhsiyar proclaimed his father's accession to the throne, issued coinage in his name and ordered "khutba" (public prayer). On 6 April, he learned of his father's defeat. Although the prince considered suicide, he was dissuaded by his friends from Bengal.


title: Farrukhsiyar

text: In 1712, Jahandar Shah (Farrukhsiyar's uncle) ascended the throne of the Mughal empire by defeating Farrukhsiyar's father, Azim-ush-Shan. Farrukhsiyar wanted revenge for his father's death and was joined by Hussain Ali Khan (the "subahdar" of Bengal) and Abdullah Khan, his brother and the "subahdar" of Allahabad.


title: Farrukhsiyar

text: When they reached Allahabad from Azimabad, Jahandar Shah's military general Syed Abdul Ghaffar Khan Gardezi and 12,000 troops clashed with Abdullah Khan, resulting in Abdullah retreating to the Allahabad Fort. However, Gardezi's army fled when they learned about his death. After the defeat, Jahandar Shah sent general Khwaja Ahsan Khan and his son Aazuddin. When they reached Khajwah (present-day Fatehpur district, Uttar Pradesh, India), they learned that Farrukhsiyar was accompanied by Hussain Ali Khan and Abdullah Khan. With Abdullah Khan commanding the vanguard, Farrukhsiyar began the attack. After a night-long artillery fight, Aazuddin and Khwaja Ahsan Khan fled and the camp fell to Farrukhsiyar.


title: Farrukhsiyar

text: On 10 January 1713, Farrukhsiyar and Jahandar Shah's forces met at Samugarh, east of Agra in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Jahandar Shah was defeated and imprisoned, and the following day Farrukhsiyar proclaimed himself the Mughal emperor. On 12 February, Farrukhsiyar marched to the Mughal capital of Delhi, capturing the Red Fort and the citadel. Jahandar Shah's head, mounted on a bamboo rod, was carried by an executioner on an elephant and his body was carried by another elephant.


title: Farrukhsiyar

text: Farrukhsiyar defeated Jahandar Shah with the aid of the Sayyid brothers, and one of the brothers, Abdullah Khan, wanted the post of "wazir" (prime minister). His demand was rejected, since the post was promised to Ghaziuddin Khan, but Farrukhsiyar offered him a post as regent under the name of "wakil-e-mutlaq". Abdullah Khan refused, saying that he deserved the post of "wazir" since he led Farrukhsiyar's army against Jahandar Shah. Farrukhsiyar ultimately gave in to his demand, and Abdullah Khan became prime minister.


title: Farrukhsiyar

text: According to historian William Irvine, Farrukhsiyar's close aides Mir Jumla III and Khan Dauran sowed seeds of suspicion in his mind that they might usurp him from the throne. Learning about these developments, the other Sayyid brother (Hussain Ali Khan) wrote to Abdullah: "It was clear, from the Prince's talk and the nature of his acts, that he was a man who paid no regard to claims for service performed, one void of faith, a breaker of his word and altogether without shame". Hussain Ali Khan felt it necessary to act in their interests "without regard to the plans of the new sovereign".


title: Farrukhsiyar

text: Maharaja Ajit Singh captured Ajmer with the support of the Marwari nobles and expelled Mughal diplomats from his state. Farrukhsiyar sent Hussain Ali Khan to subjugate him. However, the anti-Sayyid brothers faction in the Mughal emperor's court compelled him to send secret letters to Ajit Singh assuring him of rewards if he defeated Hussain Ali Khan.