text: AIPAC has supported loyal incumbents (such as Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr. (R-Connecticut) even when opposed by Jewish candidates, and the organization has worked to unseat pro-Palestinian incumbents (such as Representative Paul Findley) or candidates perceived to be unsympathetic to Israel (Senator Charles H. Percy). However, a Jewish member of Congress, Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois), who had maintained good relations with AIPAC and had been given campaign contributions by its members, was opposed by the group in her 2010 reelection campaign after she was endorsed by the advocacy group J Street.


title: American Israel Public Affairs Committee

text: According to former Representative Brian Baird (D-Washington), "Any member of Congress knows that AIPAC is associated indirectly with significant amounts of campaign spending if you're with them, and significant amounts against you if you're not with them." "AIPAC-connected money" amounted to about $200,000 in each of his campaigns for office — "and that's two hundred thousand going your way, versus the other way: a four-hundred-thousand-dollar swing." AIPAC-directed campaign contributions—as with many interest groups—came with considerable "tactical input". AIPAC staffers told Baird and other lawmakers, "No, we don't say it that way, we say it this way." Baird complained, "There's a whole complex semantic code you learn. ... After a while, you find yourself saying and repeating it as if it were fact."


text: AIPAC strongly supports substantial U.S. aid to Israel. In March 2009, AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr appeared before the House Committee on Appropriations' Foreign Operations subcommittee and requested that Israel receive $2.775 billion in military aid in fiscal year 2010, as called for in the 2007 Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Israel that allocates $30 billion in aid for Israel over 10 years. Kohr stated that "American assistance to Israel serves vital U.S. national security interests and advances critical U.S. foreign policy goals." The military hardware Israel must purchase to face the increased threat of terrorism and Islamist radicalism is increasingly expensive due to the recent spike in petroleum prices which have enabled countries such as Iran to augment their military budgets, according to Kohr.


text: Whether AIPAC lobbied for the Iraq War is disputed. Representative Jim Moran (D-Virginia) has stated that AIPAC had been "pushing the [Iraq War] from the beginning." A report in "The New Yorker" also reported that AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the war. However, according to the Jewish News, AIPAC never supported or lobbied for the war in Iraq. According to a columnist at "The Washington Post": "Once it was clear that the Bush administration was determined to go to war [in Iraq], AIPAC cheered from the sidelines." Some observers suggested the official silence owed to concerns that linking Israel to the war.


text: AIPAC's official position on Iran is to encourage a strong diplomatic and economic response coordinated among the United States government, its European allies, Russia, and China.


text: In 2012, AIPAC called for "crippling" sanctions on Iran in a letter to every member of Congress. In line with this approach, AIPAC has lobbied to levy economic embargoes and increase sanctions on Iran (known as the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013). However, according to "The New York Times", its effort "stalled after stiff resistance from President Obama."


text: AIPAC has been compared to firearms, banking, defense, and energy lobbies as "long" being "a feature of politics in Washington."


text: Its promotional literature notes that the Leadership Reception during its annual Policy Conference "will be attended by more members of Congress than almost any other event, except for a joint session of Congress or a State of the Union address."


text: "The New York Times" has described AIPAC as "a major force in shaping United States policy in the Middle East" that is able to push numerous bills through Congress. "Typically," these "pass by unanimous votes."


text: A House of Representatives resolution condemning the UN Goldstone Report on human rights violations by Israel in Gaza, for example, passed 344–36 in 2009.


text: AIPAC advises members of Congress about the issues that face today's Middle East, including the dangers of extremism and terrorism. It was an early supporter of the Counter-Terrorism Act of 1995, which resulted in increased FBI resources being committed to fight terrorism.


text: AIPAC also lobbies for financial aid from the United States to Israel, helping to procure up to $3 billion in aid yearly, making Israel "the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II." According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), these include providing aid "as all grant cash transfers, not designated for particular projects, and...transferred as a lump sum in the first month of the fiscal year, instead of in periodic increments. Israel is allowed to spend about one quarter of the military aid for the procurement in Israel of defense articles and services, including research and development, rather than in the United States."


text: In 2016, nearly 20,000 delegates attended the AIPAC Policy Conference; approximately 4,000 of those delegates were American students. For the first time in AIPAC's history, the general sessions of Policy Conference were held in Washington, D.C.'s Verizon Center in order to accommodate the large number of delegates. Keynote speakers included Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Governor John Kasich, Senator Ted Cruz, and Speaker Paul Ryan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has spoken at AIPAC before in person, addressed Policy Conference via satellite on the final day of the conference. Senator Bernie Sanders chose not to attend the conference.


text: Howard Kohr has been the CEO of AIPAC since 1996, nearly half of its existence, serving with most of its presidents.


text: The American Israel Education Foundation is a sister organization of AIPAC, that handles educational work, rather than lobbying. It is a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization that conducts educational programs, including educational trips to Israel for members of the U.S. Congress and other American politicians.


text: AIEF trips for members of Congress occur every two years, becoming "the top spender on congressional travel" in those years. In August 2019, the foundation sponsored week-long trips with 72 members of Congress: 41 Democrats and 31 Republicans. They traveled to Israel and the West Bank and visited with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Other educational activities include regular seminars for congressional staff.


text: Critics alleges that these trips are propaganda rather than education and do not tell the Palestinian "side of the story," and that they violate ethics rules prohibiting lobbying groups from gifting personal travel to congresspersons.


text: Until 2021 AIPAC did not raise funds for political candidates itself, but its members raise money for candidates through political action committees unaffiliated with AIPAC and by other means. In late 2021, AIPAC formed its own political action committee. It also announced plans for a Super-PAC, which can spend money on behalf of candidates. In a letter explaining the move, Betsy Berns Korn, AIPAC president, said: "The DC political environment has been undergoing profound change. Hyperpartisanship, high congressional turnover and the exponential growth in the cost of campaigns now dominate the landscape." Dov Waxman, director of the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, said: "Although for decades AIPAC has had informal ties with pro-Israel PACs, it has always refrained from forming its own PAC." He added: "I think its decision to establish its own PAC and super PAC is based on the recognition that campaign funding is a crucial means of exerting political influence in Congress, and that AIPAC now needs this tool in order to maintain its influence in Congress."


text: Former AIPAC executive director Tom Dine and legislative director Douglas Bloomfield criticized the move, saying it could call the organization's neutrality into question.


text: In March 2022, the PAC released its first endorsements of 130 candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate. The list included 37 Congresspersons of the Sedition Caucus who had voted to overturn the 2020 election of Joe Biden. The endorsement drew criticism from a variety of sources. Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel C. Kurtzer said it was "very disappointing that AIPAC has turned a blind eye to the damage that these people have done to our democracy. Their support of Israel cannot ever trump that damage." Conservative pro-Israel columnist Jennifer Rubin called it "truly horrifying".


text: Aipac's push into the political campaign support comes amid the erosion of bipartisan support for Israel in the US, with opinion polls showing growing criticism for the state among younger Democrats, including American Jews, the breaking of the taboo on comparisons between Israel's treatment of Palestinians and apartheid South Africa, and rising support for the Boycott, Sanctions and Divest (BDS) movement.


text: In May 2022, it was also revealed that AIPAC has been spending millions, channeled through surrogate group, the United Democracy Project (UDP), which makes no mention of its creation by AIPAC, to defeat progressive Democrats and particularly female candidates who might potentially align with "the Squad" of progressive Congress members made up of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.


text: The UDP spent $2.3m in opposition to Summer Lee in the Pennsylvania Democratic congressional primary race in Pennsylvania. Lee has supported setting conditions for US aid to Israel and accused the country of atrocities in Gaza, comparing Israeli actions to the treatment of young black men in the U.S. The UDP also spent $2m in a North Carolina senate primary to support the incumbent Valeria Foushee against Nida Allam, the first Muslim American woman to hold elected office in North Carolina and the political director for the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. Both candidates are endorsed by the squad.


text: The UDP spent a further $1.2m to help the Democratic congressman for Texas, Henry Cuellar, face off a challenge from Jessica Cisneros, a 28-year-old immigration lawyer also endorsed by the Squad. Cuellar called Amnesty International "antisemitic" after the release of its report accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid, in agreement with the Human Right Watch and other Israeli and international human rights groups.


text: J Street spokesperson Logan Bayroff, has called Aipac "a Republican front organisation", a fact that he said they are obfuscating while "trying to persuade Democratic voters who they should support". He added: "The United Democracy Project sounds innocuous ... but the reason that they’re aligning with certain candidates is because they are more aligned with their more hawkish positions on Israel".


text: One critic, former Congressman Brian Baird, who "had admired Israel since I was a kid," but became alienated from AIPAC, argued that


text: "When key votes are cast, the question on the House floor, troublingly, is often not, 'What is the right thing to do for the United States of America?', but 'How is AIPAC going to score this?'"


text: He cited a 2009 House resolution he opposed condemning the Goldstone Report on civilian deaths. "When we had the vote, I said, 'We have member after member coming to the floor to vote on a resolution they've never read, about a report they've never seen, in a place they've never been.'"


text: Baird worries that AIPAC members and supporters believe that they're "supporting Israel" when they are "actually backing policies" such as the killing of civilians in Gaza, "that are antithetical to its highest values and, ultimately, destructive for the country."


text: A criticism of AIPAC's proposal for tougher sanctions on Iran is that the primary incentive P5+1 negotiators can give Iran to stop its nuclear program is reduction in the sanctions that have harmed Iran's economy. By imposing even harsher sanctions on Iran, AIPAC takes this chip away. According to a "senior" Obama Administration official, the administration told AIPAC leadership that its tougher sanctions on Iran "would blow up the negotiations – the Iranians would walk away from the table." The official asked them, "Why do you know better than we do what strengthens our hand? Nobody involved in the diplomacy thinks that." A former congressional staffer complained to journalist Connie Bruck, "What was striking was how strident the message was," from AIPAC. "'How could you not pass a resolution that tells the President what the outcome of the negotiations has to be?'"


text: AIPAC has been criticized as being unrepresentative of American Jews who support Israel, and supportive only of right-wing Israeli policy and viewpoints. A PEW center poll found that only 38% of American Jews believe that the Israeli government is sincerely pursuing peace; 44% believe that the construction of new settlements damages Israel's national security.


text: Among the best-known critical works about AIPAC is "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", by University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer and Harvard Kennedy School professor Stephen Walt. In the working paper and resulting book, they accuse AIPAC of being "the most powerful and best known" component of a larger pro-Israel lobby that distorts American foreign policy. They write:


text: "[AIPAC's] success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. ... AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. ... The bottom line is that AIPAC, a "de facto" agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world."


text: AIPAC has also been the subject of criticism by prominent politicians including former Representative Dave Obey of Wisconsin, and former Senator Mike Gravel.


text: Democratic Congressman Jim Moran from Northern Virginia has been a vocal critic of AIPAC, causing national controversy in 2007 and drawing criticism from many Jewish groups after he told California Jewish magazine "Tikkun" that AIPAC had been "pushing the [Iraq War] from the beginning," and that, "I don't think they represent the mainstream of American Jewish thinking at all, but because they are so well organized, and their members are extraordinarily powerful – most of them are quite wealthy – they have been able to exert power." AIPAC's membership has been described as "overwhelmingly Democratic" by one conservative columnist (Jennifer Rubin).


text: In 2020 Senator Bernie Sanders said AIPAC provides a platform for bigotry and said he will not attend their conference. Also in 2020, Democratic Congresswoman Betty McCollum accused AIPAC of hate speech and said the group is a hate group.


text: Former Senator William Fulbright, in the 1970s, and former senior CIA official Victor Marchetti, in the 1980s, contended that AIPAC should have registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). FARA requires those who receive funds or act on behalf of a foreign government to register as a foreign agent. However, AIPAC states that the organization is a registered American lobbying group, funded by private donations, and maintains it receives "no financial assistance" from Israel or any other foreign group.


text: In 2006, Representative Betty McCollum (DFL) of Minnesota demanded an apology from AIPAC, claiming an AIPAC representative had described her vote against the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006 as "support for terrorists." McCollum stated that AIPAC representatives would not be allowed in her office until she received a written apology for the comment. AIPAC disputed McCollum's claim, and McCollum has since declared the incident over.


text: In 1992, AIPAC president David Steiner was forced to resign after he was recorded boasting about his political influence in obtaining aid for Israel. Steiner also claimed that he had "met with (then Bush U.S. Secretary of State) Jim Baker and I cut a deal with him. I got, besides the $3 billion, you know they're looking for the Jewish votes, and I'll tell him whatever he wants to hear ... Besides the $10 billion in loan guarantees which was a fabulous thing, $3 billion in foreign, in military aid, and I got almost a billion dollars in other goodies that people don't even know about." Steiner also claimed to be "negotiating" with the incoming Clinton administration over who Clinton would appoint as Secretary of State and Secretary of the National Security Agency. Steiner stated that AIPAC had "a dozen people in [the Clinton] campaign, in the headquarters... in Little Rock, and they're all going to get big jobs."


text: New York real estate developer Haim Katz told "The Washington Times" that he taped the conversation because "as someone Jewish, I am concerned when a small group has a disproportionate power. I think that hurts everyone, including Jews. If David Steiner wants to talk about the incredible, disproportionate clout AIPAC has, the public should know about it."


text: In April 2005, AIPAC policy director Steven Rosen and AIPAC senior Iran analyst Keith Weissman were fired by AIPAC amid an FBI investigation into whether they passed classified U.S. information received from Lawrence Franklin on to the government of Israel. They were later indicted for illegally conspiring to gather and disclose classified national security information to Israel.


text: In May 2005, the Justice Department announced that Lawrence Anthony Franklin, a U.S. Air Force Reserves colonel working as a Department of Defense analyst at the Pentagon in the office of Douglas Feith, had been arrested and charged by the FBI with providing classified national defense information to Israel. The six-count criminal complaint identified AIPAC by name and described a luncheon meeting in which, allegedly, Franklin disclosed top-secret information to two AIPAC officials.


text: Franklin pleaded guilty to passing government secrets to Rosen and Weissman and revealed for the first time that he also gave classified information directly to an Israeli government official in Washington. On January 20, 2006, he was sentenced to 151 months (almost 13 years) in prison and fined $10,000. As part of the plea agreement, Franklin agreed to cooperate in the larger federal investigation. All charges against the former AIPAC employees were dropped in 2009.


text: After the formation of its first political action committee (PAC) in early March 2022, AIPAC was criticized for backing the election campaigns of 37 Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying Biden's 2020 U.S. presidential election victory after the 2021 United States Capitol attack.


text: The endorsement of the politicians was described as "morally bankrupt and short-sighted" by Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, while Abe Foxman, former head of the Anti-Defamation League, called it a “sad mistake”, and Dan Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, urged Aipac to reconsider the move. Halie Soifer, of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said the move suggested "one must compromise support of America’s democracy to support Israel", which, she noted in an opinion piece published in "Haaretz", presents "a patently false dichotomy rejected by the overwhelming majority of American Jews."


text: AIPAC defended the endorsements by stating that it was "no moment for the pro-Israel movement to become selective about its friends". In a later, "rare rebuke" of the lobby group from within the Israeli government, Alon Tal, a member of the Knesset, criticized the AIPAC endorsements as "outrageous", noting that criticism was important for maintaining what Tal referred to as "a healthy relationship between Israel and American Jewry", according to "The Times of Israel".


text: While having endorsed over 100 Republican members of Congress who had voted against certifying Joe Biden's election, AIPAC has spent $24 million, via its political action committee, the United Democracy Project, to defeat candidates not considered pro-Israel enough in the primaries of the Democratic Party that select candidates for the 2022 midterm elections. Substantial contributions to this funding have been obtained from Republican Trump campaign financiers such as Paul Singer and Bernie Marcus, together with Haim Saban. It spent $4 million to support Haley Stevens and defeat the Jewish congressman Andy Levin who is known to be critical of AIPAC'S support for hardline Israeli policies, . It spent $7 million to defeat the favourite in a Maryland July primary, Donna Edwards, who had failed to back resolutions in support of Israel during its War in Gaza in 2012. A number of AIPAC supporters assert that reports focusing on AIPAC's campaign funding against candidates critical of Israel's policies are 'antisemitic'.


text: The Israeli documentary film "The Kings of Capitol Hill" features interviews with former and current AIPAC personalities and depicts how AIPAC has moved toward the political right wing and away from political positions most American Jews hold.


title: Jo Min-su

text: Jo Min-su (; born January 29, 1965) is a South Korean actress. She is best known for her role in the Kim Ki-duk film "Pietà".


title: Jo Min-su

text: Jo Min-su graduated from a vocational high school, Gyungbok Girls' Commercial High School, and first entered the entertainment business by doing a television commercial for (about US$100). She debuted in 1986 via the KBS TV Cultural Center, then appeared first on the big screen in "Chung: Blue Sketch". But her public profile grew more through her television roles than movies, culminating in a Best Actress trophy in the 1989 KBS Drama Awards. Among her other notable TV series were "Sandglass", "Daemang" (also known as "Great Ambition"), and "Piano". After her marriage in 2005, she took a break from her acting career, but returned four years later with a memorable performance in "Will It Snow for Christmas?".


title: Jo Min-su

text: But 2012 would prove to be the now-veteran actress's breakthrough year. Though she initially had reservations about doing a film by controversial auteur Kim Ki-duk, Jo became thankful to Kim for giving her the chance "to work with new material from what I was used to in the past. There aren't too many roles that women my age can do. They all seem the same. But this role was different." Her performance in "Pietà" brought her rave reviews and praise at the Venice Film Festival, as well as from domestic critics and audiences, notably a Best Actress trophy at the Grand Bell Awards. She was also awarded the prestigious Okgwan Order of Cultural Merit.


title: Financial system

text: A financial system is a system that allows the exchange of funds between financial market participants such as lenders, investors, and borrowers. Financial systems operate at national and global levels. Financial institutions consist of complex, closely related services, markets, and institutions intended to provide an efficient and regular linkage between investors and borrowers.


title: Financial system

text: In other words, financial systems can be known wherever there exists the exchange of a financial medium (money) while there is a reallocation of funds into needy areas (financial markets, business firms, banks) to utilize the potential of ideal money and place it in use to get benefits out of it. This whole mechanism is known as a financial system.


title: Financial system

text: Money, credit, and finance are used as media of exchange in financial systems. They serve as a medium of known value for which goods and services can be exchanged as an alternative to bartering. A modern financial system may include banks (public sector or private sector), financial markets, financial instruments, and financial services. Financial systems allow funds to be allocated, invested, or moved between economic sectors, and they enable individuals and companies to share the associated risks.


title: Financial system

text: Banks are financial intermediaries that lend money to borrowers to generate revenue and accept deposits . They are typically regulated heavily, as they provide market stability and consumer protection. Banks include:


title: Financial system

text: Non-bank financial institutions facilitate financial services like investment, risk pooling, and market brokering. They generally do not have full banking licenses. Non-bank financial institutions include:


title: Financial system

text: Financial markets are markets in which securities, commodities, and fungible items are traded at prices representing supply and demand. The term "market" typically means the institution of aggregate exchanges of possible buyers and sellers of such items.


title: Financial system

text: The primary market (or initial market) generally refers to new issues of stocks, bonds, or other financial instruments. The primary market is divided in two segment, the money market and the capital market.


title: Financial system

text: Financial instruments are tradable financial assets of any kind. They include money, evidence of ownership interest in an entity, and contracts.


title: Financial system

text: A derivative instrument is a contract that derives its value from one or more underlying entities (including an asset, index, or interest rate).


title: Financial system

text: Financial services are offered by a large number of businesses that encompass the finance industry. These include credit unions, banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, stock brokerages, and investment funds.


title: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center

text: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center (also commonly referred to as "UCLA Medical Center", "RRMC" or "Ronald Reagan") is a hospital located on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, in Westwood, Los Angeles, California, United States. It is currently ranked the 5th best hospital in the United States by "U.S. News & World Report", and 2nd best in California and the West Coast (behind Cedars-Sinai Medical Center - also in Los Angeles). The hospital provides tertiary care to Los Angeles and the surrounding communities.


title: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center

text: UCLA Medical Center has research centers covering nearly all major specialties of medicine and nursing as well as dentistry and is the primary teaching hospital for the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the UCLA School of Nursing. The hospital's emergency department is a certified level I trauma center for both adult and pediatric patients. Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center is a constituent part of UCLA Health, a comprehensive consortium of research hospitals and medical institutes affiliated with UCLA, including Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica, Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA, UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital, and UCLA Medical Group.


title: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center

text: Collectively, the hospitals and specialty-care facilities of the UCLA Health system make it among the most comprehensive and advanced healthcare systems in the United States. The hospital has been ranked in the top twenty in 15 of the 16 medical specialties ranked by the US News ranking. Ten of those specialties were ranked in the top ten. In 2005, the American Nurses Credentialing Center granted the medical center "Magnet" status.


title: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center

text: On June 29, 2008, the new Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center opened and became fully operational, replacing the older facilities across the street. The older hospital complex had suffered moderate interior structural damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Because numerous hospitals in the area were severely damaged during the Northridge earthquake and injured people had to be transported long distances for emergency care, the state of California passed SB1953, an amendment to an older law requiring all hospitals to move their acute care and intensive care units into earthquake-resistant buildings by 2008.


title: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center

text: Originally budgeted at $598 million in 1998, construction began in 1999 and was completed in 2004. Cost overruns and construction delays attributed to rising construction costs and design changes due to medical advances resulted in the price of the building increasing to $829 million. Equipment purchased for the new building increased the total cost to over $1 billion. The Federal Emergency Management Agency contributed $432 million in earthquake relief funds to the project, and the state of California contributed $44 million. Private donations raised over $300 million for the project, including $150 million in President Reagan's name. The new building was constructed to withstand an 8.0 magnitude earthquake, one of the first buildings in California built to the most recent seismic standards.


title: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center

text: The new hospital is named after the President of the United States and Governor of California Ronald Reagan (1911–2004). It was designed by C.C. "Didi" Pei of Pei Partnership Architects in collaboration with his father, Pritzker Prize-winning architect I.M. Pei. The hospital will contain fewer patient beds (525) than the one it replaces. Patient beds in the intensive-care units will be accessible to nurses and physicians from 360 degrees, and surgical floor plans will be modular, allowing them to be expanded and reconfigured as medical technology evolves. The hospital is sheathed with mechanically honed, cream-colored, horizontally grained travertine marble panels sold at below-market-rate cost by Carlo Marrioti, the owner of an Italian quarry whose cancer was cured at UCLA. The travertine elements were fastened to a sophisticated interlocking panelized aluminum cladding system developed by Benson Industries of Portland, Oregon. The building envelope is designed to resist and survive severe seismic events and maintain excellent resistance to air and water infiltration.


title: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center

text: The older center itself is a sprawling 11-story brick building designed by Welton Becket. It is considered a landmark of early modern architecture. The center was built in several phases, the first of which was completed in 1953. The hospital has a "tic-tac-toe" layout of intersecting wings, creating a series of courtyards throughout the complex. The first floor is unusual in that most of its walls are completely clad in a thick layer of naturally-weathered, unfilled, travertine, creating an unusual "organic" appearance. The exterior architecture is very simple (as with many Becket designs), consisting of a red brick wall with horizontal bands of stainless-steel louvers over the windows to keep direct sunlight from heating the building.


title: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center

text: Some of the old complex will be torn down, and some of it will be renovated and turned into office space when it is no longer an operational hospital. The law does not require that all parts of a hospital be made earthquake-safe, only the most important parts. Much of the extensive travertine wall cladding from the building's interior will most likely be salvaged and re-used.


title: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center

text: The Stewart & Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA is a 74-bed acute care psychiatric hospital located within the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Following a donation, the hospital was named for Lynda Resnick and her husband. The hospital has a pediatrics unit, adolescent unit, an adult unit, and a geriatrics unit


title: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center

text: UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center is a pediatric acute care hospital located in Los Angeles, California. The hospital has 156 beds. It is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine, and is a member of UCLA Health. The hospital provides comprehensive pediatric specialties and subspecialties to pediatric patients aged 0–21 throughout California. UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital features a pediatric level 1 trauma center. The UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital is located on the third and fifth floors of the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.


title: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center

text: On June 25, 2009, American singer Michael Jackson died from acute propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication at his home. Conrad Murray, his personal physician, had given Jackson various medications to help him sleep at his rented mansion in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles. Paramedics received a 911 call at 12:22 p.m. Pacific time (19:22 UTC), and arrived three minutes later. Jackson was not breathing and CPR was performed. Resuscitation efforts continued en route to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, and for more than an hour after arriving there, but were unsuccessful, and Jackson was pronounced dead at 2:26 pm Pacific time (21:26 UTC).


title: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center

text: UCLA Medical Center is well known as the defendant in a famous Supreme Court of California case, "Moore v. Regents of the University of California", 51 Cal. 3d 120 (1990). The court decided that patient John Moore had no property rights in the immensely profitable "Mo" cell line which UCLA researchers had discovered when they removed his cancerous spleen.


title: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center

text: As of 2015, seven people had been infected by and two have died from carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, a drug-resistant superbug. A total of 179 people were exposed to the bacteria via two duodenoscopes which were not disinfected sufficiently. The outbreak is not serious, however, as the superbug is not a serious threat to healthy patients, and cannot be transmitted easily through its own means. The risk of infection via duodenoscope is very low as well, with procedures being performed on over 500,000 individuals between 2013 and 2014, and only 135 cases of CRE being reported as a result. Some doctors believe several more outbreaks of this nature are imminent. Since the outbreak, demands have been made to the FDA to improve their regulation and sanitation of medical devices.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Greed is a 1924 American silent psychological drama film written and directed by Erich von Stroheim and based on the 1899 Frank Norris novel "McTeague". It stars Gibson Gowland as Dr. John McTeague; ZaSu Pitts as Trina Sieppe, his wife; and Jean Hersholt as McTeague's friend and eventual enemy Marcus Schouler. The film tells the story of McTeague, a San Francisco dentist, who marries his best friend Schouler's girlfriend Trina.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: "Greed" was one of the few films of its time to be shot entirely on location, with von Stroheim shooting approximately 85 hours of footage before editing. Two months alone were spent shooting in Death Valley for the film's final sequence, and many of the cast and crew became ill. Von Stroheim used sophisticated filming techniques such as deep-focus cinematography and montage editing. He considered "Greed" to be a Greek tragedy, in which environment and heredity controlled the characters' fates and reduced them to primitive "bêtes humaines" (human beasts), a naturalistic concept in the vein of Zola.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: During editing, the production company merged into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), putting Irving Thalberg in charge of post-production. Thalberg had fired von Stroheim a few years earlier at Universal Pictures. Originally almost eight hours long, "Greed" was edited against von Stroheim's wishes to about two-and-a-half hours. Only twelve people saw the full-length 42-reel version, now lost; some of them called it the greatest film ever made. Von Stroheim later called "Greed" his most fully realized work and was hurt both professionally and personally by the studio's re-editing of it.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: The uncut version has been called the "holy grail" for film archivists, amid repeated false claims of the discovery of the missing footage. In 1999, Turner Entertainment created a four-hour version that used existing stills of cut scenes to reconstruct the film. "Greed" was a critical and financial failure upon its initial release, but, by the 1950s, it began to be regarded as one of the greatest films ever made; filmmakers and scholars have noted its influence on subsequent films. In 1958, the film was voted number 6 on the prestigious Brussels 12 list at the 1958 World Expo. It is one of the first examples of a psychological drama films in the early 20th century.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: In 1908, John McTeague works in a gold mine in Placer County, California. A traveling dentist calling himself Dr. "Painless" Potter visits the town, and McTeague's mother begs Potter to take her son on as an apprentice. Potter agrees and McTeague eventually becomes a dentist, practicing on Polk Street in San Francisco.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Marcus Schouler brings Trina Sieppe, his cousin and intended fiancée, into McTeague's office for dental work. Schouler and McTeague are friends and McTeague gladly agrees to examine Trina. As they wait for an opening, she buys a lottery ticket. McTeague becomes enamored with Trina and begs Schouler for permission to court her. After seeing McTeague's conviction, Schouler agrees. Trina eventually agrees to marry McTeague and shortly afterwards her lottery ticket wins her $5,000. Schouler bitterly claims that the money should have been his, causing a rift between him and McTeague. After McTeague and Trina wed, they continue to live in their small apartment with Trina refusing to spend her $5,000.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Schouler leaves San Francisco to become a cattle rancher. Before he goes, he secretly, in order to ruin his former friend, reports McTeague for practicing dentistry without a license. McTeague is ordered to shut down his practice or face jail. Even though she has saved over $200 in addition to the original $5,000 from the lottery ticket, Trina is still unwilling to spend her money. Money becomes increasingly scarce, with the couple forced to sell their possessions. McTeague finally snaps and bites Trina's fingers in a fit of rage. Later, he goes fishing to earn money, taking Trina's savings (now totaling $450).


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Trina's bitten fingers become infected and have to be amputated. To earn money she becomes a janitor at a children's school. She withdraws the $5,000 from the bank to keep it close to her, eventually spreading it on her bed so she can sleep on it. McTeague then returns, having spent the money he took, and asks Trina for more. The following day McTeague confronts Trina at the school. After a heated argument McTeague beats Trina to death and steals her $5,000.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Now an outlaw, McTeague returns to Placer County and teams up with a prospector named Cribbens. Headed towards Death Valley, they find a large quantity of quartz and plan to become millionaires. Before they can begin mining, McTeague senses danger and flees into Death Valley with a single horse, the remaining money and one water jug. Several marshals pursue him, joined by Schouler. Schouler wants to catch McTeague personally and rides into Death Valley alone.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: The oppressive heat slows McTeague's progress. Schouler's progress is also beginning to wane when he spies McTeague and moves in to arrest him. After a confrontation, McTeague's horse bolts and Schouler shoots it, puncturing the water container. The water spills onto the desert floor. The pair fight one last time, with McTeague proving the victor; however, Schouler has handcuffed himself to McTeague. The film ends with McTeague left in the desert with no horse and no water, handcuffed to a corpse and unable to reach the remaining money.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Von Stroheim's original edit contained two main sub-plots that were later cut. The point of these sub-plots was to contrast two possible outcomes of Trina and McTeague's life together. The first depicted the lives of the junkman Zerkow and Maria Miranda Macapa, the young Mexican woman who collects junk for Zerkow and sold Trina the lottery ticket. Maria often talks about her imaginary solid gold dining set with Zerkow, who becomes obsessed by it. Eventually, believing she has riches hidden away, Zerkow marries her. He often asks about it, but she gives a different answer each time he mentions it. Zerkow does not believe her and becomes obsessed with prying the truth from her. He murders her and, after having lost his mind, leaps into San Francisco Bay.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: The second sub-plot depicts the lives of Charles W. Grannis and Miss Anastasia Baker. Grannis and Baker are two elderly boarders who share adjoining rooms in the apartment complex where Trina and McTeague live. Throughout their time at the apartment complex, they have not met. They both sit close to their adjoining wall and listen to the other for company, so they know almost everything about each other. They finally meet and cannot hide their long-time feelings for each other. When they reveal their love, Grannis admits he has $5,000, making him just as rich as Trina. But this makes little difference to them. Eventually, they marry and a door connects their rooms.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: "Greed" is based on the American author Frank Norris's 1899 novel "McTeague: A Story of San Francisco". Von Stroheim's interest in "McTeague" can be traced back to January 1920, when he told a journalist that he wanted to film the novel. He had lived in San Francisco in the early 1910s, living there in poverty like that of the story's characters. He eventually moved to Los Angeles, and worked his way up in the film industry from extra to acting in villainous or aristocratic roles in films. By 1919, von Stroheim had finally become a successful director in his own right at Universal Film Manufacturing Company, although one with a reputation of going over budget and over schedule.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Upon the appointment of Irving Thalberg as general manager at Universal, von Stroheim's defiance of commercial and industrial norms was no longer tolerated. After Thalberg's prior shutdown of "Foolish Wives" in 1921 (which had been shooting nonstop for eleven months), and after six weeks of filming on "Merry-Go-Round", von Stroheim was finally fired from the studio on October 6, 1922. This was a step unprecedented in Hollywood, heralding a new era in which the producer and the studio would hold artistic control over actors and directors. However, by this time von Stroheim had received several offers of contracts with other studios, even before being fired from Universal. He had met with executives of the Goldwyn Company on September 14, 1922, less than a month before, and he formally signed with them in late November.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Von Stroheim chose his new studio because of the level of artistic freedom he was offered, which he had been denied at Universal under Thalberg. Since March of that year, Goldwyn had been run by Abe Lehr, who publicly promised that "each director will have his own staff and will be given every facility in putting into production his own individuality and personality." Von Stroheim signed a one-year, three-feature deal with Goldwyn on November 20, 1922. The deal stipulated that each feature would be between long, cost no more than $175,000 and be completed in fourteen weeks. It also promised von Stroheim $30,000 for each completed film.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Lehr initially hired von Stroheim in order to film a big-budget version of the operetta "The Merry Widow", which the producer saw as a guaranteed hit; von Stroheim, however, convinced Lehr to let him make "Greed" first, promising low costs. A press release of February 1923 said that although von Stroheim had "run rather freely to large sets in the past, [he] seems to have reformed—or surrendered—for it is announced that he will not build any sets at all."


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Von Stroheim wrote a highly detailed 300-page script that contained camera movements, composition and tint cues. Among the changes that he made to Norris's novel was giving McTeague the first name of John and omitting Norris's anti-Semitism. "McTeague" had been filmed once before as "Life's Whirlpool", a five-reel short by William A. Brady's World Pictures, starring Broadway star Holbrook Blinn as McTeague, which had been released in 1916. Film critics disliked this version and von Stroheim later criticized Blinn's performance. According to film historian Kevin Brownlow, "Life's Whirlpool" was also shot on location in Death Valley.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Von Stroheim was known for his meticulous perfectionism and attention to detail, as well as his insolence towards studio executives. Working on "Greed", von Stroheim set out to make a realistic film about everyday people and rejected the Hollywood tropes of glamor, happy endings and upper-class characters. Before shooting began, von Stroheim told a reporter:


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: In early January 1923, von Stroheim arrived in San Francisco, where he scouted locations and finished writing the shooting script. While researching for "Greed", he attended society functions in town and met many friends of Frank Norris, including his brother Charles and his sister-in-law Kathleen. To capture the authentic spirit of the story, von Stroheim insisted on filming on location in San Francisco, the Sierra Nevada mountains, the Big Dipper Mine in Iowa Hill, and Death Valley. He rented some of the actual buildings that had inspired scenes in the novel. Other locations included Cliff House and San Francisco Bay.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Norris had similarly scouted settings for his novel and chose the upstairs of a building on the corner of Polk and California street as McTeague's dentist office, as well as many of the saloons and lunch counters in the area. Von Stroheim discovered that many of the locations that Norris had described, such as Polk Street, had been destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but he was able to find suitable period locations on Hayes and Laguna streets. For authenticity, von Stroheim had no sets built in San Francisco and only redecorated existing locations, such as saloons, butcher shops, and wooden shacks, thus saving on construction costs.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Despite the strict conditions of von Stroheim's initial contract, Goldwyn approved the lengthy shooting script before filming began. Production Manager J. J. Cohn later explained that "they thought they could control him when the time comes."


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: With the exception of Jean Hersholt, all of the main actors in "Greed" were regulars of von Stroheim's earlier films, a group dubbed the "Stroheim Stock Company". Gibson Gowland had previously appeared in "Blind Husbands" and returned to the U.S. from Scotland for the role of John McTeague. Cesare Gravina, who played the junkman Zerkow, and Dale Fuller, the lottery-ticket seller Maria, had both appeared in "Foolish Wives" and would later appear in "The Merry Widow". Other actors in von Stroheim's Stock Company included Sidney Bracey, Mae Busch, George Fawcett, Maude George, Hughie Mack and George Nichols.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Trina was the most difficult role to cast, and ZaSu Pitts was hired at the last minute, after von Stroheim had rejected both Claire Windsor and Colleen Moore. Pitts had previously acted only in comedic roles; "Greed" was her first dramatic part. The actress later appeared in both "The Wedding March" and "Hello, Sister!" Von Stroheim said that Pitts was "the greatest psychopathological actress in the American cinema" and that "she should not be in comedy, for she is the greatest of all tragediennes."


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Von Stroheim had met casually with Jean Hersholt to discuss the role of Marcus Schouler, but he was initially reluctant to cast him. However, after Hersholt adjusted his appearance and wardrobe to more closely resemble Schouler, von Stroheim changed his mind on the spot. With the exception of Gowland, von Stroheim shot extensive screen tests of all the other actors at Goldwyn with cinematographer Paul Ivano. A scene from the Goldwyn film "Souls for Sale" is thought to be behind-the-scenes footage of von Stroheim directing "Greed", but it actually depicts him directing Hersholt during one of these screen tests.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Filming began in San Francisco on March 13, 1923, and lasted until late June. Despite the initial contract between von Stroheim and Goldwyn, Lehr agreed to double the film's budget to $347,000 three days after shooting began. Von Stroheim had already worked twenty-hour days for over two months of pre-production and collapsed on set after a few days of filming. He remained in good health for the remainder of the shoot. This was not the only mishap on set; during scenes shot at San Francisco Bay, Cesare Gravina got double pneumonia, making von Stroheim bitterly ashamed that Gravina's entire performance was later cut from the film, despite the actor's dedication to the role. Hersholt was knocked out by Gowland during the picnic scene (later cut) in which McTeague and Schouler fight, and Pitts was almost run over by a trolley. In late May, Lehr visited von Stroheim on the set and praised the footage that he had seen, saying that "it has atmosphere, color and realism that could not possibly have been reproduced in the studio."


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: One scene that von Stroheim re-shot at the studio's insistence depicted a younger McTeague in his apprenticeship with Potter. In the scene McTeague is too embarrassed to examine the teeth of a young woman and Potter has to take over. A thinly disguised ZaSu Pitts portrayed the woman so that the audience would see a resemblance to Trina, but the studio insisted that the scene was confusing and von Stroheim agreed to re-shoot it. Von Stroheim also conceded his original vision when shooting the bar confrontation between McTeague and Schouler. The director wanted to have a knife thrower actually throw a real knife at Gibson Gowland's head. Von Stroheim was overruled by Gowland himself, who refused to allow such a dangerous stunt. A special-effect shot was used instead.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: After filming in San Francisco wrapped in late June, the production traveled to Death Valley. Most Hollywood films that required desert scenes settled for the local Oxnard dunes north of Los Angeles, but von Stroheim insisted on authenticity. Death Valley had no roads, hotels, gas stations or running water and was occupied by tarantulas, scorpions and venomous snakes. The nearest populated area to the shoot was away and insurance coverage was denied. Filming in Death Valley lasted for two months during midsummer, allowing actors Gowland and Hersholt time to grow the beards necessary for the sequence. Some members of the production reported temperatures between , but the highest temperature officially recorded in Death Valley during the period was . Of the 43 members of the cast and crew who worked on the Death Valley sequence, 14 became ill and were sent back to Los Angeles.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: While shooting, crew members would collapse of heat exhaustion every day. Hersholt spent a week in the hospital after shooting was completed, suffering from internal bleeding. He claimed to have lost , and was covered in blisters by the end of filming. Despite the hardship Hersholt said that he considered it the best role of his career. In order to motivate Hersholt and Gibson during the scene where they fight, von Stroheim yelled at them, "Fight, fight! Try to hate each other as you both hate me!" Throughout filming, von Stroheim brought musicians on set to help create mood for the actors. He continued to use this for the Death Valley scenes with a harmonium and violin player. A theme, inspired by the music of Ruggero Leoncavallo, was composed and played throughout production. Other music used included the popular songs "Nearer, My God, to Thee", "Hearts and Flowers", "Oh Promise Me", and "Call Me Thine Own".


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Filming moved to Placer County on September 13 and continued for less than a month. The Big Dipper Mine had been closed for ten years, so von Stroheim convinced the Goldwyn Company to lease and renovate it for filming. While first visiting Placer County during pre-production, von Stroheim had met Harold Henderson, a local resident and fan of Norris whose brother had worked in the mine in the 1890s. Von Stroheim hired Henderson to oversee the renovation of the mine and other locations in Iowa Hill. Von Stroheim also wanted to restore the local cemetery for a newly invented scene depicting McTeague's mother's funeral, but the Goldwyn Company turned down this proposal. Inside the mine, von Stroheim usually shot at night between 9 pm and 6 am. Cinematographer William H. Daniels later said that von Stroheim insisted on descending underground for realism, even though the setting would have looked exactly the same at . Filming was completed on October 6, 1923, after 198 days. Despite his original contract stipulating that all films be under , von Stroheim shot a total of of footage for the film, running approximately 85 hours.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Von Stroheim's biographer Arthur Lennig compared the director's visual style to that of pioneering filmmaker D. W. Griffith, but felt that "unlike Griffith, who viewed scenes as though through a fourth wall, von Stroheim shot from many sides and from different angles; he also used deep-focus, meaningful foregrounds and effective camera movement." "Greed"s lighting included high contrast, chiaroscuro techniques with pools or shafts of lights illuminating an otherwise dark space. Examples of this technique include the scene where McTeague begs Trina for money in a pool of moonlight and the merry-go-round scene in which characters alternate between appearing only as dark silhouettes and being fully lit.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Daniels was especially proud of the wedding scene, which has a funeral procession visible through the window and was difficult to light properly. "Greed" has often been praised for its use of deep focus cinematography, seventeen years before its more-famous application in "Citizen Kane". Daniels sometimes used incandescent lights instead of studio arc lights, due to the constraints of his locations. He later said that von Stroheim "was one of the first to insist on no make-up for men, on real paint on the walls which were shiny, real glass in the windows, pure white on sets and in costumes  ... everything up to then had been painted a dull brown" to mask the scratches on worn-down film prints. Although not officially credited, Ernest B. Schoedsack worked on the picture as a camera operator.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Von Stroheim favored "Soviet-style" montage editing. "Greed" often uses dramatic close-ups and cuts instead of long takes. One exception to this is the scene in which Schouler becomes angry with McTeague and breaks his pipe, which was shot in one long, unbroken take. Von Stroheim also used symbolic cross-cutting for dramatic effect, such as his use of animals in the film and a shot of a train when McTeague and Trina first kiss. In 1932 film theorist Andrew Buchanan called von Stroheim a montage director, stating that "each observation would be captured in a 'close-up' and at leisure, he would assemble his 'shots' in just the order which would most forcibly illustrate the fact." In the 1950s film critic André Bazin praised von Stroheim's use of "mise en scène" and noted his "one simple rule for directing. Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so and in the end it will lay bare for you all its cruelty and ugliness."


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Despite von Stroheim's reputation as a perfectionist, "Greed" contains anachronisms. In the scenes on Polk Street, the main characters are clothed in 1890s fashions, but the extras wear 1920s clothing. Von Stroheim did his best to avoid such historical mistakes; he shot only those buildings that were from the era "Greed" was set in, and he kept motor vehicles out of sight while filming. Daniels stated that, despite his desire for authenticity, von Stroheim sometimes had walls knocked out of real locations to achieve a desired camera position.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Frank Norris's novel belongs to the literary school of naturalism founded by French author Émile Zola. "McTeague" depicts the fate of its lower-class characters in terms of heredity and their environment, with the belief that "man's nature, despite free will, is determined by genetic and environmental factors" and that heredity controls fate, despite efforts at upward mobility. This literary style was influenced by Charles Darwin and portrayed characters whose higher states of being, the rational and compassionate, are in conflict with their lower states, the "bête humaine" (human beast). "McTeague" was first published in 1899 and was inspired by an October 1893 murder case in which Patrick Collins, a poor husband with a history of beating his wife Sarah, finally stole her money and stabbed her to death at her San Francisco workplace. Sarah Collins worked at the Lest Norris kindergarten, which was financed by Norris's family.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Von Stroheim did not see "Greed" as political and told a journalist that he considered it to be like a Greek tragedy. Despite the characters' struggles with poverty and class, von Stroheim followed the naturalist technique of portraying characters whose lives are driven by fate and their inner nature. Von Stroheim employed variations of this theme in his other films, which often involved a commoner falling in love with an aristocrat or royal.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: One of the cinematic techniques by which von Stroheim portrayed naturalism was animal symbolism. In "Greed" McTeague is associated with a canary, only briefly mentioned in the novel. Von Stroheim altered Norris's original ending and has McTeague release the canary in Death Valley. McTeague buys Trina a female canary as a wedding gift and early in their marriage von Stroheim cuts from a shot of them kissing to birds fluttering wildly in their cage. Another scene with animal imagery includes cross-cutting between a cat attempting to pounce on the canaries in the scene where Schouler bids goodbye to McTeague and Trina without telling them that he has informed on McTeague. Dogs, cats and monkeys are associated with various supporting characters. Von Stroheim also used the naturalist technique of giving characters specific objects, gestures or phrases that repeat throughout the film as a visual "leitmotif". For example, Trina tugs on her lips and McTeague fiddles with his birdcage.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Throughout his career von Stroheim used grotesque imagery and characters. This is most apparent in the wedding-banquet scene, which includes a midget, a hunchback, a woman with buck teeth and a boy on crutches. The wedding guests violently and crudely devour their meal like animals. This scene was unlike any other in films of that period, which treated meals with dignity and a sense of communion. Other instances of grotesque imagery include Trina's fingers becoming infected and amputated. Von Stroheim contrasted love scenes between McTeague and Trina with their ugly, lower-class environment, such as the sewer with the dead rat and a garbage truck driving by as they kiss.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: As in his other films, von Stroheim used Christian imagery and symbols, such as crosses and churches. Trina first shows signs of greed on Easter Sunday and is murdered by McTeague on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve was often depicted in von Stroheim's films and was close to the date of his father's death. Lennig asserted that the character of McTeague's father (who was only briefly mentioned in the novel) is based on von Stroheim's own father, while McTeague's mother is a tribute to von Stroheim's mother, to whom "Greed" is dedicated. Von Stroheim stated that he considered all of his good qualities to have come from his mother and all of his bad qualities to have come from his father.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Editing "Greed" took almost a year and von Stroheim's contract did not include payment for his post-production work. He and his chief film cutter Frank Hull worked on the film for several months before completing a rough cut. Von Stroheim was indecisive during editing. He felt restricted by his contract's limitation on the length of the film. Von Stroheim colored certain scenes with gold tinting by using the Handschiegl Color Process, in which individual frames are hand colored with stencils. Von Stroheim credited himself in the beginning titles with "Personally directed by Erich von Stroheim."


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Other than studio personnel, only twelve people saw the original 42-reel version of "Greed" at a special screening in January 1924; they included Harry Carr, Rex Ingram, Aileen Pringle, Carmel Myers, Idwal Jones, Joseph Jackson, Jack Jungmeyer, Fritz Tidden, Welford Beaton, Valentine Mandelstam, and Jean Bertin. After the screening Jones, Carr and Ingram all agreed that they had just seen the greatest film ever made and that it was unlikely that a better film would ever be made. Carr wrote a review of the advance screening where he raved that he "saw a wonderful picture the other day—that no one else will ever see  ... I can't imagine what they are going to do with it. It is like "Les Miserables". Episodes come along that you think have no bearing on the story, then 12 or 14 reels later it hits you with a crash. For stark, terrible realism and marvelous artistry, it is the greatest picture I have ever seen. But I don't know what it will be like when it shrinks to 8 reels." Jonathan Rosenbaum suggested that Carr was most likely referring to a cut sequence early in the film that introduced all of the characters who lived in McTeague's building. The forty-minute scene depicted what the tenants did on a Saturday afternoon, and established cinematic atmosphere without furthering the plot. Rosenbaum compared the cut sequence to novels of the 19th century and to the first few hours of Jacques Rivette's "Out 1". Jones publicly praised the advance screening and compared "Greed" to "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Dr. Mabuse the Gambler". However, Welford Beaton of "The Film Spectator" disliked the 42-reel version and criticized its excessive use of close-ups.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Many sources claim that the 42-reel version was only ever intended to be a rough cut, and that Von Stroheim chose to cut it down to 24 reels by March 18, 1924, with the intention of screening it with intermissions over two nights. The director had difficulty cutting the film down, telling his friend Don Ryan, "I could take out sequences and thus get the job over in a day. That would be child's play. But I can't do it. It would leave gaps that could only be bridged through titles. When you do such a thing you have illustrated subtitles instead of a motion picture." Von Stroheim later claimed that at this time the Goldwyn Company wanted him to shoot a scene of McTeague waking up in his dentist chair, showing the entire film to have been a bad dream. While von Stroheim was editing the 24-reel cut June Mathis, who was the head of the Goldwyn Story Department, had made her own 13-reel version of "Greed" by January 21, 1924. She ordered even more cuts to be made on January 29, but then left for Rome in early February to oversee the production of "Ben-Hur" and was uninvolved in the film's editing for several months.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: After having completed the 24-reel cut of "Greed", von Stroheim told Goldwyn executives that he could not cut another frame. Goldwyn producers thought that this version was still too long and told him to cut it to a more manageable length. Von Stroheim then sent the film to his friend, director Rex Ingram, who turned it over to his editor, Grant Whytock. Whytock had worked with von Stroheim on "The Devil's Pass Key" and was familiar with the director's style and tastes. Whytock initially proposed that it be split in two, with one 8-reel film ending with the wedding and a second 7-reel film ending at Death Valley. Whytock eventually cut the film down to 18 reels. His only major cut was the entire subplot of Zerkow and Maria, which he thought was "very distasteful". Otherwise he simply cut down scenes and cut out of quick "flash" shots that only lasted a few frames. However, Whytock's version of "Greed" retained the prologue and other subplots, as well as much of the humor that was later cut out of it.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Whytock and Ingram screened their version of "Greed" to studio executives, who responded favorably to it but worried that the tragic ending would be hard to sell to the public. Ingram then sent the 18-reel version to von Stroheim and told him, "If you cut one more frame I shall never speak to you again." On April 10, 1924, the Goldwyn Company officially agreed to merge with Metro Pictures, putting von Stroheim's nemesis Thalberg directly in charge of "Greed". Von Stroheim and Louis B. Mayer had a lengthy confrontation over the film's editing, which according to both men ended with von Stroheim claiming that all women were whores and Mayer punching him. Mayer disliked the film because of its lack of glamor, optimism, or morality and considered it to be a guaranteed flop.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: MGM executives screened "Greed" at full length once to meet contractual obligations. Idwal Jones, a San Francisco critic, attended the all-day screening and wrote that while some of the scenes were compelling, von Stroheim's desire that "every comma of the book [be] put in" was ultimately negative. MGM then took control and re-edited it. The studio ordered June Mathis to cut it down further; she assigned the job to an editor named Joseph W. Farnham. Farnham was a well-known "titles editor", who patched scenes together using title cards to keep continuity. His contributions to "Greed" include the notorious title cards ""Such was McTeague"" and ""Let's go over and sit on the sewer"", which were snickered at for years. Eventually, Farnham reduced "Greed" to 10 reels, totaling . Von Stroheim said that the film "was cut by a hack with nothing on his mind but his hat." He later bitterly lamented that "Greed" was made before the financial success of Eugene O'Neill's five-hour play "Strange Interlude" in 1928. Von Stroheim angrily disowned the final version, blaming Mathis for destroying his masterpiece.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: One week before "Greed"s release the New York State Motion Picture Committee (which censored films) demanded several more cuts on moral grounds. These cuts included the administration of ether in the dental scenes and certain instances of foul language. Although these cuts were made to prints that were screened in New York State, the footage was kept in many other prints.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: The main cuts to "Greed" were the elimination of its two sub-plots and other entire sequences, while individual scenes were often not touched. Commenting about the cuts made in the film to the "Los Angeles Times", Thalberg stated:


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Thalberg also stated that he "took no chances in cutting it. We took it around to different theaters in the suburbs, ran it at its enormous length, and then we took note of the places at which interest seemed to droop."


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Individual scenes or sequences that were cut include McTeague and Trina's early, happy years of marriage, the sequence showing McTeague and Trina eventually moving into their shack, the family life of the Sieppe family before Trina's marriage, the prologue depicting McTeague's mother and father at the Big Dipper mine and McTeague's apprenticeship. Other cuts included the more suggestive and sexual close-up shots depicting McTeague and Trina's physical attraction to each other, the scenes after McTeague has murdered Trina and roams around San Francisco and Placer County, additional footage of Death Valley, additional footage of Trina with her money, and a more gradual version of Trina's descent into greed and miserly obsession.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: "Greed" premiered on December 4, 1924 at the Cosmopolitan Theatre in Columbus Circle, New York City, which was owned by William Randolph Hearst. Frank Norris had once worked for Hearst as a foreign correspondent during the Spanish–American War and Hearst praised "Greed", calling it the greatest film he had ever seen. Hearst's newspapers promoted the film, but MGM did very little advertising. At the time of the release von Stroheim was in Los Angeles, having begun production on "The Merry Widow" on December 1. In May 1926 "Greed" was released in Berlin, where its premiere famously caused a riot at the theater that may have been instigated by members of the then-fledgling Nazi party.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: "Greed" received mostly negative reviews. The trade paper "Harrison's Report" said that "[i]f a contest were to be held to determine which has been the filthiest, vilest, most putrid picture in the history of the motion picture business, I am sure that "Greed" would win." "Variety Weekly" called it "an out-and-out box office flop" only six days after its premiere and claimed that the film had taken two years to shoot, cost $700,000 and was originally 130 reels long. The review went on to say that "nothing more morbid and senseless, from a commercial picture standpoint, has been seen on the screen for a long, long time" and that despite its "excellent acting, fine direction and the undoubted power of its story  ... it does not entertain." In its December 1924 – January 1925 issue, "Exceptional Photoplays" called it "one of the most uncompromising films ever shown on the screen. There have already been many criticisms of its brutality, its stark realism, its sordidness. But the point is that it was never intended to be a pleasant picture." In the February 1925 issue of "Theatre Magazine", Aileen St. John-Brenon wrote that "the persons in the photoplay are not characters, but types—they are well selected, weighed and completely drilled. But they did not act; they do not come to life. They perform their mission like so many uncouth images of miserliness and repugnant animalism." Mordaunt Hall of the "New York Times" gave the film a mostly positive review in regards to the acting and directing while criticizing how it was edited, writing that MGM "clipped this production as much as they dared  ... and are to be congratulated on their efforts and the only pity is that they did not use the scissors more generously in the beginning." In a "Life Magazine" article, Robert E. Sherwood also defended MGM's cutting of the film and called von Stroheim "a genius  ... badly in need of a stopwatch." Iris Barry of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) disliked the tinting, saying "a not very pleasing yellow tinge is smudged in." A March 1925 review in "Pictureplay" magazine stated, "perhaps an American director would not have seen greed as a vice."


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: A more favorable review came from Richard Watts, Jr. of the "New York Herald Tribune", who called "Greed" "the most important picture yet produced in America  ... It is the one picture of the season that can hold its own as a work of dramatic art worthy of comparison with such stage plays as "What Price Glory?" and "Desire Under the Elms"." The April 20, 1925 edition of "The Montreal Gazette" claimed it "impresses as a powerful film" and described the "capacity audience" screening as "one of the few pictures which are as worthy of serious consideration ... which offer a real and convincing study of life and character and that secure their ends by artistic and intellectual means rather than by writing down to the level of the groundlings." The review went on to describe the direction as "masterly", citing "its remarkable delineation of character development and the subtle touches which convey ideas through vision rather than the written word, an all too-rare employment of the possibilities of the cinema play as a distinct branch of art capable of truthful and convincing revelation and interpretation of life's realities." A review in "Exceptional Photoplays" stated that "Mr. von Stroheim has always been the realist as Rex Ingram is the romanticist and Griffith the sentimentalist of the screen, and in "Greed" he has given us an example of realism at its starkest. Like the novel from which the plot was taken, "Greed" is a terrible and wonderful thing."


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: "Greed" was a financial disappointment. On its initial run, it earned $224,500 in the United States, $3,063 in Canada and $47,264 in other markets. In total it earned $274,827. Von Stroheim's biographer Arthur Lennig stated that according to MGM's records the final cost of "Greed" was $546,883. Another biographer, Richard Koszarski, stated that its final cost was $665,603: $585,250 for the production, $30,000 for von Stroheim's personal fee, $54,971 for processing and editing, $53,654 for advertising and $1,726 for Motion Picture dues.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Arthur Lennig asserted that MGM's official budget for "Greed" was suspiciously high for a film with no stars, no built sets, a small crew and inexpensive film stock. Lennig suspects that MGM averaged the film's cost with the more expensive "The Merry Widow" in order to prevent von Stroheim from getting a percentage of the more profitable film. "The Merry Widow" ended up being a hit and earned more profits than "Greed" had lost; it cost $614,961 but earned $996,226 on its initial run.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: In his final years, von Stroheim said that "of all my films, only "Greed" was a fully realized work; only "Greed" had a total validity." In 1926 a British foundation of arts and sciences requested a copy of the original version of "Greed" to keep in their archive, but their request was denied by MGM. Henri Langlois screened the studio version of "Greed" for von Stroheim in 1950. Von Stroheim said, "It was for me an exhumation. It was like opening a coffin in which there was just dust, giving off a terrible stench, a couple of vertebra and a piece of shoulder bone." He went on to say that "It was as if a man's beloved was run over by a truck, maimed beyond recognition. He goes to see her in the morgue. Of course, he still loves her but it's only the memory of her that he can love—because he doesn't recognize her anymore."


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: In the early 1950s "Greed"s reputation began to grow and it appeared on several lists of the greatest films ever made. In 1952 at the "Festival Mondial du Film et des Beaux Arts de Belgique", "Greed" was named the fifth greatest film ever made, with such directors as Luchino Visconti, Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel and Billy Wilder voting for it. Later in 1952, "Sight and Sound" magazine published its first list of the "ten greatest films ever made". "Greed" was tied for 7th place on that list, with such critics as Andre Bazin, Lotte Eisner, Curtis Harrington, Penelope Houston and Gavin Lambert voting for it. In 1962 it was tied for 4th on the same list. Since 1972 it has failed to reach a spot on the top ten. The "Cinémathèque royale de Belgique" released a list of "the most important and misappreciated American films of all time" in 1978. "Greed" was third on its list after "Citizen Kane" and "". In a University of Southern California list of the "50 Most Significant American Films" made by the school's Performing Arts Council, "Greed" was listed as number 21. In 1991 "Greed" was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2020, the film's copyright lapsed, entering into the public domain.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Among those who have praised "Greed" over the years are Sergei Eisenstein; Joseph von Sternberg, who said, "We were all influenced by "Greed""; Jean Renoir, who called it "the film of films"; and Ernst Lubitsch, who called von Stroheim "the only true 'novelist'" in films. More recently Guillermo del Toro called it "a perfect reflection of the anxiety permeating the passage into the 20th century and the absolute dehumanization that was to come", and Norbert Pfaffenbichler said that "the last shot of the movie is unforgettable." American writer, filmmaker, philosopher and political activist, Susan Sontag named "Greed" as one of her favorite films. Jonathan Rosenbaum has stated that "Greed" was a major influence on the style and content of many films. von Stroheim's shots filming the sun predated Akira Kurosawa's better-known uses of the technique in "Rashomon" (1950). Rosenbaum compared specific shot set-ups in "Greed" to shots in King Vidor's "The Crowd", Jean Renoir's "Le Crime de Monsieur Lange", Orson Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons", Howard Hawks' "To Have and Have Not" and Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Avventura". In addition, he likened certain plot elements or characters in "Greed" to John Huston's "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948), Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" (1954), Claude Chabrol's "Les Bonnes Femmes" (1960) and Elaine May's "Mikey and Nicky" (1975). Rosenbaum singled out von Stroheim's influence on May, an American director, with "Mikey and Nicky" centering on the disintegration of a friendship over money and sex, and including grotesque elements and characters caught between innocence and corruption. Rosenbaum also asserts that Orson Welles's use of satirical caricatures in all of his films is in "the spirit of von Stroheim".


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: The two films most commonly compared to "Greed" are Huston's "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons". Rosenbaum believes that besides Huston's film ending with gold being lost in the desert and similarities between Trina's descent into madness with Fred C. Dobbs own obsessions, the two films have little else in common. "The Magnificent Ambersons" and "Greed" both have characters who struggle with class differences that lead to their downfall. "Ambersons" was famously edited down drastically by its studio and the cut footage is now lost. Rosenbaum goes on to state that "Greed" influenced the methods in which novels are adapted into films and filmmakers like Welles, Huston and Bill Forsyth followed von Stroheim's example by re-arranging the plot and adding new scenes to their films while still remaining faithful to the intentions of the original novels. In the first chapter of the 1966 serial film "Captain Celluloid vs. the Film Pirates", the uncut version of "Greed" is used as a plot device. The 1994 Jonathan Lynn film "Greedy" pays tribute to the film by giving the main characters the last name McTeague.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Attempts to reconstruct the uncut version of "Greed" without use of the lost footage first began in 1958. At the Brussels International Exposition, the "Cinémathèque royale de Belgique" named "Greed" as one of the twelve greatest films ever made and simultaneously published von Stroheim's original, uncut script for "Greed", which came directly from von Stroheim's personal copy preserved by his widow Denise Vernac. This publication led to three separate books that all used von Stroheim's script in order to reconstruct the original version of the film and compare it to the released version: a French book edited by Jacques-G. Perret in 1968 and two versions edited by Joel Finler and Herman G. Weinberg, both in 1972. Weinberg's book utilized 400 individual stills and production photos to reconstruct the uncut version of "Greed", the first time that images from the uncut version were publicly available.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: In 1999, Turner Entertainment decided to recreate, as closely as possible, the original version by combining the existing footage with over 650 still photographs of the lost scenes (many of which had been used in Weinberg's book), in accordance with an original continuity outline written by von Stroheim. All materials were provided by the Margaret Herrick Library. This restoration runs almost four hours. It was produced by film preservationist Rick Schmidlin and edited by Glenn Morgan. Schmidlin restored many characters and sub-plots from the original version. A new musical score was composed by Robert Israel. The reconstruction cost $100,000 to produce. Schmidlin called the finished product "a reconstruction of Von Stroheim's lost narrative." It premiered at the 1999 Telluride Film Festival and was later screened at the Venice Film Festival and the Pordenone Silent Film Festival before being aired on Turner Classic Movies on December 5, 1999. Film critic Todd McCarthy called the restored version of "Greed" a triumph. Roger Ebert called "Greed" a masterpiece and said that the restored Schmidlin cut illustrates the "prudish sensibilities [that] went into MGM's chop job." Rosenbaum praised the project, but claimed it could only be considered a "study version". The reconstruction won a special citation from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Von Stroheim was known to exaggerate events from his life and create myths about himself, such as his fictitious aristocratic origins and military record in Austria. He claimed that shortly after having moved to the US in the early 1910s, he had found a copy of "McTeague" in a motel in New York and had read it in one sitting. He also said that wanting to adapt the book inspired him to make a career in filmmaking. Georges Sadoul later stated that von Stroheim had first read the novel in 1914, while living in poverty in Los Angeles.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: Claims that von Stroheim's original cut was a completely unabridged version of "McTeague" are not accurate. Von Stroheim's 300-page script was almost as long as the original novel, but he rethought the entire story and invented new scenes, as well as extensively elaborating existing ones. In the Norris novel, McTeague's back story in Placer County and relationships with his father, mother and Potter were remembered as a flashback and took two paragraphs. In von Stroheim's original "Greed", this sequence took up the first hour of the film and was not a flashback. Von Stroheim also modernized the novel's time span to between 1908 and 1923, a quarter-century later than the novel.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: "Greed" has sometimes been said to be over 100 reels long. von Stroheim said that his initial edit was 42 reels, although several of the people who saw this cut remembered it as being anywhere from 42 to 47 reels. Grant Whytock remembered the edited version that von Stroheim initially sent to him as between 26 and 28 reels. MGM's official studio files list the original cut of the film at 22 reels. As recently as 1992, former MGM Story Editor Samuel Marx erroneously claimed that the original version of "Greed" was 70 reels.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: June Mathis is credited with co-writing the script due to her work on the 10-reel version. Mathis was the head of the Story Department at MGM and her contract stipulated that she would receive writing credit for all MGM films. She did not actually write any part of the screenplay. She is said to have changed its title from "McTeague" to "Greed" during post-production; however, a publicity still of the cast and crew taken during production clearly indicates that it was titled "Greed" before the MGM merger even took place. The film's working title was ""Greedy Wives"", a nod towards von Stroheim's previous film "Foolish Wives"; this working title never was considered as the film's actual title.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: The original version of "Greed" has been called the "holy grail" for film archivists. Various reports of the original version being uncovered have proved to be unfounded. Among these "sightings" are a claim that a copy existed in a vault in South America that only was screened once a year for invited guests on New Year's Eve. Another claim was that a copy in the possession of a Texan millionaire was sold to Henri Langlois of "Cinémathèque Française". Other claims include that a film society in Boston held a private screening of a print found by a World War II veteran in Berlin from a tip by Emil Jannings, that David Shepherd of the American Film Institute had found a copy at a garage sale, and that the head of a film society in Redwood City, California owned "the longest existing version of "Greed" (purchased in Europe)." von Stroheim himself once stated that Benito Mussolini owned a personal copy of the film. Von Stroheim's son Joseph von Stroheim once claimed that when he was in the Army during World War II, he saw a version of the film that took two nights to fully screen, although he could not remember exactly how long it was.


title: Greed (1924 film)

text: There were also reports that MGM had retained a copy of the original version. Iris Barry of the Museum of Modern Art claimed that a copy was locked in the MGM vaults, although Thalberg denied it. It was also reported that John Houseman had a private screening at MGM and that MGM owned two copies stored in a vault in a Utah salt mine. Lotte Eisner once claimed that in the 1950s and 1960s, several cans of films labeled "McTeague" were found in MGM's vaults and destroyed by executives who did not know that it was footage from "Greed". MGM executive Al Lewin said that several years after the film's release von Stroheim asked him for the cut footage. Lewin and editor Margaret Booth searched MGM's vault but could not find any missing footage.


title: Pall-mall

text: Pall-mall, paille-maille, palle-maille, pell-mell, or palle-malle (, , ) is a lawn game (though mostly played on earth surfaces rather than grass) that was mostly played in the 16th and 17th centuries, a precursor to croquet.


title: Pall-mall

text: Related to Italian (also known as lawn billiards or trucks in English) and similar games, pall-mall is an early modern development from , a French form of ground billiards.


title: Pall-mall

text: The name comes from the Italian , which literally means 'ball mallet', ultimately derived from Latin , meaning 'ball', and meaning 'maul, hammer, or mallet'. An alternative etymology has been suggested, from Middle French or 'straw-mallet', in reference to target hoops being made of bound straw.


title: Pall-mall

text: It appears that pall mall was introduced from France into Scotland and later to England. The 19th-century historian Henry B. Wheatley states that "pall mall was a popular game in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and few large towns were without a mall, or prepared ground, where it could be played; but it has now been so long out of use that no satisfactory account of the game can be found."


title: Pall-mall

text: Mary, Queen of Scots, reportedly played pall mall at Seton Palace in East Lothian shortly after the murder of David Rizzio in the spring of 1566. King James VI in his 1599 "Basilikon Doron" mentions "palle maillé" among the "faire and pleasant field-games" suitable for his son Prince Henry.


title: Pall-mall

text: The author Henry B. Wheatley speculated that the game was introduced to England from Scotland after the accession of James VI in 1603, quoting a statement from Robert Dallington's "Method for Travell", that the game had not yet reached England. In the "Method for Travell", which Wheatley dated to 1598 but may have been as late as 1605, Dallington marvels that pall-mall was one of the few French pastimes that had not been introduced to England.


title: Pall-mall

text: The French ambassador Antoine Lefèvre de la Boderie said that Prince Henry (in England) in 1606 played golf, which he compared to "pallemail". One of Prince Henry's biographers, in a work published in 1634, mentioned that he played "gauffe (a play not unlike to Palemaille)". Prince Henry had a court or pitch, a "pell mell", laid out at St James' Fields, north of St James's Palace. It was surfaced with cockle shells crushed into clay or loam.


title: Pall-mall

text: It is known that sometime around 1630 a Frenchman named John Bonnealle laid out a court for playing pall-mall on the south side of St. James's Square, London, in an area known as St. James's Field (later Pall Mall Field). "A year or two" later, in about 1631, Bonnealle had died and the king's shoemaker, David Mallard or Mallock, had built a house on this land, which he was ordered to demolish by Candlemas Day (around 2 February) 1632.


title: Pall-mall

text: Evidently, the pall-mall court was rebuilt at this site, as Archibald Lumsden received a grant on 30 September 1635 "for sole furnishing of all the 'Malls,' bowls, scoops, and other necessaries for the game of Pall Mall within his grounds in St. James's Fields, and that such as resort there shall pay him such sums of money as are according to the ancient order of the game."


title: Pall-mall

text: Lumsden's pall-mall court also appears in the records in September 1660, when his daughter Isabella petitioned for "one of the tenements in St. James's Field, as promised to her father who spent £425 14s in keeping the sport of Pall Mall". Accounts attached to the petition appeared to indicate the money was spent on "bowls, malls and scopes, 1632 to 1635, and in repairs in Pall Mall, when the Queen went thither to lie in of the Lady Mary."


title: Pall-mall

text: Samuel Pepys's diary for 2 April 1661 records that he went "into St. James's Park, where I saw the Duke of York playing at Pelemele, the first time that I ever saw the sport".


title: Pall-mall

text: There do not appear to be references earlier than 1630 to the game being played in England. The game is mentioned in a 1611 French–English dictionary, but this does not demonstrate that it was actually played in England at that time:


title: Pall-mall

text: Cotgrave's description of the long alley-like playing surface with an iron hoop at either end accords well with reports of the game as played in London twenty years later. However, there's little reason to read this as an implication that the game was played in England in 1611, especially given that he is providing an English definition of a French word.


title: Pall-mall

text: An early 19th-century writer on English games, Joseph Strutt, quotes Cotgrave's description and the association with Restoration royalty:


title: Pall-mall

text: The game was still known in the early nineteenth century, as is proved by its reference in many English dictionaries. In Samuel Johnson's 1828 dictionary, his definition of "Pall mall" clearly describes a game with similarities to modern croquet: "A play in which the ball is struck with a mallet through an iron ring". In his unpublished memoir the writer Oswell Blakeston reports seeing it played at "the only pub that still has a green for this game" in the late 1930s.


title: Pall-mall

text: It was played in a long alley with an iron hoop suspended over the ground at the end. The object was to strike a boxwood ball of unknown circumference (a modern croquet ball is normally in diameter, which equates to approx , in circumference) with a heavy wooden mallet, down the alley and through the hoop with the fewest hits possible. Many references tell us that the ball was about in diameter. However, it is known that this is not correct, as a ball of that size would be far, far too heavy to lift to a high height with a small mallet. Note the ball in the engraving. It is thought that the ball was likely in the region of or slightly larger. It differed from trucco especially in its more extreme length of playing area, suggesting a closer relationship to golf than other derivatives of ground billiards.


title: Pall-mall

text: Pall-mall was popular in Italy, France and Scotland, and spread to England and other parts of Western Europe in the 16th century. The name refers not only to the game, but also to the mallet used and the alley in which it was played. Many cities still have long straight roads or promenades which evolved from the alleys in which the game was played. Such in London are Pall Mall and the Mall, in Hamburg the Palmaille, in Paris the Rue du Mail, the Avenue du Mail in Geneva, and in Utrecht the Maliebaan. When the game fell out of fashion, some of these "pall malls" evolved into shopping areas, hence the modern name of shopping centres in North America—shopping malls—while others evolved into grassed, shady promenades, still called malls today.


title: Alex Meret

text: Alex Meret (; born 22 March 1997) is an Italian professional footballer who plays as a goalkeeper for club Napoli and the Italy national team.


title: Alex Meret

text: Born in Udine, Meret began his career at an early age with amateur club Donatello Calcio before making a switch to the famous Udinese youth system in 2012. After rising through the academy system at the club, he made his senior debut in 2015. He later had spells on loan with SPAL, whom he helped win the Serie B title in 2017, and achieve promotion to Serie A. He joined Napoli in 2018.


title: Alex Meret

text: At international level, Meret has represented Italy at U16, U17, U18, U19 and U21 levels, and made his senior debut for Italy in 2019, also representing the nation at their victorious UEFA Euro 2020 campaign.


title: Alex Meret

text: An Udinese youth product, Meret was promoted to the first team as second-choice goalkeeper behind Orestis Karnezis during the 2015–16 season. He made his senior professional debut on 2 December 2015 in the Coppa Italia against Atalanta.


title: Alex Meret

text: In July 2016, Meret was sent on loan to Serie B club SPAL. He returned to SPAL on loan for the 2017–18 season.


title: Alex Meret

text: On 5 July 2018, Meret signed with Napoli until 30 June 2023. The transfer fee agreed with Udinese was reported as €35 million. He made his European debut on 14 February 2019, in a 3–1 away win over FC Zürich in the first leg of the round of 32 of the Europa League.


title: Alex Meret

text: He was initially often used in a rotational role along with David Ospina during his first two seasons with Napoli; however, under the club's new manager Gennaro Gattuso, he was relegated to the bench up until the season break due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, as the coach favoured the Colombian shot-stopper due to his superior ability with the ball at his feet. Due to a suspension to Ospina, however, Meret started in the 2020 Coppa Italia Final against Juventus on 17 June; following a goalless draw after regulation time, Meret saved Paulo Dybala's spot kick, helping his team earn a 4–2 penalty shoot-out victory. Subsequently, Meret ended up in the rotation with Ospina again, starting every second match on average until the end of the season. This rotational role was maintained in the following 2020–21 season, with Ospina and Meret taking turns every other match in the Europa League, Serie A and Coppa Italia.


title: Alex Meret

text: Meret was a crucial member in the Italy U19 national team which took part in the 2016 UEFA European Under-19 Championship, finishing as runner-up after losing in the final; he was named in the team of the tournament alongside Kylian Mbappé of France.


title: Alex Meret

text: In March 2017, following impressive performances for SPAL in Serie B, he was called up to the Italy national team squad for the World Cup qualification for a match against Albania and a friendly against the Netherlands.


title: Alex Meret

text: On 22 March 2018, he made his debut with the Italy U21, playing as starter in a friendly match against Norway.


title: Alex Meret

text: He took part in the 2019 UEFA European Under-21 Championship under manager Luigi Di Biagio, as the team's first-choice goalkeeper.


title: Alex Meret

text: Meret made his international debut for the senior national team under manager Roberto Mancini, on 18 November 2019, coming on as a substitute for Salvatore Sirigu in a 9–1 home win over Armenia, in Italy's final Euro 2020 qualifier.


title: Alex Meret

text: In June 2021, he was included in Italy's squad for UEFA Euro 2020. On 11 July, Meret won the European Championship with Italy following a 3–2 penalty shoot-out victory over England at Wembley Stadium in the final, after a 1–1 draw in extra-time. He was the only squad member not to make an appearance in the competition.


title: Alex Meret

text: Considered once to be a talented and highly promising young goalkeeper in the Italian media, Meret is an agile goalkeeper, who possesses good reactions and shot-stopping abilities, despite his height and imposing physique, and who is known for his handling and ability to rush off his line. He has also drawn praise in the media for his decision–making, maturity, and calm composure under pressure, as well as his discipline and work ethic, despite his youth; moreover, he is capable of organising his defence effectively and is known for his penalty–stopping abilities. Although he is competent with his feet, his distribution has been cited as an area in need of improvement. He has also struggled with physical problems and injuries throughout his career.


title: Numinous

text: Numinous () is a term derived from the Latin "numen", meaning "arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring." The term was given its present sense by the German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto in his influential 1917 German book "The Idea of the Holy". He also used the phrase mysterium tremendum as another description for the phenomenon. Otto's concept of the numinous influenced thinkers including Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and C. S. Lewis. It has been applied to theology, psychology, religious studies, literary analysis, and descriptions of psychedelic experiences.