MOVIE QUIZ
Ah, October. The 10th month on the calendar, with a name derived from the number eight. Fittingly scrambled for a month that can go from scorchingly hot to (early) snow covered, and back again.
And amazingly apt for our “October” movie quiz in which the films all have the word October in their titles (save one), but they run the gamut from comedy to drama, faithbased to horror, documentary to downright absurd.
1. The 1999 biographical film “October Sky” was originally titled “Rocket Boys,” the same as the book it was based on, but the studio thought that name wouldn’t sell, especially to women. Was the significance of the new title because it was an anagram of “Rocket Boys” or because it was the month when the main character saw the Russian satellite Sputnik flying overhead and was inspired to be a rocket engineer?
2. “First Monday in October,” a comedy-drama about the first woman on the Supreme Court, came out in 1981, but before or after Sandra Day O’connor achieved that honor in real life?
3. Alec Baldwin became the first actor to portray author Tom Clancy’s iconic character Jack Ryan in the 1990 thriller “The Hunt for Red October.” Which of these actors did NOT follow in his footsteps in the role, whether on film or TV: Ben Affleck, Harrison Ford, Chris Evans, John Krasinski or Chris Pine?
4. In 1948’s “The Return of October,” Glenn Ford plays a psychology professor and author who helps a teenage girl who believes her late uncle has been reincarnated as what?
5. 2011’s “The Houses October Built” was a documentary about the “dark world” of Halloween haunted houses. Three years later, the same filmmakers remade it as found-footage horror film and called it what?
6. “October Baby” is a 2011 fact-based, Christian-themed drama about a college freshman who discovers that she is adopted and the survivor of a failed abortion attempt 19 years earlier. Playing her adoptive father is an actor experienced in taking in a cast-off child, as he did with Clark Kent for five seasons on TV’S “Smallville.” Who is he?
7. Sergei Eisenstein co-directed 1927’s “October (Ten Days That Shook the World),” about the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, as the next film after his 1925 epic about a real-life 1905 mutiny. Name this earlier silent movie that is considered one of the greatest films ever made.
8. “The Missiles of October” was a 1974 TV movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis that starred Albany-born William Devane as John F. Kennedy. What 2000 feature film featuring Bruce Greenwood as JFK, covers the same territory?
9. In the 1947 British mystery film “The October Man,” writer Eric Ambler adapted his own novel into a screenplay. Someone else did the honors for another Ambler novel, “The Light of Day,” turning it into what iconic 1964 heist movie directed by Jules Dassin?
10. Major league baseball player Reggie Jackson, who earned the nickname “Mr. October” for his postseason clutch-hitting, appeared in many movies and TV shows as himself, but in only one did he try to kill Queen Elizabeth II. What was the film?
Here are the answers to the Movie Quiz on page 2.
1. Both
2. The movie came out on Aug. 21, 1981, two days after O’connor’s nomination and exactly one month before her confirmation.
3. Chris Evans
4. A racehorse
5. “The Houses October Built”
6. John Schneider
7. “Battleship Potemkin”
8. “Thirteen Days”
9. “Topkapi”
10. “The Naked Gun! From the Files of Police Squad!”