For No One

I’m such a dork

When I drive from our home in the Mid-Hudson Valley of NY State to visit family in the Chicago, IL area, I pass through a city in Pennsylvania named Wilkes-Barre. I don’t like reading words of whose pronunciation I can’t be sure, so I looked it up. I landed on the city’s about page, which explains they got their city’s name from the names of two members of Britain’s parliament, John Wilkes and Isaac Barré. The page takes a quote from a 1909 history of the city, excerpted below (emphasis mine):

“…Wilks’-ba-ra—with a slight accent on the first syllable; ‘i’ in the first syllable being sounded as ‘i’ in ‘pin’, ‘a’ in the second syllable as ‘a’ in ‘mat’ and the final ‘è’; as ‘a’ in ‘mate’. The French ‘e’ with the ‘close’ accent has the sound last noted.”

My best guesses¹ would have been closer, had they retained the accent over the final ‘e’.

Fake Shemp

I came across an interesting bit of lore recently, and wanted to share it. I was looking at the IMDb page for The Evil Dead for my writeup thereof, and noticed something strange. IMDb lists more than 20 actors in this movie. What? The thing only had five characters. I noticed that the bulk of them had the role of Fake Shemp, which piqued my interest. I found a Wikipedia article on the topic, which answered my questions.

For those of you not familiar with Shemp Howard, he was Moe’s and Curly’s (of The Three Stooges) brother. When Curly died, Shemp took his place. Unfortunately, Shemp died too, and the Stooges were in the middle of a few movies. Their contract required the films to be completed, so they used any trick they could come up with to put Shemp’s character on screen without showing his face. They made heavy use of stock footage from prior films, and new shots of a stand-in shown from the back and sides. They combined these shots with the footage they already had, and finished the movies.

Fast forward a few decades to The Evil Dead. The production was only supposed to last six weeks, and after that most of the cast and crew left. Only Sam Raimi’s close friends remained, and they picked up the slack with anonymous shots not showing their faces. Raimi, a fan of The Stooges, credited them as Fake Shemps, and now the term has entered the common lexicon.