If the Academy was vaguely in the ballpark the first year it handed out Oscars, it completely blew it the next. This year the winners were chosen by a five-member panel — The Central Board of Judges — and while the previous year's smoke-filled room used the awards to settle scores and promote their own interests, at least they felt the need to pretend they were motivated by artistic concerns. This year the panel seemed interested only in handing out awards to the Academy's founders and the man who hand-picked them for the job, Louis B. Mayer.
It was not until the following year that the full membership of the Academy voted on the awards.
The Broadway Melody, an MGM production — that is to say, Louis B. Mayer's baby — is the weakest best picture winner ever, which is saying something.
Mary Pickford, a co-founder of the Academy, took home the best actress trophy for her first talkie, Coquette, and while audiences flocked to see "America's Sweetheart" talk for the first time, critics reviled her performance and only the first Oscar campaign in history secured the award.
Likewise, best director Frank Lloyd, who won for the dull and overly-long The Divine Lady, was one of the founding members of the Academy and his win raised eyebrows among the press.
As for the best actor winner, In Old Arizona's Warner Baxter, the less said, the better. I know some of my fellow bloggers like his performance as the Cisco Kid, but let's just say I don't think his hammy fake Mexican stands up next to the likes of Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks or John Gilbert, all of whom were eligible for the big prize that year.
Hopefully, this round of Katie awards will improve on the Academy's choices. At least I don't owe Louis B. Mayer anything.
Finally, I'll note that two of the Academy's choices, best screenplay winner, Ernst Lubitsch's The Patriot, and The Bridge Of San Luis Rey, which earned MGM set designer Cedric Gibbons the first of eleven Oscars (he was nominated thirty-nine times), have both been lost. That is, unfortunately, an all too common story when it comes to the early history of motion pictures — Hollywood took no care when it came to preserving these early films and let thousands of movies deteriorate or vanish altogether.
As national tragedies go, it's not exactly the Vietnam War. But it is a definite shame, like allowing the Louvre to go up in smoke because you can't be bothered not to play with matches.
1928-29 PICTURE (Drama) winner:The Wind (prod. Victor Sjöström) nominees:Blackmail (prod. John Maxwell); The Docks Of New York (prod. J.G. Bachmann); The Iron Mask (prod. Douglas Fairbanks); The Wedding March (prod. Pat Powers and Erich von Stroheim)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:Steamboat Willie (prod. Walt Disney) nominees:The Broadway Melody (prod. Irving Thalberg, Harry Rapf and Lawrence Weingarten); The Cameraman (prod. Buster Keaton); Show People (prod. Marion Davies and King Vidor); Steamboat Bill, Jr. (prod. Joseph M. Schenck);
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (prod. Société générale des films) nominees:Un Chien Andalou (prod. Luis Buñuel); The Fall Of The House Of Usher (prod. Jean Epstein); Man With The Movie Camera (prod. VUFKU)
ACTOR (Drama) winner:Douglas Fairbanks (The Iron Mask) nominees: George Bancroft (The Docks Of New York); Warner Baxter (In Old Arizona); John Gilbert (A Woman Of Affairs and Desert Nights); Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March)
ACTRESS (Drama) winner: Maria Falconetti (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc) nominees: Betty Amann (Asphalt); Louise Brooks (Beggars Of Life); Betty Compson (The Docks Of New York); Greta Garbo (The Mysterious Lady, A Woman Of Affairs and Wild Orchids); Lillian Gish (The Wind)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner:Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc) nominees: Victor Sjöström (The Wind); Josef von Sternberg (The Docks Of New York); Dziga Vertov (Man With The Movie Camera); Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner:Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou) nominees: Ub Iwerks (Steamboat Willie); Edward Sedgwick (The Cameraman); King Vidor (Show People)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Drama) winner:Wallace Beery (Beggars Of Life) nominees: Donald Calthrop (Blackmail); Lewis Stone (A Woman Of Affairs); Gustav von Seyffertitz (The Mysterious Lady and The Docks Of New York)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Marceline Day (The Cameraman) nominees:
SCREENPLAY winner:Frances Marion; from a novel by Dorothy Scarborough (The Wind) nominees: Jules Furthman; story by John Monk Saunders; titles by Julian Johnson (The Docks Of New York); Joseph Delteil and Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
SPECIAL AWARDS
Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks (the creation and marketing of Mickey Mouse); Douglas Shearer (The Broadway Melody) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "The Broadway Melody" (The Broadway Melody) (Best Song); Un Chien Andalou (prod. Luis Buñuel) (Best Short Subject); John Arnold (The Wind) (Cinematography)
As the silent era drew to a close, Lillian Gish — one of the day's greatest film stars (second only to Mary Pickford in my book) — was in need of a hit to re-establish her relevance at time when the movie-going public had flipped out for flappers and jazz singers, flying aces and all-American heroes.
Gish had starred in a string of hits for D.W. Griffith a decade earlier but by 1928, she, like her fellow stars Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and John Gilbert, had hit the commercial skids.
With contractual control over choice of material, screenplay, co-stars and director, and a $400,000 salary to play around with, Gish opted to make The Wind, a complex psychological drama about a frontier woman whose repressed desires slowly drive her insane, leading to death and tragedy.
Scripted by Frances Marion and directed by a pioneer of the Swedish film industry, Victor Sjöström, The Wind was a critical success — and a box-office bomb.
Gish would make just two more movies — neither a hit — before disappearing from Hollywood for a decade.
The Wind is the story of Letty (Gish) who is forced to live with her sister and brother-in-law in the forbidding environment of the frontier West. Already enduring the ever-present danger of the Texas prairie's howling wind and sandstorms, where men are killed and wild horses driven mad, the threat of an unmarried woman living in close quarters with a man proves too much for the tight-knit social order she has invaded.
Letty has a choice — enter into a loveless marriage or wander homeless in the empty prairie. Of course, she opts for marriage, but she would have done just as well choosing certain death.
Like Catherine Denueve in Roman Polanski's horror classic Repulsion, Letty's repressed desire slowly drives her insane.
In playing Letty, Gish had chosen to subvert her established screen image. For years, as D.W. Griffith's favorite actress, she had played the passive victim of any variety of men looking to relieve her of her treasured virginity. In The Wind, she finally takes up a gun and kills her would-be rapist. After all those years of playing the passive victim, the moment is liberating.
The screenplay initially envisioned a dark ending where an insane Letty wanders into a sand storm to be consumed by the desert, but when studio heads saw the initial cut, they insisted on a happy ending. The cast and crew reluctantly shot a new ending but as it turned out, it didn't much matter. Audiences rapidly acquiring a taste for talkies weren't interested in silent movies anymore or, for that matter, Lillian Gish whom they regarded as a relic of a previous age.
Silent actress turned film historian Louise Brooks also believed there was a concerted Hollywood effort to destroy Lillian Gish's reputation and box-office appeal and that a box office flop was exactly what the studio was hoping for.
It was a simple matter of economics, wrote Brooks in Lulu in Hollywood. Gish was making $400,000 a year and had complete creative control of her career. Emerging star Greta Garbo was making $16,000 and was wholly dependent on the studio to solve the visa problems that would allow her to work. Brooks lays out evidence of the studio's manipulation and then posits Gish's bosses were tired of paying big money to an actress with the power to map her own career when it could pay a younger actress a lot less money to do exactly what they wanted.
Ironically, the studio eventually did to Garbo what it had done to Gish — undercut her career when cheaper actresses came along.
In time, Gish would rebound, returning to the movies during World War II, receiving an Oscar nomination for Duel in the Sun in 1946.
Her best remembered work would come in 1955's gothic noir masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter, where she played a shotgun-toting granny squaring off against Robert Mitchum's homicidal con man preacher.
"She might look fragile," said screenwriter Frances Marion, "but physically and spiritually she was as fragile as a steel rod. Nobody could sway her from her self-appointed course. With a Botticelli face, she had the mind of a good Queen Bess, dictating her carefully thought-out policies and ruling justly, if firmly."
In 1971, Gish received an honorary Oscar in recognition of her "superlative artistry and ... distinguished contribution to the progress of motion pictures." She worked steadily into her nineties and passed away in 1993, just shy of her one hundredth birthday.
Our Dancing Daughters was the first movie written specifically for Joan Crawford and it made her a star. It's the story of a rich, wild girl (Crawford) with an addiction to short dresses and the Charleston who loses the love of her life to an even richer, wilder girl (Anita Page, also in a star-making role), all while soaking up Jazz and bootleg booze in fabulous art Deco palaces that could only have existed on the set of an MGM movie.
None of this is meant to be taken seriously — just another Hollywood studio clucking its tongue at girls gone wild even as it exploited the phenomenon to rake in box office bucks.
What's not to like?
Although technically the film's lead, Crawford winds up playing second fiddle to Page.
Although she had only just celebrated her eighteenth birthday when the movie hit the theaters, Page is absolutely convincing in her ruthless pursuit of the man, first putting on an act of virginal innocence to entice him then exploiting him to the hilt after she lands him.
In the movie's penultimate scene, Page is drunk, evil and standing at the top of a staircase. No prizes for guessing what happens next.
"Our Dancing Daughters was my picture," Page said years later. "I say that because I did the acting. Joan Crawford danced her way through it. I acted my way through it."
Our Dancing Daughters was one of a series of Hollywood movies seeking to both exploit and condemn the Jazz Age flapper phenomenon. The script called for an undercurrent of tension between Page and Crawford and, boy, is there ever.
Years later, Page claimed Crawford physically assaulted her on the set but the mutual hatred didn't hurt their on-screen chemistry any. In fact, despite their mutual loathing, Page and Crawford made two more movies together, Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides, trading the good girl/bad girl roles back and forth, to great commercial, if not artistic, effect.
Page also starred in the year's Oscar winner for best picture, The Broadway Melody, and received over ten thousand fan letters a week, including nearly a hundred from fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who was infatuated with the young actress.
"Are you starting to believe your own publicity?" director Harry Beaumont asked Page during the filming of one of their six pictures together.
"Of course," she said, "Aren't you?"
In addition to The Broadway Melody and the Joan Crawford flapper trilogy, Page appeared in films with Lon Chaney, Buster Keaton and Clark Gable.
Page's final movie for MGM was 1932's Prosperity, starring Marie Dressler and Polly Moran. On the outs with studio head Louis B. Mayer after twice refusing to sleep with him (the second proposition made in the presence of Page's mother), Page served out the remaining years of her MGM contract on loan to poverty row studios, making such low-budget bombs as Jungle Bride and Hitch Hike To Heaven.
It was an ignominious end for an actress who just a couple of years before had been second only to Greta Garbo as the studio's top draw.
Page left Hollywood and married Navy flyer Herschel House in January 1937.
After his death, she began to make films again, mostly low-budget fare such as The Crawling Brain and Witchcraft XI.
On the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Page received a standing ovation at a special screening of The Broadway Melody. She was the last surviving attendee of the first Oscar ceremony and died in 2008 at the age of ninety-eight.
Beggars of Life is the story of a teenage girl (Louise Brooks) who kills her stepfather in order to avoid being raped. Disguising herself as a young boy, she escapes with a passing vagrant (Richard Arlen, co-star of the first movie to win the Oscar for best picture, Wings) only to fall into the hands of Oklahoma Red (Wallace Beery), the ruthless leader of a "hobo jungle" who wants the girl for himself.
The story by novelist Jim Tully was based on his own experiences riding the rails during a period of unemployment and homelessness. Well before the Depression would acquaint much of this film's audience with the life they were seeing on screen, Tully hoped to demythologize poverty, showing, for example, the brutality of "hobo jungles" and the ruthless treatment of the poor at the hands of arbitrary authorities.
Although the film stars the now-legendary Brooks, the screen really belongs to Wallace Beery. He makes his first appearance during the movie's second act, arriving at the camp singing and carrying a keg of beer on his shoulder (some prints have Beery's growling singing voice on the soundtrack of this otherwise silent movie, others do not).
Beery discovers Brooks, who has disguised herself as a boy, is a fugitive with a $1000 bounty on her head. Beery helps her escape from the others and from the police, but whether it's an act of altruism or pure self-interest becomes the central question of the film.
Even with the lovely Louise Brooks on screen, Beery is the one your eyes are drawn to.
This phenomenon — the supporting performance that makes you forget the rest of the movie — was typical of Beery's career. Admittedly, sometimes he could be a distraction, but here he breathes life into a story that had threatened to grind to a halt.
Co-star Louise Brooks was blunt in her criticism of the movie: "[William Wellman] directed the opening sequence with a sure, dramatic swiftness that the rest of the film lacked."
But of Beery, Brooks said, "His Oklahoma Red is a little masterpiece."
She's right. Beery plays Oklahoma Red as complex man rather than as a stock villain and watching his internal contradictions play out is the main reason to track down this film. It's probably his most overlooked performance in a career that included starring roles in Grand Hotel, Dinner At Eight, Treasure Island and Min And Bill, and Oscar nominations for The Big House and The Champ, the latter a winner for Beery in 1931.
But Brooks was also right about the film overall. The action is repetitive, the acting outside that of Beery and Brooks is amateurish and for a movie inspired by a desire to show what riding the rails was really like, its insights sometimes feel shallow and cliched.
Still, Brooks is very good in the movie and her performance brought her to the attention of German director P.W. Pabst.
The story of a girl from the country who makes it big in Hollywood was a staple of the silent era — see, e.g., A Girl's Folly, Souls for Sale, The Extra Girl, Ella Cinders — so much so that when Marion Davies (with King Vidor directing) spoofed the genre in the 1928 silent comedy Show People, everybody in town was in on the joke.
Look for cameos from just about everybody who was anybody including Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, John Gilbert and even Marion Davies and King Vidor as themselves.
While she is mostly remembered now as the inspiration for the no-talent opera singer in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane — a grossly unfair characterization if that's what Welles really thought of her — Marion Davies was actually a very good comedic actress and this movie was the best showcase of her talent.
In Tod Browning's West Of Zanzibar, Lon Chaney is crippled in a quarrel with his wife's lover (Lionel Barrymore) and takes his revenge on the daughter he believes to be theirs. First he forces her to work in a brothel. Then he arranges for cannibals to burn her alive. Then he really gets mad.
As with most Lon Chaney movies, it starts out weird then rides the twists and turns to a bloody and bizarre conclusion. Like an O. Henry story written by a psychopath.
One of the most enduring tropes of the early sound era is that of the silent film star who finds his career in ruins when his voice proves unsuitable for the new medium. Isn't that what Singin' in the Rain is all about?
More often than not, the tale of an actor's vocal woes was simply a cover story for a studio's own greed, spite or incompetence (see, e.g., Louise Brooks, John Gilbert and Clara Bow, respectively).
But in the case if Russian-born Olga Baclanova, the myth is right on the money.
A native of Moscow, Baclanova was a star of stage and screen in the early days of the Soviet Union, and received the title of Merited Artist of the Russian Federation, the USSR's highest honor for artistic achievement.
In 1925, Baclanova toured the United States with the Moscow Art Theatre then stayed behind to try her luck in Hollywood.
She made a handful of films in the two years before talkies — including a pair of classics (below) — then found herself, thanks to a thick Russian accent, limited to "exotic" parts and B-pictures.
Baclanova abandoned Hollywood for the Broadway stage in 1933 and had at least one big hit, Claudia, which ran for two years. Baclanova returned to Hollywood briefly in 1943 to make a screen version of her Broadway hit and then permanently retired from the movies.
She died in Switzerland in 1974 at the age of 81.
Although her movie career was relatively brief, Baclanova made three classics which have stood the test of time:
The Man Who Laughs is a macabre little love story that begins with a decadent king's order to carve a permanent grin into the face of a boy whose father has been convicted of treason. The boy grows to manhood earning an unhappy but lucrative living as a circus attraction, shunning all human contact but that of the young blind woman who travels with him.
Through a series of twists plotted by the great Victor Hugo, whose novel L'Homme Qui Rit was the basis for this movie, the man (Conrad Veidt in a first-rate performance) finds himself elevated to Britain's House of Lords and ordered against his will to marry a brazen duchess (Baclanova) with a fetish for his ruined face.
Depending on who you believe, either Bill Finger and Batman creator Bob Kane concocted the Joker from a photograph of Veidt in full Man Who Laughs makeup; or illustrator Jerry Robinson conceived the Joker from a playing card and then fleshed out the character based on a photograph of Veidt that Finger provided.
In The Docks Of New York Baclanova plays Lou, an abandoned wife making ends meet as a prostitute in a waterfront bar.
Two of Hollywood's most successful writers, Jules Furthman and John Monk Saunders, wrote this story in the style of Eugene O'Neill, with all the action taking place in one evening and the following morning. A sailor on shore leave (George Bancroft) pulls a suicidal young woman (Betty Compson) out of New York's harbor and over the course of an evening, takes a liking to her and proposes marriage.
It sounds like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, an early stab at Pretty Woman, say, but everyone involved handles the story soberly and realistically and the movie reminds me more than anything of O'Neill's Anna Christie which would be adapted the following year as a vehicle for Greta Garbo's first talkie.
Baclanova in particular breathes life into what could have been a stock character, playing Lou as a hardened cynic when plying her trade in the dive bar that sees most of the movie's action but as a beaten down survivor in private, defeated and without illusions.
"Do you think he can make you decent by marryin' you?" she asks Compson after hearing of Bancroft's proposal. "Until I got married, I was decent!"
While The Docks Of New York is not as visually interesting as von Sternberg's later work featuring his greatest star, Marlene Dietrich, it's more relatable and moving. Here — before he descended into wretched excess and maybe even madness — von Sternberg was still in touch with the needs and interests of his audience, still trying to tell a story, still trying to connect with real universal human emotions. I think it's possibly the best work of his career.
Finally, you don't want to miss Freaks, which is wildest and most modern of all the horror movies that were released during the early sound era.
Helmed by Tod Browning, who not only directed Dracula but also ten Lon Chaney vehicles, Freaks is a story of exploitation and revenge centering on the lives of those circus performers once described as "sideshow freaks."
In this one, Baclanova plays the cruel circus performer Cleopatra. She seduces and marries the star of a traveling carnival (little person Harry Ealres), hoping to loot his fortune. Things don't work out quite like she planned.
Despite Browning's sensitive treatment of his stars, the combination of sex, horror and forbidden love proved too much for audiences and censors alike, and after a brief release, the film was withdrawn from circulation for more than thirty years.
Admittedly the acting is at times amateurish, but if you like your horror genuinely disturbing, this is a must-see movie. And I don't mean faux disturbing like Hostel or Saw or any of those other slaughterhouse cheesefests with stock characters and recycled plot lines. Freaks is too real to dismiss as playacting and no pose of ironic detachment can shrug off the violence done to the "freaks" and in turn by them. It's a movie that will get under your skin — or anyway, it got under mine.
Let's call this the Great Reconciliation. No, not between the Republicans and the Democrats — as if! Even the Monkey's not that good!
No, this is the reconciliation between what I used to call the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (read about them here) and my alternate Oscar polls. I stopped working on the former seven or eight years ago as I took up the latter and now the two lists have greatly diverged. So I'm reconciling the two.
Blah blah blah ...
Follow the highlighted links to read about the movie or nominee in question.
1927-28 PICTURE (Drama) winner:Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (prod. William Fox) nominees:The Crowd (prod. Irving Thalberg); The Last Command (prod. Jesse L. Lasky and Adolph Zukor); Laugh, Clown, Laugh (prod. Herbert Brenon); The Man Who Laughs (prod. Paul Kohner); Wings (prod. Lucien Hubbard)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:The Jazz Singer (prod. Warner Brothers) nominees:The Cat and the Canary (prod. Paul Kohner); The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin); My Best Girl (prod. Mary Pickford); Speedy (prod. Harold Lloyd); The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg (prod. Ernst Lubitsch)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat) (prod. Alexandre Kamenka) nominees:Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony Of A Great City) (prod. Karl Freund); Oktyabr (October (Ten Days That Shook The World)) (prod. Sovkino); Spione (Spies) (prod. Erich Pommer)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Charles Chaplin (The Circus) nominees: Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer); Harold Lloyd (Speedy); Albert Préjean (Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat))
ACTRESS (Drama) winner: Janet Gaynor (7th Heaven; Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans and Street Angel) nominees: Eleanor Boardman (The Crowd); Gloria Swanson (Sadie Thompson)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner:Mary Pickford (My Best Girl) nominees: Marion Davies (The Patsy); Norma Shearer (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner:F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) nominees: Paul Leni (The Man Who Laughs); King Vidor (The Crowd); Josef von Sternberg (The Last Command); William A. Wellman (Wings)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Charles Chaplin (The Circus) nominees: René Clair (Un chapeau de paille d'Italie a.k.a. An Italian Straw Hat); Paul Leni (The Cat And The Canary); Ernst Lubitsch (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg); Lewis Milestone (Two Arabian Knights); Ted Wilde (Speedy)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Drama) winner: Lionel Barrymore (Sadie Thompson) nominees: Gary Cooper (Wings); Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Spione); William Powell (The Last Command); Bert Roach (The Crowd)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Drama) winner:Clara Bow (Wings) nominees: Olga Baclanova (The Man Who Laughs); Evelyn Brent (Underworld and The Last Command); Gladys Brockwell (7th Heaven); Mary Philbin (The Man Who Laughs)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Eugenie Besserer (The Jazz Singer) nominees: Louise Brooks (A Girl In Every Port); Martha Mattox (The Cat and the Canary); Olga Tschechowa (Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat))
SCREENPLAY winner: Herman J. Mankiewicz (titles) and John F. Goodrich (writer), from a story by Lajos Biró and Josef von Sternberg (The Last Command) nominees:King Vidor and John V.A. Weaver; titles by Joseph Farnham (The Crowd); Elizabeth Meehan; titles by Joseph Farnham; from a play by David Belasco and Tom Cushing (Laugh, Clown, Laugh); Raoul Walsh; titles by C. Gardner Sullivan; from a story by W. Somerset Maugham (Sadie Thompson)
SPECIAL AWARDS
George Groves (The Jazz Singer) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Toot Toot Tootsie" (The Jazz Singer) (Best Song); Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) (Cinematography); Roy Pomeroy (Wings) (Special Effects)
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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