General Trivia thread (the more obscure the better)

Forgot about Gaslight and "gaslighting."

 

Star Wars became a proposed military defense system.

 

It might surprise some to know this well-known director got his undergraduate degree from this school. Many years later, he made a movie about an evil element that slowly encroached on a small town. What people from his alma mater noticed were the radios with an increasingly alarmed announcer listing the streets that had been taken over. Those streets were not the random collections of the fabulist California coastal town in the movie, they were a verbal map of the town where he went to school.
Who was the director?
Where did he go to school?
What was the movie?

Hint 1: The movie was remade in 2005.
Hint 2: Kellyanne Conway never remembered the real pain this town went through...

 

Sounds like “The Blob” with a youngish Steve McQueen.

 

Great hints.

 

@swingline, not "The Blob," but you're in the right genre.

@da man, thanks!

 

John Carpenter
WKU
The Fog

 

With Adrienne Barbeau!

 

Yep.

 

Field of Dreams. Now any nice stadium or ballfield some town builds is called its field of dreams.

 

Speaking about teaching lessons to remember, when I worked at this one newspaper, a couple of reporters couldn't remember what it meant for prison sentences to be served concurrently. I showed them the clip from Spike Lee's Malcolm X film where it shows Lee, as Shorty, fainting in the courtroom because he thought concurrently meant that they were sentenced to 100+ years in prison.

 

"Rebel Without a Cause" seemed like a popular term in the 80s to describe someone complaining about something nonsensical.