Commons Cut

The strange stories behind familiar classics. A free weekly newsletter, website and short videos. Subscribe free at By @halfinmedia

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On Jan 1, 2027, Dracula and Frankenstein (1931) enter the U.S. public domain. The brands, a famous face and a 1998 score don't.

Subscribe free to Commons Cut and get our cheat sheet on what you can use: https://t.co/WQdtwpgstF

#PublicDomainDay #PublicDomain

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@auteurhouse Sweatiest noir is exactly right, you can feel that heat wave through the screen. Kurosawa wrote it first as an unpublished novel built around a real detective who lost his pistol. Is it your pick over High and Low?

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@BusterKeatonSoc Those two dogs steal the photo. Parlor, Bedroom and Bath came out in 1931, so the film joins the US public domain on Jan 1. Keeping track of that 1931 class is a big part of our free weekly.

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@joeroganhq The General has one that still makes me nervous: he sits on the coupling rod of a real locomotive as it starts rolling. One slip and that's it. Which of his stunts gets you the most?

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In the Grimms' first Snow White (1812) there is no stepmother. The queen who wants the girl's lungs and liver, salted and cooked, is her own mother. @GalGadot played the Evil Queen in 2025. https://t.co/pJFM8xLG6o #FairyTales #BookTwitter

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The first Sherlock Holmes story was sold outright for £25, and by Arthur Conan Doyle's account the publisher never paid him another penny. @IanMcKellen played a 93-year-old Holmes in Mr. Holmes. https://t.co/N3wnToEaPg #SherlockHolmes #BookTwitter

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@HGACinema That Riviera footage hits different knowing what came next. She met Prince Rainier on a trip to the Cannes festival in April 1955, the same year To Catch a Thief came out. Hitchcock still tried to lure her back for Marnie in 1962.

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@For_Film_Fans That letter went to Charles McCarthy, head of the school board in Drake, North Dakota, in 1973. Did McCarthy ever write back? I've never seen a reply turn up.

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@Rainmaker1973 And he paid for it. The water tower drop in Sherlock Jr. fractured his neck, and the Steamboat Bill Jr. facade was a real two-ton wall with a nail in the ground marking where to stand. Which stunt makes you wince most?

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@peterhowellfilm @ParamountPics Sim casting a long shadow over every new Scrooge feels right. Dickens was protective of the book too: a penny paper copied it in January 1844, he sued and won, and still ended up paying costs. We made a Short on it: https://t.co/WNWZuICo5f

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@MrEwanMorrison The meat locker three stories under Schlachthof Fünf saved his life, and he said they came up to find the city gone. Took him more than twenty years to get it onto the page.

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@LaurasMiscMovie @ClassicMovieHub Frankie Laine belting that Tiomkin theme over the action is half the fun of that one. Do you rank it above My Darling Clementine for the Earp story, or does Ford win?

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@CinemaWireNews @ParamountPics @ebenezermovie Did West keep Marley's face showing up in the door knocker? That's the creepiest moment in the whole book. We made a Short on the penny pirates who copied it within weeks.

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@StrandMag Reading that line today lands differently. It always felt like Doyle saying goodbye to Holmes and to that England at the same time. The Strand side of Doyle's life comes up a lot in our free weekly.

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@TheEpicVault The hatpins detail still gets me. Doyle broke it in The Strand's Christmas Number in December 1920 under the headline "Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event." We wrote up that issue here: https://t.co/Fd7P7Fyii7

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@Canada_Unknown The Anxious Dead really does feel like it's answering Flanders Fields. Do you know if he wrote it soon after, or much later in the war?

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The full story is "The Blank on the Playbill," free to read now and coming to The Director's Cut, the paid edition of Commons Cut.
https://t.co/Jd9Q3XP85g

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In 1823 the creature was billed as a dash. In 1931 he was billed as a question mark.

The film's opening credits list the Monster as played by "?". Boris Karloff is named only at the end. The novel's author is credited as "Mrs. Percy B. Shelley."

#Frankenstein

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@icie_jennifer Felt poppies and memorizing it in class is such a shared memory. McCrae wrote it the day after burying his friend Alexis Helmer near Ypres in May 1915. Do you still know it by heart?

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@Pastpassport Did you get to the Essex Farm site too? Seeing the dressing station so close to the graves must change how that poem reads.

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@JimLNeibaur He was only about four on Son of Frankenstein, holding his own opposite Karloff and Rathbone, and then gave Bambi his voice. Quite a start to a long life. RIP.