Jack Kerouac – (1922-1969) a fast typist at 100 words per minute, typed “On the Road” on a roll of paper so he wouldn’t be interrupted by having to change the paper. Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paperinto long strips, wide enough for a typewriter, and taped them together into a long roll he then fed into the machine. Kerouac wrote the final draft in 20 days, with Joan, his wife, supplying him bowls of pea soup and mugs of coffee to keep him going. Within two weeks of starting to write On the Road, Kerouac had one single-spaced paragraph, 120 feet long. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or paragraph breaks and was much more explicit than what would eventually be printed. Some believed that at times Kerouac’s writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose. Truman Capote famously said about Kerouac’s work, “That’s not writing, it’s typing”.

… that the musical Chicago was written by a reporter? Maurine Dallas Watkins, worked for the Chicago Tribune and was assigned to cover the 1924 trials of Beulah Annan “Roxie Hart” and Belva Gaertner “Velma Kelly”. Lawyers William Scott Stewart and W. W. O’Brien were models for the composite character “Billy Flynn”. Watkins’ sensational columns documenting these trials proved so popular that she decided to write a play based on them. The show received both popular and critical acclaim and even made it to Broadway in 1926, running for 172 performances.

There are several differences between the film and stage versions that presented challenges in bringing the project to the screen. A significant difference is the portrayal of reporter Mary Sunshine (played in the film by Christine Baranski). In the stage version, Mary Sunshine is played by a very convincing female impersonator who appears to be a large, matronly woman. He sings falsetto, and the audience is not aware that he is a man until the second act, after a line to the effect of “Things are not always what they appear to be!” and someone pulls off the wig and dress, revealing the truth about Mary Sunshine.

Mark Twain  -  (1835-1910) claimed in his autobiography that he was the first important writer to present a publisher with a typewritten manuscript, for “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer “ (1876). Typewriter collector and historian Darryl Rehr challenges his claim by stating that Twain’s memory was faulty and that the first novel submitted in typed form was “Life on the Mississippi “(1883, also by Twain). He achieved great success as a writer and public speaker. His wit and satire earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. He lacked financial acumen though and while he made a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he squandered it on various ventures, mostly on new inventions and technology, particularly the Paige typesetting machine. It was a beautifully engineered mechanical marvel that amazed viewers when it worked, but was prone to breakdowns. Twain spent $300,000 (equal to $7,590,000 today) on it between 1880 and 1894, but before it could be perfected, it was made obsolete by the Linotype.

Twain was born during a visit by Halley’s Comet, and predicted that he would “go out with it” as well. In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’

His prediction was accurate – Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet’s closest approach to Earth.

… that when the French film “Amelie” was shooting on location, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the crew would clean the area of debris, grime, trash and graffiti? Mainly, so that the film would match his fantasy more. This was an especially difficult task when it came time to shoot at the huge train station.

The part of Amélie was written specifically for Emily Watson. She wanted the part but had to decline because she doesn’t speak French.

Amélie is a story about a girl named Amélie whose childhood was suppressed by her Father’s mistaken concerns of a heart defect. With these concerns Amélie gets hardly any real life contact with other people. This leads Amélie to resort to her own fantastical world and dreams of love and beauty. She later on becomes a young woman and moves to the central part of Paris as a waitress. After finding a lost treasure belonging to the former occupant of her apartment, she decides to return it to him. After seeing his reaction and his new found perspective – she decides to devote her life to the people around her.

Cormac McCarthy – (1933-     ) continues to write his novels on an Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter to the present day. The Olivetti Lettera 32 has been in his care for 46 years, since 1963. He picked up the used machine for $50 from a pawn shop in Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthy estimates he has typed around five million words on the machine, and maintenance consisted of “blowing out the dust with a service station hose”. In 2009, the Lettera he obtained from that pawn-shop in 1963, on which nearly all his novels and screenplays have been written, was auctioned for charity at Christie’s for $254,500. McCarthy obtained an identical replacement for $20 to continue writing on. McCarthy noted to Oprah when he was on her show that he prefers “simple declarative sentences” and that he uses capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but “never a semicolon.” He does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to “blot the page up with weird little marks”. He also spoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age, and how his now-eight-year-old son was the inspiration for The Road.

…that “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” by T. S. Eliot was the basis for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “Cats”?

T.S. Eliot’s widow, Valerie, contributed the unpublished material about Grizabella that was the basis for Cats’ most famous song, “Memory”. “Memory” has been recorded by over 150 artists, from Barbra Streisand to Johnny Mathis to Liberace.

Since the opening, “Cats” has been presented in 26 countries and over 300 cities, has been translated into 10 languages and was the largest single generator of jobs in Broadway history.

“Cats” ran on Broadway for 18 years, starting in 1982 and ending in 2000. It holds the record for the longest running Broadway musical in the twentieth century.