Deep Cuts

Lisa Frank and her husband used all that money to throw cocaine parties and abuse their employees. All throughout the 90s, Lisa Frank products were the huge back to school craze of the decade. Girls everywhere wore their brightly-colored backpacks, stored paper in their vibrantly-rendered folders, and wrote their homework onto kitty-and-puppy-adorned notebooks with dolphin-and-tiger-emblazoned pen...

He used to be a hero, but now he exploits the abuse of children for views and money. In the 80s and 90s, he was a hard-hitting journalist, tackling some incredibly important stories that shed light on issues like slave labor, the crack cocaine epidemic, and child trafficking. In the early 2000s he was host of the insanely popular TV show, To Catch a Predator. For a while, Chris Hansen was a legiti...

He used to be a hero, but now he exploits the abuse of children for views and money. In the 80s and 90s, he was a hard-hitting journalist, tackling some incredibly important stories that shed light on issues like slave labor, the crack cocaine epidemic, and child trafficking. In the early 2000s he was host of the insanely popular TV show, To Catch a Predator. For a while, Chris Hansen was a legiti...

He used to be a hero, but now he exploits the abuse of children for views and money. In the 80s and 90s, he was a hard-hitting journalist, tackling some incredibly important stories that shed light on issues like slave labor, the crack cocaine epidemic, and child trafficking. In the early 2000s he was host of the insanely popular TV show, To Catch a Predator. For a while, Chris Hansen was a legiti...

A single photo this former Disney Star posted on porn app, OnlyFans, might have destroyed an industry. When former Disney Channel star, Bella Thorne, decided to break the Internet with a bold new experiment in which she would join the massively popular paid content service OnlyFans - largely used by online adult stars and sex workers - and then make a movie about it, what eventually was supposed t...

For years he's been profiting off of the trauma of a teenage boy's murder. In 2012, George Zimmerman saw 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walking through his semi-gated community and became suspicious. The teenager had decided to walk to a nearby convenience store for a snack, but Zimmerman felt like something was just not right. He pursued the boy, and eventually got into an altercation with him that e...

It was a financial and critical flop, but it secretly changed the way movies are made. In 2008, the Wachowskis released a weird, experimental live action adaptation of the 1960s anime classic, Speed Racer. The movie starred Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, John Goodman, and Susan Sarandon, and was not well-received by critics, audiences, and totally flopped at the box office. It has a small continen...

Did Stan Lee & Steve Ditko create Spider-Man? Or was the idea stolen from a Halloween costume? In the Silver Age of comics in the 1960s and 70s, things were an existential mess from a creator perspective - especially at Marvel comics. There were no artist or writer unions, characters were often created in bull pen-type situations where authorship was given to the company at large instead of the ac...

He made a 4 hour movie where he played over 100 characters by himself, but he ended up homeless. In 1994, Laz Rojas desperately wanted to break into the entertainment industry as an actor, writer, and director. He had written literally hundreds of scripts, but couldn't get anybody to pay attention to them. So he shot a 4 hour film that was a collection of random scenes from all of the various scri...

Two Scottish guys fooled the world into thinking they were American rappers for almost a decade. In the early 2000s, Billy Boyd and Gavin Bain were college students and best friends. They also loved hip hop and wanted to do something more with their lives than live a small-town Scottish existence. They formed a rap group and got good. However, after various auditions they quickly learned that, no...

A cult started by a blind Japanese man went on to become a deadly terrorist organization. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Shoko Asahara was rising in the ranks as one of the most powerful cult leaders in history. He had over ten thousand followers, and slowly over the course of several years would launch several deadly terrorist attacks against the country of Japan - a few of which are the wors...

12 years ago she lost control of her life. Is it for mental health reasons, or something far more evil? In 2008, after a very public mental health scare in which pop star Britney Spears shaved her head and had several violent outbursts, her father, Jamie Spears, was granted a permanent conservatorship over her. Conservatorships are usually reserved for the mentally unwell or handicapped, or the ol...

They were three young girls held prisoner by their father and forced to become a rock band because of a prophecy. They ended up becoming a huge cult hit, beloved by many - including Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain who lists their album as his third favorite of all time - and one of the most influential indie bands of all time. They were musical geniuses in the category of "outsider music." They also...

Actor Jared Leto has slowly been growing a cult-like following for the last several years. What's his endgame? You know him from his films throughout the 90s, 2000s, leading up to today, as well as from his band 30 Seconds to Mars. Did you also know that, for the last several years, he's invited thousands of people to a large gathering that happens on a remote Island in some exotic area of the wor...

He's the brother that director Christopher Nolan doesn't want to talk about. Because he's a murderer. You are familiar with the massively successful British filmmaker, Christopher Nolan, who has directed films like the Dark Knight, Inception, the Prestige, and the Tenet. You might also be familiar with his brother, Jonah Nolan, who co-created HBO's Westworld. But did you know that there's a third...

He was a one-hit wonder rocker who loved to party, but nobody noticed he was a complete hoax. In the late 90s/early 2000s, Andrew W.K. exploded out of nowhere with the anthemic, epic party anthem "Party Hard" complete with a stylish music video depicting him thrashing onstage in front of a giant mural of his bloodied face. After that, he became a novelty fringe element of pop culture - occasionall...

He was a real life costumed hero dedicated to stopping crime, but in the end his story was a supervillain origin. Phoenix Jones was a real life costumed superhero that operated out of Seattle, Washington for several years. Every night, seven days a week, he patrolled the streets of Seattle at night with his crew of fellow costumed heroes and a camera person. Anywhere he could find crime being comm...

He was the world's greatest private eye who was also a double amputee. He also lied about his entire life. In part 1 of our three-part "Kayfabe Trilogy", we explore the crazy life and astonishing lies of Jay J Armes - a man from El Paso, Texas who lost both of his hands in a horrible accident as a child, and went on to become a globe-trotting private detective responsible for solving thousands of...

He was a beloved comedian and linchpin of Hollywood Squares, but he was also a tortured soul with a tragic life. In the 70s, Paul Lynde enjoyed success as one of the most popular comedians of the time - notably with his role as Uncle Arthur on 'Bewitched' and as the center square on Hollywood Squares. However, what many of the time didn't know is that Lynde was dealing with deeply-routed demons fr...

He was the Stan Lee of Hong Kong comics, but his practices eventually landed him in prison. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Tony Wong produced hundreds of Hong Kong comics, or Manhua, based on his long-running franchise Little Rascals/Oriental Heroes. Despite the fact that it was an open secret that he was largely lying about how involved he was with the creation of his own comics - most of them clear...

The Mona Lisa was once a very ordinary painting, but one man made it the most famous one in the world. In 1911, a man with an inside connection stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre by simply walking in and taking it. At the time, the Mona Lisa was regarded as a fairly insignificant minor work by the legendary artist, Leonardo DaVinci. However, all of that would change with the ensuing investigation...

A comic writer discovered the first superhero Stan Lee ever created. It was the greatest hoax in comics history. In 1999 it was discovered that Stan Lee had created a superhero character BEFORE the Fantastic Four - long-believed to be the first superhero comics characters he'd ever been a part of. His name was the Sentry, and he was co-created by an artist named Artie Rosen back in 1961 and then p...

These are the bizarre, inspiring, and sad stories of the scandals that rocked the James Bond franchise. George Lazenby was the second man to play James Bond after Sean Connery left. However, he had never acted before and tricked producers into casting him. Kevin McClory was a producer who managed to somehow win the rights to make his own bootleg James Bond movies in court. Both men left lasting ma...

Lonnie Johnson invented your childhood, but big business tried to steal all his money. Lonnie Johnson is an American inventor and engineer, and in the early 90s he invented and patented some of the most important aspects of any 90s kids' childhood. We would have had a lot of boring summer days without his contributions. However, after selling his inventions to big toy companies, he started noticin...

Andrew Getty spent 15 years making a horror movie, and it ended up killing him. Grandson of oil tycoon, J. Paul Getty, and cousin of John Paul Getty III, who was famously kidnapped and tortured as a 16-year-old boy in 1973, Andrew Getty became haunted by night terrors that were so vivid and horrifying that he decided the only way he could get rid of them was to channel all of his fear into a self-...