title: Sacagawea

text: Her Hidatsa name, which Charbonneau stated meant "Bird Woman," should be spelled "Tsakakawias" according to the foremost Hidatsa language authority, Dr. Washington Matthews. When this name is anglicized for easy pronunciation, it becomes Sakakawea, "Sakaka" meaning "bird" and "wea" meaning "woman." This is the spelling adopted by North Dakota. The spelling authorized for the use of federal agencies by the United States Geographic Board is Sacagawea. Although not closely following Hidatsa spelling, the pronunciation is quite similar and the Geographic Board acknowledged the name to be a Hidatsa word meaning "Bird Woman.


title: Sacagawea

text: Some fictional accounts speculate that Sacagawea was romantically involved with Lewis or Clark during their expedition. But, while the journals show that she was friendly with Clark and would often do favors for him, the idea of a romantic liaison was created by novelists who wrote much later about the expedition. This fiction was perpetuated in the Western film "The Far Horizons" (1955).


title: Sacagawea

text: In 1967, the actress Victoria Vetri, under the name Angela Dorian, played Sacajawea in the episode "The Girl Who Walked the West" of the syndicated television series, "Death Valley Days".


title: Sacagawea

text: Two early twentieth-century novels shaped much of the public perception of Sacagawea. "The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark" (1902), was written by American suffragist Eva Emery Dye and published in anticipation of the expedition's centennial. The National American Woman Suffrage Association embraced her as a female hero, and numerous stories and essays about her were published in ladies' journals. A few decades later, Grace Raymond Hebard published "Sacajawea: Guide and Interpreter of Lewis and Clark" (1933) to even greater success.


title: Sacagawea

text: Sacagawea has since become a popular figure in historical and young adult novels. In her novel "Sacajawea" (1984), Anna Lee Waldo explored the story of Sacajawea's returning to Wyoming 50 years after her departure. The author was well aware of the historical research supporting an 1812 death, but she chose to explore the oral tradition.


title: Sacagawea

text: "The Dinner Party", an artwork installation by feminist artist Judy Chicago, features a place setting for Sacagawea in Wing Three, part of "American Revolution to the Women's Revolution".


title: Sacagawea

text: The first episode of the history podcast, "The Broadsides", includes discussion of Sacagawea and her accomplishments during the Lewis and Clark Expedition.


title: Sacagawea

text: The Sacajawea Interpretive, Cultural, and Educational Center, located in Salmon, Idaho, by the rivers and mountains of Sacajawea's homeland. It contains a small museum and gift shop, in a park. It is "owned and operated by the City of Salmon, in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management, Idaho Governor's Lewis & Clark Trail Committee, Salmon-Challis National Forest, Idaho Department of Fish & Game, and numerous non-profit and volunteer organizations."


title: Sacagawea

text: Sacagawea was an important member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The National American Woman Suffrage Association of the early 20th century adopted her as a symbol of women's worth and independence, erecting several statues and plaques in her memory, and doing much to spread the story of her accomplishments.


title: Sacagawea

text: In 1959, Sacagawea was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. In 1976, she was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2001, she was given the title of Honorary Sergeant, Regular Army, by President Bill Clinton. In 2003, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.


title: Sacagawea

text: In 2000, the United States Mint issued the Sacagawea dollar coin in her honor, depicting Sacagawea and her son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. Because no contemporary image of Sacagawea exists, the face on the coin was modeled on a modern Shoshone-Bannock woman, Randy'L He-dow Teton. The portrait design is unusual, as the copyrights have been assigned to and are owned by the U.S. Mint. The portrait is not in the public domain, as most US coin designs are.


title: Football pitch

text: A football pitch (also known as a football field, soccer field or soccer pitch) is the playing surface for the game of association football. Its dimensions and markings are defined by Law 1 of the Laws of the Game, "The Field of Play". The pitch is typically made of natural turf or artificial turf, although amateur and recreational teams often play on dirt fields. Artificial surfaces are allowed only to be green in colour.


title: Football pitch

text: All line markings on the pitch form part of the area which they define. For example, a ball on or above the touchline is still on the field of play, and a foul committed over the line bounding the penalty area results in a penalty. Therefore, a ball has to completely cross the touchline to be out of play, and a ball has to wholly cross the goal line (between the goal posts) in order for a goal to be scored; if any part of the ball is still on or above the line, a goal is not scored and the ball is still in play.


title: Football pitch

text: The field descriptions that apply to adult matches are described below. Because of the role of the British football associations in the history of the game, the dimensions of the field of play were originally formulated and expressed in imperial units. Since 1997, the Laws of the Game have preferred metric units, with imperial equivalents given only in brackets. Because the actual values have, in general, not changed since the early twentieth century, they tend to be round numbers in imperial units (for example the width of the goal, unchanged since 1863, is 8 yards or 7.32 metres). Use of the imperial values remains common, especially in the United Kingdom.


title: Football pitch

text: The pitch is rectangular in shape. The longer sides are called touchlines and the shorter sides are called the goal lines. The two goal lines are between wide and have to be of the same length. The two touchlines are between long and have to be of the same length. All lines on the ground are equally wide, not to exceed . The corners of the pitch are marked by corner flags.


title: Football pitch

text: For international matches the field dimensions are more tightly constrained; the goal lines are between 64 and 75m wide (70 and 82yds) and the touchlines are between long. The majority of top-level professional football pitches, including those belonging to teams in the English Premier League, measure 112 yards (102.4m) to 115 (105.2m) yards long and 70 yards (64.0m) to 75 yards (68.6m) wide.


title: Football pitch

text: Although the term "goal line" is often taken to mean only that part of the line between the goalposts, in fact it refers to the complete line at either end of the pitch, from one corner flag to the other. In contrast the term "byline" (or "by-line") is often used to refer to that portion of the goal line outside the goalposts. This term is commonly used in football commentaries and match descriptions, such as this example from a BBC match report: "Udeze gets to the left byline and his looping cross is cleared..."


title: Football pitch

text: These consist of two upright posts placed equidistant from the corner flagposts, joined at the top by a horizontal crossbar. The inner edges of the posts are regulated to be (wide) apart, and the lower edge of the crossbar is elevated to above the pitch. As a result, the area that players shoot at is 17.86 sq. metres (192 sq. feet). Nets are usually placed behind the goal, though are not required by the Laws.


title: Football pitch

text: Goalposts and crossbars have to be white, and made of wood, metal or other approved material. Rules regarding the shape of goalposts and crossbars are somewhat more lenient, but they have to conform to a shape that does not pose a threat to players. Since the beginning of football there have always been goalposts, but the crossbar was not invented until 1875, before which a string between the goalposts was used.


title: Football pitch

text: A goal is scored when the ball wholly crosses the goal line between the goal-posts and beneath the crossbar, even if a defending player last touched the ball before it crossed the goal line (see own goal). A goal may, however, be ruled illegal (and void by the referee) if the player who scored or a member of their team commits an offence under any of the laws between the time the ball was previously out of play and the goal being scored. It is also deemed void if a player on the opposing team commits an offence before the ball has passed the line, as in the case of fouls being committed, a penalty awarded but the ball continued on a path that caused it to cross the goal line.


title: Football pitch

text: The football goal size for a junior match goal is approximately half the size of an adult sized match goal.


title: Football pitch

text: Football goals were first described in England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. In 1584 and 1602 respectively, John Norden and Richard Carew referred to "goals" in Cornish hurling. Carew described how goals were made: "they pitch two bushes in the ground, some eight or ten foote asunder; and directly against them, ten or twelue [twelve] score off, other twayne in like distance, which they terme their Goales". The first reference to "scoring a goal" is in John Day's play "The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green" (performed circa 1600; published 1659). Similarly in a poem in 1613, Michael Drayton refers to "when the Ball to throw, And drive it to the Gole, in squadrons forth they goe". Solid crossbars were first introduced by the Sheffield Rules. Football nets were invented by Liverpool engineer John Brodie in 1891, and they were a necessary help for discussions about whether or not a goal had been scored.


title: Football pitch

text: The "goal area" (colloquially the ""six-yard box""), consists of the rectangle formed by the goal-line, two lines starting on the goal-line from the goalposts and extending into the pitch from the goal-line, and the line joining these, i.e. they are a rectangle 6yds by 20yds. Goal kicks and any free kick by the defending team may be taken from anywhere in this area. Indirect free kicks awarded to the attacking team within the goal area are taken from the point on the line parallel to the goal line (the ""six-yard line"") nearest where the infringement occurred; they cannot be taken any closer to the goal line. Similarly drop-balls that would otherwise occur closer to the goal line are taken on this line.


title: Football pitch

text: The "penalty area" (colloquially ""the 18-yard box"" or just ""the box"") is similarly formed by the goal-line and lines extending from it, but its lines start from the goalposts and extend into the field. i.e. this is a rectangle 44yds by 18 yds. This area has a number of functions, the most prominent being to denote where the goalkeeper may handle the ball and where a foul by a defender, usually punished by a direct free kick, becomes punishable by a penalty kick. Both the goal and penalty areas were formed as semicircles until 1902.


title: Football pitch

text: The "penalty mark" (colloquially ""the penalty spot"" or just ""the spot"") is in front of the very centre of the goal: this is the point from where penalty kicks are taken.


title: Football pitch

text: The "penalty arc" (colloquially ""the D"") is marked from the outside edge of the penalty area, from the penalty mark; this, along with the penalty area, marks an exclusion zone for all players other than the penalty kicker and defending goalkeeper during a penalty kick.


title: Football pitch

text: The "centre circle" is marked at from the "centre mark". Similar to the penalty arc, this indicates the minimum distance that opposing players have to keep at kick-off; the ball itself is placed on the "centre mark". During penalty shootouts all players other than the two goalkeepers and the current kicker are required to remain within this circle.


title: Football pitch

text: The "half-way line" divides the pitch in two. The half which a team defends is commonly referred to as being their half. Players have to be located within their own half at a kick-off and may not be penalised as being offside in their own half. The intersections between the half-way line and the touchline can be indicated with flags like those marking the corners – the laws consider this as an optional feature.


title: Football pitch

text: The arcs in the "corners" denote the area (within 1 yard of the corner) in which the ball has to be placed for corner kicks; opposition players have to be away during a corner, and there may be optional lines off-pitch 9.15 metres (10 yards) away from the corner arc on the goal- and touch-lines to help gauge these distances.


title: Football pitch

text: Grass is the normal surface of play, although artificial turf may sometimes be used especially in locations where maintenance of grass may be difficult due to inclement weather. This may include areas where it is very wet, causing the grass to deteriorate rapidly; where it is very dry, causing the grass to die; and where the turf is under heavy use. Artificial turf pitches are also increasingly common in the Nordic countries, due to the amount of snow during the winter months. The strain put on grass pitches by the cold climate and subsequent snow clearing has necessitated the installation of artificial turf in the stadia of many top-tier clubs in Norway, Sweden and Finland. The latest artificial surfaces use rubber crumbs, as opposed to the previous system of sand infill. Some leagues and football associations have specifically prohibited artificial surfaces due to injury concerns and require teams' home stadia to have grass pitches. All artificial turf has to be green and also meet the requirements specified in the FIFA Quality Concept for Football Turf.


title: Football pitch

text: Football can also be played on a dirt or gravel field. In most parts of the world dirt is used only for casual recreational play.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: A Cure for Wellness is a 2016 psychological neo-gothic horror film directed by Gore Verbinski and written by Justin Haythe, based on a story co-written by Haythe and Verbinski, who were both inspired by Thomas Mann's 1924 novel "The Magic Mountain". Starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs and Mia Goth, the plot follows a young executive who is sent to retrieve his company's CEO from a mysterious rehabilitation center in the Swiss Alps.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: An international co-production based in the United States, Germany, and Luxembourg, the film was shot on location at various German locations, including Hohenzollern Castle in Baden-Württemberg.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: The film was released on February 17, 2017 by 20th Century Fox and received generally mixed reviews from critics, who praised its visuals, cinematography, performances and ambition, but criticized its length, script and narrative. It grossed $26 million against its $40 million production budget, making it a box-office bomb. The film marked Lisa Banes' final feature film role before her death in June 2021.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: Lockhart, an executive at a financial services firm in New York City, is sent by the board of directors to retrieve CEO Roland Pembroke, who had abruptly decided to stay at a "wellness center" in the Swiss Alps. At the spa, Lockhart is met with resistance by the staff and Dr. Heinreich Volmer in attempting to speak with Pembroke.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: Lockhart leaves, but is involved in a car accident and awakens at the center – supposedly three days later – with his leg in a plaster cast. In spite of the horrendous accident, both he and the driver suffered only minor injuries. Lockhart meets a mysterious young girl named Hannah who, among others, doses herself with a mysterious fluid from small, cobalt-colored bottles.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: Patient Victoria Watkins and residents of the nearby town regale a fascinated Lockhart with the history of the spa. It was built on the ruins of a castle owned 200 years ago by a baron, who desired an heir of pure blood and married his sister. Learning she was infertile, he performed hellish experiments on the peasants to find a cure. He succeeded, but after finding the carelessly buried bodies of his victims, the peasants stormed the castle and set it on fire. They captured the baron's pregnant sister and the baby was cut from her womb before she was burned. The baby was thrown into the local aquifer, but somehow survived.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: Lockhart attempts to escape the center but finds no one is allowed to leave. After gifting Hannah a ballerina figurine, Lockhart bikes into town with her help, leaving her in a bar and seeking out a translator for Pembroke's German medical dossier. He learns that the people of the spa suffer from dehydration despite the water they imbibe from the aquifer. Hannah, kept at the spa her entire life, explores the bar and attracts the locals’ attention. Lockhart returns and gets into a fight with a man who was dancing with Hannah. He is rescued by Dr. Volmer, by whom the locals are curiously cowed.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: Lockhart discovers the transfusion wing of the spa is a front for macabre medical experiments, and that the water from the local aquifer possesses unique properties – toxic to humans, but with life-restoring properties for the eels living in the water. The baron had devised a process to filter the water through the bodies of humans and distill it into a life-giving essence; Volmer uses the patients as filters for this process.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: This "cure" is ingested by Hannah, Volmer, and his staff to gain vastly lengthened lifespans. Lockhart realizes that his leg is not broken and he is being kept prisoner. Volmer subjects Lockhart to nightmarish treatments, warping his mind until he believes he is insane. Hannah perceives this change and gives Lockhart back the ballerina figurine, breaking him out of his delirium.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: Hannah has her first menstruation, and Volmer marries her. During the reception, he leads her to a secret bedroom in the ruins of the castle and begins to rape her. Lockhart breaks into Volmer's office and discovers Volmer is the baron and Hannah is his daughter, the baby who was thrown into the well; both have been aging very slowly due to the "cure". Spurred by this information, Lockhart confronts Volmer in the bedroom.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: In the ensuing fight, Volmer's face is revealed to be a mask hiding his hideous burns. Lockhart sets Volmer and the castle on fire, but is overpowered by Volmer. Hannah saves Lockhart by killing her father, who falls into the aquifer and is eaten by the eels. Lockhart and Hannah escape on her bicycle as fire engulfs the center, and crash into a car carrying Lockhart's employers, having come to retrieve him and Pembroke. Lockhart tells his employers that Pembroke died, and is ordered into the car. Ignoring their demands and muttering he feels better, he rides away with Hannah, eerily smiling as they finally escape the asylum.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: The screenplay for "A Cure for Wellness" was written by Justin Haythe, and based on a story conceived by Haythe and Verbinski, who were both inspired by the 1924 Thomas Mann novel "The Magic Mountain". The central plot of Mann's novel also involves a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps. Verbinski and Haythe also state that the movie took visual and tonal inspiration from Silent era expressionist films and Universal Classic Monsters films, as well as the 1987, 1990, and 2010 films "Hellraiser", "Jacob's Ladder", and "Shutter Island" and the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Guillermo del Toro, namely "The Dunwich Horror", "Re-Animator", "Cronos", "The Devil's Backbone", and "Pan's Labyrinth".


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: The film's leads, Dane DeHaan and Mia Goth, were announced in April 2015, Jason Isaacs was added to the cast that June.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: Principal photography for the film began on June 22, 2015 and took place mainly at Babelsberg Studio (co-producer) in Potsdam, Germany.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: Another great part of the film was shot at Hohenzollern Castle, in the German municipality of Bisingen. Eve Stewart, the set designer, stated that the castle was chosen out of a group of German castles because "rather than looking initially frightening, [it] gave the impression of being a sort of sanctuary from modern life that we’d all like to get to." The castle was closed to the public for filming from July 13 to July 24, 2015. Aside from Hohenzollern, parts of the film were also shot in Saxony-Anhalt and Zella-Mehlis, Germany. An abandoned hospital in Beelitz-Heilstätten, Germany, served as a location for many of the hospital interiors. The film received funds of €8.1 million, from the German Federal Film Fund (DFFF), as well as €500,000 from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: Benjamin Wallfisch composed the score for the film, with music conductor Gavin Greenaway and performed by Chamber Orchestra of London in Abbey Road Studio.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: The water tank scenes took two weeks to film. DeHaan and the director communicated through an intercom, and DeHaan wore a buoyancy and body-positioning waist harness connected with wires and an oxygen tank.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: Verbinski and the crew used a rubber drill in the scene where Dr. Brennan, the facility's dentist, drills through Mr. Lockhart's healthy tooth without anesthesia. According to DeHaan, he was genuinely nervous and his reaction was used in the filming. Verbinski stated that the scene had compositing, and DeHaan stated there was no outright CGI. DeHaan filmed the scene while wearing a dental gag and strapped to the chair.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: In the car crash scene, DeHaan was placed into a harness inside a device described by Bryan Alexander of "USA Today" as being similar to a rotisserie before being tossed around. DeHaan stated that he experienced his sole filming injury there, in which his arm was dislocated from and then relocated into the socket in its shoulder.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: The German actors used in the scene in which Lockhart is assaulted by elderly people had no prior experience in film acting. Alexander wrote that this scene "wasn't as torturous as it appears."


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: "A Cure for Wellness" was scored by Benjamin Wallfisch and recorded at Abbey Roads Studios in London. It was released by Milan Records on February 17, 2017. The soundtrack album consists of the film's score plus a stripped-down version of a Ramones song "I Wanna be Sedated" which is performed by Mirel Wagner.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: The film premiered at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas on December 10, 2016, as part of the Butt-Numb-A-Thon Film Festival. It subsequently received a theatrical release in the United States on February 17, 2017, by 20th Century Fox, after initially being slated for a September 23, 2016 release date.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: In the United States, 20th Century Fox premiered a 40-second exclusive commercial during the 51st Super Bowl on February 5, 2017, which resembled a medication advertisement. An article in "Vulture" reviewed the television commercial, which noted: "This spot that aired during the Super Bowl tonight may have tricked you into thinking you were just watching a regular commercial for some terrible new medication, probably not approved by the FDA. But it turned out you were watching a trailer for a new supernatural horror film."


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: Two days before the film's U.S. premiere, "The New York Times" reported that 20th Century Fox had created a group of fake news sites as part of a viral marketing campaign for "A Cure for Wellness". The film trailer also gained media attention for showing a scene where Mia Goth was in a bathtub full of eels.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: "A Cure for Wellness" grossed $8.1 million in the United States and Canada and $18.4 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $26.5 million, against a production budget of $40 million.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: In the United States and Canada, the film was initially projected to gross $6–8 million from about 2,700 theaters in its opening weekend. However, after making just $300,000 from Thursday night previews and $1.5 million on its first day, weekend projections were lowered to $4 million. It ended up debuting to $4.2 million, finishing 10th at the box office.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: After dropping to $1.4 million in its second weekend, the film was pulled from 97.8% of theaters (2,704 to 88), the largest such drop by percentage ever and at the time the second largest (now fifth) third-week theater drop by number of screens in history.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: "A Cure for Wellness" received mixed reviews from critics, with praise for its visuals, cinematography, performances and ambition, but criticism for its length, plot and structure. Critics have noted the film's Lovecraftian elements. On the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 42% based on 214 reviews, with an average rating of 5.30/10. The site's critical consensus reads, ""A Cure for Wellness" boasts a surfeit of visual style, but it's wasted on a derivative and predictable story whose twists, turns, and frights have all been more effectively dealt before." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 47 out of 100, based on 40 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: A.O. Scott of "The New York Times" compared the film to works by Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro, adding: "It’s all in good fun, really, though two and a half hours may be more of this kind of fun than a body can stand. You might feel like you’re in the company of a manic cinephile friend breathlessly recounting his favorite movie scenes in no particular order. You admire his devotion, his taste and his scholarship, but in the end the experience is probably more satisfying for him than it is for you." Justin Chang of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote that the film's first hour "sustains a creepy, clammy tension that draws you along without quite accelerating into outright terror," but concluding: "The terrors we see in "A Cure for Wellness" are never as scary as they are beautiful, but they are never so beautiful as they are arbitrary." Andrew Lapin of National Public Radio wrote that DeHaan's "disarmingly boyish face instantly gives us the impression of someone out of his element", but felt the film was derivative and overly long.


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: "The New Republic"s Josephine Livingstone criticized the film's conclusion: "The poor ending is a great shame. For Verbinski calls upon a great pantheon of stories in order to talk about daddy issues, yes, but more importantly to talk about capitalism. In the movie, two strains of moneymaking compete. Financial services go up against the wellness industry in a fully binaristic duel: city versus mountaintop, suit versus white coat, aggression versus docility. Both industries exploit those they profit from, and "A Cure for Wellness" is at its best when showing how contemporary philosophies of “health and wealth” are, at base, all the same old sin." Moira Macdonald of "The Seattle Times" was critical of the film's runtime, noting: "If Verbinski could have trimmed about an hour from the film (which weighs in at a portly 146 minutes), he might have had something... [it] looks terrific — clearly money was spent on production values, which is always a pleasant surprise in a non-franchise film...And the first half of the film nicely creates a squirmy, elegant tension." Tim Holland of "TV Guide" awarded the film three out of five stars, writing:


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: Writing for "TheWrap", Alonso Duralde praised the film's production design but criticized its narrative, saying: "While the movie is about people who are happy to remain removed from the world, not realizing that they are involved in something truly dreadful, many viewers will be all too willing to head for the exits."


title: A Cure for Wellness

text: The film was released on Blu-ray and DVD in North America by 20th Century Fox on June 6, 2017. The Blu-ray release features a deleted sequence, featurettes, and theatrical trailers as bonus materials, as well as digital and DVD copies.


title: John Wall

text: Johnathan Hildred Wall Jr. (born September 6, 1990) is an American professional basketball player for the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). A Raleigh, North Carolina native, Wall was chosen with the first overall pick of the 2010 NBA draft by the Washington Wizards after playing one year of college basketball for the Kentucky Wildcats. Wall, who plays the point guard position, was a five-time NBA All-Star from 2014 to 2018 and was named to the All-NBA Team in 2017. However, he experienced multiple injuries in 2019 and missed more than two years of basketball before being traded to the Houston Rockets in December 2020.


title: John Wall

text: Wall was born on September 6, 1990 to Frances Pulley and John Carroll Wall Sr. When he was a year old, his father, who had previously served time in prison for second-degree murder, was convicted of armed robbery. Wall Sr. was released from prison on August 24, 1999, but died of liver cancer a month later at age 52. Wall's older half-brother, John Carroll Wall Jr., promised at their father's funeral to take care of the family, but was incarcerated the next year and released in 2018.


title: John Wall

text: Throughout Wall's childhood, his mother worked multiple jobs to support him, his sister, Cierra, and his half-sister, Tonya.


title: John Wall

text: The death of his father caused Wall to frequently reject the authority of adults and act up, occasionally fighting, mostly in middle school. He was cited for breaking and entering as a teenager.


title: John Wall

text: Wall played his first two years of high school basketball at Garner Magnet High School in Garner, North Carolina. After his second season, his family moved to Raleigh, where he repeated his sophomore year at Needham B. Broughton High School. Despite having a very impressive tryout, Wall was cut from the school's varsity team for attitude-related issues. For this reason, he transferred to Word of God Christian Academy, also in Raleigh. It was there that Wall set about the reform of his attitude and related issues. Coach Levi Beckwith worked with Wall, first to stop demeaning his teammates for missed layups, and later to improve his facial expressions and general demeanor.


title: John Wall

text: On the heels of his second sophomore year of high school, in the summer of 2007, Wall was invited to the prestigious Reebok All-American Camp in Philadelphia; there, he distinguished himself by scoring 28 points against a team that featured future lottery pick Brandon Jennings.


title: John Wall

text: In 2008, Wall played in the Elite 24 Hoops Classic, at which he scored 10 points and won co-MVP honors alongside Dominic Cheek, Maalik Wayns, and Lance Stephenson.


title: John Wall

text: As a fifth-year senior in 2009, Wall averaged 19.7 points, 9 assists, and over 8 rebounds for Word of God Christian Academy and was ranked one of the best high school basketball players in the class of that year. He led the Holy Rams basketball team all the way to the North Carolina Class 1A state championship; they were ultimately defeated by United Faith Christian Academy 56–53, but not before that school's Ian Miller hit a 40 foot game-clinching jump shot at the buzzer. Wall scored 11 points in the contest. He was selected to participate in the 2009 Nike Hoop Summit in Portland, Oregon; he scored 13 points to go along with 11 assists and 5 steals at the high-profile event. He was also selected to play in the Jordan Brand Classic that year at Madison Square Garden, where he notched 6 assists.


title: John Wall

text: Originally recruited by the University of Kentucky, Duke University, Georgia Tech, and University of Kansas, Wall announced his commitment to attend the University of Kentucky on May 19, 2009. He was suspended by the NCAA from Kentucky's first exhibition game and first regular season game for travel benefits he received from his AAU coach Brian Clifton, a certified agent at the time. In his first action as a Wildcat, in an exhibition game against Clarion University of Pennsylvania, the freshman point guard led his team to victory with 27 points and 9 assists in 28 minutes of playing time. In his collegiate debut at Kentucky versus Miami University, Wall made the game-winning shot with .5 seconds left on the clock to help then #5 ranked Kentucky win. He finished with 19 points, 2 rebounds, 5 assists, and 3 steals.


title: John Wall

text: On December 29, 2009, against Hartford, Wall set the Kentucky single-game assist record with 16, 11 in the first half, with only 1 turnover. The mark was previously held by Travis Ford, at 15, and was broken on Ford's 40th birthday. Wall scored 9 points, failing to break double digits for the first time in his college career.


title: John Wall

text: Because Wall was a fifth-year high school senior in 2009 and would turn 19 by the end of the year, some sources argued that he would be eligible for the 2009 NBA draft. League rules stated that American players must turn 19 during the year of the draft and be a year removed from their regular high school class. NBA spokesman Tim Frank told sportswriter Chad Ford that the league was not sure whether Wall met the second criterion, and that league officials would need to "do [their] due diligence to determine his eligibility". Wall announced in April 2009 that he was not entering the 2009 NBA draft, where he was expected to be the first player taken, and would attend Kentucky instead.


title: John Wall

text: On April 7, 2010, Wall announced that he would forgo his final three seasons of collegiate eligibility and enter the 2010 NBA draft, where he was expected to be the first overall selection for the Washington Wizards. On May 3, Wall signed with agent Dan Fegan.


title: John Wall

text: On June 23, 2010, Reebok revealed Wall as its latest signing, casting him as the face of its latest basketball shoe, the ZigTech Slash. On June 24, 2010, Wall was drafted as the first overall pick by the Wizards. On June 25, 2010, Mayor Adrian Fenty of Washington, D.C., declared June 25 John Wall Day on a plaque handed to Wall during his Wizards presser.


title: John Wall

text: Wall was named the Most Valuable Player of the 2010 Las Vegas Summer League, averaging 23.5 points, 7.8 assists, 4.0 rebounds and 2.5 steals in 32.3 minutes per game. Wall made his NBA debut in a 112–83 loss to the Orlando Magic. He had 14 points, 9 assists, and 3 steals. In his third game, his first home game, he tied a franchise record with nine steals, and became only the second player in NBA history to get nine assists or more in each of his first three games. On November 10, Wall recorded his first career triple-double with 19 points, 10 rebounds, and 13 assists to go along with 6 steals and only 1 turnover. Wall was the third youngest player to record a triple-double in NBA history. John Wall was named 2011 Rookie Game MVP during the 2011 All-Star Weekend. Wall was also named Eastern Conference Rookie of the Month from January–April and finished second in Rookie of the Year voting behind unanimous selection Blake Griffin and was named to the NBA All-Rookie First Team.


title: John Wall

text: Wall would play in and start all of the Wizards' 66 games during the 2011–12 lockout shortened season. He was selected to play in the NBA All-Star Weekend Rising Stars Challenge. He was drafted to play for Team Chuck, a mix of rookies and sophomores. Wall finished the season averaging 16.3 points, 8.0 assists, and 4.5 rebounds per game.


title: John Wall

text: Wall missed the beginning of the 2012–13 because of a knee injury. On January 12, he returned against the Atlanta Hawks, scoring 14 points in a Wizards win. On March 18, Wall was named the Eastern Conference Player of the Week for games played between March 11 and March 17. In a road game against the Los Angeles Lakers on March 22, Wall recorded 24 points and a career-high 16 assists in a win. On March 25, in a win over the Memphis Grizzlies, Wall scored a career-high 47 points to go along with 7 rebounds and 8 assists. Wall ended the season with averages of 18.5 points, 7.6 assists, and 4.0 rebounds a game.


title: John Wall

text: On July 31, 2013, Wall, labeled by the Wizards as a designated player, signed a five-year contract extension worth approximately $80 million.


title: John Wall

text: On January 22, 2014, Wall recorded his second career triple-double with 28 points, 11 rebounds and 10 assists in a 111-113 overtime loss to the Boston Celtics. On January 30, 2014, Wall was selected as an East reserve for the 2014 NBA All-Star Game, making this his first All-Star team. During All-Star weekend, he became the first in Washington franchise history to win the Slam Dunk Contest after fans voted him the Dunker of the Night. His final dunk was a reverse slam assisted by the Wizards' mascot. On February 27, 2014, Wall had 31 points and 9 assists as the Wizards won a triple overtime game against the Raptors 134-129. It was the franchise's first triple-overtime game since 1975. On March 1, 2014, Wall recorded a then career-high 16 assists, along with 17 points, 3 rebounds, and 2 steals, in a 122-103 victory over the Philadelphia 76ers.


title: John Wall

text: Wall averaged 19.3 points, 8.8 assists, and 4.1 rebounds on the season as the Wizards finished as the fifth seed in the East and qualified for the playoffs for the first time in six years. They went on to defeat the Chicago Bulls 4 games to 1 in their first round playoff match-up. After defeating the Bulls, Wall and the Wizards lost in the second round to the Indiana Pacers in 6 games.


title: John Wall

text: On December 8, 2014, Wall recorded 26 points, 7 rebounds, 3 steals and a then career-high 17 assists in a 133–132 double-overtime win over the Boston Celtics. Following the game, Wall dedicated the win to his close friend, six-year-old Damiyah Telemaque-Nelson, who had died of cancer earlier that day. When asked by a reporter "She meant a lot to you, didn't she?", he broke down and started to cry. He later gave her family all of his gear that he wore that night, including his shoes which had Damiyah's name on them. He went on to tie his career-high of 17 assists, along with 21 points, on December 16 in a 109–95 win over the Minnesota Timberwolves. On January 22, 2015, he was named an Eastern Conference starter for the 2015 NBA All-Star Game, earning his first starting gig after garnering 886,368 votes.


title: John Wall

text: On March 14, 2015, Wall tied his season-high of 31 points while adding 12 assists in a 113–97 win over the Sacramento Kings. On April 3, he recorded 6 points and a then career-high 18 assists in a 101–87 win over the New York Knicks. On April 21, he recorded a Wizards playoff franchise record for assists with 17 as the Wizards defeated the Toronto Raptors 117–106 to take a 2–0 lead in their first-round playoff series. The Wizards went on to win the series with a 4–0 sweep, but lost their second-round series to the Atlanta Hawks in six games.


title: John Wall

text: After starting the 2015–16 season with six wins over the first 10 games, the Wizards went on a four-game losing streak between November 24 and November 28. Wall averaged 15.0 points, 5.5 assists and 2.3 steals per game over that losing stretch, and shot just 33.3% from the field. On December 1, Wall recorded a then season-high 35 points, 10 assists and 5 steals in a 97–85 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers, breaking the Cavaliers 9–0 unbeaten streak at home to begin the season, and broke the Wizards' four-game losing streak. Following the win over the Cavaliers, Wall stated "Every team is trying to make me make jump shots this year, so I was just being aggressive and getting to the basket. I got into a rhythm early and it helped us get going." Wall's shooting percentage over the first 14 games of the season was a career worst (.390), as was his 16.1 point average. The next day, in a loss to the Los Angeles Lakers, Wall recorded his first career back-to-back 30-point, 10-assist game, finishing the game with 34 points and 11 assists.


title: John Wall

text: On December 21, Wall recorded 12 points and a career-high 19 assists in a 113–99 win over the Sacramento Kings. On December 30, in a loss to the Toronto Raptors, Wall recorded his seventh straight double-double and 17th of the season. He averaged 22.6 points and 11.7 assists in 16 December games. He subsequently earned NBA Eastern Conference Player of the Month honors for December. On January 16, he recorded a season-high 36 points, 13 assists and 7 steals against the Boston Celtics, but missed a potential tying layup at the buzzer, as the Wizards were defeated 119–117. He topped his season-high mark on February 3, scoring 41 points in a 134–121 loss to the Golden State Warriors. Two days later, he recorded his fourth career triple-double with 18 points, a career-high 13 rebounds and 10 assists in a 106–94 win over the Philadelphia 76ers. On February 23, he recorded his second triple-double of the season and fifth of his career with 16 points, 12 rebounds and 11 assists in a 109–89 win over the New Orleans Pelicans. On March 16, he recorded his third triple-double of the season with 29 points, 12 assists and 10 rebounds in a 117–96 win over the Chicago Bulls. The next day, he recorded his second straight triple-double with 16 points, 14 assists and 13 rebounds in a 99–94 win over the Philadelphia 76ers.


title: John Wall

text: Following off-season surgery on both knees, Wall was rested in the second of back-to-back night games early on in the 2016–17 season, as a way of limiting his minutes. With eight assists against the Houston Rockets on November 7, Wall broke Wes Unseld's franchise record (3,822) for career assists. On November 21, he recorded 18 points, a then season-high 15 assists and three blocked shots in a 106–101 win over the Phoenix Suns. By late November, his minutes restriction was lifted. On December 6, he scored a career-high 52 points in a 124–116 loss to the Orlando Magic. He made 18-of-31 from the field and added eight assists. With seven steals against the Charlotte Hornets on December 14, Wall became Washington's franchise leader in steals, surpassing Greg Ballard (762). On December 26, he had 18 points and a then season-high 16 assists in a 107–102 win over the Milwaukee Bucks. On January 2, 2017, he was named Eastern Conference Player of the Week for games played Monday, December 26 through Sunday, January 1. He led the Wizards to a 3–0 week while averaging 24.3 points (eighth in the East), an NBA-leading 13.0 assists, 5.3 rebounds and 2.67 steals (second in the East). A day later, he was named Eastern Conference Player of the Month for December.


title: John Wall

text: On January 6, 2017, Wall recorded 18 points and a season-high 18 assists in a 112–105 win over the Minnesota Timberwolves. Later that month, he was named an Eastern Conference All-Star reserve for the 2017 NBA All-Star Game. On February 28, 2017, he tied his career high with 19 assists in a 112–108 win over the Golden State Warriors. On March 11, 2017, he scored 39 points in a 125–124 overtime win over the Portland Trail Blazers. Two days later, he was named Eastern Conference Player of the Week for games played Monday, March 6 through Sunday, March 12. Wall led the Wizards to a 4–0 week, with all of Washington's wins coming on the road. He paced the East in scoring (29.8 ppg) and assists (11.3 apg) while adding 3.3 rebounds and 1.5 steals. On March 17, he set a new career high with 20 assists to go with 14 points in a 112–107 win over the Chicago Bulls. On April 2, Wall had 15 points and 11 assists in a 139–115 loss to Golden State. As a result, he set the single-season franchise assists record with No. 802 in the third quarter, topping Rod Strickland's 1997–98 record of 801.


title: John Wall

text: On April 16, Wall scored a playoff career-high 32 points in a 114–107 win over the Atlanta Hawks in Game 1 of their first-round series. In Game 6 of the series on April 28, Wall set a new playoff career with 42 points to help the Wizards eliminate the Hawks with a 115–99 victory, capturing the opening-round series 4–2. On May 12, he helped the Wizards avoid elimination and force a Game 7 in their second-round series against the Boston Celtics after hitting the game-winning 3-pointer with 3.5 seconds left in Game 6, lifting the Wizards to a 92–91 win. He finished the game with 26 points. The Wizards went on to lose Game 7 despite Wall's 18 points and 11 assists, as they bowed out of the playoffs with a 4–3 defeat.


title: John Wall

text: On July 26, 2017, Wall signed a four-year, $170 million contract extension with the Wizards. Wall missed nine games in late November and early December with a knee injury; the Wizards went 4–5 in that time. On January 6, he recorded 16 points and a season-high 16 assists against the Milwaukee Bucks. On January 12, he scored 30 points in a 125–119 win over the Orlando Magic, becoming the youngest player (27 years, 128 days) in franchise history to reach 10,000 points for his career. The next day, he scored 17 of his 23 points in the second half and overtime, and tied a season high with 16 assists in the Wizards' 119–113 victory over the Brooklyn Nets. On January 30, 2018, he was sidelined for the next six-to-eight weeks due to his troublesome left knee requiring surgery. He missed two months with the injury, returning to action on March 31 against the Charlotte Hornets and recording 15 points and 14 assists in a 107–93 win. On April 10, he recorded 29 points and 12 assists in a 113–101 win over the Boston Celtics, thus surpassing 5,000 career assists. In Game 3 of the Wizards' first-round playoff series against the Toronto Raptors, Wall recorded 28 points and 14 assists, as the Wizards cut the series deficit to 2–1 with a 122–103 win. In Game 4, Wall recorded 27 points and 14 assists in a 106–98 win, helping the Wizards tie the series at 2–2. The Wizards went on to lose the series in six games despite Wall's 23 points and eight assists in a 102–92 loss in Game 6.


title: John Wall

text: On November 26, 2018, in a 135–131 overtime win over the Houston Rockets, Wall passed Wes Unseld for third place on the franchise career scoring list. On December 16, he recorded 40 points and 14 assists in a 128–110 win over the Los Angeles Lakers. On December 29, he was ruled out for the rest of the season with a left heel injury. After initially undergoing season-ending surgery on his left heel in January 2019, Wall developed an infection in the incision from that surgery, then suffered a ruptured left Achilles tendon when he slipped and fell in his home. He was subsequently ruled out for 12 months.


title: John Wall

text: On March 11, 2020, the 2019–20 NBA season was suspended as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the season resuming in July at the NBA Bubble in Orlando, Florida, which exceeded Wall's 12-month timetable of recovery, he did not travel with the Wizards, officially ending his season.


title: John Wall

text: On December 2, 2020, Wall, along with a 2023 lottery-protected first-round pick, were traded to the Houston Rockets for Russell Westbrook. On March 22, 2021, Wall logged his eighth career triple-double with 19 points, 11 rebounds and 10 assists in a 117–99 win over the Toronto Raptors, ending the team's 20-game losing streak. It was his first triple-double since 2016. On April 26, Wall was ruled out for the remainder of the season after suffering a grade 2 hamstring strain.


title: John Wall

text: In 2021–22, Wall and the Rockets reached a mutual decision for him not to play, as the team was rebuilding and developing young guards Kevin Porter Jr. and Jalen Green. On June 28, 2022, Wall and the Rockets reached a contract buyout agreement.


title: John Wall

text: On July 8, 2022, Wall signed with the Los Angeles Clippers. Wall made his preseason debut with the Clippers on October 3, putting up five points, one rebound, and three assists in a 102–97 win over the Portland Trail Blazers. He made his regular season debut with the Clippers on October 20, where he put up fifteen points, four rebounds, and three assists in a 103–97 win over the Los Angeles Lakers.


title: John Wall

text: In July 2014, Wall was selected as a member of the United States camp roster to compete for the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup team. Due to off-season knee surgery, Wall withdrew his name from consideration for USA Basketball's 2016 Rio Olympics team.


title: John Wall

text: Wall is known for being one of the NBA's fastest players. His results at the draft combine of 10.84 seconds in the lane agility drill (combine best that year) and 3.14 seconds in the 3/4 court sprint (second-best that year), demonstrating horizontal and vertical quickness. Despite only being a point guard-average listed height in shoes and barefoot, Wall has a wingspan, slightly larger than the average for a point guard.


title: John Wall

text: Relying on his speed, Wall focuses on driving to the basket and sparking fast transition play. He is also a skilled passer, averaging over 10 assists a game for the 2014 through 2017 seasons, and 9.2 overall for his career. In the earlier stages of his time in the NBA, Wall was criticized for the amount of turnovers he committed, being dubbed "very turnover prone". While increasing his assist to turnover ratio in later years, Wall's TOPG has increased to 4.1, his mark at the conclusion of the 2017 season. Despite Wall's shooting percentages hovering slightly below league average except for free throw shooting (League average is .458/.364/.765 while Wall shoots .433/.321/.790), he has seen his shooting largely improve throughout his NBA career.


title: John Wall

text: In 2013, after signing a five-year contract with the Wizards, Wall purchased a home in Potomac for $4.9 million. The two-acre property, which has eight bedrooms, six garages, and 17,980 square feet, was selected to accommodate Wall's mother, siblings, and guests.


title: John Wall

text: In 2016, Wall received the Stewart B. McKinney Award for his work to end homelessness after he donated $400,000 to Bright Beginnings.


title: John Wall

text: Wall signed a five-year endorsement deal worth $25 million with Reebok in 2010, then moved to Reebok's parent company Adidas in 2013. He signed another five-year deal with Adidas in 2018. In May 2017, Wall signed on as a brand ambassador for New Era caps.


title: John Wall

text: Wall apologized via Twitter in September 2020 after a video surfaced on social media of him using Bloods gang signs and displaying a red bandana to the camera.


title: Escape from New York

text: Escape from New York is a 1981 American science fiction action film co-written, co-scored and directed by John Carpenter. It stars Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence, Isaac Hayes, Adrienne Barbeau, and Harry Dean Stanton.


title: Escape from New York

text: The film's storyline, set in the near-future world of 1997, concerns a crime-ridden United States, which has converted Manhattan Island in New York City into the country's sole maximum-security prison. Air Force One is hijacked by anti-government insurgents who deliberately crash it into the walled borough. Ex-soldier and current federal prisoner Snake Plissken (Russell) is given just 24 hours to go in and rescue the President of the United States, after which, if successful, he will be pardoned.


title: Escape from New York

text: Carpenter wrote the film in the mid-1970s in reaction to the Watergate scandal. After the success of "Halloween" (1978), he had enough influence to begin production and filmed it mainly in St. Louis, Missouri, on an estimated budget of $6 million. Debra Hill and Larry J. Franco served as the producers. The film was co-written by Nick Castle, who had collaborated with Carpenter by portraying Michael Myers in "Halloween".


title: Escape from New York

text: Released in the United States on July 10, 1981, the film received positive reviews from critics and was a commercial success, grossing more than $25.2 million at the box office. The film was nominated for four Saturn Awards, including Best Science Fiction Film and Best Direction. The film became a cult classic and was followed by a sequel, "Escape from L.A." (1996), which was also directed and written by Carpenter and starred Russell.


title: Escape from New York

text: In a dystopian 1988, amidst total war against an alliance of China and the Soviet Union, the United States government has turned Manhattan into a giant maximum-security prison to deal with a 400% increase in crime. A wall surrounds the island, bridges have been mined, rivers are patrolled by helicopters and all prisoners unlucky to be alive are sentenced to life terms in Manhattan.


title: Escape from New York

text: In 1997, while flying President John Harker to a peace summit in Hartford, Air Force One is hijacked by a guerrilla fighter of the "National Liberation Front of America" (named in reference to the Viet Cong) posing as the stewardess. Unable to regain control, Secret Service agents attach a tracking device to the President's arm and handcuff him to a briefcase of sensitive documents before putting him in the plane's escape pod. The aircraft crashes while the pod is ejected.


title: Escape from New York

text: Police are dispatched to rescue the President. Romero, the right-hand man of the Duke of New York, a powerful crime boss, shows them a severed finger with the President's signet ring and warns that he will be killed if any further rescue attempts are made. Meanwhile, former Special Forces soldier Snake Plissken is about to be sent into Manhattan after being convicted of robbing the Federal Reserve. Police Commissioner Bob Hauk offers a deal to Snake: if he rescues the President in time for the summit, Hauk will arrange a full presidential pardon. To keep Snake from going rogue, Hauk has him injected with micro-explosives that will sever his carotid arteries in 22 hours. If Snake is successful, Hauk will neutralize the explosives.


title: Escape from New York

text: Using a stealth glider to land atop the World Trade Center, Snake follows the President's tracker to a vaudeville theater only to find it on the wrist of a deluded vagrant. Convinced the President is dead, Snake radios Hauk but is told that he will be shot down if he returns without the President. Inspecting the escape pod, Snake is ambushed by dozens of starving "Crazies", and accidentally drops and destroys his radio while trying to flee. He is rescued by "Cabbie", a jovial old man who drives an armored taxi.


title: Escape from New York

text: Cabbie takes Snake to Harold "Brain" Hellman, an adviser to the Duke and a former associate of Snake's. Brain, a brilliant engineer, has established a small gasoline refinery, fueling the city's remaining cars and tells Snake that the Duke plans to lead a mass escape across the Queensboro Bridge by using the President as a human shield and following a landmine map that Brain has drawn up. Snake forces Brain and his girlfriend Maggie to lead him to the Duke's hideout at Grand Central Terminal. Snake finds the President but gets shot in the leg with a crossbow bolt and overpowered by the Duke's men.


title: Escape from New York

text: While Snake is forced to fight against Duke's champion Slag in a deathmatch, Brain and Maggie kill Romero and flee with the President. Snake kills Slag and finds Brain, Maggie and the President at the top of the World Trade Center trying to escape in the glider. The inmates drop it off the roof, so the group returns to street level and encounters Cabbie who offers to take them across the bridge. Cabbie reveals that he bartered with Romero for the contents of the briefcase: a cassette tape which contains information about nuclear fusion, intended to be an international peace offering. The President demands the tape but Snake claims it.


title: Escape from New York

text: The Duke pursues them onto the bridge in his customized Cadillac, setting off mines as he tries to catch up. Brain guides Snake but they hit a mine and Cabbie is killed. As they continue on foot, Brain accidentally stumbles into another mine. A distraught Maggie sacrifices herself to slow down the Duke. Snake and the President reach the containment wall and guards hoist the President up. The Duke opens fire with Snake's MAC-10, killing the guards before Snake subdues him. He attempts to shoot Snake as he is being lifted up by the rope but the President takes up a dead guard's rifle, violently guns down the Duke and hoists Snake to safety. Hauk's doctor saves Snake's life with just seconds to spare.


title: Escape from New York

text: As the President prepares for a televised speech to the leaders at the summit meeting, he thanks Snake and tells him that he can have anything he wants. Snake then asks how he feels about the people who died saving his life. The President offers only half-hearted regret and lip service for their sacrifice, and Snake walks away in disgust. An impressed Hauk offers him a job as his deputy but Snake just keeps walking. The President's live speech commences and he plays the cassette tape. To his embarrassment, it only plays Cabbie's favorite song, "Bandstand Boogie". As Snake walks away a free man, he tears the magnetic strip out of the real tape.


title: Escape from New York

text: In addition, frequent Carpenter collaborators Nancy Stephens appeared as the "Hijacker" and Buck Flower appeared as the "Drunk with the president's tracker", respectively, while then-active professional wrestler


title: Escape from New York

text: Ox Baker played "Slag". The narrator was voiced by an uncredited Jamie Lee Curtis. Actor Joe Unger filmed scenes as Snake's partner-in-crime Bill Taylor, but they were cut from the final film.


title: Escape from New York

text: Carpenter originally wrote the screenplay for "Escape from New York" in 1976, in the aftermath of Nixon's Watergate scandal. Carpenter said, "The whole feeling of the nation was one of real cynicism about the president." He wrote the screenplay, but no studio wanted to make it because, according to Carpenter, "[i]t was too violent, too scary, [and] too weird". He had been inspired by the film "Death Wish", which was very popular at the time. He did not agree with this film's philosophy, but liked how it conveyed "the sense of New York as a kind of jungle, and I wanted to make a science-fiction film along these lines".


title: Escape from New York

text: International Film Investors agreed to provide 50% of the budget, and Goldcrest Films signed a co-financing deal with them. They ended up providing £720,000 of the budget and making a profit of £672,000 from their investment after earning £1,392,000.


title: Escape from New York

text: AVCO Embassy Pictures, the film's financial backer, preferred either Charles Bronson or Tommy Lee Jones to play the role of Snake Plissken to Carpenter's choice of Kurt Russell, who was trying to overcome the "lightweight" screen image conveyed by his roles in several Disney comedies. Carpenter refused to cast Bronson on the grounds that he was too old, and because he worried that he could lose directorial control over the film with an experienced actor. At the time, Russell described his character as "a mercenary, and his style of fighting is a combination of Bruce Lee, The Exterminator, and Darth Vader, with Eastwood's vocal-ness." All that matters to Snake, according to the actor, is "the next 60 seconds. Living for exactly that next minute is all there is." Russell used a rigorous diet and exercise program to develop a lean and muscular build. He also endeavored to stay in character between takes and throughout the shooting, as he welcomed the opportunity to get away from the Disney comedies he had done previously. He did find it necessary to remove the eyepatch between takes, as wearing it constantly seriously affected his depth perception.


title: Escape from New York

text: Carpenter had just made "Dark Star", but no one wanted to hire him as a director, so he assumed he would make it in Hollywood as a screenwriter. The filmmaker went on to do other films with the intention of making "Escape" later. After the success of "Halloween", Avco-Embassy signed producer Debra Hill and him to a two-picture deal. The first film from this contract was "The Fog". Initially, the second film he was going to make to finish the contract was "The Philadelphia Experiment", but because of script-writing problems, Carpenter rejected it in favor of this project. However, Carpenter felt something was missing and recalls, "This was basically a straight action film. And at one point, I realized it really doesn't have this kind of crazy humor that people from New York would expect to see." He brought in Nick Castle, a friend from his film-school days at University of Southern California, who played "The Shape" in "Halloween". Castle invented the Cabbie character and came up with the film's ending.


title: Escape from New York

text: The film's setting proved to be a potential problem for Carpenter, who needed to create a decaying, semi-destroyed version of New York City on a shoestring budget. The film's production designer Joe Alves and he rejected shooting on location in New York City because it would be too hard to make it look like a destroyed city. Carpenter suggested shooting on a movie back lot, but Alves nixed that idea "because the texture of a real street is not like a back lot." They sent Barry Bernardi, their location manager (and associate producer), "on a sort of all-expense-paid trip across the country looking for the worst city in America," producer Debra Hill remembers.


title: Escape from New York

text: Bernardi suggested East St. Louis, Illinois because it was filled with old buildings "that exist in New York now, and [that] have that seedy run-down quality" that the team was looking for. East St. Louis, sitting across the Mississippi River from the more prosperous St. Louis, Missouri, had entire neighborhoods burned out in 1976 during a massive urban fire. Hill said in an interview, "block after block was burnt-out rubble. In some places, there was absolutely nothing, so that you could see three and four blocks away." Also, Alves found an old bridge to serve as the "69th St. Bridge". The filmmaker purchased the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge for one dollar from the government and then gave it back to them, for the same amount, once production was completed, "so that they wouldn't have any liability," Hill remembers. Locations across the river in St. Louis were used, including Union Station and the Fox Theatre, both of which have since been renovated, as well as the building that would eventually become the Schlafly Tap Room microbrewery.


title: Escape from New York

text: Carpenter and his crew persuaded the city to shut off the electricity to 10 blocks at a time at night. The film was shot from August to November 1980. It was a tough and demanding shoot for the filmmaker as he recalls. "We'd finish shooting at about 6 am and I'd just be going to sleep at 7 when the sun would be coming up. I'd wake up around 5 or 6 pm, depending on whether or not we had dailies, and by the time I got going, the sun would be setting. So for about two and a half months I never saw daylight, which was really strange." The gladiatorial fight to the death scene between Snake and Slag (played by professional wrestler Ox Baker) was filmed in the Grand Hall at St. Louis Union Station. Russell has stated, "That day was a nightmare. All I did was swing a [spiked] bat at that guy and get swung at in return. He threw a trash can in my face about five times ... I could have wound up in pretty bad shape." In addition to shooting on location in St. Louis, Carpenter shot parts of the film in Los Angeles. Various interior scenes were shot on a sound stage; the final scenes were shot at the Sepulveda Dam, in Sherman Oaks. New York served as a location, as did Atlanta, to use their futuristic-looking rapid-transit system (the latter scenes were cut from the final film). In New York City, Carpenter persuaded federal officials to grant access to Liberty Island. "We were the first film company in history allowed to shoot on Liberty Island at the Statue of Liberty at night. They let us have the whole island to ourselves. We were lucky. It wasn't easy to get that initial permission. They'd had a bombing three months earlier and were worried about trouble".


title: Escape from New York

text: Carpenter was interested in creating two distinct looks for the movie. "One is the police state, high tech, lots of neon, a United States dominated by underground computers. That was easy to shoot compared to the Manhattan Island prison sequences, which had few lights, mainly torch lights, like feudal England". Certain matte paintings were rendered by James Cameron, who was at the time a special-effects artist with Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Cameron was also one of the directors of photography on the film. As Snake pilots the glider into the city, three screens on his control panel display wireframe animations of the landing target on the World Trade Center and surrounding buildings. Carpenter wanted high-tech computer graphics, which were very expensive, even for such a simple animation. The effects crew filmed the miniature model set of New York City they used for other scenes under black light, with reflective tape placed along every edge of the model buildings. Only the tape is visible and appears to be a three-dimensional wireframe animation.


title: Escape from New York

text: "Escape from New York" was released on LaserDisc 10 times between 1983 and 1998. A 1994 Collector's Edition includes a commentary track by John Carpenter and Kurt Russell that is still included on more recent DVD releases of the film.


title: Escape from New York

text: "Escape from New York" was released on DVD twice by MGM (USA), and once by Momentum Pictures (UK). One MGM release is a barebones edition containing just the theatrical trailer. Another version is the Collector's Edition, a two-disc set featuring a high definition remastered transfer with a 5.1 stereo audio track, two commentaries (one by John Carpenter and Kurt Russell, another by producer Debra Hill and Joe Alves), a making-of featurette, the first issue of a comic book series titled "John Carpenter's Snake Plissken Chronicles", and the 10-minute Colorado bank robbery deleted opening sequence.


title: Escape from New York

text: MGM's special edition of the 1981 film was not released until 2003 because the original negative had gone missing. The workprint containing deleted scenes finally turned up in the Hutchinson, Kansas, salt-mine film depository. The excised scenes feature Snake Plissken robbing a bank, introducing the character of Plissken and establishing a backstory. Director John Carpenter decided to add the original scenes into the special edition release as an extra only: "After we screened the rough cut, we realized that the movie didn't really start until Snake got to New York. It wasn't necessary to show what sent him there." The film has been released on the UMD format for Sony's PlayStation Portable.


title: Escape from New York

text: On August 3, 2010, MGM Home Entertainment released "Escape From New York" as a bare-bones Blu-ray. Scream Factory, in association with Shout! Factory, released the film on a special edition Blu-ray on April 21, 2015.


title: Escape from New York

text: "Escape from New York" opened in New York and Los Angeles July 10, 1981. The film grossed $25.2 million in American theaters in summer 1981.


title: Escape from New York

text: The film received generally positive reviews. "Newsweek" magazine wrote of Carpenter: "[He has a] deeply ingrained B-movie sensibility – which is both his strength and limitation. He does clean work, but settles for too little. He uses Russell well, however". In "Time" magazine, Richard Corliss wrote, "John Carpenter is offering this summer's moviegoers a rare opportunity: to escape from the air-conditioned torpor of ordinary entertainment into the hothouse humidity of their own paranoia. It's a trip worth taking". Vincent Canby, in his review for "The New York Times", wrote, "[The film] is not to be analyzed too solemnly, though. It's a toughly told, very tall tale, one of the best escape (and escapist) movies of the season". On the other hand, in his negative review for the "Chicago Reader", critic Dave Kehr, wrote "it fails to satisfy – it gives us too little of too much".


title: Escape from New York

text: Christopher John reviewed "Escape from New York" in "Ares Magazine" #10 and commented that "It is solid summer entertainment of unusually high caliber. By not pretending to be more than it is, but by also not settling for any "less" than it could be, "Escape" becomes an exciting, fast-moving drama, the likes of which we haven't seen in years."


title: Escape from New York

text: On Rotten Tomatoes it received an 86% positive rating based on reviews from 66 critics, with an average score of 7.20/10. The site's critical consensus was: "Featuring an atmospherically grimy futuristic metropolis, "Escape from New York" is a strange, entertaining jumble of thrilling action and oddball weirdness". On Metacritic it has a score of 76% based on reviews from 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Escape from New York

text: Cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson credits the film as an influence on his 1984 science fiction novel "Neuromancer". "I was intrigued by the exchange in one of the opening scenes where the Warden says to Snake 'You flew the Gullfire over Leningrad, didn't you?' It turns out to be just a throwaway line, but for a moment it worked like the best SF where a casual reference can imply a lot". Popular video game director Hideo Kojima has referred to the film frequently as an influence on his work, in particular the "Metal Gear" series. Solid Snake is partially influenced by the character Snake Plissken. In "" Snake uses the alias "Pliskin" to hide his real identity during most of the game. J. J. Abrams, producer of the 2008 film "Cloverfield", mentioned that a scene in his film, which shows the head of the Statue of Liberty crashing into a New York street, was inspired by the poster for "Escape from New York". "Empire" magazine ranked Snake Plissken #29 in their "The 100 Greatest Movie Characters" poll.


title: Escape from New York

text: A sequel, "Escape from L.A.", was released in 1996, with Carpenter returning along with Russell, now also acting as producer and co-writer.


title: Escape from New York

text: A remake for "Escape from New York" began development in 2007, when New Line Cinema won the rights to remake in a bidding war. Gerard Butler was attached to play Snake Plissken, Neal H. Moritz would produce through his Original Film company, and Ken Nolan would be in charge of the screenplay. Len Wiseman was announced to direct, but was later replaced by Brett Ratner, who also stepped off the project. In April 2010, Variety reported that Breck Eisner was being looked at to direct a remake of "Escape from New York", with David Kajganich and Allan Loeb providing revisions to the script. It was later announced in 2011 that New Line had dropped the remake completely. In January 2015, 20th Century Fox purchased the remake rights, with The Picture Company producing. In March 2017, it was announced that Robert Rodriguez would direct a remake of the film with Carpenter producing it. In February 2019, it was reported that Leigh Whannell will be writing the script after "Luther" creator Neil Cross completed a recent iteration of the project. Wyatt Russell, son of Kurt, was considered to portray Snake Plissken, but he expressed no interest in playing the role, considering it "career suicide." On November 17, 2022, it was revealed that Radio Silence would be directing the film, with Andrew Rona, Alex Heineman, and Radio Silence producing, and Carpenter serving as an executive producer. They are currently searching for a writer. In December 2022, the film was confirmed to be a sequel, rather than a remake.


title: Escape from New York

text: Screen Rant announced the publication a new book on the making of the film by John Walsh entitled "" to be published on September 28, 2021 by Titan Books.


title: Escape from New York

text: In 1981, Bantam Books published a movie tie-in novelization written by Mike McQuay that adopts a lean, humorous style reminiscent of the film. The novel includes significant scenes that were cut from the film, such as the Federal Reserve Depository robbery that results in Snake's incarceration. The novel provides background on the relationship between Snake and Hauk—presenting the characters as disillusioned war veterans, and deepening the relationship that was only hinted in the film. The novel also explains how Snake lost his eye during the Battle for Leningrad in World War III, how Hauk became warden of New York, and Hauk's quest to find his crazed son, who lives somewhere in the prison. The novel gives greater detail on the world in which these characters live, at times presenting a future even bleaker than the one depicted in the film. It explains that the West Coast is a no-man's land, and the nation's population is gradually being driven insane by nerve gas as a result of World War III. The novel also clarifies that the president's plan for the cassette tape is not benevolent. Rather than presenting to the world a new energy source in the form of nuclear fusion (as claimed in the film), the tape actually reveals the successful development of a "fallout-free thermonuclear weapon, which would grant the US supremacy in the global conflict.


title: Escape from New York

text: Marvel Comics released the one-shot "The Adventures of Snake Plissken" in January 1997. The story takes place sometime between "Escape from New York" and before his famous Cleveland escape mentioned in "Escape from L.A." Snake has robbed Atlanta's Centers for Disease Control of some engineered metaviruses and is looking for buyers in Chicago. Finding himself in a deal that is really a set-up, he makes his getaway and exacts revenge on the buyer for ratting him out to the United States Police Force. In the meantime, a government lab has built a robot called ATACS (Autonomous Tracking And Combat System) that can catch criminals by imprinting their personalities upon its program to predict and anticipate a specific criminal's every move. The robot's first test subject is America's public enemy number one, Snake Plissken. After a brief battle, the tide turns when ATACS copies Snake to the point of fully becoming his personality. Now recognizing the government as the enemy, ATACS sides with Snake. Unamused, Snake sucker punches the machine and destroys it. As ATACS shuts down, it can only ask him, "Why?" Snake just walks off, answering, "I don't need the competition".


title: Escape from New York

text: In 2003, CrossGen published "John Carpenter's Snake Plissken Chronicles", a four-part comic book miniseries. The story takes place a day or so after the events of "Escape from New York". Snake has been given a military Humvee after his presidential pardon and makes his way to Atlantic City. Although the director's cut of "Escape from New York" shows Snake was caught after a bank job, this story has Snake finishing up a second heist that was planned before his capture. The job entails stealing the car in which John F. Kennedy was assassinated from a casino before delivering it to a buyer in the Gulf of Mexico. Snake partners with a man named Marrs who ends up double-crossing him. Left for dead in a sinking crab cage, Snake escapes and is saved by a passing fisherman named Captain Ron (an in-joke referring to Kurt Russell's 1992 comedy, "Captain Ron"). When Ron denies Snake's request to use his boat to beat Marrs to the robbery, Snake decides to kill him. When Snake ends up saving Ron from the Russian mob, who wants money, Ron changes his mind and helps Snake. Once at the casino, Snake comes face-to-face with Marrs and his men, who arrive at the same time, ending in a high-speed shootout. Snake gets away with the car and its actress portraying Jackie Kennedy, leaving Marrs to be caught by the casino owner, who cuts him a deal to bring his car back and live. After some trouble, Snake manages to finally get the car to the buyer's yacht, using Ron's boat, and is then attacked by Marrs. Following the firefight, the yacht and car are destroyed, Marrs and Captain Ron are dead, and Snake makes his escape in a helicopter with the 30 million credits owed to him for the job.


title: Escape from New York

text: In 2014, BOOM! Studios began publishing an "Escape from New York" comic book by writer, Christopher Sebela. The first issue of the series was released on December 3, 2014, and the story picks up moments after the end of the film.


title: Escape from New York

text: BOOM! released a crossover comics miniseries between Snake and Jack Burton titled "Big Trouble in Little China/ Escape from New York" in October 2016.


title: Escape from New York

text: An "Escape from New York" board game was released in 1981 by TSR, Inc. Another board game was crowd-funded in 2022.


title: Escape from New York

text: The plot of the film served as inspiration for the first part of the popular German video game series Gothic. In the game, the protagonist ("Nameless Hero") is sent on a secret mission to a penal colony ("Mines Colony"). This colony, separated from the outside world by a magical barrier, is used as a prison of the fictional kingdom.


title: Escape from New York

text: In 2003, Carpenter was planning an anime spin-off of "Escape from New York", with "Outlaw Star"s Mitsuru Hongo slated to direct.


title: Nazareth

text: Nazareth ( ; , "an-Nāṣira"; , "Nāṣəraṯ"; , "Naṣrath") is the largest city in the Northern District of Israel. Nazareth is known as "the Arab capital of Israel". In its population was . The inhabitants are predominantly Arab citizens of Israel, of whom 69% are Muslim and 30.9% Christian.


title: Nazareth

text: Findings unearthed in the neighboring Qafzeh Cave show that the area around Nazareth was populated in the prehistoric period. Nazareth was a Jewish village during the Roman and Byzantine periods, and is described in the New Testament as the childhood home of Jesus. It became an important city during the Crusades after Tancred established it as the capital of the Principality of Galilee. The city declined under Mamluk rule, and following the Ottoman conquest, the city's Christian residents were expelled, only to return once Fakhr ad-Dīn II granted them permission to do so. In the 18th century, Zahir al-Umar transformed Nazareth into a large town by encouraging immigration to it. The city grew steadily during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when European powers invested in the construction of churches, monasteries, educational and health facilities.


title: Nazareth

text: Since late antiquity, Nazareth has been a center of Christian pilgrimage, with many shrines commemorating biblical events. The Church of the Annunciation is the considered one of the largest Christian sites of worship in the Middle East. It contains the Grotto of the Annunciation, where, according to Catholic tradition, angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and announced that she would conceive and bear Jesus. According to Greek Orthodox belief, the same event took place at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation, also known as Church of Saint Gabriel. Other important churches in Nazareth include the Synagogue Church, St. Joseph's Church, the Mensa Christi Church, and the Basilica of Jesus the Adolescent.


title: Nazareth

text: As the largest Arab city in Israel, Nazareth is a today a cultural, political, religious, economic and commercial center of the Arab citizens of Israel, and became also a center of Arab and Palestinian nationalism.


title: Nazareth

text: One view holds that "Nazareth" is derived from one of the Hebrew words for 'branch', namely , , and alludes to the prophetic, messianic words in Book of Isaiah 11:1, 'from (Jesse's) roots a Branch () will bear fruit'. One view suggests this toponym might be an example of a tribal name used by resettling groups on their return from exile. Alternatively, the name may derive from the verb , , "watch, guard, keep," and understood either in the sense of "watchtower" or "guard place", implying the early town was perched on or near the brow of the hill, or, in the passive sense as 'preserved, protected' in reference to its secluded position. The negative references to Nazareth in the Gospel of John suggest that ancient Jews did not connect the town's name to prophecy.


title: Nazareth

text: Another theory holds that the Greek form (), used in Matthew and Luke, may derive from an earlier Aramaic form of the name, or from another Semitic language form. If there were a "tsade" (צ) in the original Semitic form, as in the later Hebrew forms, it would normally have been transcribed in Greek with a "sigma" (σ) instead of a "zeta" (ζ). This has led some scholars to question whether "Nazareth" and its cognates in the New Testament actually refer to the settlement known traditionally as Nazareth in Lower Galilee. Such linguistic discrepancies may be explained, however, by "a peculiarity of the 'Palestinian' Aramaic dialect wherein a sade (ṣ) between two voiced (sonant) consonants tended to be partially assimilated by taking on a zayin (z) sound".


title: Nazareth

text: The Arabic name for Nazareth is "an-Nāṣira", and Jesus (, "Yasū`") is also called "an-Nāṣirī", reflecting the Arab tradition of according people an attribution, a name denoting whence a person comes in either geographical or tribal terms. In the Qur'an, Christians are referred to as "naṣārā", meaning "followers of an-Nāṣirī", or "those who follow Jesus of Nazareth".


title: Nazareth

text: In Luke's Gospel, Nazareth is first described as 'a town of Galilee' and home of Mary. Following the birth and early epiphanial events of chapter 2 of Luke's Gospel, Mary, Joseph and Jesus "returned to Galilee, to their own city, Nazareth".


title: Nazareth

text: The phrase "Jesus of Nazareth" appears seventeen times in English translations of the New Testament, whereas the Greek original contains the form "Jesus the "Nazarēnos"" or "Jesus the "Nazōraios"." One plausible view is that "Nazōraean" (Ναζωραῖος) is a normal Greek adaptation of a reconstructed, hypothetical term in Jewish Aramaic for the word later used in Rabbinical sources to refer to Jesus. "Nazaréth" is named twelve times in surviving Greek manuscript versions of the New Testament, 10 times as "Nazaréth" or "Nazarét", and twice as "Nazará". The former two may retain the 'feminine' endings common in Galilean toponyms. The minor variants, "Nazarat" and "Nazarath" are also attested. "Nazara" (Ναζαρά) might be the earliest form of the name in Greek, going back to the putative Q document. It is found in Matthew 4:13 and Luke 4:16. However, the Textus Receptus clearly translates all passages as "Nazara" leaving little room for debate there.


title: Nazareth

text: Many scholars have questioned a link between "Nazareth" and the terms "Nazarene" and "Nazoraean" on linguistic grounds, while some affirm the possibility of etymological relation "given the idiosyncrasies of Galilean Aramaic."


title: Nazareth

text: The form "Nazara" is also found in the earliest non-scriptural reference to the town, a citation by Sextus Julius Africanus dated about AD 221 (see "Middle Roman to Byzantine Periods" below). The Church Father Origen (c. AD 185 to 254) knows the forms "Nazará" and "Nazarét". Later, Eusebius in his "Onomasticon" (translated by St. Jerome) also refers to the settlement as "Nazara". The "nașirutha" of the scriptures of the Mandeans refers to "priestly craft", not to Nazareth, which they identified with Qom.


title: Nazareth

text: The first non-Christian reference to Nazareth is an inscription on a marble fragment from a synagogue found in Caesarea Maritima in 1962. This fragment gives the town's name in Hebrew as נצרת (n-ṣ-r-t). The inscription dates to c. AD 300 and chronicles the assignment of priests that took place at some time after the Bar Kokhba revolt, AD 132–35. (See "Middle Roman to Byzantine Periods" below.) An 8th-century AD Hebrew inscription, which was the earliest known Hebrew reference to Nazareth prior to the discovery of the inscription above, uses the same form.


title: Nazareth

text: Around 331, Eusebius records that, from the name Nazareth, Christ was called a Nazoraean, and that, in earlier centuries, Christians were once called Nazarenes. Tertullian (Against Marcion 4:8) records that "for this reason the Jews call us 'Nazarenes'." In the New Testament Christians are called "Christians" three times by Paul in Romans, and "Nazarenes" once by Tertullus, a Jewish lawyer. The Rabbinic and modern Hebrew name for Christians, "notzrim," is also thought to derive from Nazareth, and be connected with Tertullus' charge against Paul of being a member of the sect of the Nazarenes, "Nazoraioi", "men of Nazareth" in Acts. Against this, some medieval Jewish polemical texts connect "notzrim" with the "netsarim" "watchmen" of Ephraim in Jeremiah 31:6. In Syriac Aramaic "Nasrath" (ܢܨܪܬ) is used for Nazareth, while "Nazarenes" (Acts 24:5) and "of Nazareth" are both "Nasrani" or "Nasraya" (ܕܢܨܪܝܐ) an adjectival form. "Nasrani" is used in the Quran for Christians, and in Modern Standard Arabic may refer more widely to Western people. Saint Thomas Christians, an ancient community of Jewish Christians in India who trace their origins to evangelistic activity of Thomas the Apostle in the 1st century, are sometimes known by the name "Nasrani" even today.


title: Nazareth

text: Archaeological researchers have revealed that a funerary and cult center at Kfar HaHoresh, about two miles () from current Nazareth, dates back roughly 9,000 years to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B era. The remains of some 65 individuals were found, buried under huge horizontal headstone structures, some of which consisted of up to 3 tons of locally produced white plaster. Decorated human skulls uncovered there have led archaeologists to identify Kfar HaHoresh as a major cult centre in that era.


title: Nazareth

text: The Franciscan priest Bellarmino Bagatti, "Director of Christian Archaeology", carried out extensive excavation of this "Venerated Area" from 1955 to 1965. Fr. Bagatti uncovered pottery dating from the Middle Bronze Age (2200 to 1500 BC) and ceramics, silos and grinding mills from the Iron Age (1500 to 586 BC) which indicated substantial settlement in the Nazareth basin at that time.


title: Nazareth

text: Archaeological evidence shows the Nazareth was occupied during the late Hellenistic period, through the Roman period and into the Byzantine period.


title: Nazareth

text: According to the Gospel of Luke, Nazareth was the home village of Mary as well as the site of the Annunciation (when the angel Gabriel informed Mary that she would give birth to Jesus). According to the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph and Mary resettled in Nazareth after returning from the flight from Bethlehem to Egypt. According to the Bible, Jesus grew up in Nazareth from some point in his childhood. However, some modern scholars also regard Nazareth as the birthplace of Jesus.


title: Nazareth

text: A Hebrew inscription found in Caesarea dating to the late 3rd or early 4th century mentions Nazareth as the home of the priestly Hapizzez/Hafizaz family after the Bar Kokhba revolt (AD 132–135). From the three fragments that have been found, the inscription seems to be a list of the twenty-four priestly courses, with each course (or family) assigned its proper order and the name of each town or village in Galilee where it settled. Nazareth is not spelled with the "z" sound but with the Hebrew tsade (thus "Nasareth" or "Natsareth"). Eleazar Kalir (a Hebrew Galilean poet variously dated from the 6th to 10th century) mentions a locality clearly in the Nazareth region bearing the name Nazareth נצרת (in this case vocalized "Nitzrat"), which was home to the descendants of the 18th Kohen family Happitzetz (הפצץ), for at least several centuries after the Bar Kochva revolt.


title: Nazareth

text: Although it is mentioned in the New Testament gospels, there are no extant non-biblical references to Nazareth until around AD 200, when Sextus Julius Africanus, cited by Eusebius ("Church History" 1.7.14), speaks of Nazara as a village in Judea and locates it near an as-yet unidentified "Cochaba". In the same passage Africanus writes of "desposunoi" – relatives of Jesus – who he claims "kept the records of their descent with great care". Ken Dark describes the view that Nazareth did not exist in Jesus's time as "archaeologically unsupportable".


title: Nazareth

text: James F. Strange, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, notes: "Nazareth is not mentioned in ancient Jewish sources earlier than the third century AD. This likely reflects its lack of prominence both in Galilee and in Judaea." Strange originally calculated the population of Nazareth at the time of Christ as "roughly 1,600 to 2,000 people" but, in a subsequent publication that followed more than a decade of additional research, revised this figure down to "a maximum of about 480." In 2009, Israeli archaeologist Yardenna Alexandre excavated archaeological remains in Nazareth that date to the time of Jesus in the early Roman period. Alexandre told reporters, "The discovery is of the utmost importance since it reveals for the very first time a house from the Jewish village of Nazareth."


title: Nazareth

text: Other sources state that during Jesus' time, Nazareth had a population of 400 and one public bath, which was important for civic and religious purposes, as a "mikva".


title: Nazareth

text: A tablet at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, dating to AD 50, was sent from Nazareth to Paris in 1878. It contains an inscription known as the "Ordinance of Caesar" that outlines the penalty of death for those who violate tombs or graves. However, it is suspected that this inscription came to Nazareth from somewhere else (possibly Sepphoris). Bagatti writes: "we are not certain that it was found in Nazareth, even though it came from Nazareth to Paris. At Nazareth there lived various vendors of antiquities who got ancient material from several places." C. Kopp is more definite: "It must be accepted with certainty that [the Ordinance of Caesar]… was brought to the Nazareth market by outside merchants." Princeton University archaeologist Jack Finnegan describes additional archaeological evidence related to settlement in the Nazareth basin during the Bronze and Iron Ages, and states that "Nazareth was a strongly Jewish settlement in the Roman period."


title: Nazareth

text: Epiphanius in his "Panarion" (c. AD 375) numbers Nazareth among the cities devoid of a non-Jewish population. Epiphanius, writing of Joseph of Tiberias, a wealthy Roman Jew who converted to Christianity in the time of Constantine, says he claimed to have received an imperial rescript to build Christian churches in Jewish towns and villages where no gentiles or Samaritans dwell, naming Tiberias, Diocaesarea, Sepphoris, Nazareth and Capernaum. From this scarce notice, it has been concluded that a small church which encompassed a cave complex might have been located in Nazareth in the early 4th century," although the town was Jewish until the 7th century.


title: Nazareth

text: The Christian monk and Bible translator Jerome, writing at the beginning of the 5th century, says Nazareth was a "viculus" or mere village.


title: Nazareth

text: In the 6th century, religious narrations from local Christians about the Virgin Mary began to spark interest in the site among pilgrims, who founded the first church at the location of the current Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation at the site of a freshwater spring, today known as Mary's Well. Around 570, the Anonymous of Piacenza reports travelling from Sepphoris to Nazareth. There he records seeing in the Jewish synagogue the books from which Jesus learnt his letters, and a bench where he sat. According to him, Christians could lift it, but Jews could not, since it disallowed them from dragging it outside. Writing of the beauty of the Hebrew women there, he records them saying St. Mary was a relative of theirs, and notes that, "The house of St. Mary is a basilica." Constantine the Great ordered that churches be built in Jewish cities, and Nazareth was one of the places designated for this purpose, although construction of churches apparently only started decades after Constantine's death, i.e. after 352.


title: Nazareth

text: Archaeologists have unearthed evidence that previous to the erection of the Byzantine-period church at the site of Mary's house in the mid-5th century, Judeo-Christians had built there a synagogue-church, leaving behind Judeo-Christian symbols. Until being expelled in c. 630, Jews probably kept on using their older synagogue, while the Judeo-Christian needed to build their own, probably at the site of Mary's house.


title: Nazareth

text: The Jewish town profited from the Christian pilgrim trade which began in the 4th century AD, but latent anti-Christian hostility broke out in AD 614 when the Persians invaded Palestine. The Christian Byzantine author Eutychius claimed that Jewish people of Nazareth helped the Persians carry out their slaughter of the Christians. When the Byzantine or Eastern Roman emperor Heraclius ejected the Persians in AD 629-630, he expelled the Jews from the village, turning it all-Christian.


title: Nazareth

text: The Arab Muslim invasion of AD 638 had no immediate impact on the Christians of Nazareth and their churches, since Bishop Arculf remembered seeing there around 670 two churches, one at the house of Joseph where Jesus had lived as a child, and one at the house of Mary where she received the Annunciation - but no synagogue, which had possibly been transformed into a mosque. The 721 iconoclastic edict of Caliph Yazid II apparently led to the destruction of the former church, so that Willibald found during his pilgrimage in 724-26 only one church there, the one dedicated to St. Mary, which Christians had to save through repeated payments from destruction by the "pagan Saracens" (Muslim Arabs). The ruins of St. Joseph's remained untouched for a very long time, while the Church St. Mary is repeatedly mentioned throughout the following centuries, including by an Arab geographer in 943.


title: Nazareth

text: In 1099, the Crusader Tancred captured Galilee and established his capital in Nazareth. He was the ruler of the Principality of Galilee, which was established, at least in name, in 1099, as a vassal of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Later, in 1115, Nazareth was created as a seigneury within the principality. A Martin of Nazareth, who probably acted as viscount of Nazareth, is documented in 1115 and in 1130/1131. Nazareth was the original site of the Latin Patriarch, also established by Tancred. The ancient diocese of Scythopolis was relocated under the Archbishop of Nazareth, as one of the four archdioceses in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. When the town returned to Muslim control in 1187 following the victory of Saladin in the Battle of Hattin, the remaining Crusaders and European clergy were forced to leave town. Frederick II managed to negotiate safe passage for pilgrims from Acre in 1229, and in 1251, Louis IX, the king of France, attended mass in the grotto, accompanied by his wife.


title: Nazareth

text: In 1263, Baybars, the Mamluk Sultan, destroyed the Christian buildings in Nazareth and declared the site off-limits to Latin clergy, as part of his bid to drive out the remaining Crusaders from Palestine. While Arab Christian families continued to live in Nazareth, its status was reduced to that of a poor village. Pilgrims who visited the site in 1294 reported only a small church protecting the grotto. In the 14th century, Franciscan monks were permitted to return and live within the ruins of the basilica.


title: Nazareth

text: In 1584 the Franciscan monks were evicted again from the site of the ruined basilica. In 1620, Fakhr-al-Din II, a Druze emir who controlled this part of Ottoman Syria, permitted them to build a small church at the Grotto of the Annunciation. Pilgrimage tours to surrounding sacred sites were organised by the Franciscans, but the monks suffered harassment from surrounding Bedouin tribes who often kidnapped them for ransom.


title: Nazareth

text: Stability returned with the rule of Zahir al-Umar, a powerful Arab sheikh who ruled the Galilee, and later much of the Levantine coast and Palestine. He transformed Nazareth from a minor village into a large town by encouraging immigration to it. Nazareth played a strategic role in Zahir's sheikhdom because it allowed him to wield control over the agricultural areas of central Galilee. He ensured Nazareth's security for other reasons as well, among them strengthening ties with France by protecting the Christian community and protecting one of his wives who resided in Nazareth.


title: Nazareth

text: Zahir authorized the Franciscans to build a church in 1730. That structure stood until 1955, when it was demolished to make way for a larger building completed in 1967. He also permitted the Franciscans to purchase the Synagogue Church in 1741 and authorized the Greek Orthodox community to build St. Gabriel's Church in 1767. Zahir commissioned the construction of a government house known as the Seraya, which served as the city's municipal headquarters until 1991. His descendants—known as the "Dhawahri"—along with the Zu'bi, Fahum, and 'Onassah families later constituted Nazareth's traditional Muslim elite.