Everyone needs a little help from time to time. Most of us live our lives in such a way that no one knows when we need to rely on others or why. If you've ever hired a gardener, or a masseuse, or an entire theater troupe to entertain you, this is probably your thing. But the higher a person's status, the more likely it is that their efforts to hire someone to help them with whatever task they have at hand will be scrutinized by the public. More often than not, these tasks will be as mundane as they are for you and me. But not always.
10. Angelina Jolie is tired of hiring a hitman to kill herself
Hiring a hitman is not an everyday occurrence. You see it in movies from time to time, and you may even come across stories in the news about someone who fell in love with the Rent-a-Hitman website and tried to kill their ex. And then there’s the Angelina Jolie story.
Jolie is arguably one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, although her personal life often overshadows her professional life in the media, despite winning an Academy Award, several Golden Globes and SAG Awards among others. However, back in 2001, she made a stunning and unexpected revelation.
Never one to shy away from talking about her mental health issues, Jolie has admitted that she once tried to hire a hitman. The target? Angelina Jolie. She was suicidal, but felt it would be less of a burden on her family if she died by something else. So instead of killing herself, she considered having someone else do it, believing that murder would be less traumatic.
And this wasn't a random idea either. She planned how to raise money over time without raising suspicion, and then she found and even contacted the hitman. The hitman himself suggested that she wait a while before making a final decision. If she still wanted to do it, he told her to call him back in a month or two.
Obviously things changed and she never followed through, but who knows what might have happened if her contact hadn't had empathy.
9. Jeff Goldblum tried to hire a prostitute when he was 13 years old.
Few actors can match Jeff Goldblum for weirdness and charm. His performances are memorable and mysterious, and he comes across as a unique and curious person. And if the story is to be believed, he has been curious about many things since he was a child.
In 2016, Goldblum was on The Graham Norton Show and shared a story about illicit wonder from his childhood. When he was 13, he stole money from his father to hire a prostitute. He explained that he had hit puberty but wasn't quite having success with girls at school, so he tried to improvise.
He took $5 and headed to his city's red light district, and apparently it was a reasonable amount of money at the time, as he was returning to the room with the woman when he chickened out. He explained that he had another engagement and would be back later. He never did.
8. The CIA hired a wizard to write a magic book for spies
The CIA has a certain reputation around the world, partly based on their real-life exploits and partly based on fiction. But overall, it's the part of the American government we most closely associate with spies. There are undercover operations and mind-blowing feats of international espionage and intelligence gathering. And then they hired a magician to write a book for spies.
Rumors of a CIA manual that taught spies magic were long dismissed as rumors until a former agent finally dug them up. The book dates back to the 1950s and was written by magician John Mulholland, and described techniques like sleight of hand and covert signaling that could help spies in the field during the height of the Cold War.
In the 1970s, it was revealed that Mulholland's methods were being used to secretly administer drugs, such as slipping a sedative into a drink, perhaps without detection. He was even consulted to help explain and evaluate the unexplainable, as a mystic who claimed to be able to send and receive psychic messages.
7. San Diego hired a rainmaker and then flooded it.
Bad weather can wreak havoc on any city, and catastrophic weather can bring a person to their knees. And that's only in today's world, where we have technology to help us overcome almost anything. You can imagine that in 1915, things were much simpler.
The lack of rain had become such a problem for San Diego due to the drought of 1915 that their reservoirs were nearly depleted and they needed a miracle. So they paid for one. The city paid $10,000 to a man named Charles Hatfield, a “humidity accelerator,” who promised to make it rain.
Hatfield, a sewing machine salesman, built a 20-foot tower on top of which he burned a chemical mixture that he claimed would make clouds appear and cause rain. And while it sounds ridiculous, the fact that it later rained so hard that the city flooded probably led many people to believe that he was the real deal. Unfortunately for him, the flood was so bad that he was blamed rather than praised.
The rain started on January 1, 1916, and lasted literally all month, dumping 30 inches on the town. It washed out the dam, killed dozens of people, and no one paid Hatfield because it was called an act of God.
6. Bogota's mayor hired mimes to mock bad drivers
Most of us have had the experience of dealing with a politician who is perhaps a little more quirky than we consider normal. Just because someone is weird doesn’t mean they’re un-electable. The city of Bogota, Colombia, elected a mayor who fit the bill when they handed the job to mathematician and philosopher Antanas Mockus.
Mockus had a high order in a city of 6.5 million people that was known to be riddled with all sorts of crime. How did he deal with it? He started wearing a Superman costume. He also took many unusual and inventive measures to change the direction of the city.
He developed "Ladies' Night Out" and encouraged all men to stay home so women could spend the night out. The first one was used by 700,000 women. He showered on TV and turned off the water in the middle to encourage water conservation. Water consumption dropped by 14%. When people realized it was saving them money, it dropped to 40%.
For social change, his ideas were just as bizarre. He handed out 350,000 thumbs-up/thumbs-down cards to use publicly to express support or contempt for other people's behavior. He asked people to pay 10% more in taxes. He didn't force anyone, he just asked. 63,000 people agreed. He even lowered the murder rate in a year from 80 per 100,000 to 22 per 100,000.
City Hall painted stars on roads where people had died in accidents. By the following year, the number of fatalities had been cut in half. This was achieved in part by hiring more than 400 mimes to ridicule pedestrians and drivers who did not follow traffic rules. It worked so well that they were able to eliminate the old and corrupt traffic police.
5. The Rolling Stones hired Hell's Angels as security
The Rolling Stones are often ranked among the top ten rock bands of all time, and have been doing so for decades. They are certified legends of the genre, and when a band gets that big, they need their own infrastructure. Security, for example. Concerts and performances can get rowdy.
In 1969, the Stones attempted to stage their Woodstock at Altamont Speedway with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and a few others. The slapdash event was to be guarded by a few dozen Hell's Angels biker gang members in exchange for $500 worth of beer.
The Stones were headlining the show, and the Grateful Dead were next to last. But the Dead folded when they learned that Jefferson Airplane's lead singer had been knocked out by a biker during their set. So when the Stones took the stage, tensions were high. And then one of the gang members stabbed another man with a gun to death right in front of Mick Jagger.
The band didn't see what happened, so they kept playing. By the time the show was over, three more people had accidentally died, and four children had somehow been born.
4. Gary Oldman hired a vocal coach to relearn his British accent
Gary Oldman is considered one of the greatest actors of our time, and his work has required him to wear many hats. He is often described as a chameleon on the big screen, changing his image dramatically between roles in things like the franchise O Harry Potter, to his portrayal of Winston Churchill, to his bizarre but iconic transformation into a super villain in "Fifth element "There's little he can't do. Except, apparently, always sound British.
British by birth, he has played an American many times, and this has caused him personal strife. Having lived in Los Angeles for too long, he has lost his accent. And to fix it, he hired a dialect coach to teach him to speak British again.
3. Ozzy Osbourne once hired a "personal gnome"
Ozzy Osbourne has had one of the most illustrious careers in music history. From his time in Black Sabbath to his reality TV show and that whole bat incident, he's had a certain amount of success in the weird headlines.
When Ozzy launched his solo career in the '80s, he apparently became fixated on the idea of hiring his own little man. He hired actor John Edward Allen, who performed under the name Ronnie the Gnome, a reference to new Sabbath member Ronnie James Dio.
Allen became a staple of Osbourne's stage show, where he was ritually hanged at each performance, and also brought Ozzy drinks when he chatted with the crowd. Osbourne and Allen had a toxic relationship offstage, and at one point Ozzy locked Allen in the luggage compartment of a tour bus because he was angry at him for drinking.
2. Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift hired a fake director
Making a movie can require a team of hundreds or even thousands of people, but one job that rarely gets credited is the decoy director. But The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift had to be on set for a very specific reason.
The producers couldn't get permission to film legally where they wanted to, in Tokyo, so they just didn't do it. They filmed anyway, knowing full well they would get in trouble for it, and that's where the decoy comes in. They specifically hired a fake director so he could take over when the cops showed up, and the real director could finish what he needed to do.
1. Bill Murray hired an assistant that no one could communicate with.
Bill Murray has been a beloved comedian since the '70s, but his real identity has become even more famous in the Internet age, as stories of people's confusing and bizarre interactions with the man have spread widely. Some are clearly fake, and some are harder to pin down.
He can be notoriously difficult to work with. That's true for strangers and friends alike. Harold Ramis, with whom Murray has worked on numerous films from "Stripes" to « Ghostbusters" , was Murray's director in the film "Groundhog Day" , and they clearly had problems.
Murray was going through a divorce, which may have contributed to the breakdown on the set. Bill was not enjoying the production and was notoriously difficult to communicate with. Someone suggested that he hire an assistant, which he did. His assistant was deaf, had no verbal ability, and could only communicate using American Sign Language, which neither Murray nor anyone else understood.
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