The Long and Winding Road is a piano ballad Paul McCartney wrote in 1968, when the Beatles were falling apart. The band's January 1969 recording was lent to producer Phil Spector, who added heavy orchestral and choral overdubs for the 1970 album Let It Be. McCartney asked manager Allen Klein to curtail the changes, but Klein did not, and McCartney later cited the treatment of the song as one reason for dissolving the band's legal partnership in court. Critics disliked the overdubs, calling them oppressive mush, yet the public pushed the song to number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in June 1970. Later reviewers came to appreciate it, and the original take was released on Anthology 3.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.