Why are they in Park, when they are anything but in Park?

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cuffs054

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Caught Dirty Dancing (for the 50th. time) on cable last night. There is a scene where Johnny (my, he is a handsome youngin'), is cruising with Baby in his Chevy and it's clear that the Powerglide is in PARK. The next scene is Johnny slamming the thing into park when they get back to hotel.
This drives me friggin' crazy! It's not just this movie, it's all over. Doesn't somebody check this stuff? The older Ford-O-Matics and PowerGlides are the worst since the shifter is long and large and almost erect and right in the damn scene.
Also, in 90% of old movies the scene showing the car drive away always seem to have one lamp out. Why?
 
~are the worst since the shifter is long and large and almost erect and right in the damn scene.

Hell that would get my focus and attention as well and CAUSE a scene.......

Uh yes "they" do check these things out. Apparently they don't have an employess who is OCD or Asperger's enough to get it right. :-) (ducks and runs)

I have a hard enough time trying to focus on the characters and the plot and the scenes without findig errors. I guess with repeated viewings these things become obvious!
 
I see a lot of this kind of crap, and I don't even watch that many movies - they're just not checked carefully.

A couple of months ago I saw "A Single Man". Great movie, both praised and criticized for the emphasis on really elegant early '60s style. Early in the movie the main character, George, gets a pivotal phone call that his partner has been killed in an accident. The scene is really played up with a huge shot on screen of a classic Bell System desk phone, just like virtually every American home had in 1963. Except, the camera panned in on the left side of the phone where one can clearly see a MODULAR plug for the handset cable. Duh! The phone was obviously a much later desk set, after Bell standardized on modular plugs. How could they have not caught that and panned the other side of the phone, or better yet have purchased a correct phone on Ebay? This was even more grating than the later scene where one can clearly see the left rear fender of a '66-'67 Continental. When the casting guys made a request for old car suitable for a street scene, who on earth thought a '66-'67 car was suitable for a movie set in late '63???
 
Life is so big, Why do we focus on things that are so small?

No one will die from these mistakes. Perhaps the cost to get it right or time constraints don't allow for perfection.

If you think Amercian movies are bad, you haven't been viewing any turd-world productions laltely.

If the production team is 30 y.o. and under, anything before that period is so foreign to them, probably.
 
cuffs...

If you check the credits, there's a job title called, "continuity." The person therein named is responsible for making sure that actor B is wearing the same shirt the same way when they re-shoot part of a scene already shot, and all other such things.

We had a production company for the History Channel here several years ago, and they were pretty good about it. We didn't see any problems in the final cut.

This past May, part of the up-coming Adam Sandler movie, "Grown-Ups," was shot 1/2 a mile from here. A skeleton crew came back in August to film some additional footage (more people going into and coming out of a church for a funeral) and it'll be interesting to see how it melds. BTW, yours truly was an extra in that 2nd filming. So, I will be watching very closely for mixing problems in trying to find me on-screen!

Keep finding those bloopers! I'm sure there's a website somewhere for reporting them!

Chuck
 
I like flawed movies. It gives them character. I like the scene in the t.v. show "EMERGENCY" where one of the fire fighters pulls out the pot roast from the HOT oven,with his bare hands! No pot holders. No "ouch" or any thing... Gotta love it!

Jim
 
Huge continuity breakdown

I saw the play Driving Miss Daisy. The only large props on the stage are two chairs. In one scene, she is all bundled up and walks onstage carrying a lighted candle. The instant I saw it, I nudged the friend next to me and said the words that strike terror in Atlantans, "ice storm." After a couple of seconds Hoke arrives with a couple of cups of hot coffee from the Krispy Kreme Doughnut place with the explanation that with the power out he figured her stove would not work. That was fine in the play, but in the movie, the kitchen had a big honking Chambers gas range and just before the ice storm scene, Hoke and Miss Daisy were frying chicken after Ardella died and he had remarked that she had the flame too high so she moved the cast iron chicken fryer to the side and lowered the flame. They did not change the line to fit the situation. He could have easily said that the coffee pot wouldn't work with the power out, but nobody thought to change the line. Appliances get no consideration. At the very end of the film when she has gone to the nursing home and the house has been sold, the camera goes through the rooms and instead of the 1950s GE two door refrigerator-freezer, there is an ancient Frigidaire up on legs. I realize it's an appliance thing with me and they're just appliances to most everyone else.
 
Move Mistakes

I am an x-ray tech in real life and I can't tell you the number of times I have seen x-rays that were hung up (and being studied by act/doctors) up-side-down on the viewer. JEB
 
gump, Jenny's poltergeist iron....

Anyone ever notice the haunted iron in Forrest Gump? In one scene the iron is up on it's heel rest, the next shot it is setting on it's soleplate. This is the part when Tom Hanks ask's he gotta daddy named forrest too. alr2903
 
Hey Tomturbomatic...

I think the fridge you saw in Driving Miss Daisy was in the pantry because early on in the movie I believe you see that same fridge and an Easy Spindrier in the pantry and the Chambers range and a circa 1938 GE fridge in the kitchen....as for the thing about the modular telephones in a 1963 movie I would have noticed that too just like I noticed the pink princess phone and the moss green desk phone in the Whoopi Goldberg film The Long Walk Home. That movie took place in 1955/56 and Moss green desk phones would have had charcol grey handset and line cords and the princess phone was not introduced until 1959. My point is only people like us are gonna notice such things and having done props for a few community plays I am sure that the prop people get what ever looks the period but they really do not have the time to fuss over every little detail. I too severly scrutinize all the period piece movies that take place from the 20's through the 80's but I honestly think that if we ever had to get all the stuff that they had to get (and it can be literally thousands of pieces) we probably would not be so pickey either...even though we would really want to be.... I just do not think we would have the time or the budgert to be so pickey. I do agree with Hyralique though....not having the proper period cars is just lazy and in most cases (unless you need a real rare or pristine car) antique cars are easier to get.......PAT COFFEY
 
Tom, it's not just you on the appliance thing. Since I'm into early antique cast iron stoves from the northeast (particularly from PA), I watch with interest if the movie is set in the late 1700's-early 1800's. I knew that an early PA stove was bought off the internet for the HBO series about John Adams. The courthouse scene in which it was used was set in 1803. Adams died in the something like 1828. The stove was from the last half of the 1850's-early 1860's. Someone must have time-traveled the stove back 50 years. The stove was later resold in a Virginia antique store and the guy that bought it believes the stove is that old.

Dammit, we're some geeks here!
 
There was a made-for-PBS movie in the early 1980s about a guy who made a time machine out of his single engine plane. He took a girl on a date to April 1957 and in the diner parking lot was a 1958 Buick. This movie was lampooned on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which is where I saw it.
 
How magicians succeed; noboby notices

Even in incredibly popular old movies there are gaffs that we've all seen a zillion times and just ignore. I can't tell you the number of times I've pointed out in the scene in "The Wizard of Oz" when Margaret Hamilton disappears from Munchkinland after telling Dorothy, "I'll get you my pretty and your little dog too",how the red smudge that's supposed to obscure her exit starts to pump out of the stage way before she hits her mark, you can actually see the trap door open, you can see her drop below the stage and you can even see the trap door close over her as the fireball ignites. Most people tell me they've never noticed it before.
I would bet that since Ms. Hamilton got severely burned doing this stunt they decided not to do a retake and used what must have been the best shot and called it a day. Put her in the hospital but didn't hurt the movie one bit.

View attachment bajaespuma++3-6-2010-09-09-15.jpg
 
The gear selector gaffe is also in the original Parent trap. Brian Keith and Hayley Mills are chatting while he is driving with the gear selector obviously in park.

Having two-way radio background, I always laugh when I see actors talking on them without using the push-to-talk, release to listen button. Worse is when they are talking and listening at the same time. Two way radios are a simplex function, not a duplex function like wireless or cellular telephones.
 
But what I'm saying is that shot at the end of the film showed that old refrigerator in the pantry in the 1970s when the movie ends. It seemed strange, although I guess it made a more haunting shot than one of the kitchen.

Todd, I have collected some mint pieces of Prizer Ware from the Prizer Stove Works in Reading. I even have the box for the 8" turquoise skillet with the wooden pistol grip handle.

Ken, how much did you have to slow down the film to find that trap door sequence? That is amazing. I had read about her burns, but not about the rest of the trap door sequence. I wonder if she would have been more severely burned if she had been on her mark when the fireball happened?
 
In the 1953 Titanic, nothing is correct except for Titanic's exterior appearance.

The clothes and the ships interiors TRY to get the feel of 1912.

In the iceberg scene, it shows the iceberg clearly on the Starboard side. It cuts to under water and shows the iceberg on the Port side tearing into the ship. It's like a mirror image of what it's supposed to be.

Now these things I do notice, but it doesn't bother me. I enjoy the film as it is.

~Tim

 

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