Elsewhere in this section there is a discussion on whether someone is a jerk for correcting someone else’s false believe about something. I think this might be an appropriate place for weird shit people believe. Just questions of fact, not questions of opinion.
For example. My husband tells me, almost every time we watch an episode of Rockford, that the producer insisted that James Garner pay for all the damage caused to the car during the car chases, because he was driving it. My response is kind of WTF? He’s the actor, not the writer. If stuntmen had to pay for the damage to the cars they drove, they wouldn’t do it–they are hired to wreck them, and the same should apply to actors if they’re also acting as stunt men. This makes no sense at all.
I have been unable to confirm or refute this rumor. Also: can’t find a word about it on the internet. It seems Garner did own a share of the production company, so maybe that’s how he paid for it.
A friend and I almost came to blows because he said that the musicians who performed in Disney’s Fantasia decided to put one over on the ignorant movie audiences who would see it and put the movements of a classical piece out of order. And those rubes would never know the difference, nor would the rubes who’d hired them to perform the music.
Huh? I believed this for about half a second, and then I remembered–or I think I remember–the conductor standing up in the middle of the piece, with little cartoon characters flying around him, and he SAID they had the movements out of order. But they could have put that in later–although I don’t think so. So first, there’s my memory.
Second, there’s the idea that NO ONE who saw the movie would know the movements were out of order. Would they really take the chance that no single person who saw this movie would know? So even if my memory is wrong, there’s that.
Third, I don’t think that’s how it works for music in movies. I know it isn’t. They don’t just sit down and play the piece while the film is running. There’s a lot of planning.
Now I suppose it’s possible that musicians could concoct this idea, and carry it through (somehow), and then, someone could discover it in time to have Leopold Stokowski stand up and say they did it on purpose, in order to redeem themselves. But still…
Friend still believes it, because classical musicians are terrible snobs, I guess.
Both my husband and my friend insist that “everybody knows” these things. If a single other person has ever heard either one of these, I’d sure like to know about it.
Also, any other weird thing people believe. I like to think of these as false facts. I know we’ve done it before.
) but also that it’s ridiculous. Interestingly, it also made me ‘rewrite’ a couple of dreams that I had as a child in which I did die, so that my experience would fit the ‘knowledge’. Thinking that through later on was a big help in developing a skeptical world view.