Sue Grafton has you covered there, although the plot is somewhat different than those you describe. “C” is for Corpse has just such a doctor as one of the main characters. Unfortunately, one of the scenes is quite unrealistic. The doctor in question has a pint sized container filled with all of the internal organs of a recently deceased person, all mixed together and seemingly being chopped up randomly.
My pathologist is of course the hero of the novel.
Yes, you’d need at least a gallon-sized container for the liver alone.
I’ve always loved the movie The Last Detail, starring Jack Nicholson. To me, the portrayal of Navy enlisted life rang true, and Nicholson’s portrayal of a macho give-a-shit petty officer was right on.
So did Season 4 of The Wire. I’ve toured the NYT newsroom with a friend who is an editor there, and it looks just like that.
No kidding. I went through locksmith school with the Department of State. Our teacher basically said “Don’t bother, unless you’re bored; drill it.” And that whole nonsense of listening to a combination lock in order to get the combo, especially on a lock of any sophistication is just downright impossible.
The down, er, right sizing interviews with the Bobs were painfully, although hilariously, accurate.
I hope you were joking.
I can see the opportunity for drama in being a small town solicitor because of the human interest stories. City law firm not so much, I’m afraid.
The pilot episode of St. Elsewhere was the most accurate depiction of internship I ever saw. Second was the pilot of ER, but the latter program became extremely unrealistic starting with the second episode.
As a game developer, most cinematic adaptations of my career are laughable at best- and usually fairly insulting. However, Mythic Quest is fairly accurate in its depiction, and at times hits way too close to home. Not too surprising, I guess, as Ubisoft is quite involved with the production.
I can think of a couple of fictional portrayals of management consultants:
The TV show House of Lies on Showtime staring Don Cheadle, Kristen Bell, and Ben Schwartz. Based on a non-fiction book written by a Booz Allen alum, a lot of it rings true, but a lot of it is either highly sensationalized or exaggerated or downplays the more routine and mundane aspects of the job. As the series went on, it was less late nights in conference rooms planning presentations and more time spent on personal drama, No one wants to see a show about a bunch of nerds grinding through spreadsheets and Powerpoint decks until 1am.
The Bob’s from Office Space are a lot closer to the reality. Lot of time spent in conference rooms meeting with clients and making staffing (or other business-related) suggestions.
George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air also rang true on it’s portrayal of the typical consultant “road warrior” lifestyle. Ironically, it also ended up being unintentionally prescient in it’s portrayal of much of that lifestyle being replaced with remove teleconferencing (especially with COVID).
Office Space also captured the grim reality of waiting tables in a mid-level chain restaurant. I worked at California Pizza Kitchen for nearly a decade starting shortly after that movie came out; I also had friends working at Applebee’s, Cheesecake Factory, and Bennigan’s, and we could all quote it in its entirety. A few of the cooler managers got in on the joke, announcing the new “pieces of flair” we were going to have to wear to promote gift cards for the holiday season. Other managers were more like that annoying co-worker Brian–CPK liked to promote from within.
I keep waiting for Law & Order to do a CPS spinoff. If they ever do, I’ll get back to you on how well they portray my current profession. I’m guessing it’ll be pretty accurate on the law itself, there will be an episode “ripped from the headlines” of every well-known recent news story (Gabriel Fernandez, Anthony Avalos, etc.), but every case will be a once-in-a-career-if-ever outlier.
Buck in the novel and movie Fail Safe is a fairly accurate portrayal of what it’s like to be a translator/interpreter of a foreign language. There’s one point in the book where he’s very careful to choose the appropriate word in Russian so as not to offend Khruschev during his hotline conversation with the American president. I very often have to be equally careful in my work, especially for clients like the ILO and UN.
It should be noted that in both the book and the movie, Buck performs consecutive rather than simultaneous oral interpretation (though he’s capable of both). The latter is a highly specialized skill that requires intensive training at places like the US Army Language School in Monterey, CA.
As an aside, Buck in the movie is played by a very young Larry “JR Ewing” Hagman. He pretty much steals the show from President Henry Fonda.
Never partook, myself, neither have I seen Annapolis nor Crimson Tide, but AIUI they’re generally well-recieved pictures, and was curious if you can vouch for that.
I did see Das Boot, which I found claustrophobically compelling. Felt quite nerve-rackingly drained at the end of that one. This is a good thing.
Heh - I bet I dig The Last Detail more than you - Hal Ashby is one of the gods. Hilarious when JN is yelling “HIT ME!!!” at the meek (and hilariously young-as-a-fawn-looking) Randy Quaid, who just can’t get himself to do so, of course then doubling JN’s frustration)
I worked as a TV broadcast technician, and one of the memorable scenes in “Broadcast News” always makes me laugh. An editor is frantically running up flights of stairs to deliver a taped story to the playback room in time to make its slot on the nightly news. This is treated as some type of crisis that has everyone in the control room sweating bullets.
That would never happen in real life. First of all, it’s a common everyday occurrence for a news story to not be ready. It happens all the time. The producer will just skip over it, go to the next event on the rundown and insert the story later in the broadcast.
Also, the scene shows the editor running up flights of stairs to get to the playback room. This is also unrealistic. At any broadcast news operation, seconds count. For this reason the edit rooms will be located near playback, not on separate floors.
If I can cite an incident from my misspent youth: I was working as a gofer for a big TV network back in the '80s. They were on location, not in a studio, so the editors and their machines were in one section of the hotel and the command post was in another. There was one segment that wasn’t ready for broadcast, and the temperamental anchor (I won’t name him here, since most Americans would know who I’m talking about) was waiting outside in the cold. He finally just said “I’m outta here!” and went back inside. The camera came on live a few seconds later and he was nowhere to be seen.
If there are any scientists about, how good is the film The Andromeda Strain in depicting how science works in such a situation?
Did you watch American Me? A friend of mine who was a Mexican American in a California prison during the same timeframe as the movie said it was very accurate.
That happened on The Mary Tyler Moore Show one time. Ted had an argument with Lou during a commercial break and to demonstrate what he thought was his power on the show, walked off the set.
Lou told Gordy, the weatherman, to take over the news broadcast. When they went back on the air, Gordy said Ted had been called away and began doing the news. Ted, seeing this, went back to his seat and said he had gone to the bathroom.
I haven’t seen it.
But from the synopsis I just read, it sounds like it has a common problem with most of the movies and TV shows that are supposedly depicting prison life; they portray prisoners as having way more agency than they have in a real prison.
There aren’t that many Optical Engineers in the movies.
As I pointed out in an article, Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chanery, Jr.) was an Optical Engineer in The Wolfman. In Curt Siodmak’s original script he wasn’t even a member of the family – he was just a guy brought in to install the telescope. As far as that goes, he seems to be accurate, although spying on ladies through their open upper story windows is awfully unprofessional (and definitely not PC for a hero these days).
And most optical engineers don’t get bitten by werewolves and develop lycanthropy, but I don’t want to be dogmatic about this.
Professor Metz in the James Bond movie Diamonds are Forever is “an expert in light refraction”, although that’s not quite what is required for building a weapons-grade laser. Metz is portrayed as helping the evil Ernst Stavro Blofeld because he hopes to bring about World Peace, which I would say was hopelessly and unbelievably naive. But, then again, there are definitely real-life cases of this, like Klaus Fuchs who leaked atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets.
It also bothered me that they had JImmy Dean (as Howard Hughes stand-in Willard Whyte) saying “The first laser was generated through a diamond…” Well, no. The first practical laser demonstrated used a ruby. But they’re both gem stones, so I guess Richard Maibaum figured he could get away with it. Besides, the needed a way to make diamonds into a high tech weapon, now that they threw out Fleming’s original story, and they were stuck with the title.
As far as I know, the first laser generated using a diamond used point defects called “color centers” in the diamond. It was built by Larry de Shayzer and Stephen Rand at – appropriately enough – Hughes Labs in California. But it wouldn’t do much about destroying subs and missiles from orbit. It put out milliwatts of energy.
They published in 1987, about 15 years after the movie came out.
The movie version of Michael Crichton’s Congo also had diamonds being used (somehow) in weaponized lasers (though they never said that it was the active medium). The book was at least a little more plausible, in that it had diamonds (with just the right naturally-occurring impurities) being used as semiconductors in place of silicon (which was being researched by a defense contractor, presumably for use in weapons of some sort or other, but I guess they wanted to make the “used for weapons” more dramatic and obvious).